Chapter IV: The Problem of World-History (2)

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

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

-----

Footnote 127:

See Vol. II, pp. 360 et seq.

Footnote 128:

Diels, _Antike Technik_ (1920), p. 159.

Footnote 129:

About 400 B.C. savants began to construct crude sun-dials in Africa
and Ionia, and from Plato’s time still more primitive clepsydræ came
into use; but in both forms, the Greek clock was a mere imitation of
the far superior models of the older East, and it had not the
slightest connexion with the Greek life-feeling. See Diels, _op.
cit._, pp. 160 et seq.

Footnote 130:

Horace’s _monumentum ære perennius_ (Odes III, 30) may seem to
conflict with this: but let the reader reconsider the whole of that
ode in the light of the present argument, and turn also to Leuconoe
and her “Babylonian” impieties (Odes I, 11) _inter alia_, and he will
probably agree that so far as Horace is concerned, the argument is
supported rather than impugned.—_Tr._

Footnote 131:

Ordered, for us, by the Christian chronology and the ancient-mediæval-
modern scheme. It was on those foundations that, from early Gothic
times, the images of religion and of art have been built up in which a
large part of Western humanity continues to live. To predicate the
same of Plato or Phidias is quite impossible, whereas the Renaissance
artists could and did project a classical past, which indeed they
permitted to dominate their judgments completely.

Footnote 132:

See pp. 9. et seq.

Footnote 133:

The Indian history of our books is a Western reconstruction from texts
and monuments. See the chapter on epigraphy in the “Indian Gazetteer,”
Vol. II.—_Tr._

Footnote 134:

See Vol. II, pp. 482, 521 et seq.

Footnote 135:

There is one famous episode in Greek history that may be thought to
contradict this—the race against time of the galley sent to Mitylene
to countermand the order of massacre (Thucydides, III, 49). But we
observe that Thucydides gives twenty times the space to the debates at
Athens that he gives to the drama of the galley-rowers pulling night
and day to save life. And we are told that it was the Mitylenean
ambassadors who spared no expense to make it worth the rowers’ while
to win, whereupon “there arose such a zeal of rowing that....” The
final comment is, strictly construing Thucydides’s own words: “Such
was the magnitude of the danger that Mitylene passed by” (παρὰ
τοσοῦτον μὲν ἡ Μυτιλήνη ἦλθε κινδύνου), a phrase which recalls
forcibly what has just been said regarding the “situation-drama.”—
_Tr._

Footnote 136:

Besides the clock, the bell itself is a Western “symbol.” The passing-
bell tolled for St. Hilda of Whitby in 680, and a century before that
time bells had come into general use in Gaul both for monasteries and
for parish churches. On the contrary, it was not till 865 that
Constantinople possessed bells, and these were presented in that year
by Venice. The presence of a belfry in a Byzantine church is accounted
a proof of “Western influence”: the East used and still largely uses
mere gongs and rattles for religious purposes. (British Museum
“Handbook of Early Christian Antiquities)”.—_Tr._

Footnote 137:

May we be permitted to guess that the Babylonian sun-dial and the
Egyptian water-clock came into being “simultaneously,” that is, on the
threshold of the third millennium before Christ? The history of clocks
is inwardly inseparable from that of the calendar; it is therefore to
be assumed that the Chinese and the Mexican Cultures also, with their
deep sense of history, very early devised and used methods of time-
measurement.

(The Mexican Culture developed the most intricate of all known systems
of indicating year and day. See British Museum “Handbook of May on
Antiquities.”—_Tr._)

Footnote 138:

Let the reader try to imagine what a Greek would feel when suddenly
made acquainted with this custom of ours.

Footnote 139:

The Chinese ancestor-worship honoured genealogical order with strict
ceremonies. And whereas here ancestor-worship by degrees came to be
the centre of all piety, in the Classical world it was driven entirely
into the background by the cults of _present_ gods; in Roman times it
hardly existed at all.

(Note the elaborate precautions taken in the Athenian “Anthesteria” to
keep the anonymous mass of ghosts at bay. This feast was anything but
an All Souls’ Day of re-communion with the departed spirits.—_Tr._)

Footnote 140:

With obvious reference to the resurrection of the flesh (ἐκ νεκρῶν).
But the meaning of the term “resurrection” has undergone, from about
1000 A.D., a profound—though hardly noticed—change. More and more it
has tended to become identified with “immortality.” But in the
resurrection from the dead, the implication is that time begins again
to repeat in space, whereas in “immortality” it is time that overcomes
space.

Footnote 141:

For English readers, the most conspicuous case of historic doubt is
the Shakespeare-Bacon matter. But even here, it is only the work of
Shakespeare that is in question, not his existence and personality,
for which we have perfectly definite evidence.—_Tr._

Footnote 142:

Originally a philosophical and scientific lecture-temple founded in
honour of Aristotle, and later the great University of Alexandria,
bore the title Μουσεῖον. Both Aristotle and the University amassed
collections but they were collections of (_a_) books, (_b_) natural
history specimens, living or taken from life. In the West, the
collection of _memorials of the past as such_ dates from the earliest
days of the Renaissance.—_Tr._

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VI

It is the _primitive feeling of Care_[143] which dominates the physiognomy of Western, as also that of Egyptian and that of Chinese history, and it creates, further, the symbolism of the erotic which represents the flowing on of endless life in the form of the familial series of individual existences. The point-formed Euclidean existence of Classical man, in this matter as in others, conceived only the here-and- now definitive act of begetting or of bearing, and thus it comes about that we find the birth-pangs of the mother made the centre of Demeter- worship and the Dionysiac symbol of the phallus (the sign of a sexuality wholly concentrated on the moment and losing past and future in it) more or less everywhere in the Classical. In the Indian world we find, correspondingly, the sign of the Lingam and the sect of worshippers of Paewati.[144] In the one case as in the other, man feels himself as nature, as a plant, as a willless and care-less element of becoming (dem Sinn des Werdens willenlos und sorglos hingegeben). The domestic religion of Rome centred on the _genius_, i.e., the creative power of the head of the family. To all this, the deep and thoughtful care of the Western soul has opposed the sign of _mother-love_, a symbol which in the Classical Culture only appeared above the horizon to the extent that we see it in, say, the mourning for Persephone or (though this is only Hellenistic) the seated statue of Demeter of Knidos.[145] The Mother with the Child—the future—at her breast, the Mary-cult in the new Faustian form, began to flourish only in the centuries of the Gothic and found its highest expression in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna.[146] This conception is not one belonging to Christianity generally. On the contrary, Magian Christianity had elevated Mary as Theotokos, “she who gave birth to God”[147] into a symbol felt quite otherwise than by us. The lulling Mother is as alien to Early-Christian-Byzantine art as she is to the Hellenic (though for other reasons) and most certainly Faust’s Gretchen, with the deep spell of unconscious motherhood on her, is nearer to the Gothic Madonna than all the Marys of Byzantine and Ravennate mosaics. Indeed, the presumption of a spiritual relation between them breaks down completely before the fact that the Madonna with the Child answers exactly to the Egyptian Isis with Horus—both are caring, nursing mothers—and that nevertheless this symbol had vanished for a thousand years and more (for the whole duration of the Classical and the Arabian Cultures) before it was reawakened by the Faustian soul.[148]

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

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

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

VII

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

At first sight, however, there seems to be only a difference of degree in the connotations of “destiny” and “incident.” One feels that it is more or less of an incident when Goethe goes to Sesenheim, but destiny when he goes to Weimar;[151] one regards the former as an episode and the latter as an epoch. But we can see at once that the distinction depends on the inward quality of the man who is impressed. To the mass, the whole life of Goethe may appear as a sequence of anecdotal incidents, while a very few will become conscious, with astonishment, of a symbolic necessity inherent even in its most trivial occurrences. Perhaps, then, the discovery of the heliocentric system by Aristarchus was an unmeaning incident for the Classical Culture, but its supposed[152] rediscovery by Copernicus a destiny for the Faustian? Was it a destiny that Luther was not a great organizer and Calvin was? And if so, for whom was it a destiny—for Protestantism as a living unit, for the Germans, or for Western mankind generally? Were Tiberius Gracchus and Sulla incidents and Cæsar a destiny?

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

“In the Endless, self-repeating
flows for evermore The Same.
Myriad arches, springing, meeting,
hold at rest the mighty frame.
Streams from all things love of living,
grandest star and humblest clod.
All the straining, all the striving
is eternal peace in God.”[153]

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

So, also, the supreme ethical expression of Incident and Destiny is found in the Western Christian’s idea of Grace—the grace, obtained through the sacrificial death of Jesus, of being made free to will.[154] The polarity of Disposition (original sin) and Grace—a polarity which must ever be a projection of feeling, of the emotional life, and not a precision of learned reasoning—embraces the existence of every truly significant man of this Culture. It is, even for Protestants, even for atheists, hidden though it may be behind a scientific notion of “evolution” (which in reality is its direct descendant[155]), the foundation of every confession and every autobiography; and it is just its absence from the constitution of Classical man that makes confession, by word or thought, impossible to him. It is the final meaning of Rembrandt’s self-portraits and of music from Bach to Beethoven. We may choose to call that something which correlates the life-courses of all Western men disposition, Providence or “inner evolution”[156] but it remains inaccessible to thought. “Free will” is an inward certitude. But whatever one may will or do, that which actually ensues upon and issues from the resolution—abrupt, surprising, unforeseeable—_subserves_ a deeper necessity and, for the eye that sweeps over the picture of the distant past, visibly conforms to a major order. And when the Destiny of that which was willed has been Fulfilment we are fain to call the inscrutable “Grace.” What did Innocent III, Luther, Loyola, Calvin, Jansen, Rousseau and Marx will, and what came of the things that they willed in the stream of Western history? Was it Grace or Fate? Here all rationalistic dissection ends in nonsense. The Predestination doctrine of Calvin and Pascal—who, both of them more upright than Luther and Thomas Aquinas, dared to draw the causal conclusion from Augustinian dialectic—is the _necessary_ absurdity to which the pursuit of these secrets by the reason leads. They lost the destiny-logic of the world-becoming and found themselves in the causal logic of notion and law; they left the realm of direct intuitive vision for that of a mechanical system of objects. The fearful soul-conflicts of Pascal were the strivings of a man, at once intensely spiritual and a born mathematician, who was determined to subject the last and gravest problems of the soul both to the intuitions of a grand instinctive faith and to the abstract precision of a no less grand mathematical plan. In this wise the Destiny-idea—in the language of religion, God’s Providence—is brought _within the schematic form of the Causality Principle_, i.e., the Kantian form of mind activity (productive imagination); _for that is what Predestination signifies_, notwithstanding that thereby Grace—the causation-free, living Grace which can only be experienced as an inward certainty—is made to appear as a nature-force that is bound by irrevocable law and to turn the religious world-picture into a rigid and gloomy system of machinery. And yet was it not a Destiny again—for the world as well as for themselves— that the English Puritans, who were filled with this conviction, were ruined not through any passive self-surrender but through their hearty and vigorous certainty that their will was the will of God?

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Footnote 143:

The connotation of “care” is almost the same as that of “Sorge,” but
the German word includes also a certain specific, _ad hoc_
apprehension, that in English is expressed by “concern” or “fear.”—
_Tr._

Footnote 144:

The _Lingayats_ are one of the chief sects of the Saivas (that is, of
the branch of Hinduism which devotes itself to Shiva) and Paewati
worshippers belong to another branch, having the generic name of
Saktas, who worship the “active female principle” in the persons of
Shiva’s consorts, of whom Paewati is one. Vaishnavism—the Vishnu
branch of Indian religion—also contains an erotic element in that form
which conceives Vishnu as Krishna. But in Krishna worship the erotic
is rather less precise and more amorous in character.

See “Imperial Gazetteer of India,” Vol. I, pp. 421 et seq., and Ency.
Brit., XI Edition, article _Hinduism_.—_Tr._

Footnote 145:

British Museum.—_Tr._

Footnote 146:

Dresden.—_Tr._

Footnote 147:

See Vol. II, p. 316.

Footnote 148:

In connexion with this very important link in the Author’s argument,
attention may be drawn to a famous wall-painting of very early date in
the Catacomb of St. Priscilla. In this, Mary is definitely and
unmistakably the _Stillende Mutter_. But she is, equally unmistakably,
different in soul and style from her “Early-Christian-Byzantine”
successor the Theotokos. Now, it is well known that the art of the
catacombs, at any rate in its beginnings, is simply the art of
contemporary Rome, and that this “Roman” art had its home in
Alexandria. See Woermann’s _Geschichte der Kunst_, III, 14-15, and
British Museum “Guide to Early Christian Art,” 72-74, 86. Woermann
speaks of this Madonna as the prototype of our grave, tenderly-
solicitous Mother-Madonnas. Dr. Spengler would probably prefer to
regard her as the last Isis. In any case it is significant that the
symbol disappears: in the very same catacomb is a Theotokos of perhaps
a century later date.—_Tr._

Footnote 149:

Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq.

Footnote 150:

See, further, the last two sections of Vol. II (_Der Staat_ and
_Wirtschaftsleben_).—_Tr._

Footnote 151:

Sesenheim is the home of Friederike, and a student’s holiday took him
thither: Weimar, of course, is the centre from which all the activity
of his long life was to radiate.—_Tr._

Footnote 152:

_Vermeintlich._ The allusion is presumably to the fact that
Copernicus, adhering to the hypothesis of circular orbits, was obliged
to retain some elements of Ptolemy’s geocentric machinery of
epicycles, so that Copernicus’s sun was not placed at the true centre
of any planetary orbit.—_Tr._

Footnote 153:

Sprüche in Reimen.

Footnote 154:

See Vol. II, pp. 294 et seq., 359 et seq.

Footnote 155:

The path from Calvin to Darwin is easily seen in English philosophy.

Footnote 156:

This is one of the eternal points of dispute in Western art-theory.
The Classical, ahistorical, Euclidean soul has no “evolution”; the
Western, on the contrary, extends itself in evolving like the
convergent function that it is. The one _is_, the other _becomes_. And
thus all Classical tragedy assumes the _constancy_ of the personality,
and all Western its _variability_, which essentially constitutes a
“character” in our sense, viz., a picture of being that consists in
continuous qualitative movement and an endless wealth of
relationships. _In Sophocles the grand gesture ennobles the suffering,
in Shakespeare the grand idea_ (Gesinnung) _ennobles the doing_. As
our æsthetic took its examples from _both_ Cultures, it was bound to
go wrong in the very enunciation of its problem.

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VIII

We can proceed to the further elucidation of the incidental (or casual) without running the risk of considering it as an exception or a breach in the causal continuity of “Nature,” for Nature is _not_ the world- picture in which Destiny is operative. Wherever the sight emancipates itself from the sensible-become, spiritualizes itself into Vision, penetrates through the enveloping world and lets prime phenomena instead of mere objects work upon it, we have the grand _historical_, trans- natural, super-natural outlook, the outlook of Dante and Wolfram and also the outlook of Goethe in old age that is most clearly manifested in the finale of Faust II. If we linger in contemplation in this world of Destiny and Incident, it will very likely seem to us incidental that the episode of “world-history” should have played itself out in this or that phase of one particular star amongst the millions of solar systems; incidental that it should be men, peculiar animal-like creatures inhabiting the crust of this star, that present the spectacle of “knowledge” and, moreover, present it in just this form or in just that form, according to the very different versions of Aristotle, Kant and others; incidental that as the counter-pole of this “knowing” there should have arisen just these codes of “natural law,” each supposedly eternal and universally-valid and each evoking a supposedly general and common picture of “Nature.” Physics—quite rightly—banishes incidentals from its field of view, but it is incidental, again, that physics itself should occur in the alluvial period of the earth’s crust, uniquely, as a particular kind of intellectual composition.

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

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

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

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

The kind of history that is commonly written must, even if it does not lose itself in compilation of data, come to a halt before the _superficially_ incidental—that is the ... destiny of its authors, who, spiritually, remain more or less in the ruck. In their eyes nature and history mingle in a cheap unity, and incident or accident, “sa sacrée majesté le Hazard,” is for the man of the ruck the easiest thing in the world to understand. For him the secret logic of history ‘which he does not feel’ is replaced by a causal that is only waiting behind the scene to come on and prove itself. It is entirely appropriate that the anecdotal foreground of history should be the arena of all the scientific causality-hunters and all the novelists and sketch-writers of the common stamp. How many wars have been begun when they were because some jealous courtier wished to remove some general from the proximity of his wife! How many battles have been won and lost through ridiculous incidents! Only think how Roman history was written in the 18th Century and how Chinese history is written even to-day! Think of the Dey smacking the Consul with his fly-flap[159] and other such incidents that enliven the historical scene with comic-opera motives! Do not the deaths of Gustavus Adolphus and of Alexander seem like expedients of a nonplussed playwright; Hannibal a simple intermezzo, a surprise intrusion in Classical history; or Napoleon’s “transit” more or less of a melodrama? Anyone who looks for the inner form of history in any causal succession of its visible detail-events must always, if he is honest, find a comedy of burlesque inconsequence, and I can well imagine that the dance-scene of the drunken Triumvirs in “Antony and Cleopatra” (almost overlooked, but one of the most powerful in that immensely deep work)[160] grew up out of the contempt of the prince of _historical_ tragedy for the pragmatic aspect of history. For this is the aspect of it that has always dominated “the world,” and has encouraged ambitious little men to interfere in it. It was because their eyes were set on _this_, and its rationalistic structure, that Rousseau and Marx could persuade themselves that they could alter the “course of the world” by a theory. And even the social or economic interpretation of political developments, to which present-day historical work is trying to rise as to a peak-ideal (though its biological cast constantly leads us to suspect foundations of the causal kind), is still exceedingly shallow and trivial.

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

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

For this reason, the Euclidean soul of the Classical Culture could only experience its existence, bound as this was to present foregrounds, in the form of _incidents of the Classical style_. If in respect of the Western soul we can regard incident as a minor order of Destiny, in respect of the Classical soul it is just the reverse. Destiny is incident become immense—that is the very signification of Ananke, Heimarmene, Fatum. As the Classical soul did not genuinely live through history, it possessed no genuine feeling for a _logic_ of Destiny. We must not be misled by words. The most popular goddess of Hellenism was Tyche, whom the Greeks were practically unable to distinguish from Ananke. But Incident and Destiny are felt by _us_ with all the intensity of an opposition, and on the issue of this opposition we feel that everything fundamental in our existence depends. _Our_ history is that of great connexions, Classical history—its full actuality, that is, and not merely the image of it that we get in the historian (e.g., Herodotus)—is that of anecdotes, of a series of plastic details. The style of the Classical life generally, the style of every individual life within it, is anecdotal, using the word with all seriousness. The sense-perceivable side of events condenses on _anti-historical, daemonic, absurd_ incidents; it is the denial and disavowal of all logic of happening. The stories of the Classical master-tragedies one and all _exhaust_ themselves in incidents that mock at any meaning of the world; they are the exact denotation of what is connoted by the word εἱμαρμένη[163] in contrast to the Shakesperian _logic_ of incident. Consider Œdipus once more: that which happened to him was wholly extrinsic, was neither brought about nor conditioned by anything subjective to himself, and could just as well have happened to anyone else. This is the very _form of the Classical myth_. Compare with it the necessity—inherent in and governed by the man’s whole existence and the relation of that existence to Time—that resides in the destiny of Othello, of Don Quixote, of Werther. It is, as we have said before, the difference of situation-tragedy and character-tragedy. And this opposition repeats itself in history proper—every epoch of the West has character, while each epoch of the Classical only presents a situation. While the life of Goethe was one of fate-filled logic, that of Cæsar was one of mythical indidentalness, and it was left to Shakespeare to _introduce_ logic into it. Napoleon is a tragic character, Alcibiades fell into tragic situations. Astrology, in the form in which from Gothic to Baroque the Western soul knew it—was dominated by it even in denying it—was the attempt to master one’s _whole_ future life-course; the Faustian horoscope, of which the best-known example is perhaps that drawn out for Wallenstein by Kepler, _presupposes_ a steady and purposeful direction in the existence that has yet to be accomplished. But the Classical oracle, always consulted for the _individual_ case, is the genuine symbol of the meaningless incident and the moment; it accepts the point-formed and the discontinuous as the elements of the world’s course, and oracle-utterances were therefore entirely in place in that which was written and experienced as history at Athens. Was there one single Greek who possessed the notion of a historical _evolution_ towards this or that or any aim? And _we_—should we have been able to reflect upon history or to make it if we had _not_ possessed it? If we compare the destinies of Athens and of France at corresponding times after Themistocles and Louis XIV, we cannot but feel that the style of the historical feeling and the style of its actualization are always one. In France logic _à outrance_, in Athens un-logic.

The ultimate meaning of this significant fact can now be understood. History is the actualizing of a soul, and the same style governs the history one makes as governs the history one contemplates. The Classical mathematic excludes the symbol of infinite space, and therefore the Classical history does so too. It is not for nothing that the scene of Classical existence is the smallest of any, the individual _Polis_, that it lacks horizon and perspective—notwithstanding the episode of Alexander’s expedition[164]—just as the Attic stage cuts them off with its flat back-wall, in obvious contrast to the long-range efficacy of Western Cabinet diplomacy and the Western capital city. And just as the Greeks and the Romans neither knew nor (with their fundamental abhorrence of the Chaldean astronomy) would admit as actual any cosmos but that of the foreground; just as at bottom their deities are house- gods, city-gods, field-gods but never star-gods,[165] so also what they _depicted_ was only foregrounds. Never in Corinth or Athens or Sicyon do we find a landscape with mountain horizon and driving clouds and distant towns; every vase-painting has the same constituents, figures of Euclidean separateness and artistic self-sufficiency. Every pediment or frieze group is serially and not contrapuntally built up. But then, life-experience itself was one strictly of foregrounds. Destiny was not the “course of life” but something upon which one suddenly stumbles. And this is how Athens produced, with Polygnotus’s fresco and Plato’s geometry, _a fate-tragedy_ in which fate is precisely the fate that we discredit in Schiller’s “Bride of Messina.” The complete unmeaning of blind doom that is embodied, for instance, in the curse of the House of Atreus, served to reveal to the ahistorical Classical soul the full meaning of its own world.

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Footnote 157:

“The older one becomes, the more one is persuaded that His Sacred
Majesty Chance does three-quarters of the work of this miserable
Universe.” (Frederick the Great to Voltaire.) So, necessarily, must
the genuine rationalist conceive it.

Footnote 158:

See Vol. II, pp. 20 et seq.

Footnote 159:

The incident which is said to have precipitated the French war on
Algiers (1827).—_Tr._

Footnote 160:

Act. II, Scene VII.—_Tr._

Footnote 161:

In the general upheaval of 1848 a German national parliament was
assembled at Frankfurt, of a strongly democratic colour, and it chose
Frederick William IV of Prussia as hereditary emperor. Frederick
William, however, refused to “pick up a crown out of the gutter.” For
the history of this momentous episode, the English reader may be
referred to the Cambridge Modern History or to the article _Germany
(History)_ in the Ency. Brit., XI Edition.—_Tr._

Footnote 162:

It is the fact that a whole group of these Cultures is available for
our study that makes possible the “comparative” method used in the
present work. See Vol. II, pp. 42 et seq.

Footnote 163:

Derived from μείρομαι, to receive as one’s portion, to have allotted
to one, or, colloquially, to “come in for” or “step into.”—_Tr._

Footnote 164:

The expedition of the Ten Thousand into Persia is no exception. The
Ten Thousand indeed formed an ambulatory Polis, and its adventures are
truly Classical. It was confronted with a series of “situations.”—
_Tr._

Footnote 165:

Helios is only a poetical figure; he had neither temples nor cult.
Even less was Selene a moon-goddess.

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IX

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

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

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

The tragic in Napoleon’s life—which still awaits discovery by a poet great enough to comprehend it and shape it—was that he, who rose into effective being by fighting British policy and the British spirit which that policy so eminently represented, completed by that very fighting the continental victory of this spirit, which thereupon became strong enough, in the guise of “liberated nations” to overpower him and to send him to St. Helena to die. It was not Napoleon who originated the expansion principle. That had arisen out of the Puritanism of Cromwell’s _milieu_ which called into life the British Colonial Empire.[167] Transmitted through the English-schooled intellects of Rousseau and Mirabeau to the Revolutionary armies, of which English philosophical ideas were essentially the driving force, it became their tendency even from that day of Valmy which Goethe alone read aright. It was not Napoleon who formed the idea, but the idea that formed Napoleon, and when he came to the throne he was obliged to pursue it further against the only power, England namely, whose purpose was _the same_ as his own. His Empire was a creation of French blood but of English style. It was in London, again, that Locke, Shaftesbury, Samuel Clarke and, above all, Bentham built up the theory of “European Civilization”—the Western Hellenism—which Bayle, Voltaire and Rousseau carried to Paris. Thus it was in the name of _this_ England of Parliamentarianism, business morality and journalism that Valmy, Marengo, Jena, Smolensk and Leipzig were fought, and in _all_ these battles it was the English spirit that defeated the French Culture of the West.[168] The First Consul had no intention of incorporating West Europe in France; his primary object was—note the Alexander-idea on the threshold of every Civilization!—to replace the British Colonial Empire by a French one. Thereby, French preponderance in the Western culture-region would have been placed on a practically unassailable foundation; it would have been the Empire of Charles V on which the sun never set, but managed from Paris after all, in spite of Columbus and Philip, and organized as an economic-military instead of as an ecclesiastical-chivalric unit. So far-reaching, probably, was the destiny that was in Napoleon. But the Peace of Paris in 1763 had already decided the question _against_ France, and Napoleon’s great plans time and again came to grief in petty incidents. At Acre a few guns were landed in the nick of time from the British warships: there was a moment, again, just before the signature of the Peace of Amiens, when the whole Mississippi basin was still amongst his assets and he was in close touch with the Maratha powers that were resisting British progress in India; but again a minor naval incident[169] obliged him to abandon the whole of a carefully-prepared enterprise: and, lastly, when by the occupation of Dalmatia, Corfu and all Italy he had made the Adriatic a French lake, with a view to another expedition to the East, and was negotiating with the Shah of Persia for action against India, he was defeated by the whims of the Tsar Alexander, who at times was undoubtedly willing to support a march on India and whose aid would infallibly have secured its success. It was only after the failure of all extra-European combinations that he chose, as his _ultima ratio_ in the battle against England, the incorporation of Germany and Spain, and so, raising against himself _his own_ English- Revolutionary ideas, the very ideas of which he had been the vehicle,[170] he took the step that made him “no longer necessary.”

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

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Footnote 166:

The original is somewhat obscure. It reads: "Welche Form die
Wahrscheinlichkeit für sich hat, ist bereits eine Frage des
historischen—und also des tragischen—Stils."—_Tr._

Footnote 167: