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THE DECLINE 
OF THE WEST 



THE DECLINE 
OF THE WEST 

[DER UNTERGANG DES 
ABENDLANDES] 

BY 
OSWALD SPENGLER 



VOLUME ONE 

FORM AND ACTUALITY 
[GESTALT UND WIRKLICHKEIT] 

VOLUME TWO 

PERSPECTIVES OF 
WORLD-HISTORY 

[WELTHISTORISCHE PERSPEKTIVEN] 



\T H E DECLINE 
OF THE WEST 

FORM AND ACTUALITY 

BY 
OSWALD SPENGLER 



AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION 
WITH NOTES BY 

CHARLES FRANCIS ATKINSON 



LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. 
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1 







NEW AND REVISED EDITION 



Originally published as 

Dcr Untcrgang dcs Abendlandes 
Gestalt und WMicbkeit 

Copyright 1918 by 

C. H. Beckschc, Vcrlagsbuchhandlung, 
Munchen 



SG3 

111* 

.i 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



SEEN BY 

PRESERVATION 

SERVICES 



THIS TRANSLATION IS 
DEDICATED TO 

ELLINOR JAMES 

A FRIEND 



Wenn im Unendlichen dasselbe 
Sich wiederholend ewig fliesst, 
Das tausendfaltige Gewolbe 
Sich kraftig ineinander schliesst; 
Stromt Lebenslust aus alien Dingen, 
Dem kleinsten wie dem grossten Stern, 
Und alles Drangen, alles Ringen 
1st ewige Rub in Gott dem Herrn. 

GOETHE. 



\l\ 



TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE xi 

found in Spengler's vast ordered multitude of facts, Eduard Meyer honourably 
bears testimony to our author's "erstaunlich umfangreiches, ihm standig 
prasentes, Wissen" (a phrase as neat and as untranslatable as Goethe's "exakte 
sinnliche Phantasie ' '). He insists upon the fruitfulness of certain of Spengler's 
ideas such as that of the "Second Religiousness." Above all, he adheres to and 
covers with his high authority the basic idea of the parallelism of organically- 
living Cultures. It is not necessarily Spengler's structure of the Cultures that he 
accepts parts of it indeed he definitely rejects as wrong or insufficiently es- 
tablished by evidences but on the question of their being an organic structure 
of the Cultures, a morphology of History, he ranges himself frankly by the side 
of the younger thinker, whose work he sums up as a " bleibendes und auf lange 
Zeit hinaus nachhaltig wirkendes Besitz unserer Wissenschaft und Literatur." 
This last phrase of Dr. Meyer's expresses very directly and simply that which 
for an all-round student (as distinct from an erudite specialist) constitutes the 
peculiar quality of Spengler's work. Its influence is far deeper and subtler than 
any to which the conventional adjective "suggestive" could be applied. It 
cannot in fact be described by adjectives at all, but only denoted or adumbrated 
by its result, which is that, after studying and mastering it, one finds it nearly 
if not quite impossible to approach any culture-problem old or new, dog- 
matic or artistic, political or scientific without conceiving it primarily as 
' 'morphological. 

The work comprises two volumes under the respective sub-titles "Form 
and Reality" and "World-historical Perspectives" of which the present 
translation covers the first only. Some day I hope to have the opportunity of 
completing a task which becomes such is the nature of this book more 
attractive in proportion to its difficulty. References to Volume II are, for the 
present, necessarily to the pages of the German original; if, as is hoped, this 
translation is completed later by the issue of the second volume, a list of the 
necessary adjustments of page references will be issued with it. The reader will 
notice that translator's foot-notes are scattered fairly freely over the pages of 
this edition. In most cases these have no pretensions to being critical annota- 
tions. They are merely meant to help the reader to follow up in more detail the 
points of fact which Spengler, with his "standig prasentes Wissen," sweeps 
along in his course. This being their object, they take the form, in the majority 
of cases, of references to appropriate articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 
which is the only single work that both contains reasonably full information 
on the varied (and often abstruse) matters alluded to, and is likely to be acces- 
sible wherever this book may penetrate. Every reader no doubt will find these 
notes, where they appertain to his own special subject, trivial and even annoy- 
ing, but it is thought that, for example, an explanation of the mathematical 
Limit may be helpful to a student who knows all about the Katharsis in Greek 
drama, and vice versa. 



xii TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 

In conclusion I cannot omit to put on record the part that ray wife, Hannah 
Waller Atkinson, has taken in the work of translation and editing. I may best 
describe it by saying that it ought perhaps to have been recorded on the title 
page instead of in this place. 

C. F. A. 

7- 



PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION 

AT the close of an undertaking which, from the first brief sketch to the final 
shaping of a complete work of quite unforeseen dimensions, has spread itself 
over ten years, it will not be out of place to glance back at what I intended and 
what I have achieved, my standpoint then and my standpoint to-day. 

In the Introduction to the 1918 edition inwardly and outwardly a frag- 
ment I stated my conviction that an idea had now been irrefutably formu- 
lated which no one would oppose, once the idea had been put into words. I 
ought to have said: once that idea had been understood. And for that we must 
look as I more and more realize not only in this instance but in the whole 
history of thought to the new generation that is born with the ability to 
do it. 

I added that this must be considered as a first attempt, loaded with all the 
customary faults, incomplete and not without inward opposition. The remark 
was not taken anything like as seriously as it was intended. Those who have 
looked searchingly into the hypotheses of living thought will know that it is 
not given to us to gain insight into the fundamental principles of existence 
without conflicting emotions. A thinker is a person whose part it is to sym- 
bolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he 
thinks as he has to think. Truth in the long run is to him the picture of the 
world which was born at his birth. It is that which he does not invent but 
rather discovers within himself. It is himself over again: his being expressed 
in words; the meaning of his personality formed into a doctrine which so far 
as concerns his life is unalterable, because truth and his life are identical. This 
symbolism is the one essential, the vessel and the expression of human history. 
The learned philosophical works that arise out of it are superfluous and only 
serve to swell the bulk of a professional literature. 

I can then call the essence of what I have discovered "true" that is, true 
for me, and as I believe, true for the leading minds of the coming time; not true 
in itself as dissociated from the conditions imposed by blood and by history, for 
that is impossible. But what I wrote in the storm and stress of those years was, 
it must be admitted, a very imperfect statement of what stood clearly before 
me, and it remained to devote the years that followed to the task of correlating 
facts and finding means of expression which should enable me to present my 
idea in the most forcible form. 

To perfect that form would be impossible life itself is only fulfilled in 
death. But I have once more made the attempt to bring up even the earliest 



xiv PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION 

portions of the work to the level of dcfinitcncss with which I now feel able to 
speak; and with that I take leave of this book with its hopes and disappoint- 
ments, its merits and its faults. 

The result has in the meantime justified itself as far as I myself am concerned 
and judging by the effect that it is slowly beginning to exercise upon ex- 
tensive fields of learning as far as others arc concerned also. Let no one ex- 
pect to find everything set forth here. It is but one side of what I see before me, 
a new outlook on history and the philosophy of destiny the first indeed of its 
kind. It is intuitive and depictive through and through, written in a language 
which seeks to present objects and relations illustratively instead of offering 
an army of ranked concepts. It addresses itself solely to readers who arc capable 
of living themselves into the word-sounds and pictures as they read. Difficult 
this undoubtedly is, particularly as our awe in face of mystery the respect 
that Goethe felt denies us the satisfaction of thinking that dissections are 
the same as penetrations. 

Of course, the cry of "pessimism" was raised at once by those who live 
eternally in yesterday (^Ewif^estrigen) and greet every idea that is intended for 
the pathfinder of to-morrow only. But I have not written for people who 
imagine that delving for the springs of action is the same as action itself; those 
who make definitions do not know destiny. 

By understanding the world I mean being equal to the world. It is the hard 
reality of living that is the essential, not the concept of life, that the ostrich- 
philosophy of idealism propounds. Those who refuse to be bluffed by enuncia- 
tions will not regard this as pessimism; and the rest do not matter. For the 
benefit of serious readers who arc seeking a glimpse at life and not a definition, 
I have in view of the far too great concentration of the text mentioned 
in my notes a number of works which will carry that glance into more distant 
realms of knowledge. 

And now, finally, I feel urged to name once more those to whom I owe 
practically everything: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe gave me method, 
Nietzsche the questioning faculty and if I were asked to find a formula for 
my relation to the latter I should say that I had made of his "outlook" (Aus- 
blick) an "overlook" (Uberblick). But Goethe was, without knowing it, a 
disciple of Leibniz in his whole mode of thought. And, therefore, that which 
has at last (and to my own astonishment) taken shape in my hands I am able 
to regard and, despite the misery and disgust of these years, proud to call a 
German philosophy. 

OSWALD SPENOLER. 
Blanktnbttrt am 
December, 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 

THE complete manuscript of this book the outcome of three years' work 

was ready when the Great War broke out. By the spring of 1917 it had 
been worked over again and in certain details supplemented and cleared 
up, but its appearance in print was still delayed by the conditions then pre- 
vailing. 

Although a philosophy of historv^s its scope and subject, it possesses also a 
certain deeper significance as a commentary on the great epochal moment of 
which the portents were visible when the leading ideas were being formed. 

The title, which had been decided upon in 1911, expresses quite literally the 
intention of the book, which was to describe, in the light of the decline of the 
Classical age, one world-historical phase of several centuries upon which we 
ourselves are now entering. 

Events have justified much and refuted nothing. It became clear that these 
ideas must necessarily be brought forward at just this moment and in Germany, 
and, more, that the war itself was an element in the premisses from which the 
new world-picture could be made precise. 

For I am convinced that it is not merely a question of writing one out of 
several possible and merely logically justifiable philosophies, but of writing the 
philosophy of our time, one that is to some extent a natural philosophy and is 
dimly presaged by all. This may be said without presumption; for an idea that 
is historically essential that does not occur within an epoch but itself makes 
that epoch is only in a limited sense the property of him to whose lot it 
falls to parent it. It belongs to our time as a whole and influences all thinkers, 
without their knowing it; it is but the accidental, private attitude towards it 
(without which no philosophy can exist) that with its faults and its merits 

is the destiny and the happiness of the individual. 

OSWALD SPENGLER. 
Munich, 
December, 19/7. 



CONTENTS OF VOLUME I 

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE ix 

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION xiii 

AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xv 

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION i 

Scope of the work, p. 3. Morphology of World-History, a new philosophy, p. 5. For whom 
is History? p. 8. Classical and Indian mankind ahistorical, p. 9. The Egyptian mummy and 
the burning of the dead, p. 13. The conventional scheme of World-History (ancient, mediaeval, 
modern), p. 15. Its origin, p. 18. Its breakdown, p. zz. Europe not a centre of gravity, p. Z3. 
The only historical method is Goethe's, p. Z5. Ourselves and the Romans, p. z6. Nietzsche 
and Mommsen, p. z8. The problem of Civilization, p. 31. Imperialism the last phase, p. 36. 
The necessity and range of our basic idea, p. 39. Its relation to present-day philosophy, p. 41. 
Philosophy's last task, p. 45. The origin of this work, p. 46. 

CHAPTER II. THE MEANING OF NUMBERS 51 

Fundamental notions, p. 53. Numbers as the sign of delimitation, p. 56. Every Culture has 
its own Mathematic, p. 59. Number as magnitude in the Classical world, p. 64. Aristarchus, 
p. 68. Diophantus and Arabian number, p. 71. Number as Function in the Western Culture, 
p. 74. World-fear and world-longing, p. 78. Geometry arid arithemetic, p. 81. The Limit 
idea, p. 86. Visual limits transcended; symbolical space worlds, p. 86. Final possibilities, p. 87. 

CHAPTER III. THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY, (i) PHYSIOGNOMIC AND / 
SYSTEMATIC 91 

Copernican methods, p. 93. History and Nature, p. 94. Form and Law, p. 97. Physiognomic 
and Systematic, p. 100. Cultures as organisms, p. 104. Inner form, tempo, duration, p. 108. 
Homology, p. in. What is meant by "contemporary," p. nz. 

CHAPTER IV. THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY. (2.) THE DESTINY-IDEA AND ^ 
THE CAUSALITY-PRINCIPLE 115 

Logic, organic and inorganic, p. 117. Time and Destiny, p. 119. Space and Causality, p. 119. 
The problem of Time, p. izi. Time a counter-conception to Space, p. iz6. The symbols of 
Time tragedy, time reckoning, disposal of the dead, p. 130. Care (sex, the State, works), 
p. 136. Destiny and Incident, p. 139. Incident and Cause, p. 141. Incident and Style of exist- 
ence, p. 142.. Anonymous and personal epochs, p. 148. Direction into the future and Image of 
the Past, p. 152.. Is there a Science of History? p. 155. The new enunciation of the problem, 
p. 159. 

CHAPTER V. MAKROKOSMOS. (i) THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND j 
THE PROBLEM OF SPACE 161 

The Macrocosm as the sum total of symbols referred to a Soul, p. 163. Space and Death, p. 
165. "Alles vergangliche ist nur ein Gleichnis," p. 167. The space problem (only Depth is 
space-forming), p. 169. Depth as Time, p. i7z. The world-idea of a Culture born out of its 
prime symbol, p. 174. Classical Body, Magian Cavern, Western Infinity, p. 174. 



- c 



xviii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VI. MAKROKOSMOS. (2.) APOLLJNIAN, FAUSTIAN, AND MAOIAI 
SOUL 181 

Prime symbol, architecture, divinities, p. 183. The Egyptian prime symbol of the path, p. 
188. Expression-language of art: Ornamentation and Imitation, p. 191. Ornament and early 
architecture, p. 196. The window, p. 199. The grand style, p. 200. The history of a Style as 
organism, p. 105. On the history of the Arabian style, p. 107. Psychology of art- technique, 
r . 114. 

CHAPTER VII. Music AND PLASTIC, (i) THE ARTS OF FORM 117 

Music one of the arts of form, p. 119. Classification of the arts impossible except from the 
historical standpoint, p. iii. The choice of particular arts itself an expression-means of the 
higher order, p. in. Apollinian and Faustian art-groups, p. 2.2.4. The stages of Western Music, 
p. 116. The Renaissance an anti-Gothic and anti-musical movement, p. 132.. Character of the 
Baroque, p. 136. The Park, p. 140. Symbolism of colours, p. 145. Colours of the Near and of 
the Distance, p. 146. Gold background and Rembrandt brown, p. 147. Patina, p. 153. 

CHAPTER VIII. Music AND PLASTIC, (i) ACT AND PORTRAIT 2.57 

Kinds of human representation, p. 159. Portraiture, Contrition, Syntax, p. z6i. The heads of 

Classical statuary, p. 164. Portrayal of children and women, p. 166. Hellenistic portraiture, 

p. 169. The Baroque portrait, p. I.JL. Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo overcome the 

Renaissance, p. 173. Victory of Instrumental Music over Oil-Painting, corresponding to tlv: 

i Statuary over Fresco in the Classical, p. r8i. Impressionism, p. 1.85. Pergamum and 

Bayrcuch, p. 191. The finale of Art, p. 193. 

CHAPTER IX. SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING, (i) ON THE FORM OF THE 
SOUL 2.97 

Soul-image as function of World-image, p. 199. Psychology of a counter-physics, p. 301. 
Apollinian, Magian and Faustian soul-image, p. 305. The " Will " in Gothic space, p. 308. The 
"inner" mythology, p. 311. Will and Character, p. 314. Classical posture tragedy and Faustian 
character tragedy, p. 317. Symbolism of the drama-image, p. 310. Day and Night Art, p. 314. 
Popular and esoteric, p. 316. The astronomical image, 319. The geographical horizon, p. 331. 

CHAPTER X. SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING. (JL) BUDDHISM, STOICISM, AND 
SOCIALISM 339 

The Faustian morale purely dynamic, p. 341. Every Culture has a form of morale proper to 
itself, p. 345. Posture-morale and will-morale, p. 347. Buddha, Socrates, Rousseau as protago- 
nists of the dawning Civilizations, p. 351. Tragic and plebeian morale, p. 354. Return to 
L Nature, Irreligion, Nihilism, p. 356. Ethical Socialism, p. 361. Similarity of structure in the 
philosophical history of every Culture, p. 364. The Civilized philosophy of the West, p. 365. 

CHAPTER XI. FAUSTIAN AND APOLLINIAN NATURE-KNOWLEDGE 375 

Theory as Myth, p. 377. Every Natural Science depends upon a preceding Religion, p. 391. 
Statics, Alchemy, Dynamics as the theories of three Cultures, p. 381. The Atomic theory, p. 384. 
The problem of motion insoluble, p. 388. The style of causal process and experience, p. 391. 
The feeling of God and the knowing of Nature, p. 391. The great Myth, p. 394. Classical, 
Magian and Faustian numina, p. 397. Atheism, p. 408. Faustian physics as a dogma of force, 
p. 411. Limits of its theoretical (as distinct from its technical) development, p. 417. Self- 
destruction of Dynamics, and invasion of historical ideas; theory dissolves into a system of 
morphological relationships, p. 410. 

INDEX following page 42.8 

TABLES ILLUSTRATING THE COMPARATIVE MORPHOLOGY OF HISTORY 

At end of volume 



CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTION 



CHAPTER I 

INTRODUCTION 



IN this book is attempted for the first time the venture of predetermining his- 
tory, of following the still untravelled stages in the destiny of a Culture, and 
specifically of the only Culture of our time and on our planet which is actu- 
ally in the phase of fulfilment the West-European-American. 

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. 

v 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? 
Are not these actualities indeed secondary or derived from that something? 
Does world-history present to the seeing eye certain grand traits, again and 
again, with sufficient constancy to justify certain conclusions? And if so, what 
are the limits to which reasoning from such premisses may be pushed? 
/ Is it possible to find in life itself for human history is the sum of mighty 
life-courses which already have had to be endowed with ego and personality, 
in customary thought and expression, by predicating entities of a higher order 
like "the Classical" or "the Chinese Culture," "Modern Civilization" a 
series of stages which must be traversed, and traversed moreover in an ordered 
and obligatory sequence? 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 corre- 
sponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and 
space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when compre- 
hended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of 
Being. 

If therefore we are to discover in what form the destiny of the Western 
Culture will be accomplished, we must first be clear as to what culture is, what 
its relations are to visible history, to life, to soul, to nature, to intellect, what 
the forms of its manifestation are and how far these forms peoples, tongues 

3 



4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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. 

ii 

The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The 
means whereby to understand living forms is Analogy. By these means we 
arc enabled to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world. 

It is, and has always been, a matter of knowledge that the cxpression-fbrms 
of world-history arc limited in number, and that eras, epochs, situations, 
persons arc ever repeating themselves true to type. Napoleon has hardly ever 
been discussed without a side-glance at Cscsar and Alexander analogies of 
which, as we shall sec, the first is morphologically quite inacccptable and the 
second is correct while Napoleon himself conceived of his situation as akin 
to Charlemagne's. The French Revolutionary Convention spoke of Carthage 
when it meant England, and the Jacobins styled themselves Romans. Other 
such comparisons, of all degrees of soundness and unsoundness, are those of 
Florence with Athens, Buddha with Christ, primitive Christianity with 
modern Socialism, the Roman financial magnate of Caesar's time with the 
Yankee. Petrarch, the first passionate archaeologist (and is not archaeology it- 
self an expression of the sense that history is repetition?) related himself men- 
tally to Cicero, and but lately Cecil Rhodes, the organizer of British South 
Africa, who had in his library specially prepared translations of the classical 
lives of the Cxsars, felt himself akin to the Emperor Hadrian. The fated 
Charles XII of Sweden used to carry Quintus Curtius's life of Alexander in his 
pocket, and to copy that conqueror was his deliberate purpose. 

Frederick the Great, in his political writings such as his Considerations, 
1738 moves among analogies with perfect assurance. Thus he compares 
the French to the Macedonians under Philip and the Germans to the Greeks. 
"Even now," he says, "the Thermopylae of Germany, Alsace and Lorraine, 
arc in the hands of Philip," therein exactly characterizing the policy of Car- 
dinal Flcury. We find him drawing parallels also between the policies of the 
Houses of Habsburg and Bourbon and the proscriptions of Antony and of 
Octavius. 

Still, all this was only fragmentary and arbitrary, and usually implied rather 
a momentary inclination to poetical or ingenious expressions than a really deep 
sense of historical forms. 

Thus in the case of Rankc, a master of artistic analogy, we find that his 
parallels of Cyaxarcs and Henry the Fowler, of the inroads of the Cimmerians 
and those of the Hungarians, possess morphologically no significance, and his 
oft-quoted analogy between the Hellenic city-states and the Renaissance 
republics very little, while the deeper truth in his comparison of Alcibiadcs 



INTRODUCTION 5 

and Napoleon is accidental. Unlike the strict mathematician, who finds inner 
relationships between two groups of differential equations where the layman 
sees nothing but dissimilarities of outward form, Ranke and others draw their 
historical analogies with a Plutarchian, popular-romantic, touch, and aim 
merely at presenting comparable scenes on the world-stage. 

It is easy to see that, at bottom, it is neither a principle nor a sense of his- 
toric necessity, but simple inclination, that governs the choice of the tableaux. 
From any technique of analogies we are far distant. They throng up (to-day more 
than ever) without scheme or unities, and if they do hit upon something which 
is true in the essential sense of the word that remains to be determined 
it is thanks to luck, more rarely to instinct, never to a principle. In this re- 
gion no one hitherto has set himself to work out a method, nor has had the 
slightest inkling that there is here a root, in fact the only root, from which 
can come a broad solution of the problems of History. 

Analogies, in so far as they laid bare the organic structure of history, might 
be a blessing to historical thought. Their technique, developing under the in- 
fluence of a comprehensive idea, would surely eventuate in inevitable conclu- 
sions and logical mastery. But as hitherto understood and practised they have 
been a curse, for they have enabled the historians to follow their own tastes, 
instead of soberly realizing that their first and hardest task was concerned with 
the symbolism of history and its analogies, and, in consequence, the problem 
has till now not even been comprehended, let alone solved. Superficial in many 
cases (as for instance in designating Caesar as the creator of the official news- 
paper), these analogies are worse than superficial in others (as when phenomena 
of the Classical Age that are not only extremely complex but utterly alien to 
us are labelled with modern catchwords like Socialism, Impressionism, Capital- 
ism, Clericalism), while occasionally they are bizarre to the point of perver- 
sity witness the Jacobin clubs with their cult of Brutus, that millionaire- 
extortioner Brutus who, in the name of oligarchical doctrine and with the 
approval of the patrician senate, murdered the Man of the Democracy. 



in 



Thus our theme, which originally comprised only the limited problem of 
present-day civilization, broadens itself into a new philosophy the philos- 
ophy of the future, so far as the metaphysically-exhausted soil of the West 
can bear such, and in any case the only philosophy which is within the 
possibilities of the West-European mind in its next stages. It expands into the 
conception of a morphology of world history, of the world-as-history in contrast to 
the morphology of the world-as-nature that hitherto has been almost the only 
theme of philosophy. And it reviews once again the forms and movements 
of the world in their depths and final significance, but this time according to 
an entirely different ordering which groups them, not in an ensemble picture 



6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

inclusive of everything known, but in a picture of life, and presents them not 
as things-become, but as things-becoming. 

The world-as-history, conceived, viewed and given form from out of its oppo- 
site the u-orU-as-naturt here is a new aspect of human existence on this earth. 
As yet, in spite of its immense significance, both practical and theoretical, this 
aspect has not been realized, still less presented. Some obscure inkling of it 
there may have been, a distant momentary glimpse there has often been, but 
no one has deliberately faced it and taken it in with all its implications. We 
have before us two possible ways in which man may inwardly possess and ex- 
perience the world around him. With all rigour I distinguish (as to form, not 
substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of 
images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the 
system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the intents and pur- 
poses of imagination ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes 
of experience dissecting according to scheme; and to mention even thus early 
an opposition that has never yet been noted, in spite of its significance the 
domain of chronological from that of mathematical number. 1 

Consequently, in a research such as that lying before us, there can be no 
question of taking spiritual-political events, as they become visible day by day 
on the surface, at their face value, and arranging them on a scheme of " causes " 
or "effects" and following them up in the obvious and intellectually easy 
directions. Such a "pragmatic" 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 sec the similarity of the two methods. What concerns us is 
not what the historical facts which appear at this or that time arc, 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 so- 
cial, or still more art-history, details to "illustrate" the political sense of an 
epoch. But the decisive factor decisive, that is, in so far as visible history 
is the expression, sign and embodiment of soul they forget. I have not 
hitherto found one who has carefully considered the morphological relationship 
that inwardly binds together the expression-forms of all branches of a Culture, 
who has gone beyond politics to^grasp the ultimate and fundamental ideas of 
Greeks, Arabians, Indians and Westerners in mathematics, the meaning of their 

1 Kant's error, an error of very wide bearing which has not even yet been overcome, was first 
of all in bringing the outer and inner Man into relation with the ideas of space and time by pure 
scheme, though the meanings of these arc numerous and, above all, not unalterable; and secondly in 
allying arithmetic with the one and geometry with the other in an utterly mistaken way. It is not 
between arithmetic and geometry we must here anticipate a little but between chronological 
and mathematical number that there is fundamental opposition. Arithmetic and geometry arc both 
spatial mathematics and in their highct regions they arc no longer separable. Time-reckoning, of 
which the plain man is capable of a perfectly clear understanding through his senses, answers the 
question "When," not "What" or "How Many." 



INTRODUCTION 7 

early ornamentation, the basic forms of their architecture, philosophies, dramas 
and lyrics, their choice and development of great arts, the detail of their crafts- 
manship and choice of materials let alone appreciated the decisive importance 
of these matters for the form-problems of history. Who amongst them realizes 
that between the Differential Calculus and the dynastic principle of politics in 
the age of Louis XIV, between the Classical city-state and the Euclidean 
geometry, between the space-perspective of Western oil-painting and the con- 
quest of space by railroad, telephone and long-range weapon, between contra- 
puntal music and credit economics, there are deep uniformities? Yet, viewed 
from this morphological standpoint, even the humdrum facts of politics assume 
a symbolic and even a metaphysical character, and what has perhaps been 
impossible hitherto things such as the Egyptian administrative system, the 
Classical coinage, analytical geometry, the cheque, the Suez Canal, the book- 
printing of the Chinese, the Prussian Army, and the Roman road-engineering 
can, as symbols, be made uniformly understandable and appreciable. 

But at once the fact presents itself that as yet there exists no theory- 
enlightened art of historical treatment. What passes as such draws its methods 
almost exclusively from the domain of that science which alone has completely 
disciplined the methods of cognition, viz., physics, and thus we imagine our- 
selves to be carrying on historical research when we are really following out 
objective connexions of cause and effect. It is a remarkable fact that the old- 
fashioned philosophy never imagined even the possibility of there being any 
other relation than this between the conscious human understanding and the 
world outside. Kant, who in his main work established the formal rules of 
cognition, took nature only as the object of reason's activity, and neither he 
himself, nor anyone after him, noted the reservation. Knowledge, for Kant, is 
mathematical knowledge. He deals with innate intuition-forms and categories ' 
of the reason, but he never thinks of the wholly different mechanism by which ! 
historical impressions are apprehended. And Schopenhauer, who, significantly 
enough, retains but one of the Kantian categories, viz., causality, speaks con- 
temptuously of history. 1 That there is, besides a necessity of cause and effect 
which I may call the logic of space another necessity, an organic necessity in 
life, that of Destiny the logic of time is a fact of the deepest inward cer- 
tainty, a fact which suffuses the whole of mythological religions and artistic 
thought and constitutes the essence and kernel of all history (in contradistinc- 
tion to nature) but is unapproachable through the cognition-forms which the : 
"Critique of Pure Reason" investigates. This fact still awaits its theoretical 
formulation.' As Galileo says in a famous passage of his Saggzatore, philosophy, 

1 One cannot but be sensible how little depth and power of abstraction has been associated with 
the treatment of, say, the Renaissance or the Great Migrations, as compared with what is obviously 
required for the theory of functions and theoretical optics. Judged by the standards of the physicist 
and the mathematician, the historian becomes careless as soon as he has assembled and ordered his 
material and passes on to interpretation. 



8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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, Chro- 
nology and the idea of Destiny to a historical ordering of the phe- 
nomenal world. Both orderings, each on its own account, cover the whole 
world. The difference is only in the eyes by which and through which this 
world is realized. 

IV 

Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and 
interprets the immediate impressions of his senses.' History is that from 
which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the 
world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper 
reality. Whether he is capable of creating these shapes, which of them it is 
that dominates his waking consciousness, is a primordial problem of all human 
existence. 

Man, thus, has before him two possibilities of world-formation. But it must 
be noted, at the very outset, that these possibilities are not necessarily actuali- 
ties, and if we arc to enquire into the sense of all history we must begin by solv- 
ing a question which has never yet been put, viz., for whom is there History? 
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 some- 
thing rounded off and self-contained. For the latter type of consciousness there 
is ccrtaintly 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. In the world-consciousness of the Hellenes all experience, 
not merely the personal but the common past, was immediately transmuted 
into a timeless, immobile, mythically-fashioned background for the particular 
momentary present; thus the history of Alexander the Great began even before 
his death to be merged by Classical sentiment in the Dionysus legend, and to 
Cesar there seemed at the least nothing preposterous in claiming descent from 
Venus. 

Such a spiritual condition it is practically impossible for us men of the West, 
with a sense of time-distances so strong that we habitually and unquestioningly 
speak of so many years before or after Christ, to reproduce in ourselves. But 
we arc not on that account entitled, in dealing with the problems of History, 
simply to ignore the fact. 



INTRODUCTION 9 

What diaries and autobiographies yield in respect of an individual, that 
historical research in the widest and most inclusive sense that is, every kind 
of psychological comparison and analysis of alien peoples, times and customs 
yields as to the soul of a Culture as a whole. But the Classical culture possessed 
no memory, no organ of history in this special sense. The memory of the Classi- 
cal man so to call it, though it is somewhat arbitrary to apply to alien souls 
a notion derived from our own is something different, since past and future, 
as arraying perspectives in the working consciousness, are absent and the 
"pure Present," which so often roused Goethe's admiration in every product 
of the Classical life and in sculpture particularly, fills that life with an intensity 
that to us is perfectly unknown. 

This pure Present, whose greatest symbol is the Doric column, in itself pred- 
icates the negation of time (of direction). For Herodotus and Sophocles, as for 
Themistocles or a Roman consul, the past is subtilized instantly into an im- 
pression that is timeless and changeless, polar and not periodic in structure in 
the last analysis, of such stuff as myths are made of whereas for our world- 
sense and our inner eye the past is a definitely periodic and purposeful organism 
of centuries or millennia. 

But it is just this background which gives the life, whether it be the Clas- 
sical or the Western life, its special colouring. What the Greek called Kosmos 
was the image of a world that is not continuous but complete. Inevitably, then, 
the Greek man himself was not a series but a term. 1 

VTor this reason, although Classical man was well acquainted with the 
strict chronology and almanac-reckoning of the Babylonians and especially the 
Egyptians, and therefore with that eternity-sense and disregard of the present- 
as-such which revealed itself in their broadly-conceived operations of astronomy 
and their exact measurements of big time-intervals, none of this ever became 
intimately a part of him.) What his philosophers occasionally told him on the 
subject they had heard, not experienced, and what a few brilliant minds in the 
Asiatic-Greek cities (such as Hipparchus and Aristarchus) discovered was re- 
jected alike by the Stoic and by the Aristotelian, and outside a small professional 
circle not even noticed. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had an observatory. 
In the last years of Pericles, the Athenian people passed a decree by which all 
who propagated astronomical theories were made liable to impeachment 
(eitrayyeXta). This last was an act of the deepest symbolic significance, ex- 
pressive of the determination of the Classical soul to banish distance, in every 
aspect, from its world-consciousness. 

As regards Classical history-writing, take Thucydides. The mastery of this 
man lies in his truly Classical power of making alive and self-explanatory the 
events of the present, and also in his possession of the magnificently practical 

1 In the original, these fundamental antitheses are expressed simply by means of werden and sein. 
Exact renderings are therefore impossible in English. Tr. 



I0 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

outlook of the born statesman who has himself been both general and adminis- 
trator. In virtue of this quality of experience (which we unfortunately confuse 
with the historical sense proper), his work confronts the merely learned and 
professional historian as an inimitable model, and quite rightly so. But what 
is absolutely hidden from Thucydides is perspective, the power of surveying 
the history of centuries, that which for us is implicit in the very conception of 
a historian. The fine pieces of Classical history -writing are invariably those 
which set forth matters within the political present of the writer, whereas for 
us it is the direct opposite, our historical masterpieces without exception being 
those which deal with a distant past. Thucydides would have broken down 
in handling even the Persian Wars, let alone the general history of Greece, 
while that of Egypt would have been utterly out of his reach. He, as well as 
Polybius and Tacitus (who like him were practical politicians), loses his sure- 
ness of eye from the moment when, in looking backwards, he encounters motive 
forces in any form that is unknown in his practical experience. For Polybius 
even the First Punic War, for Tacitus even the reign of Augustus, are inex- 
plicable. As for Thucydides, his lack of historical feeling in our sense of the 
phrase is conclusively demonstrated on the very first page of his book by 
the astounding statement that before his time (about 400 B.C.) no events of 
importance had occurred (ou /ie-ydXa yeveaOaC) in the world! 1 

Consequently, Classical history down to the Persian Wars and for that 
matter the structure built up on traditions at much later periods, are the prod- 
uct of an essentially mythological thinking. The constitutional history of 

1 The attempts of the Greeks to frame something like a calendar or a chronology after the 
Egyptian fashion, besides being very belated indeed, were of extreme naiveti. The Olympiad reckon- 
ing is not an era in the sense of, say, the Christian chronology, and is, moreover, a late and purely 
literary expedient, without popular currency. The people, in fact, had no general need of a numera- 
tion wherewith to date the experiences of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, though a few 
learned persons might be interested in the calendar question. We arc not here concerned with the 
soundness or unsoundncss of a calendar, but with its currency, with the question of whether men 
regulated their lives by it or not; but, incidentally, even the list of Olympian victors before 500 is 
quite as much of an invention as the lists of earlier Athenian archons or Roman consuls. Of the 
colonizations, we possess not one single authentic date (E. Meyer. Gesch. d. Alt. II, 441. Bcloch. 
Gritcb. Gttcb. I, i, 119) "in Greece before the fifth century, no one ever thought of noting or 
reporting historical events." (Beloch. I, i, 115). We possess an inscription which sets forth a 
treaty between Elis and Hcraea which "was to be valid for a hundred years from this year." 
What "this year" was, is however not indicated. After a few years no one would have known 
how long the treaty had still to run. Evidently this was a point that no one had taken into account 
at the time indeed, the very "men of the moment" who drew up the document, probably them- 
selves soon forgot. Such was the childlike, fairy-story character of the Classical presentation of 
history that any ordered dating of the events of, say, the Trojan War (which occupies in their scries 
the same position as the Crusades in ours) would have been felt as a sheer solecism. 

Equally backward was the geographical science of the Classical world as compared with that of 
the Egyptians and the Babylonians. E. Meyer (Gtsch. d. Alt. II, 101) shows how the Greeks' knowl- 
edge of the forra of Africa degenerated from Herodotus (who followed Persian authorities) to 
Aristotle. The same is true of the Romans as the heirs of the Carthaginians; they first repeated the 
information of their alien forerunners and then slowly forgot it. 



INTRODUCTION n 

Sparta is a poem of the Hellenistic period, and Lycurgus, on whom it centres 
and whose "biography" we are given in full detail, was probably in the 
beginning an unimportant local god of Mount Taygetus. The invention of 
pre-Hannibalian Roman history was still going on even in Cesar's time. The 
story of the expulsion of the Tarquins by Brutus is built round some contem- 
porary of the Censor Appius Claudius (310 B.C.). The names of the Roman 
kings were at that period made up from the names of certain plebeian families 
which had become wealthy (K. J. Neumann). In the sphere of constitutional 
history, setting aside altogether the "constitution" of Servius Tullius, we 
find that even the famous land law of Licinius (367 B.C.) was not in existence 
at the time of the Second Punic War (B. Niese). When Epaminondas gave 
freedom and statehood to the Messenians and the Arcadians, these peoples 
promptly provided themselves with an early history. But the astounding 
thing is not that history of this sort was produced, but that there was prac- 
tically none of any other sort; and the opposition between the Classical and 
the modern outlook is sufficiently illustrated by saying that Roman history 
before 150 B.C., as known in Caesar's time, was substantially a forgery, and that 
the little that we know has been established by ourselves and was entirely 
unknown to the later Romans. In what sense the Classical world understood 
the word "history" we can see from the fact that the Alexandrine romance- 
literature exercised the strongest influence upon serious political and religious 
history, even as regards its matter. It never entered the Classical head to draw 
any distinction of principle between history as a story and history as docu- I 
ments. When, towards the end of the Roman republic, Varro set out to stabi- 
lize the religion that was fast vanishing from the people's consciousness, he 
classified the deities whose cult was exactly and minutely observed by the State, into 
"certain" and "uncertain" gods, i.e., into gods of whom something was still 
known and gods that, in spite of the unbroken continuity of official worship, 
had survived in name only. In actual fact, the religion of Roman society in 
Varro's time, the poet's religion which Goethe and even Nietzsche reproduced 
in all innocence, was mainly a product of Hellenistic literature and had almost 
no relation to the ancient practices, which no one any longer understood. 

Mommsen clearly defined the West-European attitude towards this history 
when he said that " the Roman historians," meaning especially Tacitus, "were 
men who said what it would have been meritorious to omit, and omitted what 
it was essential to say." 

In the Indian Culture we have the perfectly ahistoric soul. Its decisive ex- 
pression is the Brahman Nirvana. There is no pure Indian astronomy, no 
calendar, and therefore no history so far as history is the track of a conscious 
spiritual evolution. Of the visible course of their Culture, which as regards its 
organic phase came to an end with the rise of Buddhism, we know even less 
than we do of Classical history, rich though it must have been in great events 



n THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

between the nth and 8th centuries. And this is not surprising, since it was in 
dream-shapes and mythological figures that both came to be fixed. It is a full 
millennium after Buddha, about 500 A.D., when Ceylon first produces something 
remotely resembling historical work, the "Mahavansa." 

The world-consciousness of Indian man was so ahistorically built that it 
could not even treat the appearance of a book written by a single author as an 
event determinate in time. Instead of an organic series of writings by specific 
persons, there came into being gradually a vague mass of texts into which 
everyone inserted what he pleased, and notions such as those of intellectual 
individualism, intellectual evolution, intellectual epochs, played no part in the 
matter. It is in this anonymous form that we possess the Indian philosophy 
which is at the same time all the Indian history that we have and it is in- 
structive 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 un- 
known in India, in Egypt it was practically the artist's only theme. 

The Egyptian soul, conspicuously historical in its texture and impelled 
with primitive passion towards the infinite, perceived past and future as its 
uhole world, and the present (which is identical with waking consciousness) 
appeared to him simply as the narrow common frontier of two immeasurable 
stretches. The Egyptian Culture is an embodiment of care which is the 
spiritual counterpoise of distance care for the future expressed in the choice 
of granite or basalt as the craftsman's materials, 1 in the chiselled archives, in 
the elaborate administrative system, in the net of irrigation works, 2 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- 

1 Contrast with this the fact, symbolically of the highest importance and unparal Idled in art- 
history, that the Hellenes, though they had before their eyes the works of the Mycenaran Age and 
their land was only too rich in stone, deliberately reverted to wood; hence the absence of architectural 
remains of the period 1100-600. The Egyptian plant-column was from the outset of stone, whereas 
the Doric column was wooden, a clear indication of the intense antipathy of the Classical soul to- 
wards duration. 

Is there any Hellenic city that ever carried out one single comprehensive work that tells of 
care for future generations? The road and water systems which research has assigned to the My- 
ccnxan i.e., the pre-Classical age fell into disrepair and oblivion from the birth of the Classical 
peoples that is, from the Homeric period. It is a remarkably curious fact, proved beyond doubt 
by the lack of cpigraphic remains, that the Classical alphabet did not come into use till after 900, 
and even then only to a limited extent and for the most pressing economic needs. Whereas in the 
Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Mexican and the Chinese Cultures the formation of a script begins in 
the very twilight of dawn, whereas the Germans made themselves a Runic alphabet and presently 
developed that respect for writing as such which led to the successive refinements of ornamental 
calligraphy, the Classical primitives were entirely ignorant of the numerous alphabets that were 
current in the South and the East. We possess numerous inscriptions of Hittitc Asia Minor and of 
Crete, but not one of Homeric Greece. (Sec Vol. II, pp. 180 ct seq.) 



INTRODUCTION 13 

statuettes, which were often made in many copies and to which it was con- 
ceived 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 Egyp- 
tians embalmed even their history in chronological dates and figures. From 
pre-Solonian Greece nothing has been handed down, not a year-date, not a true 
name, not a tangible event with the consequence that the later history, 
(which alone we know) assumes undue importance but for Egypt we possess, 
from the 3rd millennium and even earlier, the names and even the exact reign- 
dates of many of the kings, and the New Empire must have had a complete 
knowledge of them. To-day, pathetic symbols of the will to endure, the 
bodies of the great Pharaohs lie in our museums, their faces still recognizable. 
On the shining, polished-granite peak of the pyramid of Amenemhet III we can 
read to-day the words "Amenemhet looks upon the beauty of the Sun" and, 
on the other side, "Higher is the soul of Amenemhet than the height of Orion, 
and it is united with the underworld." Here indeed is victory over Mortality 
and the mere present; it is to the last degree un-Classical. 



In opposition to this mighty group of Egyptian life-symbols, we meet at the 
threshold of the Classical Culture the custom, typifying the ease with which it 
could forget every piece of its inward and outward past, of burning the dead. To~' 
the Mycenaean age the elevation into a ritual of this particular funerary method 
amongst all those practised in turn by stone-age peoples, was essentially alien; 
indeed its Royal tombs suggest that earth-burial was regarded as peculiarly 
honourable. But in Homeric Greece, as in Vedic India, we find a change, so 
sudden that its origins must necessarily be psychological, from burial to that 
burning which (the Iliad gives us the full pathos of the symbolic act) was the^ 
ceremonial completion of death and the denial of all historical duration. 

From this moment the plasticity of the individual spiritual evolution was 
at an end. Classical drama admitted truly historical motives just as little as it 
allowed themes of inward evolution, and it is well known how decisively the 
Hellenic instinct set itself against portraiture in the arts. Right into the im- 
perial period Classical art handled only the matter that was, so to say, natural 
to it, the myth. 1 Even the "ideal" portraits of Hellenistic sculpture are 

v * From Homer to the tragedies of Seneca, a full thousand years, the same handful of myth-figures 
(Thyestes, Clytsemnestra, Heracles and the like) appear time after time without alteration, whereas 
in the poetry of the West, Faustian Man figures, first as Parzeval or Tristan, then (modified always 
into harmony with the epoch) as Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and eventually Faust or Werther, 
and now as the hero of the modern world-city romance, but is always presented in the atmosphere and 
under the conditions of a particular century. 



i 4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

mythical, of the same kind as the typical biographies of Plutarch's sort. No 
great Greek ever wrote down any recollections that would serve to fix a 
phase of experience for his inner eye. Not ev;n Socrates has told, regarding 
his inward life, anything important in our soise of the word. It is ques- 
tionable indeed whether for a Classical mind it was even possible to react 
to the motive forces that are presupposed in the production of a Parzeval, 
a Hamlet, or a Wcrthcr. In Plato we fail to observe any conscious evolu- 
tion of doctrine; his separate works are merely treatises written from very 
different standpoints which he took up from time to time, and it gave 
him no concern whether and how they hung together. On the contrary, a 
work of deep self-examination, the Vita Nuova of Dante, is found at the 
very outset of the spiritual history of the West. How little therefore of the 
Classical pure-present there really was in Goethe, the man who forgot nothing, 
the man whose works, as he avowed himself, are only fragments of a single 
grtat confession*. 

After the destruction of Athens by the Persians, all the older art-works were 
thrown on the dustheap (whence we are now extracting them), and we do not 
hear that anyone in Hellas ever troubled himself about the ruins of Mycenx or 
Phaistos for the purpose of ascertaining historical facts /Men read Homer but 
never thought of excavating the hill of Troy as Schliemann did; for what they 
wanted was myth, not history. The works of ^schylus and those of the pre- 
Socratic philosophers were already partially lost in the Hellenistic period. 
In the West, on the contrary, the piety inherent in and peculiar to the Culture 
manifested itself, five centuries before Schliemann, in Petrarch the fine 
collector of antiquities, coins and manuscripts, the very type of historically- 
sensitive man, viewing the distant past and scanning the distant prospect (was 
he not the first to attempt an Alpine peak?), living in his time, yet essentially 
not of it. The soul of the collector is intelligible only by having regard to his 
conception of Time. Even more passionate perhaps, though of a different 
colouring, is the collecting-bent of the Chinese. In China, whoever travels 
assiduously pursues "old traces" (Ku-tsi) and the untranslatable "Tap," the 
basic principle of Chinese existence, derives all its meaning from a deep his- 
torical feeling. In the Hellenistic period, objects were indeed collected and 
displayed everywhere, but they were curiosities of mythological appeal (as 
described by Pausanias) as to which questions of date or purpose simply did 
not arise and this too in the very presence of Egypt, which even by the time 
of the great Thuthmosis had been transformed into one vast museum of strict 
tradition. 

Amongst the Western peoples, it was the Germans who discovered the 
mechanical clock, the dread symbol of the flow of time, and the chimes of 
countless clock towers that echo day and night over West Europe arc 
perhaps the most wonderful expression of which a historical world-feeling is 



INTRODUCTION 15 

capable. 1 In the timeless countrysides and cities of the Classical world, we find 
nothing of the sort. Till the epoch of Pericles, the time of day was estimated- 
merely by the length of shadow, and it was only from that of Aristotle that 
v x the word o>pa received the (Babylonian) significance of ' ' hour ' ' ; prior to that 
there was no exact subdivision of the day. In Babylon and Egypt water-clocks 
and sun-dials were discovered in the very early stages, yet in Athens it was 
left to Plato to introduce a practically useful form of clepsydra, and this was 
merely a minor adjunct of everyday utility which could not have influenced 
the Classical life-feeling in the smallest degree. 

It remains still to mention the corresponding difference, which is very deep 
and has never yet been properly appreciated, between Classical and modern 
mathematics. 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 junction, and this brought us to 
dynamics, analytical geometry and thence to the Differential Calculus.* The 
modern theory of functions is the imposing marshalling of this whole mass of 
thought. It is a bizarre, but nevertheless psychologically exact, fact that the 
physics of the Greeks being statics and not dynamics neither knew the 
use nor felt the absence of the time-element, whereas we on the other hand work 
in thousandths of a second. The one and only evolution-idea that is timeless, 
ahistoric, is Aristotle's entelechy. 

f. This, then, is our task. We men of the Western Culture are, with our his- 
torical 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 ex- 
tinguished, there will never again be a Culture and a human type in which 
"world-history" is so potent a form of the waking consciousness. 

VI 

v^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 

1 It was about 1000 A.D. and therefore contemporaneously with the beginning of the Roman- 
esque style and the Crusades the first symptoms of a new Soul that Abbot Gerbert (Pope 
Sylvester II), the friend of the Emperor Otto III, invented the mechanism of the chiming wheel-clock. 
In Germany too, the first tower-clocks made their appearance, about 1100, and the pocket watch 
somewhat later. Observe the significant association of time measurement with the edifices of reli- 
gion. 

8 Newton's choice of the name "fluxions" for his calculus was meant to imply a standpoint 
towards certain metaphysical notions as to the nature of time. In Greek mathematics time figures 
not at all. 



16 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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. 

Everyone of course, if asked, would say that he saw the inward form of 
History quite clearly and definitely. The illusion subsists because no one has 
seriously reflected on it, still less conceived doubts as to his own knowledge, 
for no one has the slightest notion how wide a field for doubt there is. In fact, 
the lay-out of world-history is an unproved and subjective notion that has been 
handed down from generation to generation (not only of laymen but of profes- 
sional historians) and stands badly in need of a little of that scepticism which 
from Galileo onward has regulated and deepened our inborn ideas of nature. 

Thanks to the subdivision of history into "Ancient," " Medieval " and 
"Modern" an incredibly jejune and meaningless scheme, which has, however, 
entirely dominated our historical thinking we have failed to perceive the 
true position in the general history of higher mankind, of the little part-world 
which has developed on West-European l soil from the time of the German- 
Roman Empire, to judge of its relative importance and above all to estimate its 
direction. The Cultures that are to come will find it difficult to believe that the 
validity of such a scheme with its simple rectilinear progression and its mean- 
ingless proportions, becoming more and more preposterous with each century, 
incapable of bringing into itself the new fields of history as they successively 
come into the light of our knowledge, was, in spite of all, never whole-heartedly 
attacked. The criticisms that it has long been the fashion of historical re- 
searchers to level at the scheme mean nothing; they have only obliterated the 
one existing plan without substituting for it any other. To toy with phrases 
such as "the Greek Middle Ages" or "Germanic antiquity" does not in the 
least help us to form a clear and inwardly-convincing picture in which China 
and Mexico, the empire of Axum and that of the Sassanids have their proper 
places. And the expedient of shifting the initial point of "modern history" 

1 Here the historian is gravely influenced by preconceptions derived from geography, which 
assumes a Continent of Europe, and feels himself compelled to draw an ideal frontier corresponding to 
the physical frontier between "Europe" and "Asia." The word "Europe" ought to be struck out 
of history. There is historically no " European " type, and it is sheer delusion to speak of the Hellenes 
as "European Antiquity " (were Homer and Hcraclitus and Pythagoras, then, Asiatics?) and to enlarge 
upon their " mission " as such. These phrases express no realities but merely a sketchy interpretation 
of the map. It is thanks to this word "Europe" alone, and the complex of ideas resulting from it, 
that our historical consciousness has come to link Russia with the West in an utterly baseless unity 
a mere abstraction derived from the reading of books that has led to immense real consequences. 
In the shape of Peter the Great, this word has falsified the historical tendencies of a primitive human 
mass for two centuries, whereas the Russian instinct has very truly and fundamentally divided "Eu- 
rope" from "Mother Russia" with the hostility that we can sec embodied in Tolstoi, Aksakov or 
Dostoycvski. "East" and "West" arc notions that contain real history, whereas "Europe" is 
an empty sound. Everything great that the Classical world created, it created in pure denial of the 
existence of any continental barrier between Rome and Cyprus, Byzantium and Alexandria. Every- 
thing that we imply by the term European Culture came into existence between the Vistula and tie 
Adriatic and the Guadalquivir and, even if we were to agree that Greece, the Greece of Pericles, lay 
in Europe, the Greece of to-day certainly docs not. 



INTRODUCTION 17 

from the Crusades to the Renaissance, or from the Renaissance to the beginning 
of the i9th Century, only goes to show that the scheme per se is regarded as un- 
shakably 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 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. 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 our own position the decades since 
Luther, and particularly since Napoleon, loom large as Brocken-spectres. We 
know quite well that the slowness with which a high cloud or a railway train 
in the distance seems to move is only apparent, yet we believe that the tempo of 
all early Indian, Babylonian or Egyptian history was really slower than that of 
our own recent past. And we think of them as less substantial, more damped- 
down, more diluted, because we have not learned to make the allowance for 
(inward and outward) distances. 

It is self-evident that for the Cultures of the West the existence of Athens, 
Florence or Paris is more important than that of Lo-Yang or Pataliputra. But 
is it permissible to found a scheme of world-history on estimates of such a sort? 
If so, then the Chinese historian is quite entitled to frame a world-history in 
which the Crusades, the Renaissance, Caesar and Frederick the Great are passed 
over in silence as insignificant. How, from the morphological point of view, should 
our 1 8th Century be more important than any other of the sixty centuries that 
preceded it? Is it not ridiculous to oppose a "modern" history of a few cen- 
turies, and that history to all intents localized in West Europe, to an "ancient " 
history which covers as many millennia incidentally dumping into that 
"ancient history" the whole mass of the pre-Hellenic cultures, unprobed and 
unordered, as mere appendix-matter? This is no exaggeration. Do we not, for v 
the sake of keeping the hoary scheme, dispose of Egypt and Babylon each as 
an individual and self-contained history quite equal in the balance to our so- 
called "world-history" from Charlemagne to the World-War and well beyond 
it as a prelude to classical history? Do we not relegate the vast complexes 
of Indian and Chinese culture to foot-notes, with a gesture of embarrassment? 



i8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

As for the great American cultures, do we not, on the ground that they do not 
"fit in" (with what?), entirely ignore them? 

The most appropriate designation for this current West-European scheme of 
history, in which the great Cultures are made to follow orbits round us as the 
presumed centre of all world-happenings, is the Ptolemaic system of history. 
The system that is put forward in this work in place of it I regard as the Coper- 
nican discovery in the historical sphere, in that it admits no sort of privileged 
position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, 
Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico separate worlds of dynamic 
being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of 
history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual 
greatness and soaring power. 

VII 

The scheme " ancient-mediasval-modern " in its first form was a creation of 
the Magian world-sense. It first appeared in the Persian and Jewish religions 
after Cyrus, 1 received an apocalyptic sense in the teaching of the Book of Daniel 
on the four world-eras, and was developed into a world-history in the post- 
Christian religions of the East, notably the Gnostic systems. 2 

This important conception, within the very narrow limits which fixed its 
intellectual basis, was unimpeachable. Neither Indian nor even Egyptian his- 
tory was included in the scope of the proposition. For the Magian thinker the 
expression "world-history" meant a unique and supremely dramatic act, hav- 
ing as its theatre the lands between Hellas and Persia, in which the strictly 
dualistic world-sense of the East expressed itself not by means of polar concep- 
tions like the "soul and spirit," "good and evil" of contemporary meta- 
physics, but by the figure of a catastrophe, an epochal change of phase between 
world-creation and world-decay. 3 

No elements beyond those which we find stabilized in the Classical litera- 
ture, on the one hand, and the Bible (or other sacred book of the particular sys- 
tem), on the other, came into the picture, which presents (as "The Old" and 
"The New," respectively) the easily-grasped contrasts of Gentile and Jewish, 
Christian and Heathen, Classical and Oriental, idol and dogma, nature and spirit 
with a time connotation that is, as a drama in which the one prevails over the 
other. The historical change of period wears the characteristic dress of the 
religious "Redemption." This "world-history" in short was a conception 
narrow and provincial, but within its limits logical and complete. Necessarily, 
therefore, it was specific to this region and this humanity, and incapable of any 
natural extension. 

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 31, 175. 

J Windelband, Gescb. d. Phil. (1903), pp. 175 ff. 

In the New Testament the polar idea tends to appear in the dialectics of the Apostle Paul, 
while the periodic is represented by the Apocalypse. 



INTRODUCTION 19 

But to these two there has been added a third epoch, the epoch that we call 
"modern," on Western soil, and it is this that for the first time gives the pic- 
ture of history the look of a progression. The oriental picture was at rest. It 
presented a self-contained antithesis, with equilibrium as its outcome and a 
unique divine act as its turning-point. But, adopted and assumed by a wholly 
new type of mankind, it was quickly transformed (without anyone's noticing 
the oddity of the change) into a conception of a linear progress: from Homer or 
Adam the modern can substitute for these names the Indo-German, Old 
Stone Man, or the Pithecanthropus through Jerusalem, Rome, Florence and 
Paris according to the taste of the individual historian, thinker or artist, who 
has unlimited freedom in the interpretation of the three-part scheme. 

This third term, "modern times," which in form asserts that it is the last 
and conclusive term of the series, has in fact, ever since the Crusades, been 
stretched and stretched again to the elastic limit at which it will bear no more. 1 
It was at least implied if not stated in so many words, that here, beyond the an- 
cient and the medieval, 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. So it is that great thinkers, making a metaphysical virtue of intellectual 
necessity, have not only accepted without serious investigation the scheme of 
history agreed "by common consent" but have made of it the basis of their 
philosophies and dragged in God as author of this or that "world-plan." 
Evidently the mystic number three applied to the world-ages has something 
highly seductive for the metaphysician's taste. History was described by 
Herder as the education of the human race, by Kant as an evolution of the idea 
of freedom, by Hegel as a self-expansion of the world-spirit, by others in other 
terms, but as regards its ground-plan everyone was quite satisfied when he had 
thought out some abstract meaning for the conventional threefold order. 

On the very threshold of the Western Culture we meet the great Joachim of 
Floris (c. 1 145-1102.), 2 the first thinker of the Hegelian stamp who shattered 
the dualistic world-form of Augustine, and with his essentially Gothic in- 
tellect stated the new Christianity of his time in the form of a third term to the 
religions of the Old and the New Testaments, expressing them respectively as 
the Age of the Father, the Age of the Son and the Age of the Holy Ghost. His 

1 As we can see from the expression, at once desperate and ridiculous, "newest time" (neueste 
Zeif). 

2 K. Burdach, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus, 1918, pp. 48 et seq. (English readers may 
be referred to the article Joachim of Floris by Professor Alphandery in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 
XI ed., TV.) 



ID THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

teaching moved the best of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, Dante, Thomas 
Aquinas, in their inmost souls and awakened a world-outlook which slowly 
but surely took entire possession of the historical sense of our Culture. Lessing 
who often designated his own period, with reference to the Classical as the 
"after-world" 1 (Nachwelt) took his idea of the "education of the human 
race" with its three stages of child, youth and man, from the teaching of the 
Fourteenth Century mystics. Ibsen treats it with thoroughness in his Emperor 
and Galilean (1873), in which he directly presents the Gnostic world-concep- 
tion through the figure of the wizard Maximus, and advances not a step beyond 
it in his famous Stockholm address of 1887. It would appear, then, that the 
Western consciousness feels itself urged to predicate a sort of finality inherent 
in its own appearance. 

But the creation of the Abbot of Floris was a mystical glance into the secrets 
of the divine world-order. It was bound to lose all meaning as soon as it was 
used in the way of reasoning and made a hypothesis of scientific thinking, as it 
has been ever more and more frequently since the i7th Century. 

It is a quite indefensible method of presenting world-history to begin by 
giving rein to one's own religious, political or social convictions and endowing 
the sacrosanct three-phase system with tendencies that will bring it exactly to 
one's own- standpoint. This is, in effect, making of some formula say, the 
"Age of Reason," Humanity, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, 
enlightenment, economic progress, national freedom, the conquest of nature, 
or world-peace a criterion whereby to judge whole millennia of history. 
And so we judge that they were ignorant of the " true path," or that they failed 
to follow it, when the fact is simply that their will and purposes were not the 
same as ours. Goethe's saying, "What is important in life is life and not a 
result of life," is the answer to any and every senseless attempt to solve the 
riddle of historical form by means of a programme. 

It is the same picture that we find when we turn to the historians of each 
special art or science (and those of national economics and philosophy as well) .4 
We find: 

"Painting" from the Egyptians (or the cave-men) to the Impressionists, or 

"Music" from Homer to Bayreuth and beyond, or 

"Social Organization" from Lake Dwellings to Socialism, as the case may 

be, 

presented as a linear graph which steadily rises in conformity with the values 
of the (selected) arguments. No one has seriously considered the possibility 
that arts may have an allotted span of life and may be attached as forms 
of self-expression to particular regions and particular types of mankind, and 
that therefore the total history of an art may be merely an additive compilation 

1 The expression "antique" meant of course in the dualistic sense is found as early as the 
Isagpgt of Porphyry (c. 300 A.D.). 



INTRODUCTION 2.1 

of separate developments, of special arts, with no bond of union save the name 
and some details of craft-technique. 

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. In these cases we feel, with an unqualified 
certainty, a limit, and this sense of the limit is identical with our sense of the 
inward form. In the case of higher human history, on the contrary, we take our 
ideas as to the course of the future from an unbridled optimism that sets at 
naught all historical, i.e., organic, experience, and everyone therefore sets him- 
self to discover in the accidental present terms that he can expand into some 
striking progression-series, the existence of which rests not on scientific proof 
but on predilection. He works upon unlimited possibilities never a natural 
end and from the momentary top-course of his bricks plans artlessly the 
continuation of his structure. 

v/*' Mankind," however, has no aim, no idea, no plan, any more than the 
family of butterflies or orchids. "Mankind" is a zoological expression, or an 
empty word. 1 But conjure away the phantom, break the magic circle, and at 
once there emerges an astonishing wealth of actual forms the Living with all 
its immense fullness, depth and movement hitherto veiled by a catchword, 
a dryasdust scheme, and a set of personal ' ' ideals. ' ' I see, in place of that empty 
figment of one linear history which can only be kept up by shutting one's eyes 
to the overwhelming multitude of the facts, the drama of a number of mighty 
Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother- 
region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life-cycle; each , 
stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its 
own passions, its own life, will and feeling, its own death. Here indeed are colours, 
Alights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cul- 
tures, peoples, languages, truths,, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks 
and the stone-pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves but there is no ageing 
"Mankind." Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression 
which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not o^gulpture, ogjpaint- 
ing, one mathematics, one physics, but many, eacOH25^d^pest essence different 
fromjge]others7eacrnimited 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, sublimatedTIfe-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- 

1 "Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, always have been, and always will be, men and 
only men." (Goethe to Ludep.) 



n THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

history as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvellous 
waxing and waning of organic forms. The professional historian, on the con- 
trary, sees it as a sort of tapeworm industriously adding on to itself one epoch 
after another. 

But the series " ancicnt-mediasval-modern history" has at last exhausted its 
usefulness. Angular, narrow, shallow though it was as a scientific foundation, 
still we possessed no other form that was not wholly unphilosophical in which 
our data could be arranged, and world-history (as hitherto understood) has to 
thank it for filtering our classifiable solid residues. But the number of centuries 
that the scheme can by any stretch be made to cover has long since been ex- 
ceeded, and with the rapid increase in the volume of our historical material 
especially of material that cannot possibly be brought under the scheme the 
picture is beginning to dissolve into a chaotic blur. Every historical student 
who is not quite blind knows and feels this, and it is as a drowning man that he 
clutches at the only scheme which he knows of. The word "Middle Age," l 
invented in 1667 by Professor Horn of Leyden, has to-day to cover a formless 
and constantly extending mass which can only be defined, negatively, as every 
thing not classifiable under any pretext in one of the other two (tolerably well- 
ordered) groups. We have an excellent example of this in our feeble treatment 
and hesitant judgment of modern Persian, Arabian and Russian history. But, 
above all, it has become impossible to conceal the fact that this so-called history 
of the world is a limited history, first of the Eastern Mediterranean region and 
then, with an abrupt change of scene at the Migrations (an event important 
only to us and therefore greatly exaggerated by us, an event of purely Western 
and not even Arabian significance), of West-Central Europe. When Hegel de- 
clared so naively that he meant to ignore those peoples which did not fit into 
his scheme of history, he was only making an honest avowal of methodic 
premisses that every historian finds necessary for his purpose and every his- 
torical work shows in its lay-out. In fact it has now become an affair of 
scientific tact to determine which of the historical developments shall be 
seriously taken into account and which not. Ranke is a good example. 

VIII 

To-day we think in continents, and it is only our philosophers and historians 
who have not realized that we do so. Of what significance to us, then, are con- 
ceptions and purviews that they put before us as universally valid, when in 
truth their furthest horizon does not extend beyond the intellectual atmosphere 
of Western Man? 

Examine, from this point of view, our best books. When Plato speaks of 

1 " Middle Ages" connotes the history of the space-time region in which Latin was the language 
tf the Church and the Uarntd. The mighty course of Eastern Christianity, which, long before Boniface, 
spread over Turkestan into China and through Sabxa into Abyssinia, was entirely excluded from 
this "world-history." 



INTRODUCTION 13 

humanity, he means the Hellenes in contrast to the barbarians, which is entirely 
consonant with the ahistoric mode of the Classical life and thought, and his 
premisses take him to conclusions that for Greeks were complete and significant. 
W.ien, however, Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the 
validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in 
so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes with- 
out saying. In his aesthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias's art, 
or Rembrandt's art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms 
of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought, though a 
glance at Aristotle and his essentially different conclusions should have sufficed 
to show that Aristotle's intellect, not less penetrating than his own, was of 
different structure from it. The categories of the Westerner are just as alien to 
Russian thought as those of the Chinaman or the ancient Greek are to him. For 
us, the effective and complete comprehension of Classical root-words is just as 
impossible as that of Russian 1 and Indian, and for the modern Chinese or Arab, 
with their utterly different intellectual constitutions, "philosophy from Bacon 
to Kant ' ' has only a curiosity-value. 

y It is this that is lacking to the Western thinker, the very thinker in whom 
we might have expected to find it insight into the historically relative char- 
acter of his data, which are expressions of one specific existence and one only; 
knowledge of the necessary limits of their validity; the conviction that his 
"unshakable" truths and "eternal" views are simply true for him and eternal 
for his world-view; the duty of looking beyond them to find out what the men 
of other Cultures have with equal certainty evolved out of themselves. That 
and nothing else will impart completeness to the philosophy of the future, and 
only through an understanding of the living world shall we understand the 
symbolism of history. 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 will to life, to 
power, to action). Here it is not the ideal abstract "man" of Kant that is 
subjected to examination, but actual man as he has inhabited the earth during 
historical time, grouped, whether primitive or advanced, by peoples; and it is 
more than ever futile to define the structure of his highest ideas in terms of the 
" ancient-mediseval-modern " scheme with its local limitations. But it is done, 
nevertheless. 

1 See Vol. II, p. 361, foot-note. To the true Russian the basic proposition of Darwinism is as 
devoid of meaning as that of Copernicus is to a true Arab. 



14 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

Consider the historical horizon of Nietzsche. His conceptions of decadence, 
militarism, the transvaluation of all values, the will to power, lie deep in the 
essence of Western civilization and are for the analysis of that civilization of 
decisive importance. But what, do we find, was the foundation on which he 
built up his creation? Romans and Greeks, Renaissance and European preseat, 
with a fleeting and uncomprehending side-glance at Indian philosophy in 
short "ancient, medizval and modern" history. Strictly speaking, he never 
once moved outside the scheme, not did any other thinker of his time. 

What correlation, then, is there or can there be of his idea of the "Diony- 
sian" with the inner life of a highly-civilized Chinese or an up-to-date Ameri- 
can? What is the significance of his type of the "Superman" for the world 
of Islam? Can image-forming antitheses of Nature and Intellect, Heathen and 
Christian, Classical and Modern, have any meaning for the soul of the Indian 
or the Russian? What can Tolstoi who from the depths of his humanity 
rejected the whole Western world-idea as something alien and distant do 
with the "Middle Ages," with Dante, with Luther? What can a Japanese do 
with Parzcval and "Zarathustra," or an Indian with Sophocles? And is the 
thought-range of Schopenhauer, Comte, Feuerbach, Hebbel or Strindberg any 
wider? Is not their whole psychology, for all its intention of world-wide 
validity, one of purely West-European significance? 

How comic seem Ibsen's woman-problems which also challenge the 
attention of all "humanity" when, for his famous Nora, the lady of the 
North-west European city with the horizon that is implied by a house-rent 
of 100 to 300 a year and a Protestant upbringing, we substitute Ciesar's wife, 
Madame de Sevigne, a Japanese or a Turkish peasant woman! But, for that 
matter, Ibsen's own circle of vision is -that of the middle class in a great city of 
yesterday and to-day. His conflicts, which start from spiritual premisses that 
did not exist till about 1850 and can scarcely last beyond 1950, are neither those 
of the great world nor those of the lower masses, still less those of the cities in- 
habited by non-European populations. . 

All these are local and temporary values most of them indeed limited 
to the momentary "intelligentsia" of cities of West-European type. World- 
historical or "eternal" values they emphatically are not. Whatever the sub- 
stantial importance of Ibsen's and Nietzsche's generation may be, it infringes 
the very meaning of the word "world-history" which denotes the totality 
and not a selected part to subordinate, to undervalue, or to ignore the factors 
which lie outside "modem" interests. Yet in fact they are so undervalued or 
ignored to an amazing extent. What the West has said and thought, hitherto, 
on the problems of space, time, motion, number, will, marriage, property, 
tragedy, science, has remained narrow and dubious, because men were always 
looking for the solution off he question. It was never seen that many questioners 
implies many answers, that any philosophical question is really a veiled desire 



INTRODUCTION 2.5 

to get an explicit affirmation of what is implicit in the question itself, that the 
great questions of any period are fluid beyond all conception, and that therefore 
it is only by obtaining a group of historically limited solutions and measuring it by 
utterly impersonal criteria that the final secrets can be reached. The real student 
of mankind treats no standpoint as absolutely right or absolutely wrong. In 
the face of such grave problems as that of Time or that of Marriage, it is in- 
sufficient to appeal to personal experience, or an inner voice, or reason, or the 
opinion of ancestors or contemporaries. 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. 

V How greatly, then, Western world-criticism can be widened and deepened! 
How immensely far beyond the innocent relativism of Nietzsche and his genera- 
tion one must look how fine one's sense for form and one's psychological 
insight must become how completely one must free oneself from limitations 
of self, of practical interests, of horizon before one dare assert the pretension 
to understand world-history, the world-as-history. 

IX 

In opposition to all these arbitary and narrow schemes, derived from tradi- 
tion or personal choice, into which history is forced, I put forward the natural, 
the "Copernican," form of the historical process which lies deep in the essence 
of that process and reveals itself only to an eye perfectly free from prepossessions. 

Such an eye was Goethe's. That which Goethe called Living Nature is 
exactly that which we are calling here world-history, world-as-history. Goethe, 
who as artist portrayed the life and development, always the life and develop- 
ment, of his figures, the thing-becoming and not the thing-become ("Wilhelm 
Meister" and "Wahrheit und Dichtung") hated Mathematics. For him, the 
world-as-mechanism stood opposed to the world-as-organism, dead nature to 
living nature, law to form. As naturalist, every line he wrote was meant to 
display the image of a thing-becoming, the "impressed form" living and de- 
veloping. Sympathy, observation, comparison, immediate and inward cer- 
tainty, intellectual flair these were the means whereby he was enabled to 
approach the secrets of the phenomenal world in motion. Now these are the means 
of historical research precisely these and no others. It was this godlike insight 
that prompted him to say at the bivouac fire on the evening of the Battle of 
Valmy: "Here and now begins a new epoch of world history, and you, gentle- 
men, can say that you 'were there.' " No general, no diplomat, let alone the 
philosophers, ever so directly felt history "becoming." It is the deepest judg- 
ment that any man ever uttered about a great historical act in the moment of 
its accomplishment. 
" And just as he followed out the development of the plant-form from the leaf, 



16 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

the birth of the vertebrate type, the process of the geological strata the 
Destiny in nature and not the Causality so here we shall develop the form- 
language of human history, its periodic structure, its organic logic out of the 
profusion of all the challenging details. 

In other aspects, mankind is habitually, and rightly, reckoned as one of the 
organisms of the earth's surface. Its physical structure, its natural functions, 
the whole phenomenal conception of it, all belong to a more comprehensive 
unity. Only in this aspect is it treated otherwise, despite that deeply-felt 
relationship of plant destiny and human destiny which is an eternal theme of 
all lyrical poetry, and despite that similarity of human history to that of any 
other of the higher life-groups which is the refrain of endless beast-legends, 
sagas and fables. 

But only bring analogy to bear on this aspect as on the rest, Jetting the 
world of human Cultures intimately and unreservedly work upon the imagina- 
tion instead of forcing it into a ready-made scheme. Let the words youth, 
growth, maturity, decay hitherto, and to-day more than ever, used to ex- 
press subjective valuations and entirely personal preferences in sociology, ethics 
and aesthetics be taken at last as objective descriptions of organic states. 
Set forth the Classical Culture as a self-contained phenomenon embodying and 
expressing the Classical soul, put it beside the Egyptian, the Indian, the Baby- 
lonian, the Chinese and the Western, and determine for each of these higher 
individuals what is typical in their surgings and what is necessary in the riot 
of incident. And then at last will unfold itself the picture of world-history 
that is natural to us, men of the West, and to us alone. 



Our narrower task, then, is primarily to determine, from such a world- 
survey, the state of West Europe and America as at the epoch of 1800-2.000 
to establish the chronological position of this period in the ensemble of Western 
culture-history, its significance as a chapter that is in one or other guise neces- 
sarily found in the biography of every Culture, and the organic and symbolic 
meaning of its political, artistic, intellectual and social expression-forms. 

Considered in the spirit of analogy, this period appears as chronologically 
parallel- "contemporary" in our special sense with the phase of Hel- 
lenism, and its present culmination, marked by the World-War, corresponds 
with the transition from the Hellenistic to the Roman age. Rome, with its 
rigorous realism uninspired, barbaric, disciplined, practical, Protestant, 
Prussian will always give us, working as we must by analogies, the key to 
understanding our own future. The break of destiny that we express by hyphening 
the words " Greeks Romans" is occurring for us also, separating that which is 
already fulfilled from that which is to come. Long ago we might and should have 
seen in the "Classical" world a development which is the complete counter- 



INTRODUCTION 2.7 

part of our own Western development, differing indeed from it in every detail 
of the surface but entirely similar as regards the inward power driving the 
great organism towards its end. We might have found the constant alter ego 
of our own actuality in establishing the correspondence, item by item, from 
the "Trojan War" and the Crusades, Homer and the Nibelungenlied, through 
Doric and Gothic, Dionysian movement and Renaissance, Polycletus and John 
Sebastian Bach, Athens and Paris, Aristotle and Kant, Alexander and Napoleon, 
to the world-city and the imperialism common to both Cultures. 

Unfortunately, this requires an interpretation of the picture of Classical his- 
tory very different from the incredibly one-sided, superficial, prejudiced, limited 
picture that we have in fact given to it. We have, in truth been only too con- 
scious of our near relation to the Classical Age, and only too prone in con- 
sequence 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 inter- 
pretation 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 

v adorers), is a venerable prejudice which ought at last to be put aside. The 
whole religious-philosophical, art-historical and social-critical work of the 
i9th Century has been necessary to enable us, not to undersfandlEschylus, Plato, 
Apollo and Dionysus, the Athenian state and Cassarism (which we are far indeed 
from doing), but to begin to realize, once and for all, how immeasurably alien 
and distant these things are from our inner selves more alien, maybe, than 
Mexican gods and Indian architecture. 

Our views of the Grasco-Roman Culture have always swung between two 
extremes, and our standpoints have invariably been defined for us by the 
" ancient-mediasval-modern " scheme. One. group, public men before all else 
economists, politicians, jurists opine that "present-day mankind" is 
making excellent progress, assess it and its performances at the very highest 
value and measure everything earlier by its standards. There is no modern 
party that has not weighed up Cleon, Marius, Themistocles, Catiline, the 
Gracchi, according to its own principles. On the other hand we have the 
group of artists, poets, philologists and philosophers. These feel themselves 
to be out of their element in the aforesaid present, and in consequence choose 
for themselves in this or that past epoch a standpoint that is in its way just 
as absolute and dogmatic from which to condemn "to-day." The one group 
looks upon Greece as a "not yet," the other upon modernity as a "nevermore." 

^ Both labour under the obsession of a scheme of history which treats the two 
epochs as part of the same straight line. 

In this opposition it is the two souls of Faust that express themselves. The 
danger of the one group lies in a clever superficiality. In its hands there remains 



2.8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

finally, of all Classical Culture, of all reflections of the Classical soul, nothing 
but a bundle of social, economic, political and physiological facts, and the rest 
is treated as "secondary results," "reflexes," "attendant phenomena." In the 
books of this group we find not a hint of the mythical force of ^schylus's 
choruses, of the immense mother-earth struggle of the early sculpture, the 
Doric column, of the richness of the Apollo-cult, of the real depth of the Roman 
Emperor-worship. The other group, composed above all of belated roman- 
ticists represented in recent times by the three Basel professors Bachofen, 
Burckhardt and Nietzsche succumb to the usual dangers of ideology. They 
lose themselves in the clouds of an antiquity that is really no more than the 
image of their own sensibility in a philological mirror. They rest their case 
upon the only evidence which they consider worthy to support it, viz., the 
relics of the old literature, yet there never was a Culture so incompletely repre- 
sented for us by its great writers. 1 The first group, on the other hand, supports 
itself principally upon the humdrum material of law-sources, inscriptions and 
coins (which Burckhardt and Nietzsche, very much to their own Joss, despised) 
and subordinates thereto, often with little or no sense of truth and fact, the 
surviving literature. Consequently, even in point of critical foundations, 
neither group takes the other seriously. I have never heard that Nietzsche and 
Mommsen had the smallest respect for each other. 

But neither group has attained to that higher method of treatment which 
reduces this opposition of criteria to ashes, although it was within their power 
to do so. In their self-limitation they paid the penalty for taking over the 
causality-principle from natural science. Unconsciously they arrived at a prag- 
matism that sketchily copied the world-picture drawn by physics and, instead 
of revealing, obscured and confused the quite other-natured forms of history. 
They had no better expedient for subjecting the mass of historical material to 
critical and normative examination than to consider one complex of phenomena 
as being primary and causative and the rest as being secondary, as being con- 
sequences or effects. And it was not only the matter-of-fact school that re- 
sorted to this method. The romanticists did likewise, for History had not 
revealed even to their dreaming gaze its specific logic; and yet they felt that 

1 This is conclusively proved by the selection that determined survival, which was governed 
not by mere chance but very definitely by a deliberate tendency. The Atticism of the Augustan Age, 
tired, sterile, pedantic, back-looking, conceived the hall-mark "classical" and allowed only a very 
small group of Greek works up to Plato to bear it. The rest, including the whole wealth of Hellenis- 
tic literature, was rejected and has been almost entirely lost. It is this pedagogue's anthology that 
has survived (almost in its entirety) and so fixed the imaginary picture of "Classical Antiquity" 
alike for the Renaissance Florentine and for Winckclmann, Holderlin, and even Nietzsche. 

[In this English translation, it should be mentioned, the word "Classical" has almost uni- 
versally been employed to translate the German antike, as, in the translator's judgment, no literal 
equivalent of the German word would convey the specific meaning attached to antike throughout 
the work, "antique," "ancient" and the like words having for us a much more general connota- 
tion. TV.] 



INTRODUCTION 2.9 

there was an immanent necessity in it to determine this somehow, rather than 
turn their backs upon History in despair like Schopenhauer. 

XI 

Briefly, then, there are two ways of regarding the Classical the material- 
istic and the ideological. By the former, it is asserted that the sinking of one 
scale-pan has its cause in the rising of the other, and it is shown that this 
occurs invariably (truly a striking theorem); and in this juxtaposing of cause 
and effect we naturally find the social and sexual, at all events the purely polit- 
ical, facts classed as causes and the religious, intellectual and (so far as the 
materialist tolerates them as facts at all) the artistic as effects. On the other 
hand, the ideologues show that the rising of one scale-pan follows from the 
sinking of the other, which they are able to prove of course with equal exacti- 
tude; this done, they lose themselves in cults, mysteries, customs, in the secrets 
of the strophe and the line, throwing scarcely a side-glance at the commonplace 
daily life for them an unpleasant consequence of earthly imperfection. Each 
side, with its gaze fixed on causality, demonstrates that the other side either 
cannot or will not understand the true linkages of things and each ends by 
calling the other blind, superficial, stupid, absurd or frivolous, oddities or 
Philistines. It shocks the ideologue if anyone deals with Hellenic finance- 
problems and instead of, for example, telling us the deep meanings of the 
Delphic oracle, describes the far-reaching money operations which the Oracle 
priests undertook with their accumulated treasures. The politician, on the 
other hand, has a superior smile for those who waste their enthusiasm on ritual 
formulas and the dress of Attic youths, instead of writing a book adorned with 
up-to-date catchwords about antique class-struggles. 

The one type is foreshadowed from the very outset in Petrarch; it created 
Florence and Weimar and the Western classicism. The other type appears in 
the middle of the i8th Century, along with the rise of civilized, 1 economic- 
megalopolitan 2 politics, and England is therefore its birthplace (Grote). At 
bottom, the opposition is between the conceptions of culture-man and those 
of civilization-man, and it is too deep, too essentially human, to allow the 
weaknesses of both stand-points alike to be seen or overcome. 

The materialist himself is on this point an idealist. He too, without wish- 
ing or desiring it, has made his views dependent upon his wishes. In fact all 
our finest minds without exception have bowed down reverently before the 
picture of the Classical, abdicating in this one instance alone their function of 
unrestricted criticism. The freedom and power of Classical research are always 

1 As will be seen later, the words ^ivilisierte and Zivilisation possess in this work a special 
meaning. Tr. 

2 English not possessing the adjective-forming freedom of German, we are compelled to coin a 
word for the rendering of grossstadtisch, an adjective not only frequent but of emphatic significance 
in the author's argument. Tr. 



3 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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. We 
Westerners have sacrificed on the Classical altar the purity and independence of 
our art, for we have not dared to create without a side-glance at the "sublime 
exemplar." We have projected our own deepest spiritual needs and feelings 
on to the Classical picture. Some day a gifted psychologist will deal with 
this most fateful illusion and tell us the story of the "Classical" that we have 
so consistently reverenced since the days of Gothic. Few theses would be more 
helpful for the understanding of the Western soul from Otto III, the first victim 
of the South, to Nietzsche, the last. 

Goethe on his Italian tour speaks with enthusiasm of the buildings of 
Palladio, whose frigid and academic work we to-day regard very sceptically: 
but when he goes on to Pompeii he does not conceal his dissatisfaction in 
experiencing "a strange, half-unpleasant impression," and what he has to say 
on the temples of Pa^stum and Segesta masterpieces of Hellenic art is 
embarrassed and trivial. Palpably, when Classical antiquity in its full force 
met him face to face, he did not recognize it. It is the same with all others. 
Much that was Classical they chose not to see, and so they saved their inward 
image of the Classical which was in reality the background of a life-ideal 
that they themselves had created and nourished with their heart's blood, a 
vessel filled with their own world-feeling, a phantom, an idol. The audacious 
descriptions of Aristophanes, Juvenal or Petronius of life in the Classical cities 
the southern dirt and riff-raff, terrors and brutalities, pleasure-boys and 
Phrynes, phallus worship and imperial orgies excite the enthusiasm of the 
student and the dilettante, who find the same realities in the world-cities of 
to-day too lamentable and repulsive to face. "In the cities life is bad; there 
are too many of the lustful." also sprach Zarathustra. They commend the 
state-sense of the Romans, but despise the man of to-day who permits himself 
any contact with public affairs. There is a type of scholar whose clarity of 
vision comes under some irresistible spell when it turns from a frock-coat to a 
toga, from a British football-ground to a Byzantine circus, from a transcon- 
tinental railway to a Roman road in the Alps, from a thirty-knot destroyer to 
a trireme, from Prussian bayonets to Roman spears nowadays, even, from a 
modern engineer's Suez Canal to that of a Pharaoh. He would admit a steam- 
engine as a symbol of human passion and an expression of intellectual force if 
it were Hero of Alexandria who invented it, not otherwise. To such it seems 
blasphemous to talk of Roman central-heating or book-keeping in preference 
to the worship of the Great Mother of the Gods. 

But the other school sees nothing but these things. It thinks it exhausts the 



INTRODUCTION 31 

essence of this Culture, alien as it is to ours, by treating the Greeks as simply 
equivalent, and it obtains its conclusions by means of simple factual substitur 
tions, ignoring altogether the Classical soul. That there is not the slightest 
inward correlation between the things meant by "Republic," "freedom," 
"property" and the like then and there and the things meant by such words 
here and now, it has no notion whatever. It makes fun of the historians of 
the age of Goethe, who honestly expressed their own political ideals in classical 
history forms and revealed their own personal enthusiasms in vindications or 
condemnations of lay-figures named Lycurgus, Brutus, Cato, Cicero, Augustus 
but it cannot itself write a chapter without reflecting the party opinion of 
its morning paper. 

^ It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the spirit of 
Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads to the end. In 
sum, each school permits itself to bring into high relief that part of the 

\/Classical which best expresses its own views Nietzsche the pre-Socratic 
Athens, the economists the Hellenistic period, the politicians Republican Home, 
poets the Imperial Age. 

Not that religious and artistic phenomena are more primitive than social 
and economic, any more than the reverse. For the man who in these things 
has won his unconditional freedom of outlook, beyond all personal interests 
whatsoever, there is no dependence, no priority, no rejationjrf cause and effect, 

v/ho differentiation of value or importance. That which assigns relative ranks 
amongst theln3ivldual detail-facts is simply the greater or less purity and force 
of their form-language, their symbolism, beyond all questions of good and evil, 
high and low, useful and ideal. 

XII 

Looked at in this way, the "Decline of the West" comprises nothing less 
than the problem of Civilisation. 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. 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. 



32. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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. What, but this, can be the meaning of the fact which 
can only be disputed by vain phrases that the Romans were barbarians who 
did not precede but closed a great development? Unspiritual, unphilosophical, 
devoid of art, clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible 
successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and nothingness. An im- 
agination directed purely to practical objects they had religious laws gov- 
erning godward relations as they had other laws governing human relations, 
but there was no specifically Roman saga of gods was something which is 
not found at all in Athens. In a word, Greek soul Roman intellect; and this 
antithesis is the differentia between Culture and Civilization. Nor is it only to 
the Classical that it applies. Again and again there appears this type of strong- 
minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the hands of this type lies 
the intellectual and material destiny of each and every "late" period. Such 
arc the men who carried through the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the 
Chinese, the Roman Civilizations, and in such periods do Buddhism, Stoicism, 
Socialism ripen into definitive world-conceptions which enable a moribund 
humanity to be attacked and re-formed in its intimate structure. Pure Civiliza- 
tion, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking-down of forms that 
have become inorganic or dead. 

The transition from Culture to Civilization was accomplished for the 
Classical world in the 4th, for the Western in the i9th Century. From these 
periods onward the great intellectual decisions take place, not as in the days of 
the Orpheus-movement or the Reformation in the ' ' whole world ' ' where not 
a hamlet is too small to be unimportant, but in three or four world-cities that 
have absorbed into themselves the whole content of History, while the old 
wide landscape of the Culture, become merely provincial, serves only to feed 
the cities with what remains of its higher mankind. 

World-city and province 1 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, reli- 
gionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and es- 
pecially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman. This is a 
very great stride towards the inorganic, towards the end what does it signify? 
France and England have already taken the step and Germany is beginning to 
do so. After Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, 

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 117 ct scq. 






INTRODUCTION 33 

Paris, London come Berlin and New York. It is the destiny of whole regions 
that lie outside the radiation-circle of one of these cities of old Crete and 
Macedon and to-day the Scandinavian North * to become "provinces." 

Of old, the field on which the opposed conception of an epoch came to 
battle was some world-problem of a metaphysical, religious or dogmatic kind, 
and the battle was between the soil-genius of the countryman (noble, priest) 
and the "worldly" patrician genius of the famous old small towns of Doric or 
Gothic springtime. Of such a character were the conflicts over the Dionysus 
religion as in the tyranny of Kleisthenes of Sikyon 2 and those of the 
Reformation in the German free cities and the Huguenot wars. But just as 
these cities overcame the country-side (already it is a purely civic world-outlook 
that appears in even Parmenides and Descartes), so in turn the world-city over- 
came them. It is the common intellectual process of later periods such as the 
Ionic and the Baroque, and to-day as in the Hellenistic age which at its 
outset saw the foundation of artificial, land-alien Alexandria Culture-cities 
like Florence, Niirnberg, Salamanca, Bruges and Prag, have become provincial 
towns and fight inwardly a lost battle against the world-cities. The world- 
city means cosmopolitanism in place of "home," 3 cold matter-of-fact in place 
of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a fossil representative 
of the older religion of the heart, ' ' society ' ' in place of the state, natural instead 
of hard-earned rights. It was in the conception of money as an inorganic and 
abstract magnitude, entirely disconnected from the notion of the fruitful earth 
and the primitive values, that the Romans had the advantage of the Greeks. 
Thenceforward any high ideal of life becomes largely a question of money. 
Unlike the Greek stoicism of Chrysippus, the Roman stoicism of Cato and 
Seneca presupposes a private income; 4 and, unlike that of the i8th Century, 
the social-ethical sentiment of the zoth, 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 sex and society goes back far beyond 
Rousseau and Socrates to quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappear- 

1 One cannot fail to notice this in the development of Strindberg and especially in that of Ibsen, 
who was never quite at home in the civilized atmosphere of his problems. The motives of " Brand " 
and " Rosmersholm " are a wonderful mixture of innate provincialism and a theoretically-acquired 
megalopolitan outlook. Nora is the very type of the provincial derailed by reading. 

2 Who forbade the cult of the town's hero Adrastos and the reading of the Homeric poems, with 
the object of cutting the Doric nobility from its spiritual roots (c. 560 B.C.). 

3 A profound word which obtains its significance as soon as the barbarian becomes a culture-man 
anJ loses it again as soon as the civilization-man takes up the motto "Ubi bene, ibi patria." 

\s 4 Hence it was that the first to succumb to Christianity were the Romans who could not afford 
to be Stoics. See Vol. II, pp. 607 et seq. 



34 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

ance of the pancm et circcnscs in the form of wage-disputes and football-grounds 
all these things betoken the definite closing-down of the Culture and the 
opening of a quite new phase of human existence anti-provincial, late, 
futureless, but quite inevitable. 

This is what has to be viewed, and viewed not with the eyes of the partisan, 
the ideologue, the up-to-date novelist, not from this or that "standpoint," but 
in a high, time-free perspective embracing whole millenniums of historical 
world-forms, if we are really to comprehend the great crisis of the present. 

To me it is a symbol of the first importance that in the Rome of Crassus - 
triumvir and all-powerful building-site speculator the Roman people with 
its proud inscriptions, the people before whom Gauls, Greeks, Parthians, Syri- 
ans afar trembled, lived in appalling misery in the many-storied lodging-houses 
of dark suburbs, 1 accepting with indifference or even with a sort of sporting 
interest the consequences of the military expansion: that many famous old-noble 
families, descendants of the men who defeated the Celts and the Samnites, lost 
their ancestral homes through standing apart from the wild rush of speculation 
and were reduced to renting wretched apartments; that, while along the Appian 
Way there arose the splendid and still wonderful tombs of the financial mag- 
nates, the corpses of the people were thrown along with animal carcases and 
town refuse into a monstrous common grave till in Augustus's time it was 
banked over for the avoidance of pestilence and so became the site of Maecenas's 
renowned park; that in depopulated Athens, which lived on visitors and on the 
bounty of rich foreigners, the mob of parvenu tourists from Rome gaped at the 
works of the Periclean age with as little understanding as the American globe- 
trotter in the Sistine Chapel at those of Michelangelo, every removable art- 
piece having ere this been taken away or bought at fancy prices to be replaced 
by the Roman buildings which grew up, colossal and arrogant, by the side of 
* the low and modest structures of the old time. In such things which it is 
the historian's business not to praise or to blame but to consider morphologi- 
cally there lies, plain and immediate enough for one who has learnt to see, 
an idea. 

For it will become manifest that, from this moment on, all great conflicts 
of world-outlook, of politics, of art, of science, of feeling will be under the 
influence of this one opposition. What is the hall-mark of a politic of Civiliza- 
tion to-day, in contrast to a politic of Culture yesterday? It is, for the Classical 
rhetoric, and for the Western journalism, both serving that abstract which 
represents the power of Civilization money? It is the money-spirit which 

1 In Rome and Byzantium, lodging-houses of six to ten stories (with street-widths of ten feet 
at most!) were built without any sort of official supervision, and frequently collapsed with all their 
inmates. A great part of the cives Romani, for whom panemet circenses constituted all existence, pos- 
sessed no more than a high-priced sleeping-berth in one of the swarming ant-hills called insula. 
(Pohlraann, Aus Altertum und Gegenwart, 1911, pp. 199 ff.) 

Sec Vol. II, 577. 



INTRODUCTION 35 

penetrates unremarked the historical forms of the people's existence, often with- 
out 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? 
The ideals of a Platonic or those of a Kantian age had for the higher mankind 
concerned a general validity. But those of a Hellenistic age, or those of our 
own, are valid exclusively for the brain of the Megalopolitan. For the villager's 
or, generally, the nature-man's world-feeling our Socialism like its near re- 
lation Darwinism (how utterly un-Goethian are the formulas 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 

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 palaestra and the 
Roman circus. 1 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 specula- 
tion, and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the megalopolitan palate 
and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the provincials. Neither Alex- 
andrine poetry nor plein-air painting is anything to the "people." And, then 
as now, the phase of transition is marked by a series of scandals only to be found 

such moments. The anger evoked in the Athenian populace by Euripides and 
by the "Revolutionary" painting of Apollodorus, for example, is repeated in 
the opposition to Wagner, Manet, Ibsen, and Nietzsche. 

It is possible to understand the Greeks without mentioning their economic 
relations; the Romans, on the other hand, can only be understood through these. 
Chasronea and Leipzig were the last battles fought about an idea. In the First 
Punic War and in 1870 economic motives are no longer to be overlooked. Not 

1 German gymnastics, from the intensely provincial and natural forms imparted to it by Jahn, 
has since 1813 been carried by a very rapid development into the sport category. The difference be- 
tween a Berlin athletic ground on a big day and a Roman circus was even by 1914 very slight. 



36 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

till the Romans came with their practical energy was slave-holding given that 
big collective character which many students regard as the die-stamp of Clas- 
sical economics, legislation and way of life, and which in any event vastly 
lowered both the value and the inner worthiness of such free labour as continued 
to exist side by side with gang-labour. And it was not the Latin, but the 
Germanic peoples of the West and America who developed out of the steam- 
engine a big industry that transformed the face of the land. The relation of 
these phenomena to Stoicism and to Socialism is unmistakable. Not till the 
Roman Cassarism foreshadowed by C. Flaminius, shaped first by Marius, 
handled by strong-minded, large-scale men of fact did the Classical World 
learn the pre-eminence of money. Without this fact neither Caesar, nor "Rome" 
-'generally, is understandable. In every Greek is a Don Quixote, in every Roman 
a Sancho Panza factor, and these factors are dominants. 



XIII 



Considered in itself, the Roman world-dominion was a negative phenom- 
enon, being the result not of a surplus of energy on the one side that the 
Romans had never had since Zama but of a deficiency of resistance on the 
other. That the Romans did not conquer the world is certain; l they merely 
took possession of a booty that lay open to everyone. The Imperium Romanum 
came into existence not as the result of such an extremity of military and 
financial effort as had characterized the Punic Wars, but because the old East 
forwent all external self-determinations. We must not be deluded by the ap- 
pearance of brilliant military successes. With a few ill-trained, ill-led, and 
sullen legions, Lucullus and Pompey conquered whole realms a phenomenon 
that in the period of the battle of Ipsus would have been unthinkable. The 
Mithradatic danger, serious enough for a system of material force which had 
never been put to any real test, would have been nothing to the conquerors of 
Hannibal. After Zama, the Romans never again either waged or were capable 
of waging a war against a great military Power. 2 Their classic wars were those 
% against the Samnites, Pyrrhus and Carthage. Their grand hour was Cannae. 
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. 

uX Here, then, I lay it down that Imperialism, of which 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. 

1 Sec Vol. II, 519. 

* The conquest of Gaul by Czsar was frankly a colonial, i.e., a one-sided, war; and the fact 
that it is the highest achievement in the later military history of Rome only shows that the well of 
real achievement was rapidly drying up. 



INTRODUCTION 37 

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. He stands for the 
political style of a far-ranging, Western, Teutonic and especially German future, 
and his phrase "expansion is everything" is the Napoleonic reassertion of the 
indwelling tendency of every Civilization that has fully ripened Roman, Arab 
or Chinese. It is not a matter of choice it is not the conscious will of in- 
^dividuals, 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. 1 Life is the process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain- 
man there are only extensive possibilities. 2 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. Here the form-language of politics, as the 
direct intellectual expression of a certain type of humanity, touches on a deep 
metaphysical problem on the fact, affirmed in the grant of unconditional 
validity to the causality-principle, that the soul is the complement oj its extension. 
When, between 480 and 2.30, 3 the Chinese group of states was tending 
towards imperialism, it was entirely futile to combat the principle of Imperi- 
alism (Lien-heng), practised in particular by the "Roman" state of Tsin 4 and 
theoretically represented by the philosopher Dschang Yi, by ideas of a League 
of Nations (Hoh-tsung) largely derived from Wang Hii, a profound sceptic who 
had no illusions as to the men or the political possibilities of this "late" 
period. Both sides opposed the anti-political idealism of Lao-tse, but as be- 
tween themselves it was Lien-heng and not Hoh-tsung which swam with the 
natural current of expansive Civilization. 5 

Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a Western type of Caesars, 
whose day is to come though yet distant. He stands midway between Napoleon 
and the force-men of the next centuries, just as Flaminius, who from 2.32. B.C. 
onward pressed the Romans to undertake the subjugation of Cisalpine Gaul 
and so initiated the policy of colonial expansion, stands between Alexander and 
Oesar. Strictly speaking, Flaminius was a private person for his real power 
was of a kind not embodied in any constitutional office who exercised a 
dominant influence in the state at a time when the state-idea was giving way to 
the pressure of economic factors. So far as Rome is concerned, he was the arche- 

1 The modern Germans are a conspicuous example of a people that has become expansive without 
knowing it or willing it. They were already in that state while they still believed themselves to be 
the people of Goethe. Even Bismarck, the founder of the new age, never had the slightest idea of it, 
and believed himself to have reached the conclusion of a political process (cf. Vol. II, 52.9). 

2 This is probably the meaning of Napoleon's significant words to Goethe: "What have we 
to-day to do with destiny? Policy is destiny." 

3 Corresponding to the 300-50 B.C. phase of the Classical world. 

4 Which in the end gave its name to the Empire (Tsin = China). 
6 See Vol. II, 511-539- 



38 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

type of opposition Cassarism; with him there came to an end the idea of state- 
service and there began the "will to power" which ignored traditions and 
reckoned only with forces. Alexander and Napoleon were romantics; though 
they stood on the threshold of Civilization and in its cold clear air, the one 
fancied himself an Achilles and the other read Werther. Csesar, on the contrary, 
was a pure man of fact gifted with immense understanding. 

But even for Rhodes political success means territorial and financial success, 
and only that. Of this Roman-ness within himself he was fully aware. But 
Western Civilization has not yet taken shape in such strength and purity as 
this. It was only before his maps that he could fall into a sort of poetic trance, 
this son of the parsonage who, sent out to South Africa without means, made a 
gigantic fortune and employed it as the engine of political aims. His idea of 
a trans-African railway from the Cape to Cairo, his project of a South African 
empire, his intellectual hold on the hard metal souls of the mining magnates 
whose wealth he forced into the service of his schemes, his capital Bulawayo, 
royally planned as a future Residence by a statesman who was all-powerful yet 
stood in no definite relation to the State, his wars, his diplomatic deals, his 
road-systems, his syndicates, his armies, his conception of the "great duty to 
civilization" of the man of brain all this, broad and imposing, is the pre- 
lude of a future which is still in store for us and with which the history of 
West-European mankind will be definitely closed. 

v^rlc who does not understand that this outcome is obligatory and insuscep- 
tible of modification, that our choice is between willing this and willing nothing 
at all, between cleaving to this destiny or despairing of the future and of life 
itself; he who cannot feel that there is grandeur also in the realizations of 
powerful intelligences, in the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in 
battles fought with the coldest and most abstract means; he who is obsessed 
with the idealism of a provincial and would pursue the ways of life of past 
ages must forgo all desire to comprehend history, to live through history or 
to make history. 

Thus regarded, the Imperium Romanum appears no longer as an isolated 
phenomenon, but as the normal product of a strict and energetic, megalopolitan, 
predominantly practical spirituality, as typical of a final and irreversible con- 
dition which has occurred often enough though it has only been identified 
as such in this instance. 

Let it be realized, then: 

That the secret of historical form does not lie on the surface, that it cannot 
be grasped by means of similarities of costume and setting, and that in the 
history of men as in that of animals and plants there occur phenomena showing 
deceptive similarity but inwardly without any connexion e.g., Charlemagne 
and Haroun-al-Raschid, Alexander and Gesar, the German wars upon Rome 
and the Mongol onslaughts upon West Europe and other phenomena of 



INTRObUCTION 39 

extreme outward dissimilarity but of identical import e.g., Trajan and 
Rameses II, the Bourbons and the Attic Demos, Mohammed and Pythagoras. 

That the i9th and 2.oth centuries, hitherto looked on as the highest point 
of an ascending straight line of world-history, are in reality a stage of life 
which may be observed in every Culture that has ripened to its limit a stage 
of life characterized not by Socialists, Impressionists, electric railways, tor- 
pedoes and differential equations (for these are only body-constituents of the 
time), but by a civilized spirituality which possesses not only these but also 
quite other creative possibilities. 

That, as our own time represents a transitional phase which occurs with 
certainty under particular conditions, there are perfectly well-defined states 
(such as have occurred more than once in the history of the past) later than the 
present-day state of West Europe, and therefore that 

The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards for 
all time towards our present ideals, but a single phenomenon of history, strictly 
limited and defined as to form and duration, which covers a few centuries and 
can be viewed and, in essentials, calculated from available precedents. 



XIV 



This high plane of contemplation once attained, the rest is easy. To this 
single idea one can refer, and by it one can solve, without straining or forcing, 
all those separate problems of religion, art-history, epistemology, ethics, poli- 
tics, economics with which the modern intellect has so passionately and so 
vainly busied itself for decades. 

This idea is one of those truths that have only to be expressed with full 
clarity to become indisputable. It is one of the inward necessities of the West- 
ern Culture and of its world-feeling. It is capable of entirely transforming the 
world-outlook of one who fully understands it, i.e., makes it intimately his 
own. It immensely deepens the world-picture natural and necessary to us in 
that, already trained to regard world-historical evolution as an organic unit 
seen backwards from our standpoint in the present, we are enabled by its aid 
to follow the broad lines into the future a privilege of dream-calculation 
till now permitted only to the physicist. It is, I repeat, in effect the substitution 
of a Copernican for a Ptolemaic aspect of history, that is, an immeasurable 
widening of horizon. 

^ 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. When we use the risky word "freedom" 
we shall mean freedom to do^notjhis or that, butjhejiecessary or nptfring. 
The feeling that this is "just as it should be" is the hall-mark of the man of 



4 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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. 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 theory and was adopted as a practical scheme of life by the group 
of personalities effectively moulding the future. 

Such is not my opinion. We are civilized, not Gothic or Rococo, people; 
we have to reckon with the hard cold facts of a late life, to which the parallel 
is to be found not in Pericles's Athens but in Caesar's Rome. Of great painting 
or great music there can no longer be, for Western people, any question. Their 
architectural possibilities have been exhausted these hundred years. Only ex- 
tensive possibilities are left to them. Yet, for a sound and vigorous generation 
that is filled with unlimited hopes, I fail to see that it is any disadvantage to 
discover betimes that some of these hopes must come to nothing. And if the 
hopes thus doomed should be those most dear, well, a man who is worth any- 
thing will not be dismayed. It is true that the issue may be a tragic one for 
some individuals who in their decisive years are overpowered by the conviction 
that in the spheres of architecture, drama, painting, there is nothing left for 
them to conquer. What matter if they do go under! It has been the convention 
hitherto to admit no limits of any sort in these matters, and to believe that 
each period had its own task to do in each sphere. Tasks therefore were found 
by hook or by crook, leaving it to be settled posthumously whether or not 
the artist's faith was justified and his life-work necessary. Now, nobody but 
a pure romantic would take this way out. Such a pride is not the pride of a 
Roman. What are we to think of the individual who, standing before an ex- 
hausted quarry, would rather be told that a new vein will be struck to-morrow 
the bait offered by the radically false and mannerized art of the moment 
than be shown a rich and virgin clay-bed near by? The lesson, I think, would 
be of benefit to the coming generations, as showing them what is possible 
and therefore necessary and what is excluded from the inward potentialities 
of their time. Hitherto an incredible total of intellect and power has been 
squandered in false directions. The West-European, however historically he 
may think and feel, is at a certain stage of life invariably uncertain of his own 
direction; he gropes and feels his way and, if unlucky in environment, he loses 
it. But now at. last the work of centuries enables him to view the disposition 



INTRODUCTION 4I 

of his own life in relation to the general culture-scheme and to test his own 
^powers and purposes. And I can only hope that men of the new generation 
may be moved by this book to devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, 
the sea instead of the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology. Better 
they could not do. 

xv 

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

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 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. At highest, the philosophy 
may absorb the entire content of an epoch, realize it within itself and then, 
embodying it in some grand form or personality, pass it on to be developed 
further and further. 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. Only this can settle whether he is merely a 
clever architect of systems and principles, versed in definitions and analyses, 
or whether it is the very soul of his time that speaks in his works and his in- 
tuitions. A philosopher who cannot grasp and command actuality as well will 
never be of the first rank. The Pre-Socratics were merchants and politicians 



4i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

en grand. The desire to put his political ideas into practice in Syracuse 
nearly cost Plato his life, and it was the same Plato who discovered the set 
of geometrical theorems that enabled Euclid to build up the Classical system of 
mathematics. Pascal whom Nietzsche knows only as the "broken Chris- 
tian" Descartes, Leibniz were the first mathematicians and technicians of 
their time. 

The great " Pre-Socratics " of China from Kwan-tsi (about 670) to Confu- 
cius (550-478) were statesmen, regents, lawgivers like Pythagoras and Ptir- 
menides, like Hobbes and Leibniz. With Lao-tsze the opponent of all state 
authority and high politics and the enthusiast of small peaceful communities 
unworldliness and deed-shyness first appear, heralds of lecture-room and 
study philosophy. But Lao-tsze was in his time, the ancien regime of China, an 
exception in the midst of sturdy philosophers for whom epistemology meant 
the knowledge of the important relations of actual life. 

' And herein, I think, all the philosophers of the newest age are open to a 
serious criticism. What they do not possess is real standing in actual life. Not 
one of them has intervened effectively, either in higher politics, in the develop- 
ment of modern technics, in matters of communication, in economics, or in 
any other big actuality, with a single act or a single compelling idea. Not one 
of them counts in mathematics, in physics, in the science of government, even 
to the extent that Kant counted. Let us glance at other times. Confucius was 
several times a minister. Pythagoras was the organizer of an important politi- 
cal movement l akin to the Cromwellian, the significance of which is even now 
far underestimated by Classical researchers. Goethe, besides being a model 
executive minister though lacking, alas! the operative sphere of a great 
state was interested in the Suez and Panama canals (the dates of which he 
foresaw with accuracy) and their effects on the economy of the world, and he 
busied himself again and again with the question of American economic life 
and its reactions on the Old World, and with that of the dawning era of 
machine-industry. Hobbes was one of the originators of the great plan of 
winning South America for England, and although in execution the plan went 
no further than the occupation of Jamaica, he has the glory of being one of the 
founders of the British Colonial Empire. Leibniz, without doubt the greatest 
intellect in Western philosophy, the founder of the differential calculus and the 
analysis situs, conceived or co-operated in a number of major political schemes, 
one of which was to relieve Germany by drawing the attention of Louis XIV 
to the importance of Egypt as a factor in French world-policy. The ideas of 
the memorandum on this subject that he drew up for the Grand Monarch were 
so far in advance of their time (1672.) that it has been thought that Napoleon 
made use of them for his Eastern venture. Even thus early, Leibniz laid down 
the principle that Napoleon grasped more and more clearly after Wagram, viz., 

* Sec Vol. II, 373 ff. 



INTRODUCTION 43 

that acquisitions on the Rhine and in Belgium would not permanently better 
the position of France and that the neck of Suez would one day be the key of 
world-dominance. Doubtless the King was not equal to these deep political 
and strategic conceptions of the Philosopher. 

Turning from men of this mould to the ' ' philosophers ' ' of to-day, one is dis- 
mayed and shamed. How poor their personalities, how commonplace their 
political and practical outlook! Why is it that the mere idea of calling upon 
one of them to prove his intellectual eminence in government, diplomacy, 
large-scale organization, or direction of any big colonial, commercial or trans- 
port concern is enough to evoke our pity? And this insufficiency indicates, not 
that they possess inwardness, but simply that they lack weight. I look round 
in vain for an instance in which a modern "philosopher" has made a name by 
even one deep or far-seeing pronouncement on an important question of the day. 
I see nothing but provincial opinions of the same kind as anyone else's. When- 
ever I take up a work by a modern thinker, I find myself asking: has he any 
idea whatever of the actualities of world-politics, world-city problems, capi- 
talism, the future of the state, the relation of technics to the course of civiliza- 
tion, Russia, Science? Goethe would have understood all this and revelled in 

v- it, but there is not one living philosopher capable of taking it in. This sense of 
actualities is of course not the same thing as the content of a philosophy but, I 
repeat, it is an infallible symptom of its inward necessity, its fruitfulness and 
its symbolic importance. 

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 philos- 
ophy. 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. If not, it were fai 
better to become a colonist or an engineer, to do something, no matter what, 
that is true and real, than to chew over once more the old dried-up themes under 
cover of an alleged "new wave of philosophic thought" far better to con- 
struct an aero-engine than a new theory of apperception that is not wanted. 
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. 

vThis 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. 

To me, the depths and refinement of mathematical and physical theories are 
a joy; by comparison, the aesthete and the physiologist are fumblers. I would 
sooner have the fine mind-begotten forms of a fast steamer, a steel structure, a 
precision-lathe, the subtlety and elegance of many chemical and optical proc- 



44 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

esses, than all the pickings and stealings of present-day "arts and crafts," 
architecture and painting included. I prefer one Roman aqueduct to all Roman 
temples and statues. I love the Colosseum and the giant vault of the Palatine, 
for they display for me to-day in the brown massiveness of their brick construc- 
tion the real Rome and the grand practical sense of her engineers, but it is a 
matter of indifference to me whether the empty and pretentious marblery of the 
Cassars their rows of statuary, their friezes, their overloaded architraves 
is preserved or not. Glance at some reconstruction of the Imperial Fora do 
we not find them the true counterpart of a modern International Exhibition, 
obtrusive, bulky, empty, a boasting in materials and dimensions wholly alien 
to Pcriclean Greece and the Rococo alike, but exactly paralleled in the Egyptian 
modernism that is displayed in the ruins of Rameses II (1300 B.C.) at Luxor and 
Karnak? It was not for nothing that the genuine Roman despised the Graculus 
histrio, the kind of ' ' artist ' ' and the kind of ' ' philosopher " to be found on the 
soil of Roman Civilization. The time for art and philosophy had passed; they 
were exhausted, used up, superfluous, and his instinct for the realities of life 
told him so. One Roman law weighed more than all the lyrics and school- 
metaphysics of the time together. And I maintain that to-day many an in- 
ventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all 
those who practise the dull craft of experimental psychology. This is a situa- 
v tion which regularly repeats itself at a certain historical level. It would have 
been absurd in a Roman of intellectual eminence, who might as Consul or 
Prartor lead armies, organize provinces, build cities and roads, or even be the 
Princeps in Rome, to want to hatch out some new variant of post-Platonic 
school philosophy at Athens or Rhodes. Consequently no one did so. It was 
not in harmony with the tendency of the age, and therefore it only attracted 
third-class men of the kind that always advances as far as the Zeitgeist of the 
day before yesterday. It is a very grave question whether this stage has or has 
not set in for us already. 

v A. century of purely extensive effectiveness, excluding big artistic and 
metaphysical production let us say frankly an irreligious time which coin- 
cides 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. He who does not acknowledge this in 
his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains 
cither a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant. 

Therefore, in approaching a problem of the present, one must begin by asking 
one's self a question answered in advance by instinct in the case of the genuine 
adept what to-day is possible and what he must forbid himself. Only a very 



INTRODUCTION 45 

few of the problems of metaphysics are, so to say, allocated for solution to any 
epoch of thought. Even thus soon, a whole world separates Nietzsche's time 4 
in which a last trace of romanticism was still operative, from our own, which 
has shed every vestige of it. 

/ Systematic philosophy closes with the end of the i8th Century. Kant put 
its utmost possibilities in forms both grand in themselves and as a rule 
final for the Western soul. He is followed, as Plato and Aristotle were followed, 
by a specifically "megalopolitan philosophy that was not speculative but prac- 
tical, irreligious, social-ethical. This philosophy paralleled in the Chinese 
civilization by the schools of the "Epicurean" Yang-chu, the "Socialist" 
Mo-ti, the "Pessimist" Chuang-tsii, the "Positivist" Mencius, and in the 
Classical by the Cynics, the Cyrenaics, the Stoics and the Epicureans begins 
in the West with Schopenhauer, who is the first to make the Will to life ("crea- 
tive life-force ' ') the centre of gravity of his thought, although the deeper ten- 
dency of his doctrine is obscured by his having, under the influence of a great 
tradition, maintained the obsolete distinctions of phenomena and things-in- 
themselves and suchlike. It is the same creative will-to-life that was Schopen- 
hauer-wise denied in "Tristan" and Darwin-wise asserted in "Siegfried"; that 
was brilliantly and theatrically formulated by Nietzsche in " Zarathustra " ; 
that led the Hegelian Marx to an economic and the Malthusian Darwin to a 
biological hypothesis which together have subtly transformed the world- 
outlook of the Western megalopolis; and that produced a homogeneous series 
of tragedy-conceptions extending from Hebbel's "Judith" to Ibsen's "Epi- 
logue." It has embraced, therefore, all the possibilities of a true philosophy 
and at the same time it has exhausted them. 

Systematic philosophy, then, lies immensely far behind us, and ethical has 
been wound up. But a third possibility, corresponding to the Classical Scepticism, 
still remains to the soul-world of the present-day West, and it can be brought to 
light by the hitherto unknown methods of historical morphology. That which 
is a possibility is a necessity. The Classical scepticism is ahistoric, it doubts 
by denying outright^ But that of the West, if it is an inward necessity, a symbol 
of the autumn of our spirituality, is obliged to be historical through and 
through. Its solutions are got by treating everything as relative, as a historical 
phenomenon, and its procedure is psychological. Whereas the Sceptic philos- 
ophy arose within Hellenism as the negation of philosophy declaring 
philosophy to be purposeless we, on the contrary, regard the history of 
philosophy as, in the last resort, philosophy's gravest theme. This is " skepsis," 
in the true sense, for whereas the Greek is led to renounce absolute standpoints 
by contempt for the intellectual past, we are led to do so by comprehension of 
that past as an organism. 

In this work it will be our task to sketch out this unphilosophical philos- 
ophy the last that West Europe will know. Scepticism is the expression of 



46 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

a pure Civilization; and it dissipates the world-picture of the Culture that has 
gone before. For us, its success will lie in resolving all the older problems into 
one, the genetic. The conviction that what is also has become, that the natural 
and cognizable is rooted in the historic, that the World as the actual is founded 
on an Ego as the potential actualized, that the "when" and the "how long" 
hold as deep a secret as the "what," leads directly to the fact that everything, 
whatever else it may be, must at any rate be the expression of something living. 
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. 
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 effect are specified. 

XVI 

In concluding this Introduction, I may be permitted to add a personal note. 
In 1911, 1 proposed to myself to put together some broad considerations on the 
political phenomena of the day and their possible developments. At that time 
the World-War appeared to me both as imminent and also as the inevitable 
outward manifestation of the historical crisis, and my endeavour was to com- 
prehend it from an examination of the spirit of the preceding centuries not 
years. In the course of this originally small task, 1 the conviction forced itself 
on me that for an effective understanding of the epoch the area to be taken into 
the foundation-plan must be very greatly enlarged, and that in an investigation 
of this sort, if the results were to be fundamentally conclusive and necessary 
results, it was impossible to restrict one's self to a single epoch and its political 
actualities, or to confine one's self to a pragmatical framework, or even to do 
without purely metaphysical and highly transcendental methods of treatment. 
It became evident that a political problem could not be comprehended by means 
of politics themselves and that, frequently, important factors at work in the 
depths could only be grasped through their artistic manifestations or even 
distantly seen in the form of scientific or purely philosophical ideas. Even the 
politico-social analysis of the last decades of the i9th century a period of 
tense quiet between two immense and outstanding events: the one which, ex- 
pressed in the Revolution and Napoleon, had fixed the picture of West-European 
actuality for a century and another of at least equal significance that was 

1 The work referred to is embodied in Vol. II (pp. 511 ct scq., 561 ct scq., 631 ct scq.). 



INTRODUCTION 47 

visibly and ever more rapidly approaching was found in the last resort to be 
impossible without bringing in all the great problems of Being in all their 
aspects. For, in the historical as in the natural world-picture, there is found 
nothing, however small, that does not embody in itself the entire sum of 
fundamental tendencies. And thus the original theme came to be immensely 
widened. A vast number of unexpected (and in the main entirely novel) ques- 
tions and interrelations presented themselves. And finally it became perfectly 
clear that no single fragment of history could be thoroughly illuminated unless 
and until the secret of world-history itself, to wit the story of higher mankind 
as an organism of regular structure, had been cleared up. And hitherto this has 
not been done, even in the least degree. 

From this moment on, relations and connexions previously of ten 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 mathe- 
matical aspects of the same Culture, between religious and technical concep- 
tions, between mathematics, music and sculpture, between economics and / 
cognition-forms. Clearly and unmistakably there appeared the fundamental 
dependence of the most modern physical and chemical theories on the mytho- 
logical concepts of our Germanic ancestors, the style-congruence of tragedy 
and power-technics and up-to-date finance, and the fact (bizarre at first but soon 
self-evident) that oil-painting perspective, printing, the credit system, long- 
range weapons, and contrapuntal music in one case, and the nude statue, the 
city-state and coin-currency (discovered by the Greeks) in another were identi- 
cal expressions of one and the same spiritual principle. And, beyond and above 
all, there stood out the fact that these great groups of morphological relations t each 
one of which symbolically represents a particular sort of mankind in the whole 
picture of world-history, are strictly symmetrical in structure. It is this 
perspective that first opens out for us the true style of history. Belonging 
itself as symbol and expression to one time and therefore inwardly possible 
and necessary only for present-day Western man, it can but be compared 
distantly to certain ideas of ultra-modern mathematics in the domain of 
the Theory of Groups. These were thoughts that had occupied me for many 
years, though dark and undefined until enabled by this method to emerge in 
tangible form. 

/ Thereafter I saw the present the approaching World-War in a quite 
other light. It was no longer a momentary constellation of casual facts due to 
national sentiments, personal influences, or economic tendencies endowed with 
an appearance of unity and necessity by some historian's scheme of political or 
social cause-and-effect, but the type of a historical change of phase occurring 
within a great historical organism of definable compass at the point preor- 
dained for it hundreds of years ago. The mark of the great crisis is its innumer- 



48 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

able passionate questionings and probings. In our own case there were books 
and ideas by the thousand; but, scattered, disconnected, limited by the horizons 
of specialisms as they were, they incited, depressed and confounded but could 
not free. Hence, though these questions are seen, their identity is missed. 
Consider those art-problems that (though never comprehended in their depths) 
were evinced in the disputes between form and content, line and space, drawing 
and colour, in the notion of style, in the idea of Impressionism and the music 
of Wagner. Consider the decline of art and the failing authority of science; 
the grave problems arising out of the victory of the megalopolis over the 
country-side, such as childlessness and land-depopulation; the place in society 
of a fluctuating Fourth Estate; the crisis in materialism, in Socialism, in par- 
liamentary government; the position of the individual vis-a-vis the State; the 
problem of private property with its pendant the problem of marriage. Consider 
at the same time one fact taken from what is apparently an entirely different 
field, the voluminous work that was being done in the domain of folk-psy- 
chology on the origins of myths, arts, religions and thought and done, more- 
over, no longer from an ideal but from a strictly morphological standpoint. 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. And 
yet it had been in the air since Nietzsche, and Nietzsche himself had gripped all 
the decisive problems although, being a romantic, he had not dared to look 
strict reality in the face. 

But herein precisely lies the inward necessity of the stock-taking doctrine, so 
to call it. It had to come, and it could only come at this time. Our scepticism 
is not an attack upon, but rather the verification of, our stock of thoughts and 
works. It confirms all that has been sought and achieved for generations past, 
in that it integrates all the truly living tendencies which it finds in the special 
spheres, no matter what their aim may be. 

Above all, there discovered itself the opposition of History and Nature through 
which alone it is possible to grasp the essence of the former. As I have 
already said, man as an element and representative of the World is a member, 
not only of nature, but also of history which is a second Cosmos different in 
structure and complexion, entirely neglected by Metaphysics in favour of the 
first. I was originally brought to reflect on this fundamental question of our 
world-consciousness through noticing how present-day historians as they 
fumble round tangible events, things-become, believe themselves to have al- 
ready grasped History, the happening, the becoming itself. This is a prejudice 
common to all who proceed by reason and cognition, as against intuitive per- 



INTRODUCTION 49 

ception. 1 And it had long ago been a source of perplexity to the great Eleatics 
with their doctrine that through cognition there could be no becoming, but 
only a being (or having-become). In other words, History was seen as Nature 
(in the objective sense of the physicist) and treated accordingly, and it is to 
this that we must ascribe the baneful mistake of applying the principles of 
causality, of law, of system that is, the structure of rigid being to the 
picture of happenings. It was assumed that a human culture existed just as 
electricity or gravitation existed, and that it was capable of analysis in much 
the same way as these. The habits of the scientific researcher were eagerly taken 
as a model, and if, from time to time, some student asked what Gothic, or 
Islam, or the Polis was, no one inquired why such symbols of something living 
inevitably appeared just then, and there, in that form, and for that space of time. 
Historians were content, whenever they met one of the innumerable similari- 
ties between widely discrete historical phenomena, simply to register it, adding 
some clever remarks as to the marvels of coincidence, dubbing Rhodes the 
"Venice of Antiquity" and Napoleon the "modern Alexander," or the like; 
yet it was just these cases, in which the destiny-problem came to the fore as the 
true problem of history (viz., the problem of time), that needed to be treated 
with all possible seriousness and scientifically regulated physiognomic in order 
to find out what strangely-constituted necessity, so completely alien to the 
causal, was at work. That every phenomenon ipso facto propounds a meta- 
physical riddle, that the time of its occurrence is never irrelevant; that it still 
remained to be discovered what kind of a living interdependence (apart from the 
inorganic, natural-law interdependence) subsists within the world-picture, 
which radiates from nothing less than the whole man and not merely (as Kant 
thought) from the cognizing part of him; that a phenomenon is not only a fact 
for the understanding but also an expression of the spiritual, not only an object 
but a symbol as well, be it one of the highest creations of religion or art or a 
mere trifle of everyday life all this was, philosophically, something new. 
And thus in the end I came to see the solution clearly before me in immense 

1 The philosophy of this book I owe to the philosophy of Goethe, which is practically unknown 
to-day, and also (but in a far less degree) to that of Nietzsche. The position of Goethe in West- 
European metaphysics is still not understood in the least; when philosophy is being discussed he is 
not even named. For unfortunately he did not set down his doctrines in a rigid system, and so the 
systematic philosophy has overlooked him. Nevertheless he was a philosopher. His place vis-2-vis 
Kant is the same as that of Plato who similarly eludes the would-be-systematizer vis-^-vis 
Aristotle. Plato and Goethe stand for the philosophy of Becoming, Aristotle and Kant the philos- 
ophy of Being. Here we have intuition opposed to analysis. Something that it is practically im- 
possible to convey by the methods of reason is found in individual sayings and poems of Goethe, e.g., 
vin the Orphische Urworte, and stanzas like " Wenn im Unendlichen" and "Sagt es Niemand," which 
must be regarded as the expression of a perfectly definite metaphysical doctrine. I would not have one 
single word changed in this: "The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the 
becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, similarly, the reason 
(Vernunfi) is concerned only to strive towards the divine through the becoming and the living, and 
the understanding (VcrstaniT) only to make use of the become and the set-fast" (to Eckermann). 
This sentence comprises my entire philosophy. 



5 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

outlines, possessed of full inward necessity, a solution derived from one single 
principle that though discoverable had never been discovered, that from my 
youth had haunted and attracted me, tormenting me with the sense that it was 
there and must be attacked and yet defying me to seize it. Thus, from an almost 
accidental occasion of beginning, there has arisen the present work, which is 
put forward as the provisional expression of a new world-picture. The book is 
laden, as I know, with all the defects of a first attempt, incomplete, and cer- 
tainly not free from inconsistencies. Nevertheless I am convinced that it con- 
tains the incontrovertible formulation of an idea which, once enunciated 
clearly, will (I repeat) be accepted without dispute. 

If, then, the narrower theme is an analysis of the Decline of that West- 
European Culture which is now spread over the entire globe, yet the object in 
view is the development of a philosophy and of the operative method peculiar 
to it, which is now to be tried, viz., the method of comparative morphology in 
world-history. The work falls naturally into two parts. The first, "Form and 
Actuality," starts from the form-language of the great Cultures, attempts to 
penetrate to the deepest roots of their origin and so provides itself with the 
basis for a science of Symbolic. The second part, "World-historical Perspec- 
tives," starts from the facts of actual life, and from the historical practice of 
higher mankind seeks to obtain a quintessence of historical experience that we 
can set to work upon the formation of our own future. 

The accompanying tables l present a general view of what has resulted from 
the investigation. They may at the same time give some notion both of the 
fruitfulness and of the scope of the new methods. 

1 At the end of the volume. 



CHAPTER II 
THE MEANING OF NUMBERS 



CHAPTER II 

THE MEANING OF NUMBERS 



IT is necessary to begin by drawing attention to certain basic terms which, as 
used in this work, carry strict and in some cases novel connotations. Though the 
metaphysical content of these terms would gradually become evident in following 
the course of the reasoning, nevertheless, the exact significance to be attached 
to them ought to be made clear beyond misunderstanding from the very outset. 

The popular distinction current also in philosophy between "being" 
and ' ' becoming ' ' seems to miss the essential point in the contrast it is meant to 
express. An endless becoming "action," "actuality" will always be 
thought of also as a condition (as it is, for example, in physical notions such as 
uniform velocity and the condition of motion, and in the basic hypothesis of 
the kinetic theory of gases) and therefore ranked in the category of "being." 
On the other hand, out of the results that we do in fact obtain by and in con- 
sciousness, we may, with Goethe, distinguish as final elements "becoming" 
and "the become" (Das Werden, das Gewordni). In all cases, though the atom 
of human-ness may lie beyond the grasp of our powers of abstract conception, 
the very clear and definite feeling of this contrast fundamental and diffused 
throughout consciousness is the most elemental something that we reach. 
It necessarily follows therefore that "the become" is always founded on a 
"becoming" and not the other way round. 

I distinguish further, by the words "proper" and "alien" (das Eigne, das 
Fremde), those two basic facts of consciousness which for all men in the waking 
(not in the dreaming) state are established with an immediate inward cer- 
tainty, without the necessity or possibility of more precise definition. The 
element called "alien" is always related in some way to the basic fact expressed 
by the word "perception," i.e., the outer world, the life of sensation. Great 
thinkers have bent all their powers of image-forming to the task of expressing 
this relation, more and more rigorously, by the aid of half-intuitive dichotomies 
such as "phenomena and things-in-themselves," " world-as-will and world- 
as-idea," "ego and non-ego," although human powers of exact knowing are 
surely inadequate for the task. 

Similarly, the element "proper" is involved with the basic fact known as 
feeling, i.e., the inner life, in some intimate and invariable way that equally 
defies analysis by the methods of abstract thought. 

53 



54 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

I distinguish, again, "soul" and "world." The existence of this opposition is 
identical with the fact of purely human waking consciousness (Wachsein). There are 
degrees of clearness and sharpness in the opposition and therefore grades of the 
consciousness, of the spirituality, of life. These grades range from the feeling- 
knowledge that, unalert yet sometimes suffused through and through by an 
inward light, is characteristic of the primitive and of the child (and also of those 
moments of religious and artistic inspiration that occur ever less and less often 
as aCulture grows older)right to the extremity of waking and reasoning sharp- 
ness that we find, for instance, in the thought of Kant and Napoleon, for whom 
soul and world have become subject and object. This elementary structure of 
consciousness, as a fact of immediate inner knowledge, is not susceptible of 
conceptual subdivision. Nor, indeed, are the two factors distinguishable at 
all except verbally and more or less artificially, since they are always associated, 
always intertwined, and present themselves as a unit, a totality. The episte- 
mological starting-point of the born idealist and the born realist alike, the 
assumption that soul is to world (or world to soul, as the case may be) as foun- 
dation is to building, as primary to derivative, as "cause" to "effect," has no 
basis whatever in the pure fact of consciousness, and when a philosophic system 
lays stress on the one or the other, it only thereby informs us as to the personal- 
ity of the philosopher, a fact of purely biographical significance. 

Thus, by regarding waking-consciousness structurally as a tension of con- 
traries, and applying to it the notions of "becoming" and "the thing-become," 
we find for the word Life a perfectly definite meaning that is closely allied to 
that of "becoming." We may describe becomings and the things-become as 
the form in which respectively the facts and the results of life exist in the wak- 
ing consciousness. To man in the waking state his proper life, progressive and 
constantly self-fulfilling, is presented through the element of Becoming in his 
consciousness this fact we call "the present" and it possesses that mysterious 
property of Direction which in all the higher languages men have sought to im- 
pound and vainly to rationalize by means of the enigmatic word time. 
It follows necessarily from the above that there is a fundamental connexion 
between the become (the hard-set} and Death. 

If, now, we designate the Soul that is, the Soul as it is felt, not as it is 
reasonably pictured as the possible and the World on the other hand as the 
actual (the meaning of these expressions is unmistakable to man's inner sense), 
we see life as the form in which the actualizing of the possible is accomplished. With 
respect to the property of Direction, the possible is called the Future and the 
actualized the Past. The actualizing itself, the centre-of-gravity and the centre- 
of-meaning of life, we call the Present. "Soul " is the still-to-be-accomplished, 
"World" the accomplished, "life" the accomplishing. In this way we are 
enabled to assign to expressions like moment, duration, development, life- 
content, vocation, scope, aim, fullness and emptiness of life, the definite mean- 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 55 

ings which we shall need for all that follows and especially for the understand- 
ing of historical phenomena. 

Lastly, the words History and Nature are here employed, as the reader will 
have observed already, in a quite definite and hitherto unusual sense. These 
words comprise possible modes of understanding, of comprehending the totality 
of knowledge becoming as well as things-become, life as well as things-lived 

as a homogeneous, spiritualized, well-ordered world-picture fashioned out of 
an indivisible mass-impression in this way or in that according as the becoming 
or the become, direction ("time") or extension ("space") is the dominant 
factor. And it is not a question of one factor being alternative to the other. 
The possibilities that we have of possessing an ' ' outer world ' ' that reflects and 
attests our proper existence are infinitely numerous and exceedingly hetero- 
geneous, and the purely organic and the purely mechanical world-view (in the 
precise literal sense of that familiar term are only the extreme members of the 
series. Primitive man (so far as we can imagine his waking-consciousness) and 
the child (as we can remember) cannot fully see or grasp these possibilities. 
One condition of this higher world-consciousness is the possession of language , 
meaning thereby not mere human utterance but a culture-language, and such 
is non-existent for primitive man and existent but not accessible in the case of 
the child. In other words, neither possesses any clear and distinct notion of the 
world. They have an inkling but no real knowledge of history and nature, 
being too intimately incorporated with the ensemble of these. They have no 
Culture. 

And therewith that important word is given a positive meaning of the high- 
est significance which henceforward will be assumed in using it. In the same 
way as we have elected to distinguish the Soul as the possible and the World 
as the actual, we can now differentiate between possible and actual culture, i.e., 
culture as an idea in the (general or individual) existence and culture as the body 
of that idea, as the total of its visible, tangible and comprehensible expressions 

acts and opinions, religion and state, arts and sciences, peoples and cities, 
economic and social forms, speech, laws, customs, characters, facial lines and 
costumes. Higher history, intimately related to life and to becoming, is the 
actualizing of possible Culture. 2 

We must not omit to add that these basic determinations of meaning arc 
largely incommunicable by specification, definition or proof, and in their deeper 
import must be reached by feeling, experience and intuition. There is a distinc- 
tion, rarely appreciated as it should be, between experience as lived and experi- 
ence as learned (zwischen Erleben und Erkennen), between the immediate 
certainty given by the various kinds of intuition such as illumination, 
inspiration, artistic flair, experience of life, the power of "sizing men up" 

1 Weltanschauung im wortlichen Sinne; Anschauung der Welt. 

* The case of mankind in the historyless state is discussed in Vol. II, pp. 58 et seq. 



56 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

(Goethe's "exact percipient fancy") and the product of rational procedure 
and technical experiment. 

The first are imparted by means of analogy, picture, symbol, the second by 
formula, law, scheme. The become is experienced by learning indeed, as we 
shall see, the having-become is for the human mind identical with the com- 
pleted act of cognition. A becoming, on the other hand, can only be experi- 
enced by living, felt with a deep wordless understanding. It is on this that 
what we call "knowledge of men" is based; in fact the understanding of his- 
tory implies a superlative knowledge of men. The eye which can see into the 
depths of an alien soul owes nothing to the cognition-methods investigated 
in the "Critique of Pure Reason," yet the purer the historical picture is, the Jess 
accessible it becomes to any other eye. The mechanism of a pure nature-picture, 
such as the world of Newton and Kant, is cognized, grasped, dissected in laws 
and equations and finally reduced to system: the organism of a pure history- 
picture, like the world of Plotinus, Dante and Giordano Bruno, is intuitively 
seen, inwardly experienced, grasped as a form or symbol and finally rendered in 
poetical and artistic conceptions. Goethe's "living nature" is a historical 
world-picture. 1 

ii 

In order to exemplify the way in which a soul seeks to actualize itself in the 
picture of its outer world to show, that is, in how far Culture in the "be- 
come ' ' state can express or portray an idea of human existence I have chosen 
number y the primary element on which all mathematics rests. I have done so 
because mathematics, accessible in its full depth only to the very few, holds a 
quite peculiar position amongst the creations of the mind. It is a science of the 
most rigorous kind, like logic but more comprehensive and very much fuller; 
it is a true art, along with sculpture and music, as needing the guidance of in- 
spiration and as developing under great conventions of form; it is, lastly, a 
metaphysic of the highest rank, as Plato and above all Leibniz show us. 
Every philosophy has hitherto grown up in conjunction with a mathematic 
belonging to it. Number is the symbol of causal necessity. Like the conception 
of God, it contains the ultimate meaning of the world-as-nature. The exist- 
ence of numbers may therefore be called a mystery, and the religious thought 
of every Culture has felt their impress. 2 

Just as all becoming possesses the original property of direction (irreversi- 
bility), all things-become possess the property of extension. But these two 
words seem unsatisfactory in that only an artificial distinction can be made 
between them. The real secret of all things-become, which are ipso facto things 
extended (spatially and materially), is embodied in mathematical number as 
contrasted with chronological number. Mathematical number contains in its 

1 With, moreover, a "biological horizon." Sec Vol. II, p. 34. 
See Vol. II, pp. 317 et scq. 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 57 

very essence the notion of a mechanical demarcation, number being in that respect 
akin to word, which, in the very fact of its comprising and denoting, fences off 
world-impressions. The deepest depths, it is true, are here both incomprehen- 
sible and inexpressible. But the actual number with which the mathematician 
works, the figure, formula, sign, diagram, in short the number-sign which ht 
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 demar- 
cation. 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. So also numbers are something that marks off and captures 
nature-impressions, and it is by means of names and numbers that the human 
understanding obtains power over the world. 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 l men strive to delimit the ex- 
tended in words as well, i.e., to set it forth in the form of proofs, conclusions, 
theorems and systems; and it is only through acts of this kind (which may be 
more or less unintentioned) that waking man begins to be able to use numbers, 
normatively, to specify objects and properties, relations and differentiae, unities 
and pluralities briefly, that structure of the world-picture which he feels as 
necessary and unshakable, calls "Nature" and "cognizes." Nature is the 
numerable, while History, on the other hand, is the aggregate of that which has 
no relation to mathematics hence the mathematical certainty of the laws of 
Nature, the astounding Tightness of Galileo's saying that Nature is "written 
in mathematical language," and the fact, emphasized by Kant, that exact 
natural science reaches just as far as the possibilities of applied mathematics 
allow it to reach. In number, then, as the sign of completed demarcation, lies the 
essence of everything actual, which is cognized, is delimited, and has become all 
at once as Pythagoras and certain others have been able to see with complete 
inward certitude by a mighty and truly religious intuition. Nevertheless, 
mathematics meaning thereby the capacity to think practically in figures 
must not be confused with the far narrower scientific mathematics, that is, the 
theory of numbers as developed in lecture and treatise. The mathematical vision 
and thought that a Culture possesses within itself is as inadequately represented 
by its written mathematic as its philosophical vision and thought by its 
philosophical treatises. Number springs from a source that has also quite 
other outlets. Thus at the beginning of every Culture we find an archaic style, 
which might fairly have been called geometrical in other cases as well as the 
1 Also "thinking in money." See Vol. II, pp. 603 et scq. 



5 8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

Early Hellenic. There is a common factor which is expressly mathematical 
in this early Classical style of the loth Century B.C., in the temple style of the 
Egyptian Fourth Dynasty with its absolutism of straight line and right angle, 
in the Early Christian sarcophagus-relief, and in Romanesque construction and 
ornament. 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 scientif- 
ically 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 the statue and the 
Doric order of columns. The great arts are, one and all, modes of interpreta- 
tion by means of limits based on number (consider, for example, the problem of 
space-representation in oil painting). A high mathematical endowment may, 
without any mathematical science whatsoever, come to fruition and full self- 
knowledge in technical spheres. 

In the presence of so powerful a number-sense as that evidenced, even in the 
Old Kingdom, 1 in the dimensioning of pyramid temples and in the technique 
of building, water-control and public administration (not to mention the 
calendar), no one surely would maintain that the valueless arithmetic of 
Ahmes belonging to the New Empire represents the level of Egyptian mathe- 
matics. The Australian natives, who rank intellectually as thorough primi- 
tives, possess a mathematical instinct (or, what comes to the same thing, a 
power of thinking in numbers which is not yet communicable by signs or words) 
that as regards the interpretation of pure space is far superior to that of the 
Greeks. Their discovery of the boomerang can only be attributed to their 
having a sure feeling for numbers of a class that we should refer to the higher 
geometry. Accordingly we shall justify the adverb later they possess an 
extraordinarily complicated ceremonial and, for expressing degrees of affinity, 
such fine shades of language as not even the higher Cultures themselves can 
show. 

There is analogy, again, between the Euclidean mathematic and the absence, 
in the 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 Ver- 
sailles 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. 

1 Dynasties I-VIII, or, effectively, I-VI. The Pyramid period coincides with Dynasties IV-VI. 
Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus belong to the IV dynasty, under which also great water-control 
works were carried out between Abydos and the Fayum. Tr. 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 59 

in 

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 definition, a principle of ordering the Become which reflects the 
central essence of one and only one soul, viz., the soul of that particular Cul- 
ture. Consequently, there are more mathematics than one. For indubitably 
the inner structure of the Euclidean geometry is something quite different from 
that of the Cartesian, the analysis of Archimedes is something other than the 
analysis of Gauss, and not merely in matters of form, intuition and method but 
above all in essence, in the intrinsic and obligatory meaning of number which 
they respectively develop and set forth. This number, the horizon within 
which it has been able to make phenomena self-explanatory, and therefore the 
whole of the "nature" or world-extended that is confined in the given limits 
and amenable to its particular sort of mathematic, are not common to all man- 
kind, but specific in each case to one definite sort of mankind. 

The style of any mathematic which comes into being, then, depends wholly 
on the Culture in which it is rooted, the sort of mankind it is that ponders it. 
The soul can bring its inherent possibilities to scientific development, can 
manage them practically, can attain the highest levels in its treatment of them 
but is quite impotent to alter them. The idea of the Euclidean geometry is 
actualized in the earliest forms of Classical ornament, and that of the Infini- 
tesimal Calculus in the earliest forms of Gothic architecture, centuries before 
the first learned mathematicians of the respective Cultures were born. 

A deep inward experience, the genuine awakening of the ego, which turns the 
child into the higher man and initiates him into community of his Culture, 
marks the beginning of number-sense as it does that of language-sense. It is 
only after this that objects come to exist for the waking consciousness as things 
limitable and distinguishable as to number and kind; only after this that prop- 
erties, concepts, causal necessity, system in the world-around, a form of the 
world, and world laws (for that which is set and settled is if so facto bounded, 
hardened, number-governed) are susceptible of exact definition. And therewith 
comes too a sudden, almost metaphysical, feeling of anxiety and awe regarding 
the deeper meaning of measuring and counting, drawing and form. 

Now, Kant has classified the sum of human knowledge according to syn- 
theses a priori (necessary and universally valid) and a posteriori (experiential and 
variable from case to case) and in the former class has included mathematical 
knowledge. Thereby, doubtless, he was enabled to reduce a strong inward 



60 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

feeling to abstract form. But, quite apart from the fact (amply evidenced in 
modern mathematics and mechanics) that there is no such sharp distinction 
between the two as is originally and unconditionally implied in the principle, 
the a priori itself, though certainly one of the most inspired conceptions of 
philosophy, is a notion that seems to involve enormous difficulties. With it 
Kant postulates without attempting to prove what is quite incapable of 
proof both unalterableness of form in all intellectual activity and identity of 
form for all men in the same. And, in consequence, a factor of incalculable im- 
portance is thanks to the intellectual prepossessions of his period, not to 
mention his own simply ignored. This factor is the varying degree of this 
alleged "universal validity." There are doubtless certain characters of very 
wide-ranging validity which are (seemingly at any rate) independent of the 
Culture and century to which the cognizing individual may belong, but along 
with these there is a quite particular necessity of form which underlies all his 
thought as axiomatic and to which he is subject by virtue of belonging to his 
own Culture and no other. Here, then, we have two very different kinds of a 
priori thought-content, and the definition of a frontier between them, or even 
the demonstration that such exists, is a problem that lies beyond all possibili- 
ties of knowing and will never be solved. 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 philoso- 
phers which every glance at the history of philosophy shows us. But that this 
non-agreement is not due to imperfections of the human intellect or present 
gaps in a perfectible knowledge, in a word, is not due to defect, but to destiny 
and historical necessity this is a discovery. Conclusions on the deep and final 
things are to be reached not by predicating constants but by studying differ- 
entiae and developing the organic logic of differences. The comparative morphology 
of knowledge forms is a domain which Western thought has still to attack. 

IV 

If mathematics were a mere science like astronomy or mineralogy, it would 
be possible to define their object. This man is not and never has been able to do. 
We West-Europeans may put our own scientific notion of number to perform 
the same tasks as those with which the mathematicians of Athens and Baghdad 
busied themselves, but the fact remains that the theme, the intention and the 
methods of the like-named science in Athens and in Baghdad were quite differ- 
ent from those of our own. There is no mathematic but only mathematics. What 
we call "the history of mathematics" implying merely the progressive 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 61 

actualizing of a single invariable ideal is in fact, below the deceptive surface 
of history, a complex of self-contained and independent developments, an ever- 
repeated process of bringing to birth new form-worlds and appropriating, 
transforming and sloughing alien form-worlds, a purely organic story of blos- 
soming, ripening, wilting and dying within the set period. The student must 
not let himself be deceived. The mathematic of the Classical soul sprouted 
almost out of nothingness, the historically-constituted Western soul, already 
possessing the Classical science (not inwardly, but outwardly as a thing learnt), 
had to win its own by apparently altering and perfecting, but in reality destroying 
the essentially alien Euclidean system. In the first case, the agent was Pytha- 
goras, in the second Descartes. In both cases the act is, at bottom, the same. 
The relationship between the form-language of a mathematic and that of 
the cognate major arts, 1 is in this way put beyond doubt. The temperament of 
the thinker and that of the artist differ widely indeed, but the expression- 
methods of the waking consciousness are inwardly the same for each. The sense 
of form of the sculptor, the painter, the composer is essentially mathematical 
in its nature. The same inspired ordering of an infinite world which manifested 
itself in the geometrical analysis and projective geometry of the iyth Century, 
could vivify, energize, and suffuse contemporary music with the harmony that 
it developed out of the art of thoroughbass, (which is the geometry of the 
sound-world) and contemporary painting with the principle of perspective 
(the felt geometry of the space-world that only the West knows). 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. 
And so the born mathematician takes his place by the side of the great masters 
of the fugue, the chisel and the brush; he and they alike strive, and must strive, 
to actualize the grand order of all things by clothing it in symbol and so to 
communicate it to the plain fellow-man who hears that order within himself 
but cannot effectively possess it; the domain of number, like the domains of 
tone, line and colour, becomes an image of the world-form. For this reason 
the word ' ' creative ' ' means more in the mathematical sphere than it does in the 
pure sciences Newton, Gauss, and Riemann were artist-natures, and we 
know with what suddenness their great conceptions came upon them. 2 "A 

1 As also those of law and of money. See Vol. II, pp. 68 et seq., pp. 616 et seq. 

2 Poincare, in his Science et Methode (Ch. Ill), searchingly analyses the " becoming " of one of his 
own mathematical discoveries. Each decisive stage in it bears " les mimes caracteres de britveti, de 
soudainete et de certitude absolue" and in most cases this "certitude" was such that he merely registered 
the discovery and put off its working-out to any convenient season. Tr. 



&. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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 lay- 
man too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to un- 
noticed changes from epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought 
never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at con- 
temporary mathematics. In the very deep relation between changes of musical 
theory and the analysis of the infinite, the details have never yet been investi- 
gated, although aesthetics might have learned a great deal more from these 
than from all so-called "psychology." Still more revealing would be a history 
of musical instruments written, not (as it always is) from the technical stand- 
point of tone-production, but as a study of the deep spiritual bases of the tone- 
colours and tone-effects aimed at. For it was the wish, intensified to the point 
of a longing, to fill a spatial infinity with sound which produced in contrast 
to the Classical lyre and reed (lyra, kithara; aulos, syrinx) and the Arabian 
lute the two great families of keyboard instruments (organ, pianoforte, etc.) 
and bow instruments, and that as early as the Gothic time. The development 
of both these families belongs spiritually (and possibly also in point of technical 
origin) to the Celtic-Germanic North lying between Ireland, the Weser and the 
Seine. The organ and clavichord belong certainly to England, the bow in- 
struments reached their definite forms in Upper Italy between 1480 and 1530, 
while it was principally in Germany that the organ was developed into the 
sface-commanding giant that we know, an instrument the like of which does not 
exist in all musical history. The free organ-playing of Bach and his time was 
nothing if it was not analysis analysis of a strange and vast tone-world. 
And, similarly, it is in conformity with the Western number-thinking, and in 
opposition to the Classical, that our string and wind instruments have been 
developed not singly but in great groups (strings, woodwind, brass), ordered 
within themselves according to the compass of the four human voices; the 
history of the modern orchestra, with all its discoveries of new and modifica- 
tion of old instruments, is in reality the self-contained history of one tone-world 
a world, moreover, that is quite capable of being expressed in the forms of the 
higher analysis. 



When, about 540 B.C., the circle of the Pythagoreans arrived at the idea that 
number is the essence of all things, it was not "a step in the development of mathe- 
matics" that was made, but a wholly new mathematic that was born. Long 
heralded by metaphysical problem-posings and artistic form-tendencies, now it 
came forth from the depths of the Classical soul as a formulated theory, a 
mathematic born in one act at one great historical moment just as the 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 6 3 

mathematic of the Egyptians had been, and the algebra-astronomy of the 
Babylonian Culture with its ecliptic co-ordinate system and new for these 
older mathematics had long been extinguished and the Egyptian was never 
written down. Fulfilled by the xnd century B.C., the Classical mathematic 
vanished in its turn (for though it seemingly exists even to-day, it is only as a 
convenience of notation that it does so), and gave place to the Arabian. From 
what we know of the Alexandrian mathematic, it is a necessary presumption 
that there was a great movement within the Middle East, of which the centre 
of gravity must have lain in the Persian-Babylonian schools (such as Edessa, 
Gundisapora and Ctesiphon) and of which only details found their way into 
the regions of Classical speech. In spite of their Greek names, the Alexandrian 
mathematicians Zenodorus who dealt with figures of equal perimeter, 
Serenus who worked on the properties of a harmonic pencil in space, Hypsicles 
who introduced the Chaldean circle-division, Diophantus above all were 
all without doubt Aramaeans, and their works only a small part of a literature 
which was written principally in Syriac. This mathematic found its comple- 
tion in the investigations of the Arabian-Islamic thinkers, and after these 
there was again a long interval. And then a perfectly new mathematic was 
born, the Western, our own, which in our infatuation we regard as "Mathe- 
matics," as the culmination and the implicit purpose of two thousand years' 
evolution, though in reality its centuries are (strictly) numbered and to-day 
almost spent. 

The most valuable thing in the Classical mathematic is its proposition that 
number is the essence of all things -perceptible to the senses. Defining number as a 
measure, it contains the whole world-feeling of a soul passionately devoted to 
the "here" and the "now." Measurement in this sense means the measure- 
ment of something near and corporeal. Consider the content of the Classical 
art-work, say the free-standing statue of a naked man; here every essential and 
important element of Being, its whole rhythm, is exhaustively rendered by 
surfaces, dimensions and the sensuous relations of the parts. The Pythagorean 
notion of the harmony of numbers, although it was probably deduced from 
music a music, be it noted, that knew not polyphony or harmony, and 
formed its instruments to render single plump, almost fleshy, tones seems to 
be the very mould for a sculpture that has this ideal. The worked stone is only 
a something in so far as it has considered limits and measured form; what it is 
is what it has become under the sculptor's chisel. Apart from this it is a chaos, 
something not yet actualized, in fact for the time being a null. The same feeling 
transferred to the grander stage produces, as an opposite to the state of chaos, 
that of cosmos, which for the Classical soul implies a cleared-up situation of the 
external world, a harmonic order which includes each separate thing as a well- 
defined, comprehensible and present entity. The sum of such things constitutes 
neither more nor less than the whole world, and the interspaces between them, 



64 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

which for us are filled with the impressive symbol of the Universe of Space, arc 
for them the nonent (j6 /LCI) 6v). 

Extension means, for Classical mankind body, and for us space, and it is 
as a function of space that, to us, things "appear." And, looking backward 
from this standpoint, we may perhaps see into the deepest concept of the Classi- 
cal metaphysics, Anaximander's airetpov a word that is quite untranslatable 
into any Western tongue. It is that which possesses no "number" in the 
Pythagorean sense of the word, no measurable dimensions or definable limits, 
and therefore no being; the measureless, the negation of form, the statue not yet 
carved out of the block; the frpxti optically boundless and formless, which only 
becomes a something (namely, the world) after being split up by the senses. 
It is the underlying form a priori of Classical cognition, bodiliness as such, which 
is replaced exactly in the Kantian world-picture by that Space out of which 
Kant maintained that all things could be "thought forth." 

We can now understand what it is that divides one mathematic from an- 
other, and in particular the Classical from the Western. The whole world- 
feeling of the matured Classical world led it to see mathematics only as the 
theory of relations of magnitude, dimension and form between bodies. When, 
from out of this feeling, Pythagoras evolved and expressed the decisive formula, 
number had come, for him, to be an optical symbol not a measure of form 
generally, an abstract relation, but a frontier-post of the domain of the Become, 
or rather of that part of it which the senses were able to split up and pass under 
review. By the whole Classical world without exception numbers are con- 
ceived as units of measure, as magnitude, lengths, or surfaces, and for it no 
other sort of extension is imaginable. The whole Classical mathematic is at 
bottom Stereometry (solid geometry). To Euclid, who rounded off its system in 
the third century, the triangle is of deep necessity the bounding surface of a 
body, never a system of three intersecting straight lines or a group of three 
points in three-dimensional space. He defines a line as "length without 
breadth" (/Z^KOS dTrAares). In our mouths such a definition would be pitiful 
- in the Classical mathematic it was brilliant. 

The Western number, too, is not, as Kant and even Helmholtz thought, 
something proceeding out of Time as an a priori form of conception, but is some- 
thing specifically spatial, in that it is an order (or ordering) of like units. 
Actual time (as we shall see more and more clearly in the sequel) has not the 
slightest relation with mathematical things. Numbers belong exclusively to 
the domain of extension. But there are precisely as many possibilities and 
therefore necessities of ordered presentation of the extended as there are 
Cultures. Classical number is a thought-process dealing not with spatial rela- 
tions but with visibly limitable and tangible units, and it follows naturally 
and necessarily that the Classical knows only the "natural" (positive and 
whole) numbers, which on the contrary olay in our Western mathematics a 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 65 

quite undistinguished part in the midst of complex, hypercomplex, non- 
Archimedean and other number-systems. 

On this account, the idea of irrational numbers the unending decimal 
fractions of our notation was unrealizable within the Greek spirit. Euclid 
says and he ought to have been better understood that incommensurable 
lines are "not related to one another like numbers." In fact, it is the idea of irra- 
tional number that, once achieved, separates the notion of number from that of 
magnitude, for the magnitude of such a number (TT, for example) can never be 
denned or exactly represented by any straight line. Moreover, it follows from 
this that in considering the relation, say, 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." I 

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 them recoil time and again from the 
Babylonian astronomy with its penetration of endless starry space, 2 and refuse 
to venture out of the Mediterranean along sea-paths long before dared by the 
Phoenicians and the Egyptians. It is the deep metaphysical fear that the sense- 
comprehensible and present in which the Classical existence had entrenched 
itself would collapse and precipitate its cosmos (largely created and sustained 
by art) into unknown primitive abysses. And to understand this fear is to 
understand the final significance of Classical number that is, measure in con- 
trast to the immeasurable and to grasp the high ethical significance of its 
limitation. Goethe too, as a nature-student, felt it hence his almost terri- 
fied aversion to mathematics, which as we can now see was really an involun- 

1 One may be permitted to add that according to legend, both Hippasus who took to himself 
public credit for the discovery of a sphere of twelve pentagons, viz., the regular dodecahedron 
(regarded by the Pythagoreans as the quintessence or sether of a world of real tetrahedrons, 
octahedrons, icosahedrons and cubes), and Archytas the eighth successor of the Founder are reputed 
to have been drowned at sea. The pentagon from which this dodecahedron is derived, itself involves 
incommensurable numbers. The "pentagram" was the recognition badge of Pythagoreans and the 
a\oyov (incommensurable) their special secret. It would be noted, too, that Pythagoreanism was 
popular till its initiates were found to be dealing'in these alarming and subversive doctrines, and then 
they were suppressed and lynched a persecution which suggests more than one deep analogy with 
certain heresy-suppressions of Western history. The English student may be referred to G. J. Allman, 
Greek Geometry from Thales to Euclid (Cambridge, 1889), and to his articles "Pythagoras," " Philolaus " 
and "Archytas" in the Ency. Brit., XI Edition. Tr. 

2 Horace's words (Odes I xi): "Tu ne qusesieris, scire nefas, quern mihi quern tibi finem di dc- 
derint, Leuconoe, nee Babylonia* tcmptaris numeros . . . carpe diem, quam minimum credula fostero. 
Tr. 



66 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

tary reaction against the non-Classical mathematic, the Infinitesimal Calculus 
which underlay the natural philosophy of his time. 

Religious feeling in Classical man focused itself ever more and more intensely 
upon physically present, localised cults which alone expressed a college of Eucli- 
dean deities. Abstractions, dogmas floating homeless in the space of thought, 
were ever alien to it. A cult of this kind has as much in common with a 
Roman Catholic dogma as the statue has with the cathedral organ. There is no 
doubt that something of cult was comprised in the Euclidean mathematic 
consider, for instance, the secret doctrines of the Pythagoreans and the Theo- 
<rems of regular polyhedrons with their esoteric significance in the circle of 
'Plato. Just so, there is a deep relation between Descartes' analysis of the in- 
finite and contemporary dogmatic theology as it progressed from the final 
decisions of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation to entirely desensual- 
ized deism. Descartes and Pascal were mathematicians and Jansenists, Leibniz a 
mathematician and pietist. Voltaire, Lagrange and D'Alembert were contem- 
poraries. Now, the Classical soul felt the principle of the irrational, which 
overturned the statuesquely-ordered array of whole numbers and the complete 
and self-sufficing world-order for which these stood, as an impiety against the 
Divine itself. In Plato's "Timseus" this feeling is unmistakable. For the trans- 
formation of a series of discrete numbers into a continuum challenged not merely 
the Classical notion of number but the Classical world-idea itself, and so it is 
understandable that even negative numbers, which to us offer no conceptual 
difficulty, were impossible in the Classical mathematic, let alone ^ero as a 
number , that refined creation of a wonderful abstractive power which, for 
the Indian soul that conceived it as base for a positional numeration, was 
nothing more nor less than the key to the meaning of existence. Negative 
magnitudes have no existence. The expression ( 2.) X ( 3) = + 6 is neither 
something perceivable nor a representation of magnitude. The series of mag- 
nitudes ends with-f- i, and in graphic representation of negative numbers 
(+3 +i+io i 2. 3) we have suddenly, from zero onwards, posi- 
tive symbols of something negative; they mean something, but they no longer 
are. But the fulfilment of this act did not lie within the direction of Classical 
number-thinking. 

Every product of the waking consciousness of the Classical world, then, is 
elevated to the rank of actuality by way of sculptural definition. That which 
cannot be drawn is not "number." Archytas and Eudoxus use the terms sur- 
face- and volume-numbers to mean what we call second and third powers, and 
it is easy to understand that the notion of higher integral powers did not 
exist for them, for a fourth power would predicate at once, for the mind based 
on the plastic feeling, an extension in four dimensions, and four material di- 
mensions into the bargain, "which is absurd." Expressions like e" which we 
constantly use, or even the fractional index (e.g., 5*) which is employed in the 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 67 

Western mathematics as early as Oresme (i4th Century), would have been to 
them utter nonsense. Euclid calls the factors of a product its sides (TrXeup&Q 
and fractions (finite of course) were treated as whole-number relationships 
between two lines. Clearly, out of this no conception of zero as a number could 
possibly come, for from the point of view of a draughtsman it is meaningless. 
We, having minds differently constituted, must not argue from our habits to 
theirs and treat their mathematic as a "first stage" in the development of 
"Mathematics." Within and for the purposes of the world that Classical man 
evolved for himself, the Classical mathematic was a complete thing it is 
merely not so for us. Babylonian and Indian mathematics had long contained, 
as essential elements of their number- worlds, things which the Classical number- 
feeling regarded as nonsense and not from ignorance either, since many a 
Greek thinker was acquainted with them. It must be repeated, ' ' Mathematics ' ' 
is an illusion. A mathematical, and, generally, a scientific way of thinking is 
right, convincing, a "necessity of thought," when it completely expresses the 
life-feeling proper to it. Otherwise it is either impossible, futile and senseless, 
or else, as we in the arrogance of our historical soul like to say, "primitive." 
The modern mathematic, though "true" only for the Western spirit, is un- 
deniably a master-work of that spirit; and yet to Plato it would have seemed a 
ridiculous and painful aberration from the path leading to the "true" to wit, 
the Classical mathematic. And so with ourselves. Plainly, we have almost 
no notion of the multitude of great ideas belonging to other Cultures that we 
have suffered to lapse because our thought with its limitations has not permitted 
us to assimilate them, or (which comes to the same thing) has led us to reject 
them as false, superfluous, and nonsensical. 

VI 

The Greek mathematic, as a science of perceivable magnitudes, deliberately 
confines itself to facts of the comprehensibly present, and limits its researches 
and their validity to the near and the small. As compared with this impeccable 
consistency, the position of the Western mathematic is seen to be, practically, 
somewhat illogical, though it is only since the discovery of Non-Euclidean 
Geometry that the fact has been really recognized. Numbers are images of the 
perfectly desensualized understanding, of pure thought, and contain their ab- 
stract validity within themselves. 1 Their exact application to the actuality of 
conscious experience is therefore a problem in itself a problem which is 
always being posed anew and never solved and the congruence of mathe- 
matical system with empirical observation is at present anything but self- 
evident. Although the lay idea as found in Schopenhauer is that math- 
ematics rest upon the direct evidences of the senses, Euclidean geometry, 
superficially identical though it is with the popular geometry of all ages, is 

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. ii ct scq. 



68 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

only in agreement with the phenomenal world approximately and within very 
narrow limits in fact, the limits of a drawing-board. Extend these limits, 
and what becomes, for instance, of Euclidean parallels? They meet at the line 
of the horizon a simple fact upon which all our art-perspective is grounded. 

Now, it is unpardonable that Kant, a Western thinker, should have evaded 
the mathematic of distance, and appealed to a set of figure-examples that their 
mere pettiness excludes from treatment by the specifically Western infinitesimal 
methods. But Euclid, as a thinker of the Classical age, was entirely consistent 
with its spirit when he refrained from proving the phenomenal truth of his 
axioms by referring to, say, the triangle formed by an observer and two in- 
finitely distant fixed stars. For these can neither be drawn nor "intuitively 
apprehended" and his feeling was precisely the feeling which shrank from 
the irrationals, which did not dare to give nothingness a value as zero (i.e., 
a number) and even in the contemplation of cosmic relations shut its eyes to 
the Infinite and held to its symbol of Proportion. 

Aristarchus of Samos.who in 2.88-2.77 belonged to a circle of astronomers at 
Alexandria that doubtless had relations with Chaldaeo-Persian schools, pro- 
jected the elements of a heliocentric world-system. 1 Rediscovered by Coper- 
nicus, it was to shake the metaphysical passions of the West to their foundations 
witness Giordano Bruno 2 to become the fulfilment of mighty premoni- 
tions, and to justify that Faustian, Gothic world-feeling which had already 
professed its faith in infinity through the forms of its cathedrals. But the world 
of Aristarchus received his work with entire indifference and in a brief space of 
time it was forgotten designedly, we may surmise. His few followers were 
nearly all natives of Asia Minor, his most prominent supporter Seleucus (about 
150) being from the Persian Seleucia on Tigris. In fact, the Aristarchian system 
had no spiritual appeal to the Classical Culture and might indeed have become 
dangerous to it. And yet it was differentiated from the Copernican (a point 
always missed) by something which made it perfectly conformable to the 
Classical world-feeling, viz., the assumption that the cosmos is contained in a 
materially finite and optically appreciable hollow sphere, in the middle of which 
the planetary system, arranged as such on Copernican lines, moved. In the 
Classical astronomy, the earth and the heavenly bodies are consistently re- 
garded as entities of two different kinds, however variously their movements 
in detail might be interpreted. Equally, the opposite idea that the earth is 
only a star among stars * is not inconsistent in itself with either the Ptolemaic or 

1 In the only writing of his that survives, indeed, Aristarchus maintains the geocentric view; 
it may be presumed therefore that it was only temporarily that he let himself be captivated by a 
hypothesis of the Chaldaean learning. 

1 Giordano Bruno (born 1548, burned for heresy 1600). His whole life might be expressed as a 
crusade on behalf of God and the Copernican universe against a degenerated orthodoxy and an 
Aristotelian world-idea long coagulated in death. Tr. 

' F. Strunz, Gesch. d. Naturwiss. im Mittelalttr (1910), p. 90. 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 69 

the Copernican systems and in fact was pioneered by Nicolaus Cusanus and 
Leonardo da Vinci. But by this device of a celestial sphere the principle of 
infinity which would have endangered the sensuous-Classical notion of bounds 
was smothered. One would have supposed that the infinity-conception was 
inevitably implied by the system of Aristarchus long before his time, the 
Babylonian thinkers had reached it. But no such thought emerges. On the 
contrary, in the famous treatise on the grains of sand i Archimedes proves that 
the filling of this stereometric body (for that is what Aristarchus's Cosmos is, 
after all) with atoms of sand leads to very high, but not to infinite, figure- 
results. This proposition, quoted though it may be, time and again, as being 
a first step towards the Integral Calculus, amounts to a denial (implicit indeed 
in the very title) of everything that we mean by the word analysis. Whereas 
in our physics, the constantly-surging hypotheses of a material (i.e., directly 
cognizable) asther, break themselves one after the other against our refusal to 
acknowledge material limitations of any kind, Eudoxus, Apollonius and Archi- 
medes, certainly the keenest and boldest of the Classical mathematicians, com- 
pletely worked out, in the main with rule and compass, a purely optical analysis 
of things-become on the basis of sculptural-Classical bounds. They used deeply- 
thought-out (and for us hardly understandable) methods of integration, but 
these possess only a superficial resemblance even to Leibniz's definite-integral 
method. They employed geometrical loci and co-ordinates, but these are always 
specified lengths and units of measurement and never, as in Fermat and above all 
in Descartes, unspecified spatial relations, values of points in terms of their 
positions in space. With these methods also should be classed the exhaustion- 
method of Archimedes, 2 given by him in his recently discovered letter to Eratos- 
thenes on such subjects as the quadrature of the parabola section by means of 
inscribed rectangles (instead of through similar polygons). But the very sub- 
tlety and extreme complication of his methods, which are grounded in certain 
of Plato's geometrical ideas, make us realize, in spite of superficial analogies, 
what an enormous difference separates him from Pascal. Apart altogether from 
the idea of Riemann's -integral, what sharper contrast could there be to these 
ideas than the so-called quadratures of to-day? The name itself is now no more 
than an unfortunate survival, the "surface" is indicated by a bounding func- 
tion, and the drawing as such, has vanished. Nowhere else did the two mathe- 
matical minds approach each other more closely than in this instance, and 
nowhere is it more evident that the gulf between the two souls thus expressing 
themselves is impassable. 

In the cubic style of their early architecture the Egyptians, so to say, con- 

1 In the "Psammites," or "Arenarius," Archimedes framed a numerical notation which was 
to be capable of expressing the number of grains of sand in a sphere of the si%e of our universe. Tr. 

2 This, for which the ground had been prepared by Eudoxus, was employed for calculating the 
volume of pyramids and cones: "the means whereby the Greeks were able to evade the forbidden no- 
tion of infinity" (Heiberg, Naturwiss. u. Math. i. Klass. Alter. [1912.], p. 2.7). 



70 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

ccalcd 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 necessity of destiny. This con- 
nexion of strict mathematical form with the end of organic being, with the 
phenomenon of its organic remainder the corpse, we shall see more and more 
clearly to be the origin of all great art. We have already noticed the develop- 
ment 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 

"The realms of Image unconfincd. 
. . . Formation, transformation, 
Eternal play of the eternal mind 
With semblances of all things in creation 
For ever and for ever sweeping round." * 

Goethe draws very near to Plato in this divination of one of the final secrets. 
For his unapproachable Mothers are Plato's Ideas the possibilities of a 
spirituality, the unborn forms to be realized as active and purposed Culture, as 
art, thought, polity and religion, in a world ordered and determined by that 
spirituality. And so the number-thought and the world-idea of a Culture arc 
related, and by this relation, the former is elevated above mere knowledge and 
experience and becomes a view of the universe, there being consequently as many 
mathematics as many number-worlds as there are higher Cultures. Only 
so can we understand, as something necessary, the fact that the greatest mathe- 
matical thinkers, the creative artists of the realm of numbers, have been brought 
to the decisive mathematical discoveries of their several Cultures by a deep 
religious intuition. 

Classical, Apollinian number we must regard as the creation of Pythagoras 
who founded a religion. It was. an instinct that guided Nicolaus Cusanus, the 
great Bishop of Brixen (about 1450), from the idea of the unendingness of God 
in nature to the elements of the Infinitesimal Calculus. Leibniz himself, who 
two centuries later definitely settled the methods and notation of the Calculus, 
was led by purely metaphysical speculations about the divine principle and its 
relation to infinite extent to conceive and develop the notion of an analysis 
situs probably the most inspired of all interpretations of pure and emanci- 
pated space the possibilities of which were to be developed later by Grass- 
maun in his Ausdehnungslehre and above all by Riemann, their real creator, in his 
1 Dr. Anstcr's translation. Tir. 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 71 

symbolism of two-sided planes representative of the nature of equations. And 
Kepler and Newton, strictly religious natures both, were and remained con- 
vinced, like Plato, that it was precisely through the medium of number that 
they had been able to apprehend intuitively the essence of the divine world- 
order. 

VII 

The Classical arithmetic, we are always told, was first liberated from its 
sense-bondage, widened and extended by Diophantus, who did not indeed 
create algebra (the science of undefined magnitudes) but brought it to expression 
within the framework of the Classical mathematic that we know and so 
suddenly that we have to assume that there was a pre-existent stock of ideas 
which he worked out. But this amounts, not to an enrichment of, but a com- 
plete victory over, the Classical world-feeling, and the mere fact should have 
sufficed in itself to show that, inwardly, Diophantus does not belong to the 
Classical Culture at all. What is active in him is a new number-feeling, or let 
us say a new limit-feeling with respect to the actual and become, and no longer 
that Hellenic feeling of sensuously-present limits which had produced the 
Euclidean geometry, the nude statue and the coin. Details of the formation of 
this new mathematic we do not know Diophantus stands so completely by 
himself in the history of so-called late-Classical mathematics that an Indian 
influence has been presumed. But here also the influence must really have 
been that of those early-Arabian schools whose studies (apart from the 
dogmatic) have hitherto been so imperfectly investigated. In Diophantus, 
unconscious though he may be of his own essential antagonism to the Classical 
foundations on which he attempted to build, there emerges from under the 
surface of Euclidean intention the new limit-feeling which I designate the 
"Magian." He did not widen the idea of number as magnitude, but (unwit- 
tingly) eliminated it. No Greek could have stated anything about an undefined 
number a or an undenominated number 3 which are neither magnitudes nor 
lines whereas the new limit-feeling sensibly expressed by numbers of this 
sort at least underlay, if it did not constitute, Diophantine treatment; and the 
letter-notation which we employ to clothe our own (again transvalued) algebra 
was first introduced by Vieta in 1591, an unmistakable, if unintended, protest 
against the classicizing tendency of Renaissance mathematics. 

Diophantus lived about 2.50 A.D., that is, in the third century of that Arabian 
Culture whose organic history, till now smothered under the surface-forms of the 
Roman Empire and the "Middle Ages," l comprises everything that happened 
after the beginning of our era in the region that was later to be Islam's. It was 
precisely in the time of Diophantus that the last shadow of the Attic statuary 
art paled before the new space-sense of cupola, mosaic and sarcophagus-relief 
that we have in the Early-Christian-Syrian style. In that time there was once 

1 Sec Vol. II, Chapter III. 



72. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

more archaic art and strictly geometrical ornament; and at that time too Dio- 
cletian completed the transformation of the now merely sham Empire into a 
Caliphate. The four centuries that separate Euclid and Diophantus, separate 
also Plato and Plotinus the last and conclusive thinker, the Kant, of a 
fulfilled Culture and the first schoolman, the Duns Scotus, of a Culture just 
awakened. 

It is here that we arc made aware for the first time of the existence of those 
higher individualities whose coming, growth and decay constitute the real 
substance of history underlying the myriad colours and changes of the surface. 
The Classical spirituality, which reached its final phase in the cold intelligence 
of the Romans and of which the whole Classical Culture with all its works, 
thoughts, deeds and ruins forms the "body," had been born about uoo B.C. in 
the country about the ^gean Sea. The Arabian Culture, which, under cover of 
the Classical Civilization, had been germinating in the East since Augustus, 
came wholly out of the region between Armenia and Southern Arabia, Alexan- 
dria and Ctesiphon, and we have to consider as expressions of this new soul 
almost the whole "late-Classical " art of the Empire, all the young ardent relig- 
ions of the East Mandseanism, Manichseism, Christianity, Neo-Platonism, 
and in Rome itself, as well as the Imperial Fora, that Pantheon which is the 
first of all mosques. 

That Alexandria and Antioch still wrote in Greek and imagined that they 
were thinking in Greek is a fact of no more importance than the facts that 
Latin was the scientific language of the West right up to the time of Kant and 
that Charlemagne "renewed" the Roman Empire. 

In Diophantus, number has ceased to be the measure and essence of plastic 
things. In the Ravennate mosaics man has ceased to be a body. Unnoticed, Greek 
designations have lost their original connotations. We have left the realm of 
Attic Ka\OK&yaJdia the Stoic Arapa(a and ydKrjvr]. Diophantus does not yet 
know zero and negative numbers, it is true, but he has ceased to know Pytha- 
gorean numbers. And this Arabian indeterminateness of number is, in its turn, 
something quite different from the controlled variability of the later Western 
mathematics, the variability of the function. 

The Magian mathematic we can see the outline, though we are ignorant of 
the details advanced through Diophantus (who is obviously not a starting- 
point) boldly and logically to a culmination in the Abbassid period (9th cen- 
tury) that we can appreciate in Al-Khwarizmi and Alsidzshi. And as Euclidean 
geometry is to Attic statuary (the same expression-form in a different medium) 
and the analysis of space to polyphonic music, so this algebra is to the Magian 
art with its mosaic, its arabesque (which the Sassanid Empire and later Byzan- 
tium produced with an ever-increasing profusion and luxury of tangible-intan- 
gible organic motives) and its Constantinian high-relief in which uncertain 
deep-darks divide the freely-handled figures of the foreground. As algebra is to 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 73 

Classical arithmetic and Western analysis, so is the cupola-church to the Doric 
temple and the Gothic cathedral. It is not as though Diophantus were one of 
the great mathematicians. On the contrary, much of what we have been 
accustomed to associate with his name is not his work alone. His accidental 
importance lies in the fact that, so far as our knowledge goes, he was the first 
mathematician in whom the new number-feeling is unmistakably present. In 
comparison with the masters who conclude the development of a mathematic 
with Apollonius and Archimedes, with Gauss, Cauchy, Riemann Diophan- 
tus has, in his form-language especially, something primitive. This something, 
which till now we have been pleased to refer to "late-Classical" decadence, 
we shall presently learn to understand and value, just as we are revising our 
ideas as to the despised "late-Classical" art and beginning to see in it the 
tentative expression of the nascent Early Arabian Culture. Similarly archaic, 
primitive, and groping was the mathematic of Nicolas Oresme, Bishop of 
Lisieux (132.3-1382.), * who was the first Western who used co-ordinates so to 
say elastically 2 and, more important still, to employ fractional powers both 
of which presuppose a number-feeling, obscure it may be but quite unmistak- 
able, which is completely non-Classical and also non- Arabic. But if, further, 
we think of Diophantus together with the early-Christian sarcophagi of the 
Roman collections, and of Oresme together with the Gothic wall-statuary of 
the German cathedrals, we see that the mathematicians as well as the artists 
have something in common, which is, that they stand in their respective Cul- 
tures at the same (viz., the primitive) level of abstract understanding. In the 
world and age of Diophantus the stereometric sense of bounds, which had long 
ago reached in Archimedes the last stages of refinement and elegance proper to 
the megalopolitan intelligence, had passed away. Throughout that world men 
were unclear, longing, mystic, and no longer bright and free in the Attic way; 
they were men rooted in the earth of a young country-side, not megalopolitans 
like Euclid and D'Alembert. 3 They no longer understood the deep and com- 
plicated forms of the Classical thought, and their own were confused and new, 
far as yet from urban clarity and tidiness. Their Culture was in the Gothic 
condition, as all Cultures have been in their youth as even the Classical was 
in the early Doric period which is known to us now only by its Dipylon pottery. 
Only in Baghdad and in the 9th and loth Centuries were the young ideas of the 
age of Diophantus carried through to completion by ripe masters of the calibre 
of Plato and Gauss. 

1 Oresme was, equally, prelate, church reformer, scholar, scientist and economist the very 
type of the philosopher-leader. Tr. 

2 Oresme in his Latitudines Formarum used ordinate and abscissa, not indeed to specify numeri- 
cally, but certainly to describe, change, i.e., fundamentally, to express functions. Tr. 

3 Alexandria ceased to be a world-city in the second century A.D. and became a collection of 
houses left over from the Classical civilization which harboured a primitive population of quite 
different spiritual constitution. See Vol. II, pp. 12.2. et seq. 



74 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 



VIII 



The decisive act of Descartes, whose geometry appeared in 1637, consisted 
not in the introduction of a new method or idea in the domain of traditional 
geometry (as we are so frequently told), but in the definitive conception of a 
new number-idea, which conception was expressed in the emancipation of ge- 
ometry from servitude to optically-realizable constructions and to measured 
and measurable lines generally. With that, the analysis of the infinite became 
a fact. The rigid, so-called Cartesian, system of co-ordinates a semi-Eucli- 
dean method of ideally representing measurable magnitudes had long been 
known (witness Oresme) and regarded as of high importance, and when we 
get to the bottom of Descartes' thought we find that what he did was not to 
round off the system but to overcome it. Its last historic representative was 
Descartes' contemporary Fermat. 1 

In place of the sensuous element of concrete lines and planes the specific 
character of the Classical feeling of bounds there emerged the abstract, 
spatial, un-Classical element of the point which from then on was regarded as a 
group of co-ordered pure numbers. The idea of magnitude and of perceivable 
dimension derived from Classical texts and Arabian traditions was destroyed 
and replaced by that of variable relation-values between positions in space. 
It is not in general realized that this amounted to the supersession of geometry, 
which thenceforward enjoyed only a fictitious existence behind a facade of 
Classical tradition. The word "geometry" has an inextensible Apollinian 
meaning, and from the time of Descartes what is called the "new geometry" 
is made up in part of synthetic work upon the position of points in a space which 
is no longer necessarily three-dimensional (a "manifold of points"), and in 
part of analysis, in which numbers are defined through point-positions in space. 
And this replacement of lengths by positions carries with it a purely spatial, 
and no longer a material, conception of extension. 

The clearest example of this destruction of the inherited optical-finite 
geometry seems to me to be the conversion of angular functions which in 
the Indian mathematic had been numbers (in a sense of the word that is hardly 
accessible to our minds) into periodic functions, and their passage thence 
into an infinite number-realm, in which they become series and not the 
smallest trace remains of the Euclidean figure. In all parts of that realm 
the circle-number IT, like the Napierian base , generates relations of all 
sorts which obliterate all the old distinctions of geometry, trigonometry and 
algebra, which arc neither arithmetical nor geometrical in their nature, and 
in which no one any longer dreams of actually drawing circles or working out 
powers. 

1 Born 1601, died 1665. Sec Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article Ftrmat, and references therein. Tr. 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 75 

IX 

At the moment exactly corresponding to that at which (c. 540) the Classical 
Soul in the person of Pythagoras discovered its own proper Apollinian number, 
the measurable magnitude, the Western soul in the persons of Descartes and his 
generation (Pascal, Fermat, Desargues) discovered a notion of number that was 
the child of a passionate Faustian tendency towards the infinite. Number as 
pure magnitude inherent in the material presentness of things is paralleled by 
numbers as pure relation, 1 and if we may characterize the Classical "world," 
the cosmos, as being based on a deep need of visible limits and composed ac- 
cordingly as a sum of material things, so we may say that our world-picture 
is an actualizing of an infinite space in which things visible appear very nearly 
as realities of a lower order, limited in the presence of the illimitable. The 
symbol of the West is an idea of which no other Culture gives even a hint, the 
idea of Function. The function is anything rather than an expansion of, it is 
complete emancipation from, any pre-existent idea of number. With the func- 
tion, not only the Euclidean geometry (and with it the common human geom- 
etry of children and laymen, based on everyday experience) but also the 
Archimedean arithmetic, ceased to have any value for the really significant 
mathematic of Western Europe. Henceforward, this consisted solely in abstract 
analysis. For Classical man geometry and arithmetic were self-contained and 
complete sciences of the highest rank, both phenomenal and both concerned 
with magnitudes that could be drawn or numbered. For us, on the contrary, 
those things are only practical auxiliaries of daily life. Addition and multi- 
plication, the two Classical methods of reckoning magnitudes, have, like their 
sister geometrical-drawing, utterly vanished in the infinity of functional 
processes. Even the power, which in the beginning denotes numerically a set 
of multiplications (products of equal magnitudes), is, through the exponential 
idea (logarithm) and its employment in complex, negative and fractional forms, 
dissociated from all connexion with magnitude and transferred to a transcendent 
relational world which the Greeks, knowing only the two positive whole- 
number powers that represent areas and volumes, were unable to approach. 

Think, for instance, of expressions like e~ x , \/~x, al. 

Every one of the significant creations which succeeded one another so 
rapidly from the Renaissance onward imaginary and complex numbers, in- 
troduced by Cardanus as early as 1550; infinite series, established theoretically 
by Newton's great discovery of the binomial theorem in 1666; the differential 
geometry, the definite integral of Leibniz; the aggregate as a new number-unit, 
hinted at even by Descartes; new processes like those of general integrals; the 
expansion of functions into series and even into infinite series of other functions 

1 Similarly, coinage and double-entry book-keeping play analogous parts in the money-thinking 
of the Classical and the Western Cultures respectively. See Vol. II, pp. 610 ct scq. 



7 6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

is a victory over the popular and sensuous number-feeling in us, a victory 
which the new mathematic had to win in order to make the new world-feeling 
actual. 

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. The history of Western knowledge is 
thus one of progressive emancipation from Classical thought, an emancipation 
never willed but enforced in the depths of the unconscious. And so the develop- 
ment of the new mathematic consists of a long, secret and finally victorious battle against 
the notion of magnitude. 1 

I 

One result of this Classicizing tendency has been to prevent us from finding 
the new notation proper to our Western number as such. The present-day sign- 
language of mathematics perverts its real content. It is principally owing to 
that tendency that the belief in numbers as magnitudes still rules to-day even 
amongst mathematicians, for is it not the base of all our written notation? 

But it is not the separate signs (e.g., AT, TT, s) serving to express the func- 
tions but the function itself as unit, as element, the variable relation no longer 
capable of being optically defined, that constitutes the new number; and this 
new number should have demanded a new notation built up with entire dis- 
regard of Classical influences. Consider the difference between two equations 
(if the same word can be used of two such dissimilar things) such as 3 x +4* = 
5 * and x w +y n =z n (the equation of Fermat's theorem). The first consists 
of several Classical numbers i.e., magnitudes but the second is one number 
of a different sort, veiled by being written down according to Euclidean- 
Archimedean tradition in the identical form of the first. In the first case, the 
sign = establishes a rigid connexion between definite and tangible magnitudes, 
but in the second it states that within a domain of variable images there exists 
a relation such that from certain alterations certain other alterations necessarily 
follow. The first equation has as its aim the specification by measurement of 
a concrete magnitude, viz., a "result," while the second has, in general, no 
result but is simply the picture and sign of a relation which for n>2. (this is 
the famous Fermat problem 2 ) can probably be shown to exclude integers. A 

1 The same may be said in the matter of Roman Law (sec Vol. II, pp. 96 et scq.) and of coinage 
(see Vol. II, pp. 616 ct seq.). 

* That is, " it is impossible to part a cube into two cubes, a biquadrate into two biquadrates, and 
generally any power above the square into two powers having the same exponent." Fermat claimed 
xo possess a proof of the proposition, but this has not been preserved, and no general proof has 
hitherto been obtained. Tr. 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 77 

Greek mathematician would have found it quite impossible to understand the 
purport of an operation like this, which was not meant to be "worked out.',' 

As applied to the letters in Fermat's equation, the notion of the unknown 
is completely misleading. In the first equation x is a magnitude, defined and 
measurable, which it is our business to compute. In the second, the word 
"defined" has no meaning at all for x, y, %, n, and consequently we do not 
attempt to compute their "values." Hence they are not numbers at all in the 
plastic sense but signs representing a connexion that is destitute of the hall- 
marks of magnitude, shape and unique meaning, an infinity of possible positions 
of like character, an ensemble unified and so attaining existence as a number. 
The whole equation, though written in our unfortunate notation as a plurality 
of terms, is actually one single number, x, y, % being no more numbers than 
+ and = are. 

In fact, directly the essentially anti-Hellenic idea of the irrationals is 
introduced, the foundations of the idea of number as concrete and definite 
collapse. Thenceforward, the series of such numbers is no longer a visible row 
of increasing, discrete, numbers capable of plastic embodiment but a uni- 
dimensional continuum in which each "cut" (in Dedekind's sense) represents 
a number. Such a number is already difficult to reconcile with Classical number, 
for the Classical mathematic knows only one number between i and 3, whereas 
for the Western the totality of such numbers is an infinite aggregate. But when 
we introduce further the imaginary (V i or /) and finally the complex 
numbers (general form a + /'), the linear continuum is broadened into the 
highly transcendent form of a number-body, i.e., the content of an aggregate 
of homogeneous elements in which a "cut" now stands for a number-surface 
containing an infinite aggregate of numbers of a lower "potency" (for instance, 
all the real numbers), and there remains not a trace of number in the Classical 
and popular sense. These number-surfaces, which since Cauchy and Riemann 
have played an important part in the theory of functions, are pure thought- 
pictures. Even positive irrational number (e.g., Vz) could be conceived in a 
sort of negative fashion by Classical minds; they had, in fact, enough idea 
of it to ban it as appijTos and 0X0705. But expressions of the form x + yi 
lie beyond every possibility of comprehension by Classical thought, whereas 
it is on the extension of the mathematical laws over the whole region of 
the complex numbers, within which these laws remain operative, that we 
have built up the function theory which has at last exhibited the Western 
mathematic in all purity and unity. Not until that point was reached could 
this mathematic be unreservedly brought to bear in the parallel sphere of our 
dynamic Western physics; for the Classical mathematic was fitted precisely to 
its own stereometric world of individual objects and to static mechanics as 
developed from Leucippus to Archimedes. 

The brilliant period of the Baroque mathematic the counterpart of the 



78 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

Ionian lies substantially in the i8th Century and extends from the decisive 
discoveries of Newton and Leibniz through Euler, Lagrange, Laplace and 
D'Alembert to Gauss. Once this immense creation found wings, its rise was 
miraculous. Men hardly dared believe their senses. The age of refined scepti- 
cism witnessed the emergence of one seemingly impossible truth after another. 1 
Regarding the theory of the differential coefficient, D'Alembert had to say: 
"Go forward, and faith will come to you." Logic itself seemed to raise ob- 
jections and to prove foundations fallacious. But the goal was reached. 

This century was a very carnival of abstract and immaterial thinking, in 
which the great masters of analysis and, with them, Bach, Gluck, Haydn and 
Mozart a small group of rare and deep intellects revelled in the most 
refined discoveries and speculations, from which Goethe and Kant remained 
aloof; and in point of content it is exactly paralleled by the ripest century of 
the Ionic, the century of Eudoxus and Archytas (440-350) and, we may add, of 
Phidias, Polycletus, Alcamenes and the Acropolis buildings in which the 
form-world of Classical mathematic and sculpture displayed the whole fullness 
of its possibilities, and so ended. 

And now for the first time it is possible to comprehend in full the elemental 
opposition of the Classical and the Western souls. In the whole panorama of 
history, innumerable and intense as historical relations are, we find no two 
things so fundamentally alien to one another as these. And it is because ex- 
tremes meet because it may be there is some deep common origin behind 
their divergence that we find in the Western Faustian soul this yearning 
effort towards the Apollinian ideal, the only alien ideal which we have loved 
and, for its power of intensely living in the pure sensuous present, have envied. 



XI 



We have already observed that, like a child, a primitive mankind acquires 
(as part of the inward experience that is the birth of the ego) an understanding 
of number and ipso facto possession of an external world referred to the ego. As 
soon as the primitive's astonished eye perceives the dawning world of ordered ex- 
tension, and the significant emerges in great outlines from the welter of mere im- 
pressions, and the irrevocable parting of the outer world from his proper, his in- 
ner, world gives form and direction to his waking life, there arises in the soul 
instantly conscious of its loneliness the root-feeling of longing (Sehnsucht). 
It is this that urges "becoming" towards its goal, that motives the fulfilment 
and actualizing of every inward possibility, that unfolds the idea of indi- 
vidual being. It is the child's longing, which will presently come into the 
consciousness more and more clearly as a feeling of constant direction and 

1 Thus Bishop Berkeley's Discourse addressed to an infidel mathematician (1735) shrewdly asked 
whether the mathematician were in a position to criticize the divine for proceeding on the basis of 
faith. Tr. 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 79 

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. 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 
is inwardly fulfilled and consciousness stands at its goal. It is the deep world-fear 
of the child which never leaves the higher man, the believer, the poet, the 
artist that makes him so infinitely lonely in the presence of the alien powers 
that loom, threatening in the dawn, behind the screen of sense-phenomena. 
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. 
Like a secret melody that not every ear can perceive, it runs through the form- 
language of every true art-work, every inward philosophy, every important 
deed, and, although those who can perceive it in that domain are the very few, 
it lies at the root of the great problems of mathematics. Only the spiritually 
dead man of the autumnal cities Hammurabi's Babylon, Ptolemaic Alexan- 
dria, Islamic Baghdad, Paris and Berlin to-day only the pure intellectual, 
the sophist, the sensualist, the Darwinian, loses it or is able to evade it by 
setting up a secretless "scientific world-view" between himself and the alien. 
As the longing attaches itself to that impalpable something whose thousand- 
formed elusive manifestations are comprised in, rather than denoted by, the 
word "time," so the other prime feeling, dread, finds its expression in the 
intellectual, understandable, outlinable symbols of extension; and thus we find 
that every Culture is aware (each in its own special way) of an opposition of 
time and space, of direction and extension, the former underlying the latter as 
becoming precedes having-become. It is the longing that underlies the dread, 
becomes the dread, and not vice versa. The one is not subject to the intellect, 
the other is its servant. The r61e of the one is purely to experience, that of the 



8o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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. To bind, to bridle, to placate, to "know" are all, in the last 
analysis, the same thing. In the mysticism of all primitive periods, to know 
God means to conjure him, to make him favourable, to appropriate him inwardly. 
This is achieved, principally, by means of a word, the Name the "nomen" 
which designates and calls up the "numen " and also by ritual practices of 
secret potency; and the subtlest, as well as the most powerful, form of this 
defence is causal and systematic knowledge, delimitation by label and number. 
In this respect man only becomes wholly man when he has acquired language. 
When cognition has ripened to the point of words, the original chaos of im- 
pressions necessarily transforms itself into a "Nature" that has laws and must 
obey them, and the world-in-itself becomes a world-for-us. 1 

The world-fear is stilled when an intellectual form-language hammers out 
brazen vessels in which the mysterious is captured and made comprehensible. 
This is the idea of " taboo," 2 which plays a decisive part in the spiritual life of 
all primitive men, though the original content of the word lies so far from us 
that it is incapable of translation into any ripe culture-language. Blind terror, 
religious awe, deep loneliness, melancholy, hate, obscure impulses to draw near, 
to be merged, to escape all those formed feelings of mature souls are in the 
childish condition blurred in a monotonous indecision. The two senses of the 
word "conjure" (verschworen), meaning to bind and to implore at once, may 
serve to make clear the sense of the mystical process by which for primitive 
man the formidable alien becomes "taboo." Reverent awe before that which 
is independent of one's self, things ordained and fixed by law, the alien powers 
of the world, is the source from which the elementary formative acts, one and 
all, spring. In early times this feeling is actualized in ornament, in laborious 
ceremonies and rites, and the rigid laws of primitive intercourse. At the zeniths 
of the great Cultures those formations, though retaining inwardly the mark of 
their origin, the characteristic of binding and conjuring, have become the 
complete form-worlds of the various arts and of religious, scientific and, above 
all, mathematical thought. The method common to all the only way of 
actualizing itself that the soul knows is the symbolizing of extension, of space 
or of things; and we find it alike in the conceptions of absolute space that per- 
vade Newtonian physics, Gothic cathedral-interiors and Moorish mosques, and 

1 From the savage conjuror with his naming-magic to the modern scientist who subjects things 
by attaching technical labels to them, the form has in no wise changed. Sec Vol. II, pp. 166 ct scq., 
311 ct seq. 

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 137 ct scq. 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 81 

the atmospheric infinity of Rembrandt's paintings and again the dark tone- 
worlds of Beethoven's quartets; in the regular polyhedrons of Euclid, the 
Parthenon sculptures and the pyramids of Old Egypt, the Nirvana of Buddha, 
the aloofness of court-customs under Sesostris, Justinian I and Louis XIV, in 
the God-idea of an JEschylus, a Plotinus, a Dante; and in the world-embracing 
spatial energy of modern technics. 

XII 

To return to mathematics. In the Classical world the starting-point of 
every formative act was, as we have seen, the ordering of the "become," in so 
far as this was present, visible, measurable and numerable. The Western, 
Gothic, form-feeling on the contrary is that of an unrestrained, strong-willed 
far-ranging soul, and its chosen badge is pure, imperceptible, unlimited space. 
But we must not be led into regarding such symbols as unconditional. On the 
contrary, they are strictly conditional, though apt to be taken as having iden- 
tical essence and validity. Our universe of infinite space, whose existence, for 
us, goes without saying, simply does not exist for Classical man. It is not even 
capable of being presented to him. On the other hand, the Hellenic cosmos, 
which is (as we might have discovered long ago) entirely foreign to our way 
of thinking, was for the Hellene something self-evident. The fact is that the 
infinite space of our physics is a form of very numerous and extremely com- 
plicated 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; and they are difficult because for 
all alien men their real content is ipso facto quite inaccessible. Such a notion, 
at once simple and difficult, is our specifically Western meaning of the word 
"space." The whole of our mathematic from Descartes onward is devoted to 
the theoretical interpretation of this great and wholly religious symbol. The 
aim of all our physics since Galileo is identical; but in the Classical mathe- 
matics and physics the content of this word is simply not known. 

Here, too, Classical names, inherited from the literature of Greece and 
retained in use, have veiled the realities. Geometry means the art of measuring, 
arithmetic the art of numbering. The mathematic of the West has long ceased 
to have anything to do with both these forms of defining, but it has not man- 
aged to find new names for its own elements for the word "analysis" is 
hopelessly inadequate. 

The beginning and end of the Classical mathematic is consideration of the 
properties of individual bodies and their boundary-surfaces; thus indirectly 
taking in conic sections and higher curves. We, on the other hand, at bottom 



8i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

know only the abstract space-clement of the point, which can neither be seen, 
nor measured, nor yet named, but represents simply a centre of reference. The 
straight line, for the Greeks a measurable edge, is for us an infinite continuum 
of points. Leibniz illustrates his infinitesimal principle by presenting the 
straight line as one limiting case and the point as the other limiting case of a 
circle having infinitely great or infinitely little radius. But for the Greek the 
circle is a plane and the problem that interested him was that of bringing it 
into a commensurable condition. Thus the squaring of the circle became for the 
Classical intellect the supreme problem of the finite. The deepest problem of world- 
form seemed to it to be to alter surfaces bounded by curved lines, without 
change of magnitude, into rectangles and so to render them measureable. For 
us, on the other hand, it has become the usual, and not specially significant, 
practice to represent the number TT by algebraic means, regardless of any geo- 
metrical image. 

The Classical mathematician knows only what he sees and grasps. Where 
definite and defining visibility the domain of his thought ceases, his science 
comes to an end. The Western mathematician, as soon as he has quite shaken off 
the trammels of Classical prejudice, goes off into a wholly abstract region of 
infinitely numerous "manifolds" of n (no longer 3) dimensions, in which his 
so-called geometry always can and generally must do without every common- 
place aid. When Classical man turns to artistic expressions of his form-feeling, 
he tries with marble and bronze to give the dancing or the wrestling human 
form that pose and attitude in which surfaces and contours have all attainable 
proportion and meaning. But the true artist of the West shuts his eyes and 
loses himself in the realm of bodiless music, in which harmony and polyphony 
bring him to images of utter "beyondness" that transcend all possibilities of 
visual definition. One need only think of the meanings of the word "figure" 
as used respectively by the Greek sculptor and the Northern contrapuntist, and 
the opposition of the two worlds, the two mathematics, is immediately pre- 
sented. The Greek mathematicians ever use the word o-cojua for their entities, 
just as the Greek lawyers used it for persons as distinct from things (o-oj/xara 
Ktd Trp&ynaTa: persona et res). 

Classical number, integral and corporeal, therefore inevitably seeks to relate 
itself with the birth of bodily man, the <rw/za. The number i is hardly yet 
conceived of as actual number but rather as dpxi?, the prime stuff of- the 
number-series, the origin of all true numbers and therefore all magnitudes, 
measures and materiality (Dinglichkeit). In the group of the Pythagoreans 
(the date does not matter) its figured-sign was also the symbol of the mother- 
womb, the origin of all life. The digit 2., the first true number, which doubles 
the i, was therefore correlated with the male principle and given the sign of 
the phallus. And, finally, 3, the "holy number" of the Pythagoreans, denoted 
the act of union between man and woman, the act of propagation the erotic 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 83 

suggestion in adding and multiplying (the only two processes of increasing, of 
propagating magnitude useful to Classical man) is easily seen and its sign was 
the combination of the two first. Now, all this throws quite a new light upon 
the legends previously alluded to, concerning the sacrilege of disclosing the 
irrational. The irrational in our language the employment of unending 
decimal fractions implied the destruction of an organic and corporeal and 
reproductive order that the gods had laid down. There is no doubt that the 
Pythagorean reforms of the Classical religion were themselves based upon the 
immemorial Demeter-cult. Demeter, Gasa, is akin to Mother Earth. There is 
a deep relation between the honour paid to her and this exalted conception of 
the numbers. 

Thus, inevitably, the Classical became by degrees the Culture of the small. 
The Apollinian soul had tried to tie down the meaning of things-become 
by means of the principle of visible limits; its taboo was focused upon the 
immediately-present and proximate alien. What was far away, invisible, was 
tpso facto ' ' not there. ' ' The Greek and the Roman alike sacrificed to the gods of 
the place in which he happened to stay or reside; all other deities were outside 
the range of vision. Just as 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 em- 
bracing 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. The Polis is the smallest of all conceiv- 
able state-forms, and its policy is frankly short-range, therein differing in the 
extreme from our own cabinet-diplomacy which is the policy of the unlimited. 
Similarly, the Classical temple, which can be taken in in one glance, is the 
smallest of all first-rate architectural forms. Classical geometry from Archytas 
to Euclid like the school geometry of to-day which is still dominated by it 
concerned itself with small, manageable figures and bodies, and therefore 
remained unaware of the difficulties that arise in establishing figures of astro- 
nomical dimensions, which in many cases are not amenable to Euclidean geome- 
try. 1 . Otherwise the subtle Attic spirit would almost surely have arrived at 
some notion of the problems of non-Euclidean geometry, for its criticism of the 
well-known "parallel" axiom, 2 the doubtfulness of which soon aroused oppo- 

1 A beginning is now being made with the application of non-Euclidean geometries to astron- 
omy. The hypothesis of curved space, closed but without limits, filled by the system of fixed stars 
on a radius of about 470,000,000 earth-distances, would lead to the hypothesis of a counter-image of 
the sun which to us appears as a star of medium brilliancy. (See translator's footnote, p. 331.) 

2 That only one parallel to a given straight line is possible through a given point a proposi- 
tion that is incapable of proof. 



84 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

sition yet could not in any way be elucidated, brought it very close indeed to 
the decisive discovery. The Classical mind as unquestioningly devoted and 
limited itself to the study of the small and the near as ours has to that of the 
infinite and ultra-visual. All the mathematical ideas that the West found for 
itself or borrowed from others were automatically subjected to the form- 
language of the Infinitesimal and that long before the actual Differential 
Calculus was discovered. Arabian algebra, Indian trigonometry, Classical 
mechanics were incorporated as a matter of course in analysis. Even the most 
"self-evident" propositions of elementary arithmetic such as 2. X 2. = 4 be- 
come, when considered analytically, problems, and the solution of these prob- 
lems was only made possible by deductions from the Theory of Aggregates, and 
is in many points still unaccomplished. Plato and his age would have looked 
upon this sort of thing not only as a hallucination but also as evidence of an 
utterly nonmathematical mind. In a certain measure, geometry may be treated 
algebraically and algebra geometrically, that is, the eye may be switched off 
or it may be allowed to govern. We take the first alternative, the Greeks the 
second. Archimedes, in his beautiful management of spirals, touches upon cer- 
tain general facts that are also fundamentals in Leibniz's method of the definite 
integral; but his processes, for all their superficial appearance of modernity, are 
subordinated to stereometric principles; in like case, an Indian mathematician 
would naturally have found some trigonometrical formulation. 1 

XIII 

From this fundamental opposition of Classical and Western numbers there 
arises an equally radical difference in the relationship of element to element in 
each of these number-worlds. The nexus of magnitudes is called proportion, that 
of relations is comprised in the notion of function. The significance of these two 
words is not confined to mathematics proper; they are of high importance also 
in the allied arts of sculpture and music. Quite apart from the r61e of propor- 
tion in ordering the parts of the individual statue, the typically Classical art- 
forms of the statue, the relief, and the fresco, admit enlargements and reductions of 
scale words that in music have no meaning at all as we see in the art of the 
gems, in which the subjects are essentially reductions from life-sized originals. 
In the domain of Function, on the contrary, it is the idea of transformation of 
groups that is of decisive importance, and the musician will readily agree that 
similar ideas play an essential part in modern composition-theory. I need only 
allude to one of the most elegant orchestral forms of the i8th Century, the 
Tema con Varia^ioni. 

All proportion assumes the constancy, all transformation the variability of 
the constituents. Compare, for instance, the congruence theorems of Euclid, 

1 It is impossible to say, with certainty, how much of the Indian mathematics that we posses* 
is old, i.e., before Buddha. 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 85 

the proof of which depends in fact on the assumed ratio i : i , with the modern 
deduction of the same by means of angular functions. 



XIV 



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 in fact, a great number of the ideas met with in 
the theory of music (key, phrasing, chromatics, for instance) can be directly 
employed in physics, and it is at least arguable that many relations would be 
clarified by so doing. 

Every construction affirms, and every operation denies appearances, in that the 
one works out that which is optically given and the other dissolves it. And so 
we meet with yet another contrast between the two kinds of mathematic; the 
Classical mathematic of small things deals with the concrete individual instance 
and produces a once-for-all construction, while the mathematic of the infinite 
handles whole classes of formal possibilities, groups of functions, operations, 
equations, curves, and does so with an eye, not to any result they may have, 
but to their course. And so for the last two centuries though present-day 
mathematicians hardly realize the fact there has been growing up the idea of 
a general morphology of mathematical operations, which we are justified in regarding 
as the real meaning of modern mathematics as a whole. All this, as we shall 
perceive more and more clearly, is one of the manifestations of a general ten- 
dency inherent in the Western intellect, proper to the Faustian spirit and 
Culture and found in no other. The great majority of the problems which 
occupy our mathematic, and are regarded as "our" problems in the same sense 
as the squaring of the circle was the Greeks', e.g., the investigation of con- 
vergence in infinite series (Cauchy) and the transformation of elliptic and 
algebraic integrals into multiply-periodic functions (Abel, Gauss) would 
probably have seemed to the Ancients, who strove for simple and definite 
quantitative results, to be an exhibition of rather abstruse virtuosity. 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 sym- 
bolism of the infinitely far, of distance. All the great works of the West, 
from the "Divina Commedia" to "Parsifal," are unpopular, whereas every- 
thing Classical from Homer to the Altar of Pergamum was popular in the 
highest degree. 



86 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

xv 

Thus, finally, the whole content of Western number-thought centres itself 
upon the historic limit-problem of the Faustian mathematic, the key which opens 
the way to the Infinite, that Faustian infinite which is so different from the 
infinity of Arabian and Indian world-ideas. Whatever the guise infinite 
series, curves or functions in which 'number appears in the particular case, 
the essence of it is the theory of the limit. 1 This limit is the absolute opposite of 
the limit which (without being so called) figures in the Classical problem of 
the quadrature of the circle. Right into the i8th Century, Euclidean popular 
prepossessions obscured the real meaning of the differential principle. The idea 
of infinitely small quantities Jay, so to say, ready to hand, and however skil- 
fully they were handled, there was bound to remain a trace of the Classical 
constancy, the semblance of magnitude, about them, though Euclid would never 
have known them or admitted them as such. Thus, zero is a constant, a whole 
number in the linear continuum between -f i and i ; and it was a great hindrance 
to Euler in his analytical researches that, like many after him, he treated the 
differentials as zero. Only in the i9th Century was this relic of Classical 
number-feeling finally removed and the Infinitesimal Calculus made logically 
secure by Cauchy's definitive elucidation of the limit-idea; only the intellectual 
step from the "infinitely small quantity" to the "lower limit of every possible 
finite magnitude" brought out the conception of a variable number which 
oscillates beneath any assignable number that is not zero. A number of this 
sort has ceased to possess any character of magnitude whatever: the limit, as 
thus finally presented by theory, is no longer that which is approximated to, 
but the approximation, the process, the operation itself. It is not a state, but a relation. 
And so in this decisive problem of our mathematic, we are suddenly made to 
see how historical is the constitution of the Western soul. 2 

XVI 

The liberation of geometry from the visual, and of algebra from the notion 
of magnitude, and the union of both, beyond all elementary limitations of 
drawing and counting, in the great structure of function-theory this was the 

1 The technical difference (in German usage) between Gren% and Gren^wert is in most cases 
ignored in this translation as it is on.y the underlying conception of " number" common to both that 
concerns us. Gren% is the "limit" strictly speaking, i.e., the number a to which the terms <*,, <*,, 
*3. ... of a particular series approximate more and more closely, till nearer to a than any assignable 
number whatever. The Gren^wtrt of a function, on the other hand, is the " limit " of the value which 
the function takes for a given value a of the variable x. These methods of reasoning and their deriva- 
tives enable solutions to be obtained for scries such uf ,] (. ) ( ) . . . ( )or functions 

x(zx-i) V l /> 2 /\'V \^I 

such as y - - where x is tnfintte or tnaefintte. Tr . 

1 "Function, rightly understood, is existence considered as an activity" (Goethe). Cf. Vol. II, 
p. 618, for functional money. 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 87 

grand course of Western number-thought. The constant number of the Classical 
mathematic was dissolved into the variable. Geometry became analytical and 
dissolved all concrete forms, replacing the mathematical bodies from which the 
rigid geometrical values had been obtained, by abstract spatial relations which 
in the end ceased to have any application at all to sense-present phenomena. 
It began by substituting for Euclid's optical figures geometrical loci referred to a 
co-ordinate system of arbitrarily chosen "origin," and reducing the postulated 
objectiveness of existence of the geometrical object to the one condition that 
during the operation (which itself was one of equating and not of measurement) 
the selected co-ordinate system should not be changed. But these co-ordinates 
immediately came to be regarded as values pure and simple, serving not so much 
to determine as to represent and replace the position of points as space-elements. 
Number, the boundary of things-become, was represented, not as before pictori- 
ally by a figure, but symbolically by an equation. ' ' Geometry ' ' altered its mean- 
ing; the co-ordinate system as a picturing disappeared and the point became an 
entirely abstract number-group. In architecture, we find this inward transfor- 
mation of Renaissance into Baroque through the innovations of Michael Angelo 
and Vignola. Visually pure lines became, in palace and church facades as in 
mathematics, ineffectual. In place of the clear co-ordinates that we have in \ 
Romano-Florentine colonnading and storeying, the "infinitesimal" appears in 
the graceful flow of elements, the scrollwork, the cartouches. The construc- 
tive dissolves in the wealth of the decorative in mathematical language, the 
functional. Columns and pilasters, assembled in groups and clusters, break up 
the fagades, gather and disperse again restlessly. The flat surfaces of wall, roof, 
storey melt into a wealth of stucco work and ornaments, vanish and break into 
a play of light and shade. 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 1 is a sinfonia. Along with i8th Century mathematics, 
1 8th Century architecture develops into a form-world of musical characters. 



XVII 



This mathematics of ours was bound in due course to reach the point at 
which not merely the limits -of artificial geometrical form but the limits of the 
visual itself were felt by theory and by the soul alike as limits indeed, as ob- 
stacles to the unreserved expression of inward possibilities in other words, 
the point at which the ideal of transcendent extension came into fundamental 
conflict with the limitations of immediate perception. The Classical soul, with 
the entire abdication of Platonic and Stoic drapata, submitted to the sensuous 
and (as the erotic under-meaning of the Pythagorean numbers shows) it rather 
felf than emitted its great symbols. Of transcending the corporeal here-and-now 
1 Built for August II, in 1711, as barbican or fore-building for a projected palace. Tr. 



88 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

it was quite incapable. But whereas number, as conceived by a Pythagorean, 
exhibited the essence of individual and discrete data in "Nature" Descartes 
and his successors looked upon number as something to be conquered, to be 
ivrung out, an abstract relation royally indifferent to all phenomenal support 
and capable of holding its own against "Nature" on all occasions. The 
will-to-power (to use Nietzsche's great formula) that from the earliest Gothic 
of the Eddas, the Cathedrals and Crusades, and even from the old conquer- 
ing Goths and Vikings, has distinguished the attitude of the Northern 
soul to its world, appears also in the sense-transcending energy, the dynamic 
of Western number. In the Apollinian mathematic the intellect is the serv- 
ant of the eye, in the Faustian its master. Mathematical, "absolute" space, 
we see then, is utterly un-Classical, and from the first, although mathematicians 
with their reverence for the Hellenic tradition did not dare to observe the fact, 
it was something different from the indefinite spaciousness of daily experience 
and customary painting, the a priori space of Kant which seemed so unambig- 
uous and sure a concept. 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 of which, since Gauss, we know it to be quite 
impossible to prove in the face of other and perfectly non-perceptual geometries. 
The critical proposition of this geometry, Euclid's axiom of parallels, is an 
assertion, for which we are quite at liberty to substitute another assertion. We 
may assert, in fact, that through a given point, no parallels, or two, or many 
parallels may be drawn to a given straight line, and all these assumptions lead 
to completely irreproachable geometries of three dimensions, which can be 
employed in physics and even in astronomy, and are in some cases preferable to 
the Euclidean. 

Even the simple axiom that extension is boundless (boundlessness, since 
Riemann and the theory of curved space, is to be distinguished from endlessness) 
at once contradicts the essential character of all immediate perception, in that 
the latter depends upon the existence of light-resistances and ipso facto has 
material bounds. But abstract principles of boundary can be imagined which 
transcend, in an entirely new sense, the possibilities of optical definition. For 
the deep thinker, there exists even in the Cartesian geometry the tendency to 
get beyond the three dimensions of experiential space, regarded as an unnecessary 
restriction on the symbolism of number. And although it was not till about 
1800 that the notion of multi-dimensional space (it is a pity that no better word 
was found) provided analysis with broader foundations, the real first step was 
taken at the moment when powers that is, -really, logarithms were re- 



MEANING OF NUMBERS 89 

leased from their original relation with sensually realizable surfaces and solids 
and, through the employment of irrational and complex exponents, brought 
within the realm of function as perfectly general relation-values. It will be 
admitted by everyone who understands anything of mathematical reasoning 
that directly we passed from the notion of a 3 as a natural maximum to that 
of a n , the unconditional necessity of three-dimensional space was done away 
with. 

Once the space-element or point had lost its last persistent relic of visualness 
and, instead of being represented to the eye as a cut in co-ordinate lines, was 
defined as a group of three independent numbers, there was no longer any 
inherent objection to replacing the number 3 by the general number n. The 
notion of dimension was radically changed. It was no longer a matter of 
treating the properties of a point metrically with reference to its position in a 
visible system, but of representing the entirely abstract properties of a number- 
group by means of any dimensions that we please. The number-group con- 
sisting of n independent ordered elements is an image of the point and it is 
called a point. Similarly, an equation logically arrived therefrom is called a 
plane and is the image of a plane. And the aggregate of all points of n dimen- 
sions is called an w-dimensional space. 1 In these transcendent space-worlds, 
which are remote from every sort of sensualism, lie the relations which it is the 
business of analysis to investigate and which are found to be consistently in 
agreement with the data of experimental physics. This space of higher degree 
is a symbol which is through-and-through the peculiar property of the Western 
mind. That mind alone has attempted, and successfully too, to capture the 
"become" and the extended in these forms, to conjure and bind to "know" 
the alien by this kind of appropriation or taboo. Not until such spheres 
of number-thought are reached, and not for any men but the few who have 
reached them, do such imaginings as systems of hypercomplex numbers (e.g., 
the quaternions of the calculus of vectors) and apparently quite meaningless 
symbols like o> n acquire the character of something actual. And here if any- 
where it must be understood that actuality is not only sensual actuality. The 
spiritual is in no wise limited to perception-forms for the actualizing of its idea. 

XVIII 

From this grand intuition of symbolic space-worlds came the last and con- 
clusive creation of Western mathematic the expansion and subtilizing of the 
function theory in that of groups. Groups are aggregates or sets of homogeneous 
mathematical images e.g., the totality of all differential equations of a cer- 

1 From the standpoint of the theory of "aggregates" (or "sets of points"), a well-ordered set 
of points, irrespective of the dimension figure, is called a corpus; and thus an aggregate of - i 
dimensions is considered, relatively to one of n dimensions, as a surface. Thus the limit (wall, edge) 
of an " aggregate" represents an aggregate of lower "potentiality." 



90 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

tain type which in structure and ordering are analogous to the Dedekind 
number-bodies. Here are worlds, we feel, of perfectly new numbers, which are 
nevertheless not utterly sense- transcendent for the inner eye of the adept; and 
the problem now is to discover in those vast abstract form-systems certain 
elements which, relatively to a particular group of operations (viz., of trans- 
formations of the system), remain unaffected thereby, that is, possess invariance. 
In mathematical language, the problem, as stated generally by Klein, is 
given an w-dimensional manifold ("space") and a group of transformations, it 
is required to examine the forms belonging to the manifold in respect of such 
properties as are not altered by transformation of the group. 

And with this culmination our Western mathematic, having exhausted 
every inward possibility and fulfilled its destiny as the copy and purest expression 
of the idea of the Faustian soul, closes its development in the same way as the 
mathematic of the Classical Culture concluded in the third century. Both those 
sciences (the only ones of which the organic structure can even to-day be 
examined historically) arose out of a wholly new idea of number, in the one 
case Pythagoras's, in the other Descartes'. Both, expanding in all beauty, 
reached their maturity one hundred years later; and both, after flourishing for 
three centuries, completed the structure of their ideas at the same moment as the 
Cultures to which they respectively belonged passed over into the phase of 
megalopolitan Civilization. The deep significance of this interdependence will 
be made clear in due course. It is enough for the moment that for us the time 
of the great mathematicians is past. Our tasks to-day are those of preserving, 
rounding off, refining, selection in place of big dynamic creation, the same 
clever detail-work which characterized the Alexandrian mathematic of late 
Hellenism. 

A historical paradigm will make this clearer. 

Classical Western 
I . Conception of a new number 

About 540 B.C. About 1630 A.D. 

Number as magnitude Number as relation (Descartes, Pascal, 

(Pythagoreans) Fcrmat). (Newton, Leibniz, 1670) 

(About 470, sculpture prevails over fresco (About 1670, music prevails over oil 

painting) painting) 

z. Zenith of systematic development 

450-350 1750-1800 

Plato, Archytas, Eudoxus Eulcr, Lagrangc, Laplace 

(Phidias, Praxiteles) (Gluck, Haydn, Mozart) 

3. Inward completion and conclusion of the figure-world 

300-X50 After 1800 

Euclid, Apollonius, Archimedes Gauss, Cauchy, Ricmann 
(Lysippus, Lcochares) (Beethoven) 



CHAPTER III 
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY 

I 

PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 



CHAPTER III 

THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY 

I 

PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 



Now, at last, it is possible to take the decisive step of sketching an image of 
history that is independent of the accident of standpoint, of the period in which 
this or that observer lives independent too of the personality of the observer 
himself, who as an interested member of his own Culture is tempted, by its 
religious, intellectual, political and social tendencies, to order the material of 
history according to a perspective that is limited as to both space and time, and 
to fashion arbitrary forms into which the superficies of history can be forced 
but which are entirely alien to its inner content. 

What has been missing, till now, is detachment from the objects considered 
(die Distanz vom Gegenstande). In respect of Nature, this detachment has 
long ago been attained, though of course it was relatively easy of attainment, 
since the physicist can obviously systematize the mechanical-causal picture of 
his world as impersonally as though he himself did not exist in it. 

It is quite possible, however, to do the same as regards the form-world of 
History. We have merely been unaware of the possibility. The modern his- 
torian, in the very act of priding himself on his "objectivity," naively and 
unconsciously reveals his prepossessions. For this reason it is quite legitimate 
to say and it will infallibly be said some day that so far a genuinely 
Faustian treatment of history has been entirely lacking. By such a treatment 
is meant one that has enough detachment to admit that any ' ' present ' ' is only 
such with reference to a particular generation of men; that the number of genera- 
tions is infinite^ and that the proper present must therefore be regarded just as 
something infinitely distant and alien is regarded, and treated as an interval of 
time neither more nor less significant in the whole picture of History than 
others. Such a treatment will employ no distorting modulus of personal ideals, 
set no personal origin of co-ordinates, be influenced by none of the personal 
hopes and fears and other inward impulses which count for so much in practical 
life; and such a detachment will to use the words of Nietzsche (who, be 
it said, was far from possessing enough of it himself) enable one to view 
the whole fact of Man from an immense distance, to regard the individual 

93 



94 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

Cultures, one's own included, as one regards the range of mountain peaks along 
a horizon. 

Once again, therefore, there was an act like the act of Copernicus to be 
accomplished, an act of emancipation from the evident present in the name of 
infinity. This the Western soul achieved in the domain of Nature long ago, 
when it passed from the Ptolemaic world-system to that which is alone valid for 
it to-day, and treats the position of the observer on one particular planet as 
accidental instead of normative. 

A similar emancipation of world-history from the accidental standpoint, 
the perpetually re-defined "modern period," is both possible and necessary. 
It is true that the i9th Century A.D. seems to us infinitely fuller and more im- 
portant than, say, the i9th Century B.C.; but the moon, too, seems to us bigger 
than Jupiter or Saturn. The physicist has long ago freed himself from pre- 
possessions as to relative distance, the historian not so. We permit ourselves 
to consider the Culture of the Greeks as an "ancient" related to our own 
"modern." Were they in their turn "modern" in relation to the finished and 
historically mature Egyptians of the court of the great Thuthmosis who lived 
a millennium before Homer? For us, the events which took place between 1500 
and 1800 on the soil of Western Europe constitute the most important third of 
"world "-history; for the Chinese historian, on the contrary, who looks back 
on and judges by 4000 years of Chinese history, those centuries generally are a 
brief and unimportant episode, infinitely less significant than the centuries of 
the Han dynasty (2.06 B.C. to 2.2.0 A.D.), which in his "world "-history are 
epoch-making. 

To liberate History, then, from that thraldom to the observers' prejudices 
which in our own case has made of it nothing more than a record of a partial 
past leading up to an accidental present, with the ideals and interests of that 
present as criteria of the achievement and possibility, is the object of all that 
follows. 



Nature and History l are the opposite extreme terms of man's range of pos- 
sibilities, whereby he is enabled to order the actualities about him as a picture of 
the world. An actuality is Nature in so far as it assigns things-becoming their 
place as things-become, and History in so far as it orders things-become with 
reference to their becoming. An actuality as an evocation of mind is contem- 
plated, and as an assurance of the senses is critically comprehended, the firs* 
being exemplified in the worlds of Plato, Rembrandt, Goethe and Beethoven, 
the second in the worlds of Parmenides, Descartes, Kant and Newton. Cogni- 
tion in the strict sense of the word is that act of experience of which the com- 
pleted issue is called "Nature." The cognized and "Nature" are one and the 

1 Sec p. 55, also Vol. II, pp. 15 ct scq. 



PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 95 

same. The symbol of mathematical number has shown us that the aggregate of 
things cognized is the same as the world of things mechanically defined, things 
correct once and for all, things brought under law. Nature is the sum of the law- 
imposed necessities. There are only laws of Nature. No physicist who under- 
stands his duty would wish to transcend these limits. His task is to establish 
an ordered code which not only includes all the laws that he can find in the 
picture of Nature that is proper to himself but, further, represents that picture 
exhaustively and without remainder. 

Contemplation or vision (Anschauen), on the other hand I may recall 
Goethe's words: "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 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. Our feeling 
of world-fear has its sources here. Everything cognized, on the contrary, is 
timeless, neither past nor future but simply "there," and consequently per- 
manently valid, as indeed the very constitution of natural law requires that it 
should be. Law and the domain of law are anti-historical. They exclude inci- 
dent 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. No deep and pure historical research 
seeks for conformities with causal laws or, if it does so, it does not under- 
stand its own essence. 

At the same time, history as positively treated is not pure becoming: it is 
an image, a world-form radiated from the waking consciousness of the his- 
torian, in which the becoming dominates the become. The possibility of ex- 
tracting results of any sort by scientific methods depends upon the proportion of 
things-become present in the subject treated, and by hypothesis there is in this 
case a defect of them; the higher the proportion is, the more mechanical, reason- 
able, causal, history is made to appear. Even Goethe's * ' living nature, ' ' utterly 
unmathematical world-picture as it was, contained enough of the dead and 
stiffened to allow him to treat at least his foreground scientifically. But when 
this content of things-become dwindles to very little, then history becomes 
frin -pximately pure becoming, and contemplation and vision become an ex- 



96 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

perience which can only be rendered in forms of art. That which Dante saw 
before his spiritual eyes as the destiny of the world, he could not possibly have 
arrived at by ways of science, any more than Goethe could have attained by 
these ways to what he saw in the great moments of his "Faust" studies, any 
more than Plotinus and Giordano Bruno could have distilled their visions from 
researches. This contrast lies at the root of all dispute regarding the inner form 
of history. In the presence of the same object or corpus of facts, every observer 
according to his own disposition has a different impression of the whole, and 
this impression, intangible and incommunicable y underlies his judgment and gives 
it its personal colour. The degree in which things-become are taken in differs 
from man to man, which is quite enough in itself to show that they can never 
agree as to task or method. Each accuses the other of a deficiency of "clear 
thinking," and yet the something that is expressed by this phrase is some- 
thing not built with hands, not implying superiority or a priority of degree 
but necessary difference of kind. The same applies to all natural sciences. 

Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the fact that at bottom the wish to 
write history scientifically involves a contradiction. True science reaches just as 
far as the notions of truth and falsity have validity: this applies to mathematics 
and it applies also to the science of historical spade-work, viz., the collection, 
ordering and sifting of material. But real historical vision (which only begins 
at this point) belongs to the domain of significances, in which the crucial words 
are not "correct" and "erroneous," but "deep" and "shallow." 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. 

On the other hand, within the very realm of numbers and exact knowledge 
there is that which Goethe called "living Nature," an immediate vision of 
pure becoming and self-shaping, in fact, history as above defined. Goethe's 
world was, in the first instance, an organism, an existence, and it is easy there- 
fore to see why his researches, even when superficially of a physical kind, do 
not make numbers, or laws, or causality captured in formulas, or dissection of 
any sort their object, but are morphology in the highest sense of the word; and 
why his work neither uses nor needs to use the specifically Western and un- 
Classical means of causal treatment, metrical experiment. His treatment of the 
Earth's crust is invariably geology, and never mineralogy, which he called the 
science of something dead. 

Let it be said, once more, that there are no exact boundaries set between the 
two kinds of world-notion. However great the contrast between becoming 



PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 97 

the become, the fact remains that they are jointly present in every kind of 
understanding. He who looks at the becoming and fulfilling in them, experi- 
ences History; he who dissects them as become and fulfilled cognizes Nature. 
In every man, in every Culture, in every culture-phase, there is found an 
inherent disposition, an inherent inclination and vocation to prefer one of the 
two forms as an ideal of understanding the world. Western man is in a high 
degree historically disposed, 1 Classical man far from being so. We follow up 
what is given us with an eye to past and future, whereas Classical man knew 
only the point-present and an ambiance of myth. We have before us a symbol 
of becoming in every bar of our music from Palestrina to Wagner, and the 
Greeks a symbol of the pure present in every one of their statues. The rhythm 
of a body is based upon a simultaneous relation of the parts, that of a fugue in 
the succession of elements in time. 

in 

There emerge, then, as the two basic elements of all world-picturing, the 
principle of Form (Gestalt) and the principle of Law (Gesetz). The more 
decidedly a particular world-picture shows the traits of "Nature," the more 
unconditionally law and number prevail in it; and the more purely intuitive 
the picture of the world as eternally becoming, the more alien to numbers its 
manifold and intangible elements. "Form is something mobile, something 
becoming, something passing. The doctrine of formation is the doctrine of 
transformation. Metamorphosis is the key to the whole alphabet of Nature," 
so runs a note of Goethe's, marking already the methodic difference between 
his famous "exact percipient fancy' ' which quietly lets itself be worked upon 
by the Jiving, 2 and the exact killing procedure of modern physics. But whatever 
the process, a remainder consisting of so much of the alien element as is present 
is always found. In strict natural sciences this remainder takes the form of the 
inevitable theories and hypotheses which are imposed on, and leaven, the stiff mass 
of number and formula. In historical research, it appears as chronology, the 
number-structure of dates and statistics which, alien though number is to the 
essence of becoming, is so thoroughly woven around and into the world of 
historical forms that it is never felt to be intrusive. For it is devoid of mathe- 
matical import. Chronological number distinguishes uniquely-occurring actu- 
alities, mathematical number constant possibilities. The one sharpens the 
images and works up the outlines of epoch and fact for the understanding eye. 

1 "Anti-historical," the expression which we apply to a decidedly systematic valuation, is to 
be carefully distinguished from "ahistorical." The beginning of the IV Book (53) of Schopen- 
hauer's Welt als Wilh und Vorstellung affords a good illustration of the man who thinks 
anti-historically, that is, deliberately for theoretical reasons suppresses and rejects the historical 
in himself something that is actually there. The ahistoric Greek nature, on the contrary, neither 
possesses nor understands it. 

2 "There arc prime phenomena which in their godlike simplicity we must not disturb or in- 
fringe." 



98 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

But the other is itself the law which it seeks to establish, the end and aim of 
research. Chronological number is a scientific means of pioneering borrowed 
from the science of sciences, mathematics, and used as such without regard to 
its specific properties. Compare, for instance, the meaning of the two symbols 
12. X 8 = 96, and 18 October, iS^. 1 It is the same difference, in the use of 
figures, that prose and poetry present in the use of words. 

One other point remains to be noted. 2 As a becoming always lies at the 
base of the become, and as the world-picture representative of becoming is that 
which history gives us, therefore history is the original world-form, and Nature 
the fully elaborated world-mechanism is the late world-form that only 
the men of a mature Culture can completely actualize. In fact, the darkness 
encompassing the simple soul of primitive mankinds, which we can realize even 
to-day from their religious customs and myths that entirely organic world of 
pure wilfulness, of hostile demons and kindly powers was through-and- 
through a living and swaying whole, ununderstandable, indefinable, incal- 
culable. We may call this Nature if we like, but it is not what we mean by 
"nature," i.e., the strict image projected by a knowing intellect. Only the 
souls of children and of great artists can now hear the echoes of this long- 
forgotten world of nascent humanity, but it echoes still, and not rarely, even 
in the inelastic "nature" '-medium that the city-spirit of the mature Culture is 
remorselessly building up round the individual. Hence that acute antagonism 
between the scientific ("modern") and the artistic ("unpractical") world-idea 
which every Late period knows; the man of fact and the poet do not and 
cannot understand one another. Hence comes, too, that tendency of his- 
torical study, which must inevitably contain an element of the childish, the 
dreamy, the Goethian, to dress up as a science, to be (using its own nai've 
word) "materialistic," at the imminent risk of becoming a mere physics of 
public life. 

"Nature," in the exact sense, is a way of possessing actuality which is 
special to the few, restricted to the megalopolitans of the late periods of great 
Cultures, masculine, perhaps even senatorial; while History is the naive, youth- 
ful, more or less instinctive way that is proper to all men alike. At least, that 
is the position of the number-based, unmystical, dissectable and dissected 
"Nature" of Aristotle and Kant, the Sophists and the Darwinians, modern 
physics and chemistry, vis-a-vis the lived, felt and unconfined "Nature" of 
Homer and the Eddas, of Doric and Gothic man. 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. 

1 The date of Napoleon's defeat, and the liberation of Germany, on the field of Leipzig. 7>. 

2 Sec Vol. II, pp. 15 et scq., 317 ct scq. 



PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 99 

Tendencies towards a mechanistic idea of the world proceeding wholly from 
mathematical delimitation and logical differentiation, from law and causality, 
appear quite early. They are found in the first centuries of all Cultures, still 
weak, scattered and lost in the full tide of the religious world-conception. The 
name to be recalled here is that of Roger Bacon. But soon these tendencies 
acquire a sterner character: like everything that is wrung out of the soul and 
has to defend itself against human nature, they are not wanting in arrogance 
and exclusiveness. Quietly the spatial and comprehensible (comprehension is 
in its essence number, in its structure quantitative) becomes prepotent through- 
out the outer world of the individual and, aiding and aided by the simple 
impressions of sensuous-life, effects a mechanical synthesis of the causal and 
legal sort, so that at long last the sharp consciousness of the megalopolitan 
be he of Thebes, Babylon, Benares, Alexandria or a West European cosmopolis 
is subjected to so consistent a pressure of natural-law notions that, when 
scientific and philosophical prejudice (it is no more than that) dictates the 
proposition that this condition of the soul is the soul and the mechanical 
world-picture is the world, the assertion is scarcely challenged. It has been 
made predominant by logicians like Aristotle and Kant. But Plato and Goethe 
have rejected it and refuted it. 



IV 



The task of world-knowing for the man of the higher Cultures a need, 
seen as a duty, of expressing his own essence is certainly in every case the 
same, though its process may be called science or philosophy, and though its 
affinity to artistic creation and to faith-intuition may for one be something 
felt and for another something questionable. It is to present, without accre- 
tions, that form of the world-picture which to the individual in each case is 
proper and significant, and for him (so long as he does not compare) is in fact 
"the" world. 

The task is necessarily a double one, in view of the distinction between 
"Nature" and "History." Each speaks its own form-language which differs 
utterly from that of the other, and however the two may overlap and confuse 
one another in an unsifted and ambiguous world-picture such as that of every- 
day life, they are incapable of any inner unity. 

Direction and Extension are the outstanding characters which differentiate 
the historical and the scientific (naturhaft) kind of impressibility, and it is 
totally impossible for a man to have both working creatively within him at 
the same time. The double meaning of the German word "Feme" (distance, 
farness) is illuminating. In the one order of ideas it implies futurity, in the 
other a spatial interval of standing apart, and the reader will not fail to remark 
that the historical materialist almost necessarily conceives time as a mathe- 
matical dimension, while for the born artist, on the contrary, as the lyrics of 



ioo THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

every land show us the distance-impressions made by deep landscapes, clouds, 
horizon and setting sun attach themselves without an effort to the sense of a 
future. The Greek poet denies the future, and consequently he neither sees nor 
sings of the things of the future; he cleaves to the near, as he belongs to the 
present, entirely. 

The natural-science investigator, the productive reasoner in the full sense of 
the word, whether he be an experimenter like Faraday, a theorist like Galileo, 
a calculator like Newton, finds in his world only directionless quantities which 
he measures, tests and arranges. It is only the quantitative that is capable of 
being grasped through figures, of being causally defined, of being captured in a 
law or formula, and when it has achieved this, pure nature-knowledge has shot 
its bolt. All its laws are quantitative connexions, or as the physicist puts it, all 
physical processes run a course in space, an expression which a Greek physicist 
would have corrected without altering the fact into "all physical proc- 
esses occur between bodies" conformably to the space-denying feeling of the 
Classical soul. 

The historical kind of impression-process is alien to everything quantitative, 
and affects a different organ. To World-as-Nature certain modes of apprehen- 
sion, as to World-as-History certain other modes, are proper. We know them and 
use them every day, without (as yet) having become aware of their opposition. 
There is nature-knowledge and there is man-knowledge; there is scientific experience 
and there is vital experience. Let the reader track down this contrast into his 
own inmost being, and he will understand what I mean. 

All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis, be described 
as Morphology. The Morphology of the mechanical and the extended, a science which 
discovers and orders nature-laws and causal relations, is called Systematic. The Morphol- 
ogy of the organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny, 
is called Physiognomic. 



In the West, the Systematic mode of treating the world reached and passed 
its culminating-point during the last century, while the great days of Physiog- 
nomic have still to come. 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. We were 
not concerned with what this or that mathematician intended, nor with the 
savant as such or his results as a contribution to an aggregate of knowledge, 
but with the mathematician as a human being, with his work as a part of the 
phenomenon of himself, with his knowledge and purposes as a part of his 



PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 101 

expression. This alone is of importance to us here. He is the mouthpiece of a 
Culture which tells us about itself through him, and he belongs, as person- 
ality, as soul, as discoverer, thinker and creator, to the physiognomy of that 
Culture. 

Every mathematic, in that it brings out and makes visible to all the idea of 
number that is proper to itself and inborn in its conscious being, is, whether 
the expression-form be a scientific system or (as in the case of Egypt) an archi- 
tecture, the confession of a Soul. If it is true that the intentional accomplish- 
ments of a mathematic belong only to the surface of history, it is equally true 
that its unconscious element, its number-as-such, and the style in which it 
builds up its self-contained cosmos of forms are an expression of its existence, 
its blood. Its life-history of ripening and withering, its deep relation to the 
creative acts, the myths and the cults of the same Culture such things are the 
subject-matter of a second or historical morphology, though the possibility of 
such a morphology is hardly yet admitted. 

The visible foregrounds of history, therefore, have the same significance as 
the outward phenomena of the individual man (his statue, his bearing, his air, 
his stride, his way of speaking and writing), as distinct from what he says or 
writes. In the "knowledge of men " these things exist and matter. The body 
and all its elaborations defined, ' ' become ' ' and mortal as they are are an 
expression of the soul. But henceforth "knowledge of men" implies also 
knowledge of those superlative human organisms that I call Cultures, and of 
their mien, their speech, their acts these terms being meant as we mean them 
already in the case of the individual. 

Descriptive, creative, Physiognomic is the art of portraiture transferred to 
the spiritual domain. Don Quixote, Werther, Julian Sorel, are portraits of an 
epoch, Faust the portrait of a whole Culture. For the nature-researcher, the 
morphologist as systematist, the portrayal of the world is only a business of 
imitation, and corresponds to the "fidelity to nature" and the "likeness" of 
the craftsman-painter, who, at bottom, works on purely mathematical lines. 
But a real portrait in the Rembrandt sense of the word is physiognomic, that 
is, history captured in a moment. The set of his self-portraits is nothing else but 
a (truly Goethian) autobiography. So should the biographies of the great 
Cultures be handled. The "fidelity" part, the work of the professional his- 
torian on facts and figures, is only a means, not an end. The countenance 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 what- 
soever 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 Jaw it 
abhors. What it demands is that its significance should be sensed. And thus 



ioi THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

research reaches up to a final or superlative truth Alles Vergangliche ist 
nur ein Gleichnis. 1 

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. Direction, fixing, ordering, defining 
by cause and effect, are things that one can do if one likes. These things are 
work, but the other is creation. Form and law, portrayal and comprehension, 
symbol and formula, have different organs, and their opposition is that in 
jwhich life stands to death, production to destruction. Reason, system and com- 
prehension 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. The artist or the real 
historian sees the becoming of a thing (schaut, wie etwas wird), and he can re- 
enact its becoming from its lineaments, whereas the systematist, whether he be 
physicist, logician, evolutionist or pragmatical historian, learns the thing that 
has become. The artist's soul, like the soul of a Culture, is something potential 
that may actualize itself, something complete and perfect in the language of 
an older philosophy, a microcosm. The systematic spirit, narrow and with- 
drawn (" abs-tract") from the sensual, is an autumnal and passing phenomenon 
belonging to the ripest conditions of a Culture. Linked with the city, into 
which its life is more and more herded, it comes and goes with the city. In the 
Classical world, there is science only from the 6th-century lonians to the Roman 
period, but there was art in the Classical world for just as long as there was 
existence. 

Once more, a paradigm may help in elucidation. 

Soul World 

/ potentiality * fulfilment actuality 
Existence 



(becoming * the become 
direction extension 

organic mechanical 

symbol, portrait, number, notion. 

History*^* ^^ 



Nature 

Rhythm, form. Tension, law. 

Physiognomic. Systematic. 

Facts Truths 

1 "All we sec before us passing 
Sign and symbol is alone." 
From the final stanza of Faust II (Anstcr's translation). Tr, 



PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 103 

Seeking thus to obtain a clear idea of the unifying principle out of which 
each of these two worlds is conceived, we find that mathematically-controlled 
cognition relates always (and the purer it is, the more directly) to a continu- 
ous present. The picture of nature dealt with by the physicist is that which 
is deployed before his senses at the given moment. It is one of the tacit, but 
none the less firm, presuppositions of nature-research that ' ' Nature " (die Natur) 
is the same for every consciousness and for all times. An experiment is decisive 
for good and all; time being, not precisely denied, but eliminated from the field 
of investigation. Real history rests on an equally certain sense of the contrary; 
what it presupposes as its origin is a nearly indescribable sensitive faculty 
within, which is continuously labile under continuous impressions, and is in- 
capable therefore of possessing what may be called a centre of time. 1 (We shall 
consider later what the physicist means by " time.") The picture of history ^ 
be it the history of mankind, of the world of organisms, of the earth or of the 
stellar systems is a memory-picture. 'j 4i Memory,'^ in this connexion, -is con- 
ceived as a higher state (certainly not propeFto^very consciousness and vouch- 
safed to many in only a low degree), a perfectly definite kind of imagining power, 
which enables experience to traverse each particular moment sub specie aternitatis 
as one point in an integral made up of all the past and all the future, and it forms 
the necessary basis of all looking-backward, all self-knowledge and all self-^j 
confession. In this sense, Classical man has no memory and therefore no history, 
either in or around himself. ' ' No man can judge history but one who has him- 
self experienced history," says Goethe. In the Classical world-consciousness all 
Past was absorbed in the instant Present. Compare the entirely historical heads 
of the Niirnberg Cathedral sculptures, of Diirer, of Rembrandt, with those of 
Hellenistic sculpture, for instance the famous Sophocles statue. The former tell 
the whole history of a soul, whereas the latter rigidly confines itself to ex- 
pressing the traits of a momentary being, and tells nothing of how this being is 
the issue of a course of life if indeed we can speak of ' ' course of life ' * at all in 
connexion with a purely Classical man, who is always complete and nevef 
becoming. 

VI 

And now it is possible to discover the ultimate elements of the historical 
form-world. 

Countless shapes that emerge and vanish, pile up and melt again, a thousand- 
hued glittering tumult, it seems, of perfectly wilful chance such is the pic- 
ture of world-history when first it deploys before our inner eye. But through 
this seeming anarchy, the keener glance can detect those pure forms which 
underlie all human becoming, penetrate their cloud-mantle, and bring them 
unwillingly to unveil. 

1 This phrase, derived by analogy from the centre of gravity of mechanics, is offered as a transla- 
tion of "mi thin in einem Zeitpunkte gar nicht zusammengefasst werden konnen." TV. 



104 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

But of the whole picture of world-becoming, of that cumulus of grand planes 
that the Faust-eye 1 sees piled one beyond another the becoming of the 
heavens, of the earth's crust, of life, of man we shall deal here only with 
that very small morphological unit that we are accustomed to call "world- 
history," that history which Goethe ended by despising, the history of higher 
mankind during 6000 years or so, without going into the deep problem of the 
inward homogeneity of all these aspects. What gives this fleeting form-world 
meaning and substance, and what has hitherto lain buried deep under a mass of 
tangible "facts" and "dates" that has hardly yet been bored through, is 
the phenomenon of the Great Cultures. Only after these prime forms shall have been 
seen and felt and worked out in respect of their physiognomic meaning will it 
be possible to say that the essence and inner form of human History as opposed 
to the essence of Nature are understood or rather, that we understand them. 
Only after this inlook and this outlook will a serious philosophy of history 
become feasible. Only then will it be possible to see each fact in the historical 
picture each idea, art, war, personality, epoch according to its symbolic 
content, and to regard history not as a mere sum of past things without in- 
trinsic 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. Mor- 
phologically, 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. For the Faustian vision, this is not a postu- 
late but an experience; if we want to learn to recognize inward forms that 
constantly and everywhere repeat themselves, the comparative morphology 2 
of plants and animals has long ago given us the methods. In the destinies of the 
several Cultures that follow upon one another, grow up with one another, touch, 
overshadow, and suppress one another, is compressed the whole content of 
human history. And if we set free their shapes, till now hidden all too deep 
under the surface of a trite "history of human progress," and let them march 
past us in the spirit, it cannot .but be that we shall succeed in distinguishing, 
amidst all that is special or unessential, the primitive culture-form, the Culture 
that underlies as ideal all the individual Cultures. 

I distinguish the idea of a Culture, which is the sum total of its inner pos- 
sibilities, from its sensible phenomenon or appearance upon the canvas of history 
as a fulfilled actuality. It is the relation of the soul to the living body, to its 
expression in the light-world perceptible to our eyes. This history of a Culture 

1 Cf. Vol. II, p. 33 ct scq. 

1 Not the dissecting morphology of the Darwinian's pragmatic zoology with its hunt for 
causal connexions, but the seeing and overseeing morphology of Goethe. 



PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 105 

is the progressive actualizing of its possible, and the fulfilment is equivalent to 
the end. In this way the Apollinian soul, which some of us can perhaps under- 
stand and share in, is related to its unfolding in the realm of actuality, to the 
"Classical" or "antique" as we call it, of which the tangible and understand- 
able relics are investigated by the archaeologist, the philologist, the xsthetic 
and the historian. 

Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history. The 
deep, and scarcely appreciated, idea of Goethe, which he discovered in his 
"living nature" and always made the basis of his morphological researches, 
we shall here apply in its most precise sense to all the formations of man's 
history, whether fully matured, cut off in the prime, half opened or stifled in the 
seed. It is the method of living into (erfuhlen) the object, as opposed to dis- 
secting it. "The highest to which man can attain, is wonder; and if the prime 
phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give 
him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit." The 
prime phenomenon is that in which the idea of becoming is presented net. To 
the spiritual eye of Goethe the idea of the prime plant was clearly visible in 
the form of every individual plant that happened to come up, or even that 
could possibly come up. In his investigation of the "os intermaxillare " his 
starting-point was the prime phenomenon of the vertebrate type; and in other fields 
it was geological stratification, or the leaf as the prime form of the plant- 
organism, or the metamorphosis of the plants as the prime form of all organic 
becoming. "The same law will apply to everything else that lives," he wrote, 
in announcing his discovery to Herder. It was a look into the heart of things 
that Leibniz would have understood, but the century of Darwin is as remote 
from such a vision as it is possible to be. 

At present, however, we look in vain for any treatment of history that is 
entirely free from the methods of Darwinism **- that is, of systematic natural 
science based on causality. A physiognomic that is precise, clear and sure of 
itself and its limits has never yet arisen, and it can only arise through the dis- 
coveries of method that we have yet to make. Herein lies the great problem 
set for the loth Century to solve to explore carefully the inner structure 
of the organic units through and in which world-history fulfils itself, to separ- 
ate the morphologically necessary from the accidental, and, by seizing the 
purport of events, to ascertain the languages in which they speak. J 



VII 



A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; 
up-stream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and 
restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally- 
unsolvable riddle; down-stream, a future even so dark and timeless such is 
the groundwork of the Faustian picture of human history. 



106 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

Over the expanse of the water passes the endless uniform wave-train of the 
generations. Here and there bright shafts of light broaden out, everywhere 
dancing flashes confuse and disturb the clear mirror, changing, sparkling, 
vanishing. These are what we call the clans, tribes, peoples, races which unify 
a series of generations within this or that limited area of the historical sur- 
face. As widely as these differ in creative power, so widely do the images 
that they create vary in duration and plasticity, and when the creative power 
dies out, the physiognomic, linguistic and spiritual identification-marks vanish 
also and the phenomenon subsides again into the ruck of the generations. 
Aryans, Mongols, Germans, Kelts, Parthians, Franks, Carthaginians, Berbers, 
Bantus are names by which we specify some very heterogeneous images of 
this order. 

But over this surface, too, the great Cultures ! accomplish their majestic 
wave-cycles. They appear suddenly, swell in splendid lines, flatten again and 
vanish, and the face of the waters is once more a sleeping waste. 

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the proto- 
spirituality (dtm urseelenhaften Zustande) of ever-childish humanity, and de- 
taches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the 
boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, 
to which plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when this soul has actualized 
the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, 
states, sciences, and reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that 
sequence of great epochs which define and display the stages of fulfilment, is an 
inner passionate struggle to maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos 
without and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not only the 
artist who struggles against the resistance of the material and the stifling of 
the idea within him. Every Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a 
mystical, relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through which it 
strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained the idea, the entire content 
of inner possibilities, fulfilled and made externally actual the Culture sud- 
denly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it 
becomes Civilisation, the thing which we feel and understand in the words 
Egypticism, Byzantinism, Mandarinism. As such they may, like a worn-out 
giant of the primeval forest, thrust their decaying branches towards the sky 
for hundreds or thousands of years, as we see in China, in India, in the Islamic 
world. It was thus that the Classical Civilization rose gigantic, in the Imperial 
age, with a false semblance of youth and strength and fullness, and robbed the 
young Arabian Culture of the East of light and air. 2 

This the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality, that awaits every 
living Culture is the purport of all the historic "declines," amongst them 
that decline of the Classical which we know so well and fully, and another 
1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 41 ct scq. * Sec Vol. II, pp. 117 ct scq. 



PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 107 

decline, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which will occupy 
the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded already and sensible 
in and around us to-day the decline of the West. 1 Every Culture passes 
through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, 
manhood and old age. It is a young and trembling soul, heavy with misgivings, 
that reveals itself in the morning of Romanesque and Gothic. It fills the 
Faustian landscape from the Provence of the troubadours to the Hildesheim 
cathedral of Bishop Bernward. 2 The spring wind blows over it. ' ' In the works 
of the old-German architecture," says Goethe, "one sees the blossoming of an 
extraordinary state. Anyone immediately confronted with such a blossoming 
can do no more than wonder; but one who can see into the secret inner life 
of the plant and its rain offerees, who can observe how the bud expands, little 
by little, sees the thing with quite other eyes and knows what he is seeing." 
Childhood speaks to us also and in the same tones out of early-Homeric 
Doric, out of early-Christian (which is really early-Arabian) art and out of 
the works of the Old Kingdom in Egypt that began with the Fourth Dynasty. 
There a mythic world-consciousness is fighting like a harassed debtor against 
all the dark and daemonic in itself and in Nature, while slowly ripening itself 
for the pure, day-bright expression of the existence that it will at last achieve 
and know. The more nearly a Culture approaches the noon culmination of 
its being, the more virile, austere, controlled, intense the form-language it has 
secured for itself, the more assured its sense of its own power, the clearer its 
lineaments. In the spring all this had still been dim and confused, tentative, 
filled with childish yearning and fears witness the ornament of Romanesque- 
Gothic church porches of Saxony 3 and southern France, the early-Christian 
catacombs, the Dipylon 4 vases. But there is now the full consciousness of 
ripened creative power that we see in the time of the early Middle Kingdom 
of Egypt, in the Athens of the Pisistratidas, in the age of Justinian, in that 
of the Counter-Reformation, and we find every individual trait of expres- 
sion deliberate, strict, measured, marvellous in its ease and self-confidence. 
And we find, too, that everywhere, at moments, the coming fulfilment suggested 

1 See Vol. II, pp. 116 et seq. What constitutes the downfall is not, e.g., the catastrophe of the 
Great Migrations, which like the annihilation of the Maya Culture by the Spaniards (see Vol. II, 
p. 51 et seq.) was a coincidence without any deep necessity, but the inward undoing that began from 
the time of Hadrian, as in China from the Eastern Han dynasty (1.5^12.0). 

2 St. Bernward was Bishop of Hildesheim from 993 to xozx, and himself architect and metal- 
worker. Three other churches besides"the cathedral survive in the city from his time or that of his 
immediate successors, and Hildesheim of all North German cities is richest in monuments of the 
Romanesque. Tr. 

* By "Saxony," a German historian means not the present-day state of Saxony (which was a 
small and comparatively late accretion), but the whole region of the Weser and the lower Elbe, with 
Westphalia and Holstein. Tr. 

4 Vases from the cemetery adjoining the Dipylon Gate of Athens, the most representative relics 
that we possess of the Doric or primitive age of the Hellenic Culture (about 900 to 600 B.C.). Tr. 



io8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

itself; in such moments were created the head of Amenemhet III (the so-called 
"Hyksos Sphinx" of Tanis), the domes of Hagia Sophia, the paintings of 
Titian. Still later, tender to the point of fragility, fragrant with the sweet- 
ness of late October days, come the Cnidian Aphrodite and the Hall of the 
Maidens in the Erechtheum, the arabesques on Saracen horseshoe-arches, the 
Zwinger of Dresden, Watteau, Mozart. At last, in the grey dawn of Civiliza- 
tion, the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, 
half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common 
to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks 
back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses 
its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong 
daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism, in the womb of the 
mother, in the grave. The spell of a " second religiousness ' ' 1 comes upon it, 
and Late-Classical man turns to the practice of the cults of Mithras, of Isis, 
of the Sun those very cults into which a soul just born in the East has been 
pouring a new wine of dreams and fears and loneliness. 

VIII 

The term " habit " (Habitus) is used of a plant to signify the special way, 
proper to itself, in which it manifests itself, i.e., the character, course and 
duration of its appearance in the light-world where we can see it. By its habit 
each kind is distinguished, in respect of each part and each phase of its existence, 
from all examples of other species. We may apply this useful notion of ' ' habit ' ' 
in our physiognomic of the grand organisms and speak of the habit of the 
Indian, Egyptian or Classical Culture, history or spirituality. Some vague 
inkling of it has always, for that matter, underlain the notion of style, and we 
shall not be forcing but merely clearing and deepening that word if we speak 
of the religious, intellectual, political, social or economic style 2 of a Culture. 
This "habit" of existence in space, which covers in the case of the individual 
man action and thought and conduct and disposition, embraces in the case or 
the existence of whole Cultures the totality of life-expressions of the higher 
order. The choice of particular branches of art (e.g., the round and fresco by 
the Hellenes, counterpoint and oil-painting by the West) and the out-and-out 
rejection of others (e.g., of plastic by the Arabs); inclination to the esoteric 
(India) or the popular (Greece and Rome); preference for oratory (Classical) or 
for writing (China, the West) as the form of spiritual communication, are all 
style-manifestations, and so also are the various types of costume, of administra- 
tion, of transport, of social courtesies. All great personalities of the Classical 
world form a self-contained group, whose spiritual habit is definitely different 

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 381 ct scq. 

1 In English the word "cast" will evidently satisfy the sense better on occasion. The word 
"Stil" will therefore not necessarily be always rendered "style." Tr. 



PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 109 

from that of all great men of the Arabian or the Western groups. Compare even 
Goethe and Raphael with Classical men, and Heraclitus, Sophocles, Plato, 
AJn'hiades, Themistocles, Horace and Tiberius rank themselves together in- 
stantly as members of one family. Every Classical cosmopolis from Hiero's 
Syracuse to Imperial Rome the embodiment and sense-picture of one and the 
same life-feeling differs radically in lay-out and street-plan, in the language 
of its public and private architecture, in the type of its squares, alleys, courts, 
facades, in its colour, noises, street-life and night-life, from the group of Indian 
or that of Arabian or that of Western world-cities. Baghdad and Cairo could 
be felt in Granada long after the conquest; even Philip II's Madrid had all the 
physiognomic hall-marks of modern London and Paris. There is a high sym- 
bolism in every dissimilarity of this sort. Contrast the Western tendency to 
straight-lined perspectives and street-alignments (such as the grand tract of the 
Champs-Elysees from the Louvre, or the Piazza before St. Peter's) with the 
almost deliberate complexity and narrowness of the Via Sacra, the Forum 
Romanum and the Acropolis, whose parts are arranged without symmetry and 
with no perspective. Even the town-planning whether darkly as in the 
Gothic or consciously as in the ages of Alexander and Napoleon reflects the 
same principle as the mathematic in the one case the Leibnizian mathematic 
of infinite space, in the other the Euclidean mathematic of separate bodies. 1 
But to the "habit" of a group belong, further, its definite life-duration and its 
definite tempo of development. Both of these are properties which we must not 
fail to take into account in a historical theory of structure. The rhythm (Takt) 
of Classical existence was different from that of Egyptian or Arabian; and we 
can fairly speak of the andante of Greece and Rome and the allegro con brio of the 
Faustian spirit. 

The notion of life-duration as applied to a man, a butterfly, an oak, a blade 
of grass, comprises a specific time-value, which is quite independent of all the 
accidents of the individual case. Ten years are a slice of life w r hich is approxi- 
mately equivalent for all men, and the metamorphosis of insects is associated 
with a number of days exactly known and predictable in individual cases. 
For the Romans the notions of -pueritia, adolescentia, iuventus, virilitas, senectus 
possessed an almost mathematically precise meaning. Without doubt the bi- 
ology of the future will in opposition to Darwinism and to the exclusion in 
principle of causal fitness-motives for the origins of species take these f re- 
ordained life durations as the starting-point for a new enunciation of its prob- 
lem. 2 The duration of a generation whatever may be its nature is a fact 
of almost mystical significance. 

Now, such relations are valid also, and to an extent never hitherto imagined, 
for all the higher Cultures. Every Culture, every adolescence and maturing and decay 
of a Culture, every one of its intrinsically necessary stages and periods, has a definite 
1 See Vol. II, pp. 109 et seq. 2 See Vol. II, pp. 36 et seq. 



no THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

duration, always the same, always recurring with the emphasis of a symbol. In the 
present work we cannot attempt to open up this world of most mysterious 
connexions, but the facts that will emerge again and again as we go on will 
tell us of themselves how much lies hidden here. What is the meaning of that 
striking fifty-year period, the rhythm of the political, intellectual and artistic 
"becoming" of all Cultures? * Of the 3oo-year period of the Baroque, of the 
Ionic, of the great mathematics, of Attic sculpture, of mosaic painting, of 
counterpoint, of Galileian mechanics? What does the ideal life of one mil- 
lennium for each Culture mean in comparison with the individual man's 
"three-score years and ten"? As the plant's being is brought to expression 
in form, dress and carriage by leaves, blossoms, twigs and fruit, so also is the 
being of a Culture manifested by its religious, intellectual, political and 
economic formations. Just as, say, Goethe's individuality discourses of itself 
in such widely-different forms as the Faust, the Farbenlehre, the Reineke Fuchs, 
lasso, Werther, the journey to Italy and the Friederike love, the Westbstliche 
Diwan and the Romischc Elegien; so the individuality of the Classical world 
displays itself in the Persian wars, the Attic drama, the City-State, the Dio- 
nysia and not less in the Tyrannis, the Ionic column, the geometry of Euclid, 
the Roman legion, and the gladiatorial contests and "panem et circenses" of 
the Imperial age. 

In this sense, too, every individual being that has any sort of importance 
recapitulates, 2 of intrinsic necessity, all the epochs of the Culture to which it 
belongs. In each one of us, at that decisive moment when he begins to know 
that he is an ego, the inner life wakens just where and just how that of the 
Culture wakened long ago. Each of us men of the West, in his child's day- 
dreams and child's play, lives again its Gothic the cathedrals, the castles, 
the hero-sagas, the crusader's "Dieu le veult," the soul's oath of young Parzi- 
val. Every young Greek had his Homeric age and his Marathon. In Goethe's 
Werther, the image of a tropic youth that every Faustian (but no Classical) 
man knows, the springtime of Petrarch and the Minnesanger reappears. When 
Goethe blocked out the Urfaust* he was Parzival; when he finished Faust I, he 
was Hamlet, and only with Faust II did he become the world-man of the i9th 
Century who could understand Byron. Even the senility of the Classical - 
the faddy and unfruitful centuries of very late Hellenism, the second-childhood 

1 I will only mention here the distances apart of the three Punic Wars, and the series like- 
wise comprehensible only as rhythmic Spanish Succession War, Silcsian wars, Napoleonic Wars, 
Bismarck's wars, and the World War (cf. Vol. II, p. 488). Connected with this is the spiritual rela- 
tion of grandfather and grandson, a relation which produces in the mind of primitive peoples the 
conviction that the soul of the grandfather returns in the grandson, and has originated the wide- 
spread custom of giving the grandson the grandfather's namt, which by its mystic spell binds his 
soul afresh to the corporeal world. 

The word is used in the sense in which biology employs it, viz., to describe the process by which 
the embryo traverses all the phases which its species has undergone. Tir. 

' The first draft of Faust I, discovered only comparatively recently. Tr. 



PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC in 

of a weary and blase intelligence can be studied in more than one of its grand 
old men. Thus, much of Euripides' Baccha anticipates the life-outlook, and 
much of Plato's Timaus the religious syncretism of the Imperial age; and 
Goethe's Faust II and Wagner's Parsifal disclose to us in advance the shape 
that our spirituality will assume in our next (in point of creative power our last) 
centuries. 

Biology employs the term bomology of organs to signify morphological 
equivalence in contradistinction to the term analogy which relates to functional 
equivalence. This important, and in the sequel most fruitful, notion was con-\/ 
ceived by Goethe (who was led thereby to the discovery of the "os inter- 
maxillare" in man) and put into strict scientific shape by Owen; l this notion 
also we shall incorporate in our historical method. 

It is known that for every part of the bone-structure of the human head an 
exactly corresponding part is found in all vertebrated animals right down to 
the fish, and that the pectoral fins of fish and the feet, wings and hands of 
terrestrial vertebrates are homologous organs, even though they have lost 
every trace of similarity. The lungs of terrestrial, and the swim-bladders 
of aquatic animals are homologous, while lungs and gills on the other hand 
are analogous that is, similar in point of use. 2 And the trained and deepened 
morphological insight that is required to establish such distinctions is an 
utterly different thing from the present method of historical research, with its 
shallow comparisons of Christ and Buddha, Archimedes and Galileo, Caesar 
and Wallenstein, parcelled Germany and parcelled Greece. More and more 
clearly as we go on, we shall realize what immense views will offer themselves 
to the historical eye as soon as the rigorous morphological method has been 
understood and cultivated. To name but a few examples, homologous forms are: 
Classical sculpture and West European orchestration, the Fourth Dynasty pyra- 
mids and the Gothic cathedrals, Indian Buddhism and Roman Stoicism (Bud- 
dhism and Christianity are not even analogous^ the periods of "the Contending 
States" in China, the Hyksos in Egypt and the Punic Wars; the age of Pericles 
and the age of the Ommayads; the epochs of the Rigveda, of Plotinus and of 
Dante. The Dionysiac movement is homologous with the Renaissance, analog- 
ous to the Reformation. For us, "Wagner is the resume of modernity," as \ 
Nietzsche rightly saw; and the equivalent that logically must exist in the Classi- 
cal modernity we find in Pergamene art. (Some preliminary notion of the fruit- 

1 See Ency. Brit., Xlth Ed., articles Owen, Sir Richard; Morphology and Zoology (p. 102.9). Tr. 

2 It is not superfluous to add that there is nothing of the causal kind in these pure phenomena of 
" Living Nature." Materialism, in order to get a system for the pedestrian reasoner, has had to adul- 
terate the picture of them with fitness-causes. But Goethe - who anticipated just about as much of 
Darwinism as there will be left of it in fifty years from Darwin absolutely excluded the causality- 
principle. And the very fact that the Darwinians quite failed to notice its absence is a clear indica- 
tion that Goethe's "Living Nature" belongs to actual life, "cause"-less and "aim"-less; for the 
idea of the prime-phenomenon does not involve causal assumptions of any sort unless it has been 
misunderstood in advance in a mechanistic sense. 



in THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

fulness of this way of regarding history, may be gathered from studying the 
tables included in this volume.) 

The application of the " homology " principle to historical phenomena 
brings with it an entirely new connotation for the word "contemporary." I 
designate as contemporary two historical facts that occur in exactly the same 
relative positions in their respective Cultures, and therefore possess exactly 
equivalent importance. It has already been shown how the development of 
the Classical and that of the Western mathematic proceeded in complete con- 
gruence, and we might have ventured to describe Pythagoras as the contem- 
porary of Descartes, Archytas of Laplace, Archimedes of Gauss. The Ionic and 
the Baroque, again, ran their course contemporaneously. Polygnotus pairs in 
time with Rembrandt, Polycletus with Bach. The Reformation, Puritanism 
and, above all, the turn to Civilization appear simultaneously in all Cultures; 
in the Classical this last epoch bears the names of Philip and Alexander, in our 
West those of the Revolution and Napoleon. Contemporary, too, are the 
building of Alexandria, of Baghdad, and of Washington; Classical coinage and 
our double-entry book-keeping; the first Tyrannis and the Fronde; Augustus 
and Shih-huang-ti; 1 Hannibal and the World War. 

I hope to show that without exception all great creations and forms in 
religion, art, politics, social life, economy and science appear, fulfil themselves 
and die down contemporaneously in all the Cultures; that the inner structure of one 
corresponds strictly with that of all the others; that there is not a single phe- 
nomenon of deep physiognomic importance in the record of one for which we 
could not find a counterpart in the record of every other; and that this counter- 
part is to be found under a characteristic form and in a perfectly definite chrono- 
logical position. At the same time, if we are to grasp such homologies of facts, 
we shall need to have a far deeper insight and a far more critical attitude 
towards the visible foreground of things than historians have hitherto been 
wont to display; who amongst them, for instance, would have allowed him- 
self to dream that the counterpart of Protestantism was to be found in the 
Dionysiac movement, and that English Puritanism was for the West what 
Islam was for the Arabian world? 

Seen from this angle, history offers possibilities far beyond the ambitions 
of all previous research, which has contented itself in the main with arranging 
the facts of the past so far as these were known (and that according to a one- 
line scheme) the possibilities, namely, of 

Overpassing the present as a research-limit, and predetermining the 
spiritual form, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the still un- 
accomplished stages of our western history; and 

1 Reigned 246-xio B.C. He styled himself "first universal emperor" and intended a position 
for himself and his successors akin to that of "Divus" in Rome. For a brief account of his energetic 
and comprehensive work sec Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article China, p. 194. Tr. 



PHYSIOGNOMIC AND SYSTEMATIC 113 

Reconstructing long-vanished and unknown epochs, even whole Cul- 
tures of the past, by means of morphological connexions, in much the 
same way as modern palaeontology deduces far-reaching and trustworthy 
conclusions as to skeletal structure and species from a single unearthed 
skull-fragment. 

It is possible, given the physiognomic rhythm, to recover from scattered 
details of ornament, building, script, or from odd political, economic and reli- 
gious data, the organic characters of whole centuries of history, and from 
known elements on the scale of art-expression, to find corresponding elements 
on the scale of political forms, or from that of mathematical forms to read 
that of economic. This is a truly Goethian method rooted in fact in 
Goethe's conception of the prime phenomenon which is already to a limited 
extent current in comparative zoology, but can be extended, to a degree hitherto 
undreamed of, over the whole field of history. 



CHAPTER IV 
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY 

II 

THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE 
OF CAUSALITY* 



CHAPTER IV 

THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY 

II 

THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY 



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

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

Every higher language possesses a number of words such as luck, doom, 
conjuncture, vocation, about which there is, as it were, a veil. No hypothesis, 
no science, can ever get into touch with that which we feel when we let our- 
selves sink into the meaning and sound of these words. They are symbols, not 
notions. In them is the centre of gravity of that world-picture that I have 
called the World-as-history as opposed to the World-as-nature. The Destiny- 
idea demands life-experience and not scientific experience, the power of seeing 
and not that of calculating, depth and not intellect. There is an organic logic , 
an instinctive, dream-sure logic of all existence as opposed to the logic of the 
inorganic, the logic of understanding and of things understood a logic of 
direction as against a logic of extension and no systematist, no Aristotle or 
Kant, has known how to deal with it. They are on their own ground when 
they tell us about "judgment," "perception," "awareness," and "recollec- 
tion," but as to what is in the words "hope," "happiness," "despair," "rc- 



n8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

peotancc," "devotion," and "consolation" they are silent. He who expects 
here, in the domain of the living, to find reasons and consequences, or imagines 
that an inward certainty as to the meaning of life is the same thing as "Fatal- 
ism" or "Predestination," simply knows nothing of the matters in question, 
confusing experience lived with experience acquired or acquirable. Causality 
is the reasonable, the law-bound, the describable, the badge of our whole 
waking and reasoning existence. But destiny is the word for an inner certainty 
that is not describable. We bring out that which is in the causal by means of 
a physical or an epistemological system, through numbers, by reasoned classi- 
fication; but the idea of destiny can be imparted only by the artist working 
through media like portraiture, tragedy and music. The one requires us to 
distinguish and in distinguishing to dissect and destroy, whereas the other is 
creative through and through, and thus destiny is related to life and causality 
to death. 

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

He who comprehends the light-world that is before his eyes not physiog- 
nomically but systematically, and makes it intellectually his own by the 
methods of causal experience, must necessarily in the end come to believe that 
every living thing can be understood by reference to cause and effect that 
there is no secret and no inner directedness. He, on the other hand, who as 
Goethe did and for that matter as everyone does in nine out of ten of his 
waking moments lets the impressions of the world about him work merely 
upon his senses, absorbs these impressions as a whole, feels the become in its 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 119 

becoming. The stiff mask of causality is lifted by mere ceasing to think. Sud- 
denly, Time is no more a riddle, a notion, a "form" or "dimension" but be- 
comes an inner certainty, destiny itself; and in its directedness, its irreversibility t 
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 physiog- 
nomy of all becoming and the system of all things become destiny or causality 
prevails. Between them there is all the difference between a feeling of life and 
a method of knowledge. Each of them is the starting-point of a complete and 
self-contained, but not of a unique world. Yet, after all, just as the become is 
founded upon a becoming, so the knowledge of cause and effect is founded upon 
the sure feeling of a destiny. Causality is so to say destiny become, des- 
tiny made inorganic and modelled in reason-forms. Destiny itself (passed over 
in silence by Kant and every other builder of rational world-systems because 
with their armoury of abstractions they could not touch life) stands beyond and 
outside all comprehended Nature. Nevertheless, being itself the original, it 
alone gives the stiff dead principle of cause-and-effect the opportunity to figure 
in the later scenes of a culture-drama, alive and historical, as the incarnation 
of a tyrannical thinking. The existence of the Classical soul is the condition for 
the appearance of Democritus's method, the existence of the Faustian soul for 
that of Newton's. We may well imagine that either of these Cultures might 
have failed to produce a natural science of its own, but we cannot imagine the 
systems without their cultural foundations. 

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

Conversely, if "Nature" is that constitution of things in which the becom- 
ing should logically be incorporated in the thing-become, and living direction 
in rigid extension, history may best be treated as a chapter of epistemology; 
and so indeed Kant would have treated it if he had remembered to include it 






no THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

at all in his system of knowledge. Significantly enough, he did not; for him as 
for every born systematist Nature is The World, and when he discusses time 
without noticing that it has direction and is irreversible, we see that he is 
dealing with the Nature-world and has no inkling of the possibility of an- 
other, the history-world. Perhaps, for Kant, this other world was actually 
impossible. 

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



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY in 

and of the materialist conception of history which springs from the same root 
as Darwinism and, like it, kills all that is organic and fateful. Thus the mdr- 
phological element of the Causal is a Principle, and the morphological element 
of Destiny is an Idea, an idea that is incapable of being "cognized," described 
or defined, and can only be felt and inwardly lived. This idea is something of 
which one is either entirely ignorant or else like the man of the spring and 
every truly significant man of the late seasons, believer, lover, artist, poet 
entirely certain. 

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

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

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

ii 

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

The word Time is a sort of charm to summon up that intensely personal 
something designated earlier as the "proper," which with an inner certainty 
we oppose to the " alien" something that is borne in upon each of us amongst 



111 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

and within the crowding impressions of the sense-life. "The Proper," "Des- 
tiny" and "Time" are interchangeable words. 

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

For primitive man the word "time" can have no meaning. He simply lives, 
without any necessity of specifying an opposition to something else. He has 
time, but he knows nothing of it. All of us are conscious, as being aware, of 
space only, and not of time. Space "is," (i.e. exists, in and with our sense- 
world) as a self-extension while we are living the ordinary life of dream, 
impulse, intuition and conduct, and as space in the strict sense in the 
moments of strained attention. "Time," on the contrary, is a discovery, which 
is only made by thinking. We create it as an idea or notion and do not begin 
till much later to suspect that we ourselves are Time, inasmuch as we live. 1 And 
only the higher Cultures, whose world-conceptions have reached the 
mechanical-Nature stage, are capable of deriving from their consciousness of a 
well-ordered measurable and comprehensible Spatial, the projected image of 
time, the phantom time, 2 which satisfies their need of comprehending, measuring 
and causally ordering all. And this impulse a sign of the sophistication of 
existence that makes its appearance quite early in every Culture fashions, 
outside and beyond the real life-feeling, that which is called time in all higher 
languages and has become for the town-intellect a completely inorganic magni- 

1 The sensuous life and the intellectual life too are Time; it is only sensuous experience and in- 
tellectual experience, the "world," that is spatial nature. (As to the nearer affinity of the Feminine 
to Time, see Vol. II, pp. 403 ct seq.) 

8 The expression "space of time" (Zcitraum) which is common to many languages, is evidence 
of our inability to represent direction otherwise than by extension. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 12.3 

tude, as deceptive as it is current. But, if the characteristics, or rather the 
characteristic, of extension limit and causality is really wizard's gear where- 
with our proper soul attempts to conjure and bind alien powers Goethe 
speaks somewhere of the "principle of reasonable order that we bear within 
ourselves and could impress as the seal of our power upon everything that we 
touch" if all law is a fetter which our world-dread hurries to fix upon the 
incrowding sensuous, a deep necessity of self-preservation, so also the invention 
of a time that is knowable and spatially representable within causality is a later 
act of this same self-preservation, an attempt to bind by the force of notion the 
tormenting inward riddle that is doubly tormenting to the intellect that has 
attained power only to find itself defied. Always a subtle hatred underlies the 
intellectual process by which anything is forced into the domain and forn> 
world of measure and law. The living is killed by being introduced into space, 
for space is dead and makes dead. With birth is given death, with the fulfilment 
the end. Something dies within the woman when she conceives hence comes 
that eternal hatred of the sexes, child of world-fear. The man destroys, in a 
very deep sense, when he begets by bodily .act in the sensuous world, by 
"knowing" in the intellectual. Even in Luther 1 the word "know" has the 
secondary genital sense. And with the "knowledge" of life which remains 
alien to the lower animals the knowledge of death has gained that power 
which dominates man's whole waking consciousness. By a -picture of time the 
actual is changed into the transitory. 2 

The mere creation of the name Time was an unparalleled deliverance. To 
name any thing 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. 3 

And there is something of this primitive expression of world-fear in the way 
in which all systematic philosophies use mere names as a last resort for getting 
rid of the Incomprehensible, the Almighty that is all too mighty for the in- 
tellect. 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. 4 Once more, "knowledge is 
power." Herein lies one root of the difference between the idealist's and the 
realist's attitude towards the Unapproachable; it is expressed by the two mean- 
ings of the German word Scheu respect and abhorrence. 6 The idealist con- 

1 I.e., the translated Bible. Tr. 2 See Vol. II, pp. 19 et seq. 

3 See p. 80 of this volume, and Vol. II, pp. 166, 318. 

4 See Vol. II, p. 137. 

5 The nearest English equivalent is perhaps the word "fear." "Fearful" would correspond 
exactly but for the fact that in the second sense the word is objective instead of subjective. The 
word "shy" itself bears the second meaning in such trivial words as gun-shy, work-shy. Tr. 



124 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

templates, 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 treat- 
ment of the Time problem. The dread mystery of Time, life itself, must be 
spellbound and, by the magic of comprehensibility, neutralized. 

All that has been said about time in ' ' scientific ' ' philosophy, psychology 
and physics the supposed answer to a question that had better never have 
been asked, namely what is time? touches, not at any point the secret itself, 
but only a spatially-formed representative phantom. The livingness and directed- 
ness and fated course of real Time is replaced by a figure which, be it never so 
intimately absorbed, is only a line, measurable, divisible, reversible, and not a 
portrait of that which is incapable of being portrayed; by a "time" that can 
be mathematically expressed in such forms as V/, f 2 , - /, from which the 
assumption of a time of zero magnitude or of negative times is, to say the least, 
not excluded. 1 Obviously this is something quite outside the domain of Life, 
Destiny, and living historical Time; it is a purely conceptual time-system that 
is remote even from the sensuous life. One has only to substitute, in any 
philosophical or physical treatise that one pleases, this word "Destiny" for 
the word "time" and one will instantly see how understanding loses its way 
when language has emancipated it from sensation, and how impossible the 
group "time and space" is. What is not experienced and felt, what is merely 
thought, necessarily takes a spatial form, and this explains why no systematic 
philosopher has been able to make anything out of the mystery-clouded, far- 
echoing sound symbols ' ' Past ' ' and ' ' Future. ' ' In Kant's utterances concerning 
time they do not even occur, and in fact one cannot see any relation which 
could connect them with what is said there. But only this spatial form enables 
time and space to be brought into functional interdependence as magnitudes 
of the same order, as four-dimensional vector analysis 2 conspicuously shows. 
As early as 1813 Lagrange frankly described mechanics as a four-dimensional 
geometry, and even Newton's cautious conception of "tempus absolutum sive 
duratio ' ' is not exempt from this intellectually inevitable transformation of the 
living into mere extension. In the older philosophy I have found one, and only 
one, profound and reverent presentation of Time; it is in Augustine "If no 
one questions me, I know: if I would explain to a questioner, I know not." 

When philosophers of the present-day West "hedge" - as they all do 

1 The Relativity theory, a working hypothesis which is on the way to overthrowing Newton's 
mechanics which means at bottom his view of the problem of motion admits cases in which 
the words "earlier" and "later" may be inverted. The mathematical foundation of this theory 
by Minkowski uses imaginary time units for measurement. 

1 The dimensions arc x, y, % (in respect of space) and t (in respect of time), and all four appear 
to be regarded as perfectly equivalent in transformations. [The English reader may be referred to 
A. Einstein, "Theory of Relativity," Ch. XI and appendices I, II. Tr] 

Si nemo ex me quacrat, scio; si quacrcnti cxplicari vclim, ncscio. (Conj. XI, 14.) 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 12.5 

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

This is the refutation of that widely-spread misunderstanding which con- 
nects time with arithmetic and space with geometry by superficial analogies, 
an error to which Kant ought never to have succumbed though it is hardly 
surprising that Schopenhauer, with his incapacity for understanding mathemat- 
ics, did so. Because the living act of numbering is somehow or other related to 
time, number and time are constantly confused. But numbering is not number, 
any more than drawing is a drawing. Numbering and drawing are a becoming, 
numbers and figures are things become. Kant and the rest have in mind now 
the living act (numbering) and now the result thereof (the relations of the 



ii6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

finished figure); but the one belongs to the domain of Life and Time, the other 
to that of Extension and Causality. That I calculate is the business of organic, 
what I calculate the business of inorganic, logic. Mathematics as a whole 
in common language, arithmetic and geometry answers the Howl and the 
W hat? that is, the problem of the Natural order of things. In oppo- 
sition to this problem stands that of the When? of things, the specifically 
historical problem of destiny, future and past; and all these things are com- 
prised in the word Chronology, which simple mankind understands fully and 
unequivocally. 

Between arithmetic and geometry there is no opposition. 1 Every kind of 
number, as has been sufficiently shown in an earlier chapter, belongs entirely to 
the realm of the extended and the become, whether as a Euclidean magnitude 
or as an analytical function; and to which heading should we have to assign 
the cyclometric 2 functions, the Binomial Theorem, the Riemann surfaces, the 
Theory of Groups? Kant's scheme was refuted by Euler and d'Alembert before 
he even set it up, and only the unfamiliarity of his successors with the mathe- 
matics of their time what a contrast to Descartes, Pascal and Leibniz, who 
evolved the mathematics of their time from the depths of their own philosophy! 
made it possible for mathematical notions of a relation between time and 
arithmetic to be passed on like an heirloom, almost uncriticized. 

But between Becoming and any part whatsoever of mathematics there is not 
the slightest contact. Newton indeed was profoundly convinced (and he was 
no mean philosopher) that in the principles of his Calculus of Fluxions 3 he had 
grasped the problem of Becoming, and therefore of Time in a far subtler 
form, by the way, than Kant's. But even Newton's view could not be upheld, 
even though it may find advocates to this day. Since Weierstrass proved that 
continuous functions exist which either cannot be differentiated at all or are 
capable only of partial differentiation, this most deep-searching of all efforts 
to close with the Time-problem mathematically has been abandoned. 

in 

Titw is a counter-conception (Gegenbcgriff) to Space, arising out of Space, just as 
the notion (as distinct from the fact) of Life arises only in opposition to 
thought, and the notion (as distinct from the fact) of birth and generation only 

1 Save in elementary mathematics. (It may be remarked that most philosophers since Schopen- 
hauer have approached these question with the prepossessions of elementary mathematics.) 

2 The "inverse circular functions" of English text-books. Tr. 

* The Newtonian form of the differential calculus was distinct from the Lcibnizian, which is 
now in general use. Without going into unnecessary detail, the characteristic of Newton's method 
was that it was meant not for the calculation of quadratures and tangents (which had occupied his 
predecessors), nor as an organ of functional theory as such (as the differential calculus became much 
later), but quite definitely as a method of dealing with rate of changt in pure mechanics, with the 
"flowing" or "fluxion" of a dependent variable under the influence of a variable which for Ncwtoo 
was the "fluent," and which we call the argument of a function. Tr. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 117 

in opposition to death. 1 This is implicit in the very essence of all awareness. 
Just as any sense-impression is only remarked when it detaches itself from 
another, so any kind of understanding that is genuine critical activity 2 is only 
made possible through the setting-up of a new concept as anti-pole to one 
already present, or through the divorce (if we may call it so) of a pair of 
inwardly-polar concepts which as long as they are mere constituents, possess no 
actuality. 3 It has long been presumed and rightly, beyond a doubt that 
all root-words, whether they express things or properties, have come into being 
by pairs; but even later, even to-day, the connotation that every new word re- 
ceives is a reflection of some other. And so, guided by language, the understand- 
ing, incapable of fitting a sure inward subjective certainty of Destiny into its 
form-world, created ' ' time ' ' out of space as its opposite. But for this we should 
possess neither the word nor its connotation. And so far is this process of 
word-formation carried that the particular style of extension possessed by the 
Classical world led to a specifically Classical notion of time, differing from the 
time-notions of India, China and the West exactly as Classical space differs from 
the space of these Cultures. 4 

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

In every work that displays the whole man and the whole meaning of the 
existence, fear and longing lie close together, but they are and they remain 
different. To the fear, to the Causal, belongs the whole " taboo" side of art 
its stock of motives, developed in strict schools and long craft- training, care- 
fully protected and piously transmitted; all of it that is comprehensible, learn- 
able, numerical; all the logic of colour, line, structure, order, which constitutes 
the mother-tongue of every worthy artist and every great epoch. But the other 
side, opposed to the " taboo" as the directed is to the extended and as the de- 
velopment-destiny within a form-language to its syllogisms, comes out in 
genius (namely, in that which is wholly personal to the individual artists y their 

1 Sec Vol. n, pp. 13, 19. 

2 Sec Vol. II, p. 16. 

3 The original reads: "(So ist jede Art von Verstchen . . . nur dadurch moglich . . .) dass 
ein Bcgriffspaar von innerem Gegensatz gewisscrmasscn durch Auseinandcrtrctcn erst Wirklichkcit 
erhalt." Tr. 

At this point the German text repeats the paragraph which in this edition begins at "But 
inquiry " (p. izi) and ends at the close of section I (p. ixi). Tr. 



ii8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

imaginative powers, creative passion, depth and richness, as against all mere 
mastery of form) and, beyond even genius, in that superabundance of creative- 
ness in the race which conditions the rise and fall of whole arts. This is the 
"totem" side, and owing to it notwithstanding all the aesthetics ever 
penned there is no timeless and solely-true way of art, but only a history of 
art, marked like everything that lives with the sign of irreversibility. 1 

And this is why architecture of the grand style which is the only one of 
the arts that handles the alien and fear-instilling itself, the immediate Extended, 
the stone is naturally the early art in all Cultures, and only step by step 
yields its primacy to the special arts of the city with their more mundane 
forms the statue, the picture, the musical composition. Of all the great 
artists of the West, it was probably Michelangelo who suffered most acutely 
under the constant nightmare of world-fear, and it was he also who, alone 
among the Renaissance masters, never freed himself from the architectural. 
He even painted as though his surfaces were stone, become, stiff, hateful. His 
work was a bitter wrestle with the powers of the cosmos which faced him and 
challenged him in the form of material, whereas in the yearning Leonardo's 
colour we see, as it were, a glad materialization of the spiritual. But in every 
large architectural problem an implacable causal logic, not to say mathematic, 
comes to expression in the Classical orders of columns a Euclidean relation 
olbeam and load, in the "analytically" disposed thrust-system of Gothic vault- 
ing the dynamic relation of force and mass. Cottage-building traditions 
which are to be traced in the one and in the other, which are the necessary back- 
ground even of Egyptian architecture, which in fact develop in every early 
period and are regularly lost in every later contain the whole sum of this 
logic of the extended. But the symbolism of direction and destiny is beyond 
all the' " technique " of the great arts and hardly approachable by way of 
aesthetics. It lies to take some instances in the contrast that is always 
felt (but never, either by Lessing or by Hebbel, elucidated) between Classical 
and Western tragedy; in the succession of scenes of old Egyptian relief and 
generally in the serial arrangement of Egyptian statues, sphinxes, temple-halls; 
in the choice, as distinct from the treatment, of materials (hardest diorite to 
affirm, and softest wood to deny, the future); in the occurrence, and not in the 
grammar, of the individual arts, e.g., the victory of arabesque over the Early 
Christian picture, the retreat of oil-painting before chamber music in the 
Baroque; in the utter diversity of intention in Egyptian, Chinese and Classical 
statuary. All these are not matters of ' ' can ' ' but of ' ' must, ' ' and therefore it is 
not mathematics and abstract thought, but the great arts in their kinship with 
the contemporary religions, that give the key to the problem of Time, a problem 
that can hardly be solved within the domain of history 2 alone. 

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 137, 159. 

Here the author presumably means history in the ordinary acceptation of the word. Tr. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 119 

IV 

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

The Classical form of the Destiny-idea I shall venture to call Euclidean. 
Thus it is the sense-actual person of (Edipus, his "empirical ego," nay, his 
0-cojua that is hunted and thrown by Destiny. (Edipus complains that Creon 
has misused his "body" l and that the oracle applied to his "body." 2 ^schy- 
lus, again, speaks of Agamemnon as the "royal body, leader of fleets." 3 It is 
this same word <rco/ia that the mathematicians employ more than once for the 
"bodies " with which they deal. But the destiny of King Lear is of the " ana- 
lytical" type to use here also the term suggested by the corresponding 
number-world and consists in dark inner relationships. The idea of father- 
hood emerges; spiritual threads weave themselves into the action, incorporeal 
and transcendental, and are weirdly illuminated by the counterpoint of the 
secondary tragedy of Gloster's house. Lear is at the last a mere name, the axis 
of something unbounded. This conception of destiny is the "infinitesimal" 
conception. It stretches out into infinite time and infinite space. It touches 
the bodily Euclidean existence not at all, but affects only the Soul. Consider 
the mad King between the fool and the outcast in the storm on the heath, and 
then look at the Laocoon group; the first is the Faustian, the other the Apollin- 
ian way of suffering. Sophocles, too, wrote a Laocoon drama; and we may be 
certain that there was nothing of pure soul-agony in it. Antigone goes below 
ground in the body, because she has buried her brother's body. Think of Ajax 
and Philoctetes, and then of the Prince of Homburg and Goethe's Tasso is 
not the difference between magnitude and relation traceable right into the 
depths of artistic creation? 

This brings us to another connexion of high symbolic significance. The 
drama of the West is ordinarily designated Character-Drama. That of the 

1 (Ed. Rex., 641. KO.K)S ei\ri<J)a rbv^v <ru>na aw rexfj *o/c0. (Cf. Rudolf Hirsch, Die Person 
(1914), p. 9.) 

2 (Ed. Col., 355. navTcia. ... & rovd' k\f^]oBt\ a^aro^. 
8 Choefhorcc, 710. tiri vav&pxw G&HO.TI,... TCJ> j3a<nXeq>. 



i 3 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

Greeks, on the other hand, is best described as Situation-Drama, and in the 
antithesis we can perceive what it is that Western, and what it is that Classical, 
man respectively feel as the basic life-form that is imperilled by the onsets of 
tragedy and fate. If in lieu of "direction" we say "irreversibility," if we let 
ourselves sink into the terrible meaning of those words ' ' too late ' ' wherewith 
we resign a fleeting bit of the present to the eternal past, we find the deep founda- 
tion of every tragic crisis. It is Time that is the tragic, and it is by the meaning 
that it intuitively attaches to Time that one Culture is differentiated from 
another; and consequently " tragedy" of the grand order has only developed in 
the Culture which has most passionately affirmed, and in that which has most 
passionately denied, Time. The sentiment of the ahistoric soul gives us a 
Classical tragedy of the moment, and that of the ultrahistorical soul puts before 
us Western tragedy thzit deals with the development of a whole life. Our tragedy 
arises from the feeling of an inexorable Logic of becoming, while the Greek feels 
the illogical, blind Casual of the moment the life of Lear matures inwardly to- 
wards a catastrophe, and that of CEdipus stumbles without warning upon a 
situation. And now one may perceive how it is that synchronously with 
Western drama there rose and fell a mighty portrait-art (culminating in Rem- 
brandt), a kind of historical and biographical art which (because it was so) was 
sternly discountenanced in Classical Greece at the apogee of Attic drama. 
Consider the veto on likeness-statuary in votive offerings * and note how 
from Demetrius of Alopeke (about 400) 2 a timid art of "ideal" portraiture 
began to venture forth when, and only when, grand tragedy had been thrown 
into the background by the light society-pieces of the "Middle Comedy." 
Fundamentally all Greek statues were standard masks, like the actors in the 
theatre of Dionysus; all bring to expression, in significantly strict form, somatic 
attitudes and positions. Physiognomically they are dumb, corporeal and of 
necessity nude character-heads of definite individuals came only with the 
Hellenistic age. Once more we are reminded of the contrast between the Greek 
number-world, with its computations of tangible results, and the other, our 
own, in which the relations between groups of functions or equations or, gener- 

1 Phidias, and through him his patron Pericles, were attacked for alleged introduction of 
portraits upon the shield of Athene Parthcnos. In Western religious art, on the contrary, portraiture 
was, as everyone knows, a habitual practice. Every Madonna, for instance, is more or less of a por- 
trait. 

With this may be compared again the growing resistance of Byzantine art, as it matured, to 
portraiture in sacred surroundings, evidenced for instance in the history of the nimbus or halo which 
was removed from the insignia of the Prince to become the badge of the Saint in the legend of the 
miraculous cffaccmcnt of Justinian's pompous inscription on Hagia Sophia, and in the banishment 
of the human patron from the celestial part of the church to the earthly. Tr. 

9 Who was criticized as "no god-maker but a man-maker" and as one who spoilt the beauty of 
his work by aiming at likeness. 

Crcsilas, the sculptor from whom the only existing portrait of Pericles is derived, was a little 
earlier; in him, however, the "ideal" was still the supreme aim. Tr. 

* The writers immediately succeeding Aristophanes. Tr. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 131 

ally, formula-elements of the same order are investigated morphologically, and 
the character of these relations fixed as such in express laws. 



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

Every Culture possesses a wholly individual way of looking at and compre- 
hending the world-as-Nature; or (what comes to the same thing) it has its own 
peculiar "Nature" which no other sort of man can possess in exactly the same 
form. But in a far greater degree still, every Culture including the individu- 
als comprising it (who are separated only by minor distinctions) possesses 
a specific and peculiar sort of history and it is in the picture of this and the 
style of this that the general and the personal, the inner and the outer, the 
world-historical and the biographical becoming, are immediately perceived, 
felt and lived. Thus the autobiographical tendency of Western man re- 
vealed even in Gothic times in the symbol of auricular confession 1 is utterly 
alien to Classical man; while his intense historical awareness is in complete 
contrast to the almost dreamy unconsciousness of the Indian. And when 
Magian man primitive Christian or ripe scholar of Islam uses the words 
"world-history," what is it that he sees before him? 

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

As an example of these hitherto almost uncomprehended signs we may take 
the clock, a creation of highly developed Cultures that becomes more and more 
mysterious as one examines it. Classical man managed to do without the clock, 
and his abstention was more or less deliberate. To the Augustan period, and 

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 360 et scq. 



i 3 z THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

far beyond it, the time of day was estimated by the length of one's shadow, 1 
although sun-dials and water-clocks, designed in conformity with a strict 
time-reckoning and imposed by a deep sense of past and future, had been in 
regular use in both the older Cultures of Egypt and Babylonia. 2 Classical man's 
existence Euclidean, relationless, point-formed was wholly contained in 
the instant. Nothing must remind him of past or future. For the true Classical, 
archaeology did not exist, nor did its spiritual inversion, astrology. The Oracle 
and the Sibyl, like the Etruscan-Roman "haruspices" and "augurs," did not 
foretell any distant future but merely gave indications on particular questions 
of immediate bearing. No time-reckoning entered intimately into everyday 
life (for the Olympiad sequence was a mere literary expedient) and what really 
matters is not the goodness or badness of a calendar but the questions: "who 
uses it?" and "does the life of the nation run by it?" In Classical cities nothing 
suggested duration, or old times or times to come there was no pious pres- 
ervation of ruins, no work conceived for the benefit of future generations; in 
them we do not find that durable 3 material was deliberately chosen. The 
Dorian Greek ignored the Mycenaean stone-technique and built in wood or 
clay, though Mycenaean and Egyptian work was before him and the country 
produced first-class building-stone. The Doric style is a timber style even 
in Pausanias's day some wooden columns still lingered in the Heraeum of 
Olympia. The real organ of history is "memory" in the sense which is always 
postulated in this book, viz., that which preserves as a constant present the 
image of one's personal past and of a national and a world-historical past 4 as 
well, and is conscious of the course both of personal and of super-personal 
becoming. That organ was not present in the make-up of a Classical soul. 
There was no "Time" in it. Immediately behind his proper present, the 
Classical historian sees a background that is already destitute of temporal and 
therefore of inward order. For Thucydides the Persian Wars, for Tacitus the 
agitation of the Gracchi, were already in this vague background; 5 and the 
great families of Rome had traditions that were pure romance witness 

1 Diels, Antike Technik (i9zo), p. 159. 

1 About 400 B.C. savants began to construct crude sun-dials in Africa and Ionia, and from Plato's 
time still more primitive clepsydra:, 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 Dicls, op. >., pp. 160 ct seq. 

Horace's monumtntum are 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 Leu- 
conoe and her " Babylonian " impieties (Odes I, n) inter alia, and he will probably agree that so far 
as Horace is concerned, the argument is supported rather than impugned. Tr. 

4 Ordered, for us, by the Christian chronology and the ancicnt-medizval-modcrn 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. 

Sec pp. 9. ct scq. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 135 

Cesar's slayer, Brutus, with his firm belief in his reputed tyrannicide a".ic 
cestor. Cassar's reform of the calendar may almost be regarded as a deed 
of emancipation from the Classical life-feeling. But it must not be forgotten 
that Caesar also imagined a renunciation of Rome and a transformation of 
the City-State into an empire which was to be dynastic marked with the 
badge of duration and to have its centre of gravity in Alexandria, which 
in fact is the birthplace of his calendar. His assassination seems to us a last 
outburst of the antiduration feeling that was incarnate in the Polis and the 
Urbs Roma. 

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

The Indians also have no sort of time-reckoning (the absence of it in their 
case expressing their Nirvana) and no clocks, and therefore no history, no life 
memories, no care. What the conspicuously historical West calls "Indian 
history" achieved itself without the smallest consciousness of what it was 
doing. 1 The millennium of the Indian- Culture between the Vedas and Buddha 
seems like the stirrings of a sleeper; here life was actually a dream. From all 
this our Western Culture is unimaginably remote. And, indeed, man has never 
not even in the "contemporary" China of the Chou period with its highly- 
developed sense of eras and epochs 2 been so awake and aware, so deeply 
sensible of time and conscious of direction and fate and movement as he has 
been in the West. Western history was willed and Indian history happened. In 
Classical existence years, in Indian centuries scarcely counted, but here the hour, 
the minute, yea the second, is of importance. Of the tragic tension of a histori- 
cal crisis like that of August, 1914, when even moments seem overpowering, 
neither a Greek nor an Indian could have had any idea. 3 Such crises, too, a 
deep-feeling man of the West can experience within himself, as a true Greek could 

1 The Indian history of our books is a Western reconstruction from texts and monuments. Sec 
the chapter on epigraphy in the "Indian Gazetteer," Vol. II. Tr. 

2 See Vol. II, pp. 482., 52.1 et seq. 

3 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, 
HI, 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" (irapa roabmov ptv % MuriXi^T? rj\de Kivdbvov), a phrase which recalls forcibly what has just 
been said regarding the "situation-drama." Tr. 



THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

/er do. Over our country-side, day and night from thousands of belfries, 
ring the bells l that join future to past and fuse the point-moments of the Classi- 
cal present into a grand relation. The epoch which marks the birth of our 
Culture the time of the Saxon Emperors marks also the discovery of the 
wheel-clock. 2 Without exact time-measurement, without a chronology of be- 
coming to correspond with his imperative need of archaeology (the preservation, 
excavation and collection of things-become*), Western man is unthinkable. The 
Baroque age intensified the Gothic symbol of the belfry to the point of gro- 
tesqueness, and produced the pocket watch that constantly accompanies the 
individual. 8 

Another symbol, as deeply significant and as little understood as the symbol 
of the clock, is that of the funeral customs which all great Cultures have con- 
secrated by ritual and by art. The grand style in India begins with tomb- 
temples, in the Classical world with funerary urns, in Egypt with pyramids, 
in early Christianity with catacombs and sarcophagi. In the dawn, innumerable 
equally-possible forms still cross one another chaotically and obscurely, de- 
pendent on clan-custom and external necessities and conveniences. But every 
Culture promptly elevates one or another of them to the highest degree of 
symbolism. Classical man, obedient to his deep unconscious life-feeling, 
picked upon burning, an act of annihilation in which the Euclidean, the here- 
and-now, type of existence was powerfully expressed. He willed to have no 
history, no duration, neither past nor future, neither preservation nor dissolu- 
tion, and therefore he destroyed that which no longer possessed a present, the 
body of a Pericles, a Caesar, a Sophocles, a Phidias. And the soul passed to 
join the vague crowd to which the living members of the clan paid (but soon 
ceased to pay) the homage of ancestor-worship and soul-feast, and which in its 
formlessness presents an utter contrast to the ancestor-jfr/rr, the genealogical tree, 
that is eternalized with all the marks of historical order in the family-vault of 
the West. In this (with one striking exception, the Vedic dawn in India) no 

1 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 Constanti- 
nople 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. 

* 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. Sec British Museum "Handbook of Mayan Antiquities. Tr.) 

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



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 135 

other Culture parallels the Classical. 1 And be it noted that the Doric-Homeric 
spring, and above all the "Iliad," invested this act of burning with all the vivid 
feeling of a new-born symbol; for those very warriors whose deeds probably 
formed the nucleus of the epic were in fact buried almost in the Egyptian manner 
in the graves of Mycenas, Tiryns, Orchomenos and other places. And when in 
Imperial times the sarcophagus or "flesh-consumer" 2 began to supersede the 
vase of ashes, it was again, as in the time when the Homeric urn superseded 
the shaft-grave of Mycenas, a changed sense of Time that underlay the change 
of rite. 

The Egyptians, who preserved their past in memorials of stone and 
hieroglyph so purposefully that we, four thousand years after them, can 
determine the order of their kings' reigns, so thoroughly eternalized their 
bodies that today the great Pharaohs lie in our museums, recognizable in 
every lineament, a symbol of grim triumph while of Dorian kings not even 
the names have survived. For our own part, we know the exact birthdays 
and deathdays of almost every great man since Dante, and, moreover, we 
see nothing strange in the fact. Yet in the time of Aristotle, the very zenith 
of Classical education, it was no longer known with certainty if Leucippus, 
the founder of Atomism and a contemporary of Pericles i.e., hardly a 
century before had ever existed at all; much as though for us the existence 
of Giordano Bruno was a matter of doubt 3 and the Renaissance had become 
pure saga. 

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

As we collect countless data in milliards of printed books, do we not 
also collect all the works of all the dead Cultures in these myriad halls of 
West-European cities, in the mass of the collection depriving each indi- 
vidual piece of that instant of actualized purpose that is its own the 

1 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 f resent 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. TV.) 

. 2 With obvious reference to the resurrection of the flesh (i/c vfup&v). 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 resur- 
rection from the dead, the implication is that time begins again to repeat in space, whereas in "im- 
mortality" it is time that overcomes space. 

s 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. Tir. 



136 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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 Mowtlov; l how deep a significance lies in the 
change of sense! 

VI 

It is the primitive feeling of Care 2 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, con- 
ceived 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, corre- 
spondingly, the sign of the Lingam and the sect of worshippers of Parwati. 3 
In the one case as in the other, man feels himself as nature, as a plant, as a will- 
less 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. 4 The Mother 
with the Child the future at her breast, the Mary-cult in the new Faus- 
tian form, began to flourish only in the centuries of the Gothic and found 
its highest expression in Raphael's Sistine Madonna. 5 This conception is 

1 Originally a philosophical and scientific lecture-temple founded in honour of Aristotle, and 
later the great University of Alexandria, bore the title Mowo-eiop. Both Aristotle and the University 
amassed collections but they were collections of (a) books, () 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. 

2 The connotation of "care" is almost the same as that of "Sorge," but the German word in- 
cludes also a certain specific, ad 0r apprehension, that in English is expressed by "concern" or 
"fear." -TV. 

* The Lingayats arc one of the chief sects of the Saivas (that is, of the branch of Hinduism which 
devotes itself to Shiva) and Pacwati 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 
Parwati is one. Vaishnavism the Vishnu branch of Indian religion also contains an erotic 
clement in that form which conceives Vishnu as Krishna. But in Krishna worship the erotic is rather 
less precise and more amorous in character. 

Sec "Imperial Gazetteer of India," Vol. I, pp. 42.1 ct scq., and Ency. Brit., XI Edition, article 
Hinduism. Tr. 

* British Museum. Tr. 

* Dresden. Tr. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 137 

not one belonging to Christianity generally. On the contrary, Magian Chris- 
tianity had elevated Mary as Theotokos, "she who gave birth to God" * 
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 un- 
conscious 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. 2 

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 . 3 

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 Chou dynasty (1169-2.56 B.C.), of the organization of which the Chou 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. 4 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. 

1 See Vol. II, p. 316. 

2 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 defi- 
nitely and unmistakably the Stittcnde Matter. 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," 71-74, 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. 

3 Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq. 

4 See, further, the last two sections of Vol. II (Der Stoat and Wirtschaftslebeti). Tr. 



138 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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 
Csesar, 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 affirma- 
tion 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 experi- 
ences, inner and outer, fills the course of his day merely as a series of facts. 
Only the outstanding (bcdcutende) man feels behind the commonplace unities 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 139 

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; 1 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 occur- 
rences. Perhaps, then, the discovery of the heliocentric system by Aristarchus 
was an unmeaning incident for the Classical Culture, but its supposed 2 redis- 
covery 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 des- 
tiny for Protestantism as a living unit, for the Germans, or for Western 
mankind generally? Were Tiberius Gracchus and Sulla incidents and Csesar a 
destiny? 

Questions like these far transcend the domain of the understanding that 
operates through concepts (der begriffliche Verstandigung). 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 some- 
thing entirely intractable to critical thought, we cannot perceive the world of 
becoming at all. Cognition, judgment, and the establishment of causal con- 
nexions 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 cease- 
lessly 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 

1 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. 

2 Vermeintlich. The allusion is presumably to the fact that Copernicus, adhering to the hypothe- 
sis 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. 



140 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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." l 

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, art- 
works 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 sacri- 
ficial death of Jesus, of being made free to will. 2 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 Protes- 
tants, even for atheists, hidden though it may be behind a scientific notion of 
"evolution" (which in reality is its direct descendant 3 ), 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 

1 Spruchc in Rcimen. 2 Sec Vol. II, pp. 194 ct scq., 359 ct scq. 

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



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 141 

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" 1 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 non- 
sense. The Predestination doctrine of Calvin and Pascal who, both of them 
more upright than Luther and Thomas Aquinas, dared to draw the causal con- 
clusion 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 Provi- 
dence is brought within the schematic form of the Causality Principle, i.e., the 
Kantian form of mind activity (productive imagination); for that is what Predesti- 
nation 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? 

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 

1 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 as- 
sumes 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 aesthetic took its examples from both Cultures, 
it was bound to go wrong in the very enunciation of its problem. 



142. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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 "know- 
ing" there should have arisen just these codes of "natural law," each sup- 
posedly 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 (entgegcnleberi) 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, 1 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. 2 

It is this insight that constitutes the singularity and the power of Shake- 

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

1 Sec Vol. II, pp. 10 ct seq. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 143 

speare. 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 mis- 
construed 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 lago, 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 in- 
ward 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 naivete 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 CEdipus 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 sacree majeste 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 



144 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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 i8th Century and how Chinese history is written 
even to-day! Think of the Dcy smacking the Consul with his fly-flap l 
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 sur- 
prise 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) 2 grew up out of the con- 
tempt 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 develop- 
ments, 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 un- 
necessary, 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 Marcngo 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 con- 
cerned without altering itself which is quite another matter funda- 
mentally. The epoch of German national union accomplished itself through 

1 The incident which is said to have precipitated the French war on Algiers (1817). Tr. 
Act. II, Scene VII. - Tr. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 145 

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, dynas- 
tic, 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, con- 
trapuntal ly 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; 1 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 im- 
peratively 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 mys- 
terious 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 it- 
self 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, pros- 
perous 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. 2 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, how- 

1 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 put 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. 

2 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. 41 et seq. 



i 4 6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

ever 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 ex- 
perience 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 significa- 
tion 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 
elfjLapnevT] 1 in contrast to the Shakesperian logic of incident. Consider CEdipus 
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 Csesar was one of mythical 
incidcntalness, and it was left to Shakespeare to introduce logic into it. Napo- 
leon 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 



1 Derived from nelpo/jiai, to receive as one's portion, to have allotted to one, or, colloquially, 
to "come in for" or "step into." Tr. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 147 

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 
outrance, in Athens un-logic. 

The ultimate meaning of this significant fact can now be understood. His- 
tory 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 notwith- 
standing the episode of Alexander's expedition 1 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, 2 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 constitu- 
ents, figures of Euclidean separateness and artistic self-sufficiency. Every pedi- 
ment 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 embod- 
ied, 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. 

1 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. 

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



148 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 



We may now point our moral with a few examples, which, though hazard- 
ous, 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, Caldcron, 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 country- 
side 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 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 149 

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 (^386-32.2.), fluid and unsure of itself, required decades of 
undermining-work to achieve. It is of the essence of all Culture that at the out- 
set 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. 1 

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 "liber- 
ated 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. 2 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 

1 The original is somewhat obscure. It reads: "Welche Form die Wahrscheinlichkeit fur sich 
hat, ist bereits eine Frage des historischen und also des tragischen Stils." Tr. 

2 The words of Canning at the beginning of the XlXth century may be recalled. "South 
America free! and if possible English!" The expansion idea has never been expressed in greater 
purity than this. 



i 5 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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. 1 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 pre- 
ponderance in the Western culture-region would have been placed on a practi- 
cally 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 Napo- 
leon. 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 inci- 
dents. 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 prog- 
ress in India; but again a minor naval incident 2 obliged him to abandon the 
whole of a carefully-prepared enterprise: and, lastly, when by the occupa- 
tion 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, 8 he took the step that made him "no longer 
necessary." 

1 The Western Culture of maturity was through-and-through a French outgrowth of the Spanish, 
beginning with Louis XIV. But even by Louis XVI's time the English park had defeated the French, 
sensibility had ousted wit, London costume and manners had overcome Versailles, and Hogarth, 
Chippendale and Wedgwood had prevailed over Wattcau, Boullc and Sevres. 

8 The allusion is to the voyage of Linois's small squadron to Pondichry in 1803, its confronta- 
tion by another small British squadron there, and the counter-order which led Linois to retire to 
Mauritius. Tr. 

* Hardcnbcrg's reorganization of Prussia was thoroughly English in spirit, and as such incurred 
the severe censure of the old Prussian Von dcr Marwitz. Scharnhorst's army reforms too, as a break- 
away from the professional army system of the eighteenth-century cabinet-wars, arc a sort of 
"return to nature" in the Rousseau-Revolutionary sense. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 151 

At one time it falls to the Spanish spirit to outline, at another to. the 
British or the French to remould, tjie 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 ust-Century economic organism by a matter-of-fact 
Cassar, 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 regime, 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 Chasronea, Gaugamela (Arbela), Alexander's Indian expedition and the 
Roman victory of Sentinum. 1 And we begin to understand that in wars and 
political catastrophies the chief material of our historical writings victory 
is not the essence of the fight nor peace the aim of a revolution. 



Anyone who has absorbed these ideas will have no difficulty in understand- 
ing how the causality principle is bound to have a fatal effect upon the capacity 
for genuinely experiencing History when, at last, it attains its rigid form in 
that "late" condition of a Culture to which it is proper and in which it is able 
to tyrannize over the world-picture. Kant, very wisely, established causality as 
a necessary form of knowledge, and it cannot be too often emphasized that this 
was meant to refer exclusively to the understanding of man's environment by 
the way of reason. But while the word "necessary" was accepted readily 
enough, it has been overlooked that this limitation of the principle to a single 
domain of knowledge is just what forbids its application to the contemplation 
and experiencing of living history. Man-knowing and Nature-knowing are in 
essence entirely incapable of being compared, but nevertheless the whole Nine- 
teenth Century was at great pains to abolish the frontier between Nature and 
History in favour of the former. The more historically men tried to think, the 
more they forgot that in this domain they ought not to think. In forcing the 
rigid scheme of a spatial and anti-temporal relation of cause and effect upon 
something alive, they disfigured the visible face of becoming with the 

1 Where in 2.95 B.C. the Romans decisively defeated the last great Samnite effort to resist their 
hegemony over Italy. Tr. 



i 5 2. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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 be- 
coming by methodically misunderstanding it as the machinery of the thing- 
become. Day is not the cause of night, nor youth of age, nor blossom of fruit. 
Everything that we grasp intellectually has a cause, everything that we live 
organically with inward certitude has a past. The one recognizes the case, that 
which is generally possible and has a fixed inner form which is the same when- 
ever and wherever and however often it occurs, the other recognizes the event 
which once was and will never recur. And, according as we grasp something 
in our envelope-world critically and consciously or physiognomically and in- 
voluntarily, we draw our conclusion from technical or from living experience, 
and we relate it to a timeless cause in space or to a direction which leads from 
yesterday to to-day and to-morrow. 

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

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



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 153 

At this point a distinction presents itself between the immediate impression 
of the present and the image of the past that is only presented in the spirit, in 
other words between the world as happening and the world as history. The 
eye of the man of action (statesman and general) appreciates the first, that of 
the man of contemplation (historian and poet) the second. Into the first one 
plunges practically to do or to suffer; chronology, 1 that great symbol of irre- 
vocable past, claims the second. We look backwards, and we live forward 
towards the unforeseen, but even in childhood our technical experience soon 
introduces into the image of the singular occurrence elements of the foreseeable, 
that is, an image of regulated Nature which is subject not to physiognomic fact 
but to calculation. We apprehend a "head of game" as a living entity and 
immediately afterwards as food; we see a flash of lightning as a peril and then 
as an electrical discharge. And this second, later, petrifying projection of the 
world more and more tends to overpower the first in the Megalopolis; the 
image of the past is mechanized and materialized and from it is deduced a set 
of causal rules for present and future. We come to believe in historical laws 
and in a rational understanding of them. 

Nevertheless science is always natural science. Causal knowledge and 
technical experience refer only to the become, the extended, the comprehended. 
As life is to history, so is knowledge (Wissen) to Nature, viz., to the sensible 
world apprehended as an element, treated as in space and subjected to the law 
of cause and effect. Is there, then, a science of History at all? To answer this 
question, let us remember that in every personal world-picture, which only 
approximates more or less to the ideal picture, there is both something of 
Nature and something of History. No Nature is without living, and no His- 
tory without causal, harmonies. For within the sphere of Nature, although 
two like experiments, conformably to law, have the like result, yet each of 
these experiments is a historical event possessing a date and not recurring. 
And within that of History, the dates or data of the past (chronologies, sta- 
tistics, names, forms 2 ) form a rigid web. "Facts are facts" even if we are 
unaware of them, and all else is image, Theoria, both in the one domain and 
in the other. But history is itself the condition of being "in the focus" and 
the material is only an aid to this condition, whereas in Nature the real aim 
is the winning of the material, and theory is only the servant of this purpose. 

There is, therefore, not a science of history but an ancillary science for his- 

1 Which, inasmuch as it has been detached from time, is able to employ mathematical symbols. 
These rigid figures signify for us a destiny of yore. But their meaning is other than mathematical. 
Past is not a cause, nor Fate a formula, and to anyone who handles them, as the historical materialist 
handles them, mathematically, the past event as such, as an actuality that has lived once and only 
once, is invisible. 

2 That is, not merely conclusions of peaces or deathdays of persons, but the Renaissance style, 
the Palis, the Mexican Culture and so forth are dates or data, facts that have been, even when we 
possess no representation of them. 



154 



THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 



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



Life, Direction 
Destiny-Experience 

The uniquely 
occurring and irrevocable 

"Fact- 
Physiognomic tact (instinct) 



Extension 
Causal Knowledge 
The constantly- 
possible 
"Truth" 
Systematic criticism (reason) 



Consciousness 

as servant of Being 

The world-image of " History" 

Life-experience 

Image of the Past 

Constructive Contemplation 

(Historian, Tragic Dramatist) 

to investigate Destiny 

Direction into the Future 

Constructive Action 

(Statesman) 

to be Destiny 



Consciousness 

as master of Being 

The world-image of "Nature" 

Scientific methods 

Religion. Natural Science 

Theoretical: Myth and Dogma. Hypothesis 

Practical: Cult. Technique 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 155 



XI 



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

Hunger and Love l thus become mechanical causes of mechanical processes 
in the "life of peoples." Social problems and sexual problems (both belonging 
to a "physics" or "chemistry" of public all-too-public existence) be- 
come the obvious themes of utilitarian history and therefore of the corresponding 
tragedy. For the social drama necessarily accompanies the materialist treatment 
of history, and that which in Goethe's " Wahlverwandtschaften " was destiny 

1 See Vol. II, pp. 403 et seq., 589 ct seq. 



156 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

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

With all this, the historians have failed to learn the lesson that our ripest 
and strictest science, Physics, would have taught them, the lesson of prudence. 
Even if we concede them their causal method, the superficiality with which 
they apply it is an outrage. There is neither the intellectual discipline nor the 
keen sight, let alone the scepticism that is inherent in our handling of physical 
hypotheses. 1 For the attitude of the physicist to his atoms, electrons, currents, 
and fields of force, to anher and mass, is very far removed from the naive faith 
of the layman and the Monist in these things. They are images which he sub- 
jects to the abstract relationships of his differential equations, in which he 
clothes trans-phenomenal numbers, and if he allows himself a certain freedom 
to choose amongst several theories, it is because he does not try to find in them 
any actuality but that of the "conventional sign." 2 He knows, too, that over 

1 The formation of hypotheses in Chemistry is much more thoughtless, owing to the less close 
relation of that science to mathematics. A house of cards such as is presented to us in the researches 
of the moment on atom-structure (sec, for example, M. Born, Der Aujbau der Materie, 192.0) would be 
impossible in the near neighbourhood of the electro-magnetic theory of light, whose authors never 
for a moment lost sight of the frontier between mathematical vision and its representation by a 
picture, or of the fact that this was only a picture. 

There is no difference essentially between these representations and the switchboard wiring- 
diagram. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 157 

and above an experimental acquaintance with the technical structure of the 
world-around, all that it is possible to achieve by this process (which is th-t 
only one open to natural science) is a symbolic interpretation of it, no more 
certainly not "Knowledge" in the sanguine popular sense. For, the image of 
Nature being a creation and copy of the Intellect, its "alter ego ' ' in the domain 
of the extended, to know Nature means to know oneself. 

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

"So must thou be. Thou canst not Self escape. 
So erst the Sibyls, so the Prophets told. 
Nor Time nor any Power can mar the shape 
Impressed, that living must itself unfold." 

The mere chemistry of the stars, the mathematical side of physical observa- 
tions, and physiology proper interested him, the great historian of Nature 
very little, because they belonged to Systematic and were concerned with ex- 
periential learning of the become, the dead, and the rigid. This is what under- 
lies his anti-Newton polemic a case in which, it must be added, both sides 
were in the right, for the one had " knowledge ' ' of the regulated nature-process 
in the dead colour 1 while the experiencing of the other, the artist, was intuitive- 
sensuous "feeling." Here we have the two worlds in plain opposition; and 
now therefore the essentials of their opposition must be stated with all strict- 
ness. 

1 Goethe's theory of colour openly controverted Newton's theory of light. A long account of 
the controversy will be found in Chapter IX of G. H. Lewes 's Life of Goethe a work that, taken 
all in all, is one of the wisest biographies ever written. In reading his critique of Goethe's theory, 
of course, it has to be borne in mind that he wrote before the modern development of the electro- 
magnetic theory, which has substituted a merely mathematical existence for the Newtonian physical 
existence of colour-rays as such in white light. Now, this physical existence was just what, in 
substance, Goethe denied. What he affirmed, in the simpler language of his day, was that white 



158 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

History carries the mark of the singular- factual. Nature that of the con- 
tinuously possible. So long as I scrutinize the image of the world-around in order 
to see by what laws it must actualize itself, irrespective of whether it does 
happen or merely might happen irrespective, that is, of time then I am 
working in a genuine science. For the necessity of a nature-law (and there are 
no other laws) it is utterly immaterial whether it becomes phenomenal in- 
finitely often or never. That is, it is independent of Destiny. There are thousands 
of chemical combinations that never are and never will be produced, but they 
are demonstrably possible and therefore they exist for the fixed System of 
Nature though not for the Physiognomy of the whirling universe. A system 
consists of truths, a history rests on facts. Facts follow one another, truths 
follow from one another, and this is the difference between "when" and 
"how." That there has been a flash of lightning is a fact and can be indicated, 
without a word, by the pointing of a finger. "When there is lightning there is 
thunder," on the contrary, is something that must be communicated by a 
proposition or sentence. Experience-lived may be quite wordless, while sys- 
tematic 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 direc- 
tional quality. Hence, for the one, the necessity of the mathematical, and 
for the other the necessity of the tragic. 

In the actuality of waking existence both worlds, that of scrutiny and that of 
acceptance (Hingebung), are interwoven, just as in a Brabant tapestry warp and 
woof together effect the picture. Every law must, to be available to the under- 
standing at all, once have been discovered through some destiny-disposition 
in the history of an intellect that is, it must have once been in experiential 
life; and every destiny appears in some sensible garb as persons, acts, scenes 

light was something simple and colourless that becomes coloured through diminutions or modifi- 
cations imposed upon it by "darkness." The modern physicist, using a subtler hypothesis than 
Newton's and a more refined "balance" than that which Lewes reproaches Goethe for "flinging 
away," has found in white light, not the Newtonian mixture of colour-rays, but a surge of irregular 
wave-trains which arc only regularized into colour-vibrations through being acted upon by analysers 
of one sort and another, from prisms to particulars matter. This necessity of a counter-agent for the 
production of colour seems to a critical outsider at any rate very like the necessity of an efficient 
negative principle or "opaque" that Goethe's intuitive interpretation of his experiments led him 
to postulate. It is this that is the heart of the theory, and not the "simplicity" of light per se. 

So much it seems desirable to add to the text and the reference, in order to expand the author's 
statement that "both were right." For Lewes, with all his sympathetic penetration of the man 
and real appreciation of his scientific achievement, feels obliged to regard his methods and his theory 
as such as "erroneous." And it is perhaps not out of place in this book to adduce an instance of the 
peculiar nature and power of intuitive vision (which entirely escapes direct description) in which 
Vision frankly challenges Reason on its own ground, meets with refutation (or contempt) from the 
Reason of its day, and yet may come to be upheld in its specific Tightness (its tightness as vision, that 
is, apart from its technical enunciation by the seer) by the Reason of a later day. Tr. 



DESTINY AND CAUSALITY 159 

and gestures in which Nature-laws are operative. Primitive life is submissive 
before the daemonic unity of the fateful; in the consciousness of the mature Cul- 
ture this "early" world-image is incessantly in conflict with the other, "late," 
world-image; and in the civilized man the tragic world-feeling succumbs to the 
mechanizing intellect. History and nature within ourselves stand opposed to one 
another as life is to death, as ever-becoming time to ever-become space. In the waking 
consciousness, becoming and become struggle for control of the world-picture, 
and the highest and maturest forms of both sorts (possible only for the great 
Cultures) are seen, in the case of the Classical soul, in the opposition of Plato 
and Aristotle, and, in the case of our Western, in that of Goethe and Kant 
the pure physiognomy of the world contemplated by the soul of an eternal 
child, and its pure system comprehended by the reason of an eternal greybeard. 



XII 



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

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

To attempt the interpretation of a poet or a prophet, a thinker or a con- 
queror, is of course nothing new, but to enter a culture-soul Classical, Egyp- 
tian or Arabian so intimately as to absorb into one's self, to make part of 
one's own life, the totality expressed by typical men and situations, by religion 
and polity, by style and tendency, by thought and customs, is quite a new man- 



i6o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

ner of experiencing life. Every epoch, every great figure, every deity, the cities, 
the tongues, the nations, the arts, in a word everything that ever existed and 
will become existent, arc physiognomic traits of high symbolic significance 
that it will be the business of quite a new kind of " judge of men" (Menschen- 
kenner) to interpret. Poems and battles, Isis and Cybcle, festivals and Roman 
Catholic masses, blast furnaces and gladiatorial games, dervishes and Dar- 
winians, railways and Roman roads, "Progress" and Nirvana, newspapers, 
mass-slavery, money, machinery all these are equally signs and symbols in 
the world-picture of the past that the soul presents to itself and would interpret. 
"Allcs Vergangliche ist nur tin Gleicbnis." Solutions and panoramas as yet un- 
imagined await the unveiling. Light will be thrown on the dark questions 
which underlie dread and longing those deepest of primitive human feelings 
and which the will-to-know has clothed in the "problems" of time, neces- 
sity, space, love, death, and first causes. There is a wondrous music of the 
spheres which wills to be heard and which a few of our deepest spirits will hear. 
The physiognomic of world-happening will become the last Faustian philosophy. 






CHAPTER V 
MAKROKOSMOS 

I 

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



CHAPTER V 

MAKROKOSMOS 

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

I 

THE notion of a world-history of physiognomic type expands itself therefore 
into the wider idea of an all-embracing symbolism. Historical research, in the 
sense that we postulate here, has simply to investigate the picture of the once- 
living past and to determine its inner form and logic, and the Destiny-idea is the 
furthest limit to which it can penetrate. But this research, however comprehen- 
sive the new orientation tends to make it, cannot be more than a fragment and 
a foundation of a still wider treatment. Parallel with it, we have a Nature-in- 
vestigation that is equally fragmentary and is limited to its own causal system of 
relations. But neither tragic nor technical "motion" (if we may distinguish 
by these words the respective bases of the lived and the known) exhausts the 
living itself. We both live and know when we are awake, but, in addition, we 
live when mind and senses are asleep. Though night may close every eye, the 
blood does not sleep. We are moving in the moving (so at least we try to indi- 
cate, by a word borrowed from science, the inexpressible that in sleep-hours we 
feel with inward certainty). But it is only in the waking existence that ' ' here ' ' 
and "there" appear as an irreducible duality. Every impulse proper to oneself 
has an expression and every impulse alien to oneself makes an impression. And 
thus everything of which we are conscious, whatever the form in which it is ap- 
prehended ' ' soul ' ' and ' ' world, ' ' or life and actuality, or History and Nature, 
or law and feeling, Destiny or God, past and future or present and eternity 
has for us a deeper meaning still, a final meaning. And the one and only means 
of rendering this incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of meta- 
physics which regards everything whatsoever as having significance as a symbol. 
Symbols are sensible signs, final, indivisible and, above all, unsought im- 
pressions of definite meaning. A symbol is a trait of actuality that for the 
sensuously-alert man has an immediate and inwardly-sure significance, and that 
is incommunicable by process of reason. The detail of a Doric or Early- Arabic 
or Early-Romanesque ornament; the forms of the cottage and the family, of 
intercourse, of costume and rite; the aspect, gait and mien of a man and of whole 
classes of peoples and men; the communication- and community-forms of man 

163 



164 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

and beast; and beyond all this the whole voiceless language of Nature with her 
woods and pastures, flocks, clouds, stars, moonlight and thunderstorm, bloom 
and decay, nearness and distance all this is the emblematical impression of 
the Cosmos upon us, who arc both aware and in our reflective hours quite 
capable of listening to this language. Vice versa, it is the sense of a homogene- 
ous understanding that raises up the family, the class, the tribe, or finally the 
Culture, out of the general humanity and assembles it as such. 

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

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

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



SYMBOLISM AND SPACE 165 

causal laws and number that overlies and binds them. And even in the domain 
of pure number the symbolical is not lacking, for we find that refined thought 
puts inexpressible meanings into signs like the triangle, the circle and the 
numbers 7 and n. 

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

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



ii 



Symbols, as being things actualized, belong to the domain of the extended. 
They are become and not becoming (although they may stand for a becoming) 
and they are therefore rigidly limited and subject to the laws of space. There 
are only sensible-spatial symbols. The very word ' ' form ' ' designates something 
extended in the extended, even the inner forms of music are no exception, 



166 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

as we shall see. But extension is the hall-mark of the fact "waking conscious- 
ness," and this constitutes only one side of the individual existence and is 
intimately bound up with that existence's destinies. Consequently, every trait 
of the actual waking-consciousness, whether it be feeling or understanding, is 
in the moment of our becoming aware of it, already past. We can only reflect 
upon impressions, " think them over" as our happy phrase goes, but that which 
for the sensuous life of the animals is past, is for the grammatical (wortge- 
bundene) understanding of man passing, transient. That which happens is, of 
course, transient, for a happening is irrevocable, but every kind of significance 
is also transient. Follow out the destiny of the Column, from the Egyptian 
tomb-temple in which columns are ranked to mark the path for the traveller, 
through the Doric peripteros in which they are held together by the body of 
the building, and the Early-Arabian basilica where they support the interior, 
to the facades of the Renaissance in which they provide the upward-striving 
clement. As we see, an old significance never returns; that which has entered 
the domain of extension has begun and ended at once. A deep relation, and 
one which is early felt, exists between space and death. Man is the only being 
that knows death; all others become old, but with a consciousness wholly 
limited to the moment which must seem to them eternal. They live, but like 
children in those first years in which Christianity regards them as still "inno- 
cent," they know nothing of life, and they die and they see death without 
knowing anything about it. Only fully-awakened man, man proper, whose 
understanding has been emancipated by the habit of language from dependence 
on sight, comes to possess (besides sensibility) the notion of transience, that is, 
a memory of the past as past and an experiential conviction of irrevocability. 
We are Time, 1 but we possess also an image of history and in this image death, 
and with death birth, appear as the two riddles. For all other beings life 
pursues its course without suspecting its limits, i.e., without conscious knowl- 
edge of task, meaning, duration and object. It is because there is this deep and 
significant identity that we so often find the awakening of the inner life in a 
child associated with the death of some relation. The child suddenly grasps the 
lifeless corpse for what it is, something that has become wholly matter, wholly 
space, and at the same moment it feels itself as an individual being in an alien 
extended world. "From the child of five to myself is but a step. But from 
the new-born baby to the child of five is an appalling distance," said Tolstoi 
once. Here, in the decisive moments of existence, when man first becomes man 
and realizes his immense loneliness in the universal, the world-fear reveals 
itself for the first time as the essentially human fear in the presence of death, 
the limit of the light-world, rigid space. Here, too, the higher thought origi- 
nates as meditation upon death. Every religion, every scientific investigation, 
every philosophy proceeds from it. Every great symbolism attaches its form- 

* Sec p. 113 






SYMBOLISM AND SPACE 167 

language to the cult of the dead, the forms of disposal of the dead, the 
adornment of the graves of the dead. The Egyptian style begins with the 
tomb-temples of the Pharaohs, the Classical with the geometrical decoration 
of the funerary urns, the Arabian with catacomb and sarcophagus, the Western 
with the cathedral wherein the sacrificial death of Jesus is re-enacted daily 
under the hands of the priest. From this primitive fear springs, too, historical 
sensitiveness in all its modes, the Classical with its cleaving to the life-abundant 
present, the Arabian with its baptismal rite that wins new life and overcomes 
death, the Faustian with its contrition that makes worthy to receive the 
Body of Jesus and therewith immortality. Till we have the constantly-wakeful 
concern for the life that is not yet past, there is no concern for that which is past, 
The beast has only the future, but man knows also the past. And thus every 
new Culture is awakened in and with a new view of the world, that is, a sudden 
glimpse of death as the secret of the perceivable world. It was when the idea of 
the impending end of the world spread over Western Europe (about the year 
1000) that the Faustian soul of this religion was born. 

Primitive man, in his deep amazement before death, sought with all the 
forces of his spirit to penetrate and to spellbind this world of the extended with 
the inexorable and always present limits of its causality, this world filled with 
dark almightiness that continuously threatened to make an end of him. This 
energetic defensive lies deep in unconscious existence, but, as being the first 
impulse that genuinely projects soul and world as parted and opposed, it marks 
the threshold of personal conduct of life. Ego-feeling and world-feeling begin 
to work, and all culture, inner or outer, bearing or performance, is as a whole 
only the intensification of this being-human. Henceforward all that resists 
our sensations is not mere resistance or thing or impression, as it is for animals 
and for children also, but an expression as well. Not merely are things actually 
contained in the world-around but also they possess meaning, as phenomena in 
the world-view. Originally they possessed only a relationship to men, but now 
there is also a relationship of men to them. They have become emblems of 
his existence. And thus the essence of every genuine unconscious and inwardly 
necessary symbolism proceeds from the knowledge of death in which the 
secret of space reveals itself. All symbolism implies a defensive; it is the 
expression of a deep Scheu in the old double sense of the word, 1 and its form- 
language tells at once of hostility and of reverence. 

Every thing-become is mortal. Not only peoples, languages, races and Culture? 
are transient. In a few centuries from now there will no more be a Western 
Culture, no more be German, English or French than there were Romans in the 
time of Justinian. Not that the sequence of human generations failed; it was 
the inner form of a people, which had put together a number of these genera- 
tions as a single gesture, that was no longer there. The Civis Romanus, one of 

1 See page 113. 



168 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST 

the most powerful symbols of Classical being, had nevertheless, as a form, only 
a duration of some centuries. But the primitive phenomenon of the great 
Culture will itself have disappeared some day, and with it the drama of world- 
history; aye, and man himself, and beyond man the phenomenon of plant and 
animal existence on the earth's surface, the earth, the sun, the whole world 
of sun-systems. All art is mortal, not merely the individual artifacts but the 
arts themselves. One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of 
Mozart will have ceased to be though possibly a coloured canvas and a sheet 
of notes may remain because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their 
message will have gone. Every thought, faith and science dies as soon as the 
spirits in whose worlds their "eternal truths" were true and necessary arc 
extinguished. Dead, even, arc the star-worlds which "appeared," a proper 
world to the proper eye, to the astronomers of the Nile and the Euphrates, for 
our eye is different from theirs; and o