III

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 living, 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 mathematical import. Chronological number distinguishes uniquely-occurring actualities, mathematical number constant possibilities. The one sharpens the images and works up the outlines of epoch and fact for the understanding eye. 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 × 8 = 96, and 18 October, 1813. 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. 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, incalculable. 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 historical 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 naïve 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 naïve, youthful, 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-à-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.

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 throughout 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 accretions, 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 everyday 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 “Ferne” (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 mathematical dimension, while for the born artist, on the contrary,—as the lyrics of 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 processes 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 apprehension, 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 Morphology of the organic, of history and life and all that bears the sign of direction and destiny, is called Physiognomic.

V

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 Physiognomic 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 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 personality, 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 architecture, the confession of a Soul. If it is true that the intentional accomplishments 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 historian 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 whatsoever that has become is a symbol, and the expression of a soul. Only to one having the knowledge of men will it unveil itself. The restraint of a law it abhors. What it demands is that its significance should be sensed. And thus research reaches up to a final or superlative truth—Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.

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 which life stands to death, production to destruction. Reason, system and comprehension kill as they “cognize.” That which is cognized becomes a rigid object, capable of measurement and subdivision. Intuitive vision, on the other hand, vivifies and incorporates the details in a living inwardly-felt unity. Poetry and historical study are kin. Calculation and cognition also are kin. But, as Hebbel says somewhere, systems are not dreamed, and art-works are not calculated or (what is the same thing) thought out. 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 withdrawn “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 Ionians 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

Existence { potentiality → fulfilment
(Life) → actuality

{ becoming → the become

Consciousness direction extension

organic mechanical

symbol, portrait, number, notion.

{ History Nature

World-image Rhythm, form. Tension, law.

Physiognomic. Systematic.

Facts Truths

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 continuous 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 incapable therefore of possessing what may be called a centre of time. (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. “Memory,” in this connexion, is conceived as a higher state (certainly not proper to every consciousness and vouchsafed to many in only a low degree), a perfectly definite kind of imagining power, which enables experience to traverse each particular moment sub specie æternitatis 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-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 himself experienced history,” says Goethe. In the Classical world-consciousness all Past was absorbed in the instant Present. Compare the entirely historical heads of the Nürnberg Cathedral sculptures, of Dürer, 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 expressing 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 never becoming.