The decline of the West

by Oswald Spengler

II

It follows then that all “knowing” of Nature, even the exactest, is based on a religious faith. The pure mechanics that the physicist has set before himself as the end-form to which it is his task (and the purpose of all this imagination-machinery) to reduce Nature, presupposes a dogma—namely, the religious world-picture of the Gothic centuries. For it is from this world-picture that the physics peculiar to the Western intellect is derived. There is no science that is without unconscious presuppositions of this kind, over which the researcher has no control and which can be traced back to the earliest days of the awakening Culture. There is no Natural science without a precedent Religion. In this point there is no distinction between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the world—both say the same thing in different words. Even atheistic science has religion; modern mechanics exactly reproduces the contemplativeness of Faith.

When the Ionic reaches its height in Thales or the Baroque in Bacon, and man has come to the urban stage of his career, his self-assurance begins to look upon critical science, in contrast to the more primitive religion of the countryside, as the superior attitude towards things, and, holding as he thinks the only key to real knowledge, to explain religion itself empirically and psychologically—in other words, to “conquer” it with the rest. Now, the history of the higher Cultures shows that “science” is a transitory spectacle,[^[467]] belonging only to the autumn and winter of their life-course, and that in the cases of the Classical, the Indian, the Chinese and the Arabian thought alike a few centuries suffice for the complete exhaustion of its possibilities. Classical science faded out between the battle of Cannæ and that of Actium and made way for the world-outlook of the “second religiousness.”[^[468]] And from this it is possible to foresee a date at which our Western scientific thought shall have reached the limit of its evolution.

There is no justification for assigning to this intellectual form-world the primacy over others. Every critical science, like every myth and every religious belief, rests upon an inner certitude. Various as the creatures of this certitude may be, both in structure and in sound, they are not different in basic principle. Any reproach, therefore, levelled by Natural science at Religion is a boomerang. We are presumptuous and no less in supposing that we can ever set up “The Truth” in the place of “anthropomorphic” conceptions, for no other conceptions but these exist at all. Every idea that is possible at all is a mirror of the being of its author. The statement that “man created God in his own image,” valid for every historical religion, is not less valid for every physical theory, however firm its reputed basis of fact. Classical scientists conceived of light as consisting in corporeal particles proceeding from the source of light to the eye of the beholder. For the Arabian thought, even at the stage of the Jewish-Persian academies of Edessa, Resaïna and Pombaditha (and for Porphyry too), the colours and forms of things were evidenced without the intervention of a medium, being brought in a magic and “spiritual” way to the seeing-power which was conceived as substantial and resident in the eyeball. This was the doctrine[^[469]] taught by Ibn-al-Haitan, by Avicenna and by the “Brothers of Sincerity.”[^[470]] And the idea of light as a force, an impetus, was current even from about 1300 amongst the Paris Occamists who centred on Albert of Saxony, Buridan and Oresme the discoverer of co-ordinate geometry. Each Culture has made its own set of images of processes, which are true only for itself and only alive while it is itself alive and actualizing its possibilities. When a Culture is at its end and the creative element—the imaginative power, the symbolism—is extinct, there are left “empty” formulæ, skeletons of dead systems, which men of another Culture read literally, feel to be without meaning or value and either mechanically store up or else despise and forget. Numbers, formulæ, laws mean nothing and are nothing. They must have a body, and only a living mankind—projecting its livingness into them and through them, expressing itself by them, inwardly making them its own—can endow them with that. And thus there is no absolute science of physics, but only individual sciences that come, flourish and go within the individual Cultures.

The “Nature” of Classical man found its highest artistic emblem in the nude statue, and out of it logically there grew up a static of bodies, a physics of the near. The Arabian Culture owned the arabesque and the cavern-vaulting of the mosque, and out of this world-feeling there issued Alchemy with its ideas of mysterious efficient substantialities like the “philosophical mercury,” which is neither a material nor a property but some thing that underlies the coloured existence of metals and can transmute one metal into another.[^[471]] And the outcome of Faustian man’s Nature idea was a dynamic of unlimited span, a physics of the distant. To the Classical therefore belong the conceptions of matter and form, to the Arabian (quite Spinozistically) the idea of substances with visible or secret attributes,[^[472]] and to the Faustian the idea of force and mass. Apollinian theory is a quiet meditation, Magian a silent knowledge of Alchemy the means of Grace (even here the religious source of mechanics is to be discerned), and the Faustian is from the very outset a working hypothesis.[^[473]] The Greek asked, what is the essence of visible being? We ask, what possibility is there of mastering the invisible motive-forces of becoming? For them, contented absorption in the visible; for us, masterful questioning of Nature and methodical experiment.

As with the formulation of problems and the methods of dealing with them, so also with the basic concepts. They are symbols in each case of the one and only the one Culture. The Classical root-words ἄπειρον, ἀρχή, μορφή, ὕλη, are not translatable into our speech. To render ἀρχή by “prime-stuff” is to eliminate its Apollinian connotation, to make the hollow shell of the word sound an alien note. That which Classical man saw before him as “motion” in space, he understood as ἀλλοίωσις, change of position of bodies; we, from the way in which we experience motion, have deduced the concept of a process, a “going forward,” thereby expressing and emphasizing that element of directional energy which our thought necessarily predicates in the courses of Nature. The Classical critic of Nature took the visible juxtaposition of states as the original diversity, and specified the famous four elements of Empedocles—namely, earth as the rigid-corporeal, water as the non-rigid-corporeal and air as the incorporeal, together with fire, which is so much the strongest of all optical impressions that the Classical spirit could have no doubt of its bodiliness. The Arabian “elements,” on the contrary, are ideal and implicit in the secret constitutions and constellations which define the phenomenon of things for the eye. If we try to get a little nearer to this feeling, we shall find that the opposition of rigid and fluid means something quite different for the Syrian from what it means for the Aristotelian Greek, the latter seeing in it different degrees of bodiliness and the former different magic attributes. With the former therefore arises the image of the chemical element as a sort of magic substance that a secret causality makes to appear out of things (and to vanish into them again) and which is subject even to the influence of the stars. In Alchemy there is deep scientific doubt as to the plastic actuality of things—of the “somata” of Greek mathematicians, physicists and poets—and it dissolves and destroys the soma in the hope of finding its essence. It is an iconoclastic movement just as truly as those of Islam and the Byzantine Bogomils were so. It reveals a deep disbelief in the tangible figure of phenomenal Nature, the figure of her that to the Greek was sacrosanct. The conflict concerning the person of Christ which manifested itself in all the early Councils and led to the Nestorian and Monophysite secessions is an alchemistic problem.[^[474]] It would never have occurred to a Classical physicist to investigate things while at the same time denying or annihilating their perceivable form. And for that very reason there was no Classical chemistry, any more than there was any theorizing on the substance as against the manifestations of Apollo.

The rise of a chemical method of the Arabian style betokens a new world-consciousness. The discovery of it, which at one blow made an end of Apollinian natural science, of mechanical statics, is linked with the enigmatic name of Hermes Trismegistus,[^[475]] who is supposed to have lived in Alexandria at the same time as Plotinus and Diophantus. Similarly it was just at the time of the definite emancipation of the Western mathematic by Newton and Leibniz that the Western chemistry[^[476]] was freed from Arabic form by Stahl (1660-1734) and his Phlogiston theory. Chemistry and mathematic alike became pure analysis. Already Paracelsus (1493-1541) had transformed the Magian effort to make gold into a pharmaceutical science—a transformation in which one cannot but surmise an altered world-feeling. Then Robert Boyle (1626-1691) devised the analytical method and with it the Western conception of the Element. But the ensuing changes must not be misinterpreted. That which is called the founding of modern chemistry and has Stahl and Lavoisier at its turning-points is anything but a building-up of “chemical” ideas, in so far as chemistry implies the alchemistic outlook on Nature. It is in fact the end of genuine chemistry, its dissolution into the comprehensive system of pure dynamic, its assimilation into the mechanical outlook which the Baroque age had established through Galileo and Newton. The elements of Empedocles designate states of bodiliness (bezeichnen ein körperliches Sichverhalten) but the elements of Lavoisier, whose combustion-theory followed promptly upon the isolation of oxygen in 1771, designate energy-systems accessible to human will, “rigid” and “fluid” becoming mere terms to describe tension-relations between molecules. By our analysis and synthesis, Nature is not merely asked or persuaded but forced. The modern chemistry is a chapter of the modern physics of Deed.

What we call Statics, Chemistry and Dynamics—words that as used in modern science are merely traditional distinctions without deeper meaning—are really the respective physical systems of the Apollinian, Magian and Faustian souls, each of which grew up in its own Culture and was limited as to validity to the same. Corresponding to these sciences, each to each, we have the mathematics of Euclidean geometry, Algebra and Higher Analysis, and the arts of statue, arabesque and fugue. We may differentiate these three kinds of physics (bearing in mind of course that other Cultures may and in fact do give rise to other kinds) by their standpoints towards the problem of motion, and call them mechanical orderings of states, secret forces and processes respectively.