III
The separation of its ultimate elements is a task that the Gothic world-outlook and its philosophy leaves to the courage of the future. Just as the ornamentation of the cathedral and the primitive contemporary painting still shirk the decision between gold and wide atmosphere in backgrounds—between the Magian and the Faustian aspects of God in Nature—so this early, timid, immature soul-image as it presents itself in this philosophy mingles characters derived from the Christian-Arabian metaphysic and its dualism of Spirit and Soul with Northern inklings of functional soul-forces not yet avowed. This is the discrepance that underlies the conflict concerning the primacy of will or reason, the basic problem of the Gothic philosophy, which men tried to solve now in the old Arabian, now in the new Western sense. It is this myth of the mind—which under ever-changing guises accompanies our philosophy throughout its course—that distinguishes it so sharply from every other. The rationalism of late Baroque, in all the pride of the self-assured city-spirit, decided in favour of the greater power of the Goddess Reason (Kant, the Jacobins); but almost immediately thereafter the 19th Century (Nietzsche above all) went back to the stronger formula Voluntas superior intellectu, and this indeed is in the blood of all of us.[[381]] Schopenhauer, the last of the great systematists, has brought it down to the formula “World as Will and Idea,” and it is only his ethic and not his metaphysic that decides against the Will.
Here we begin to see by direct light the deep foundations and meaning of philosophizing within a Culture. For what we see here is the Faustian soul trying in labour of many centuries to paint a self-portrait, and one, moreover, that is in intimate concordance with its world-portrait. The Gothic world-view with its struggle of will and reason is in fact an expression of the life-feeling of the men of the Crusades, of the Hohenstaufen empire, of the great cathedrals. These men saw the soul thus, because they were thus.
Will and thought in the soul-image correspond to Direction and Extension, History and Nature, Destiny and Causality in the image of the outer world. Both aspects of our basic characters emerge in our prime-symbol which is infinite extension. Will links the future to the present, thought the unlimited to the here. The historic future is distance-becoming, the boundless world-horizon distance-become—this is the meaning of the Faustian depth-experience. The direction-feeling as “Will” and the space-feeling as “Reason” are imagined as entities, almost as legend-figures; and out of them comes the picture that our psychologists of necessity abstract from the inner life.
To call the Faustian Culture a Will-Culture is only another way of expressing the eminently historical disposition of its soul. Our first-person idiom, our “ego habeo factum”—our dynamic syntax, that is—faithfully renders the “way of doing things” that results from this disposition and, with its positive directional energy, dominates not only our picture of the World-as-History but our own history to boot. This first person towers up in the Gothic architecture; the spire is an “I,” the flying buttress is an “I.” And therefore the entire Faustian ethic, from Thomas Aquinas to Kant, is an “excelsior”—fulfilment of an “I,” ethical work upon an “I,” justification of an “I” by faith and works; respect of the neighbour “Thou” for the sake of one’s “I” and its happiness; and, lastly and supremely, immortality of the “I.”
Now this, precisely this, the genuine Russian regards as contemptible vain-glory. The Russian soul, will-less, having the limitless plane as its prime-symbol,[[382]] seeks to grow up—serving, anonymous, self-oblivious—in the brother-world of the plane. To take “I” as the starting-point of relations with the neighbour, to elevate “I” morally through “I’s” love of near and dear, to repent for “I’s” own sake, are to him traits of Western vanity as presumptuous as is the upthrusting challenge to heaven of our cathedrals that he compares with his plane church-roof and its sprinkling of cupolas. Tolstoi’s hero Nechludov looks after his moral “I” as he does after his finger-nails; this is just what betrays Tolstoi as belonging to the pseudomorphosis of Petrinism. But Raskolnikov is only something in a “we.” His fault is the fault of all,[[383]] and even to regard his sin as special to himself is pride and vanity. Something of the kind underlies the Magian soul-image also. “If any man come to me,” says Jesus (Luke xiv, 26), “and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, yea, and his own life (τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ψυχήν) also,[[384]] he cannot be my disciple”; and it is the same feeling that makes him call himself by the title that we mistranslate “Son of Man.”[[385]] The Consensus of the Orthodox too is impersonal and condemns “I” as a sin. So too with the—truly Russian—conception of truth as the anonymous agreement of the elect.
Classical man, belonging wholly to the present, is equally without that directional energy by which our images of world and of soul are dominated, which sums all our sense-impressions as a path towards distance and our inward experiences as a feeling of future. He is will-less. The Classical idea of destiny and the symbol of the Doric column leave no doubt as to that. And the contest of thinking and willing that is the hidden theme of every serious portrait from Jan van Eyck to Marées is impossible in Classical portraiture, for in the Classical soul-image thought (νοῦς), the inner Zeus, is accompanied by the wholly ahistoric entities of animal and vegetative impulse (θυμός and ἐπιθυμία), wholly somatic and wholly destitute of conscious direction and drive towards an end.
The actual designation of the Faustian principle, which belongs to us and to us alone, is a matter of indifference. A name is in itself mere sound. Space, too, is a word that is capable of being employed with a thousand nuances—by mathematicians and philosophers, poets and painters—to express one and the same indescribable; a word that is ostensibly common to all mankind and yet, carrying a metaphysical under-meaning that we gave it and could not but give it, is in that sense valid only for our Culture. It is not the notion of “Will,” but the circumstance that we possess it while the Greeks were entirely ignorant of it, that gives it high symbolic import. At the very bottom, there is no distinction between space-as-depth and will. For the one, and therefore for the other also, the Classical languages had no expression.[[386]] The pure space of the Faustian world-picture is not mere extension, but efficient extension into the distance, as an overcoming of the merely sensuous, as a strain and tendency, as a spiritual will-to-power. I am fully aware how inadequate these periphrases are. It is entirely impossible to indicate in exact terms the difference between what we and what the men of the Indian or the Arabian Culture call space, or feel or imagine in the word. But that there is some radical distinction is proved by the very different fundamentals of the respective mathematics, arts of form, and, above all, immediate utterances of life. We shall see how the identity of space and will comes to expression in the acts of Copernicus and Columbus—as well as in those of the Hohenstaufen and Napoleon—but it underlies also, in another way, the physical notions of fields of force and potential, ideas that it would be impossible to convey to the comprehension of any Greek. "Space as a priori form of perception," the formula in which Kant finally enunciated that for which Baroque philosophy had so long and tirelessly striven, implies an assertion of supremacy of soul over the alien; the ego, through the form, is to rule the world.[[387]]
This is brought to expression in the depth-perspective of oil-painting which makes the space-field of the picture, conceived as infinite, dependent on the observer, who in choosing his distance asserts his dominion. It is this attraction of distance that produces the type of the heroic and historically-felt landscape that we have alike in the picture and the park of the Baroque period, and that is expressed also in the mathematico-physical concept of the vector. For centuries painting fought passionately to reach this symbol, which contains all that the words space, will and force are capable of indicating. And correspondingly we find in our metaphysic the steady tendency to formulate pairs of concepts (such as phenomena and things-in-themselves, will and idea, ego and non-ego) all of the same purely dynamic content, and—in utter contrast to Protagoras’s conception of man as the measure, not the creator, of things—to establish a functional dependence of things upon spirit. The Classical metaphysic regarded man as a body among bodies, and knowledge as a sort of contact, passing from the known to the knower and not vice versa. The optical theories of Anaxagoras and Democritus were far from admitting any active participation of the percipient in sense-perception. Plato never felt, as Kant was driven to feel, the ego as centre of a transcendent sphere of effect. The captives in his celebrated cave are really captives, the slaves and not the masters of outer impressions—recipients of light from the common sun and not themselves suns which irradiate the universe.
The relation of our will to our imaginary space is evidenced again in the physical concept of space-energy—that utterly un-Classical idea in which even spatial interval figures as a form, and indeed as prime form thereof, for the notions of “capacity” and “intensity” rest upon it. We feel will and space, the dynamic world-picture of Galileo and Newton and the dynamic soul-picture which has will as its centre of gravity and centre of reference, as of identical significance. Both are Baroque ideas, symbols of the fully-ripened Faustian Culture.
It is wrong, though it may be usual, to regard the cult of the “will” as common, if not to mankind, at any rate to Christendom, and derived in consequence from the Early-Arabian ethos. The connexion is merely a phenomenon of the historical surface, and the deduction fails because it confuses the (formal) history of words and ideas such as “voluntas” with the course of their destiny, thereby missing the profoundly symbolical changes of connotation that occur in that course. When Arabian psychologists—Murtada for instance—discuss the possibility of several “wills,” a will that hangs together with the act, another will that independently precedes the act, another that has no relation to the act at all, a will that is simply the parent of a willing, they are obviously working in deeper connotations of the Arabic word and on the basis of a soul-image that in structure differs entirely from the Faustian.
For every man, whatever the Culture to which he belongs, the elements of the soul are the deities of an inner mythology. What Zeus was for the outer Olympus, νοῦς was for the inner world that every Greek was entirely conscious of possessing—the throned lord of the other soul-elements. What “God” is for us, God as Breadth of the world, the Universal Power, the ever-present doer and provider, that also—reflected from the space of world into the imaginary space of soul and necessarily felt as an actual presence—is “Will.” With the microcosmic dualism of the Magian Culture, with ruach and nephesh, pneuma and psyche, is necessarily associated the macrocosmic opposition of God and Devil—Ormuzd and Ahriman for Persians, Yahwe and Beelzebub for Jews, Allah and Eblis for Mohammedans—in brief, Absolute Good and Absolute Evil. And note, further, how in the Western world-feeling both these oppositions pale together. In proportion as the Will emerges, out of the Gothic struggle for primacy between “intellectus” and “voluntas,” as the centre of a spiritual monotheism, the figure of the Devil fades out of the real world. In the Baroque age the pantheism of the outer world immediately resulted in one of the inner world also; and the word “God” in antithesis to “world” has always—however interpreted in this or that case—implied exactly what is implied in the word “will” with respect to soul, viz., the power that moves all that is within its domain.[[388]] Thought no sooner leaves Religion for Science than we get the double myth of concepts, in physics and psychology. The concepts “force,” “mass,” “will,” “passion” rest not on objective experience but on a life-feeling. Darwinism is nothing but a specially shallow formulation of this feeling. No Greek would have used the word “Nature” as our biology employs it, in the sense of an absolute and methodical activity. “The will of God” for us is a pleonasm—God (or “Nature,” as some say) is nothing but will. After the Renaissance the notion of God sheds the old sensuous and personal traits (omnipresence and omnipotence are almost mathematical concepts), becomes little by little identical with the notion of infinite space and in becoming so becomes transcendent world-will. And therefore it is that about 1700 painting has to yield to instrumental music—the only art that in the end is capable of clearly expressing what we feel about God. Consider, in contrast with this, the gods of Homer. Zeus emphatically does not possess full powers over the world, but is simply “primus inter pares,” a body amongst bodies, as the Apollinian world-feeling requires. Blind necessity, the Ananke immanent in the cosmos of Classical consciousness, is in no sense dependent upon him; on the contrary, the Gods are subordinate to It. Æschylus says so outright in a powerful passage of the “Prometheus,”[[389]] but it is perceptible enough even in Homer, e.g., in the Strife of the Gods and in that decisive passage in which Zeus takes up the scales of destiny, not to settle, but to learn, the fate of Hector.[[390]] The Classical soul, therefore, with its parts and its properties, imagines itself as an Olympus of little gods, and to keep these at peace and in harmony with one another is the ideal of the Greek life-ethic of σωφροσύνη and ἀταραξία. More than one of the philosophers betrays the connexion by calling νοῦς, the highest part of the soul, Zeus. Aristotle assigns to his deity the single function of θεωρία, contemplation, and this is Diogenes’s ideal also—a completely-matured static of life in contrast to the equally ripe dynamic of our 18th-Century ideal.
The enigmatic Something in the soul-image that is called “will,” the passion of the third dimension, is therefore quite specially a creation of the Baroque, like the perspective of oil-painting and the force-idea of modern physics and the tone-world of instrumental music. In every case the Gothic had foreshadowed what these intellectualizing centuries brought to fullness. Here, where we are trying to take in the cast of Faustian life in contradiction to that of all other lives, what we have to do is to keep a firm hold on the fact that the primary words will, space, force, God, upborne by and permeated with connotations of Faustian feeling, are emblems, are the effective framework that sustains the great and kindred form-worlds in which this being expresses itself. It has been believed, hitherto, that in these matters one was holding in one’s grip a body of eternal facts, of facts-in-themselves, which sooner or later would be successfully treated, “known,” and proved by the methods of critical research. This illusion of natural science was shared by psychology also. But the view that these “universally-valid” fundamentals belong merely to the Baroque style of apprehension and comprehension, that as expression-forms they are only of transitory significance, and that they are only “true” for the Western type of intellect, alters the whole meaning of those sciences and leads us to look upon them not only as subjects of systematic cognition but also, and in a far higher degree, as objects of physiognomic study.
Baroque architecture began, as we have seen, when Michelangelo replaced the tectonic elements of the Renaissance, support and load, by those of dynamics, force and mass. While Brunelleschi’s chapel of the Pazzi in Florence expresses a bright composedness, Vignola’s façade of the Gesù in Rome is will become stone. The new style in its ecclesiastical form has been designated the “Jesuit,” and indeed there is an inward connexion between the achievement of Vignola and Giacomo Della Porta and the creation by Ignatius Loyola of the Order that stands for the pure and abstract will of the Church,[[391]] just as there is between the invisible operations and the unlimited range of the Order and the arts of Calculus and Fugue.
Henceforward, then, the reader will not be shocked if we speak of a Baroque, and even of a Jesuit, style in psychology, mathematics, and pure physics. The form-language of dynamics, which puts the energetic contrast of capacity and intensity in place of the volitionless somatic contrast of material and form, is one common to all the mind-creations of those centuries.