V
Only physiognomic tact can, if creative, succeed in this, and in fact it has done so from time immemorial in the arts, particularly tragic poetry. It is the thinking man who is perplexed by movement; for the contemplative it is self-evident. And however completely the former can reduce his perplexities to system, the result is systematic and not physiognomic, pure extension logically and numerically ordered, nothing living but something become and dead.
It is this that led Goethe, who was a poet and not a computer, to observe that “Nature has no system. It has Life, it is Life and succession from an unknown centre to an unknowable bourne.” For one who does not live it but knows it, Nature has a system. But it is only a system and nothing more, and motion is a contradiction in it. The contradiction may be covered up by adroit formulation, but it lives on in the fundamental concepts. The shock and countershock of Democritus, the entelechy of Aristotle, the notions of force from the “impetus” of 14th-Century Occamists to the quantum-theory of radiation, all contain it. Let the reader conceive of the motion within a physical system as the ageing of that system (as in fact it is, as lived-experience of the observer), and he will feel at once and distinctly the fatefulness immanent in, the unconquerably organic content of, the word “motion” and all its derivative ideas. But Mechanics, having nothing to do with ageing, should have nothing to do with motion either, and consequently, since no scientific system is conceivable without a motion-problem in it, a complete and self-contained mechanics is an impossibility. Somewhere or other there is always an organic starting-point in the system where immediate Life enters it—an umbilical cord that connects the mind-child with the life-mother, the thought with the thinker.
This puts the fundamentals of Faustian and Apollinian Nature-science in quite another light. No “Nature” is pure—there is always something of history in it. If the man is ahistorical, like the Greek, so that the totality of his impressions of the world is absorbed in a pure point-formed present, his Nature-image is static, self-contained (that is, walled against past and future) in every individual moment. Time as magnitude figures in Greek physics as little as it does in Aristotle’s entelechy-idea. If, on the other hand, the Man is historically constituted, the image formed is dynamic. Number, the definitive evaluation of the become, is in the case of ahistoric man Measure, and in that of the historical man Function. One measures only what is present and one follows up only what has a past and a future, a course. And the effect of this difference is that the inner inconsistencies of the motion-problem are covered up in Classical theories and forced into the foreground in Western.
History is eternal becoming and therefore eternal future; Nature is become and therefore eternally past.[[485]] And here a strange inversion seems to have taken place—the Becoming has lost its priority over the Become. When the intellect looks back from its sphere, the Become, the aspect of life is reversed, the idea of Destiny which carries aim and future in it having turned into the mechanical principle of cause-and-effect of which the centre of gravity lies in the past. The spatially-experienced is promoted to rank above the temporal living, and time is replaced by a length in a spatial world-system. And, since in the creative experience extension follows from direction, the spatial from life, the human understanding imports life as a process into the inorganic space of its imagination. While life looks on space as something functionally belonging to itself, intellect looks upon life as something in space. Destiny asks: “Whither?”, Causality asks: “Whence?” To establish scientifically means, starting from the become and actualized, to search for “causes” by going back along a mechanically-conceived course, that is to say, by treating becoming as a length. But it is not possible to live backwards, only to think backwards. Not Time and Destiny are reversible, but only that which the physicist calls “time” and admits into his formulæ as divisible, and preferably as negative or imaginary quantities.
The perplexity is always there, though it has rarely been seen to be originally and necessarily inherent. In the Classical science the Eleatics, declining to admit the necessity of thinking of Nature as in motion, set up against it the logical view that thinking is a being, with the corollary that known and extended are identical and knowledge and becoming therefore irreconcilable. Their criticisms have not been, and cannot be, refuted. But they did not hinder the evolution of Classical physics, which was a necessary expression of the Apollinian soul and as such superior to logical difficulties. In the “classical” mechanics so-called of the Baroque, founded by Galileo and Newton, an irreproachable solution of the motion-problem on dynamic lines has been sought again and again. The history of the concept of force, which has been stated and restated with all the tireless passion of a thought that feels its own self endangered by a difficulty, is nothing but the history of endeavours to find a form that is unimpeachable, mathematically and conceptually, for motion. The last serious attempt—which failed like the rest, and of necessity—was Hertz’s.
Without discovering the true source of all perplexities (no physicist as yet has done that), Hertz tried to eliminate the notion of force entirely—rightly feeling that error in all mechanical systems has to be looked for in one or another of the basic concepts—and to build up the whole picture of physics on the quantities of time, space and mass. But he did not observe that it is Time itself (which as direction-factor is present in the force-concept) that is the organic element without which a dynamic theory cannot be expressed and with which a clean solution cannot be got. Moreover, quite apart from this, the concepts force, mass and motion constitute a dogmatic unit. They so condition one another that the application of one of them tacitly involves both the others from the outset. The whole Apollinian conception of the motion-problem is implicit in the root-word ἀρχή, the whole Western conception of it in the force-idea. The notion of mass is only the complement of that of force. Newton, a deeply religious nature, was only bringing the Faustian world-feeling to expression when, to elucidate the words “force” and “motion,” he said that masses are points of attack for force and carriers for motion. So the 13th-Century Mystics had conceived of God and his relation to world. Newton no doubt rejected the metaphysical element in his famous saying “hypotheses non fingo,” but all the same he was metaphysical through and through in the founding of his mechanics. Force is the mechanical Nature-picture of western man; what Will is to his soul-picture and infinite Godhead in his world-picture. The primary ideas of this physics stood firm long before the first physicist was born, for they lay in the earliest religious world-consciousness of our Culture.