VI
With this it becomes manifest that the physical notion of Necessity, too, has a religious origin. It must not be forgotten that the mechanical necessity that rules in what our intellects comprehend as Nature is founded upon another necessity which is organic and fateful in Life itself. The latter creates, the former restricts. One follows from inward certitude, the other from demonstration; that is the distinction between tragic and technical, historical and physical logic.
There are, further, differences within the necessity postulated and assumed by science (that of cause-and-effect) which have so far eluded the keenest sight. We are confronted here with a question at once of very great difficulty and of superlative importance. A Nature-knowledge is (however philosophy may express the relation) a function of knowing, which is in each case knowing in a particular style. A scientific necessity therefore has the style of the appropriate intellect, and this brings morphological differences into the field at once. It is possible to see a strict necessity in Nature even where it may be impossible to express it in natural laws. In fact natural laws, which for us are self-evidently the proper expression-form in science, are not by any means so for the men of other Cultures. They presuppose a quite special form, the distinctively Faustian form, of understanding and therefore of Nature-knowing. There is nothing inherently absurd in the conception of a mechanical necessity wherein each individual case is morphologically self-contained and never exactly reproduced, in which therefore the acquisitions of knowledge cannot be put into consistently-valid formulæ. In such a case Nature would appear (to put it metaphorically) as an unending decimal that was also non-recurring, destitute of periodicity. And so, undoubtedly, it was conceived by Classical minds—the feeling of it manifestly underlies their primary physical concepts. For example, the proper motion of Democritus’s atoms is such as to exclude any possibility of calculating motions in advance.
Nature-laws are forms of the known in which an aggregate of individual cases are brought together as a unit of higher degree. Living Time is ignored—that is, it does not matter whether, when or how often the case arises, for the question is not of chronological sequence but of mathematical consequence.[[486]] But in the consciousness that no power in the world can shake this calculation lies our will to command over Nature. That is Faustian. It is only from this standpoint that miracles appear as breaches of the laws of Nature. Magian man saw in them merely the exercise of a power that was not common to all, not in any way a contradiction of the laws of Nature. And Classical man, according to Protagoras, was only the measure and not the creator of things—a view that unconsciously forgoes all conquest of Nature through the discovery and application of laws.
We see, then, that the causality-principle, in the form in which it is self-evidently necessary for us—the agreed basis of truth for our mathematics, physics and philosophy—is a Western and, more strictly speaking, a Baroque phenomenon. It cannot be proved, for every proof set forth in a Western language and every experiment conducted by a Western mind presupposes itself. In every problem, the enunciation contains the proof in germ. The method of a science is the science itself. Beyond question, the notion of laws of Nature and the conception of physics as “scientia experimentalis,”[[487]] which has held ever since Roger Bacon, contains a priori this specific kind of necessity. The Classical mode of regarding Nature—the alter ego of the Classical mode of being—on the contrary, does not contain it, and yet it does not appear that the scientific position is weakened in logic thereby. If we work carefully through the utterances of Democritus, Anaxagoras, and Aristotle (in whom is contained the whole sum of Classical Nature-speculation), and, above all, if we examine the connotations of key-terms like ἀλλοίωσις, ἀνάγκη, ἐντελέχεια, we look with astonishment into a world-image totally unlike our own. This world-image is self-sufficing and therefore, for this definite sort of mankind, unconditionally true. And causality in our sense plays no part therein.
The alchemist or philosopher of the Arabian Culture, too, assumes a necessity within his world-cavern that is utterly and completely different from the necessity of dynamics. There is no causal nexus of law-form but only one cause, God, immediately underlying every effect. To believe in Nature-laws would, from this standpoint, be to doubt the almightiness of God. If a rule seems to emerge, it is because it pleases God so; but to suppose that this rule was a necessity would be to yield to a temptation of the Devil. This was the attitude also of Carneades, Plotinus and the Neo-Pythagoreans.[[488]] This necessity underlies the Gospels as it does the Talmud and the Avesta, and upon it rests the technique of alchemy.
The conception of number as function is related to the dynamic principle of cause-and-effect. Both are creations of the same intellect, expression-forms of the same spirituality, formative principles of the same objectivized and “become” Nature. In fact the physics of Democritus differs from the physics of Newton in that the chosen starting-point of the one is the optically-given while that of the other is abstract relations that have been deduced from it. The “facts” of Apollinian Nature-knowledge are things, and they lie on the surface of the known, but the facts of Faustian science are relations, which in general are invisible to lay eyes, which have to be mastered intellectually, which require for their communication a code-language that only the expert researcher can fully understand. The Classical, static, necessity is immediately evident in the changing phenomena, while the dynamic causation-principle prevails beyond things and its tendency is to weaken, or to abolish even, their sensible actuality. Consider, for example, the world of significance that is connected, under present-day hypotheses, with the expression “a magnet.”
The principle of the Conservation of Energy, which since its enunciation by J. R. Mayer has been regarded in all seriousness as a plain conceptual necessity, is in fact a redescription of the dynamic principle of causality by means of the physical concept of force. The appeal to “experience,” and the controversy as to whether judgment is necessary or empirical—i.e., in the language of Kant (who greatly deceived himself about the highly-fluid boundaries between the two), whether it is a priori or a posteriori certain—are characteristically Western. Nothing seems to us more self-evident and unambiguous than “experience” as the source of exact science. The Faustian experiment, based on working hypotheses and employing the methods of measurement, is nothing but the systematic and exhaustive exploitation of this “experience.” But no one has noticed that a whole world-view is implicit in such a concept of “experience” with its aggressive dynamic connotation, and that there is not and cannot be “experience” in this pregnant sense for men of other Cultures. When we decline to recognize the scientific results of Anaxagoras or Democritus as experiential results, it does not mean that these Classical thinkers were incapable of interpreting and merely threw off fancies, but that we miss in their generalizations that causal element which for us constitutes experience in our sense of the word. Manifestly, we have never yet given adequate thought to the singularity of this, the pure Faustian, conception of experience. The contrast between it and faith is obvious—and entirely superficial. For indeed exact sensuous-intellectual experience is in point of structure completely congruent with that heart-experience (as we may well call it), that illumination which deep religious natures of the West (Pascal, for instance, whom one and the same necessity made mathematician and Jansenist) have known in the significant moments of their being. Experience means to us an activity of the intellect, which does not resignedly confine itself to receiving, acknowledging and arranging momentary and purely present impressions, but seeks them out and calls them up in order to overcome them in their sensuous presence and to bring them into an unbounded unity in which their sensuous discreteness is dissolved. Experience in our sense possesses the tendency from particular to infinite. And for that very reason it is in contradiction with the feeling of Classical science. What for us is the way to acquire experience is for the Greek the way to lose it. And therefore he kept away from the drastic method of experiment; therefore his physics, instead of being a mighty system of worked-out laws and formulæ that strong-handedly override the sense-present (“only knowledge is power”), is an aggregate of impressions—well ordered, intensified by sensuous imagery, clean-edged—which leaves Nature intact in its self-completeness. Our exact Natural science is imperative, the Classical is θεωρία in the literal sense, the result of passive contemplativeness.