VIII
The term “habit” (Habitus) is used of a plant to signify the special way, proper to itself, in which it manifests itself, i.e., the character, course and duration of its appearance in the light-world where we can see it. By its habit each kind is distinguished, in respect of each part and each phase of its existence, from all examples of other species. We may apply this useful notion of “habit” in our physiognomic of the grand organisms and speak of the habit of the Indian, Egyptian or Classical Culture, history or spirituality. Some vague inkling of it has always, for that matter, underlain the notion of style, and we shall not be forcing but merely clearing and deepening that word if we speak of the religious, intellectual, political, social or economic style[[93]] of a Culture. This “habit” of existence in space, which covers in the case of the individual man action and thought and conduct and disposition, embraces in the case or the existence of whole Cultures the totality of life-expressions of the higher order. The choice of particular branches of art (e.g., the round and fresco by the Hellenes, counterpoint and oil-painting by the West) and the out-and-out rejection of others (e.g., of plastic by the Arabs); inclination to the esoteric (India) or the popular (Greece and Rome); preference for oratory (Classical) or for writing (China, the West) as the form of spiritual communication, are all style-manifestations, and so also are the various types of costume, of administration, of transport, of social courtesies. All great personalities of the Classical world form a self-contained group, whose spiritual habit is definitely different from that of all great men of the Arabian or the Western groups. Compare even Goethe and Raphael with Classical men, and Heraclitus, Sophocles, Plato, Alcibiades, Themistocles, Horace and Tiberius rank themselves together instantly as members of one family. Every Classical Cosmopolis—from Hiero’s Syracuse to Imperial Rome the embodiment and sense-picture of one and the same life-feeling—differs radically in lay-out and street-plan, in the language of its public and private architecture, in the type of its squares, alleys, courts, façades, in its colour, noises, street-life and night-life, from the group of Indian or that of Arabian or that of Western world-cities. Baghdad and Cairo could be felt in Granada long after the conquest; even Philip II’s Madrid had all the physiognomic hall-marks of modern London and Paris. There is a high symbolism in every dissimilarity of this sort. Contrast the Western tendency to straight-lined perspectives and street-alignments (such as the grand tract of the Champs-Elysées from the Louvre, or the Piazza before St. Peter’s) with the almost deliberate complexity and narrowness of the Via Sacra, the Forum Romanum and the Acropolis, whose parts are arranged without symmetry and with no perspective. Even the town-planning—whether darkly as in the Gothic or consciously as in the ages of Alexander and Napoleon—reflects the same principle as the mathematic—in the one case the Leibnizian mathematic of infinite space, in the other the Euclidean mathematic of separate bodies.[[94]] But to the “habit” of a group belong, further, its definite life-duration and its definite tempo of development. Both of these are properties which we must not fail to take into account in a historical theory of structure. The rhythm (Takt) of Classical existence was different from that of Egyptian or Arabian; and we can fairly speak of the andante of Greece and Rome and the allegro con brio of the Faustian spirit.
The notion of life-duration as applied to a man, a butterfly, an oak, a blade of grass, comprises a specific time-value, which is quite independent of all the accidents of the individual case. Ten years are a slice of life which is approximately equivalent for all men, and the metamorphosis of insects is associated with a number of days exactly known and predictable in individual cases. For the Romans the notions of pueritia, adolescentia, iuventus, virilitas, senectus possessed an almost mathematically precise meaning. Without doubt the biology of the future will—in opposition to Darwinism and to the exclusion in principle of causal fitness-motives for the origins of species—take these pre-ordained life durations as the starting-point for a new enunciation of its problem.[[95]] The duration of a generation—whatever may be its nature—is a fact of almost mystical significance.
Now, such relations are valid also, and to an extent never hitherto imagined, for all the higher Cultures. Every Culture, every adolescence and maturing and decay of a Culture, every one of its intrinsically necessary stages and periods, has a definite duration, always the same, always recurring with the emphasis of a symbol. In the present work we cannot attempt to open up this world of most mysterious connexions, but the facts that will emerge again and again as we go on will tell us of themselves how much lies hidden here. What is the meaning of that striking fifty-year period, the rhythm of the political, intellectual and artistic “becoming” of all Cultures?[[96]] Of the 300-year period of the Baroque, of the Ionic, of the great mathematics, of Attic sculpture, of mosaic painting, of counterpoint, of Galileian mechanics? What does the ideal life of one millennium for each Culture mean in comparison with the individual man’s "three-score years and ten"? As the plant’s being is brought to expression in form, dress and carriage by leaves, blossoms, twigs and fruit, so also is the being of a Culture manifested by its religious, intellectual, political and economic formations. Just as, say, Goethe’s individuality discourses of itself in such widely-different forms as the Faust, the Farbenlehre, the Reineke Fuchs, Tasso, Werther, the journey to Italy and the Friederike love, the Westöstliche Diwan and the Römische Elegien; so the individuality of the Classical world displays itself in the Persian wars, the Attic drama, the City-State, the Dionysia and not less in the Tyrannis, the Ionic column, the geometry of Euclid, the Roman legion, and the gladiatorial contests and “panem et circenses” of the Imperial age.
In this sense, too, every individual being that has any sort of importance recapitulates,[[97]] of intrinsic necessity, all the epochs of the Culture to which it belongs. In each one of us, at that decisive moment when he begins to know that he is an ego, the inner life wakens just where and just how that of the Culture wakened long ago. Each of us men of the West, in his child’s day-dreams and child’s play, lives again its Gothic—the cathedrals, the castles, the hero-sagas, the crusader’s “Dieu le veult,” the soul’s oath of young Parzival. Every young Greek had his Homeric age and his Marathon. In Goethe’s Werther, the image of a tropic youth that every Faustian (but no Classical) man knows, the springtime of Petrarch and the Minnesänger reappears. When Goethe blocked out the Urfaust,[[98]] he was Parzival; when he finished Faust I, he was Hamlet, and only with Faust II did he become the world-man of the 19th Century whom Byron could understand. Even the senility of the Classical—the faddy and unfruitful centuries of very late Hellenism, the second-childhood of a weary and blasé intelligence—can be studied in more than one of its grand old men. Thus, much of Euripides’ Bacchæ anticipates the life-outlook, and much of Plato’s Timæus the religious syncretism of the Imperial age; and Goethe’s Faust II and Wagner’s Parsifal disclose to us in advance the shape that our spirituality will assume in our next (in point of creative power our last) centuries.
Biology employs the term homology of organs to signify morphological equivalence in contradistinction to the term analogy which relates to functional equivalence. This important, and in the sequel most fruitful, notion was conceived by Goethe (who was led thereby to the discovery of the “os intermaxillare” in man) and put into strict scientific shape by Owen;[[99]] this notion also we shall incorporate in our historical method.
It is known that for every part of the bone-structure of the human head an exactly corresponding part is found in all vertebrated animals right down to the fish, and that the pectoral fins of fish and the feet, wings and hands of terrestrial vertebrates are homologous organs, even though they have lost every trace of similarity. The lungs of terrestrial, and the swim-bladders of aquatic animals are homologous, while lungs and gills on the other hand are analogous—that is, similar in point of use.[[100]] And the trained and deepened morphological insight that is required to establish such distinctions is an utterly different thing from the present method of historical research, with its shallow comparisons of Christ and Buddha, Archimedes and Galileo, Cæsar and Wallenstein, parcelled Germany and parcelled Greece. More and more clearly as we go on, we shall realize what immense views will offer themselves to the historical eye as soon as the rigorous morphological method has been understood and cultivated. To name but a few examples, homologous forms are: Classical sculpture and West European orchestration, the Fourth Dynasty pyramids and the Gothic cathedrals, Indian Buddhism and Roman Stoicism (Buddhism and Christianity are not even analogous); the periods of “the Contending States” in China, the Hyksos in Egypt and the Punic Wars; the age of Pericles and the age of the Ommayads; the epochs of the Rigveda, of Plotinus and of Dante. The Dionysiac movement is homologous with the Renaissance, analogous to the Reformation. For us, "Wagner is the résumé of modernity," as Nietzsche rightly saw; and the equivalent that logically must exist in the Classical modernity we find in Pergamene art. (Some preliminary notion of the fruitfulness of this way of regarding history, may be gathered from studying the tables included in this volume.)
The application of the “homology” principle to historical phenomena brings with it an entirely new connotation for the word “contemporary.” I designate as contemporary two historical facts that occur in exactly the same—relative—positions in their respective Cultures, and therefore possess exactly equivalent importance. It has already been shown how the development of the Classical and that of the Western mathematic proceeded in complete congruence, and we might have ventured to describe Pythagoras as the contemporary of Descartes, Archytas of Laplace, Archimedes of Gauss. The Ionic and the Baroque, again, ran their course contemporaneously. Polygnotus pairs in time with Rembrandt, Polycletus with Bach. The Reformation, Puritanism and, above all, the turn to Civilization appear simultaneously in all Cultures; in the Classical this last epoch bears the names of Philip and Alexander, in our West those of the Revolution and Napoleon. Contemporary, too, are the building of Alexandria, of Baghdad, and of Washington; Classical coinage and our double-entry book-keeping; the first Tyrannis and the Fronde; Augustus and Shih-huang-ti;[[101]] Hannibal and the World War.
I hope to show that without exception all great creations and forms in religion, art, politics, social life, economy and science appear, fulfil themselves and die down contemporaneously in all the Cultures; that the inner structure of one corresponds strictly with that of all the others; that there is not a single phenomenon of deep physiognomic importance in the record of one for which we could not find a counterpart in the record of every other; and that this counterpart is to be found under a characteristic form and in a perfectly definite chronological position. At the same time, if we are to grasp such homologies of facts, we shall need to have a far deeper insight and a far more critical attitude towards the visible foreground of things than historians have hitherto been wont to display; who amongst them, for instance, would have allowed himself to dream that the counterpart of Protestantism was to be found in the Dionysiac movement, and that English Puritanism was for the West what Islam was for the Arabian world?
Seen from this angle, history offers possibilities far beyond the ambitions of all previous research, which has contented itself in the main with arranging the facts of the past so far as these were known (and that according to a one-line scheme)—the possibilities, namely, of
Overpassing the present as a research-limit, and predetermining the spiritual form, duration, rhythm, meaning and product of the still unaccomplished stages of our western history; and
Reconstructing long-vanished and unknown epochs, even whole Cultures of the past, by means of morphological connexions, in much the same way as modern palæontology deduces far-reaching and trustworthy conclusions as to skeletal structure and species from a single unearthed skull-fragment.
It is possible, given the physiognomic rhythm, to recover from scattered details of ornament, building, script, or from odd political, economic and religious data, the organic characters of whole centuries of history, and from known elements on the scale of art-expression, to find corresponding elements on the scale of political forms, or from that of mathematical forms to read that of economic. This is a truly Goethian method—rooted in fact in Goethe’s conception of the prime phenomenon—which is already to a limited extent current in comparative zoology, but can be extended, to a degree hitherto undreamed of, over the whole field of history.
CHAPTER IV
THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY
II
THE IDEA OF DESTINY AND THE PRINCIPLE
OF CAUSALITY