XI
We have already observed that, like a child, a primitive mankind acquires (as part of the inward experience that is the birth of the ego) an understanding of number and ipso facto possession of an external world referred to the ego. As soon as the primitive’s astonished eye perceives the dawning world of ordered extension, and the significant emerges in great outlines from the welter of mere impressions, and the irrevocable parting of the outer world from his proper, his inner, world gives form and direction to his waking life, there arises in the soul—instantly conscious of its loneliness—the root-feeling of longing (Sehnsucht). It is this that urges “becoming” towards its goal, that motives the fulfilment and actualizing of every inward possibility, that unfolds the idea of individual being. It is the child’s longing, which will presently come into the consciousness more and more clearly as a feeling of constant direction and finally stand before the mature spirit as the enigma of Time—queer, tempting, insoluble. Suddenly, the words “past” and “future” have acquired a fateful meaning.
But this longing which wells out of the bliss of the inner life is also, in the intimate essence of every soul, a dread as well. As all becoming moves towards a having-become wherein it ends, so the prime feeling of becoming—the longing—touches the prime feeling of having-become, the dread. In the present we feel a trickling-away, the past implies a passing. Here is the root of our eternal dread of the irrevocable, the attained, the final—our dread of mortality, of the world itself as a thing-become, where death is set as a frontier like birth—our dread in the moment when the possible is actualized, the life is inwardly fulfilled and consciousness stands at its goal. It is the deep world-fear of the child—which never leaves the higher man, the believer, the poet, the artist—that makes him so infinitely lonely in the presence of the alien powers that loom, threatening in the dawn, behind the screen of sense-phenomena. The element of direction, too, which is inherent in all “becoming,” is felt owing to its inexorable irreversibility to be something alien and hostile, and the human will-to-understanding ever seeks to bind the inscrutable by the spell of a name. It is something beyond comprehension, this transformation of future into past, and thus time, in its contrast with space, has always a queer, baffling, oppressive ambiguity from which no serious man can wholly protect himself.
This world-fear is assuredly the most creative of all prime feelings. Man owes to it the ripest and deepest forms and images, not only of his conscious inward life, but also of the infinitely-varied external culture which reflects this life. Like a secret melody that not every ear can perceive, it runs through the form-language of every true art-work, every inward philosophy, every important deed, and, although those who can perceive it in that domain are the very few, it lies at the root of the great problems of mathematics. Only the spiritually dead man of the autumnal cities—Hammurabi’s Babylon, Ptolemaic Alexandria, Islamic Baghdad, Paris and Berlin to-day—only the pure intellectual, the sophist, the sensualist, the Darwinian, loses it or is able to evade it by setting up a secretless “scientific world-view” between himself and the alien. As the longing attaches itself to that impalpable something whose thousand-formed elusive manifestations are comprised in, rather than denoted by, the word “time,” so the other prime feeling, dread, finds its expression in the intellectual, understandable, outlinable symbols of extension; and thus we find that every Culture is aware (each in its own special way) of an opposition of time and space, of direction and extension, the former underlying the latter as becoming precedes having-become. It is the longing that underlies the dread, becomes the dread, and not vice versa. The one is not subject to the intellect, the other is its servant. The rôle of the one is purely to experience, that of the other purely to know (erleben, erkennen). In the Christian language, the opposition of the two world-feelings is expressed by: “Fear God and love Him.”
In the soul of all primitive mankind, just as in that of earliest childhood, there is something which impels it to find means of dealing with the alien powers of the extension-world that assert themselves, inexorable, in and through space. To bind, to bridle, to placate, to “know” are all, in the last analysis, the same thing. In the mysticism of all primitive periods, to know God means to conjure him, to make him favourable, to appropriate him inwardly. This is achieved, principally, by means of a word, the Name—the “nomen” which designates and calls up the “numen”—and also by ritual practices of secret potency; and the subtlest, as well as the most powerful, form of this defence is causal and systematic knowledge, delimitation by label and number. In this respect man only becomes wholly man when he has acquired language. When cognition has ripened to the point of words, the original chaos of impressions necessarily transforms itself into a “Nature” that has laws and must obey them, and the world-in-itself becomes a world-for-us.[[68]]
The world-fear is stilled when an intellectual form-language hammers out brazen vessels in which the mysterious is captured and made comprehensible. This is the idea of “taboo,”[[69]] which plays a decisive part in the spiritual life of all primitive men, though the original content of the word lies so far from us that it is incapable of translation into any ripe culture-language. Blind terror, religious awe, deep loneliness, melancholy, hate, obscure impulses to draw near, to be merged, to escape—all those formed feelings of mature souls are in the childish condition blurred in a monotonous indecision. The two senses of the word “conjure” (verschwören), meaning to bind and to implore at once, may serve to make clear the sense of the mystical process by which for primitive man the formidable alien becomes “taboo.” Reverent awe before that which is independent of one’s self, things ordained and fixed by law, the alien powers of the world, is the source from which the elementary formative acts, one and all, spring. In early times this feeling is actualized in ornament, in laborious ceremonies and rites, and the rigid laws of primitive intercourse. At the zeniths of the great Cultures those formations, though retaining inwardly the mark of their origin, the characteristic of binding and conjuring, have become the complete form-worlds of the various arts and of religious, scientific and, above all, mathematical thought. The method common to all—the only way of actualizing itself that the soul knows—is the symbolizing of extension, of space or of things; and we find it alike in the conceptions of absolute space that pervade Newtonian physics, Gothic cathedral-interiors and Moorish mosques, and the atmospheric infinity of Rembrandt’s paintings and again the dark tone-worlds of Beethoven’s quartets; in the regular polyhedrons of Euclid, the Parthenon sculptures and the pyramids of Old Egypt, the Nirvana of Buddha, the aloofness of court-customs under Sesostris, Justinian I and Louis XIV, in the God-idea of an Æschylus, a Plotinus, a Dante; and in the world-embracing spatial energy of modern technics.