III
Now, the tendency of human thought (which is always causally disposed) to reduce the image of Nature to the simplest possible quantitative form-units that can be got by causal reasoning, measuring and counting—in a word, by mechanical differentiation—leads necessarily in Classical, Western and every other possible physics, to an atomic theory. Of Indian and Chinese science we know hardly more than the fact they once existed, and the Arabian is so complicated that even now it seems to defy presentation. But we do know our own and the Apollinian sciences well enough to observe, here too, a deeply symbolical opposition.
The Classical atoms are miniature forms, the Western minimal quanta, and quanta, too, of energy. On the one hand perceptibility, sensuous nearness, and on the other, abstractness are the basic conditions of the idea. The atomistic notions of modern physics—which include not only the Daltonian or “chemical” atom but also the electrons[[477]] and the quanta of thermodynamics—make more and more demands upon that truly Faustian power of inner vision which many branches of higher mathematics (such as the Non-Euclidean geometries and the Theory of Groups) postulate, and which is not at the disposal of laymen. A quantum of action is an extension-element conceived without regard to sensible quality of any kind, which eludes all relation with sight and touch, for which the expression “shape” has no meaning whatever—something therefore which would be utterly inconceivable to a Classical researcher. Such, already, were Leibniz’s “Monads”[[478]] and such, superlatively, are the constituents of Rutherford’s picture of the atom as positively-charged nucleus with planetary negative electrons, and of the picture that Niels Bohr has imagined by working these in with the “quanta” of Planck.[[479]] The atoms of Leucippus and Democritus were different in form and magnitude, that is to say, they were purely plastic units, “indivisible,” as their name asserts, but only plastically indivisible. The atoms of Western physics, for which “indivisibility” has quite another meaning, resemble the figures and themes of music; their being or essence consisting in vibration and radiation, and their relation to the processes of Nature being that of the “motive” to the “movement.”[[480]] Classical physics examines the aspect, Western the working, of these ultimate elements in the picture of the Become; in the one, the basic notions are notions of stuff and form, in the other they are notions of capacity and intensity.
There is a Stoicism and there is a Socialism of the atom, the words describing the static-plastic and the dynamic-contrapuntal ideas of it respectively. The relations of these ideas to the images of the corresponding ethics is such that every law and every definition takes these into account. On the one hand—Democritus’s multitude of confused atoms, put there, patient, knocked about by the blind chance that he as well as Sophocles called ἀνάγκη, hunted like Œdipus. On the other hand—systems of abstract force-points working in unison, aggressive, energetically dominating space (as “field”), overcoming resistances like Macbeth. The opposition of basic feelings makes that of the mechanical Nature-pictures. According to Leucippus the atoms fly about in the void “of themselves”; Democritus merely regards shock and countershock as a form of change of place. Aristotle explains individual movements as accidental, Empedocles speaks of love and hate, Anaxagoras of meetings and partings. All these are elements also of Classical tragedy; the figures on the Attic stage are related to one another just so. Further, and logically, they are the elements of Classical politics. There we have minute cities, political atoms ranged along coasts and on islands, each jealously standing for itself, yet ever needing support, shut-in and shy to the point of absurdity, buffeted hither and thither by the planless orderless happenings of Classical history, rising to-day and ruined to-morrow. And in contrast—the dynastic states of our 17th and 18th Centuries, political fields of force, with cabinets and great diplomats as effective centres of purposeful direction and comprehensive vision. The spirit of Classical history and the spirit of Western history can only be really understood by considering the two souls as an opposition. And we can say the same of the atom-idea, regarded as the basis of the respective physics. Galileo who created the concept of force and the Milesians who created that of ἀρχή, Democritus and Leibniz, Archimedes and Helmholtz, are “contemporaries,” members of the same intellectual phases of quite different Cultures.
But the inner relationship between atom-theory and ethic goes further. It has been shown how the Faustian soul—whose being consists in the overcoming of presence, whose feeling is loneliness and whose yearning is infinity—puts its need of solitude, distance and abstraction into all its actualities, into its public life, its spiritual and its artistic form-worlds alike. This pathos of distance (to use Nietzsche’s expression) is peculiarly alien to the Classical, in which everything human demanded nearness, support and community. It is this that distinguishes the spirit of the Baroque from that of the Ionic, the culture of the Ancien Régime from that of Periclean Athens. And this pathos, which distinguishes the heroic doer from the heroic sufferer, appears also in the picture of Western physics as tension. It is tension that is missing in the science of Democritus; for in the principle of shock and countershock it is denied by implication that there is a force commanding space and identical with space. And, correspondingly, the element of Will is absent from the Classical soul-image. Between Classical men, or states, or views of the world, there was—for all the quarrelling and envy and hatred—no inner tension, no deep and urging need of distance, solitude, ascendancy; and consequently there was none between the atoms of the Cosmos either. The principle of tension (developed in the potential theory), which is wholly untranslatable into Classical tongues and incommunicable to Classical minds, has become for Western physics fundamental. Its content follows from the notion of energy, the Will-to-Power in Nature, and therefore it is for us just as necessary as for the Classical thought it is impossible.
IV
Every atomic theory, therefore, is a myth and not an experience. In it the Culture, through the contemplative-creative power of its great physicists, reveals its inmost essence and very self. It is only a preconceived idea of criticism that extension exists in itself and independently of the form-feeling and world-feeling of the knower. The thinker, in imagining that he can cut out the factor of Life, forgets that knowing is related to the known as direction is to extension and that it is only through the living quality of direction that what is felt extends into distance and depth and becomes space. The cognized structure of the extended is a projection of the cognizing being.
We have already[[481]] shown the decisive importance of the depth-experience, which is identical with the awakening of a soul and therefore with the creation of the outer world belonging to that soul. The mere sense-impression contains only length and breadth, and it is the living and necessary act of interpretation—which, like everything else living, possesses direction, motion and irreversibility (the qualities that our consciousness synthesizes in the word Time)—that adds depth and thereby fashions actuality and world. Life itself enters into the experiences as third dimension. The double meaning of the word “far,” which refers both to future and to horizon, betrays the deeper meaning of this dimension, through which extension as such is evoked. The Becoming stiffens and passes and is at once the Become; Life stiffens and passes and is at once the three-dimensional Space of the known. It is common ground for Descartes and Parmenides that thinking and being, i.e., imagined and extended, are identical. “Cogito, ergo sum” is simply the formulation of the depth-experience—I cognize, and therefore I am in space. But in the style of this cognizing, and therefore of the cognition-product, the prime-symbol of the particular Culture comes into play. The perfected extension of the Classical consciousness is one of sensuous and bodily presence. The Western consciousness achieves extension, after its own fashion, as transcendental space, and as it thinks its space more and more transcendentally it develops by degrees the abstract polarity of Capacity and Intensity that so completely contrasts with the Classical visual polarity of Matter and Form.
But it follows from this that in the known there can be no reappearance of living time. For this has already passed into the known, into constant “existence,” as Depth, and hence duration (i.e., timelessness) and extension are identical. Only the knowing possesses the mark of direction. The application of the word “time” to the imaginary and measurable time-dimension of physics is a mistake. The only question is whether it is possible or not to avoid the mistake. If one substitutes the word “Destiny” for “time” in any physical enunciation, one feels at once that pure Nature does not contain Time. The form-world of physics extends just as far as the cognate form-world of number and notion extend, and we have seen that (notwithstanding Kant) there is not and cannot be the slightest relation of any sort between mathematical number and Time. And yet this is controverted by the fact of motion in the picture of the world-around. It is the unsolved and unsolvable problem of the Eleatics—being (or thinking) and motion are incompatible; motion “is” not (is only “apparent”).
And here, for the second time, Natural science becomes dogmatic and mythological. The words Time and Destiny, for anyone who uses them instinctively, touch Life itself in its deepest depths—life as a whole, which is not to be separated from lived-experience. Physics, on the other hand—i.e., the observing Reason—must separate them. The livingly-experienced “in-itself,” mentally emancipated from the act of the observer and become object, dead, inorganic, rigid, is now “Nature,” something open to exhaustive mathematical treatment. In this sense the knowledge of Nature is an activity of measurement. All the same, we live even when we are observing and therefore the thing we are observing lives with us. The element in the Nature-picture in virtue of which it not merely from moment to moment is, but in a continuous flow with and around us becomes, is the copula of the waking-consciousness and its world. This element is called movement, and it contradicts Nature as a picture, but it represents the history of this picture. And therefore, as precisely as Understanding is abstracted (by means of words) from feeling and mathematical space from light-resistances (“things”[[482]]), so also physical “time” is abstracted from the impression of motion.