Above all, this is manifested in the bizarre hypotheses of atomic disintegration which elucidate the phenomena of radioactivity, and according to which uranium atoms that have kept their essence unaltered, in spite of all external influences, for millions of years and then suddenly without assignable cause explode, scattering their smallest particles over space with velocities of thousands of kilometres per second. Only a few individuals in an aggregate of radioactive atoms are struck by Destiny thus, the neighbours being entirely unaffected. Here too, then, is a picture of history and not “Nature,” and although statistical methods here also prove to be necessary, one might almost say that in them mathematical number has been replaced by chronological.[[527]]
With ideas like these, the mythopoetic force of the Faustian soul is returning to its origins. It was at the outset of the Gothic, just at the time when the first mechanical clocks were being built, that the myth of the world’s end, Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, arose. It may be that, like all the reputedly old-German myths Ragnarök (whether in the Völuspa form or as the Christian Muspilli) was modelled more or less on Classical and particularly Christian-Apocalyptic motives. Nevertheless, it is the expression and symbol of the Faustian and of no other soul. The Olympian college is historyless, it knows no becoming, no epochal moments, no aim. But the passionate thrust into distance is Faustian. Force, Will, has an aim, and where there is an aim there is for the inquiring eye an end. That which the perspective of oil-painting expressed by means of the vanishing point, the Baroque park by its point de vue, and analysis by the nth term of an infinite series—the conclusion, that is, of a willed directedness—assumes here the form of the concept. The Faust of the Second Part is dying, for he has reached his goal. What the myth of Götterdämmerung signified of old, the irreligious form of it, the theory of Entropy, signifies to-day—world’s end as completion of an inwardly necessary evolution.
XV
It remains now to sketch the last stage of Western science. From our standpoint of to-day, the gently-sloping route of decline is clearly visible.
This too, the power of looking ahead to inevitable Destiny, is part of the historical capacity that is the peculiar endowment of the Faustian. The Classical died, as we shall die, but it died unknowing. It believed in an eternal Being and to the last it lived its days with frank satisfaction, each day spent as a gift of the gods. But we know our history. Before us there stands a last spiritual crisis that will involve all Europe and America. What its course will be, Late Hellenism tells us. The tyranny of the Reason—of which we are not conscious, for we are ourselves its apex—is in every Culture an epoch between man and old-man, and no more. Its most distinct expression is the cult of exact sciences, of dialectic, of demonstration, of causality. Of old the Ionic, and in our case the Baroque were its rising limb, and now the question is what form will the down-curve assume?
In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical Alexandrianism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new element of inwardness will arise to overthrow the will-to-victory of science. Exact science must presently fall upon its own keen sword. First, in the 18th Century, its methods were tried out, then, in the 19th, its powers, and now its historical rôle is critically reviewed. But from Skepsis there is a path to “second religiousness,” which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect.
The individual renounces by laying aside books. The Culture renounces by ceasing to manifest itself in high scientific intellects. But science exists only in the living thought of great savant-generations, and books are nothing if they are not living and effective in men worthy of them. Scientific results are merely items of an intellectual tradition. It constitutes the death of a science that no one any longer regards it as an event, and an orgy of two centuries of exact scientific-ness brings satiety. Not the individual, the soul of the Culture itself has had enough, and it expresses this by putting into the field of the day ever smaller, narrower and more unfruitful investigators. The great century of the Classical science was the third, after the death of Aristotle; when Archimedes died and the Romans came, it was already almost at its end. Our great century has been the 19th. Savants of the calibre of Gauss and Humboldt and Helmholtz were already no more by 1900. In physics as in chemistry, in biology as in mathematics, the great masters are dead, and we are now experiencing the decrescendo of brilliant gleaners who arrange, collect and finish-off like the Alexandrian scholars of the Roman age. Everything that does not belong to the matter-of-fact side of life—to politics, technics or economics—exhibits the common symptom. After Lysippus no great sculptor, no artist as man-of-destiny, appears, and after the Impressionists no painter, and after Wagner no musician. The age of Cæsarism needed neither art nor philosophy. To Eratosthenes and Archimedes, true creators, succeed Posidonius and Pliny, collectors of taste, and finally Ptolemy and Galen, mere copyists. And, just as oil-painting and instrumental music ran through their possibilities in a few centuries, so also dynamics, which began to bud about 1600, is to-day in the grip of decay.
But before the curtain falls, there is one more task for the historical Faustian spirit, a task not yet specified, hitherto not even imagined as possible. There has still to be written a morphology of the exact sciences, which shall discover how all laws, concepts and theories inwardly hang together as forms and what they have meant as such in the life-course of the Faustian Culture. The re-treatment of theoretical physics, of chemistry, of mathematics as a sum of symbols—this will be the definitive conquest of the mechanical world-aspect by an intuitive, once more religious, world-outlook, a last master-effort of physiognomic to break down even systematic and to absorb it, as expression and symbol, into its own domain. One day we shall no longer ask, as the 19th Century asked, what are the valid laws underlying chemical affinity or diamagnetism—rather, we shall be amazed indeed that minds of the first order could ever have been completely preoccupied by questions such as these. We shall inquire whence came these forms that were prescribed for the Faustian spirit, why they had to come to our kind of humanity particularly and exclusively, and what deep meaning there is in the fact that the numbers that we have won became phenomenal in just this picture-like disguise. And, be it said, we have to-day hardly yet an inkling of how much in our reputedly objective values and experiences is only disguise, only image and expression.
The separate sciences—epistemology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy—are approaching one another with acceleration, converging towards a complete identity of results. The issue will be a fusion of the form-worlds, which will present on the one hand a system of numbers, functional in nature and reduced to a few ground-formulæ, and on the other a small group of theories, denominators to those numerators, which in the end will be seen to be myths of the springtime under modern veils, reducible therefore—and at once of necessity reduced—to picturable and physiognomically significant characters that are the fundamentals. This convergence has not yet been observed, for the reason that since Kant—indeed, since Leibniz—there has been no philosopher who commanded the problems of all the exact sciences.
Even a century ago, physics and chemistry were foreign to one another, but to-day they cannot be handled separately—witness spectrum analysis, radioactivity, radiation of heat. Fifty years ago the essence of chemistry could still be described almost without mathematics, and to-day the chemical elements are in course of volatilizing themselves into the mathematical constants of variable relation-complexes, and with the sense-comprehensibility of the elements goes the last trace of magnitude as the term is Classically and plastically understood. Physiology is becoming a chapter of organic chemistry and is making use of the methods of the Infinitesimal Calculus. The branch of the older physics—distinguished, according to the bodily senses concerned in each, as acoustics, optics and heat—have melted into a dynamic of matter and a dynamic of the æther, and these again can no longer keep their frontiers mathematically clear. The last discussions of epistemology are now uniting with those of higher analysis and theoretical physics to occupy an almost inaccessible domain, the domain to which, for example, the theory of Relativity belongs or ought to belong. The sign-language in which the emanation-theory of radioactivity expresses itself is completely de-sensualized.