[5]. Contrast with this the fact, symbolically of the highest importance and unparalleled[unparalleled] in art-history, that the Hellenes, though they had before their eyes the works of the Mycenæan Age and their land was only too rich in stone, deliberately reverted to wood; hence the absence of architectural remains of the period 1200-600. The Egyptian plant-column was from the outset of stone, whereas the Doric column was wooden, a clear indication of the intense antipathy of the Classical soul towards duration.
[6]. Is there any Hellenic city that ever carried out one single comprehensive work that tells of care for future generations? The road and water systems which research has assigned to the Mycenæan—i.e., the pre-Classical—age fell into disrepair and oblivion from the birth of the Classical peoples—that is, from the Homeric period. It is a remarkably curious fact, proved beyond doubt by the lack of epigraphic remains, that the Classical alphabet did not come into use till after 900, and even then only to a limited extent and for the most pressing economic needs. Whereas in the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Mexican and the Chinese Cultures the formation of a script begins in the very twilight of dawn, whereas the Germans made themselves a Runic alphabet and presently developed that respect for writing as such which led to the successive refinements of ornamental calligraphy, the Classical primitives were entirely ignorant of the numerous alphabets that were current in the South and the East. We possess numerous inscriptions of Hittite Asia Minor and of Crete, but not one of Homeric Greece. (See Vol. II, pp. 180 et seq.)
[7]. From Homer to the tragedies of Seneca, a full thousand years, the same handful of myth-figures (Thyestes, Clytæmnestra, Heracles and the like) appear time after time without alteration, whereas in the poetry of the West, Faustian Man figures, first as Parzeval or Tristan, then (modified always into harmony with the epoch) as Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and eventually Faust or Werther, and now as the hero of the modern world-city romance, but is always presented in the atmosphere and under the conditions of a particular century.
[8]. It was about 1000 A.D. and therefore contemporaneously with the beginning of the Romanesque style and the Crusades—the first symptoms of a new Soul—that Abbot Gerbert (Pope Sylvester II), the friend of the Emperor Otto III, invented the mechanism of the chiming wheel-clock. In Germany too, the first tower-clocks made their appearance, about 1200, and the pocket watch somewhat later. Observe the significant association of time measurement with the edifices of religion.
[9]. Newton’s choice of the name “fluxions” for his calculus was meant to imply a standpoint towards certain metaphysical notions as to the nature of time. In Greek mathematics time figures not at all.
[10]. Here the historian is gravely influenced by preconceptions derived from geography, which assumes a Continent of Europe, and feels himself compelled to draw an ideal frontier corresponding to the physical frontier between “Europe” and “Asia.” The word “Europe” ought to be struck out of history. There is historically no “European” type, and it is sheer delusion to speak of the Hellenes as “European Antiquity” (were Homer and Heraclitus and Pythagoras, then, Asiatics?) and to enlarge upon their “mission” as such. These phrases express no realities but merely a sketchy interpretation of the map. It is thanks to this word “Europe” alone, and the complex of ideas resulting from it, that our historical consciousness has come to link Russia with the West in an utterly baseless unity—a mere abstraction derived from the reading of books—that has led to immense real consequences. In the shape of Peter the Great, this word has falsified the historical tendencies of a primitive human mass for two centuries, whereas the Russian instinct has very truly and fundamentally divided “Europe” from “Mother Russia” with the hostility that we can see embodied in Tolstoi, Aksakov or Dostoyevski. “East” and “West” are notions that contain real history, whereas “Europe” is an empty sound. Everything great that the Classical world created, it created in pure denial of the existence of any continental barrier between Rome and Cyprus, Byzantium and Alexandria. Everything that we imply by the term European Culture came into existence between the Vistula and the Adriatic and the Guadalquivir and, even if we were to agree that Greece, the Greece of Pericles, lay in Europe, the Greece of to-day certainly does not.
[11]. See Vol. II, pp. 31, 175.
[12]. Windelband, Gesch. d. Phil. (1903), pp. 275 ff.
[13]. In the New Testament the polar idea tends to appear in the dialectics of the Apostle Paul, while the periodic is represented by the Apocalypse.
[14]. As we can see from the expression, at once desperate and ridiculous, “newest time” (neueste Zeit).