[385]. Barnasha. The underlying idea is not the filial relation, but an impersonal coming-up in the field of mankind.
[386]. ἐθέλω and βούλομαι imply, to have the intention, or wish, or inclination (βουλή means counsel, council, plan, and ἐθέλω has no equivalent noun). Voluntas is not a psychological concept but, like potestas and virtus, a thoroughly Roman and matter-of-fact designation for a practical, visible and outward asset—substantially, the mass of an individual’s being. In like case, we use the word energy. The “will” of Napoleon is something very different from the energy of Napoleon, being, as it were, lift in contrast to weight. We must not confuse the outward-directed intelligence, which distinguishes the Romans as civilized men from the Greeks as cultured men, with “will” as understood here. Cæsar is not a man of will in the Napoleonic sense. The idioms of Roman law, which represent the root-feeling of the Roman soul far better than those of poetry, are significant in this regard. Intention in the legal sense is animus (animus occidendi); the wish, directed to some criminal end, is dolus as distinct from the unintended wrongdoing (culpa). Voluntas is nowhere used as a technical term.
[387]. The Chinese soul “wanders” in its world. This is the meaning of the East-Asiatic perspective, which places the vanishing point in the middle of the picture instead of in the depth as we do. The function of perspective is to subject things to the “I,” which in ordering comprehends them; and it is a further indication that “will”—the claim to command the world—is absent from the Classical make-up that its painting denies the perspective background. In Chinese perspective as in Chinese technique (see Vol. II, p. 627), directional energy is wanting, and it would not be illegitimate to call East-Asiatic perspective, in contrast with the powerful thrust into depth of our landscape-painting, a perspective of “Tao”; for the world-feeling indicated by that word is unmistakably the operative element in the picture.
[388]. Obviously, atheism is no exception to this. When a Materialist or Darwinian speaks of a “Nature” that orders everything, that effects selections, that produces and destroys anything, he differs only to the extent of one word from the 18th-Century Deist. The world-feeling has undergone no change.
[389]. Lines 525-534:
ΧΟ. τούτων ἄρα Ζεύς ἐστιν ἀσθενέστερος;
ΠΡ. οὔκουν ἂν ἐκφύγοι[ἂν ἐκφύγοι] γε τὴν πεπρωμένην, etc.—Tr.
[390]. Iliad, XXII, 208-215.—Tr.
[391]. The great part played by learned Jesuits in the development of theoretical physics must not be overlooked. Father Boscovich, with his system of atomic forces (1759), made the first serious advance beyond Newton. The idea of the equivalence of God and pure space is even more evident in Jesuit work than it is in that of the Jansenists of Port Royal with whom Descartes and Pascal were associated.
(Boscovich’s atomic theory is discussed by James Clerk Maxwell in Ency. Brit., XI ed., XVIII, 655—a reference that, for more general reasons, no student of the Faustian-as-scientist should fail to follow up.—Tr.)