The tragic in Napoleon’s life—which still awaits discovery by a poet great enough to comprehend it and shape it—was that he, who rose into effective being by fighting British policy and the British spirit which that policy so eminently represented, completed by that very fighting the continental victory of this spirit, which thereupon became strong enough, in the guise of “liberated nations” to overpower him and to send him to St. Helena to die. It was not Napoleon who originated the expansion principle. That had arisen out of the Puritanism of Cromwell’s milieu which called into life the British Colonial Empire.[[167]] Transmitted through the English-schooled intellects of Rousseau and Mirabeau to the Revolutionary armies, of which English philosophical ideas were essentially the driving force, it became their tendency even from that day of Valmy which Goethe alone read aright. It was not Napoleon who formed the idea, but the idea that formed Napoleon, and when he came to the throne he was obliged to pursue it further against the only power, England namely, whose purpose was the same as his own. His Empire was a creation of French blood but of English style. It was in London, again, that Locke, Shaftesbury, Samuel Clarke and, above all, Bentham built up the theory of “European Civilization”—the Western Hellenism—which Bayle, Voltaire and Rousseau carried to Paris. Thus it was in the name of this England of Parliamentarianism, business morality and journalism that Valmy, Marengo, Jena, Smolensk and Leipzig were fought, and in all these battles it was the English spirit that defeated the French Culture of the West.[[168]] The First Consul had no intention of incorporating West Europe in France; his primary object was—note the Alexander-idea on the threshold of every Civilization!—to replace the British Colonial Empire by a French one. Thereby, French preponderance in the Western culture-region would have been placed on a practically unassailable foundation; it would have been the Empire of Charles V on which the sun never set, but managed from Paris after all, in spite of Columbus and Philip, and organized as an economic-military instead of as an ecclesiastical-chivalric unit. So far-reaching, probably, was the destiny that was in Napoleon. But the Peace of Paris in 1763 had already decided the question against France, and Napoleon’s great plans time and again came to grief in petty incidents. At Acre a few guns were landed in the nick of time from the British warships: there was a moment, again, just before the signature of the Peace of Amiens, when the whole Mississippi basin was still amongst his assets and he was in close touch with the Maratha powers that were resisting British progress in India; but again a minor naval incident[[169]] obliged him to abandon the whole of a carefully-prepared enterprise: and, lastly, when by the occupation of Dalmatia, Corfu and all Italy he had made the Adriatic a French lake, with a view to another expedition to the East, and was negotiating with the Shah of Persia for action against India, he was defeated by the whims of the Tsar Alexander, who at times was undoubtedly willing to support a march on India and whose aid would infallibly have secured its success. It was only after the failure of all extra-European combinations that he chose, as his ultima ratio in the battle against England, the incorporation of Germany and Spain, and so, raising against himself his own English-Revolutionary ideas, the very ideas of which he had been the vehicle,[[170]] he took the step that made him “no longer necessary.”
At one time it falls to the Spanish spirit to outline, at another to the British or the French to remould, the world-embracing colonial system. A “United States of Europe,” actualized through Napoleon as founder of a romantic and popular military monarchy, is the analogue of the Realm of the Diadochi; actualized as a 21st-Century economic organism by a matter-of-fact Cæsar, it is the counterpart of the imperium Romanum. These are incidentals, but they are in the picture of history. But Napoleon’s victories and defeats (which always hide a victory of England and Civilization over Culture), his Imperial dignity, his fall, the Grande Nation, the episodic liberation of Italy (in 1796, as in 1859, essentially no more than a change of political costume for a people long since become insignificant), the destruction of the Gothic ruin of the Roman-German Empire, are mere surface phenomena, behind which is marching the great logic of genuine and invisible History, and it was in the sense of this logic that the West, having fulfilled its French-formed Culture in the ancien régime, closed it off with the English Civilization. As symbols of “contemporary” epochal moments, then, the storming of the Bastille, Valmy, Austerlitz, Waterloo and the rise of Prussia correspond to the Classical-history facts of Chæronea, Gaugamela (Arbela), Alexander’s Indian expedition and the Roman victory of Sentinum.[[171]] And we begin to understand that in wars and political catastrophies—the chief material of our historical writings—victory is not the essence of the fight nor peace the aim of a revolution.
X
Anyone who has absorbed these ideas will have no difficulty in understanding how the causality principle is bound to have a fatal effect upon the capacity for genuinely experiencing History when, at last, it attains its rigid form in that “late” condition of a Culture to which it is proper and in which it is able to tyrannize over the world-picture. Kant, very wisely, established causality as a necessary form of knowledge, and it cannot be too often emphasized that this was meant to refer exclusively to the understanding of man’s environment by the way of reason. But while the word “necessary” was accepted readily enough, it has been overlooked that this limitation of the principle to a single domain of knowledge is just what forbids its application to the contemplation and experiencing of living history. Man-knowing and Nature-knowing are in essence entirely incapable of being compared, but nevertheless the whole Nineteenth Century was at great pains to abolish the frontier between Nature and History in favour of the former. The more historically men tried to think, the more they forgot that in this domain they ought not to think. In forcing the rigid scheme of a spatial and anti-temporal relation of cause and effect upon something alive, they disfigured the visible face of becoming with the construction-lines of a physical nature-picture, and, habituated to their own late, megalopolitan and causally-thinking milieu, they were unconscious of the fundamental absurdity of a science that sought to understand an organic becoming by methodically misunderstanding it as the machinery of the thing-become. Day is not the cause of night, nor youth of age, nor blossom of fruit. Everything that we grasp intellectually has a cause, everything that we live organically with inward certitude has a past. The one recognizes the case, that which is generally possible and has a fixed inner form which is the same whenever and wherever and however often it occurs, the other recognizes the event which once was and will never recur. And, according as we grasp something in our envelope-world critically and consciously or physiognomically and involuntarily, we draw our conclusion from technical or from living experience, and we relate it to a timeless cause in space or to a direction which leads from yesterday to to-day and to-morrow.
But the spirit of our great cities refuses to be involuntary. Surrounded by a machine-technique that it has itself created in surprising Nature’s most dangerous secret, the “law,” it seeks to conquer history also technically, “theoretically and practically.” “Usefulness,” suitableness to purpose (Zweckmässigkeit), is the great word which assimilates the one to the other. A materialist conception of history, ruled by laws of causal Nature, leads to the setting up of usefulness-ideals such as “enlightenment,” “humanity,” “world-peace,” as aims of world-history, to be reached by the “march of progress.” But in these schemes of old age the feeling of Destiny has died, and with it the young reckless courage that, self-forgetful and big with a future, presses on to meet a dark decision.
For only youth has a future, and is Future, that enigmatic synonym of directional Time and of Destiny. Destiny is always young. He who replaces it by a mere chain of causes and effects, sees even in the not-yet-actualized something, as it were, old and past—direction is wanting. But he who lives towards a something in the superabundant flow of things need not concern himself with aims and abilities, for he feels that he himself is the meaning of what is to happen. This was the faith in the Star that never left Cæsar nor Napoleon nor the great doers of another kind; and this it is that lies deepest of all—youthful melancholy notwithstanding—in every childhood and in every young clan, people, Culture, that extends forward over all their history for men of act and of vision, who are young however white their hair, younger even than the most juvenile of those who look to a timeless utilitarianism. The feeling of a significance in the momentarily present world-around discloses itself in the earliest days of childhood, when it is still only the persons and things of the nearest environment that essentially exist, and develops through silent and unconscious experience into a comprehensive picture. This picture constitutes the general expression of the whole Culture as it is at the particular stage, and it is only the fine judge of life and the deep searcher of history who can interpret it.
At this point a distinction presents itself between the immediate impression of the present and the image of the past that is only presented in the spirit, in other words between the world as happening and the world as history. The eye of the man of action (statesman and general) appreciates the first, that of the man of contemplation (historian and poet) the second. Into the first one plunges practically to do or to suffer; chronology,[[172]] that great symbol of irrevocable past, claims the second. We look backwards, and we live forward towards the unforeseen, but even in childhood our technical experience soon introduces into the image of the singular occurrence elements of the foreseeable, that is, an image of regulated Nature which is subject not to physiognomic fact but to calculation. We apprehend a “head of game” as a living entity and immediately afterwards as food; we see a flash of lightning as a peril and then as an electrical discharge. And this second, later, petrifying projection of the world more and more tends to overpower the first in the Megalopolis; the image of the past is mechanized and materialized and from it is deduced a set of causal rules for present and future. We come to believe in historical laws and in a rational understanding of them.
Nevertheless science is always natural science. Causal knowledge and technical experience refer only to the become, the extended, the comprehended. As life is to history, so is knowledge (Wissen) to Nature, viz., to the sensible world apprehended as an element, treated as in space and subjected to the law of cause and effect. Is there, then, a science of History at all? To answer this question, let us remember that in every personal world-picture, which only approximates more or less to the ideal picture, there is both something of Nature and something of History. No Nature is without living, and no History without causal, harmonies. For within the sphere of Nature, although two like experiments, conformably to law, have the like result, yet each of these experiments is a historical event possessing a date and not recurring. And within that of History, the dates or data of the past (chronologies, statistics, names, forms[[173]]) form a rigid web. “Facts are facts” even if we are unaware of them, and all else is image, Theoria, both in the one domain and in the other. But history is itself the condition of being “in the focus” and the material is only an aid to this condition, whereas in Nature the real aim is the winning of the material, and theory is only the servant of this purpose.
There is, therefore, not a science of history but an ancillary science for history, which ascertains that which has been. For the historical outlook itself the data are always symbols. Scientific research, on the contrary, is science and only science. In virtue of its technical origin and purpose it sets out to find data and laws of the causal sort and nothing else, and from the moment that it turns its glance upon something else it becomes Metaphysics, something trans-scientific. And just because this is so, historical and natural-science data are different. The latter consistently repeat themselves, the former never. The latter are truths, the former facts. However closely related incidentals and causals may appear to be in the everyday picture, fundamentally they belong to different worlds. As it is beyond question that the shallowness of a man’s history-picture (the man himself, therefore) is in proportion to the dominance in it of frank incidentals, so it is beyond question that the emptiness of written history is in proportion to the degree in which it makes the establishment of purely factual relations its object. The more deeply a man lives History, the more rarely will he receive “causal” impressions and the more surely will he be sensible of their utter insignificance. If the reader examines Goethe’s writings in natural science, he will be astounded to find how “living nature” can be set forth without formulas, without laws, almost without a trace of the causal. For him, Time is not a distance but a feeling. But the experience of last and deepest things is practically denied to the ordinary savant who dissects and arranges purely critically and allows himself neither to contemplate nor to feel. In the case of History, on the contrary, this power of experience is the requisite. And thus is justified the paradox that the less a historical researcher has to do with real science, the better it is for his history.
To elucidate once more by a diagram: