I
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE
SPACE-PROBLEM
CHAPTER V
MAKROKOSMOS
I
THE SYMBOLISM OF THE WORLD-PICTURE AND THE SPACE-PROBLEM
I
The notion of a world-history of physiognomic type expands itself therefore into the wider idea of an all-embracing symbolism. Historical research, in the sense that we postulate here, has simply to investigate the picture of the once-living past and to determine its inner form and logic, and the Destiny-idea is the furthest limit to which it can penetrate. But this research, however comprehensive the new orientation tends to make it, cannot be more than a fragment and a foundation of a still wider treatment. Parallel with it, we have a Nature-investigation that is equally fragmentary and is limited to its own causal system of relations. But neither tragic nor technical “motion” (if we may distinguish by these words the respective bases of the lived and the known) exhausts the living itself. We both live and know when we are awake, but, in addition, we live when mind and senses are asleep. Though night may close every eye, the blood does not sleep. We are moving in the moving (so at least we try to indicate, by a word borrowed from science, the inexpressible that in sleep-hours we feel with inward certainty). But it is only in the waking existence that “here” and “there” appear as an irreducible duality. Every impulse proper to oneself has an expression and every impulse alien to oneself makes an impression. And thus everything of which we are conscious, whatever the form in which it is apprehended—“soul” and “world,” or life and actuality, or History and Nature, or law and feeling, Destiny or God, past and future or present and eternity—has for us a deeper meaning still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which regards everything whatsoever as having significance as a symbol.
Symbols are sensible signs, final, indivisible and, above all, unsought impressions of definite meaning. A symbol is a trait of actuality that for the sensuously-alert man has an immediate and inwardly-sure significance, and that is incommunicable by process of reason. The detail of a Doric or Early-Arabic or Early-Romanesque ornament; the forms of the cottage and the family, of intercourse, of costume and rite; the aspect, gait and mien of a man and of whole classes of peoples and men; the communication-and community-forms of man and beast; and beyond all this the whole voiceless language of Nature with her woods and pastures, flocks, clouds, stars, moonlight and thunderstorm, bloom and decay, nearness and distance—all this is the emblematical impression of the Cosmos upon us, who are both aware and in our reflective hours quite capable of listening to this language. Vice versa, it is the sense of a homogeneous understanding that raises up the family, the class, the tribe, or finally the Culture, out of the general humanity and assembles it as such.
Here, then, we shall not be concerned with what a world “is,” but with what it signifies to the being that it envelops. When we wake up, at once something extends itself between a “here” and a “there.” We live the “here” as something proper, we experience the “there” as something alien. There is a dualizing of soul and world as poles of actuality; and in the latter there are both resistances which we grasp causally as things and properties, and impulses in which we feel beings, numina (“just like ourselves”) to be operative. But there is in it, further, something which, as it were, eliminates the duality. Actuality—the world in relation to a soul—is for every individual the projection of the Directed upon the domain of the Extended—the Proper mirroring itself on the Alien; one’s actuality then signifies oneself. By an act that is both creative and unconscious—for it is not “I” who actualize the possible, but “it” actualizes itself through me—the bridge of symbol is thrown between the living “here” and “there.” Suddenly, necessarily, and completely “the” world comes into being out of the totality of received and remembered elements: and as it is an individual who apprehends the world, there is for each individual a singular world.
There are therefore as many worlds as there are waking beings and like-living, like-feeling groups of beings. The supposedly single, independent and external world that each believes to be common to all is really an ever-new, uniquely-occurring and non-recurring experience in the existence of each.