Arabian thinkers of the ripest period—and they included minds of the very first order like Alfarabi and Alkabi—in controverting the ontology of Aristotle, proved that the body as such did not necessarily assume space for existence, and deduced the essence of this space—the Arabian kind of extension, that is—from the characteristic of “one’s being in a position.”
But this does not prove that as against Aristotle and Kant they were in error or that their thinking was muddled (as we so readily say of what our own brains cannot take in). It shows that the Arabian spirit possessed other world-categories than our own. They could have rebutted Kant, or Kant them, with the same subtlety of proof—and both disputants would have remained convinced of the correctness of their respective standpoints.
When we talk of space to-day, we are all thinking more or less in the same style, just as we are all using the same languages and word-signs, whether we are considering mathematical space or physical space or the space of painting or that of actuality, although all philosophizing that insists (as it must) upon putting an identity of understanding in the place of such kinship of significance-feeling must remain somewhat questionable. But no Hellene or Egyptian or Chinaman could re-experience any part of those feelings of ours, and no artwork or thought-system could possibly convey to him unequivocally what “space” means for us. Again, the prime conceptions originated in the quite differently constituted soul of the Greek, like ἀρχή, ὕλη, μορφἠ, comprise the whole content of his world. But this world is differently constituted from ours. It is, for us, alien and remote. We may take these words of Greek and translate them by words of our own like “origin,” “matter” and “form,” but it is mere imitation, a feeble effort to penetrate into a world of feeling in which the finest and deepest elements, in spite of all we can do, remain dumb; it is as though one tried to set the Parthenon sculptures for a string quartet, or cast Voltaire’s God in bronze. The master-traits of thought, life and world-consciousness are as manifold and different as the features of individual men; in those respects as in others there are distinctions of “races” and “peoples,” and men are as unconscious of these distinctions as they are ignorant of whether “red” and “yellow” do or do not mean the same for others as for themselves. It is particularly the common symbolic of language that nourishes the illusion of a homogeneous constitution of human inner-life and an identical world-form; in this respect the great thinkers of one and another Culture resemble the colour-blind in that each is unaware of his own condition and smiles at the errors of the rest.
And now I draw the conclusions. There is a plurality of prime symbols. It is the depth-experience through which the world becomes, through which perception extends itself to world. Its signification is for the soul to which it belongs and only for that soul, and it is different in waking and dreaming, acceptance and scrutiny, as between young and old, townsmen and peasant, man and woman. It actualizes for every high Culture the possibility of form upon which that Culture’s existence rests and it does so of deep necessity. All fundamentals words like our mass, substance, material, thing, body, extension (and multitudes of words of the like order in other culture-tongues) are emblems, obligatory and determined by destiny, that out of the infinite abundance of world-possibilities evoke in the name of the individual Culture those possibilities that alone are significant and therefore necessary for it. None of them is exactly transferable just as it is into the experiential living and knowing of another Culture. And none of these prime words ever recurs. The choice of prime symbol in the moment of the Culture-soul’s awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil—a moment that for one who can read world-history thus contains something catastrophic—decides all.
Culture, as the soul’s total expression “become” and perceptible in gestures and works, as its mortal transient body, obnoxious to law, number and causality:
As the historical drama, a picture in the whole picture of world-history:
As the sum of grand emblems of life, feeling and understanding:
—this is the language through which alone a soul can tell of what it undergoes.
The macrocosm, too, is a property of the individual soul; we can never know how it stands with the soul of another. That which is implied by “infinite space,” the space that “passeth all understanding,” which is the creative interpretation of depth-experience proper and peculiar to us men of the West—the kind of extension that is nothingness to the Greeks, the Universe to us—dyes our world in a colour that the Classical, the Indian and the Egyptian souls had not on their palettes. One soul listens to the world-experience in A flat major, another in F minor; one apprehends it in the Euclidean spirit, another in the contrapuntal, a third in the Magian spirit. From the purest analytical Space and from Nirvana to the most somatic reality of Athens, there is a series of prime symbols each of which is capable of forming a complete world out of itself. And, as the idea of the Babylonian or that of the Indian world was remote, strange and elusive for the men of the five or six Cultures that followed, so also the Western world will be incomprehensible to the men of Cultures yet unborn.