The Apollinian soul-image—Plato’s biga-team with νοῦς as charioteer—takes to flight at once on the approach of the Magian soul. It is fading out already in the later Stoa, where the principal teachers came predominantly from the Aramaic East, and by the time of the Early Roman Empire, even in the literature of the city itself, it has come to be a mere reminiscence.
The hall-mark of the Magian soul-image is a strict dualism of two mysterious substances, Spirit and Soul. Between these two there is neither the Classical (static) nor the Western (functional) relation, but an altogether differently constituted relation which we are obliged to call merely “Magian” for want of a more helpful term, though we may illustrate it by contrasting the physics of Democritus and the physics of Galileo with Alchemy and the Philosopher’s Stone. On this specifically Middle-Eastern soul-image rests, of inward necessity, all the psychology and particularly the theology with which the “Gothic” springtime of the Arabian Culture (0-300 A.D.) is filled. The Gospel of St. John belongs thereto, and the writings of the Gnostics, the Early Fathers, the Neoplatonists, the Manichæans, and the dogmatic texts in the Talmud and the Avesta; so, too, does the tired spirit of the Imperium Romanum, now expressed only in religiosity and drawing the little life that is in its philosophy from the young East, Syria, and Persia. Even in the 1st Century B.C. the great Posidonius, a true Semite and young-Arabian in spite of the Classical dress of his immense learning, was inwardly sensible of the complete opposition between the Classical life-feeling and this Magian soul-structure which for him was the true one. There is a patent difference of value between a Substance permeating the body and a Substance which falls from the world-cavern into humanity, abstract and divine, making of all participants a Consensus.[[375]] This “Spirit” it is which evokes the higher world, and through this creation triumphs over mere life, “the flesh” and Nature. This is the prime image that underlies all feeling of ego. Sometimes it is seen in religious, sometimes in philosophical, sometimes in artistic guise. Consider the portraits of the Constantinian age, with their fixed stare into the infinite—that look stands for the πνεῦμα. It is felt by Plotinus and by Origen. Paul distinguishes, for example in I Cor., xv, 44, between σῶμα ψυχικόν and σῶμα πνευματικόν. The conception of a double, bodily or spiritual, ecstasy and of the partition of men into lower and higher, psychics and pneumatics, was familiar currency amongst the Gnostics. Late-Classical literature (Plutarch) is full of the dualistic psychology of νοῦς and ψυχή, derived from Oriental sources. It was very soon brought into correlation with the contrast between Christian and Heathen and that between Spirit and Nature, and it issued in that scheme of world-history as man’s drama from Creation to Last Judgment (with an intervention of God as means) which is common to Gnostics, Christians, Persians and Jews alike, and has not even now been altogether overcome.
This Magian soul-image received its rigorously scientific completion in the schools of Baghdad and Basra.[[376]] Alfarabi and Alkindi dealt thoroughly with the problems of this Magian psychology, which to us are tangled and largely inaccessible. And we must by no means underrate its influence upon the young and wholly abstract soul-theory (as distinct from the ego-feeling) of the West. Scholastic and Mystic philosophy, no less than Gothic art, drew upon Moorish Spain, Sicily and the East for many of its forms. It must not be forgotten that the Arabian Culture is the culture of the established revelation-religions, all of which assume a dualistic soul-image. The Kabbala[[377]] and the part played by Jewish philosophers in the so-called mediæval philosophy—i.e., late-Arabian followed by early-Gothic—is well known. But I will only refer here to the remarkable and little-appreciated Spinoza.[[378]] Child of the Ghetto, he is, with his contemporary Schirazi, the last belated representative of the Magian, a stranger in the form-world of the Faustian feeling. As a prudent pupil of the Baroque he contrived to clothe his system in the colours of Western thought, but at bottom he stands entirely under the aspect of the Arabian dualism of two soul-substances. And this is the true and inward reason why he lacked the force-concept of Galileo and Descartes. This concept is the centre of gravity of a dynamic universe and ipso facto is alien to the Magian world-feeling. There is no link between the idea of the Philosopher’s Stone (which is implicit in Spinoza’s idea of Deity as “causa sui”) and the causal necessity of our Nature-picture.[Nature-picture.] Consequently, his determinism is precisely that which the orthodox wisdom of Baghdad had maintained—“Kismet.” It was there that the home of the more geometrico[[379]] method was to be looked for—it is common to the Talmud, the Zend Avesta and the Arabian Kalaam;[[380]] but its appearance in Spinoza’s “Ethics” is a grotesque freak in our philosophy.
Once more this Magian soul-image was to be conjured up, for a moment. German Romanticism found in magic and the tangled thought-threads of Gothic philosophers the same attractiveness as it found in the Crusade-ideals of cloisters and castles, and even more in Saracenic art and poetry—without of course understanding very much of these remote things. Schelling, Oken, Baader, Görres and their circle indulged in barren speculations in the Arabic-Jewish style, which they felt with evident self-satisfaction to be “dark” and “deep”—precisely what, for Orientals, they were not—understanding them but partially themselves and hoping for similar quasi-incomprehension in their audiences. The only noteworthy point in the episode is the attractiveness of obscurity. We may venture the conclusion that the clearest and most accessible conceptions of Faustian thought—as we have it, for instance, in Descartes or in Kant’s “Prolegomena”—would in the same way have been regarded by an Arabian student as nebulous and abstruse. What for us is true, for them is false, and vice versa; and this is valid for the soul-images of the different Cultures as it is for every other product of their scientific thinking.
III
The separation of its ultimate elements is a task that the Gothic world-outlook and its philosophy leaves to the courage of the future. Just as the ornamentation of the cathedral and the primitive contemporary painting still shirk the decision between gold and wide atmosphere in backgrounds—between the Magian and the Faustian aspects of God in Nature—so this early, timid, immature soul-image as it presents itself in this philosophy mingles characters derived from the Christian-Arabian metaphysic and its dualism of Spirit and Soul with Northern inklings of functional soul-forces not yet avowed. This is the discrepance that underlies the conflict concerning the primacy of will or reason, the basic problem of the Gothic philosophy, which men tried to solve now in the old Arabian, now in the new Western sense. It is this myth of the mind—which under ever-changing guises accompanies our philosophy throughout its course—that distinguishes it so sharply from every other. The rationalism of late Baroque, in all the pride of the self-assured city-spirit, decided in favour of the greater power of the Goddess Reason (Kant, the Jacobins); but almost immediately thereafter the 19th Century (Nietzsche above all) went back to the stronger formula Voluntas superior intellectu, and this indeed is in the blood of all of us.[[381]] Schopenhauer, the last of the great systematists, has brought it down to the formula “World as Will and Idea,” and it is only his ethic and not his metaphysic that decides against the Will.
Here we begin to see by direct light the deep foundations and meaning of philosophizing within a Culture. For what we see here is the Faustian soul trying in labour of many centuries to paint a self-portrait, and one, moreover, that is in intimate concordance with its world-portrait. The Gothic world-view with its struggle of will and reason is in fact an expression of the life-feeling of the men of the Crusades, of the Hohenstaufen empire, of the great cathedrals. These men saw the soul thus, because they were thus.
Will and thought in the soul-image correspond to Direction and Extension, History and Nature, Destiny and Causality in the image of the outer world. Both aspects of our basic characters emerge in our prime-symbol which is infinite extension. Will links the future to the present, thought the unlimited to the here. The historic future is distance-becoming, the boundless world-horizon distance-become—this is the meaning of the Faustian depth-experience. The direction-feeling as “Will” and the space-feeling as “Reason” are imagined as entities, almost as legend-figures; and out of them comes the picture that our psychologists of necessity abstract from the inner life.
To call the Faustian Culture a Will-Culture is only another way of expressing the eminently historical disposition of its soul. Our first-person idiom, our “ego habeo factum”—our dynamic syntax, that is—faithfully renders the “way of doing things” that results from this disposition and, with its positive directional energy, dominates not only our picture of the World-as-History but our own history to boot. This first person towers up in the Gothic architecture; the spire is an “I,” the flying buttress is an “I.” And therefore the entire Faustian ethic, from Thomas Aquinas to Kant, is an “excelsior”—fulfilment of an “I,” ethical work upon an “I,” justification of an “I” by faith and works; respect of the neighbour “Thou” for the sake of one’s “I” and its happiness; and, lastly and supremely, immortality of the “I.”
Now this, precisely this, the genuine Russian regards as contemptible vain-glory. The Russian soul, will-less, having the limitless plane as its prime-symbol,[[382]] seeks to grow up—serving, anonymous, self-oblivious—in the brother-world of the plane. To take “I” as the starting-point of relations with the neighbour, to elevate “I” morally through “I’s” love of near and dear, to repent for “I’s” own sake, are to him traits of Western vanity as presumptuous as is the upthrusting challenge to heaven of our cathedrals that he compares with his plane church-roof and its sprinkling of cupolas. Tolstoi’s hero Nechludov looks after his moral “I” as he does after his finger-nails; this is just what betrays Tolstoi as belonging to the pseudomorphosis of Petrinism. But Raskolnikov is only something in a “we.” His fault is the fault of all,[[383]] and even to regard his sin as special to himself is pride and vanity. Something of the kind underlies the Magian soul-image also. “If any man come to me,” says Jesus (Luke xiv, 26), “and hate not his father and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, yea, and his own life (τὴν ἑαυτοῦ ψυχήν) also,[[384]] he cannot be my disciple”; and it is the same feeling that makes him call himself by the title that we mistranslate “Son of Man.”[[385]] The Consensus of the Orthodox too is impersonal and condemns “I” as a sin. So too with the—truly Russian—conception of truth as the anonymous agreement of the elect.