HOUSTON STEWART CHAMBERLAIN
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Volume
I, page I—CII. Introduction
CONTENTS
FOUNDATIONS
OF THE
NINETEENTH
CENTURY
BY HOUSTON STEWART
CHAMBERLAIN
A TRANSLATION
FROM THE GERMAN
BY JOHN LEES,
M.A., D.LIT. (EDIN.)
WITH AN
INTRODUCTION
BY LORD REDESDALE,
G.C.V.O., K.C.B., ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES:
VOLUME I
LONDON:
JOHN
LANE,
THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY: MCMXII
First Impression
November
1910
Second Impression
January
1912
Printed by BALLANTYNE
& CO. LIMITED
Tavistock Street, Covent
Garden, London
v
INTRODUCTION
SOME ten years ago
there appeared in Germany a work of the highest importance which at
once
arrested the attention of the literary world, and was speedily declared
to be one of the masterpieces of the century. The deep learning, the
sympathy
with knowledge in its most various forms, a style sometimes playful,
sometimes
ironical, always persuasive, always logical, pages adorned with
brilliant
passages of the loftiest eloquence — these features were a passport to
immediate recognition. Three editions were exhausted in as many years,
and now when it has gone through eight editions, and, in spite of the
expense
of the two bulky volumes, no fewer than sixty thousand copies have been
sold in Germany, it is surely time that England should see the book
clothed
in the native language of its author.
Houston Stewart
Chamberlain
was born at Southsea in 1855, the son of Admiral William Charles
Chamberlain.
Two of his uncles were generals in the English army, a third was the
well-known
Field-Marshal Sir
Neville Chamberlain. His mother was a daughter of
Captain
Basil Hall, R.N.,
whose travels were the joy of the boyhood of my
generation,
while his scientific observations
vi INTRODUCTION
won for him the honour of Fellowship
of the Royal Society. Captain Basil Hall's father, Sir
James Hall, was
himself eminent in science, being the founder of experimental geology.
As a man of science therefore (and natural science was his first love),
Houston Chamberlain may be regarded as an instance of atavism, or, to
use
the hideous word coined by Galton,
“eugenics.”
His education was
almost entirely foreign. It began in a Lycée at Versailles.
Being
destined for the army he was afterwards sent to Cheltenham College: but
the benign cruelty of fate intervened; his health broke down, he was
removed
from school, and all idea of entering the army was given up: and so it
came to pass that the time which would have been spent upon mastering
the
goose-step and the subtleties of drill was devoted under the direction
of an eminent German tutor, Herr Otto Kuntze, to sowing the seed of
that
marvellous harvest of learning and scholarship the full fruit of which,
in the book before us, has ripened for the good of the world. After a
while
he went to Geneva, where under Vogt, Graebe, Müller Argovensis,
Thury,
Plantamour and other great professors he studied systematic botany,
geology,
astronomy, and later the anatomy and physiology of the human body. But
the strain of work was too great and laid too heavy a tax upon his
strength;
so, for a time at any rate, natural science had to be abandoned and he
migrated to Dresden, a forced change which was another blessing in
disguise;
for at Dresden he plunged heart and soul into the mysterious depths of
the Wagnerian music and philosophy, the metaphysical works of the
master
probably exercising as strong an influence upon him as the musical
dramas.
vii INTRODUCTION
Chamberlain's first
published work was in French, Notes sur Lohengrin. This was
followed
by various essays in German on Wagnerian subjects: but they were not a
success, and so, disgusted with the petty jealousies and unrealities of
art-criticism, he fell back once more upon natural science and left
Dresden
for Vienna, where he placed himself under the guidance of Professor
Wiesner.
Again the miseries of health necessitated a change. Out of the wreck of
his botanical studies he saved the materials for his Recherches sur
la sève ascendante, a recognised authority among continental
botanists, and natural science was laid aside, probably for ever.
Happily the spell
of the great magician was upon him. In 1892 there appeared Das
Drama Richard Wagners, which, frozen almost out of existence at
first (five copies were sold in the twelvemonth, of which the author
was
himself the buyer), has since run into four greedily purchased
editions.
Then came that fine book, the Life of Wagner, which has been
translated
into English by Mr. Hight, and Chamberlain's reputation was made, to be
enhanced by the colossal success of the Grundlagen des Neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts
which followed in 1899. Naturally enough, criticism was not spared. The
book was highly controversial and no doubt lent itself to some
misunderstanding:
moreover the nationality of the author could hardly fail to be in a
sense
provocative of some slight jealousy or even hostility. One critic did
not
hesitate to accuse him of plagiarism — plagiarism, above all, from
Richard
Wagner, the very man whose disciple and historian he was proud to be,
whose
daughter he was; years afterwards, to marry. But this attack is one for
which Chamberlain might well be thankful,
viii INTRODUCTION
for it gave him the chance, in the
preface
to the third edition, of showing all his skill in fence, a skill proof
even against the coup de Jarnac. His answer to his critics on
his
theory of Race, and his criticism of Delitzsch in the preface to the
fourth
edition are fine pieces of polemical writing.
What is the Book?
How should it be defined? Is it history, a philosophical treatise, a
metaphysical
inquiry? I confess, I know not: probably it is all three. I am neither
an historian, alas! nor a philosopher, nor a metaphysician. To me the
book
has been a simple delight — the companion of months — fulfilling the
highest
function of which a teacher is capable, that of awakening thought and
driving
it into new channels. That is the charm of the book. The charm of the
man
is his obviously transparent truthfulness. Anything fringing upon fraud
is abhorrent to him, something to be scourged with scorpions. As in one
passage he himself says, the enviable gift of lying has been denied to
him. Take his answer to Professor Delitzsch's famous pamphlet Babel
und Bibel, to which I have alluded above.
No writer is so
dangerous
as the really learned scholar who uses his learning, as a special
pleader
might, in support of that which is not true. Now, Professor Delitzsch
is
an authority in Assyriology and the knowledge of the cuneiform
inscriptions.
The object of his brilliant and cleverly named pamphlet was to arouse
interest
in the researches of the German Orientalischer Verein. in this sense
any
discovery which can be brought into line with the story of the Old
Testament
is an engine the price of which is above pearls. Accordingly, Professor
Delitzsch, eager to furnish proof of Semitic monotheism,
ix INTRODUCTION
brings out the statement that the
Semitic
tribes of Canaan which, at the time of Khammurabi, two thousand years
before
Christ, flooded Assyria, were worshippers of one God, and that the name
of that God was Jahve (Jehovah), and in support of that statement he
translates
the inscriptions on two tablets, or fragments of tablets, in the
British
Museum. Now it must be obvious to the poorest intelligence that an
obscure
script like that in the cuneiform character can only be read with any
approach
to certainty where there is the Opportunity of comparison, that is to
say,
where the same groups of wedges or arrowheads, as they used to be
called,
are found repeated in various connections: even so, the patience and
skill
which have been spent upon deciphering the inscriptions, from the days
of Hincks and Rawlinson until now, are something phenomenal. Where a
proper
name occurs only once, the difficulty is increased a hundredfold. Yet
this
did not deter Delitzsch from making his astounding monotheistic
assertion
on the strength of an arbitrary interpretation of a single example of a
group of signs, which signs moreover are capable of being read, as is
proved
by the evidence of the greatest Assyriologists, in six if not eleven
different
ways. Truly a fine case for doctors to disagree upon! Chamberlain, with
that instinctive shying at a fraud which distinguishes him, at once
detected
the imposition. He is no Assyriologist, but his work brings him into
contact
with the masters of many crafts, and so with the pertinacity of a
sleuth-hound
he runs the lie to earth. In a spirit of delicate banter, through which
the fierce indignation of the truth-lover often pierces, he tears the
imposture
to tatters; his attack is a fighting masterpiece, to which I cannot but
x INTRODUCTION
allude, if only in the sketchiest way,
as giving a good example of Chamberlain's methods. So much for Tablet
No.
I.
The interpretation
of the second tablet upon which Professor Delitzsch reads the solemn
declaration
“Jahve is God” fares no better at our author's hands; for he brings
forward
two unimpeachable witnesses, Hommel and König, who declare that
Delitzsch
has misread the signs which really signify “The moon is God.”
It is well known
— a fact scientifically proved by much documentary evidence — that
Khammurabi
and his contemporaries were worshippers of the sun, the moon and the
stars;
the name of his father was Sin-mubalit, “the moon gives life,” his son
was Shamshuiluna, “the sun is our God.” But no evidence is sufficient
to
check Professor Delitzsch's enthusiasm over his monotheistic
Khammurabi!
That much in the deciphering of Assyrian inscriptions is to a great
extent
problematical is evident. One thing, however, is certain in these
readings
of Professor Delitzsch: in the face of the authority of other men of
learning,
his whole fabric, “a very Tower of Babel, but built on paper, crumbles
to pieces; and instead of the pompously announced, unsuspected aspect
of
the growth of monotheism, nothing remains to us but a surely very
unexpected
insight into the workshop of lax philology and fanciful
history-mongering.”
It seems to me that
Khammurabi has been made a victim in this controversy. Even if he was a
worshipper of the sun and the stars and the moon, he was, unless we
ignorant
folk have been cruelly misled, a very great man: for he appears to have
been the first king who recognised the fact that if a people has duties
to its
xi INTRODUCTION
sovereign, the sovereign on the other
hand has duties to his people — and that, for a monarch who reigned so
many centuries before Moses, must be admitted to show a very high sense
of kingly responsibility. But Delitzsch, in trying to prove too much,
has
done him the dis-service of exposing him to what almost amounts to a
sneer
from the Anti-Semites. I have submitted what I have written above to
Dr.
Budge of the British Museum, who authorises me to say that he concurs
in
Chamberlain's views of Professor Delitzsch's translation.
But it is time that
we should leave these battles of the learned in order to consider the
scheme,
the scope and the conduct of the book. To write the story of the
Foundations
of the Nineteenth Century was a colossal task, for which the strength
of
a literary Hercules would alone be of any avail. Mr. Chamberlain,
however,
has brought to the undertaking such a wealth of various knowledge and
reading,
set out with unrivalled dialectical power, that even those who may
disagree
with some of his conclusions must perforce incline themselves before
the
presence of a great master. That his book should be popular with those
scholars who are wedded to old traditions was not to be expected. He
has
shattered too many idols, dispelled too many dearly treasured
illusions.
And the worst of it is that the foundations of his beliefs — perhaps I
should rather say of his disbeliefs — are built upon rocks so solid
that
they will defy the cunningest mines that can be laid against them. This
is no mere “chronicle of ruling houses, no record of butcheries.” It is
the story of the rise of thought, of religion, of poetry, of learning,
of civilisation, of art; the story of all those elements of which the
complex
life of the Indo-European
xii INTRODUCTION
of to-day is composed — the story of
what he calls “Der Germane.”
And here let me
explain
once for all what Chamberlain means by “Der Germane”: obviously not the
German, for that would have been “Der Deutsche.” To some people the
name
may be misleading; but he has adopted it, and I may have to use it
again,
so let us take his own explanation of it. In this term he includes the
Kelts, the Germans, the Slavs, and all those races of northern Europe
from
which the peoples of modern Europe have sprung (evidently also the
people
of the United States of America). The French are not specifically
mentioned,
but it is clear from more than one passage that they too are included.
As indeed how should they be left out? Yet it strikes one almost as a
paradox
to find Louis XIV. claimed as a “genuine Germane” for resisting the
encroachments
of the Papacy, and bearding the Pope as no other Catholic sovereign
ever
did; and blamed as a Germane false to his “Germanentum” for his
shameless
persecution of the Protestants! In the Germane, then, he describes the
dominant race of the nineteenth century. Strange indeed is the
beginning
of the history of that race.
Far away in Asia,
behind the great mountain fastnesses of India, in times so remote that
even tradition and fable are silent about them, there dwelt a race of
white
men. They were herdsmen, shepherds, tillers of the soil, poets and
thinkers.
They were called Aryas — noblemen or householders — and from them are
descended
the dominant caste of India, the Persians, and the great nations of
Europe.
The history of the Aryan migrations, their dates, their causes, is lost
in the clouds of a mysterious
xiii
INTRODUCTION
past. All that we know is that there
were at least three great wanderings: two southward to India and
Persia,
one, or perhaps several, across the great Asiatic continent to Europe.
What drove these highly gifted people from their farms and pastures?
Was
it the search for change of climate? Was it pressure from the Mongols?
There are some reasons for supposing that religious dissent may have
had
something to do with it. For instance, the evil spirits of the
Zendavesta,
the scriptures of the Zoroastrians are the gods of the Rigveda, the
sacred
poems of the Indian Aryans, and vice versa. Be that as it may,
wherever
the Aryans went they became masters. The Greek, the Latin, the Kelt,
the
Teuton, the Slav — all these were Aryans: of the aborigines of the
countries
which they overran, scarcely a trace remains. So, too, in India it was
“Varna,” colour, which distinguished the white conquering Arya from the
defeated black man, the Dasyu, and so laid the foundation of caste. It
is to the Teuton branch of the Aryan family that the first place in the
world belongs, and the story of the Nineteenth Century is the story of
the Teuton's triumph.
While by no means
ignoring, or failing to throw light upon, the Assyrian or Egyptian
civilisations,
this all-embracing book ascribes the laying of the Foundations of the
Nineteenth
Century to the life-work of three peoples: two of these, the Greek and
Roman, being of Aryan extraction, the third, the Jew, Semitic.
Of Greek poetry and
art Chamberlain writes with all the passionate rapture of a lover.
“Every
inch of Greek soil is sacred.” Homer, the founder of a religion, the
maker
of gods, stands on a pinnacle by himself. He was, as it were, the
Warwick
of Olympus. “That any
xiv INTRODUCTION
one should have doubted the existence
of the poet Homer will not give to future generations a favourable
impression
of the perspicacity of our times.” It is just a hundred years since
Wolf
started his theory that there was no such poet as Homer — that the Iliad
and Odyssey were a parcel of folk-songs of many dates and many
poets
pasted together. By whom? asks Chamberlain. Why are there no more such
“able editors”? Is it paste that is lacking or brain-paste? Schiller at
once denounced the idea as “simply barbarous” and proclaimed Wolf to be
a “stupid devil.” Goethe at first was caught by the idea, but when he
examined
the poems more closely, from the point of view of the poet, recanted,
and
came to the conclusion that there could be only one Homer. And now
“Homer
enters the twentieth century, the fourth millennium of his fame,
greater
than ever.” No great work of art, as Chamberlain points out, was ever
produced
by the collaboration of a number of little men. The man who made the
faith
of a people was, as Aristotle put it, “divine before all other poets.”
If Greek poetry and Greek art were in those two branches of human
culture
the chief inheritance of the nineteenth century, then we may safely
assert
that Homer in that direction dominated all other influence and was the
first prophet of our Indo-European culture.
Never, indeed, did
the sacred fire of poetry and art burn with a purer flame than it did
in
ancient Greece. Homer was followed by a radiant galaxy of poets. The
tragic
dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the farces of Aristophanes, the
idylls
of Theocritus, the odes of Pindar, the dainty lyrics of Anacreon, have
made the Greek genius the test by which all subsequent work must be
xv INTRODUCTION
judged. In architecture and sculpture
the Greeks have never been equalled; of their painting we know less;
but
the men who were under the influence of a Phidias and a Praxiteles, we
may safely say, would not have borne with a mere dauber. Poetry and art
then were the very essence of Greek life; they penetrated the soul and
thrilled every fibre of the ancient Hellenes. Their philosophy, the
deep
thoughts that vibrated in their brain, were poetry. Plato himself was,
as Montesquieu said of him, one of the four great poets of mankind. He
was the Homer of thought, too great a poet, according to Zeller, to be
quite a philosopher. But Plato was Himself; and his spirit is as young
and as fresh to-day as it was when he was so penetrated with the sense
of beauty that he made his Socrates lecture only in the fairest scenes,
and pray to the great god Pan that he might be beautiful in his inner
self,
and that his outer self should be in tune with it. “Much that has come
between has sunk in oblivion; while Plato and Aristotle, Democritus,
Euclid
and Archimedes live on in our midst stimulating and instructing, and
the
half-fabulous figure of Pythagoras grows greater with every century.“
But — and it is a
big “but“ — when we come to metaphysics Chamberlain cries, Halt! With
all
his reverence for Plato as statesman, moralist and practical reformer;
for Aristotle as the first encyclopedist; full of admiration for the
philosophers
of the great epoch so far as they represent a “creative manifestation”
of the mind of man closely allied to the poetic art, in the history of
human thought he dethrones them from the high place which has hitherto
been assigned to them, he denies them the honour of having been the
first
thinkers. To Aristotle,
xvi INTRODUCTION
indeed, with all his gifts, he traces
the decadence of the Hellenic spirit.
It has been the
fashion
among the schoolmen to hold the Greeks up to admiration as being
historically
the first thinkers. Nothing could be further from the truth. They laid
the foundations of our science, of geography, natural history, logic,
ethics,
mathematics — of metaphysics they were not the founders, though they
taught
us to think. Bacon indeed condemned their philosophy as “childish,
garrulous,
impotent and immature in creative power.” Centuries before the birth of
the great Greeks, India had produced philosophers who in the realms of
thought reached heights which never were attained by Plato or
Aristotle.
The doctrine of the transmigration of souls was brought by Pythagoras
from
India. In Greece, until it was published by Plato, it was regarded as
the
mystery of mysteries, only to be revealed to the elect — to the high
priests
of thought: but in India it was the common belief of the vulgar;
whereas
to the philosophers, a small body of deep thinkers, it was and is an
allegorical
representation of a truth only to be grasped by deep metaphysical
pondering.
The common creed of the Indian coolie, invested by Plato with the halo
of his sublime poetry, became glorified as the highest expression of
Greek
thought!
Alas! for the long
years wasted in the worship of false gods! Alas! for the idols with
feet
of clay, ruthlessly hurled from their pedestals! That the ancient Greek
was the type of all that was chivalrous and noble was the accepted
belief
taught by the old-fashioned, narrow-minded pedagogues of two
generations
ago. They took the Greeks at their own valuation, accepting all their
xvii INTRODUCTION
figures and facts without a question.
Their battles were always fought against fearful odds; they performed
prodigies
of valour; their victories decided the fate of the world. To the
student
brought up in the faith of such books as Creasy's Fifteen Decisive
Battles
of the World, it comes as a shock to be told that Marathon was a
mere
skirmish without result, in which, as a matter of fact, the Athenians
had
if anything rather the worst of it. Even Herodotus inconveniently let
out
the fact that Miltiades hurried on the battle knowing that his brave
Hoplites
were half minded to go over to the enemy, and that delay might cause
this
treacherous thought to be carried into effect. Another half-hour and
the
“heroes of Marathon“ would have been seen marching against Athens side
by side with the Persians. As it was, the latter quietly sailed back to
Ionia in their Grecian ships, carrying with them several thousand
prisoners
and a great store of booty. Gobineau has shown that Salamis was no
better,
and he describes Grecian history as “la plus élaborée des
fictions du plus artiste des peuples.”
In view of writers
like Gobineau and Chamberlain the ancient Greek was a fraud, a rogue
and
a coward, a slave-driver, cruel to his enemies, faithless to his
friends,
without one shred of patriotism or of honour. Alcibiades changing
colour
like a chameleon, Solon forsaking his life's work and going over to
Pisistratus,
Themistocles haggling over the price for which he should betray Athens
before Salamis, and living at the Court of Artaxerxes as the declared
enemy
of Greece, despised by the Persians “as a wily Greek snake,” these and
others are sickening pictures which Chamberlain draws of the Hellene
when
viewed as a man apart from his poetry and his art.
xviii INTRODUCTION
Probably in these
days of critical investigation the fanciful teaching of previous
generations
will be modified. The Greeks have enough really to their credit, they
have
a sufficient title to our gratitude for what they were, without being
held
up to our admiration for that which they distinctly were not. It seems
laughable that Grote should have accepted as gospel truth, and held up
as an example for future ages, what Juvenal had summed up, eighteen
hundred
years before, as “all that lying Greece dares in history.”
No two people could
be in sharper contrast to one another than the Greeks and the Romans.
From
the creative genius of the Greeks we have inherited Olympus, the Gods,
and Homer who made them, poetry, architecture, sculpture, philosophy,
all
that makes up the joy of life: not our religion — that comes from a
higher
source — and yet, even here perhaps something, some measure of
religiosity
which fitted us to receive the Divine Message. The gift of the
matter-of-fact
Roman, on the other hand, has been law, order, statecraft, the idea of
citizenship, the sanctity of the family and of property. Borne on the
pinions
of imagination the Greek soared heavenward. The Roman struck his roots
deep into the soil. In all that contributes to the welfare and
prosperity
of the State and of the man the Roman was past-master. In poetry, in
the
fine arts, in all that constitutes culture, he was an imitator, a
follower
— at a great distance — of the Greeks. A poet in the true sense of the
word, he certainly was not. A poet means one who creates. Consider the
translations and imitations wrought with consummate skill by Virgil, at
the imperial command, into an epic in honour of a dynasty and a people.
Compare these, masterpieces
xix INTRODUCTION
of their kind though they be, with the
heaven-inspired creations of Homer, and you will see what Chamberlain
means
when he says that “to unite Greek poetry with Latin poetry in the one
conception
of classical literature, is a proof of incredible barbarism in taste,
and
of a lamentable ignorance of the essence and value of artistic genius.“
The Roman was no true poet, no creator. Horace, with all his charm —
the
most quotable of writers because his dainty wit had the secret of
rendering
with delicate fancy the ideas which occur at every step, on every
occasion
of our lives — was after all only the first and foremost of all society
verse-writers. Chamberlain is inclined to make an exception in favour
of
Lucretius, of whom in a footnote he says that he is worthy of
admiration
both as thinker and bard. (I hesitate here to translate the word
Dichter
by “poet.”) Yet in the same note he goes on to say that his thoughts
are
altogether Greek, and his materials preponderatingly so. “Moreover
there
lies over his whole work the deadly shadow of that scepticism that
sooner
or later leads to barrenness, and which must be carefully distinguished
from the deep intuition of truly religious spirits that preserve the
figurative
in that which they set forth without thereby casting doubt upon the
lofty
truth of their inmost forebodings, their inscrutable mysteries.” For
Lucretius,
Epicurus, the man who denied the existence of God, was the greatest of
mortals. And yet there came a day when even Epicurus must needs fall
down
before Zeus. “Never,“ cried Diokles, who found him in the Temple, “did
I see Zeus greater than when Epicurus lay there at his feet.“ Footnotes
are apt to be skipped, and I have felt it right to dwell upon this one
because of its
xx INTRODUCTION
importance as bearing upon Chamberlain's
views of the “deadly shadow of scepticism.”
The poetry of Greece
was the dawn of all that is beautiful, the bounteous fountain of all
good
gifts, at which, century after century, country after country, have
quaffed
the joyous cup, seeking inspiration that in their turn they might
achieve
something lovely.
The influence which
Rome has exercised upon our development has been in a totally different
direction. From the beginning of time the races of Aryan extraction
have
been deeply imbued with the conviction of the importance of law. Yet it
was reserved for the Romans to develop this instinct, and they
succeeded
because to them alone among the Aryans was possible the consolidation
of
the State. The law was the foundation of personal right; the State was
based upon the sacrifice of that personal right, and the delegation of
personal power for the common weal. If we realise that, we recognise
the
immense value of the inheritance bequeathed to us by the Romans.
Without
the great quality of patriotism this would have been impossible.
The spot, upon which
the Roman had settled had little physically to recommend it. There was
no romantic scenery, there were no lofty mountains, no rushing rivers.
The seven mean hills, the yellow mud of the Tiber, the fever-stricken
marshes,
a soil poor and unproductive, were not features to captivate the
imagination.
But the Roman loved it and cherished it in his heart of hearts.
Surrounded
by hostile tribes, his early history was one long struggle for life, in
which his great qualities always won the day. Once defeated, he would
have
been wiped off the face of the earth: strength of character, deter-
xxi INTRODUCTION
mination, courage above proof, saved
him, and in the end made him the conqueror of the world. There was no
need
in his case to pass laws enforcing valour as in the case of Sparta,
making
men brave, as it were, by act of Parliament. There was no fear of his
turning
traitor; he was loyal to the core. His home, his family, his fatherland
were sacred, the deeply treasured objects of his worship, a religion in
themselves. Self was laid on one side — the good of the community was
everything.
It was the idea of the family carried into statecraft. One word
represented
it, Patria, the fatherland, and the man who worked for the Patria was
the
ideal statesman.
Is it fair, asks
Chamberlain, to call the Roman a conqueror or invader? He thinks not.
He
was driven to war not by the desire of conquest or of aggrandisement,
but
by the desperate determination to maintain his home or die. With the
defeat
and disappearance of the surrounding tribes, he found himself ever
compelled
to push his outposts farther and farther still; it was
self-preservation,
not the lust of conquest, which armed the Roman. For him war was a
political
necessity, and no people ever possessed the political instinct in so
high
a degree.
The struggle with
Carthage was a case in point. Historians from the earliest times, from
Polybius to Mommsen, have denounced the barbarity shown by the Romans
in
the extermination of Carthage. Chamberlain in a few convincing
paragraphs
teaches us what was the real issue. He shows us that annihilation was
an
absolute necessity. Rome and Carthage could not exist together. The
fight
was for the supremacy in the Mediterranean, and therefore for the
mastery
of the world. On the one side was the civilising influence of Rome,
colonising
under
xxii INTRODUCTION
laws so beneficent that nations even
came to petition that they might be placed under her rule: on the other
side a system of piratical colonisation undertaken in the sole cause of
gain, the abolition of all freedom, the creation of artificial wants in
the interest of trade, no attempt at legal organisation beyond the
imposition
of taxes, slavery, a religion of the very basest in which human
sacrifices
were a common practice. The Roman felt that it must be war to the knife
without quarter. In his own interest, and, though he knew it not, in
that
of the world, there could be nothing short of extermination. “Delenda
est
Carthago” was the cry. Had he failed, had the piracy of the Semitic
combination
of Phoenicians and Babylonians won the day against the law and order of
the Aryan, it is not too much to say that culture and civilisation
would
have come to a standstill, and the development of the nineteenth
century
would have been an impossibility, or at any rate hopelessly retarded.
“It
is refreshing,” writes Chamberlain, “for once to come across an author
who, like Bossuet, simply says, ’Carthage was taken and destroyed by
Scipio,
who herein proved himself worthy of his great ancestor,’
without any
outburst
of moral indignation, without the conventional phrase, ’all
the misery
that later burst upon Rome was retribution for this crime.’ ”
Caesar
rebuilt
Carthage, and it became a congeries of all the worst criminals, Romans,
Greeks, Vandals, all rotten to the very marrow of their bones. It must
have been something like Port Said in the early days some forty years
ago,
which seemed to be the trysting-place of the world's rascaldom: those
who
remember it can form some idea of what that second Carthage of Caesar's
must have been.
xxiii
INTRODUCTION
In the destruction
of Jerusalem by the Romans one sees the hand of Providence. It was
largely
the act of the Jew himself, the born rebel against State law, or any
law
save that which he deemed to be his own sacred inheritance. It was
immaterial
that he had himself petitioned Rome to save him from his own Semitic
kings
and to take him under her charge. He was a continual thorn in the side
of his chosen rulers, and his final subjugation and dispersal became a
necessity. Had the Jew remained in Jerusalem, Christianity would have
become
a mere sect of the Jews. Long before our era the Diaspora had taken
place.
Originally the Diaspora meant the Jews who, after the Babylonian
captivity,
refused to go back to Palestine because of the prosperity which they
enjoyed
in their place of exile. Later it embraced all those Jews who, for
various
reasons of trade, or convenience, or missionary enterprise, went forth
into the world. In Alexandria alone these numbered over one million.
The
making of proselytes was universal. But wherever they might be, to
Jerusalem
they looked as to their home. To Jerusalem they sent tribute, in the
interests
of Jerusalem they worked as one man. The influence of Jerusalem was
all-pervading.
Even the first Christians, in spite of St. Paul, held to the rites of
Judaism;
those who did not were branded by St. John as “them of the Synagogue of
Satan.“ In destroying the stronghold of Judaism the Romans, though here
again they knew it not, were working for the triumph of Christianity.
As
it is, much of Judaism pervades our faith. Had Jerusalem stood, the
“religious
monopoly of the Jews,“ says Chamberlain, “would have been worse than
the
trade monopoly of the Phoenicians. Under the leaden
xxiv INTRODUCTION
pressure of these born dogmatists and
fanatics, all freedom of thought and of belief would have vanished from
the world: the flat materialistic conception of God would have been our
religion, pettifoggery our philosophy. This is no fancy picture, there
are too many facts crying aloud: for what is that stiff, narrow-minded,
spiritually cramped dogmatising of the Christian Church, such as no
Aryan
people ever dreamt of; what is that bloodthirsty fanaticism disgracing
the centuries down to the nineteenth, that curse of hatred fastening on
to the religion of love from the very beginning, from which Greek and
Roman,
Indian and Chinese, Persian and Teuton, turn with a shudder? What is it
if not the shadow of that Temple in which sacrifice was offered to the
God of wrath and of revenge, a black shadow cast over the young
generation
of heroes striving out of the Darkness into the Light?“
With the help of
Rome, Europe escaped from the chaos of Asia. The imaginative Greek was
ever looking towards Asia — to him the East called. The practical Roman
transferred the centre of gravity of culture to find an eternal home in
the West, so that Europe “became the beating heart and the thinking
brain
of all mankind.“ The Aryan had mastered the Semite for all time.
It comes somewhat
as a surprise to find Rome, the ideal Republic, pointed to as the
fountain-head
from which the conception of Constitutional Monarchy is drawn. The
principle
of Roman Law and the Roman State was, as we have seen, that of the
rights
of the individual and his power to choose representatives. In the
course
of time when Rome ceased to be Rome, when she fell under the rule of
half-breeds
from Africa, aliens from Asia Minor,
xxv INTRODUCTION
baseborn men from Illyria, not chosen
by the people, but elected by the army; when she had ceased even to be
the capital of her own Empire; one would have thought that the decay of
the Republic would have been the end of all the constitutional
principles
which it had established. But it was not so. The jurists in the service
of Diocletian, an Illyrian shepherd, of Galerius, an Illyrian cowherd,
of Maximinus, an Illyrian swineherd, were the men who based the
imperial
conception upon the theory of the will of the people, upon the same
power
which had elected the consuls and the other officers of the ancient
State.
Never before had the world beheld such a phenomenon. “Despots had ruled
as direct descendants of the Gods, as in the case of the Egyptians and
the Japanese of to-day, or as in Israel as representatives of the
Godhead,
or again by the Jus Gladii — the right of the sword.“ The
soldier-emperors
who had made themselves masters of the Roman Empire founded their
rights
as autocrats upon the constitutional law of the Republic. There was no
usurpation, only delegation pure and simple. To this we owe the
conception
of the Sovereign and the Subject.
In the meantime
Christianity
had become a power; and with it had taken place the abolition of
slavery
in Europe. Only a Sovereign could abolish slavery — that we saw in
Russia
in 1862. The nobles would never have given up their slaves, who were
their
property, their goods and chattels; far rather would they have made
free
men into bondsmen. But the establishment of the monarchical principle
has
been the main pillar of law and order and of that civic freedom from
which,
as we see, it originally sprang: it is one proof of the great debt of
gratitude
which Europe owes to ancient Rome. It is not the only one.
xxvi INTRODUCTION
It would be an
impertinence
were I to attempt to discuss Roman Law. The treatment of the subtleties
and intricacies of a highly technical subject must be left to those who
have made of them a special study. Yet it is impossible to pass over in
silence the effect of the great legacy which the world has inherited
from
Rome. The effect is an historical fact and must be as patent to the
layman
as to the professed jurist. What Greece did for the higher aesthetic
culture,
that Rome did for law, good government and statecraft. The one made
life
beautiful, the other made it secure. As a poet, or as a philosopher,
the
Roman was insignificant; he had not even an equivalent for either word
in his language; he must borrow the name, as he borrowed the idea, from
the Greek. But in the practical direction of the life of the
individual,
of the life of the State, he remains, after more than twenty centuries,
the unrivalled master. The pages in which Chamberlain brings into
relief
the noble qualities of the Roman character are, to my thinking, among
the
best and most eloquent in his book, and they should be read not without
profit in an age which is singularly impatient of discipline. For after
listening to Chamberlain we must come away convinced that it was
discipline
which made the Roman what he was. He learnt to obey that he might learn
to command, and so he became the ruler of the world. That his
conception
of the law has become the model upon which all jurisprudence has been
moulded,
the State as he founded it being based upon the great principles of
reciprocity
and self-sacrifice on the one side and of protection of the sanctity of
private rights on the other, is a fact which bears lasting testimony to
the force of Roman character. There have
xxvii INTRODUCTION
been great jurists in many nations —
professors learned in the law — laws have been amplified and changed to
meet circumstances; but no single nation has ever raised such a legal
monument
as that of the Romans, which, according to Professor Leist, is “the
everlasting
teacher for the civilised world and will so remain.“
It is interesting
to consider wherein lay the difference between Greek and Roman
legislation.
How came it, asks Chamberlain, that the Greeks, mentally so
incomparably
superior to the Romans, were able to achieve nothing lasting, nothing
perfect,
in the domain of law? The reason he gives is simple enough — simple and
convincing. The Roman started with the principle of the family, and on
the basis of the family he raised the structure of State and Law. The
Greek,
on the contrary, ignored the family, and took the State as his
starting-point.
Even the law of inheritance was so vague that questions in connection
with
it were left by Solon to the decision of the Courts. In Rome the
position
of the Father as King in his own house, the rank assigned to the Wife
as
house-mistress, the reverential respect for matrimony, these were great
principles of which the Greeks knew nothing; but they were the
principles
upon which the existence of the private man depended, upon which the Res
Publica was founded. The Jus Privatum and the Jus
Publicum
were inseparable, and from them sprang the Jus Gentium, the law
of nations. The laws of Solon, of Lycurgus and others have withered and
died; but the laws of Rome remain a stately and fruit-bearing tree,
under
whose wholesome shade the civilisation of Europe has sprung up and
flourished.
Few men have
approached
a great subject in a loftier
xxviii INTRODUCTION
spirit of reverence than that in which
Chamberlain deals with what, to him, as to all of us, is the one great
and incomparable event in the whole story of our planet. “No battle, no
change of dynasty, no natural phenomenon, no discovery possesses a
significance
which can be compared with that of the short life upon earth of the
Galilean.
His birth is, in a sense, the beginning of history. The nations that
are
not Christian, such as the Chinese, the Turks and others have no
history;
their story is but a chronicle on the one hand of ruling houses,
butcheries
and the like, and on the other, represents the dull, humble, almost
bestially
happy life of millions that sink in the night of time without leaving a
trace.“
With the dogmas of
the Church or Churches, Chamberlain has scant sympathy, and on that
account
he will doubtless be attacked by swarms as spiteful as wasps and as
thoughtless.
And yet how thoroughly imbued with the true spirit of Religion, as
apart
from Churchcraft, is every line that he has written! Christ was no
Prophet,
as Mahomet dubbed him. He was no Jew. The genealogies of St. Matthew
and
St. Luke trace to Joseph, but Joseph was not His father. The essence of
Christ's significance lies in the fact that in Him God was made man.
Christ
is God, or rather since, as St. Thomas Aquinas has shown, it is easier
to say what God is not than what He is, it is better to invert the
words
and say God is Christ, and so to avoid explaining what is known by what
is not known. Such are but a few ideas of the author culled at random
and
from memory. But (and here is the stone of offence against which the
Churchman
will stumble) “it is not the Churches that form the strength of
Christianity,
but that Fountain
xxix INTRODUCTION
from which they themselves draw their
power, the vision of the Son of Man upon the Cross.“
In two or three
masterly
pages written with such inspiration that it is difficult to read them
without
emotion, Chamberlain has drawn a parallel between Christ and Buddha,
between
the love and life-breathing doctrine of the One and the withering
renunciation
of the other. Buddha tears from his heart all that is dear to man —
parents,
wife, child, love, hope, the religion of his fathers — all are left
behind
when he wanders forth alone into the wilderness to live a living
suicide
and wait for death, an extinction that can only be perfect, in the face
of the doctrine of metempsychosis, if it is so spiritually complete
that
the dread reaper can harvest no seed for a new birth. How different is
it with the teaching of Christ, whose death means no selfish, solitary
absorption into a Nirvana, a passionless abstraction, but the Birth of
the whole world into a new life. Buddha dies that there may be no
resurrection.
Christ dies that all men may live, that all men may inherit the Kingdom
of Heaven. And this Kingdom of Heaven, what is it? Clearly no Nirvana,
no sensuous Paradise like that of Mahomet. He gives the answer Himself
in a saying which must be authentic, for His hearers could not
understand
it, much less could they have invented it. The Kingdom of God is within
you. “In these sayings of Christ we seem to hear a voice: we know not
His
exact words but there is an unmistakable, unforgettable tone which
strikes
our ear and so forces its way to the heart. And then we open our eyes
and
we see this Form, this Life. Across the centuries we hear the words,
Learn
from me! and at last we understand what that means:
xxx INTRODUCTION
to be as Christ was, to live as Christ
lived, to strive as Christ died, that is the Kingdom of Heaven, that is
eternal Life.“
As I sit writing
I can see on a shelf a whole row of books written on Buddhism by
eminent
scholars and missionaries, comparing its doctrines with those of the
Saviour.
It is not too much to say that the sum of all the wisdom and learning
of
that little library of Buddhism is contained in the few paragraphs of
which
I have given the kernel. Chamberlain in burning words points out how
radiant
is the doctrine of hope preached by the Saviour — where is there room
for
pessimism since the Kingdom of God is within us? — and he contrasts,
the
teaching of our Lord with the dreary forebodings of the Old Testament,
where all is vanity, life is a shadow, we wither like grass. The Jewish
writers took as gloomy a view of the world as the Buddhists. But our
Lord
who went about among the people and loved them, taking part in their
joys
and in their sorrows — His was a teaching of love and sympathy, and
above
all of hope. Christ did not retire into the wilderness to seek death
and
annihilation. He came out of the wilderness to bring life eternal.
Buddha
represents the senile decay of a culture that has finished its life:
Christ
represents the Birth of a new day, of a new civilisation dawning under
the sign of the Cross, raised upon the ruins of the old world, a
civilisation
at which we must work for many a long day before it may be worthy to be
called by His name.
Chamberlain is
careful
to tell us that he does not intend to lift the veil which screens the
Holy
of Holies of his own belief. But it must be clear from such utterances
as those upon which I have drawn above, how
xxxi INTRODUCTION
noble and how exalted is the conception
of Christ and of His teaching which is borne in on the mind of one of
the
foremost thinkers of our day. He draws his inspiration at the fountain
head. For the dogmas of oecumenical councils, for the superstitions and
fables of monks, he has an adequate respect: he preaches Christ and Him
crucified: that is to him all-sufficing. Can there be a purer ideal?
It is this same lofty
conception which accounts for the contrast which this protestant layman
draws between Catholicism and the hierarchy of Rome. For the former he
has every sympathy: upon the latter he looks as a hindrance to
civilisation
and to the essential truths of Religion. How could it be otherwise with
an institution which until the year 1822 kept under the ban of the
Index
every book which should dare to contest the sublime truth that the sun
goes round the Earth? The whole Roman system, hierarchical and
political,
is in direct opposition to the development of Indo-European culture, of
which the “Germane“ constitutes the highest expression. The Catholic,
on
the other hand, when not choked by the mephitic vapours of Roman dogma
and Roman imperialism, left free to follow the simple teaching of the
cross,
and to practise so far as in him lies the example of the Saviour, is
worthy
of all the respect which is due to the true Christian of whatsoever
denomination
he may be. He at any rate is no enemy to the Truth.
Very striking are
the passages in which Chamberlain points out the ambiguous attitude of
our Lord towards Jewish thought and the religion of which His teaching
was the antithesis. How he brushed aside the narrow
xxxii INTRODUCTION
prescriptions of the Law, as for example
in the great saying, “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the
Sabbath“;
— and yet how, born in the midst of Jewish ideas and bigotry, the
bearer
of the new Glad Tidings, the Teacher who was to revolutionise the
world,
never altogether shook off the old traditions. Chamberlain's argument
leads
us a step farther. It is impossible not to feel how much more
completely
St. Paul, a Pharisee after the strictest sect of his religion, cut
himself
adrift from Judaism. There was no beating about the bush, no
hesitation,
no searching of the soul. A convert, he at once threw into his new
faith
all the zeal and energy with which up to that very moment he had
persecuted
it. He ceased to be a Jew: he became the Apostle to the Gentiles, and
bade
his followers refuse all “old wives' fables“ (I Tim. iv. 7),
while
to Titus he says, “rebuke them sharply, not giving heed to Jewish
fables
and commandments of men, that turn from the truth“ (Titus i.
14).
Christ's life upon earth was spent among the Jews: it was to them that
His “good tidings“ were addressed. To touch the hearts of men you must
speak to them in a language that they understand. St. Paul, on
the
other hand, who lived and worked among the Gentiles, was unfettered by
any preconceived ideas on the part of his hearers. His doctrine was to
them absolutely new, standing on its own foundation, the rock of
Christianity
— and yet, as Chamberlain points out in a later part of the book, it
was
St. Paul, the very man who after his conversion avoided the Jews and
separated
himself from them as much as he could, who did more than any of the
first
preachers of Christianity to weld into the new faith the traditions of
the Old Testament.
xxxiii INTRODUCTION
In the Epistle to the Romans the fall
of man is given as an historical event; our Lord born “from the seed of
David according to the flesh“ is declared to be the son of God; Israel
is the people of God, the good olive-tree into which the branches of
the
wild olive-tree, the Gentiles, may be “grafted.“ The death of the
Messiah
is an atoning sacrifice in the Jewish sense, &c. &c., all
purely
Jewish ideas preached by the man who hated the Jews. When we read these
contradictions of the man's self we may say of St. Paul's epistles as
St.
Peter did, in another sense, “in which are some things hard to be
understood.“
The influence of
Judaism on Indo-European civilisation is a subject upon which the
author
of the Grundlagen dwells with special stress. He cannot
withhold
his admiration from the sight of that one small tribe standing out amid
the chaos of nationalities, which was the legacy of the fallen Roman
Empire,
“like a sharply cut rock in the midst of a shapeless sea,“ maintaining
its identity and characteristics in the midst of a fiery vortex where
all
other peoples were fused into a molten conglomerate destroying all
definition.
The Jew alone remained unchanged. His belief in Jehovah, his faith in
the
promises of the prophets, his conviction that to him was to be given
the
mastery of the world — these were the articles of his creed, a creed
which
might be summed up as belief in himself. Obviously to Chamberlain the
Jew
is the type of pure Race, and pure Race is what he looks upon as the
most
important factor in shaping the destinies of mankind. Here he joins
issue
with Buckle, who considered that climate and food have been the chief
agents
in mental and physical development. Rice as a staple
xxxiv INTRODUCTION
food Buckle held to be the explanation
of the special aptitudes of the Indian Aryans. The error is grotesque.
As Chamberlain points out, rice is equally the food of the Chinese, of
the hard-and-fast materialists who are the very antipodes of the
idealist,
metaphysical Aryans. In the matter of climate Chamberlain might have
brought
the same witnesses into court. There are more variations of climate in
China than in Europe. The climate of Canton differs as much from that
of
Peking as from that of St. Petersburg. The Chinaman of the north speaks
a different language from that of the south, though the ideographic
script
is the same: his food is different, the air that he breathes is
different:
but the racial characteristics remain identical.
Race and purity of
blood are what constitute a type, and nowhere has this type been more
carefully
preserved than among the Jews. I remember once calling upon a
distinguished
Jewish gentleman. Mr. D'Israeli, as he was then, had just left him.
“What
did you talk about?“ I asked at haphazard. “Oh,“ said my host, “the
usual
thing — the Race.“ No one was more deeply penetrated with the idea of
the
noble purity of “the Race“ than Lord Beaconsfield. No one believed more
fully in the influence of the Jew working alongside of the
Indo-European.
With what conviction does he insist upon this in Coningsby!
That Race, however,
does not drop ready-made from the skies is certain; nature and history
show
us no single example either among men or beasts of a prominently noble
and distinctly individual race which is not the result of a mixture.
Once
the race established it must be preserved. The English constitute a
Race
and
xxxv INTRODUCTION
a noble one, though their pedigree shows
an infusion of Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Norman bloods. In spite of its
history
which is its religion, there is proof that at a remote stage of its
existence
the Jewish race was actually formed of several elements. Its stability,
unchanged for thousands of years, is one of the wonders of the world.
One
rigidly observed law is sufficient for their purpose. The Israelite
maiden
may wed a Gentile: such an affiance tends not to the degeneracy of the
race: but the Jewish man must not marry outside his own nation, the
seed
of the chosen people of Jehovah must not be contaminated by a foreign
alliance.
That Chamberlain is a strong Anti-Semite adds to the value of the
testimony
which he bears to the nobility of the Sephardim, the intensely
aristocratic
Jews of Spain and Portugal, the descendants of the men whom the Romans,
dreading their influence, deported westward. “That is nobility in the
fullest
sense of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful forms, noble
heads,
dignity in speech and in deportment.... That out of the midst of such
men
prophets and psalmists should go forth, that I understood at the first
glance — something which I confess the closest observation of the many
hundred 'Bochers' in the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin had failed to
enable
me to do.“ To the Ashkenazim, the so-called German Jews, Chamberlain is
as it seems to me unjust. That they have played a greater part in the
history
of the nineteenth century than the Sephardim is hardly to be denied.
They
are born financiers and the acquisition of money has been their
characteristic
talent. But of the treasure which they have laid up they have given
freely.
The charities of the great cities of Europe would be in a sad
xxxvi INTRODUCTION
plight were the support of the Jews
to be withdrawn; indeed many noble foundations owe their existence to
them.
Politically too they have rendered great services: one instance which
Chamberlain
himself quotes is the settlement of the French indemnity after the war
of 1870. Bismarck was represented by a Jew, and the French on their
side
appointed a Jew to meet him, and these two Jews belonged to the
Ashkenazim,
not to the noble Sephardim.
Who and what then
is the Jew, this wonderful man who during the last hundred years has
attained
such a position in the whole civilised world?
Of all the histories
of the ancient world there is none that is more convincing, none more
easily
to be realised, than that of the wanderings of the patriarch Abraham.
It
is a story of four thousand years ago, it is a story of yesterday, it
is
a story of to-day. A tribe of Bedouin Arabs with their womenkind and
children
and flocks flitting across the desert from one pasture to another is a
sight still commonly seen — some of us have even found hospitality in
the
black tents of these pastoral nomads, where the calf and the foal and
the
child are huddled together as they must have been in Abraham's day.
Such
a tribe it was that wandered northward from the city of Ur on the
fringe
of the desert, on the right bank of the Euphrates, northward to Padan
Aram
at the foot of the Armenian Highlands; six hundred kilometres as the
crow
flies, fifteen hundred if we allow for the bends of the river and for
the
seeking of pasture. From Padan Aram the tribe travels westward to
Canaan,
thence south to Egypt and back again to Canaan. It is possible that the
names of the patriarchs may have been
xxxvii INTRODUCTION
used to indicate periods, but however
that may be, these journeys long in themselves, and complicated by the
incumbrances of flocks and herds, occupied a great space in time; there
were moreover long halts, residences lasting for centuries in the
various
countries which were traversed, during which intermarriages took place
with the highly civilised peoples with whom the wanderers came in
contact.
The Bible story,
ethnology, the study of skulls and of racial types, all point to the
fact
that the Jewish people, the descendants of the tribes of Judah and
Benjamin,
united in themselves the five great qualifications which Chamberlain
holds
to be necessary for the establishment of a powerful race. First, to
start
with, a strong stock. This the Jew possessed in his Arab origin. No
type,
surely, was ever so persistent as that of the Bedouin Arab of the
desert,
the same to-day as he was thousands of years ago. Secondly, inbreeding.
Thirdly, such inbreeding not to be at haphazard but carefully carried
out,
the best mating only with the best. Fourthly, intermarriage with
another
race or races. Fifthly, here again careful selection is essential. The
Jewish race, built up under all these conditions, was, as we have seen,
once formed, kept absolutely pure and uncontaminated. Of what happens
where
these laws are not observed the mongrels of the South American
republics
— notably of Peru — furnish a striking example.
In the days of the
Roman Republic the influence of the Israelite was already felt. It is
strange
to read of Cicero, who could thunder out his denunciations of a
Catiline,
dropping his voice in the law courts when of the Jews he spoke with
bated
breath lest he should incur
xxxviii
INTRODUCTION
their displeasure. In the Middle Ages
high offices were conferred by Popes upon Jews, and in Catholic Spain
they
were even made bishops and archbishops. In France the Jews found the
money
for the Crusades — Rudolph of Habsburg exempted them from the ordinary
laws. In all countries and ages the Jew has been a masterful man. Never
was he more powerful than he is to-day. Well may Chamberlain count
Judea
as the third ancient country which with Greece and Rome has made itself
felt in the development of our civilisation. It is not possible within
the limits of this brief notice to give an idea of the extraordinary
interest
of Chamberlain's special chapter
upon
the Jews and their entry into the history of the West. I have
already
hinted that with some of his conclusions I do not agree: but I go all
lengths
with him in his appreciation of the stubborn singleness of purpose and
dogged consistency which have made the Jew what he is. The ancient Jew
was not a soldier — foreigners furnished the bodyguard of his king. He
was no sailor like his cousins the Phoenicians, indeed he had a horror
of the sea. He was no artist — he had to import craftsmen to build his
Temple — neither was he a farmer, nor a merchant. * What was it then
that
gave
* It
was a common creed of the days of my youth that all the great musical
composers
were of Jewish extraction. The bubble has long since been pricked.
Joachim,
who was a Jew, and as proud of his nationality as Lord Beaconsfield
himself,
once expressed to Sir Charles Stanford his sorrow at the fact that
there
should never have been a Jewish composer of the first rank. Mendelssohn
was the nearest approach to it, and after him, Meyerbeer. But in these
days Mendelssohn, in spite of all his charm, is no longer counted in
the
first rank. Some people have thought that Brahms was a Jew, that his
name
was a corruption of Abrahams. But this is false. Brahms came of a
Silesian
family, and in the Silesian dialect Brahms means a reed. (See an
interesting paper in Truth of January 13, 1909). In
xxxix INTRODUCTION
him his wonderful self-confidence, his
toughness of character, which could overcome every difficulty, and
triumph
over the hatred of other races? It was his belief in the sacred books
of
the law, the Thora: his faith in the promises of Jehovah: his certainty
of belonging to the chosen people of God. The influence of the books of
the Old Testament has been far-reaching indeed, but nowhere has it
exercised
more power than in the stablishing of the character of the Jew. If it
means
so much to the Christian, what must it not mean to him? It is his
religion,
the history of his race, and his individual pedigree all in one. Nay!
it
is more than all that: it is the attesting document of his covenant
with
his God.
Within the compass
of a few pages Chamberlain has performed what amounts to a literary
feat:
he has made us understand the condition of Europe and of the chief
countries
of the Mediterranean littoral at the time of the first symptoms of
decay
in the power of Rome. It was the period of what he calls the
“Völker-chaos,“
a hurly-burly of nationalities in which Greeks and Romans, Syrians,
African
mongrels, Armenians, Gauls and Indo-Europeans of many tribes were all
jumbled
up together — a seething, heterogeneous conflicting mass of humanity in
which all character, individuality, belief and customs were lost. In
this
witches' Sabbath only the Jew maintained his individuality, only the
Teuton
preserved the two great characteristics of his race, freedom and faith
—
poetry, on the other hand,
the Jew excelled. The Psalms, parts of Isaiah, the sweet idyll of Ruth
are above praise. The Book of Job is extolled by Carlyle as the finest
of all poems, and according to Chamberlain poetry is the finest of all
arts. In the plastic arts, as in music, the Jew has been barren.
xl INTRODUCTION
the Jew the witness of the past; the
Teuton the power of the future.
They were a wonderful
people, these tall men with the fair hair and blue eyes, warriors from
their birth, fighting for fighting's sake, tribe against tribe, clan
against
clan, so that Tiberius, looking upon them as a danger, could think of
no
better policy than to leave them alone to destroy one another. But the
people who held in their hands the fate of mankind were not to be got
rid
of like so many Kilkenny cats. Their battlesomeness made them a danger
to the State — to a Roman Emperor, ever under the shadow of murder,
their
trustworthiness made them the one sure source from which he could
recruit
his bodyguard. But they were not mere fighting machines, though war was
to them a joy and a delight. From their Aryan ancestors, from the men
to
whom the poems of the Rigveda were a holy writ, they had received,
instilled
in their blood, a passion for song and for music, an imagination which
revelled in all that is beautiful, and which loved to soar into the
highest
realms of thought. And so it came to pass that when in the fulness of
time
they absorbed the power of Europe, they knew how to make the most of
the
three great legacies which they had inherited: poetry and art from the
Greeks, law and statecraft from the Romans, and, greatest of all, the
teaching
of Christ. By them, with these helps, was founded the culture of the
nineteenth
century.
In the descendants
of such men it is not surprising to see the union of the practical with
the ideal. A Teuton writes The Criticism of Pure Reason. A
Teuton
invents the steam-engine. “The century of Bessemer and Edison is
equally
the century of Beethoven and Richard Wagner.
xli INTRODUCTION
... Newton interrupts his mathematical
inquiries to write a commentary on the Revelation of St. John. Crompton
troubles himself with the invention of the spinning mule, that he may
have
more leisure to devote to his one love — music. Bismarck, the statesman
of blood and iron, in the critical moments of his life causes the
sonatas
of Beethoven to be played to him.“ Whoso does not realise all this,
fails
to understand the essence of the Teuton character, and is unable to
judge
of the part which it has played in the past and is still playing in the
present.
The Goths, who of
course were Teutons, have been, as Gibbon puts it, “injuriously accused
of the ruin of antiquity.“ Their very name has passed into a byword for
all that is barbarous and destructive; yet, as a matter of fact, it was
Theodosius and his followers who, with the help of the Christian
fanatics,
destroyed the Capitol and the monuments of ancient art, whereas it was
Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, on the contrary, who issued edicts for the
preservation
of the ancient glories of Rome. Yet “this man could not write; for his
signature he had to use a metal stencil.... But that which was
beautiful,
that which the nobler spirits of the Chaos of Peoples hated as a work
of
the devil, that the Goth at once knew how to appreciate: to such a
degree
did the statues of Rome excite his admiration that he appointed a
special
official for their protection.“ Who will deny the gift of imagination
in
the race which produced a Dante (his name Alighieri a corruption of
Aldiger,
taken from his grandmother who was of a Goth family from Ferrara), a
Shakespeare,
a Milton, a Goethe, a Schiller, not to speak of many other great and
lesser
lights? Who
xlii INTRODUCTION
will dispute the powers of thought of
a Locke, a Newton, a Kant, a Descartes? We have but to look around us
in
order to see how completely our civilisation and culture are the work
of
the Germane.
Freedom, above all
things Freedom, was the watchword of the Germane — Dante taking part
with
the Bianchi against the Neri and Pope Boniface; Wycliffe rebelling
against
the rule of the Church of Rome; Martin Luther leading a movement which
was as much political as it was religious, or even more so; all these
were
apostles of Freedom. The right to think and to believe, and to live
according
to our belief, is that upon which the free man insists: our enjoyment
of
it is the legacy of those great men to us. Without the insistence of
the
Germane religious toleration would not exist to-day.
We have seen that
Chamberlain takes the year one — the birth of our Lord — as the first
great
starting-point of our civilisation. The second epoch which he
signalises
as marking a fresh departure is the year 1200. The thirteenth century
was
a period of great developments. It was a period full of accomplishment
and radiant with hope. In Germany the founding and perfecting of the
great
civic league known as the Hansa, in England the wresting of Magna
Charta
from King John by the Barons, laid the foundation of personal freedom
and
security. The great religious movement in which St. Francis of Assisi
was
the most powerful agent “denied the despotism of the Church as it did
the
despotism of the State, and annihilated the despotism of wealth.“ It
was
the first assertion of freedom to think. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus,
Albertus
Magnus and Roger Bacon were leaders, the first two in philosophical
thought,
the last two in
xliii INTRODUCTION
modern natural science. In poetry, and
not in poetry alone but in statecraft, Dante towers above all those of
his day; and yet there were many poets, singers whose names are still
famous,
while at the same time lived Adam de la Halle, the first great master
in
counterpoint. Among painters we find such names as Niccolo Pisani,
Cimabue,
Giotto, from whom sprang the new school of art. And while these men
were
all working each at his own craft, great churches and cathedrals and
monuments
were springing up, masterpieces of the Gothic architect's skill. Well
did
the thirteenth century deserve the title given to it by Fiske, “the
glorious
century.“ *
When we reach these
times we stand on fairly firm ground. The details of history, when we
think
how the battle rages round events which have taken place in our own
times
[for instance, the order for the heroic mistake of the Balaclava
charge,
where “some one had blundered“] may not always command respect, but
the
broad outlines are clear enough. We are no longer concerned with the
deciphering
of an ambiguous cuneiform inscription. The
* It
is strange to see how great tidal waves of intellectual and creative
power
from time to time flood the world. Take as another example the
sixteenth
century, the era of the artistic revival in Italy, of the heroes of the
Reformation. What a galaxy of genius is there. To cite only a few names
Ariosto, Tasso, Camoens, Magellan, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, St. Francis
Xavier, St. Ignatius Loyola, Rabelais, Shakespeare. Bacon. The best
works
of Indian art are produced under the reign of the Moghul Akbar,
Damascus
turns out its finest blades; the tiles of Persia, and the porcelain of
China under the Ming Dynasty, reach their highest perfection; while in
far Japan Miyôchin, her greatest artist in metal, is working at
the
same time as Benvenuto Cellini in Florence and Rome. Such epidemics of
genius as those of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries are mysteries
indeed. This, however is but an aside, though as I think one worthy of
note.
xliv INTRODUCTION
works of the great men testify, and
their witness commands respect.
The second volume
of the Grundlagen opens with a chapter
entitled “Religion“ — a chapter which leaves upon the mind of the
reader
a vivid impression of the superstitions and myths which gave birth to
the
dogmas of the Christian Church in its early years, dogmas the
acceptance
or rejection of which was decided by the votes of Councils of Bishops,
many of whom could neither read nor write. It seems incredible that
such
sublime questions as those of the nature of the Godhead, the relation
of
the Father to the Son, Eternal Punishment and others, should have been
settled by a majority of votes “like the imposition of taxes by our
Parliaments.“
In the dark ages of Christianity, Judaism, Indian mythology, Egyptian
mysteries
and magic, were woven into a chequered woof, which was an essential
contradiction
of the touching simplicity of our Lord's teaching. It was a strange
moment
in the world's history, and one which lent itself to the welding
together
of utterly dissimilar elements. In the Chaos of Peoples, all mixed up
in
the weirdest confusion, the dogma-monger found his opportunity.
Judaism,
which up to that time had been absolutely confined to the Jews, was
clutched
at with eagerness by men who were tired of the quibbles, the riddles
and
the uncertainties of the philosophers. Here was something solid,
concrete;
a creed which preached facts, not theories, a religion which announced
itself as history. In the international hodgepodge, a jumble in which
all
specific character, all feeling of race or country had been lost, the
Asiatic
and Egyptian elements of this un-Christian Christianity, this travesty
of our Lord's teaching, found ready acceptance. The
xlv INTRODUCTION
seed bed was ready and the seed
germinated
and prospered greatly. In vain did the nobler spirits, the wiser and
more
holy-minded of the early Fathers raise their voices against gross
superstitions
borrowed from the mysteries of Isis and of Horus. The Jews and dogma
triumphed.
The religion of Christ was too pure for the vitiated minds of the Chaos
of Peoples, and perhaps dogma was a necessity, a hideous evil, born
that
good might arise. Men needed a Lord who should speak to them as slaves:
they found him in the God of Israel. They needed a discipline, a ruling
power; they found it in the Imperial Church of Rome.
Conversion to
Christianity
was in the days of the Empire far less a question of religious
conviction
than one of Law arbitrarily enforced for political reasons by autocrats
who might or might not be Christians. Aurelian, a heathen, established
the authority of the Bishop of Rome at the end of the third century.
Theodosius
made heresy and heathenism a crime of high treason. Lawyers and civil
administrators
were made Bishops — Ambrosius even before he was baptized — that they
might
enforce Christianity, as a useful handmaid in government and
discipline.
As the power of the Empire dwindled, that of the Church grew, until the
Caesarism of the Papacy was crystallised in the words of Boniface
VIII.,
“Ego sum Caesar, ego sum Imperator.“
In vain did men of
genius, as time went on and the temporal claims of the Popes became
intolerable,
rise in revolt against it. Charlemagne, Dante, St. Francis, all tried
to
separate Church from State. But the Papacy stood its ground, firm as
the
Tarpeian Rock, immutable as the Seven Hills themselves. It held to the
inheritance
xlvi INTRODUCTION
which came to it not from St. Peter,
the poor fisherman of the Sea of Galilee, but from the Caesars, like
whom
the Bishops of Rome claimed to be Sovereigns over the world. How much
more
tolerant the early Popes were in religious matters than in temporal is
a point which Chamberlain forcibly brings out: they might bear with
compromise
in the one; in the other they would not budge an inch. Like the Phoenix
in the fable, out of its own ashes the Roman Empire arose in a new
form,
the Papacy.
It is not possible
here to dwell upon our author's contrast between St. Paul and
Augustine,
that wonderful African product of the Chaos, in whom the sublime and
the
ridiculous went hand in hand, who believed in the heathen Gods and
Goddesses
as evil spirits, who took Apuleius and his transformation into an ass
seriously,
to whom witches and sorcerers, and a dozen other childish fancies of
the
brain, were realities. We must leave equally untouched his interesting
sketches of Charlemagne and Dante and their efforts at Reformation. His
main object in this chapter is to show the position of the Church at
the
beginning of the thirteenth century. The Papacy was in its glory. Its
doctrines,
its dogmas and its temporal supremacy had been enforced — politically
it
stood upon a pinnacle. The proudest title of the Caesars had been that
of Pontifex Maximus. The Pontifex Maximus was now Caesar.
And the present
position
— what of to-day? The Church of Rome is as solid as ever it was. The
Reformation
achieved much politically. It achieved freedom. But as the parent of a
new and consistent religion, Protestantism has been a failure. Picking
and choosing, accepting and rejecting, it has cast aside some of the
xlvii INTRODUCTION
dogmas of the early days of the Chaos,
but it remains a motley crowd of sects without discipline, all hostile
to one another, all more or less saturated with the tenets of the very
Church against which they rebelled. Rome alone remains consistent in
its
dogmas, as in its claims, and, purged by the Reformation of certain
incongruous
and irreconcilable elements, has in religion rather gained than lost
strength.
It is easy to see what difficulties the lack of unity creates for
Protestant
missionaries. Church men, Chapel men, Calvinists, Baptists,
Presbyterians,
Methodists, Congregationalists and Heaven knows how many more, all
pulling
against one another! and the Roman Catholic Church against them all!
The
religion of Christ as He taught it absolutely nowhere! Small wonder
that
the heathen should grin and be puzzled.
The building up of
the ideal State as we know it to-day was the result of two mighty
struggles
which raged during the first twelve centuries of our era. The first, as
we have seen, was the fight for power between the Caesars and the Popes
for the Empire of the world in which now one, now the other, had the
upper
hand. The second was the struggle between “Universalism“ and
“Nationalism,“
that is to say, between the idea on the one hand of a boundless Empire,
whether under Caesar or Pope, and on the other a spirit of nationality
within sure bounds, and a stubborn determination to be free from either
potentate, which ended in the organisation of independent States and
the
triumph of the Teuton. His rise meant the dawn of a new culture, not as
we are bidden to remember a Renaissance in the sense of the calling
back
into life of a dead past, but a new birth into freedom, a new birth in
which the cramping shackles, the
xlviii INTRODUCTION
levelling influences of the Imperium
Romanum, of the Civitas Dei, were cast aside — in which at last, after
long centuries of slavery, men might live, thinking and working and
striving
according to their impulses, believing according to the faith that was
in them.
Independent
statecraft
then, as opposed to the all-absorbing Imperium, was the work of the
rebellious
Teuton, the poet warrior, the thinker, the free man. It was a mighty
victory,
yet one in which defeat has never been acknowledged. From his prison in
the Vatican the Pope continues to issue Bulls and Briefs hurling
defiance
at the world and at common sense; new saints are canonised, new dogmas
proclaimed by oecumenical councils summoned from all parts of the
inhabited
world; and there are good men and, in many respects, wise men, who bow
their heads and tremble. No one can say that the Papacy, though shorn
of
its earthly dominions, is not still a Power to be reckoned with: its
consistency
commands respect; but the Civitas Dei is a thing of the past: it is no
more than a dream in the night, from which a weary old man wakens to
find
its sole remnant in the barren semblance of a medieval court, and the
man-millinery
of an out-of-date ceremonial. Truly a pathetic figure!
A new world has
arisen.
The thirteenth century was the turning-point. The building is even now
not ended. But the Teuton was at work everywhere, and the foundations
were
well and truly laid. In Italy, north and south, the land was overrun
with
men of Indo-European race — Goths, Lombards, Norsemen, Celts. It was to
them that was owing the formation of the municipalities and cities
which
still remain as witnesses of their labour.
xlix INTRODUCTION
It was their descendants, certainly
not the hybrids of the Chaos, that worked out the so-called
“Renaissance,“
and when owing to the internecine feuds and petty wars, as well as to
the
too frequent intermixture with the hybrids, the Teuton element became
weaker
and weaker, the glory of Italy waned likewise. Happily for the world
the
race was maintained in greater purity elsewhere.
The leitmotiv which
runs through the whole book is the assertion of the superiority of the
Teuton family to all the other races of the world — and more
especially,
as we have seen, is this shown by the way in which the Germane threw
off
the shackles with which, under the guise of religion, the Papacy strove
to fetter him. It is interesting to consider how Immanuel Kant, the
greatest
thinker that ever lived, treated this subject. He, the man who was so
deeply
penetrated with religious feeling that he held it to be “the duty of
man
to himself to have religion,“ saw in the teaching of Christ a “perfect
religion.“ His demand was for a religion which should be one in spirit
and in truth, and for the belief in a God whose kingdom is not of this
world.“ He by no means rejected the Bible, but he held that its value
lay
not so much in that which we read in it, as in that which we read into
it, nor is he the enemy of Churches, “of which there may be many good
forms.“
But with superstition and dogma he will have no dealings. Nor is this
to
be wondered at when we consider how, by whom, and for what purpose
dogmas,
as we have seen above, were manufactured and what manner of men they
were
who degraded the early Church with their superstitions. In the mass of
ignorant monks and bishops who were the
l INTRODUCTION
so-called “Fathers of the Church“ there
are brilliant exceptions. Perhaps the greatest of these was St.
Augustine.
He was a good and a holy man, but even his great brain, as we have
seen,
was saturated with Hellenic mythology, Egyptian magic and witchcraft,
Neoplatonism,
Judaism, Romish dogmatism. If we cite him as an irrefutable authority
on
a point of dogma, we should, to be consistent, go a step farther, and
equally
hold him as irrefutable when he inclines to a belief in Apuleius and
his
ass, and in his views as to Jupiter, Juno and the theocracy of Olympus.
Religious dogmas, superstitions, so bred, could not be accepted by a
man
of Kant's intellect. They were noxious weeds to be rooted up and swept
out of existence. Christ's teaching being, as he held it to be,
perfect,
could only be degraded by being loaded with heathen fables and tawdry
inanities.
It was the scum of the people who invented superstitions, the belief in
witches and demons: it was the priestcraft who welded those false
doctrines
into the semblance of a religion to which they gave Christ's name. *
Kant said of himself
that he was born too soon; that a century must elapse before his day
should
come. “The morning has dawned,“ as Chamberlain says in another book, †
and “it is no mere chance that the first complete and exact edition of
Kant's collected works and letters should have begun to appear for the
first time in the
* The
Christian religion, I would point out here, is not the only one which
has
suffered in this way. Nothing can be simpler, nothing purer in its way
than Buddhism as the Buddha taught it. Yet see what the monks have made
of it! The parallel is striking.
† Immanuel
Kant, by Chamberlain. Bruckmann, Munich, 1905. The book which
Chamberlain
tells me that he himself considers the “most important“ of his works.
It
is published in German.
li INTRODUCTION
year 1900; the new century needed this
strong guardian spirit, who thought himself justified in saying of his
system of philosophy that it worked a revolution in the scheme of
thought
analogous to that of the Copernican system. There are to-day a few who
know, and many who suspect, that this scheme of philosophy must form a
pillar of the culture of the future. For every cultivated and civilised
man Kant's thought possesses a symbolical significance; it wards off
the
two opposite dangers — the dogmatism of the Priests and the
superstition
of science — and it strengthens us in the devoted fulfilment of the
duties
of life.“ Now that thought is less cramped and Kant is beginning to be
understood, the true religiosity of his august nature is surely being
recognised,
and the last charge that will be brought against him will be that of
irreligion.
If he destroyed, he also built; he was not one of those teachers who
rob
a man of what he possesses without giving anything in exchange. He
completed
the work which Martin Luther had begun. Luther was too much of a
politician
and too little of a theologian for his task; moreover he never was able
altogether to throw off the monk's cowl. To the last he believed in the
Real Presence in the Sacrament, and hardly knew what dogmas he should
accept
and what he should reject. Kant was the master who taught Christianity
in all its beauty of simplicity. The kingdom of God is in you! There
was
no cowl to smother Kant.
The foundation-stone
of the nineteenth century was laid by Christ himself. For many
centuries
after His death upon the Cross, ignorant men, barbarians, under the
cloak
of religion, were at pains to hide that stone in an
lii INTRODUCTION
overwhelming heap of rubbish. Kant laid
it bare, and revealed it to the world: his reward was the execration of
men who were not worthy to unloose the latchet of his shoes: but the
tables
are turned now. His morning has indeed dawned, and the twentieth
century
is recognising the true worth of the man who, more than any other, has
influenced the thought of the educated world. Goethe, indeed, said of
Kant
that he had so penetrated the minds of men that even those who had not
read him were under his influence.
The last
section of Chamberlain's ninth chapter is devoted to Art. He has
kept
one of his most fascinating subjects for the end. And who is better
qualified
to write upon it than he? Here is not the conventional aspect of Art
contained
in the technical dictionaries and encyclopaedias, “in which the last
judgment
of Michael Angelo, or a portrait of Rembrandt by himself, are to be
seen
cheek by jowl with the lid of a beer-mug or the back of an arm-chair.“
Art is here treated as the great creative Power, a Kingdom of which
Poetry
and Music, twin sisters, inseparable, are the enthroned Queens. To
Chamberlain,
as it was to Carlyle, the idea of divorcing Poetry from Music is
inconceivable.
“Music,“ wrote Carlyle, “is well said to be the speech of angels; in
fact
nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It
brings us near to the Infinite.“ “I give Dante my highest praise when I
say of his Divine Comedy that it is in all senses genuinely a song.“
Again:
“All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically songs. I would
say in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not
sung
is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,
to the
liii INTRODUCTION
great injury of the grammar, to the
great grief of the reader for the most part!“ so spoke Carlyle, and so
speaks Chamberlain, with the masterly competence of a man who as critic
and disciple, for he is both, has sat at the feet of the great
Tone-Poet
of our times. *
The hurry and bustle
of this fussy age have largely robbed us of true enthusiasm, for which
men substitute catchwords and commonplaces. All the more delight is
there
in meeting it in such sayings as this, coming straight from the heart
of
a man who is never in a hurry, whose convictions are the result of
measured
thought. “A Leonardo gives us the form of Christ, a Johann Sebastian
Bach
his voice, even now present to us.“ The influence of Religion upon Art,
and in reflex action, that of Art upon Religion has never been better
shown
than in these words. Religion inspired the artists, furnished them with
their subject; the artists, so inspired, have touched the hearts of
thousands,
infusing them with some perception, some share of their own inspiration.
Who can say how many
minds have been turned to piety by the frescoes of Cimabue and Giotto
picturing
the life of St. Francis at Assisi? Who can doubt the influence of the
Saint
upon the painters of the early Italian school? Who has not felt the
religious
influence of the architect, the painter, the sculptor? Two great
principles
are laid down for us by Chamberlain in regard to Art.
* It
is curious to note that of the three greatest English poets of our day,
Tennyson, whose songs are music itself, knew no tune, Swinburne, whose
magic verses read with the lilt of a lovely melody, had not the gift of
Ear, while Browning, the rugged thinker, the most unvocal of poets,
never
missed an opportunity of listening to music in its most exalted form.
liv INTRODUCTION
First: Art must be regarded as a whole:
as a “pulsing blood-system of the higher spiritual life.“ Secondly: all
Art is subordinated to poetry. But not that which has been written is
alone
poetry: the creative power of poetry is widespread. As Richard Wagner
said,
“the true inventor has ever been the people. The individual cannot
invent,
he can only make his own that which has been invented.“ This I take it
is the true spirit of folk-lore. If you think of it, the epic of Homer,
the “mystic unfathomable song,“ as Tieck called it,
of Dante, the
wonders
of Shakespeare, all prove the truth of Wagner's saying. The matter is
there:
then comes the magician: he touches it with his wand, and it lives!
That
is true creative art, the art which in its turn inspires, fathering all
that is greatest and noblest in the world. It is the art upon which the
culture of the nineteenth century has been founded and built.
Rich indeed have
been the gifts which have been showered upon mankind between the
thirteenth
and the nineteenth centuries. New worlds have been discovered, new
forces
in nature revealed. Paper has been introduced, printing invented. In
political
economy, in politics, in religion, in natural science and dynamics
there
have been great upheavals all paving the way for that further progress
for which we are apt to take too much credit to ourselves, giving too
little
to those glorious pioneers who preceded us, to the true founders of the
century.
I have endeavoured
to give some idea of the scope of Chamberlain's great work. I am very
sensible
of my inadequacy to the task, but it was his wish that I should
lv INTRODUCTION
undertake it, and I could not refuse.
I console myself with the thought that even had I been far better
fitted
for it, I could not within the limits of these few pages have given a
satisfying
account of a book which embraces so many and so various subjects, many
of which I had of necessity to leave untouched. Indeed, I feel appalled
at the range of reading which its production must have involved; but as
to that the book is its own best witness. We are led to hope that some
day the history of the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century may be
followed
by an equally fascinating analysis of the century itself from the same
pen. It will be the fitting crown of a colossal undertaking. It may be
doubted whether there is any other man equipped as Chamberlain is to
erect
such a monument in honour of a great epoch. To few men has been given
in
so bountiful a measure the power of seeing, of sifting the true from
the
false, the essential from the insignificant; comparison is the soul of
observation, and the wide horizon of Chamberlain's outlook furnishes
him
with standards of comparison which are denied to those of shorter
sight:
his peculiar and cosmopolitan education, his long researches in natural
history, his sympathy and intimate relations with all that has been
noblest
in the world of art — especially in its most divine expression, poetry
and music — point to him as the one man above all others worthy to tell
the further tale of a culture of which he has so well portrayed the
nonage,
and which is still struggling heavenward. But in addition to these
qualifications
he possesses, in a style which is wholly his own, the indescribable
gift
of charm, so that the pupil is unwittingly drawn into a close union
with
the teacher, in whom he sees an example of the truth
lvi INTRODUCTION
of Goethe's words, which Chamberlain
himself more than once quotes:
Höchstes
Glück der
Erdenkinder
Ist nur die Persönlichkeit.
REDESDALE
BATSFORD PARK
January 8, 1909
NOTE.
This introduction was in print before the writer had seen Dr. Lees'
translation.
There may, therefore, be some slight discrepancies in the passages
quoted.
lvii
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
THE translator desires
to express his great obligation to Miss Elizabeth A. J. Weir, M.A., for
reading through the manuscript; to his colleagues, Dr. Schlapp of
Edinburgh,
Dr. Scholle of Aberdeen, and Dr. Smith of Glasgow, for correcting
portions
of the proof; and above all to Lord Redesdale for his brilliant and
illuminating
introduction. Apart, however, from this, it is only just to say that
Lord
Redesdale has carefully read and re-read every page and revised many
important
passages.
The publisher wishes
to associate himself with the translator in making this entirely
inadequate
acknowledgment to Lord Redesdale for the invaluable assistance that he
has so generously rendered.
lviii
(Blank page)
lix
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
- Alles beruht auf
Inhalt, Gehalt
und Tüchtigkeit eines zuerst aufgestellten Grundsatzes und auf der
Reinheit des Vorsatzes.
- GOETHE
PLAN OF THE WORK
THE work of which
this is the first Book is one that is not to be made up of fragments
patched
together, but one that has been conceived and planned out from the
beginning
as a complete and finished whole. The object, therefore, of this
general
introduction must be to give an idea of the scheme of the whole work
when
it shall have been brought to an end. It is true that this first book
is,
in form, complete in itself; yet it would not be what it is if it had
not
come into existence as a part of a greater conception. It is this
greater
conception that must be the subject of the preface to the “part which,
in the first instance, is the whole.“
There is no need
to dwell in detail upon the limitations which the individual must
admit,
when he stands face to face with an immeasurable world of facts. The
mastery
of such a task, scientifically, is impossible; it is only artistic
power,
aided by those secret parallels which exist between the world of vision
and of thought, by that tissue which — like ether — fills and connects
the whole world, that can, if fortune is favourable, produce a unity
here
which is complete, and that, too, though only fragments be employed to
make it. If the artist does succeed in this, then his work has not
lx
AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
been superfluous: the immeasurable has
been brought within the scope of vision, the shapeless has acquired a
form.
In such a task the individual has an advantage over a combination of
men,
however capable they may be, for a homogeneous whole can be the work
only
of an individual mind. But he must know how to turn this advantage to
good
account, for it is his only one. Art appears only as a whole, as
something
perfect in itself; science, on the other hand, is bound to be
fragmentary.
Art unites and science disconnects. Art gives form to things, science
dissects
forms. The man of science stands on an Archimedean point outside the
world:
therein lies his greatness, his so-called objectivity; but this very
fact
is also the cause of his manifest insufficiency; for no sooner does he
leave the sphere of actual observation, to reduce the manifoldness of
experience
to the unity of conception and idea, than he finds himself hanging by
the
thin thread of abstraction in empty space. The artist, on the contrary,
stands at the world's centre (that is, at the centre of his own world),
and his creative power takes him as far as his senses can reach; for
this
creative power is but the manifestation of the individual mind acting
and
reacting upon its surroundings. But for that reason also he cannot be
reproached
for his “subjectivity“: that is the fundamental condition of his
creative
work. In the case before us the subject has definite historical
boundaries
and is immutably fixed for ever. Untruth would be ridiculous, caprice
unbearable;
the author cannot say, like Michael Angelo, “Into this stone there
comes
nothing but what I put there“:
- in pietra od in candido foglio
- che nulla ha dentro, et evvi ci
ch'io vogilo!
On the contrary, unconditional respect
for
facts must be his guiding star. He must be artist, not in the sense of
the creative genius, but only in the limited sense of one
lxi AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
who employs the methods of the artist.
He should give shape, but only to that which is already there, not to
that
which his fancy may mirror. Philosophical history is a desert; fanciful
history an idiot asylum. We must therefore demand that the artistic
designer
should have a positive tendency of mind and a strictly scientific
conscience.
Before be reasons, he must know: before he gives shape to a thing, he
must
test it. He cannot look upon himself as master, he is but a servant,
the
servant of truth.
These remarks will
probably suffice to give the reader some notion of the general
principles
which have been followed in planning this work. We must leave the airy
heights of philosophic speculation and descend to the earth. If in such
undertakings the moulding and shaping of the materials at hand is the
only
task which the individual can entrust to himself, how is he to set
about
it in the present case?
The Nineteenth
Century! It seems an inexhaustible theme, and so it really is; and
yet it is only by including more that it becomes comprehensible and
possible
of achievement. This appears paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true.
As soon as our gaze rests long and lovingly upon the past, out of which
the present age developed amid so much suffering, as soon as the great
fundamental facts of history are brought vividly home to us and rouse
in
our hearts violent and conflicting emotions with regard to the present,
fear and hope, loathing and enthusiasm, all pointing to a future which
it must be our work to shape, towards which too we must henceforth look
with longing and impatience — then the great immeasurable nineteenth
century
shrivels up to relatively insignificant dimensions; we have no time to
linger over details, we wish to keep nothing but the important features
vividly and clearly before our minds, in order that we may know who we
are and whither
lxii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
we are tending. This gives a definite
aim with a fair prospect of attaining it: the individual can venture
now
to begin the undertaking. The lines of his work are so clearly traced
for
him that he only requires to follow them faithfully.
The following is
the outline of my work. In the “Foundations“ I discuss the first
eighteen
centuries of the Christian era with frequent reference to times more
remote;
I do not profess to give a history of the past, but merely of that past
which is still living; as a matter of fact this involves so much, and
an
accurate and critical knowledge of it is so indispensable to every one
who wishes to form an estimate of the present, that I am inclined to
regard
the study of the “Foundations“ of the nineteenth century as almost the
most important part of the whole undertaking. A second book would be
devoted
to this century itself: naturally only the leading ideas could be
treated
in such a work, and the task of doing so would be very much lightened
and
simplified by the “Foundations,“ in which our attention had been
continually
directed to the nineteenth century. A supplement might serve to form an
approximate idea of the importance of the century; that can only be
done
by comparing it with the past, and here the “Foundations“ would have
prepared
the ground; by this procedure, moreover, we should be able to
foreshadow
the future — no capricious and fanciful picture, but a shadow cast by
the
present in the light of the past. Then at last the century would stand
out before our eyes clearly shaped and defined — not in the form of a
chronicle
or an encyclopaedia, but as a living “corporeal“ thing.
So much for the
general
outline. But as I do not wish it to remain as shadowy as the future, I
shall give some more detailed information concerning the execution of
my
plan. As regards the results at
lxiii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
which I arrive, I do not feel called
upon to anticipate them here, as they can only carry conviction after
consideration
of all the arguments which I shall have to bring forward in their
support.
THE
FOUNDATIONS
In this first book it has been
my task to endeavour to reveal the bases upon which the nineteenth
century
rests; this seemed to me, as I have said, the most difficult and
important
part of the whole scheme; for this reason I have devoted two volumes to
it. In the sphere of history understanding means seeing the evolution
of
the present from the past; even when we are face to face with a fact
which
cannot be explained further, as happens in the case of every
pre-eminent
personality and every nation of strong individuality at its first
appearance
on the stage of history, we see that these are linked with the past,
and
it is from this point of connection that we must start, if we wish to
form
a correct estimate of their significance. If we draw an imaginary line
separating the nineteenth from all preceding centuries, we destroy at
one
stroke all possibility of understanding it critically. The nineteenth
century
is not the child of the former ages — for a child begins life afresh —
rather it is their direct product; mathematically considered, a sum;
physiologically,
a stage of life. We have inherited a certain amount of knowledge,
accomplishments,
thoughts, &c., we have further inherited a definite distribution of
economic forces, we have inherited errors and truths, conceptions,
ideals,
superstitions: many of these things have grown so familiar that any
other
conditions would be inconceivable; many which promised well have become
stunted, many have shot up so suddenly that they have almost broken
their
connection with the aggregate life, and while the roots of these new
flowers
reach down to forgotten generations, their fantastic
lxiv AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
blossoms are taken for something
absolutely
new. Above all we have inherited the blood and the body by which and in
which we live.
Whoever takes the
admonition “Know thyself“ seriously will soon recognise that at least
nine-tenths
of this “self“ do not really belong to himself. And this is true also
of
the spirit of a century. The pre-eminent individual, who is able to
realise
his physical position in the universe and to analyse his intellectual
inheritance,
can attain to a relative freedom; he then becomes at least conscious of
his own conditional position, and though he cannot transform himself,
he
can at least exercise some influence upon the course of further
development;
a whole century, on the other hand, hurries unconsciously on as fate
impels
it: its human equipment is the fruit of departed generations, its
intellectual
treasure — corn and chaff, gold, silver, ore and clay — is inherited,
its
tendencies and deviations result with mathematical necessity from
movements
that have gone before. Not only, therefore, is it impossible to compare
or to determine the characteristic features, the special attributes and
the achievements of our century, without knowledge of the past, but we
are not even able to make any precise statement about it, if we have
not
first of all become clear with regard to the material of which we are
physically
and intellectually composed. This is, I repeat, the most important
problem.
THE
TURNING-POINT
My object in this
book being to connect the present with the past, I have been compelled
to sketch in outline the history of that past. But, inasmuch as my
history
has to deal with the present, that is to say, with a period of time
which
has no fixed limit, there is no case for a strictly defined beginning.
The
lxv AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
nineteenth century points onward into
the future, it points also back into the past: in both cases a
limitation
is allowable only for the sake of convenience, it does not lie in the
facts.
In general I have regarded the year 1 of the Christian era as the
beginning
of our history and have given a fuller justification of this view in
the
introduction
to the first part: but it will be seen that I have not kept
slavishly
to this scheme. Should we ever become true Christians, then certainly
that
which is here merely suggested, without being worked out, would become
an historical actuality, for it would mean the birth of a new race:
perhaps
the twenty-fourth century, into which, roughly speaking, the nineteenth
throws faint shadows, will be able to draw more definite outlines.
Compelled
as I have been to let the beginning and the end merge into an undefined
penumbra, a clearly drawn middle line becomes all the more
indispensable
to me, and as a date chosen at random could not be satisfactory in this
case, the important thing has been to fix the turning-point of the
history
of Europe. The awakening of the Teutonic peoples to the consciousness
of
their all-important vocation as the founders of a completely new
civilisation
and culture forms this turning point; the year 1200 can be designated
the
central moment of this awakening.
Scarcely any one
will have the hardihood to deny that the inhabitants of Northern Europe
have become the makers of the world's history. At no time indeed have
they
stood alone, either in the past or in the present; on the contrary,
from
the very beginning their individuality has developed in conflict with
other
individualities, first of all in conflict with that human chaos
composed
of the ruins of fallen Rome, then with all the races of the world in
turn;
others, too, have exercised influence — indeed great influence — upon
the
destinies of mankind, but then always merely as opponents of the men
from
lxvi AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
the north. What was fought out sword
in hand was of but little account; the real struggle, as I have
attempted
to show in chaps. vii. and viii.
of this work, was one of ideas; this struggle still goes on to-day. If,
however, the Teutons were not the only peoples who moulded the world's
history, they unquestionably deserve the first place: all those who
from
the sixth century onwards appear as genuine shapers of the destinies of
mankind, whether as builders of States or as discoverers of new
thoughts
and of original art, belong to the Teutonic race. The impulse given by
the Arabs is short-lived; the Mongolians destroy, but do not create
anything;
the great Italians of the rinascimento were all born either in
the
north saturated with Lombardic, Gothic and Frankish blood, or in the
extreme
Germano-Hellenic south; in Spain it was the Western Goths who formed
the
element of life; the Jews are working out their “Renaissance“ of to-day
by following in every sphere as closely as possible the example of the
Teutonic peoples. From the moment the Teuton awakes, a new world begins
to open out, a world which of course we shall not be able to call
purely
Teutonic — one in which, in the nineteenth century especially, there
have
appeared new elements, or at least elements which formerly had a lesser
share in the process of development, as, for example, the Jews and the
formerly pure Teutonic Slavs, who by mixture of blood have now become
“un-Teutonised“
— a world which will yet perhaps assimilate great racial complexes and
so lay itself open to new influences from all the different types, but
at any rate a new world and a new civilisation, essentially different
from
the Helleno-Roman, the Turanian, the Egyptian, the Chinese and all
other
former or contemporaneous ones. As the “beginning“ of this new
civilisation,
that is, as the moment when it began to leave its peculiar impress on
the
world, we can, I think, fix the thirteenth century. Individuals
lxvii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
such as Alfred the Great, Charlemagne,
Scotus Erigena and others had long ago proved their Teutonic
individuality
by their civilising activity. It is, however, not individuals, but
communities,
that make history; these individuals had been only pioneers. In order
to
become a civilising power the Teuton had to awaken and grow strong in
the
exercise far and wide of his individual will in opposition to the will
of others forced upon him from outside. This did not take place all at
once, neither did it happen at the same time in all the spheres of
life;
the choice of the year 1200 as turning-point is therefore arbitrary,
but
I hope, in what follows, to be able to justify it, and my purpose will
be gained if I in this way succeed in doing away with those two
absurdities
— the idea of Middle Ages and that of a Renaissance — by which more
than
by anything else an understanding of our present age is not only
obscured,
but rendered directly impossible.
Abandoning these
formulae which have but served to give rise to endless errors, we are
left
with the simple and clear view that our whole civilisation and culture
of to-day is the work of one definite race of men, the Teutonic. * It
is
untrue that the Teutonic barbarian conjured up the so-called “Night of
the Middle Ages“; this night followed rather upon the intellectual and
moral bankruptcy of the raceless chaos of humanity which the dying
Roman
Empire had nurtured; but for the Teuton everlasting night would have
settled
upon the world; but for the unceasing opposition of the non-Teutonic
peoples,
but for that unrelenting hostility to everything Teutonic which has not
yet died down among the racial chaos which has never been exterminated,
we should have reached a stage of culture quite different
*
Under
this designation I embrace the various portions of the one great North
European race, whether “Teutonic“ in the narrower Tacitean meaning of
the
word, or Celts or genuine Slavs — see chap.
vi. for further particulars.
lxviii
AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
from that witnessed by the nineteenth
century. It is equally untrue that our culture is a renaissance of the
Hellenic and the Roman: it was only after the birth of the Teutonic
peoples
that the renaissance of past achievements was possible and not vice
versa; and this rinascimento, to which we are beyond doubt
eternally
indebted for the enriching of our life, retarded nevertheless just as
much
as it promoted, and threw us for a long time out of our safe course.
The
mightiest creators of that epoch — a Shakespeare, a Michael Angelo — do
not know a word of Greek or Latin. Economic advance — the basis of our
civilisation — takes place in opposition to classical traditions and in
a bloody struggle against false imperial doctrines. But the greatest
mistake
of all is the assumption that our civilisation and culture are but the
expression of a general progress of mankind; not a single fact in
history
supports this popular belief (as I think I have conclusively proved in
the ninth chapter of this
book);
and in the meantime this empty phrase strikes us blind, and we lose
sight
of the self-evident fact — that our civilisation and culture, as in
every
previous and every other contemporary case, are the work of a definite,
individual racial type, a type possessing, like everything individual,
great gifts but also insurmountable limitations. And so our thoughts
float
around in limitless space, in a hypothetical “humanity,“ and we pass by
unnoticed that which is concretely presented and which alone effects
anything
in history, the definite individuality. Hence the obscurity of our
historical
groupings. For if we draw one line through the year 500, and a second
through
the year 1500, and call these thousand years the Middle Ages, we have
not
dissected the organic body of history as a skilled anatomist, but
hacked
it in two like a butcher. The capture of Rome by Odoacer and by
Dietrich
of Berne are only episodes in that entry of the Teutonic
lxix
AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
peoples into the history of the world,
which went on for a thousand years: the decisive thing, namely, the
idea
of the unnational world-empire, far from receiving its death-blow
thereby,
for a long time drew new life from the intervention of the Teutonic
races.
While, therefore, the year 1 — the (approximate) date of the birth of
Christ
— is a date which is ever memorable in the history of mankind and even
in the mere annals of events, the year 500 has no importance whatever.
Still worse is the year 1500, for if we draw a line through it we draw
it right through the middle of all conscious and unconscious efforts
and
developments — economic, political, artistic, scientific — which enrich
our lives to-day and are moving onward to a still distant goal. If,
however,
we insist on retaining the idea of “Middle Ages“ there is an easy way
out
of the difficulty: it will suffice if we recognise that we Teutons
ourselves,
together with our proud nineteenth century, are floundering in what the
old historians used to call a “Middle Age“ — a genuine “Middle Age.“
For
the predominance of the Provisional and the Transitional, the almost
total
absence of the Definite, the Complete and the Balanced, are marks of
our
time; we are in the “midst“ of a development, already far from the
starting-point
and presumably still far from the goal.
What has been said
may in the meantime justify the rejection of other divisions; the
conviction
that I have not chosen arbitrarily, but have sought to recognise the
one
great fundamental fact of all modern history, will be established by
the
study of the whole work. Yet I cannot refrain from briefly adducing
some
reasons to account for my choice of the year 1200 as a convenient
central
date.
lxx AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
THE
YEAR 1200
If we ask ourselves
when it is that we have the first sure indications that something new
is
coming into being, a new form of the world in place of the old
shattered
ruin, and of the prevailing chaos, we must admit that they are already
to be met with in many places in the twelfth century (in Northern Italy
even in the eleventh), they multiply rapidly in the thirteenth — the
glorious
century, as Fiske calls it — attain to a glorious early full bloom in
the
social and industrial centres in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries,
in art in the fifteenth and sixteenth, in science in the sixteenth and
seventeenth, and in philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth. This
movement does not advance in a straight line; in State and Church
fundamental
principles are at war with each other, and in the other spheres of life
there is far too little consciousness to prevent men from ever and anon
straying from the right path; but the all-important question we have to
ask ourselves is, whether it is only interests that clash, or whether
ideals,
suggested by a definite individuality, are floating before the eyes of
men; these ideals we do possess approximately since the thirteenth
century;
but we have not yet attained them, they are floating before us in the
distance,
and to this fact is due the feeling that we are still very deficient in
the moral equilibrium and the aesthetic harmony of the ancients, but it
is at the same time the basis of our hope for better things. When we
glance
backwards we are indeed entitled to cherish high hopes. And, I repeat,
if when looking back we try to discover when the first shimmer of those
rays of hope can be clearly seen, we find the time to be about the year
1200. In Italy the movement to found cities had begun in the eleventh
century,
that movement which aimed at the same time at the furtherance of trade
and industry and
lxxi AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
the granting of far-reaching rights
of freedom to whole classes of the population, which had hitherto pined
under the double yoke of Church and State; in the twelfth century this
strengthening of the core of the European population had become so
widely
spread and intensified that at the beginning of the thirteenth century
the powerful Hansa and the Rhenish Alliance of Cities could be formed.
Concerning this movement Ranke writes (Weltgeschichte, iv. 238):
“It is a splendid, vigorous development, which is thus initiated ...
the
cities constitute a world power, paving the way for civic liberty and
the
formation of powerful States.“ Even before the final founding of the
Hansa,
the Magna Charta had been proclaimed in England, in the year 1215, a
solemn
proclamation of the inviolability of the great principle of personal
freedom
and personal security. “No one may be condemned except in accordance
with
the laws of the land. Right and justice may not be bought nor refused.“
In some countries of Europe this first guarantee for the dignity of man
has not to this day become law; but since that June 15, 1215, a general
law of conscience has gradually grown out of it, and whoever runs
counter
to this is a criminal, even though he wear a crown. I may mention
another
important point in which Teutonic civilisation showed itself
essentially
different from all others: in the course of the thirteenth century
slavery
and the slave trade disappeared from European countries (with the
exception
of Spain). In the thirteenth century money begins to take the place of
natural products in buying and selling; almost exactly in the year 1200
we see in Europe the first manufacture of paper — without doubt the
most
momentous industrial achievement till the invention of the locomotive.
It would, however, be erroneous to regard the advance of trade and the
stirring of instincts of freedom as the only indications of the dawn of
a new day. Perhaps
lxxii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
the great movement of religious feeling,
the most powerful representative of which was Francis of Assisi (b.
1182) is a factor of deeper and more lasting influence; in it a
genuinely
democratic impulse makes itself apparent; the faith and life of men
like
Francis call in question the tyranny of Church as of State, and deal a
death-blow to the despotism of money. “This movement,“ one of the
authorities
* on Francis of Assisi writes, “gives men the first forewarning of
universal
freedom of thought.“ At the same moment the avowedly anti-Catholic
movement,
that of the Albigenses, came into dangerous prominence in Western
Europe.
In another sphere of religious life some equally important steps were
taken
at the same time: after Peter Abelard (d. 1142) had
unconsciously
defended the Indo-European conception of religion against the Semitic,
especially by emphasising the symbolic character of all religious
ideas,
two orthodox schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, made in the
thirteenth
century an admission which was just as dangerous for the church dogma
by
conceding, in agreement with each other (though they were otherwise
opponents),
the right of existence to a philosophy which differed from theology.
And
while theoretical thinking here began to assert itself, other scholars,
among whom Albertus Magnus (b. 1193) and Roger Bacon (b.
1214) are especially conspicuous, laid the foundations of modern
natural
science by turning the attention of men from logical disputes to
mathematics,
physics, astronomy and chemistry. Cantor (Vorlesungen über
Geschichte
der Mathematik, 2 Aufl. ii. 3) says that in the thirteenth century
“a new era in the history of mathematical science“ began; this was
especially
the work of Leonardo of Pisa, who was the first to introduce to us the
Indian (falsely called Arabian) numerical signs, and of Jordanus Saxo,
of the family of Count Eberstein, who initiated
*
Thode,
Franz
von Assisi, p. 4.
lxxiii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
us into the art of algebraic calculation
(also originally invented by the Hindoos). The first dissection of a
human
body — which was of course the first step towards scientific medicine —
took place towards the end of the thirteenth century, after an interval
of one thousand six hundred years, and it was carried out by Mondino
de'
Luzzi, of Northern Italy. Dante, likewise a child of the thirteenth
century,
also deserves mention here — indeed very special mention. “Nel mezzo
del
cammin di nostra vita“ is the first line of his great poem, and he
himself,
the first artistic genius of world-wide importance in the new Teutonic
epoch of culture, is the typical figure at this turning-point of
history,
the point at which she has left behind her “the half of her way,“ and,
after having travelled at break-neck speed downhill for centuries, sets
herself to climb the steep, difficult path on the opposite slope. Many
of Dante's sentiments in the Divina Comedia and in his Tractatus
de monarchia appear to us like the longing glance of the man of
great
experience out of the social and political chaos surrounding him,
towards
a harmoniously ordered world; and such a glance was possible as a sure
sign that the movement had already begun; the eye of genius is a ray of
light that shows the way to others. *
But long before Dante
— this point must not be overlooked — a poetical creative power had
manifested
itself
* I
am not here thinking of the details of his proofs, coloured as they are
by scholasticism, but of such things as his views on the relation of
men
to one another (Monarchia, I. chaps. iii. and iv.) or on the
federation
of States, each of which he says shall retain its own individuality and
its own legislature, while the Emperor, as “peacemaker“ and judge in
matters
that are “common and becoming to all,“ shall form the bond of union (I.
chap. xiv.). In other things Dante himself, as genuine “middle“ figure,
allows himself to be very much influenced by the conceptions of his
time
and dwells in poetical Utopias. This point is more fully discussed in chap.
vii., and especially in the introduction to chap.
viii. of this book.
lxxiv AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
in the heart of the most genuine
Teutonic
life, in the north, a fact in itself sufficient to prove how little
need
we had of a classical revival to enable us to create incomparable
masterpieces
of art: in the year 1200, Chrestien de Troyes, Hartmann von Aue,
Wolfram
von Eschenbach, Walther von der Vogelweide, Gottfried von Strassburg
were
writing their poems, and I mention only some of the most famous names,
for, as Gottfried says, “of the nightingales there are many more.“ And
up to this time the questionable separation of poetry and music (which
originated from the worship of the dead letters) had not taken place:
the
poet was at the same time singer; when he invented the “word“ he
invented
for it at the same time the particular “tone“ and the particular
“melody.“
And so we see music too, the most original art of the new culture,
develop
just at the moment when the peculiar individuality of this culture
began
to show itself in a perfectly new form as polyphonic harmonious art.
The
first master of note in the treatment of counterpoint is the poet and
dramatist
Adam de la Halle (b. 1240). With him — and so with a genuinely
Teutonic
word- and sound-creator — begins the development of music in the strict
sense, so that the musical authority Gevaert can write:
“Désormais
l'on peut considérer ce treizième siècle, si
décrié
jadis, comme le siècle initiateur de tout l'art moderne.“
Likewise
in the thirteenth century those inspired artists Niccolo Pisano,
Cimabue
and Giotto revealed their talents, and to them we are indebted, in the
first place, not merely for a “Renaissance“ of the plastic and graphic
arts, but above all for the birth of a perfectly new art, that of
modern
painting. It was also in the thirteenth century that Gothic
architecture
came into prominence (the “Teutonic style“ as Ruhmor rightly wished to
call it) almost all masterpieces of church architecture, the
incomparable
beauty of which we to-day admire but cannot
lxxv AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
imitate, originate in that one century.
In the meantime (shortly before 1200), the first purely secular
university
had been founded in Bologna, at which only jurisprudence, philosophy
and
medicine were taught. * We see in how many ways a new life began to
manifest
itself about the year 1200. A few names would prove nothing; but the
fact
that a movement embraces all lands and grades of society, that the most
contradictory phenomena point backwards to a similar cause and forwards
to a common goal, proves that we have here to deal not with an
accidental
and individual thing but with a great, general process which is
maturing
with unconscious imperativeness in the inmost heart of society. And
that
peculiar “decline in historical sense and historical understanding
about
the middle of the thirteenth century,“ to which different scholars have
wonderingly called attention, † should be taken also, I think, in this
connection: under the guidance of the Teutonic peoples men have just
begun
a new life; they have, so to speak, turned a corner in their course and
even the nearest past has completely vanished from their sight:
henceforth
they belong to the future.
It is most surprising
to have to chronicle the fact that exactly at this moment, when the new
European world was arising out of chaos, the discovery of the remaining
parts of the world also began, without which our blossoming Teutonic
culture
could never have developed its own peculiar power of expansion: in the
second half of the thirteenth century Marco Polo made expeditions of
discovery
and thereby laid the foundations of our still incomplete knowledge of
the
surface of our planet. What is gained by this is, in the first place
* The
theological faculty was not established till towards the end of the
fourteenth
century (Savigny).
† See
Döllinger, Das Kaisertum Karls des Grossen (Akad.
Vorträge
iii. 156).
lxxvi AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
and apart from the widening of the
horizon,
the capability of expansion; this, however, denotes only something
relative;
the most important thing is that European authority may hope within a
measurable
space of time to encompass the earth and thereby no longer be exposed,
like former civilisations, to the plundering raids of unlooked for and
unbridled barbaric Powers.
So much to justify
my choice of the thirteenth century as separating-line.
That there is,
nevertheless,
something artificial in such a choice I have admitted at the very
beginning
and I repeat it now; in particular one must not think that I attribute
a special fateful importance to the year 1200: the ferment of the first
twelve centuries of the Christian era has of course not yet ceased, it
still confuses thousands and thousands of intellects, and on the other
hand we may cheerfully assert that the new harmonious world began to
dawn
in the minds of individuals long before 1200. The rightness or
wrongness
of such a scheme is revealed only by its use. As Goethe says:
“Everything
depends on the fundamental truth, the development of which reveals
itself
not so easily in speculation as in practice: this is the touch-stone of
what has been admitted by the intellect.“
DIVISION
INTO TWO
PARTS
In consequence of
this fixing of the turning-point of our history, this book, which
treats
of the period up to the year 1800, falls naturally into two parts: the
one deals with the period previous to the year 1200, the other the
period
subsequent to that year.
In the first
part — the origins — I have discussed first the legacy of the old
world,
then the heirs and lastly the fight of the heirs for their inheritance.
As everything new is attached to something already in existence, some-
lxxvii
AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
thing older, the first fundamental
question
is, “What component parts of our intellectual capital are inherited?“
the
second, no less important, is, “Who are we?“ Though the answering of
these
questions may take us back into the distant past, the interest remains
always a present interest, because in the whole construction of every
chapter,
as well as in every detail of the discussion, the one all-absorbing
consideration
is that of the nineteenth century. The legacy of the old world forms
still
an important — often quite inadequately digested — portion of the very
youngest world: the heirs with their different natures stand opposed to
one another to-day as they did a thousand years ago; the struggle is as
bitter, as confused as ever; the investigation of the past means
therefore
at the same time an examination of the too abundant material of the
present.
Let no one, however, regard my remarks on Hellenic art and philosophy,
on Roman history and Roman law, on the teaching of Christ, or, again,
on
the Teutonic peoples and the Jews, &c., as independent academic
treatises
and apply to them the corresponding standard. I have not approached
these
subjects as a learned authority, but as a child of to-day that desires
to understand the living present world and I have formed my judgments,
not from the Aristophanic cloud-cuckoo-land of a supernatural
objectivity,
but from that of a conscious Teuton whom Goethe not in vain has warned:
- Was euch nicht
angehört,
- Müsset ihr
meiden;
- Was euch das
Inn're
stört,
- Dürft ihr
nicht
leiden!
In the eyes of God
all
men, indeed all creatures, may be equal: but the divine law of the
individual
is to maintain and to defend his individuality. I have formed my idea
of
Teutonicism on a scale quite as large; which means in this case “as
large-heartedly
as possible,“ and
lxxviii
AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
have not pleaded the cause of any
particularism
whatever. I have, on the other hand, vigorously attacked whatever is
un-Teutonic,
but — as I hope — nowhere in an unchivalrous manner.
The fact that the
chapter
on the entry of the Jews into western history has been made so long
may perhaps demand explanation. For the subject of this book, so
diffuse
a treatment would not have been indispensable; but the prominent
position
of the Jews in the nineteenth century, as also the great importance for
the history of our time of the philo- and anti-semitic currents and
controversies,
made an answer to the question, “Who is the Jew?“ absolutely
imperative.
Nowhere could I find a clear and exhaustive answer to this question, so
I was compelled to seek and to give it myself. The essential point here
is the question of religion; and so I have treated this very point at
considerable
length, not merely in the fifth,
but also in the third and in the
seventh
chapters. For I have become convinced that the usual treatment of the
“Jewish
question“ is altogether and always superficial; the Jew is no enemy of
Teutonic civilisation and culture; Herder may be right in his assertion
that the Jew is always alien to us, and consequently we to him, and no
one will deny that this is to the detriment of our work of culture; yet
I think that we are inclined to under-estimate our own powers in this
respect
and, on the other hand, to exaggerate the importance of the Jewish
influence.
Hand in hand with this goes the perfectly ridiculous and revolting
tendency
to make the Jew the general scapegoat for all the vices of our time. In
reality the “Jewish peril“ lies much deeper; the Jew is not responsible
for it; we have given rise to it ourselves and must overcome it
ourselves.
No souls thirst more after religion than the Slavs, the Celts and the
Teutons:
their history proves it; it is because of the lack of a true religion
that
lxxix AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
our whole Teutonic culture is sick unto
death (as I show in the ninth
chapter),
and this will mean its ruin if timely help does not come. We have
stopped
up the spring that welled up in our own hearts and made ourselves
dependent
upon the scanty, brackish water which the Bedouins of the desert draw
from
their wells. No people in the world is so beggarly-poor in religion as
the Semites and their half-brothers the Jews; and we, who were chosen
to
develop the profoundest and sublimest religious conception of the world
as the light, life and vitalising force of our whole culture, have with
our own hands firmly tied up the veins of life and limp along like
crippled
Jewish slaves behind Jehovah's Ark of the Covenant! Hence my exhaustive
treatment of the Jewish question: my object was to find a broad and
strong
foundation for so important a judgment.
The
second part — the gradual rise of a new world — has in these
“Foundations“
only one chapter devoted to it, “from the year 1200 to the year 1800.“
Here I found myself in a sphere which is pretty familiar even to the
unlearned
reader, and it would have been altogether superfluous to copy from
histories
of politics and of culture which are within the reach of all. My task
was
accordingly limited to shaping and bringing into clearer range than is
usually the case the too abundant material which I could presume to be
known — as material; and here again my one consideration was of course
the nineteenth century, the subject of my work. This chapter stands on
the border-line between the two parts, that now published and what is
to
follow; many things which in the preceding chapters could only be
alluded
to, not fully and systematically discussed, such for instance as the
fundamental
importance of Teutonicism for our new world and the value of our
conceptions
of progress and degeneration for the understanding of history, find
complete
treatment here; on the other hand, the short
lxxx
AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
sketch of development in the various
spheres of life brings us hurriedly to the nineteenth century, and the
tabular statement concerning knowledge, civilisation and culture, and
their
various elements points to the work of comparison which forms the plan
of the supplement and gives occasion for many an instructive parallel:
at the same moment as we see the Teuton blossom forth in his full
strength,
as though nothing had been denied him, and he were hurrying to a
limitless
goal, we behold also his limitations; and this is very important, for
it
is upon these last characteristics that his individuality depends.
In view of certain
prejudices I shall probably have to justify myself for treating State
and
Church in this chapter as subordinate matters — or, more properly
speaking,
as phenomena among others, and not the most important. State and Church
form henceforth, as it were, only the skeleton: the Church is an inner
bone structure in which, as is usual, with advancing age an always
stronger
tendency to chronic anchylosis shows itself; the State develops more
and
more into the peripheric bone-cuirass, so well known in zoology, the
so-called
dermatoskeleton; its structure becomes always massier, it stretches
over
the “soft parts“ until at last in the nineteenth century it has grown
to
truly megalotheric dimensions and sets apart from the true course of
life
and, if I may say so, “ossifies“ an extremely large percentage of the
effective
powers of humanity as military and civil officials. This is not meant
as
criticism; the boneless and invertebrate animals have never, as is well
known, played a great part in the world; it is besides far from my
purpose
to wish to moralise in this book; I wish merely to explain why in the
second
part I have not felt obliged to lay special stress upon the further
development
of Church and State. The impulse to their development had already been
given in the thirteenth century, when nationalism
lxxxi AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
having prevailed over imperialism, the
latter was scheming how to win back what was lost; nothing essentially
new was added later; even the movements against the all too prevalent
violation
of individual freedom by Church and State had already begun to make
themselves
felt very forcibly and frequently. Church and State serve from now
onwards,
as I have said, as the skeleton — now and then suffering from fractures
in arms and legs but nevertheless a firm skeleton — yet take
comparatively
little share in the gradual rise of a new world; henceforth they follow
rather than lead. On the other hand, in all European countries in the
most
widely different spheres of free human activity there arises from about
the year 1200 onwards a really recreative movement. The Church schism
and
the revolt against State decrees are in reality rather the mechanical
side
of this movement; they spring from the deeply felt need, experienced by
newly awakening powers, of making room for themselves; the creative
element,
strictly speaking, has to be sought elsewhere. I have already indicated
where, when I sought to justify my choice of the year 1200 as
turning-point:
the advance in things technical and industrial, the founding of
commerce
on a large scale on the thoroughly Teutonic basis of stainless
uprightness,
the rise of busy towns, the discovery of the earth (as we may daringly
call it), the study of nature which begins diffidently but soon extends
its horizon over the whole cosmos, the sounding of the deepest depths
of
human thought, from Roger Bacon to Kant, the soaring of the spirit up
to
heaven, from Dante to Beethoven: it is in all this that we may
recognise
the rise of a new world.
THE
CONTINUATION
With this study of
the gradual rise of a new world, approximately from the year 1200 to
the
year 1800,
lxxxii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
these “Foundations“ come to a close.
The detailed plan of the “Nineteenth Century“ lies before me. In it I
carefully
avoid all artificial theorising and all attempts to find an immediate
connection
between the two parts. It is quite sufficient that the explanatory
account
of the first eighteen centuries has been already given even though
frequent
and express reference to it be not necessary, it will prove itself as
the
indispensable introduction; the supplement will then be devoted to
drawing
parallels and to the calculation of comparative values. Here I shall
confine
myself to considering one by one the most important phenomena of the
century;
the principal features of political, religious and social organisation,
the course of development of the technical arts, the progress of
natural
science and the humanities, and, lastly, the history of the human mind
as a thinking and creative power; everywhere, of course, only the
principal
currents will be emphasised and nothing but the highest achievements
mentioned.
The consideration
of these points is led up to by an introductory chapter on the “New
Forces“
which have asserted themselves in this century and have given to it its
characteristic physiognomy, but which could not be treated adequately
within
the limits of one of the general chapters. The press, for instance, is
at the same time a political and a social power of the very first rank;
its stupendous development in the nineteenth century it owes primarily
to industry and art. I do not refer so much to the production of
newspapers
by timesaving machinery, &c., as to telegraphy, which supplies the
papers with news, and to railways, which spread printed matter
everywhere.
The press is the most powerful ally of capitalism; on art, philosophy
and
science it cannot really exercise a distinct determining influence, but
even here it can hasten or delay, and so exercise in a high degree a
formative
influence upon
lxxxiii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
the age. This is a power unknown to
previous centuries. In the same way technical developments, the
invention
and perfection of the railway and the steamboat, as also of the
electric
telegraph, have exercised no small influence upon all spheres of human
activity and wrought a great change in the face of our earth and in the
conditions of life upon it: quite direct is the influence on strategy
and
consequently upon politics, as well as on trade and industry, while
science
and even art have also been indirectly affected: the astronomers of all
lands can with comparative ease betake themselves to the North Cape or
the Fiji Islands to observe a total eclipse of the sun, and the German
festival plays in Bayreuth have, towards the end of the century, thanks
to the railway and the steamboat, become a living centre of dramatic
art
for the whole world. Among these forces I likewise reckon the
emancipation
of the Jews. Like every power that has newly dropped its fetters, like
the press and quick transit, this sudden inroad of the Jews upon the
life
of the European races, who mould the history of the world, has
certainly
not brought good alone in its train; the so-called Classical
Renaissance
was after all merely a new birth of ideas, the Jewish Renaissance is
the
resurrection of a Lazarus long considered dead, who introduces into the
Teutonic world the customs and modes of thought of the Oriental, and
who
at the same time seems to receive a new lease of life thereby, like the
vine-pest which, after leading in America the humble life of an
innocent
little beetle, was introduced into Europe and suddenly attained to a
world-wide
fame of serious import. We have, however, reason to hope and believe
that
the Jews, like the Americans, have brought us not only a new pest but
also
a new vine. Certain it is that they have left a peculiar impress upon
our
time, and that the “new world“ which is arising will require a very
great
exercise of its strength
lxxxiv AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
for the work of assimilating this
fragment
of the “old world.“ There are still other “new forces“ which will have
to be discussed in their proper place. The founding of modern
chemistry,
for example, is the starting-point of a new natural science; and the
perfecting
of a new artistic language by Beethoven is beyond doubt one of the most
pregnant achievements in the sphere of art since the days of Homer; it
gave men a new organ of speech, that is to say, a new power.
The supplement is
intended, as I have said, to furnish a comparison between the
“Foundations“
and the book which is to follow. This comparison I shall carry out
point
by point in several chapters, using the scheme of the first part; this
method will, I think, be found to lead to many suggestive discoveries
and
interesting distinctions. Besides, it paves the way splendidly for the
somewhat bold but indispensable glance into the future, without which
our
conception would not acquire complete plasticity; it is only in this
way
that we can hope to gain a bird's-eye view of the nineteenth century
and
so be able to judge it with perfect objectivity; this will be the end
of
my task.
Such then is the
extremely simple and unartificial plan of the continuation. It is a
plan
which, perhaps, I may not live to carry out, yet I am obliged to
mention
it here, as it has to no small degree influenced the form of the
present
book.
ANONYMOUS
FORCES
In this general introduction
I must also discuss briefly some specially important points, so that
later
we may not be detained by out-of-place theoretical discussions.
Almost all men are
by nature “hero-worshippers“; and no valid objection can be urged
against
this healthy instinct. Simplification is a necessity of the human
lxxxv AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
mind; we find ourselves involuntarily
setting up a single name in place of the many names representative of a
movement; further, the personality is something given, individual,
definite,
while everything that lies beyond is an abstraction and an ever-varying
circle of ideas.
We might therefore
put together the history of a century by a mere list of names: it seems
to me, however, that a different procedure is necessary to bring out
what
is really essential. For it is remarkable how slightly the separate
individualities
stand out in relief from each other. Men form inside their racial
individualities
an atomic but nevertheless very homogeneous mass. If a great spirit
were
to lean out from among the stars and, bending in contemplation over our
earth, were capable of seeing not only our bodies but also our souls,
the
human population of any part of the world would certainly appear to him
as uniform as an ant-heap does to us: he would of course distinguish
warriors,
workers, idlers and monarchs, he would notice that the one runs hither,
the other thither, but on the whole his impression would be that all
individuals
obey, and must obey, a common impersonal impulse. Extremely narrow
limits
are set to the influence as well as to the arbitrariness of the great
personality.
All great and lasting revolutions in the life of society have taken
place
“blindly.“ A remarkable personality, as, for example, that of Napoleon,
can lead us astray on this point, and yet even his, when closely
examined,
appears as a blindly working Fate. Its possibility is explained by
previous
events: had there been no Richelieu, no Louis XIV., no Louis XV., no
Voltaire,
no Rousseau, no French Revolution — there would have been no Napoleon!
How closely linked, moreover, is the life-achievement of such a man
with
the national character of the whole people, with its virtues and its
failings:
without a French people, no Napoleon! The activity of this commander
lxxxvi AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
is directed in particular towards the
outside world, and here again we must say: but for the irresolution of
Friedrich Wilhelm III., but for the want of principle in the House of
Habsburg,
but for the troubles in Spain, but for the criminal treatment of Poland
just previously, no Napoleon had been possible! And if, in order to be
quite clear on this point, we consult the biographies and
correspondence
of Napoleon, to see what were his aims and aspirations, we shall find
that
all of them remained unrealised, and that he sank back into the
indistinguishable
homogeneous mass, as clouds dissipate after a storm, as soon as the
community
rose to oppose the predominance of individual will. On the other hand,
the radical change of our whole economic conditions of life, which no
power
on earth could prevent, the passing of a considerable portion of the
property
of nations into new hands, and further, the thorough remodelling of the
relations of all parts of the earth, and so of all men, to one another,
which we read of in the history of the world, took place in the course
of the nineteenth century as the result of a series of technical
discoveries
in the sphere of quick transit and of industry, the importance of which
no one even suspected. We need only read in this connection the
masterly
exposition in the fifth volume of Treitschke's Deutsche Geschichte.
The depreciation of landed property, the progressive impoverishment of
the peasant, the advance of industry, the rise of an incalculable army
of industrial proletarians, and consequently of a new form of
Socialism,
a radical change of all political conditions: all this is a result of
changed
conditions of traffic and has been brought about, if I may so express
it,
anonymously, like the building of an ant's nest, in which each ant only
sees the individual grains which it laboriously drags to the heap. The
same, however, is true of ideas: they hold man in a tyrannical grasp,
they
clutch his mind as a bird of prey its quarry and no one can resist
them;
so long as any particular
lxxxvii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
conception is dominant, nothing can
be accomplished outside the sphere of its magic influence; whoever
cannot
feel as it dictates is condemned to sterility, however talented he may
be. This we have seen in the second half of the nineteenth century in
connection
with Darwin's theory of evolution. This idea had already begun to
appear
in the eighteenth century, as a natural reaction from the old theory of
the immutability of species, which Linnaeus had brought to formal
perfection.
In Herder, Kant and Goethe we meet with the idea of evolution in
characteristic
colouring; it is the revolt of great minds against dogma: in the case
of
the first, because he, following the course of Teutonic philosophy,
endeavoured
to find in the development of the idea “nature“ an entity embracing
man;
in the case of the second, because he as metaphysician and moralist
could
not bear to lose the conception of perfectibility, while the third,
with
the eye of the poet, discovered on all sides phenomena which seemed to
him to point to a primary relationship between all living organisms,
and
feared lest his discovery should evaporate into abstract nothingness if
this relationship were not viewed as resting upon direct descent. This
is how such thoughts arise. In minds of such phenomenal breadth as
Goethe's,
Herder's and Kant's there is room for very different conceptions side
by
side; they are to be compared with Spinoza's God, whose one substance
manifests
itself simultaneously in various forms; in their ideas on
metamorphosis,
affinities and development, I can find nothing contrary to other views,
and I believe that they would have rejected our present dogma of
evolution,
as they did that of immutability. * I return to this point in another
place.
The overwhelming
*
Compare
in this connection Kant's extremely complete exposition which forms the
concluding portion of the division “On the regulative use of ideas of
pure
reason“ in his Critique of pure Reason. The great thinker here
points
to the fact that the idea of a “continuous gradation of creatures“ did
not and cannot originate from observation
lxxxviii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
majority of men with their display of
ant-like activity are quite incapable of viewing things in such an
original
manner; productive power can be generated only by simple healthy
specialisation.
A manifestly unsound system like that of Darwin exercises a much more
powerful
influence than the deepest speculations, just because of its
“practicability.“
And so we have seen the idea of evolution develop itself till it spread
from biology and geology to all spheres of thought and investigation,
and,
intoxicated by its success, exercised such a tyranny that any one who
did
not swear by it was to be looked upon as a simpleton. I am not here
concerned
with the philosophy of all these phenomena; I have no doubt that the
spirit
of man as a whole expresses itself appropriately. I may, however,
appropriate
Goethe's remark, “what especially impresses me is the people, a great
mass,
a necessary inevitable existence“ and thus establish and explain my
conviction,
that great men are in reality the flower of history and not its roots.
And so I consider it proper to portray a century not so much by an
enumeration
of its leading men as by an emphasising of the anonymous currents, from
which it has derived its peculiar and characteristic stamp in the
various
centres of social, industrial and scientific life.
but from an interest of
reason. “The steps of such a ladder, as experience can supply them to
us,
are far, too far, removed from one another, and what we suppose to be
little
distinctions are commonly in nature itself such wide clefts that on
such
observations as intentions of nature we can lay no stress whatever
(especially
when things are so manifold, since it must always be easy to find
certain
resemblances and approximations).“ In his criticism of Herder he
reproaches
the hypothesis of evolution with being one of those ideas “in the case
of which one cannot think anything at all.“ Kant, whom even Haeckel
calls
the most important predecessor of Darwin, had thus gone so far as to
supply
the antidote to the dogmatic abuse of such a hypothesis.
lxxxix
AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
GENIUS
There is, however,
one exception. When we are dealing not with the mere power of
observation,
of comparison, of calculation, or with the inventive, industrial or
intellectual
activity struggling for existence, but with a purely creative activity,
then Personality is everything. The history of art and philosophy is
the
history of individual men, the history of the really creative men of
genius.
Here nothing else counts. Whatever outside this is achieved within the
sphere of philosophy — and much of importance is so achieved — belongs
to science; in art it belongs to mechanical art, that is, to industry.
I lay all the more
stress on this point, because at the present day regrettable confusion
prevails with regard to it. The idea and consequently the word “Genius“
originated in the eighteenth century; they arose from the necessity of
possessing a particular defining expression for “specifically creative
minds.“ No less a thinker than Kant calls our attention to the fact
that
“the greatest discoverer in the sphere of science differs only in
degree
from the ordinary man, the Genius, on the other hand, differs
specifically.“
This remark of Kant's is beyond doubt just, but we make the one
reservation,
that of extending — as we cannot help doing — the term “work of genius“
to every creation, in which the imagination plays a formative and
predominant
part, and in this connection the philosophic genius deserves the same
place
as the poetic or the plastic. Here let me say that I give to the word
philosophy
its old, wide signification, which embraced not only the abstract
philosophy
of reason, but natural philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and all
thought which rises to the dignity of a philosophy of life. If the word
genius is to retain a sense, we must employ it only of men who have
everlastingly
enriched our intellectual store by powerful
xc AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
creations of their imagination, but
it must be applicable to all such without exception. Not only the Iliad
and Prometheus Bound, the Adorations of the Cross and Hamlet,
but also Plato's World of Ideas and Democritus' World of
Atoms,
the Chandogya's tat-twam-asi and Copernicus' System of the
Heavens
are works of immortal genius; for just as indestructible as matter and
power are the flashes of light which radiate from the brains of men
endowed
with creative power; they never cease to reflect for each other the
generations
and the nations, and if they sometimes pale for a time, they shine out
brightly once more when they strike a creative eye. In recent years it
has been discovered that in the depths of the ocean, to which the
sunlight
does not penetrate, there are fishes which light up this world of
darkness
electrically; even thus is the dark night of human knowledge lighted up
by the torch of genius. Goethe lit a torch with his Faust, Kant
another with his conception of the transcendental ideality of time and
space: both were creators of great imaginative power, both were men of
genius. The scholastic strife about the Königsberg thinker, the
battles
between Kantians and anti-Kantians seem to me of just as much moment as
the work of the zealous Faust critics: what is the use of
logical
hair-splitting here? What in such a case is the meaning of the phrase,
“to be right“? Blessed are they who have eyes to see and ears to hear!
If the study of the stone, the moss, the microscopic infusorium fills
us
with wonder and admiration, with what reverence must we look up to the
greatest phenomenon that nature presents to us — Genius!
GENERALISATIONS
I must here add a
remark of some importance. Though we are to concern ourselves
particularly
with general
xci AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
tendencies, not with events and
personages,
still the danger of too wide generalisations must not be overlooked. We
are but too prone to sum up prematurely. It is this tendency that makes
men so often hang, as it were, a ticket round the neck of the
nineteenth
century, even though they must know that it is utterly impossible by
means
of a single word to be just both to ourselves and to the past. A fixed
idea of this kind is quite sufficient to render a clear comprehension
of
historical development impossible.
Quite commonly, for
example, the nineteenth century is called the “century of natural
science.“
When we remember what the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth
centuries
have achieved in this very sphere, we must surely hesitate before
bestowing
any such title on the nineteenth. We have but continued to build and by
our industry have discovered much, but whether we can point to a
Copernicus
and a Galileo, to a Kepler and a Newton, to a Lavoisier and a Bichat *
appears to me at least doubtful. Cuvier's activity attains indeed to
the
dignity of philosophical importance, and the powers of observation and
invention of men like Bunsen (the chemist) and Pasteur come remarkably
near genius; of imperishable fame are men like Louis Agassiz, Michael
Faraday,
Julius Robert Mayer, Heinrich Hertz and perhaps some few others; but we
must at least admit that their achievements do not surpass those of
their
predecessors. Some years ago a University teacher of the medical
faculty
with a fine reputation for theoretical as well as practical work
remarked
to me, “In the case of us scholars nowadays it is not so much a
question
of brain convolutions as of perseverance.“ It would indeed be false
modesty,
and an emphasising of the unimportant, to designate the nineteenth
century
the “century of perseverance.“ All the more so, since the
* He
died in 1802.
xcii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
designation of “the century of the
rolling
wheel“ would certainly be quite as justifiable for an epoch which has
produced
the railway and the bicycle. Better, certainly, would be the general
term
“the century of science,“ by which would be understood that the spirit
of accurate investigation which received its first encouragement from
Roger
Bacon had put all departments of study under its yoke. This spirit,
however,
if the matter be fully considered, will be found to have brought about
less surprising results in the sphere of natural science, in which
since
earliest times the exact observation of the heavenly bodies formed the
basis of all knowledge, than in other spheres, in which arbitrary
methods
had hitherto been the order of the day. Perhaps it would be a true and
apt characterisation of the nineteenth century — though at the same
time
an unfamiliar one to most educated people — to style it the “century of
philology.“ First called into being towards the end of the eighteenth
century
by such men as Jones, Anquetil du Perron, the brothers Schlegel and
Grimm,
Karadžič and others, comparative philology has in the course of a
single
century made quite extraordinary progress. To establish the organism
and
the history of language means not merely to throw light upon
anthropology,
ethnology and history, but particularly to strengthen human minds for
new
achievements. And while the philology of the nineteenth century thus
laboured
for the future, it unearthed buried treasures of the past, which are
among
the most valuable possessions of mankind. It is not necessary to feel
sympathy
for the pseudo-Buddhistical sport of half-educated idlers in order to
recognise
clearly that the discovery of the divine doctrine of understanding of
the
ancient Indians is one of the greatest achievements of the nineteenth
century,
destined to exercise an enduring influence upon distant ages. To this
has
been added the knowledge of old Teutonic poetry and mythology. Every-
xciii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
thing that tends to strengthen genuine
individuality is a real safety anchor. The brilliant series of Teutonic
and Indian scholars has, half unconsciously, accomplished a great work
at the right moment; now we too possess our “holy books,“ and what they
teach is more beautiful and nobler than what the Old Testament sets
forth.
The belief in our strength, which the history of the nineteenth century
gives us, has been intensified to an incalculable extent by this
discovery
of our independent capacity for much that is of the highest, and to
which
our relation was hitherto one of subjection: in particular the myth of
the peculiar aptitude of the Jew for religion is finally exploded; for
this later generations will owe a debt of gratitude to the nineteenth
century.
This is one of the greatest and most far-reaching achievements of our
time,
and so the title “the century of philology“ would be in a certain sense
justified. In this connection we have mentioned another of the
characteristic
phenomena of the nineteenth century. Ranke had prophesied that our
century
would be a century of nationality; that was a correct political
prognostic,
for never before have the nations stood opposed to each other so
clearly
and definitely as antagonistic unities. It has, however, also become a
century of races, and that indeed is in the first instance a necessary
and direct consequence of science and scientific thinking. I have
already
said at the beginning of this introduction that science does not unite
but dissects. That statement has not contradicted itself here.
Scientific
anatomy has furnished such conclusive proofs of the existence of
physical
characteristics distinguishing the races from each other that they can
no longer be denied; scientific philology has discovered between the
various
languages fundamental differences which cannot be bridged over; the
scientific
study of history in its various branches has brought about similar
results,
especially by the
xciv AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
exact determination of the religious
history of each race, in which only the most general of general ideas
can
raise the illusion of similarity, while the further development has
always
followed and still follows definite, sharply divergent lines. The
so-called
unity of the human race is indeed still honoured as a hypothesis, but
only
as a personal, subjective conviction lacking every material foundation.
The ideas of the eighteenth century with regard to the brotherhood of
nations
were certainly very noble but purely sentimental in their origin; and
in
contrast to these ideas to which the Socialists still cling, limping on
like reserves in the battle, stern reality has gradually asserted
itself
as the necessary result of the events and investigations of our time.
There
are many other titles for which much might be said: Rousseau had
already
spoken prophetically of a “siècle des révolutions,“
others
speak of a century of Jewish emancipation, century of electricity,
century
of national armies, century of colonies, century of music, century of
advertisement,
century of the proclamation of infallibility. Lately I found the
nineteenth
century described in an English book as the religious century,
and
could not quite dispute the statement; for Beer, the author of the Geschichte
des Welthandels, the nineteenth century is the “economic“ century,
whereas Professor Paulsen in his Geschichte des gelehrten
Unterrichts
(2 Aufl. ii. 206) calls it the saeculum historicum in contrast
to
the preceding saeculum philosophicum, and Goethe's expression
“ein
aberweises Jahrhundert“ could be applied quite as well to the
nineteenth
century as to the eighteenth. No such generalisation possesses any real
value.
THE
NINETEENTH
CENTURY
These remarks bring
me to the close of this general introduction. But before I write the
last
line I should
xcv AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
like to place myself, according to an
old custom, under the protection of highly honoured men.
Lessing writes in
his
Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, that “history should
not trouble with unimportant facts, should not burden the memory, but
enlighten
the understanding.“ Taken generally, this is saying too much. But in
the
case of a book which is directed not to historians but to the educated
layman, the remark is perfectly justified. To enlighten the
understanding,
not to teach in the real sense of the word, but to suggest, to
stimulate
thoughts and conclusions, that is my aim.
Goethe differs
somewhat
from Lessing in his conception of the task of the historian. He says,
“The
best thing that we get from history is the enthusiasm it arouses.“
These
words, too, I have kept in mind in the course of my work, for I am
convinced
that understanding, however well enlightened, avails little, if not
united
to enthusiasm. The understanding is the machine; the more perfect every
detail in it, the more neatly every part fits into the other, the more
efficient will it be, but only potentially, for, in order to be driven,
it requires the motive-power, and the motive-power is enthusiasm.
Perhaps,
however, it is difficult to take Goethe's hint and wax enthusiastic
over
the nineteenth century, simply for this reason, that self-love is so
contemptible;
we wish to test ourselves strictly, and tend to under-estimate rather
than
over-estimate; may future ages judge us more leniently. I find it
difficult
to grow enthusiastic because the material element is so predominant in
this century. Just as our battles have generally been won not by the
personal
superiority of individuals but by the number of the soldiers, or to put
it more simply by the amount of food for powder, so in the very same
way
have treasures in gold and knowledge and discoveries been piled up.
Things
have increased in numbers and in bulk, men
xcvi
AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
have collected but not sifted; such,
at any rate, has been the general tendency. The nineteenth century is
essentially
a century of accumulation, an age of transition and of the provisional;
in other respects it is neither fish nor flesh; it dangles between
empiricism
and spiritism, between liberalismus vulgaris, as it has been
wittily
called, and the impotent efforts of senile conservatism, between
autocracy
and anarchism, doctrines of infallibility and the most stupid
materialism,
worship of the Jew and anti-Semitism, the rule of the millionaire and
proletarian
government. Not ideas, but material gains, are the characteristic
feature
of the nineteenth century. The great thoughts that have cropped up here
and there, the mighty creations of art, from Faust, Part II.,
to
Parsifal,
have brought undying fame to the German people, but they are for future
times. After the great social revolutions and the momentous
intellectual
achievements (at the close of the eighteenth and the early dawn of the
nineteenth century) material for further development had again to be
collected.
And so this too great preoccupation with the material banished the
beautiful
almost entirely from life; at the present moment there exists perhaps
no
savage, at least no half-civilised people, which does not to my mind
possess
more beauty in its surroundings and more harmony in its existence as a
whole than the great mass of so-called civilised Europeans. It is
therefore,
I think, necessary to be moderate in our enthusiastic admiration for
the
nineteenth century. On the other hand it is easy to feel the enthusiasm
spoken of by Goethe, as soon as our glance rests not upon the one
century
alone but embraces all that “new world“ which has been slowly unfolding
for centuries. Certainly the commonly accepted idea of “progress“ has
by
no means a sound philosophical foundation; under this flag sail almost
all the refuse wares of our time; Goethe, who never tires of pointing
to
enthusiasm as the motive element
xcvii AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
in our nature, declares his conviction
nevertheless to be that “Men become wiser and more discerning, but not
better, happier and more vigorous, or if they do become so, it is only
for a time.“ * But what could be more elevating than consciously to
work
towards such an epoch, in which, if only for a time, mankind will be
better,
happier and more vigorous? And when we regard the nineteenth century
not
as something isolated but as part of a much greater period of time, we
discover soon that out of the barbarism which followed upon the
downfall
of the old world, and out of the wild ferment called forth by the shock
of opposing forces, some centuries ago a perfectly new organisation of
human society began to develop, and that our world of to-day — far from
being the summit of this evolution — simply represents a transition
stage,
a “middle point“ in the long and weary journey. If the nineteenth
century
were really a summit, then the pessimistic view of life would be the
only
justifiable one: to see, after all the great achievements in the
intellectual
and material spheres, bestial wickedness still so widespread, and
misery
increased a thousandfold, could cause us only to repeat Jean Jacques
Rousseau's
prayer: “Almighty God, deliver us from the sciences and the pernicious
arts of our fathers! Grant us ignorance, innocence and poverty once
more
as the only things which can bring happiness and which are of value in
Thine eyes!“ If, however, as I have said, we see in the nineteenth
century
a stage in the journey, if we do not let ourselves be blinded by
visions
of “golden ages,“ or by delusions of the future and the past, if we do
not allow ourselves to be led astray in our sound judgment by Utopian
conceptions
of a gradual improvement of mankind as a whole, and of political
machinery
working ideally, then we are justified in the hope and belief that we
Teutonic
peoples, and the
*
Eckermann:
October 23, 1828.
xcviii
AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
peoples under our influence, are
advancing
towards a new harmonious culture, incomparably more beautiful than any
of which history has to tell, a culture in which men should really be
“better
and happier“ than they are at present. It may be that the tendency of
modern
education to direct the glance so unceasingly to the past is
regrettable,
but it has the advantage that one does not require to be a Schiller to
feel with him that “no single modern man can vie with the individual
Athenian
for the prize of manhood.“ * For that reason we now direct our glance
to
the future, to that future the character of which is beginning to dawn
upon us, as we are gradually becoming aware of the real significance of
the present era which embraces the last seven hundred years. We will
vie
with the Athenian. We will form a world in which beauty and harmony of
existence do not, as in their case, depend upon the employment of
slaves,
upon eunuchs, and the seclusion of women! We may confidently hope to do
so, for we see this world slowly and with difficulty rising up around
our
brief span of life. And the fact that it does so unconsciously does not
matter; even the half-fabulous Phoenician historian Sanchuniathon says
in the first part of his first book, when speaking of the creation of
the
world: “Things themselves, however, knew nothing of their own origin.“
The same holds true to-day; history endlessly illustrates Mephisto's
words,
“Du glaubst zu schieben und du wirst geschoben.“ When, therefore, we
look
back at the nineteenth century, which certainly was driven more than it
drove, and in most things deviated to an almost ridiculous extent from
the paths it had originally intended to pursue, we cannot help feeling
a thrill of honest admiration and almost of enthusiasm. In this century
*
This
famous sentence is only conditionally true; I have submitted it to a
thorough
criticism in the last chapter, to which I here refer in order to avoid
misconceptions.
xcix AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
an enormous amount of work has been
done, and that is the foundation of all “growing better and happier“;
this
was the morality of our age, if I may so express myself. And while the
workshop of great creative ideas was seemingly unproductive, the
methods
of work were perfected in a manner hitherto undreamt of.
The nineteenth
century
is the triumph of method. In this more than in any political
organisation
we see a victory of the democratic principle. Men as a whole rose
hereby
a step higher, and became more efficient. In former centuries only men
of genius, later only highly gifted men could accomplish anything; now,
thanks to method, every one can do so. Compulsory education, followed
by
the imperative struggle for existence, has provided thousands to-day
with
the “method“ to enable them, without any special gift, to take part in
the common work of the human race as technicians, industrials, natural
investigators, philologists, historians, mathematicians, psychologists,
&c. The mastery of so colossal a material in so short a space of
time
would otherwise be quite unthinkable. Just consider what was understood
by “philology“ a hundred years ago! Where was there such a thing as
true
“historical investigation“? We meet with exactly the same spirit in all
spheres which lie far remote from science: the national armies are the
most universal and simple application of method and the Hohenzollerns
are
in so far the democrats of the nineteenth century that they set the
fashion
for others: method in arm and leg movement, but at the same time method
in education of the will, of obedience, of duty, of responsibility.
Skill
and conscientiousness have in consequence — unfortunately not
everywhere,
but nevertheless in many spheres — decidedly increased: we make greater
demands on ourselves and on others than we did of old; in a sense a
general
technical improvement has taken place — an improvement
c AUTHOR'S
INTRODUCTION
which extends even to men's habits of
thinking. This amelioration of conditions can hardly fail to have a
bearing
upon morality: the abolition of human slavery outside Europe — at least
in the officially recognised sense of the word — and the beginning of a
movement to protect animal slaves are omens of great significance.
And so I believe
that in spite of all doubts a just and loving contemplation of the
nineteenth
century must both “enlighten the understanding“ and “awaken
enthusiasm.“
To begin with, we consider only its “Foundations,“ that is, the “sum of
all that has gone before“ — that Past out of which the nineteenth
century
has laboriously but successfully extricated itself.
ci
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY LORD REDESDALE,
G.C.V.O.,
K.C.B., &C. v-lvi
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE lvii
AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION lix—c
Plan of the Work, lix
— The Foundations, lxiii — The
Turning-point,
lxiv
— The Year 1200, lxx — Division into
two parts,
lxxvi
— The Continuation, lxxxi —
Anonymous Forces,
lxxxiv
— Genius, lxxxix — Generalisations, xc
— The Nineteenth Century,
xciv.
FIRST PART: THE ORIGINS
DIVISION I: THE LEGACY OF THE ANCIENT
WORLD
INTRODUCTORY
Historical Principles,
3
— Hellas, Rome, Judea, 8
— Philosophy of History, 12.
FIRST
CHAPTER: HELLENIC ART
AND PHILOSOPHY
Man's Awakening, 14
— Animal and Man, 17
— Homer, 27 — Artistic
Culture,
33
— Shaping, 40 — Plato, 45
— Aristotle, 49 —
Natural
Science, 51 —
Public
Life, 58 —
Historical
Falsehoods, 60
— Decline of Religion, 69
— Metaphysics, 80 —
Theology,
87
— Scholasticism, 89
— Conclusion, 91.
SECOND
CHAPTER: ROMAN LAW
Disposition, 93
— Roman History, 95
— Roman Ideals, 104
— The Struggle against the Semites, 112
— Rome under the Empire, 122
— The Legacy of Constitutional Law, 128
— Jurisprudence as a Technical Art, 135
— Natural Law, 140
—
Roman Law, 145 — The
Family,
155
— Marriage, 160 —
Woman,
163
— Poetry and Language,
166
— Summary,
171.
THIRD
CHAPTER: THE REVELATION
OF CHRIST
Introductory, 174
— The Religion of Experience, 177
— Buddha and Christ, 182
— Buddha, 184 — Christ, 187
— The Galileans, 200
— Religion, 213
cii CONTENTS
— Christ not a Jew, 221
— Historical Religion, 228
— Will in the Semitic Race, 238
— The Prophet, 244
—
Christ a Jew, 246
—
The Nineteenth Century, 248.
DIVISION II: THE HEIRS
INTRODUCTORY
The Chaos, 251
— The Jews, 253 —
The
Teutonic Races, 256.
FOURTH
CHAPTER: THE CHAOS
Scientific Confusion,
258
— Importance of Race, 269
— The Five Cardinal Laws, 275
— Other Influences, 289
— The Nation, 292 —
The
Hero, 297 —The
Raceless
Chaos, 299
— Lucian,
302
— Augustine, 309 —
Ascetic
Delusion, 314
—
Sacredness of Pure Race, 317
— The Teutonic Peoples, 320.
FIFTH
CHAPTER: THE ENTRANCE
OF THE JEWS INTO WESTERN
HISTORY
The Jewish Question, 329
— The “Alien People,“ 336
— Historical Bird's-eye View, 345
— Consensus Ingeniorum, 344
— Princes and Nobility, 347
— Inner Contact, 351
— Who is the Jew? 352
— Systematic Arrangement of the Investigation, 356
— Origin of the Israelite, 360
— The Genuine Semite, 368
— The Syrian, 371 —
The
Amorites, 381 —
Comparative
Numbers, 387
— Consciousness of Sin against Race, 390
— Homo Syriacus, 393
— Homo Europaeus, 396
— Homo Arabicus, 397
— Homo Judaeus, 408
— Excursus on Semitic Religion, 411
— Israel and Judah, 441
— Development of the Jew, 448
— The Prophets, 466
— The Rabbis, 472 —
The
Messianic Hope, 477
— The Law, 483 — The
Thora,
486
— Judaism, 488.
SIXTH
CHAPTER: THE ENTRANCE
OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLE
INTO
HISTORY
The Term “Germanic,“ 494
— Extension of the Idea, 498
— The Germanic Celt, 499
— The Germanic Slav, 505
— The Reformation, 511
— Limitation of the Notion, 517
— Fair Hair, 522 —
The
Form of the Skull, 526
— Rational Anthropology, 534
— Physiognomy, 538
— Freedom and Loyalty, 542
— Ideal and Practice, 550
— Teuton and Anti-Teuton, 552
— Ignatius of Loyola, 564
— Backward Glance, 574
— Forward Glance, 575.
v
CONTENTS
(page originally from vol. 2, but for convenience's sake placed here)
DIVISION III: THE STRUGGLE
INTRODUCTORY
Leading Principles, 3
— Anarchy, 5 —
Religion
and State, 8.
SEVENTH
CHAPTER: RELIGION
Christ and Christianity,
13
— Religious Delirium, 15
— The Two Main Pillars, 17
— Mythology of Outer Experience, 24
— Corruption of the Myths, 27
— Mythology of Inner Experience, 31
— Jewish Chronicle of the World, 41
— Paul and Augustine, 54
— Paul, 57 — Augustine, 71
— The Three Main Tendencies, 80
— The “East,“ 82 —
The “North,“
90
— Charlemagne, 101 —
Dante, 104 — Religious
Instincts
of Race, 108
— Rome, 112 — The Victory
of
the Chaos, 123
— Position To-day, 134
— “Oratio pro Domo,“ 137.
EIGHTH
CHAPTER: STATE
Emperor and Pope, 139
— The “Duplex Potestas,“ 143
— Universalism against Nationalism, 149
— The Law of Limitation, 153
— The Struggle for the State, 160
— The Delusion of the Unlimited, 172
— Limitation Based on Principle, 180.
SECOND PART: THE RISE OF
A NEW WORLD
NINTH CHAPTER:
FROM THE YEAR 1200 TO THE
YEAR
1800
A.
The Teutons as Creators of a New Culture
Teutonic Italy, 187
— The Teutonic Master-builder, 196
— So-called “Humanity,“ 200
— The So-called “Renaissance,“ 211
— Progress and Degeneration, 214
— Historical Criterion, 222
— Inner Contrasts, 225
— The Teutonic World, 228.
vi CONTENTS
(page originally from vol. 2, but for convenience's sake placed here)
B.
Historical Survey
The Elements of Social
Life, 233
— Comparative Analyses, 246
— The Teuton, 255.
1.
DISCOVERY (From Marco Polo to Galvani).
The Inborn Capacity, 261—
The Impelling Powers, 264
— Nature as Teacher, 269
— Unity of the Work of Discovery, 282
— Idealism, 289.
2.
SCIENCE (From Roger Bacon to Lavoisier).
Our Scientific Methods,
293
— Hellene and Teuton, 303
— Nature of our Systematising, 305
— Idea and Theory, 312
— The Goal of Science, 327.
3.
INDUSTRY (From the Introduction of Paper to
Watt's
Steam-engine).
Ephemeral Nature of all
Civilisation, 329
— Autonomy of Modern Industry, 334
— Paper, 336.
4.
POLITICAL ECONOMY (From
the Lombardic
League of Cities to Robert Owen, the Founder of Co-operation).
Co-operation and
Monopoly,
344
— Guilds and Capitalists, 348
— Farmer and Landlord, 354
— Syndicates and Socialism, 358
— The Machine, 363.
5.
POLITICS AND CHURCH (From
the
Introduction of Compulsory Confession, 1215, to the French Revolution).
The Church, 365
— Martin Luther, 366
— The French Revolution, 377
— The Anglo-Saxons, 384.
6.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
(From
Francis of Assisi to Immanuel Kant).
The Two Courses, 389
— The Course of Truth, 392
— The Course of Falsehood, 394
— Scholasticism, 396
— Rome and Anti-Rome, 400
— The Four Groups, 403
— The Theologians, 404
— The Mystics, 411
— The Humanists, 429
— The Naturalist-Philosophers, 436
— The Observation of Nature, 440
— Exact Not-Knowing, 446
— Idealism and Materialism, 456
— The First Dilemma, 457
— The Metaphysical
vii CONTENTS
(page originally from vol. 2, but for convenience's sake placed here)
Problem, 460
— Nature and the Ego, 470
— The Second Dilemma, 476
— Science and Religion, 479
— Religion, 484 —
Christ
and Kant, 490.
7.
ART (From Giotto to Goethe).
The Idea “Art,“ 495
— Art and Religion, 500
— Poetry Wedded to Music, 506
— Art and Science, 513
— Art as a Whole, 525
— The Primacy of Poetry, 529
— Teutonic Music, 532
— The Tendency of Music, 544
— Naturalism, 546 —
The Struggle for Individuality, 552
— The Inner Struggle, 556
— Shakespeare and Beethoven, 558
— Summary, 561 —
Conclusion,
563.
INDEX
565
Last update: January
24th, 2008
