Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 1 of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain's The
Foundations of the 19th century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
14
FIRST CHAPTER
HELLENIC ART AND PHILOSOPHY
Nur durch den
Menschen
tritt der Mensch in das Tageslicht des Lebens ein. — JEAN
PAUL FRIEDRICH
RICHTER.
MAN BECOMING
MAN
Much wit has been spent in defining
the
difference between man and beast, but the distinction between man and
man
seems to me to be even more important, preparing the way, as it does,
for
the recognition of a fact of greater significance. The moment a man
awakens
to a consciousness of freely creative power, he crosses a definite
boundary
and breaks the spell which showed how closely, in spite of all his
talent
and all his achievements, he was related even in mind to other living
creatures.
Through art a new element, a new form of existence, enters into the
cosmos.
In expressing this
as my conviction, I put myself on the same footing as some of Germany‘s
greatest sons. This view of the importance of art corresponds, too, if
I am not mistaken, to a specific tendency of the German mind; at any
rate
so clear and precise a formulation of this thought, as we find in
Lessing
and Winckelmann, Schiller and Goethe, Hölderlin, Jean Paul and
Novalis,
in Beethoven and Richard Wagner, would hardly be met with among the
other
members of the related Indo-Teutonic group. In order to do justice to
this
view, we must in the first place know exactly what is here meant
15
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
by “art.“ When Schiller writes, “Nature
has formed creatures only, art has made men,“ we surely cannot believe
that he was thinking here of flute-playing or verse-writing? Whoever
reads
Schiller‘s writings (especially of course his Briefe über die
ästhetische
Erziehung des Menschen) carefully and repeatedly, will recognise
more
and more that the idea “art“ means to the poet-philosopher something
very
vivid, something glowing in him, as it were, and yet a very subtle
thing,
which can scarcely be confined within a brief definition. A man must
have
misunderstood him if he believes himself free of such a belief. Let us
hear what Schiller says, for an understanding of this fundamental idea
is indispensable not merely for the purpose of this chapter, but also
for
that of the whole book. He writes: “Nature does not make a better
beginning
with man than with her other works: she acts for him, while he cannot
yet
act for himself as a free intelligent being. But what precisely makes
him
a man is the fact that he does not stand still as mere nature made him,
but is endowed with the capacity of retracing with the aid of reason
the
steps which nature anticipated with him, of transforming the work of
necessity
into a work of his free choice and of raising the physical necessity to
a moral one.“ First and foremost then it is the eager struggle for
freedom
which, according to Schiller, betokens the artistic temperament. Man
cannot
escape necessity, but he “transforms“ it, and, in so doing, shows
himself
to be an artist. As such he employs the elements, which nature offers
him,
to create for himself a new world of semblance; but a second
consideration
follows from this, which must not on any account be overlooked: by
placing
himself “on his aesthetic standpoint,“ as it were, “outside the world
and
contemplating it,“ man for the first time clearly sees this world, the
world outside himself! The desire to tear himself away from nature had
indeed been a
16
HELLENIC ART AND PHILOSOPHY
delusion, but it is this very delusion
which is now bringing him to a full and proper consciousness of nature:
for “man cannot purge the semblance from the real without at the same
time
freeing the real of the semblance.“ It is only when man has begun to
invent
artistically that he also begins to think consciously, it is only when
he himself builds that he begins to perceive the architectonics of the
universe. Reality and semblance are at first mixed up in his
consciousness;
the conscious, freely creative dealing with the semblance is the first
step towards attaining to the freest and purest possible cognition of
reality.
True science — a science that not only measures and records, but
contemplates
and perceives — owes its origin, according to Schiller, to the direct
influence
of the artistic efforts of man. Then for the first time philosophy
finds
a place in the human intellect; for it hovers between the two worlds.
Philosophy
is based at once on art and on science: it is, if I may so express
myself,
the latest artistic elaboration of a reality which has been sifted and
purified. But this does not by any means exhaust the import of
Schiller‘s
conception of art. For “beauty“ (that freely transformed, new world) is
not simply an object, in it rather there is mirrored also “a condition
of our subject“: “Beauty is, in truth, form, because we contemplate it,
but it is at the same time life, because we feel it. In a word, it is
at
once a state and an achievement“ * To feel artistically, to think
artistically
denotes then a particular condition of man in general; it is a phase of
feeling, or rather attitude of mind — still better, perhaps, a latent
store
of power, which must everywhere act as a “freeing,“ “transforming,“
“purging“
element in the life of the individual man, as well as in the life of a
whole nation, even where art,
*
Cf.
Aesthetische
Erziehung, Bd. 3, 25, 26. Further particulars in chap.
ix. div. 7 of this book (vol. ii.).
17 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
science and philosophy are not directly
concerned. Or, to present this relation to ourselves from a different
side,
we can also — and indeed here too with Schiller * — say, “From being a
successful instrument, man became an unsuccessful artist.“ That is the
tragedy of which I spoke in the introductory remarks.
We must, I think,
admit that this German conception of “man becoming man“ goes deeper,
embraces
more, and throws a brighter light upon that future of mankind after
which
we have to strive than any narrowly scientific or purely utilitarian
one.
However that may be, one thing is certain: whether such a view is to
have
unconditional or merely conditional validity, it is of the very
greatest
service for a study of the Hellenic world and the sure revelation of
its
principle of life; for though in this subjective formulation it may be
a characteristically German conception, it leads back in the main to
Hellenic
art and to Hellenic philosophy, which embraced natural science, and
proves
that Hellenism lived on in the nineteenth century not merely outwardly
and historically, but also as an inherent force that has helped to
mould
the future. †
ANIMAL
AND MAN
Not every artistic
activity is art. Numerous animals evince extraordinary skill in the
construction
of dwellings; the song of the nightingale vies successfully with the
natural
song of the savage; capricious imitation we find
*
Cf.
Etwas
über die erste Menschengesellsehaft, div. I.
† To
avoid misunderstanding, I wish to mention that here at the beginning of
my book I have without further criticism joined hands with Schiller, to
ensure that what follows may be more easily understood; only in my
final
chapter can I establish my view that in the case of the Teutonic
peoples,
in contrast to the Hellenes, the turning point in “man becoming man“ is
to be sought not in art, but in religion — this however does not mean a
deviation from Schiller‘s conception of “art“ but purely and simply a
particular
gradation.
18 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
highly developed in the animal kingdom,
and that too in the most various spheres — imitation of activity, of
sound,
of form — and here it must also be remembered that we know next to
nothing
of the life of the higher apes; * language, that is, communication of
feelings
and judgments from one individual to another, is widespread throughout
the whole animal kingdom and the means adopted are so incredibly sure
that
not only anthropologists but also philologists † do not consider it
superfluous
to warn us against thinking that vibration of the human vocal chords —
or for that matter sound in general — is the only thing that can be
called
language. ‡ By instinctively uniting into civic organisations, no
matter
how complex and intricate they may be, the human race similarly
achieves
nothing which is in principle an advance on the exceedingly complex
animal
communities; modern sociologists, indeed, consider the origin of human
society as having a close organic connection with the development of
the
social instincts in the surrounding animal kingdom. § If we
consider
* See,
however, the observations of J. G. Romanes in the case of a female
chimpanzee,
given in fullest detail in Nature, vol. xi., p. 160 ff,
condensed
in the books of the same author. In a short time this ape learned to
count
up to seven with unfailing accuracy. On the other hand, the Bakairi
(South
American Indians) are able to count only up to six, and that with great
difficulty. (See Karl von Steinen: Unter den
Naturvölkern
Brasiliens.)
† See,
for example, Whitney, The Life of Language (Fr. edit. p. 238 f).
‡
Compare
especially the instructive remarks of Topinard in his Anthropologie,
pp. 159-162. It is interesting to know that so great and at the same
time
so extremely cautious a naturalist as Adolf Bastian, with all his
abhorrence
of everything fantastic, claims for the articulata (with the tentacles
with which they touch each other) a language analogous to ours and in
keeping
with their nature; see Das Beständige in den Menschenrassen,
p. viii. of the preface. In Darwin‘s Descent of Man, chap.
iii.,
we find an exceedingly interesting review of the facts pertaining to
this
question and an energetic refutation of the paradoxes of Max
Müller
and others.
§
See,
for example, the Principles of Sociology of the American
Professor
Franklin H. Giddings (Fr. edit., 1897, p. 189): “Les bases de l‘empire
de l‘homme furent posées sur les associations zoogéniques
des plus humbles formes de la vie consciente.“
19
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
the civic life of the ants, and see
by what daring refinements they ensure the practical efficiency of the
social mechanism and the faultless fitting of all parts into each other
— as an example I shall mention only the removal of the baneful sexual
impulse in a large percentage of the population, and that too not by
mutilation,
as is the case with our wretched makeshift castration, but by shrewd
manipulation
of the fecundating germs — then we must admit that the civic instinct
of
man is not of a high standard; compared with many animal species we are
nothing but political blunderers. * Even in the special exercise of
reason
we can indeed recognise a peculiar specific feature of man, but hardly
a fundamentally new natural phenomenon. Man in his natural condition
uses
his superior reason exactly as the stag his speed of foot, the tiger
his
strength, the elephant his weight; it is his finest weapon in the
struggle
for existence, it takes the place of agility, bulk and so many other
things
that he lacks. The times are past when men had the effrontery to deny
that
animals have reason; not only do the ape, the dog and all higher
animals
manifest conscious reflection and unerring judgment, but insects have
been
experimentally proved to do the same: a colony of bees, for example,
placed
in unaccustomed and absolutely new surroundings, adopts new measures,
tries
this and that, till it has found what
* See
Carl Vogt‘s amusing Untersuchungen über Thierstaaten
(1851).
In Brehm, Vom Nordpol zum Aequator (1890), we find very
noteworthy
facts concerning the waging of war by baboons; their tactics change
according
to the nature of the ground, they divide their forces into definite
groups,
first line, second line of attack, &c., several work together, so
as
to roll a large boulder down on the enemy, &c. Perhaps the most
amazing
social life is that of the farming ants from South America, first
reported
upon by Belt, Naturalist in Nicaragua, then by the German
Alfred
Möller; now we can observe these animals in the Zoological Garden
in London, where it is especially easy to follow the activity of the
large-headed
“overseers,“ which rush forward and shake up the workers whenever they
take things easy!
20 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
suits it. * There is no doubt that if
we investigate with more care and insight the psychological life — so
far
* Cf.
Huber, Nouvelles observations sur les abeilles, ii. 198, and
the
fine book by Maurice Maeterlinck, La vie des abeilles, 1901.
The
best and shortest recent résumé of the most
important
facts pertinent to our case is probably that by J. G. Romanes, Essays
on Instinct, 1897; even this distinguished pupil of Darwin is,
however,
under the constant necessity of referring to the series of observations
of the two Hubers as being the most brilliant and reliable; but too
little
known is another work, that of J. Traherne Moggridge, Observations
on
harvesting Ants and Trapdoor Spiders (Reeve, London, 1873); in
general
the psychologists of the animal kingdom should direct more attention to
the spiders, which beyond doubt are endowed with special gifts of their
own. But see H. C. MacCook, American Spiders
(Philadelphia,
1889), and the various volumes of the invaluable Souvenirs
entomologiques
by Fabre. Among older writings, Kirby‘s History, Habits, and
Instincts
of Animals is of lasting value. Of the more philosophic writings I
shall here call attention especially to Wundt‘s Vorlesungen
über
die Menschen- und Tierseele and to Fritz Schulze‘s Vergleichende
Seelenkunde (Second Part, “The Psychology of Animals and Plants,“
1897).
In this note I should like at the same time to put in an express
caveat,
namely, that here and further on I do not fail to recognise the deep
gulf
between the intellect of thinking man and that of the animal; it was
high
time that a Wundt with all his intellectual keenness should openly
oppose
our almost ineradicable inclination to anthropomorphic interpretations;
but it seems to me that Wundt himself and with him Schulze, Lubbock and
others fall into the opposite error: they make indeed a just protest
against
the uncritical over-estimation of the thought-life of the animals, yet
these learned men, accustomed from their earliest years to think and
speculate
unceasingly, do not seem to have any idea of the minimum of
consciousness
and reflection with which mankind as a whole manages to go through
life;
they are in general inclined to attach too great importance to
“consciousness“
and “reflection“; this manifests itself in their treatises on the
elementary
conditions of the human ψυχή
and — perhaps still more clearly — in their lack of ability
to explain the nature of the real act of creative genius (Art and
Philosophy).
One Wundt having reduced the estimate of animal intelligence to its
right
level, we should need a second to expose our tendency to overrate
enormously
our own importance. The following point also seems to me never to have
been properly emphasised: that in our observations of animals we, do
what
we will, remain anthropomorphists; for we cannot even conceive a sense
(I mean a physical instrument for acquiring knowledge of the
surrounding
world) if we do not possess it ourselves, and we must of necessity
remain
for ever blind and deaf to all manifestations of feeling and
understanding,
which are not immediately echoed in our own intellectual life. It is
all
very well for Wundt to warn against “false analogies“; in this whole
sphere
no conclusions but those of analogy are possible. As Clifford has
clearly
shown (cf. Seeing and
21 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
practically unknown to us — of animals
from remote classes, we shall everywhere find similar things.
Thinking), we
can
proceed neither purely objectively nor purely subjectively here; this
mixed
method of knowing he has therefore termed an “ejective“ one. We
estimate
those animals as most intelligent whose intelligence most closely
resembles
our own, and is therefore best understood by us, but is not this
extremely
simple and thoughtless in reference to a cosmic problem such as that of
intellect? Is this not disguised anthropomorphism? Most certainly. When
Wundt therefore maintains, “In this sphere experiment is in a high
degree
superior to mere observation,“ one can only very conditionally agree
with
him; for experiment is from the outset a reflex of our purely human
conceptions,
whereas the loving observation of a quite differently organised
creature
in its own most normal conditions and that with the desire not to
criticise
its achievements but to understand them — as far as our human narrow
intellectual
horizon permits us — would be bound to lead to many surprising
discoveries.
And so old blind Huber has taught us much more about bees than Lubbock
in his — nevertheless admirable — book on Ants, Bees and Wasps
(1883).
And so it is that the rough trainers, who demand of each animal only
such
tricks as they can expect from it on the basis of daily observation of
its capabilities, achieve such remarkable results. Here as elsewhere
our
science of to-day is still in the toils of Helleno-Jewish
anthropomorphism,
and not least just where it warns us against it. — Since the above has
been written, the sensational book of Bethe, Dürfen wir
Ameisen
und Bienen psychische Qualitäten zuschreiben? has appeared,
which
in its whole argumentation is a classical example of disguised
anthropomorphism.
By ingenious (though in my opinion by no means conclusive) tests, Bethe
has come to the conclusion that ants recognise by smell that they
belong
to the nest, and their finding of their way depends on the excretion of
a chemical substance, &c. The whole is “Chemoreflex,“ the whole
life
of these animals “purely mechanical.“ One is astonished to find such an
abyss of philosophical barbarity. Why, is not the whole sense-life as
such
inevitably mechanical? Can I recognise my own father without help of a
mechanism? Does not the dog recognise its master almost entirely by
smell?
Are Descartes‘ automata always to rise into life again, as though
science
and philosophy had stood still for three hundred years? Here we have
the
real ineradicable anthropomorphism. In the case of vertebrates their
strict
analogy with our own structure lets us draw conclusions about psychical
processes; in the insect, on the other hand, a totally strange being is
before us, built on a plan which is so fundamentally at variance with
that
of our body that we are not in a position to explain with certainty
even
the purely mechanical working of the organs of sense (see
Gegenbaur,
Vergleichende
Anatomie) and in consequence cannot know at all what a world of
sense-impressions
and of possibilities of communication, &c., quite closed to us, may
surround these creatures. Not to comprehend this fact is to display an
ant-like naïveté. — (Addenda of the
22 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
Thus the
comparatively
enormous development of the human brain * gives us after all only a
relative
superiority. Man does not walk upon earth like a God, but as a creature
among other creatures, perhaps it would be no exaggeration to say as primus
inter pares; for it is difficult to comprehend why a higher
differentiation,
with its countless disadvantages, should be forthwith regarded as
higher
“perfection“; the relative perfection of an organism should be judged,
in my opinion, by its suitability to given conditions. Through all the
fibres of his nature man is organically and closely connected with his
surroundings; all this is blood of his blood; if we think him apart
from
nature, he is a fragment, an uprooted stem.
What now
distinguishes
man from other beings? Many will answer, his inventive power: it is the
instrument which shows him to be prince among the animals. Yet even
with
this he still remains an animal among animals. Not only the anthropoid,
but also the common
third edition.) In
the
opening speech of the fourth International Congress of Zoologists on
August
23, 1898, Sir John Lubbock violently attacked the automata theory and
said,
inter
alia: “Many animals possess organs of sense, the meaning of which
is
inscrutable to us men. They notice sounds which we cannot hear, they
see
things which remain invisible to us, they receive impressions of sense,
which lie beyond the sphere of our power of conception. The world which
we know so well must have for them quite a different physiognomy.“
Montaigne
had already expressed the opinion: “Les bêtes ont plusieurs
conditions
qui se rapportent aux nôtres; de celles-là, par
comparaison,
nous pouvons tirer quelque conjecture: mais ce qu‘elles ont en
particulier,
que savons-nous que c‘est?“ The psychiatrician Forel became convinced
after
thirty years of diligent observation that ants possessed memory, had
the
capacity of unifying in their brain various impressions of sense and
acted
with conscious reflection. (Speech delivered on August 13, 1901, at the
Congress of Zoologists in Berlin.)
* It
is well known that Aristotle has made a serious mistake here, as he
often
does: man possesses, neither absolutely nor relatively (that is, in
relation
to weight of body), the largest brain; the superiority of this
apparatus
in his case is based on other things. (See Ranke, Der Mensch,
second edition, I., pp. 551 and 542 f.).
23
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
ape, invents simpler instruments (any
one can obtain information on this point by referring to Brehm‘s Tierleben),
and the elephant is, if perhaps not in invention, yet in the employment
of instruments a real master. (See Romanes, Die geistige
Entwickelung
im Tierreich, pp. 389 ff.) The most ingenious dynamo machine does
not
raise men one inch over the earth-surface which is common to all
creatures;
all such things denote merely a new accumulation of strength in the
struggle
for existence; man becomes thereby in a way a more highly potentiated
animal.
Instead of going to bed, he illumines with tallow candles, oil, gas or
electricity; he thereby gains time and can do more work; but there are
likewise countless animals which procure light for themselves, many by
phosphorescence, others, particularly the deep sea fishes, by
electricity;
* we travel by bicycle, by train, and shall perhaps soon travel by
airship
— the bird of passage and the inhabitant of the sea had brought
travelling
long ago into fashion, and just like them, men travel in order to
subsist.
The incalculable superiority of man shows itself certainly in this,
that
he can invent all these things rationally and can unite individual
discoveries,
so as to make still further progress. The impulse to imitate and the
capacity
for assimilation which one certainly finds in all mammals are in his
case
of so high a standard that the same thing becomes, so to speak, a
different
thing; in analogous manner we see in chemical substances that
frequently
the addition of a single essentially similar atom,
*
Emin
Pasha and Stanley tell about chimpanzees which go out at night with
torches
on their predatory raids. With Romanes, one would do well to doubt this
fact till further information is available. Stanley did not see it
himself
and Emin Pascha was exceedingly shortsighted. If apes have really
discovered
the art of lighting fires, to us men there would remain nevertheless
the
invention of the figure of Prometheus, and that this, and not that, is
what makes man man forms exactly the substance of my remarks.
24
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
accordingly a simple numerical addition,
fundamentally changes the qualities of the substance in question; if
one
adds oxygen to oxygen, a new compound, ozone, is formed (O2+O1=O3).
One should, however, not forget that all human discoveries rest on
assimilation
and imitation; man “finds out“ (er-findet) what is there and has only
awaited
his coming, just as he “discovers“ what hitherto was covered with a
veil;
nature plays at “hide and seek“ and “blind man‘s buff“ with him.
Quod
invenitur, fuit, says Tertullian. The fact that he understands
this,
that he seeks what is hidden, and bit by bit reveals and finds so much,
certainly testifies to the possession of incomparable gifts; but if he
did not possess them, he would indeed be the most miserable of
creatures,
for there he stands weaponless, powerless, wingless; bitter necessity
is
his incentive, the faculty of invention his salvation.
Now man becomes truly
man, a creature differing from all animals, even human ones, when he
reaches
the stage of inventing without necessity, when he exercises his
incomparable
gifts of his own free will and not because nature compels him, or — to
use a deeper and more suitable expression — when the necessity which
impels
him to invent enters his consciousness, no longer from outside, but
from
his inner self; when that which was his salvation becomes his
sanctuary.
The decisive moment is when free invention consciously appears, that
is,
therefore, when man becomes artist. The study of surrounding nature,
as,
for example, of the starry heavens, may have made great strides, and a
complex cult of gods and spirits have been formed without thereby
anything
fundamentally new entering into the world. All this proves a latent
capacity;
essentially, however, it is nothing more than the half-unconscious
exercise
of an instinct. It is only when an individual man, like Homer, invents
the gods of his own free will as he wishes them
25
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
to be; it is only when an observer of
nature, like Democritus, from free creative power invents the
conception
of the atom; when a pensive seer, like Plato, with the wilfulness of
the
genius superior to the world throws overboard all visible nature and
puts
in its place the realm of ideas that man has created; it is only when a
most Sublime Teacher proclaims, “Behold the kingdom of Heaven is within
you“ — it is only then that a completely new creature is born, that
being
of whom Plato says, “He has generative power in his soul rather than in
his body,“ it is only then that the macrocosm contains a microcosm. The
only thing that deserves to be called culture is the daughter of such
“creative
freedom,“ or in a word “art,“ and with art philosophy — genuine,
creative
philosophy and science — is so closely related that both must be
recognised
as two sides of the same being; every great poet has been a
philosopher,
every philosopher of genius a poet. That which lies outside this
microcosmic
life of culture is nothing more than “civilisation,“ that is, a more
and
more highly potentiated, increasingly more industrious, easier and less
free ant-like state-existence, certainly rich in blessing and in so far
desirable, nevertheless a gift of the ages, in the case of which it
frequently
remains exceedingly questionable whether the human race does not pay
more
for it than it receives from it. Civilisation is in itself nothing, for
it denotes something merely relative; a higher civilisation could be
regarded
as a positive gain (i.e., an “advance“) only when it led to an
increasingly
intensive intellectual and artistic shaping of life and to an inner
moral
enlightenment. Because this seemed to him not to be the case with us,
Goethe,
as the most competent judge, could make the melancholy confession,
“These
times are worse than one thinks.“ On the other hand, the undying
importance
of Hellenism lies in this, that it understood how to create for itself
an age better than any that we can conceive,
26 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
an age incomparably better, if I may
so express it, than its own backward civilisation deserved. To-day all
ethnographists and anthropologists distinguish clearly between morals
and
religion, and recognise that both in a certain sense are independent of
each other; it would be just as useful to learn to distinguish clearly
between culture and civilisation. A highly developed civilisation is
compatible
with a rudimentary culture: Rome, for example, exemplifies a wonderful
civilisation with very insignificant and quite unoriginal culture.
Athens,
on the other hand (with its free citizens) reveals a stage of culture
in
comparison with which we Europeans of the nineteenth century are in
many
respects still barbarians, and this is united with a civilisation which
— in comparison with ours — may with perfect justice be termed really
barbaric.
* Compared with all other phenomena of history, Hellenism represents an
exuberantly rich blossoming of the human intellect, and the reason of
this
is that its whole culture rests on an artistic basis. The freely
creative
work of human imagination was the starting-point of the infinitely rich
life of the Hellenes. Their language, religion, politics, philosophy,
science
(even mathematics), history and geography, all forms of imaginative
invention
in words and sounds, their whole public life and the whole inner life
of
the individual — everything radiates from this work, and everything
finds
itself in it once more as in a figurative and at the same time organic
centre, a centre which reduces the greatest divergencies in characters,
*
We
have an excellent example of this in the case of the Indo-Aryans in
their
original home, where the formation of a language, “which surpassed all
others, was completely uniform and wonderfully perfect,“ apart from
other
intellectual achievements, pointed to a high culture. These men were
nevertheless
a race of shepherds who walked abroad almost naked and knew neither
cities
nor metals. (See in particular Jhering, Vorgeschichte der
Indoeuropäer,
p. 2.) For a definite distinction between knowledge, civilisation and
culture
I refer readers to vol. ii. chap. ix. of this book and the synopsis
contained
in it.
27 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
interests and endeavours to reach a
living conscious unity. At this central point stands Homer.
HOMER
The fact that the
existence of the poet Homer has been open to doubt will give later
generations
no very favourable idea of the intellectual acumen of our epoch. It is
exactly a century ago since F. A. Wolf published his hypothesis; since
that time our neo-Alexandrians have bravely “sniffed and shovelled
away,“
till at last they arrived at the conclusion that Homer was merely a
pseudo-mythical
collective term and the Iliad and the Odyssey nothing
more
than a skilful pasting together and re-editing of all sorts of
poems....
Pasted together by whom? and by whom so beautifully edited? Well,
naturally
by learned philologists, the ancestors of the modern ones! The only
matter
for surprise is that, as we are once more in possession of such an
ingenious
race of critics, these gentlemen have not taken the trouble to piece
together
for us poor wretches a new Iliad. There is truly no lack of
songs,
no lack of genuine, beautiful folksongs; is there, perhaps, a lack of
paste,
of brainpaste? The most competent judges in such a question are clearly
the poets, the great poets; the philologist clings to the shell which
has
been exposed to the caprice of centuries; but the congenial glance of
the
poet, on the other hand, penetrates to the kernel and perceives the
individual
creative process. Now Schiller, with his unerring instinct, immediately
stigmatised as “simply barbaric“ the view that the Iliad and
the
Odyssey
were not, in all essential points of their construction, the work of a
single inspired individual. Indeed, in his excitement, he so far
oversteps
the mark that he calls Wolf a “stupid Devil“! The opinion of Goethe is
almost more interesting. His much-lauded objectivity manifested itself,
among other things, in this, that he unreservedly
28 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
and unresistingly let himself be
influenced
by an impression; Wolf‘s great philological merits and the mass of
correct
statements which his expositions contained, misled the great man; he
felt
convinced and declared this openly. But later, when he again had the
opportunity
of studying the Homeric poems thoroughly — and viewed them no longer
from
a philologico-historical but from a purely poetic standpoint — he
retracted
his over-hasty endorsement of the “subjective trash“ (as he now called
it), for now his knowledge was precise; behind these works there stands
a “glorious unity, a single, higher poetical sense.“ * But the
philologists
too, in their necessarily roundabout way, have come to the same view,
and
Homer enters the twentieth century, the fourth millennium of his fame,
greater than ever. †
* See,
for example, the small work, Homer noch einmal, of the year
1826.
† I
must take care to avoid even the slightest assumption of a learning
which
I do not possess; a man in my position can only note the results of
learned
research; but it is his right and his duty to approach these results as
a free man, possessing unexceptionable critical power. Indeed, he must,
in my opinion, use his critical power above all in the same way as a
monarch
whose wisdom has especially to prove itself in the choice of his
advisers;
the layman cannot sit in judgment on the value of learned arguments, he
can, however, from style, language and train of thoughts very well form
an estimate of the individual scholar and distinguish between mason and
architect. It is not therefore in the sense of a material proof, but
merely
in order that the reader himself may be able, in the sense alluded to,
to gauge my ability to form a critical judgment, that I now and then
refer
in the notes to my “authorities.“ As I have pointed out in the text, I
here in the first place hold with Socrates that musicians are the best
judges of flute-playing, poets of poetical works. Goethe‘s opinion with
regard to Homer is worth more to me than that of all the philologists
together
who have lived since the beginning of the world. I have, however,
informed
myself, as far as a layman can, in regard to the latter, and in so
complicated
a question this is very essential. The summary accounts of Niese, Die
Entwickelung der Homerischen Poesie, 1882, and of Jebb, Homer,
1888, enable us to follow the course of the discussion up to modern
times,
but nothing more. On the other hand, in Bergk, Griechische
Litteraturgeschichte,
1872-84, we have a safe guide. That Bergk was a Hellenist of the first
rank is admitted by all Homeric scholars and even the ordinary man is
impressed
by the comprehensive and penetrating character of his knowledge, com-
29 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
For besides many
philologising nonentities, Germany has produced an undying race of
really
great linguistic and literary scholars; F. A. Wolf himself was one of
them;
he never lowered himself to the absurd idea afterwards propounded, that
a great work of art could be produced by the united efforts of a number
of insignificant men or directly from the vague consciousness of the
masses,
and he would be the first to learn with satisfaction of the successful
issue that finally attended the protracted scientific researches. Even
if as great a genius as Homer himself had devoted himself to improving
and embellishing Homer‘s works — this is of course almost a senseless
supposition
— the history of all art teaches us that genuine individuality defies
all
imitation; but the farther the critical investigations of the
nineteenth
century advanced, the more was every capable investigator compelled to
realise that even the most important imitators, completers and
restorers
of the epics of Homer all differed from him in this, that not one of
them
approached even in the slightest degree
bined as it is with a
moderation
which bordered on the jejune; Bergk is not a fiery spirit; his attitude
in this question forms the complement to the lightning intuition of a
Schiller.
One should read not only the chapter, “Homer an historical
personality,“
but particularly also in the later paragraph, “Homer in modern times,“
the remarks on the song-theory, of which Bergk says, “The general
premisses,
from which the advocates of the song-theory proceed, prove themselves
on
closer examination, especially when one considers the Homeric poems in
connection with the whole development of epic poetry, as quite
untenable.
This theory could only be formulated by critics by whom the Homeric
epic,
separated from its surroundings and without any regard to the history
of
Greek literature, was submitted to their disintegrating criticism“ (i.
525). One should read also his proof that the use of writing was common
in Homer‘s time and that external as well as internal facts testify
that
Homer actually left his works in writing (i. 527 ff). — 1905. In the
meantime
the discoveries in Crete have proved that the use of script was common
among the Hellenes long before the Achaeans entered the Peloponnese. In
the palace of Minos, the most modern parts of which can be proved to
have
been built not later than 1550 years before Christ, whole libraries and
archives have been discovered (cf. the publications of A. J.
Evans
in the last volumes of the Annual of the British School at Athens).
30 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
his commanding genius. Disfigured though
they were by countless misconceptions, copyists‘ mistakes, and still
more
by the supposed improvements of irrepressible wiseacres and the
interpolations
of well-meaning followers, the more the patchwork of the present form
of
these poems was shown up by the polishing work of research, the more
they
testified to the incomparable divine creative power of the original
artist.
What marvellous power of beauty must have been possessed by works which
could so successfully defy for centuries the stormy social conditions,
and for a still longer time the desecrating tempest of
narrow-mindedness,
mediocrity and pseudogenius, that even to-day, from the midst of the
ruins,
the ever youthful charm of artistic perfection greets us like the good
fairy of our own culture! At the same time other investigations, which
had gone their own independent way — historical and mythological
studies
— clearly proved that Homer must have been an historical personage. It
has, in fact, been shown that in these poems both saga and myth have
been
treated very freely and according to definite principles of conscious
artistic
shaping. To mention only the most essential point: Homer was a
remarkable
simplifier, he unravelled the tangled clue of popular myths, and from
the
planless medley of popular sagas, which had a different form in every
district,
he wove certain definite forms in which all Hellenes recognised
themselves
and their gods, although this very delineation was quite new to them.
What
we have now discovered after so much toil the ancients knew very well;
I quote in this connection the remarkable passage in Herodotus:
“From the Pelasgians the Hellenes took their gods. But whence each of
the
gods comes, whether they were always there, what their form is, we
Hellenes
only know as it were since yesterday. For it is Hesiod and Homer, in
the
first place, who created for the Greeks their race of
31 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
gods, who gave the gods their names,
distributed honours and arts among them, and described their forms. The
poets, however, who are supposed to have lived before these two men, in
my opinion at least, really came after them“ (Book II. 53). Hesiod
lived
about a hundred years after Homer and was directly influenced by him;
with
the exception of this little error the simple naive sentence of
Herodotus
contains all that the gigantic critical work of a century has brought
to
light. It has been proved that the poets who according to the priestly
tradition lived before Homer — e.g., Orpheus, Musaeos, Eumolpos
from the Thracian school, or Olen and others of the Delian school — in
reality lived after him; * and it is likewise proved that the religious
conceptions of the Greeks have been drawn from very different sources;
the Indo-European inheritance forms the main capital; to this were
added
all kinds of motley Oriental influences (as Herodotus had also shown in
the passage which precedes that above quoted): upon this chaos a hand
was
now laid by the one incomparable man with the sovereign authority of
the
freely creative, poetic genius, and out of it he formed by artistic
means
a new world; as Herodotus says: he creates for the Greeks their race of
gods.
May I here be
permitted
to quote the words of Erwin Rohde, † recognised as one of the most
learned
of living Hellenists: “The Homeric epic can only be called folk-poetry
because it is of such a nature that the whole Greek-speaking people
willingly
took it up and could make it their own, not because the ‘people‘ in any
mystic way were engaged in its production. Many hands have been at work
on the two poems, but all in
* See
in particular Flach, Geschichte der griechischen Lyrik nach den
Quellen
dargestellt, I. pp. 45 ff, 90 ff.
†
Since
the above was written, German science has had to deplore the death of
this
extraordinary man.
32
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
the direction and in the sense which
the greatest poetic genius among the Greeks, and probably of mankind,
and
not the people or the saga, as one certainly hears maintained, gave to
them. In Homer‘s mirror Greece appears united and uniform in belief, in
dialect, in constitution, customs and morals. One may, however, boldly
maintain that this unity cannot in reality have existed; the elements
of
Panhellenism were doubtless present, but it was the genius of the poet
alone that collected and fused them together in a merely imaginary
whole.“
* Bergk, whose whole rich scholastic life was devoted to the study of
Greek
poetry formulates the opinion: “Homer draws chiefly from himself, from
his own inner soul; he is a truly original spirit, not an imitator, and
he practises his art with full consciousness“ (Griechische
Litteraturgeschichte, p. 527).
Duncker, too, the historian, remarks that “what was lacking in the
imitators
of Homer — what accordingly distinguished this one man — was the
comprehensive
eye of genius.“ † And to close these quotations in a worthy manner I
refer
to Aristotle, in whom one must admit some competence, so far as
critical
acumen is concerned. It is striking and consoling to see that he too
discovers
the distinguishing-mark of Homer to be his eye; in the eighth chapter
of
his Poetics (he is speaking of the qualities of poetic action),
he says: “But Homer, just as he is different in other things also,
seems
here too to have seen aright, either by art or by nature.“ A profound
remark!
which prepares us for the surprising outburst of enthusiasm in the
twenty-third
chapter of the Poetics: Homer is above all other poets divine.
* Seelenkult
und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen, pp. 35, 36.
† Geschichte
des Altertums, v. 566).
33
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
ARTISTIC CULTURE
I have felt bound
to prove this, even at the cost of some detail; not because it is of
importance
for the subject treated in this book, whether one man named Homer wrote
the Iliad, or in how far the poem, which to-day is so entitled,
may correspond to the original poem; the special proof is a side issue.
It is, on the other hand, essential for my whole work that I should
emphasise
the incomparable importance of personality in general; it is likewise
essential
to recognise the fact that every work of art always and without
exception
presupposes a strong individual personality, — a great work of art a
personality
of the first rank, a Genius; it is, finally, imperative that we should
grasp the fact, that the secret of the magic power of Hellenism lies
locked
in this idea “personality.“ For indeed if we would understand what
Hellenic
art and Hellenic thought have meant for the nineteenth century, if we
would
know the secret of so lasting a power, we must realise especially that
it is the power of great personalities that, coming down from that
vanished
world, still influences us with the freshness of youth.
- Höchstes Glück der
Erdenkinder
- Ist nur die Persönlichkeit:
says Goethe; this greatest gift — höchstes
Glück — the Greeks possessed as no other people ever did, and
it is this very thing that surrounds them with that sunny halo which is
peculiarly theirs. Their great poems and their great thoughts are not
the
work of anonymous commercial companies as are the so-called art and
wisdom
of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, e tutu quanti; the
life-principle
of this people is heroism; the individual steps forward alone: boldly
crossing
the boundary
34
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
of what is common to all, he leaves
behind all that civilisation which has accumulated instinctively,
unconsciously
and uselessly, and fearlessly hews out a path in the ever-deepening
gloom
of the primeval forest of accumulated superstitions, — he dares to have
Genius! And this daring gives rise to a new conception of manhood; for
the first time man has “entered into the daylight of life.“
The individual,
however,
could not accomplish this alone. Personalities can clearly reveal
themselves
as such, only when surrounded by other personalities; action receives a
conscious existence only after reaction has taken place; the genius can
breathe only in an atmosphere of genius. If then a single, surpassingly
great, incomparably creative personality has undoubtedly been the
condition
and absolutely indispensable primum mobile of the whole Grecian
culture, we must recognise as the second characteristic factor in this
culture the fact that the surroundings proved themselves worthy of so
extraordinary
a personality. That which is lasting in Hellenism, that which keeps it
alive to-day and has enabled it to be a bright ideal, a consolation and
a hope to so many of the best men in the nineteenth century, can be
summed
up in one word: it is its element of Genius. What would a Homer have
availed
in Egypt or Phoenicia? The one would have paid no heed to him, the
other
would have crucified him; yes, even in Rome... but here we have the
experimental
proof before our eyes. Has all the poetry of Greece succeeded in
striking
even a single spark out of this sober, inartistic heart? Is there among
the Romans a single true poetic genius? Is it not pitiful that our
schoolmasters
are condemned to embitter the fresh years of our childhood by
compulsory
admiration of these rhetorical, unnatural, soulless, hypocritical
imitations
of genuine poetry? And is this example alone not
35
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
enough to prove — a few poets more or
less make really no difference — how all culture is linked to art? What
is one to say to a history which embraces more than 1200 years and does
not show a single philosopher, not even a philosopher in miniature?
What
to a people which has to conceal its own modest claims in this respect
by the importation of the latter-day persecuted, anaemic Greeks, who,
however,
are not philosophers at all but merely very commonplace moralists? How
low must the quality of genius have sunk when a good Emperor, who wrote
maxims in his leisure hours, is commended to the reverence of coming
generations
as a thinker! * Where is there a great, creative natural scientist
among
the Romans? Surely not the industrious encyclopaedist, Pliny? Where is
there a mathematician
*
Lucretius
might be named as a man certainly worthy of admiration both as a
thinker
and as a poet; but his thoughts are, as he admits, always Greek
thoughts,
and his poetical apparatus is predominantly Greek. And withal there
lies
over his great poem the deadly shadow of that scepticism, which sooner
or later leads to unproductivity, and which must be carefully
distinguished
from the deep insight of truly religious minds, which become aware of
the
figurative element in their conceptions, without for that reason
doubting
the sublime truth of what they vaguely feel in their hearts but cannot
fathom, as when, for example, the Vedish seer suddenly exclaims:
- From what it has
arisen, this
creation
- Whether created it
has been
or not —
- Whoever in the
heavens watches
o‘er it,
- He knows it well!
Or does
he too not know?
- Rigveda, x.
129.
or as Herodotus in the
passage
quoted a few pages previously, where he expresses the opinion that the
poet created the gods. And Epicurus himself, the “atheist,“ the man
whom
Lucretius describes as the greatest of all mortals, the man from whom
he
takes his whole system — do we not learn that in his case “religious
feeling
must have been so to speak inborn?“ (See the sketch of Epicurus‘
life by K. L. von Knebel, which Goethe recommends.) “Never,“ exclaimed
Diocles when he found Epicurus in the temple, “never have I seen Zeus
greater
than when Epicurus lay at his feet!“ The Latin fancied he had spoken
the
last word of wisdom with his Primus in orbe deos fecit timor;
the
Greek, on the other hand, as an enlightened being, knelt more fervently
than ever before the glorious god-image, which heroism had freely
created
for itself, and in so doing testified to his own genius.
36 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
of importance? Where a meteorologist,
a geographer, an astronomer? All that was achieved under the sway of
Rome,
in these and other sciences, is derived without exception from the
Greeks.
But the poetical fountain had dried up, and so too, bit by bit,
creative
thinking and creative observation were exhausted, even among the Greeks
of the Roman Empire. The life-giving breath of genius was gone; neither
in Rome nor in Alexandria was there anything of this manna of the human
spirit for the ever upward-soaring Hellenes; in the one city the
superstition
of utility, in the other, scientific elephantiasis, gradually choked
every
movement of life. Learning indeed steadily increased, the number of
known
facts multiplied continually, but the motive-power, instead of
increasing,
decreased, where increase was badly needed. Thus the European world, in
spite of its great progress in civilisation, underwent a gradual
decline
in culture — sinking down into naked bestiality. Nothing probably is
more
dangerous for the human race than science without poetry, civilisation
without culture. *
In Hellas the course
of events was quite different. So long as art flourished, the torch of
genius flashed up heavenward in all spheres. The power, which in Homer
had fought its way to a dominant individuality, recognised in him its
vocation,
narrowed down in the first instance to the purely artistic creation of
a world of beautiful semblance. Around the radiant central figure arose
a countless army of poets and a rich gradation of poetical styles.
Immediately
after Homer‘s time and later, originality formed the hall-mark of Greek
creation. Inferior powers naturally took their direction from those of
greater eminence; but there were so many of the latter, and
*
Compare
in vol. ii., chap. ix., the remarks about China, &c.
37 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
these had invented so infinitely
manifold
forms, that the lesser talent was enabled to choose what was exactly
fitted
to it, and thus achieve its highest possibilities. I am speaking not
only
of poetry in words wedded to music, but also of the unexampled glory of
the poetry that delights the eye, which grew up beside the other, like
a dearly beloved younger sister. Architecture, sculpture, painting,
like
epic, lyric and dramatic poetry, like the hymn, the dithyramb, the ode,
the romance, and the epigram, were all rays of that same sun of art,
only
differently refracted according to the individual eye. It is surely
ridiculous
that schoolmen cannot distinguish between true culture and ballast, and
should inflict on us interminable lists of unimportant Greek poets and
sculptors; the protest — ever growing in violence — which began to be
made
against this at the end of the nineteenth century, must be welcome; but
before we consign the many superfluous names to a deserved oblivion, we
would express our admiration of the phenomenon as a whole; it gives
evidence
of a supremacy of good taste which is always desirable, of a fineness
of
judgment never since equalled, and of a widespread creative impulse.
Greek
art was a truly “living“ thing, and so it is alive to-day. That which
lives
is immortal. It possessed a solid, organic central point, and obeyed a
spontaneous and therefore unerring impulse, which knitted into one
creative
artistic whole of the most varied luxuriance the most trifling
fragments,
and even the wildest excrescences. In short — if I may be forgiven for
the apparent tautology — Hellenic art was an artistic art, and no
individual,
not even a Homer, could make it that; it could only become such by the
united efforts of a whole body of artists. Since that time nothing
similar
has happened, and so it is that Greek art not only still lives, works
and
preaches in our midst, but the greatest of our artists (of our artistic
38 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
creators of actions, sounds, words,
figures) have in the nineteenth century as in former ages felt
themselves
drawn to Greece as to a home. Among us the man of the people has only
an
indirect knowledge of Greek art; for him the gods have not, as for
Epicurus,
ascended a still higher Olympus; they have been hurled down and dashed
to pieces by rude Asiatic scepticism and rude Asiatic superstition; but
he meets them on our fountains and theatre curtains, in the park,
whither
he resorts on Sundays for fresh air, and in the museums, where
sculpture
has always had a greater attraction for the masses than painting. The
“man
of culture“ carries fragments of this art in his head as the undigested
material of education: names rather than living conceptions; yet he
meets
it too frequently at every step, to be able ever to lose sight of it
completely;
it has a greater share in the building of his intellect than he himself
is aware of. The artist, on the other hand — and here I mean every
artistic
mind — cannot help turning eyes of longing to Greece, not merely
because
of the individual works which arose there — for among us too many a
glorious
thing has been created since the year 1200: Dante stands alone,
Shakespeare
is greater and richer than Sophocles, the art of a Bach would have been
a complete novelty for a Greek — no, what the artist finds there and
misses
here is the artistic element, artistic culture. Since the time of the
Romans,
European life has had a political basis: and now it is gradually
becoming
economic. Whereas among the Greeks no free man could venture to be a
merchant,
among us every artist is a born slave: art is for us a luxury, a realm
of caprice; it is not a State necessity, and it does not lay down for
our
public life the law that the feeling for beauty should pervade
everything.
Even in Rome it was the caprice of a single Maecenas that called poetry
into life, and
39 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
since that time the greatest
achievements
of the most glorious minds have depended largely on a Pope‘s passion
for
building, on the conceit of a prince educated in the classics, or on
the
extravagant taste of a pompous commercial guild. Now and then a
lifegiving
breath was wafted from higher spheres, as, for example, from the
religious
New Birth which the great and saintly Francis of Assisi tried to bring
about — a movement which gave the first impetus to our modern art of
painting
— or from the gradual awakening of the German soul to which we owe that
glorious new art German music. But what has become of the pictures? The
wall-paintings were covered over with plaster because they were thought
ugly; the pictures were torn from the sacred places of worship and hung
side by side on the walls of museums; and then — because otherwise the
evolution up to these most treasured masterpieces could not have been
scientifically
explained — the plaster was scratched off, well or badly as the case
might
be, the pious monks were turned out and cloisters and campi santi
became a second class of museums. Music fared little better; I have
myself
been present at a concert where J. S. Bach‘s “Passion of Matthew“ was
given.
It was in one of the capitals of Europe — which, moreover, is specially
famed for its educated musical taste — and here every “number“ was
followed
by applause and the Chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden“ was actually
received with cries of “Da capo“! We have much that the Greeks did not
possess, but such instances are clear yet painful proofs of how much is
lacking in us that they possessed. One can well understand how
Hölderlin
could exclaim to the artist of to-day:
- Stirb! Du suchst auf diesem
Erdenrunde,
- Edler Geist, umsonst dein Element!
- (Die! Thou seekest on this earthly
ball,
- In vain, O noble mind, thine
element!)
40 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
It is not lack of inner strength or
of originality that draws the heart of the artist of to-day to Greece,
but the consciousness and the experience that the individual, by
himself,
cannot be really original. For originality is quite different from
caprice;
originality is the free pursuit of the path involuntarily marked out
for
itself by the particular nature of the personality in question; but the
artist can only find this freedom where he is surrounded by a
thoroughly
artistic culture; such a culture he cannot find to-day. It would of
course
be absolutely unjust to deny to our European world of to-day artistic
impulses:
the interest in music shows that men‘s minds are in a mighty ferment,
and
modern painting is laying hold upon well-defined but at the same time
extensive
circles, and rousing an enthusiasm which amounts to an almost uncanny
passion,
but all this remains outside the life of the nations, it is a
supplement
— for hours of leisure and men of leisure; and so fashion and caprice
and
manifold hypocrisy are predominant, and the atmosphere in which the
genuine
artist lives lacks all elasticity. Even the most powerful genius is now
bound, hemmed in, repelled on many sides. And so Hellenic art lives on
in our midst as a lost ideal, which we must strive to recover.
SHAPING
Under a happier
star
Hellenic philosophy and natural science enjoy with us children of the
nineteenth
and twentieth centuries a hospitality gladly and gratefully bestowed.
Here
too it is not a question of mere lares, or worship of ancestry;
on the contrary, Hellenic philosophy is very much alive among us, and
Hellenic
science, so helpless on the one hand, and so incredibly powerful in
intuition
on the other, compels
41 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
us to take in it not merely an
historical
but also a living interest. The pure joy excited in us by contemplating
Greek thought may be due, to some extent, to the consciousness that we
have advanced so much further here than our great ancestors. Our
philosophy
has become more philosophical, our science more scientific: an advance
which, unfortunately, we do not find in the domain of art. So far as
philosophy
and science are concerned, our modern culture has shown itself worthy
of
its Hellenic origin; we have a good conscience.
It cannot pertain
to my purpose here to point out connections of which every educated man
must be aware. These connections, so far as philosophy is concerned,
are
purely genetic, since it was only through contact with Greek thought
that
modern thought awoke, acquiring from it indeed that power of
contradiction
and independence which was the last to reach maturity: so far as
mathematics,
the foundation of all science, are concerned, they were equally
genetic;
in the case of the sciences of observation * they were less genetic,
and
in former years rather a hindrance than a help. My one task must be to
explain in a few words what secret power gave these old thoughts such a
tenacious spirit of life.
How much of what
has been done since has passed into everlasting oblivion, while Plato
and
Aristotle, Democritus, Euclid and Archimedes still live on in our
midst,
inspiring and teaching us, and while the half-fabulous form of
Pythagoras
grows greater with every century! † And I am of opinion that what gives
everlasting youth to the thought of a Democritus, a Plato, a Euclid, an
*
With
regard to the last point one must, however, remark that many a splendid
achievement of Hellenic talent in this sphere remained unknown to us
till
a short time ago.
†
This
is a return to a former view. When the Romans were commanded by an
oracle
to erect a statue to the wisest of the Hellenes, they put up the statue
of Pythagoras (Plutarch, Numa, chap. xi.)
42
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
Aristarchus * is that same spirit, that
same mental power which makes Homer and Phidias ever young: it is the
creative
and — in the widest sense of the word — the really artistic element.
For
the important thing is that the conception by which man seeks to master
the inner world of his Ego, or the outer world, and assimilate them in
himself, should be sharply defined and shaped with absolute clearness.
If we glance back at about three thousand years of history, we shall
see
that while the human mind has certainly been broadened by the knowledge
of new facts, it has been enriched only by new ideas, that is, by new
conceptions.
This is that creative power, of which Goethe speaks in the Wanderjahre,
which “glorifies nature“ and without which in his opinion “the outer
world
would remain cold and lifeless.“ † But its creations are lasting only
when
beautiful and perspicuous, that is, artistic.
- As imagination bodies forth
- The forms of things unknown, the
poet‘s
pen
- Turns them to shapes.
- SHAKESPEARE.
But only those
conceptions
which have been transformed into shapes form a lasting possession of
human
consciousness. The supply of facts is ever changing, hence the centre
of
gravity of the Actual (if I may so express it) is subject to constant
shifting;
besides, about the half of our knowledge or even more is provisional:
what
was yesterday regarded as true is false to-day; nor can the future
change
anything in this respect, since the multiplication of the material of
knowledge
keeps pace with the extension of knowledge itself. ‡ On the other hand,
that which man in the capacity of
*
Aristarchus
of Samos, the discoverer of the so-called Copernican system of the
world.
† One
sees that according to Goethe a creative act of the human mind is
necessary,
in order that life itself may become “living“!
‡ A
general text-book of botany or of zoology of the year 1875 is, for
example,
useless to-day, and that not solely or even chiefly
43
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
artist has formed, the figure into which
he has breathed the breath of life, does not decay. I must repeat what
I have already said: what lives is immortal. We know that to-day most
zoologists
teach the theory of immortality — physical immortality — of the
germ-plasma;
the gulf between organic and inorganic, that is, between living and
dead
nature, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was thought to
have been bridged,
because of the new
material
collected, but because actual relations are viewed differently and
exact
observations are overthrown by still more exact ones. Trace, for
example,
the dogma of Imbibition with its endless series of observations from
its
first appearance in 1838 to its point of highest popularity, about
1868;
then begins the countermine and in the year 1898 the zealous student
hears
no more about it. It is particularly interesting to observe how in
zoology,
in which at the beginning of the nineteenth century great
simplification
had been considered possible and in which, under Darwin‘s influence,
there
had been an effort to reduce, if possible, all animal forms to one
single
family, now, as our knowledge has gradually increased, an ever greater
complication of the original scheme of types has revealed itself.
Cuvier
thought four “general structure-plans“ sufficient. Soon, however, it
was
necessary to recognise seven different types, all disconnected, and
about
thirty years ago Carl Claus found that nine was the minimum. But this
minimum
is not enough. When we disregard all but the convenience and needs of
the
beginner (Richard Hertwig‘s well-known and otherwise excellent
text-book
is an example), when we weigh structural differences against each other
without reference to richness of forms and so on — we find now that
anatomical
knowledge is more thorough, that not less than sixteen different
groups,
all equally important as types, must be taken into account. (See
especially the masterly Lehrbuch der Zoologie, by Fleischmann,
1898.)
— At the same time opinions with regard to many fundamental zoological
facts have been quite changed by more exact knowledge. For instance,
twenty
years ago when I studied zoology under Karl Vogt it was considered an
established
fact that worms stood in direct genetic relation to vertebrates; even
such
critically independent Darwinists as Vogt considered this settled and
could
tell many splendid things about the worm, which had developed as high
as
man. In the meantime much more accurate and comprehensive
investigations
on the development of animals in the embryo have led to the recognition
of the fact that there are two great groups inside the “metazoa“ (which
comprises animals that do not consist of simple separable cells), the
development
of which from the moment of the fecundation of the embryo proceeds on
quite
different lines, so that every true — not merely apparent —
relationship
between them is out of the question, not only the genetic relationship
which the evolutionists assume, but also the purely architectonic. And
behold! the worms belong to
44 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
becomes deeper every day; * this is
not the proper place for a discussion on the subject; I merely adduce
this
fact by way of analogy, to justify me in extending to the intellectual
sphere the sharp distinction which I have drawn between organised and
inorganised
conceptions, and in expressing my conviction that nothing which the
style
of the creative artist has formed into a living figure has ever yet
died.
Cataclysms may bury
the one group (which
reaches
its highest point in the insects), and the vertebrates belong to the
other
and might as well be said to be descended from cuttle-fishes and
sea-urchins!
(Cf. especially Karl Camillo Schneider: Grundzüge der
tierischen
Organisation in the Preussische Jahrbücher, 1900, July
number, p. 73 ff.) Such facts serve to prove and confirm what has been
said on p. 42, and it is absolutely necessary that the layman, who is
ever
apt to suppose that the science of his time is perfection, should learn
to recognise in it only a transition stage between a past and a future
theory.
* See,
for example, the standard work of the American zoologist, E. B. Wilson
(Professor in Columbia): The Cell in Development and Inheritance,
1896, where we read: “The investigation of cell activity has on the
whole
rather widened than narrowed the great gulf which separates the lowest
forms of life from the phenomena of the inorganic world.“ Privy
Councillor
Wiesner lately assured me of the absolute correctness of this statement
from the standpoint of pure natural science. Wilson‘s book has in the
meantime
(1900) appeared in a second enlarged edition. The sentence quoted
stands
unaltered on p. 434. The whole of the last chapter, Theories of
Inheritance
and Development, is to be recommended to all who desire not mere
phrases
but real insight into the present state of scientific knowledge with
reference
to the important facts of the animal form. They will find a chaos. As
the
author says (p. 434), “The extraordinary dimensions of the problem of
development,
whether ontogenetic or phylogenetic, have been underestimated.“ Now it
is recognised that every newly discovered phenomenon does not bring
enlightenment
and simplification, but new confusion and new problems, so that a
well-known
embryologist (see Introduction) lately exclaimed: “Every animal
embryo seems to carry its own law in itself!“ Rabl arrives at similar
results
in his investigations on Der Bau und die Entwickelung der Linse
(1900); he finds that every animal form possesses its specific organs
of
sense, the differences between which are already conditioned in the
embryo
cell. And thus by the progress of true science — as distinguished from
the nonsense regarding power and matter, with which generations of
credulous
laymen have been befooled — our view of life became always “more
living,“
and the day is surely not far distant when it will be recognised as
more
reasonable to try to interpret the dead from the standpoint of the
living
than the other way about. (I refer to my Immanuel Kant, p. 482
f.)
45 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
such figures, but centuries later they
once more emerge in perpetual youth from their supposed grave; it
frequently
occurs also that the children of thought, like their brothers and
sisters,
the marble statues, become maimed, broken or even completely shattered;
that is, however, a mechanical destruction, not death. And thus Plato‘s
theory of ideas, more than one thousand years old, has been a living
factor
in the intellectual life of the nineteenth century, an “origin“ of very
many thoughts; almost every philosophical speculation of importance has
been connected with it at one point or another. In the meantime the
spirit
of Democritus has been paramount in natural science: fundamental as
were
the alterations that had to be made on his brilliant theory of atoms in
order to adapt it to the knowledge of to-day, he still remains the
inventor,
the artist. It is he who, to use the language of Shakespeare, has by
the
force of his imagination bodied forth “the forms of things unknown,“
and
then “turned them to shapes.“
PLATO
Instances of the
manner
in which Hellenic creative power has given life and efficacy to thought
are not difficult to find. Take Plato‘s philosophy. His material is not
new; he does not sit down, like Spinoza, to evolve a logical system of
the world out of the depths of his own consciousness; nor does he with
the splendid simplicity of Descartes reach into the bowels of nature,
in
the delusion that he will there find as explanation of the world a kind
of clockwork; he rather takes here and there what seems to him the best
— from the Eleatics, from Heraclitus, the Pythagoreans, Socrates — and
forms out of this no really logical, but certainly an artistic, whole.
The relation of Plato to the former philosophers of Greece is not at
all
unlike that of Homer
46
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
to past and contemporary poets. Homer,
too, probably “invented“ nothing, just as little as Shakespeare did
later
on; but from various sources he laid hold of that which suited his
purpose
and welded it into a new whole, something thoroughly individual,
endowed
with the incomparable qualities of the living individual and burthened
with the limitations, failings, and peculiarities inseparably bound up
with his nature — for every individual says with the God of the
Egyptian
mysteries: “I am who I am,“ and stands before us a new, inscrutable,
unfathomable
thing. * Similar is Plato‘s philosophy. Professor Zeller, the famous
historian
of Greek philosophy, expresses the opinion that “Plato is too much of a
poet to be quite a philosopher.“ It would probably be difficult to
extract
any definite sense out of this criticism. Heaven knows what a
philosopher
in
abstracto may be. Plato was himself, and no one else, and his
example
shows us how a mind had to be fashioned in order that Greek thought
might
yield its highest fruit. He is the Homer of this thought. If a
competent
man were to analyse the doctrine of Plato in such a way that we could
clearly
see what portions are the original property of the great thinker, not
merely
by the process of reproduction through genius but as entirely new
inventions,
then the poetical element in his work would certainly become specially
clear. For Montesquieu, too (in his Pensées), calls
Plato
one of the four great poets of mankind. Especially that which is blamed
as inconsistent and contradictory would reveal itself as an artistic
necessity.
Life is in itself a contradiction: la vie est l‘ensemble des
fonctions
qui résistent à la mort, said the great Bichat; each
living thing has therefore something fragmentary about it, something
*
“A
genuine work of art is, like a work of nature, always infinite to our
mind;
it is seen, felt; it produces its effect, but it cannot really be
known,
much less can its essence, its merit, be expressed in words.“ (Goethe.)
47 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
which might be called arbitrary; the
addition which man makes to it — a free, poetical and only
conditionally
valid addition — is the sole thing that makes the joining of the two
ends
of the magic girdle possible. Works of art are no exception. Homer‘s Iliad
is a splendid example of this, Plato‘s philosophy a second, Democritus‘
theory of the world a third of equal importance. And while the
philosophies
and theories so finely carved by the “logical“ method disappear one
after
the other in the gulf of time, these old ideas take their place in all
the freshness of youth, side by side with the most recent. Clearly it
is
not “objective truth,“ but the manner in which things receive shape, l‘ensemble
des fonctions, as Bichat would say, that is the decisive thing.
Still another remark
in reference to Plato; again it is only a hint — for the space at my
disposal
will not allow of lengthy treatment — but enough, I hope, to leave
nothing
vague. That Indian thought has exercised an influence of quite a
determinative
character upon Greek philosophy is now a settled fact; our Hellenists
and
philosophers have, it is true, long combated this with the violent
obstinacy
of prejudiced scholars; everything was supposed to have originated in
Hellas
as autochthon; at most the Egyptians and the Semites were
allowed
to have exercised a moulding influence — whereby philosophy would in
truth
have had little to gain; the more modern Indologists, however, have
confirmed
the conjectures of the oldest (particularly of that genius Sir William
Jones). It has been fully proved in regard to Pythagoras especially
that
he had a thorough knowledge of Indian doctrines, * and as Pythagoras is
being recognised more and more as the ancestor of Greek thought, that
in
itself means a great deal. Besides, direct influence upon the Eleatics,
Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Democritus, &c., has been
* Cf.
on this point Schroeder: Pythagoras und die Inder (1884).
48 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
shown to be most probable. * In these
circumstances it cannot be surprising that so lofty a spirit as Plato
forced
his way through much misleading extraneous matter and — especially in
reference
to some essential points in all genuine metaphysics — endorses in every
detail some of the sublimest views of Indian thinkers. † But compare
Plato
and the Indians, his works and their works! Then we shall no longer
wonder
why Plato lives and influences, while the Indian philosophers live
indeed
but do not directly affect the wide world and the progress of mankind.
Indian thought is unsurpassed in depth and comprehensive
many-sidedness;
if Professor Zeller thought that Plato was “too much of a poet to be
quite
a philosopher,“ we see from the example of the Indian what becomes of a
philosopher when a thinker is too “completely“ a philosopher to be at
the
same time something of a poet. This pure thinking of the Indians lacks
all capacity of being communicated — and we find this simply but at the
same time profoundly expressed by the Indians themselves, for according
to their books the highest and final wisdom can be taught only by
silence.
‡ How different the Greek! Cost what it
*
The
best summary account of recent times that is known to me is that of
Garbe
in his Sâmkhya-Philosophie (1894), p. 85 f.; there we
also
find the most important bibliography.
† For
the comparison between Plato and the Indians in reference to the
recognition
of the empirical reality and transcendental ideality of experience see
specially Max Müller: Three Lectures on the Vedânta
Philosophy
(1894), p. 128 f. Plato‘s relation to the Eleatics becomes hereby
for the first time clear. Fuller information in Deussen‘s works,
especially
in his lecture, “On the Philosophy of the Vedânta in Relation to
the Metaphysical Doctrines of the West,“ Bombay, 1893.
‡
“When
Bâhva was questioned by Vâshkali, the former explained
Brahmanism
to him by remaining silent. And Vâshkali said, ‘Teach me, O
revered
one, Brahmanism!‘ But the latter remained quite silent. When now the
other
for the second or third time asked, he said, ‘I am indeed teaching you
it, but you do not understand it; this Brahmanism is silence.‘ “
(Sankara
in the Sûtra‘s of Vedânta, iii. 2, 17). And in the Taittiriya
Upanishad we read (ii. 4): “From the great joy of knowledge all
language
and all thought turn away, unable to reach it.“
49 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
might, he must “body forth the forms
of things unknown and give them shape.“ Read in this connection the
laboured
explanation in Plato‘s Theaetetus, where Socrates ultimately
admits
that we may possess truth without being able to explain it, but that
this
is not knowledge; what knowledge is remains certainly undecided at the
end (a proof of Plato‘s profundity!); however, in the culminating-point
of the dialogue it is termed “right conception,“ and the remark is made
that we must be able to give a reasoned explanation of right
conception;
we should also read in this connection the famous passage in the Timaeus,
where the cosmos is compared to a “living animal.“ It must be conceived
and endowed with shape: that is the secret of the Greek, from Homer to
Archimedes. Plato‘s theory of ideas bears exactly the same relation to
metaphysics as Democritus‘ theory of atoms to the physical world: they
are creations of a freely creative, shaping power and in them, as in
all
works of art, there wells up an inexhaustible fountain of symbolical
truth.
Such creations bear the same relation to material facts as the sun to
the
flowers. Hellenic influence has not been an unqualified blessing: much
that we have received from the Greeks still weighs like a nightmare
upon
our struggling culture. But the goodly inheritance which we hold from
them
has been first and foremost this flower-compelling sunshine.
ARISTOTLE
It was under the
direct
influence of Plato that Aristotle, one of the mightiest sages that the
world has ever seen, shot up into the empyrean. The nature of his
intellect
accounts for the fact that in certain respects he developed as the
opposite
of Plato: but without Plato he would never have become a philosopher,
at
any rate not a metaphysician. A critical appreciation of this
50 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
great man would take me too far: I could
not do it adequately even if I were to limit myself to the scope and
object
of this chapter. I could not, however, pass him by unnoticed, and I
take
it for granted that no one fails to admire the creative power that he
revealed
in his logical Organon, his Animal History, his Poetics,
&c. These have been the admiration of all ages. To appropriate a
remark
of Scotus Erigena: it was in the sphere of naturalium rerum
discretio
that he achieved unparalleled results and won the gratitude of the most
distant generations. Aristotle‘s greatness lies not in the fact that he
was right — no man of the first rank has made more frequent or more
flagrant
mistakes — but in the fact that he knew no peace, till he had wrought
in
all spheres of human life and evolved order out of chaos. * In so far
he
is a genuine Hellene. Certainly we have paid dear for this “order.“
Aristotle
was less of a poet than perhaps any of the great philosophers of
Greece;
Herder says of him that he was perhaps the driest writer that ever used
a stylus; † he must, I fancy, be “philosopher enough“ even for
Professor
Zeller; certainly he was this in a sufficient degree — thanks to his
Hellenic
creative power — to sow more persistent error in the world than any man
before or after him. Till a short time ago he had paralysed the natural
sciences at all points; philosophy and especially metaphysics have not
yet shaken off his yoke; our theology is, if I might call it so, his
natural
child. In truth, this great and important legacy of the old world was a
two-edged sword. I shall return shortly in another connection to
Aristotle
and Greek philosophy; here I shall only add that the Greeks certainly
had
great need of an Aristotle to lay emphasis
*
Eucken
says in his essay, Thomas von Aquin und Kant, p. 30 (Kantstudien,
1901, vi. p. 12): The intellectual work of Aristotle is “an artistic or
more accurately speaking a plastic shaping.“
† Ideen
zur Geschichte der Menschheit, XIII., chap. v.
51 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
upon empiric methods and in all things
to recommend the golden mean; in their brilliant exuberance of pride
and
creative impulse they were inclined to dash upwards and onwards with
thoughtless
disregard of the serious ground of reality, and this in time was bound
to have a baneful influence; it is nevertheless characteristic that
Aristotle,
Greek as he was, exercised comparatively little influence, to begin
with,
on the development of Greek intellectual life; the healthy instinct of
a people that rejoiced in creating rebelled against a reaction which
was
so fatally violent, and had perhaps a vague feeling that this pretended
empiricist brought with him as his curative medicine the poison of
dogma.
Aristotle was, of course, by profession a doctor — he was a fine
example
of the doctor who kills to cure. But this first patient of his had a
will
of his own; he preferred to save himself by flying to the arms of the
neo-Platonic
quack. But we, hapless posterity, have inherited as our legacy both
doctor
and quack, who drench our healthy bodies with their drugs. Heaven help
us!
NATURAL
SCIENCE
One word more
about
Hellenic science. It is only natural that the scientific achievements
of
the Greeks should hardly possess for us anything more than an
historical
interest. But what cannot be indifferent to us is the perception of the
incredible advances which were made in the correct interpretation of
nature
when newly discovered artistic capacities began to develop and exercise
influence. We are involuntarily reminded of Schiller‘s statement that
we
cannot separate the phantom from the real without at the same time
purging
the real of the phantom.
If there is a sphere
in which one might expect less than nothing from the Greeks, it is that
of geography. What we remember having read in their poems — the
52
HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
wanderings of Odysseus and of Io &c.
— seemed to us rather confused and was rendered still more confusing by
contradictory commentaries. Moreover, up to the time of Alexander, the
Greeks did not travel far. But if we glance at Dr. Hugo Berger‘s Geschichte
der wissenschaftlichen Erdkunde der Griechen, a strictly scientific
work, we shall be lost in amazement. At school we learn at most
something
of Ptolemaeus, and his geographical map strikes us as almost as curious
as his heavenly spheres encased in each other; that, however, is all
the
result of a period of decay, of a science wonderfully perfect, which,
however,
had become weak in intuition, the science of a raceless chaos of
peoples.
Let us, on the other hand, inquire into the geographical conceptions of
the genuine Greeks, from Anaximander to Eratosthenes, and we shall
understand
Berger‘s assertion: “The achievements of the remarkably gifted Greek
nation
in the sphere of scientific geography are indeed worth investigating.
Even
to-day we find their traces at every step and cannot do without the
foundations
laid by them“ (i. p. vi.). Particularly striking are the comparatively
widespread knowledge and the healthy conceptive power possessed by the
ancient Ionians. There was serious falling off later, due especially to
the influence of “the despisers of physics, meteorology and
mathematics,
the cautious people, who would believe only their own eyes or the
credible
information gained at first hand by eye-witnesses“ (i. 139). Still
later,
investigators had further to contend with so deeply rooted scientific
prejudices
that the voyages of the “first North Pole explorer,“ Pytheas (a
contemporary
of Aristotle), with their accurate descriptions of the coasts of Gaul
and
Britain, their narratives of the sea of ice, their decisive
observations
with regard to the length of day and night in the northern latitudes
were
declared by all scholars of antiquity to be lies (iii. 7, compare the
53 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
opinion of men of to-day, iii. 36).
Philipp Paulitschke in his work, Die geographische Erforschung des
afrikanischen
Kontinents (second edition, p. 9), calls attention to the fact that
Herodotus possessed a more accurate conception of the outlines of
Africa
than Ptolemaeus. The latter, however, was considered an “authority.“
Thereby
hangs a tale, and it is with genuine regret that I establish the fact
that
we have inherited from the Hellenes not only the results of their
“remarkable
ability,“ as Berger puts it, but also their mania for creating
“authorities“
and believing in them. In this connection the history of palaeontology
is specially instructive. With the artless simplicity of unspoiled
intuitive
power the ancient Greeks had, long before Plato and Aristotle, noticed
the mussels on mountain-tops, and recognised even the impressions of
fishes
for what they are; upon these observations men like Xenophanes and
Empedocles
had based theories of historical development and geocyclic doctrines.
But
the authorities declared this view to be absurd; when the facts
multiplied,
they were simply explained away by the grand theory of vis plastica;
* and it was not till the year 1517 that a man ventured once more to
express
the old opinion, that the mountain-tops once lay beneath the sea: “in
the
year of the Reformation, accordingly, after 1500 years, knowledge had
reached
the point at which it had stood in classical antiquity.“ †
Fracastorius‘
idea received but scant support, and should it be desired to estimate —
it is really very difficult after the advance of science — how great
and
venerable a power of truth lay in the seeing eye of these ancient poets
(Xenophanes and Empedocles were in the first place poets and singers),
I recommend the student to consult the writings of the
*
According
to Quenstedt this hypothesis is due to Avicenna; but it is to be traced
back to Aristotle and was taught definitely by Theophrastus (see
Lyell, Principles of Geology, 12th ed., i. 20).
†
Quenstedt,
Handbuch
der Petrefaktenkunde, 2nd ed., p. 2.
54 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
free-thinker Voltaire and to see what
abuse he hurled at the palaeontologists even as late as the year 1768.
* Just as amusing are the frantic efforts of his scepticism to resist
evidence.
Oysters had been found on Mont Cenis: Voltaire is of opinion that they
fell from the hats of Roman pilgrims! Hippopotamus bones had been dug
up
not far from Paris: Voltaire declares un curieux a eu autrefois
dans
son cabinet le squelette d‘un hippopotame! Evidently scepticism
does
not suffice to clear a man‘s sight. † On the other hand, the oldest
poems
provide us with examples of peculiar discernment. Even in the Iliad,
for instance, Poseidon is called the “shaker of the earth,“ this god,
that
is, water and especially the sea, is always mentioned as the cause of
earthquakes:
that is exactly in accordance with the results arrived at by science
to-day.
However, I wish merely to point to such features as a contrast to the
ignorance
of those heroes of a pretended “age of enlightenment.“ — Much more
striking
examples of the freeing of the real from the phantom are met with in
the
sphere of astrophysics, especially in the school of Pythagoras. The
theory
of the spherical shape of the earth is found in the earliest adepts,
and
even a great deal that is fantastic in the conceptions of these
ancients
is rich in instruction, because it contains in a manner in nuce
what afterwards proved to be correct. ‡ And so
*
See
Des
singularités de la Nature, chaps. xii. to xviii., and
L‘Homme
aux quarante écus, chap. vi., both written in the year 1768.
Similar remarks in his letters (see especially, Lettre sur
un
écrit anonyme, 19.4.1772).
†
This
same Voltaire had the presumption to describe the great astronomical
speculations
of the Pythagoreans as “galimatias,“ on which the famous astronomist
Schiaparelli
remarks with justice: “Such men do not deserve to understand what great
speculative power was necessary to attain to a conception of the
spherical
form of the earth, of its free floating in space and its mobility;
ideas
without which we should have had neither a Copernicus nor a Kepler, a
Galileo
nor a Newton“ (see the work mentioned below, p. 16).
‡
Zeller,
Die
Philosophie der Griechen, 5th ed., Pt. I., p. 414 ff. More
technical,
but explained with remarkable lucidity in the work of
55 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
in the case of the Pythagoreans, as
time went on, to the theory of the earth as a sphere and the
inclination
of its orbit, there was added that of its revolving on its axis, and
that
of motion round a central point in space, vouched for from Philolaeus,
a contemporary of Democritus, onward; a generation later the
hypothetical
“central fire“ had been replaced by the sun. Not of course as a
philosopher,
but as an astronomer, Aristarchus had at a later time (about 250 B.C.)
founded the heliocentric system upon clear lines and had undertaken to
calculate the distance from sun and moon, and recognised in the sun
(1900
years before Giordano Bruno) one of the countless fixed stars. *
Schiaparelli, Die
Vorläufer
des Kopernikus im Altertum (translated into German from the Italian
original by the author and M. Curtze, published in the Altpreussische
Monatsschrift, 1876). “We are in a position to assert that the
development
of the physical principles of this school was bound by logical
connection
of ideas to lead to the theory of the earth‘s motion“ (see 5
f.).
More details of the “really revolutionary view, that it is not the
earth
that occupies the centre of the universe,“ in the recently published
book
of Wilhelm Bauer, Der ältere Pythagoreismus (1897), p. 54
ff.
64 ff. &c. The essay too of Ludwig Ideler, Über das
Verhältnis
des Kopernikus zum Altertum in the Museum für
Altertumswissenschaft,
published by Fr. Aug. Wolf, 1810, p. 391 ff. is still worth reading.
*
“Aristarchus
puts the sun among the number of the fixed stars and makes the earth
move
through the apparent track of the sun (that, is the ecliptic), and
declares
that it is eclipsed according to its inclination,“ says Plutarch. For
this
and the other evidences in reference to Aristarchus compare the
above-mentioned
book of Schiaparelli (pp. 121 ff. and 219). This astronomer is moreover
convinced that Aristarchus only taught what was already discovered at
the
time of Aristotle (p. 117), and here too he shows how the method
adopted
by the Pythagoreans was bound to lead to the correct solution. But for
Aristotle and neo-Platonism the heliocentric system would, even at the
time of Christ‘s birth, have been generally accepted; in truth, the
Stagyrite
has honestly deserved his position as official philosopher of the
orthodox
church! On the other hand, the story of the Egyptians having
contributed
something to the solution of the astrophysical problem has been proved
to be quite unfounded, like so many other Egyptian stories
(Schiaparelli,
pp. 105-6). Moreover Copernicus himself tells us in his introduction
dedicated
to Pope Paul III.: “I first found in Cicero that Nicetus had believed
that
the earth moved. Afterwards I found also in Plutarch that some others
had
likewise been of this opinion. This was what caused me too to begin to
think about the earth‘s mobility.“
56 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
What imaginative power, what capacity
of bodying forth, as Shakespeare calls it, this presupposes is clearly
seen by later history: Bruno had to pay for his imaginative power with
his life, Galileo with his freedom; it was not till the year 1822 (2000
years after Aristarchus) that the Roman Church took the work of
Copernicus
off the Index and sanctioned the printing of books which taught that
the
earth moves, without, however, annulling or in any way lessening the
validity
of the Papal bulls, in which it is forbidden to believe in the motion
of
the earth. * We must, moreover, always bear in mind that it was the
Pythagoreans,
who were decried as mystagogues, who led up to this brilliant “purging
the real of phantom,“ and they were supported by the idealist Plato,
particularly
towards the end of his life, whereas the herald of the sole saving
grace
of induction, Aristotle, attacked the theory of the motion of the earth
with the whole weight of his empiricism. “The Pythagoreans,“ he writes,
in reference to the theory of the earth‘s turning on its axis, which he
denied, “do not deduce grounds and causes from phenomena observed, but
endeavour to make phenomena harmonise with views and assumptions of
their
own; they thus attempt to interfere with the formation of the world“ (De
Coelo, ii. 13). This contrast should certainly give pause to many
of
our contemporaries; for we have no lack of natural scientists who still
cling to Aristotle, and in our newest scientific theories there is
still
as much stiff-necked dogmatism as in the Aristotelian and Semitic
doctrines
grafted upon the Christian Church. † — The progress of mathematics and
especially of geometry affords us in quite a different
* Cf.
Franz Xaver Kraus in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 1900. Nr. 1.
†
What
the English scientist, John Tyndall, in his well-known speech in
Belfast,
1874, said, “Aristotle put words in the place of things; he preached
induction,
without practising it,“ will be considered by later ages as just as apt
for many an Ernst Haeckel of the nineteenth century. It should also be
mentioned that the system of
57 HELLENIC
ART AND PHILOSOPHY
form a proof of the life-giving
influence
of G
