Here under follows the transcription of the chapter Bruno of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Immanuel Kant, published by John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1914.

Giordano Bruno

Bruno
From an old Engraving


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See also the reviews of this book:
Kant in the 20th century. Review in the London Times Literary Supplement, 1914
Kritische Urteile über Chamberlain's Kant. Collection of reviews in german, 1909

 

VOLUME I page
INTRODUCTORY 3
GOETHE 13
LEONARDO 101
DESCARTES 197
BRUNO 311




VOLUME II
PLATO 3
KANT 169
NOTES 415
INDEX 513

309


BRUNO

CRITICISM AND DOGMATISM
 
WITH AN EXCURSUS ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Upon the boundary between time
and eternity, between primeval re-
presentation and single creatures,
between the world of thought and
the world of the senses, sharing
the essence of both, and, as it were,
filling the gap between the ends
which fly apart — set up upon the
horizon of Nature — stands Man.
Giordano Bruno.

310

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BRUNO

AT the close of my last lecture I hinted at a day of dreams: this may well have seemed strange to you; for Giordano Bruno, who was born in 1548, five years after the publication of Copernicus' work upon the subject of the movements of the heavenly bodies, is the first great thinker who grasped and assimilated the new interpretation of the cosmic universe, — the new idea of countless planets circling round innumerable star-suns, — and that with such passionate enthusiasm that he makes it his starting-point for every series of thoughts in his many-sided undertakings. In a certain sense we might therefore not without justification affirm that he was the only man who was awakened in a world which was still dreaming the old Egyptian dream, more or less tricked out with Christian decorations, and vamped up by science — the dream of Heaven above, the Earth in the middle, Hell below. And yet it was he who was the dreamer, while many a man who in opposition to him held fast to the belief in the immovability of the earth, was a mere prosaic realist. 1 What we have to distinguish is this: who was it that made it his first business to look out upon the world of empiricism in the earnest endeavour clearly to grasp its concrete visible phenomena? And who was it that made it his first duty to look into his own inner self, and consult his reason as to the question of the essence of the world? In the first case we may cite Descartes as the example, in the second Bruno. Both might be dreamers, the first perhaps more so than the second; for dreams

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are fed by phantasy, and phantasy in its turn is fed by nature; the man whose mind is turned actively outwards, will possess a rich inner store of ideas, and with them food for daring dreams: still, dreams of that kind depend upon reality, whereas the true dreamer in the usual popular acceptation of the word, busies himself less with reality itself than with his own thoughts about it, and looks upon these thoughts as the most real of realities. While a Descartes looks upon his own thought as he would upon any obvious phenomenon of nature, and pursues his anatomical studies of the brain in the hope of discovering special organs of memory, of judgment, and so forth, — a Bruno is rather inclined to mistrust the evidence of the senses — il senso non e principio di certezza — and to presume that truth exists only in Reason and springs from the fire of dialectical argument. 2 This last mode of thought, the purely scholastic, is one which we have not yet come across in our lectures; for neither Goethe, nor Leonardo, nor Descartes is concerned with it; and I think we shall learn much that will be new to us about that which is distinctive in Kant's intellectual personality, if we compare it with this scholastic mode of seeing and thinking. For it is a certain fact that Kant was a specific thinker, a man who, like Bruno, devoted the greatest part and the best powers of his life to investigation by means of thought, and that so far he too might be called a schoolman, and so appears to belong to the same group as Bruno; and yet in spite of that Bruno is further removed from Kant than Goethe, and Leonardo, and Descartes are. Here, therefore, we are compelled to have recourse to analysis, and in accordance with our principles this analysis must rest upon perception and not upon the abstract: we must always use our eyes in the matter: otherwise we cannot be sure whether we are thinking thoughts, or merely stringing words together. We must, however, carefully consider how we are to

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go to work in order to arrive at a perceptible side in the scholastic mode of thought. Here we must less than ever be afraid of taking the long way round if it will but lead us to this desirable result. I think that what I have said about the dreamer, and the briefly sketched distinction between the dreaming of a Descartes and the dreaming of a Bruno, are well fitted to guide us in the right way.
    As a matter of fact, in every philosophy involuntary dream-shadows play an important part: without them no philosophy can come to anything. These dream-shadows are certain general forms, peculiar from the very outset, springing out of the inborn nature of the intellect of every thinker; and even though their possible individual combinations may be so inexhaustible both in numbers and variety that it would be ridiculous to believe that the one personality and its thoughts could in any way be satisfactorily characterised by being drawn up into a Scheme, — still, by comprehensively and keenly observing the phenomena, we may be able to refer the possible primary forms of philosophies to a few heads, just as we are able perspicuously to comprise more than a million forms of animals in eight or nine clearly definable types. Indeed, I believe that some such investigation of the possible principal aims of all human philosophies, thought out according to the principles of natural science, with systematic classification, would be an indispensable complement for every history of philosophy: for while the essence of all history is the giving prominence to that which is conditioned by time, the stress laid upon that which is necessarily eternal constitutes the essence of true science.
    I should like, therefore, at the outset of this lecture, to introduce the analytical excursus which will give us a general view of abstract things. I promised you a day of dreams: many dreams will pass before you, and you

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must not be impatient if sometimes we seem to go far astray: I shall never for a moment lose sight of the goal. And if we reach so far that we are able clearly to distinguish the various specifically different myths and dreams from one another, then the comparison between Kant and Bruno, which is no exposition of doctrines, but an exact comprehension of personal intellectual aptitudes, will be easy to effect quickly and surely; and I hope that it will be of great service to us, since it teaches us to distinguish with perfect clearness and sharpness between Dogmatism and Criticism. You will henceforth see how Kant, and with his exception Plato alone, stand upon a different footing from all other philosophers. You will seem to be crossing over from one world into another, and that other world is nothing more than the world as Kant viewed it.

* * * * * *
 
    In the dream of sleep there arises a medley of what the eyes have seen by day, and of the discoveries of our free thought: each of these two elements is inseparably joined to the other: without the fusion of the two no dream could occur. What takes place here in the passive function of the brain of the sleeper, recurs at every step of intellectual potentiality. The whole life of thought is, as we showed in detail in the previous lecture, a product, that is to say, the result of at least two components: and here, as Aristotle taught us (see p. 101), we can always distinguish between an “activity“ and a “passivity.“ But nowhere does this manifest itself so clearly as in that extreme object of comparison with the dream of the sleeper, — the fully conscious, creative philosophy of important intellects. What in the one we called dream, we may here call myth: dream and myth are intimately related, as you will have many opportunities of seeing more exactly in the course of to-day's lecture.

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Aristotle rightly derives all philosophy from the invention of Myths, and pronounces it as his opinion that every Philo-Mythos must of necessity be a Philo-Sophos, — that is, whoever views the world in the sense of the myth, will be able to think of the world in the sense of philosophy. 3 To be sure, Aristotle regards that as nothing more than a first step, and he looks upon himself as having quite outgrown the myth stage, and as having reached the positive final truth; and yet to-day we all smile at the simplicity of the great man whose views of nature swarm with demonstrable blunders, so that no natural science was possible until his fatal authority had been broken down. The man who soars high enough will perceive that Aristotle simply replaced one myth by another, just as later the Aristotelian myths were crushed by other new ones, — since absolutely no philosophy, however empirical it may be, can dispense with myths, not only as helps and stopgaps here and there, but as a fundamental element pervading the whole. We are not all possessed of Aristotle's keenness of intellect, and if we see philosophy growing out of the myth which is akin to the dream, we still all incline to the Aristotelian simplicity, and believe that the myth has at last been conquered by science, — whereas, as a matter of fact, the investigation of Nature has only resulted in the multiplication of Myths.
    It is only the so-called “positive intellect“ which can content itself with few fictions, and is proud of it: but what distinguishes the positivist is not that, as he imagines, he is living in pure “reality,“ but, on the contrary, that he contrives to get on with a minimum of “reality“; he takes his stand upon the domain of indifference, in the inner middle space between empiricism and reason, perception and thought, dream and fiction, so that all impressions and intellectual impulses are reciprocally neutralised in him, and that all that which

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has been so bountifully bestowed upon us men emerges as summa summarum, Zero. Apart from this pseudo-vegetative filling of maw and purse, called positivism, men are all dependent upon myths, as much to-day as they were thousands of years ago. And this because doubleness, twofoldness, is a fundamental phenomenon of the human being, and because we have no other means of bridging over the gulf between perception and understanding, between nature and the Ego, than by myths more or less consciously invented or dreamt. I set that out now without further explanation, because you have already seen in the previous lecture that we are always forced to schematise our perceptions and to symbolise our thoughts, without which we should have neither perceptions nor thoughts. Our whole thought-life is based upon a violent and, so to speak, artificial activity. In the meantime it is enough that I should have called your attention to the gulf which is present everywhere, and to its bridging over by the Dream-ideas of man. This bridging over, when it exists in the largest, most comprehensive sense, with a view to the creation of a unified world-picture, is a myth.
    The myth, this conscious waking dream, like the dream of the sleeper, has always a double root. On the one hand it grows from contemplation of nature, while on the other hand it springs from man's reflections upon his own Ego. The myth is therefore not only a picture but also a thought; it contains an element of the senses as well as an element which is not of the senses. How right Aristotle is with his equation Philomythos-Philosophos, how demonstrably true it is that philosophy develops itself out of mythology, we shall see with perfect clearness when we go back to the old Aryan Indians. The great vault of heaven, the sun in its daily course, the blush of the dawn, the moon, the stars, the winds, the clouds, the lightning, the bounteous rain falling upon earth, the flame that rises heavenward from the homely
 
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hearth, all, in short, that the eye sees in its simplest lines, is the foundation, — the whole foundation — of the rich myths which we meet in the Rig-Veda. But these faithfully observed outer conditions of nature become thoughts and religion through the relation which they bear to man and which man bears to them. What the eyes perceive outwardly is conceived as a reflection of what is experienced within, and the inner experience seems in its turn to be a reflection of what takes place outwardly; and so eternally the pendulum swings to and fro. The unconsciously arrived at and utterly simple presumption is that the Cosmic and the Human are similar, that they reciprocally penetrate one another, that the macrocosmos might, without more ado, be indicated and understood by the microcosmos; “nothing is within, nothing is without; for what is within, that is without.“ Nature is identical with man, man identical with nature. Any thought of a distinction does not yet exist. Such was the prayer which the old Aryan herdsman addressed to the gods of the dawn, — the knightly Ashwins, forerunners of the Hellenic heavenly twins, — in the days when he dwelt in the highlands and possessed nothing resembling an abstract philosophy: not only did he pray for help against the dangers of the night, but also for knowledge, for wisdom; how would it be possible that the conqueror of the dangers of the night, the morning herald of the Sun, should not also be a conqueror of the night of ignorance, a giver of spiritual enlightenment. Not only does such a prayer say, “awaken the joy of courage in us,“ a thing which the least imaginative of mankind might expect from the fresh breath of morning, but it says at the same time, “and bring us knowledge.“ 4 In the same way to the Sun-god Savitar is addressed the prayer, not only that he may bestow upon mankind the light which is the object of his desire, but also that he may “give furtherance to

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thought.“ 5 When the Sun rises I become wise: I have but to open my eyes and to perceive everything; I find myself illuminated in surrounding nature, and nature illuminated in me. As the Rig-Veda says, “In the heart Varuna created Will, in Heaven the Sun.“ Of the same nature are both.
    What is before us here is precisely the same as that which we to-day in our abstract and circumstantial train of thought call the “identity of thinking and being,“ that which once more came to high honour through Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, but which also is the hidden foundation of Schopenhauer's doctrine, and amongst our contemporaries is not less conspicuous in such widely different intellects as Dühring and Wundt. What is with perfect simplicity set out by metaphysically gifted but primitive peoples, — seeing that the very thought of the possibility of a distinction between world and man, between that which is seen and that which is thought, does not occur and could not be understood, — is introduced afresh as doctrine by these philosophers. For instance, Giordano Bruno, who in this, as in most things, approaches nearly to Plotinus, teaches expressly that the ladder of the emotions of the mind (affetti) exactly corresponds to the ladder of nature, and so mirrors all the modes of Being (mostra tutte le specie de lo ente). 6
    It is essential to our work to-day that in this identification of that which is seen and that which is thought, and, if it be carried further, of Nature and Understanding, we should recognise the primeval Myth of all Myths: it is an identification which, from the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, has possessed a great significance for the philosophy of the Indo-European race. As a matter of fact, there is here a yawning gulf, and it is not only a cleft between world and man — considered as two separate entities — and between perception and thought — looked upon as two different
 
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functions — but it is also reflected in Seeing and Thinking, and is the cause of our neither being able purely to perceive the world, nor purely to think, nor to look upon our own special self fully as subject or fully as object. That is the fundamental fact of our whole intellectual life, as it has been once for all established by Immanuel Kant. But man, when he was still completely unsophisticated, was not conscious of this fact, and connected the sides of the gulf by a bridge, which was no less obvious and iridescent than the rainbow upon which the German gods entered the Valhalla, but which was equally devoid of objective capability and carrying power. It is over this same bridge that mankind still wanders to and fro, though some engage as their guide the giant Schopenhauer, others the dwarf Büchner, while the greater number take any one of the numerous Dii minores. Looked at from a sufficient perspective distance, the difference between the unsophisticated creeds of an ancient Aryan contemplative herdsman, and the highly elaborated tenets of a Hegel, will resolve itself into a difference of degree; the critical solution is the only complete solution of the eternal riddle.
    Since then this primeval myth was a fiction, — a violent assumption, — it was impossible to rest content with it. As in sleep dream begets dreams, so was it necessary that from the one myth others should be born, otherwise the bridge in mid-air would vanish, and the precipice would yawn at our feet. So, in the first place, we observe that the stem of the most primitive all-embracing myth forks into two main branches, just as inclination prefers to lay chief stress upon that which is thought, or upon that which is seen; speaking from the point of view of looking Upon man as epitome and conception of the world, or, on the contrary, upon the world as the unfolding and visible representation of man. In the last case, — that is to say, where precedence had been given to the Seen

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over the Thought, in course of time men reached an artificial philosophy, as happened in Greece, where the abstract thinkers everywhere held to that which is visible and capable of being represented, and always appeared in the character of creators or formers. Think of Democritus who invented the evidence of the atoms in the interests of an abstract cosmic mechanism, and Aristotle who brought the logical functions of our intellect into visible schemes. In the first case, that is to say, where men were inclined to lay stress upon thought alone, the result was that by degrees nature (apart from man) and the visible world, which had served as starting-point for the primeval myth, were lost to sight: their very existence was as far as possible denied, and every perceptible thing was more and more degraded in the thoughts of men, as in India when the Brahmans were at their zenith, where at last thought alone, pure and bare of all ideas, remained, the Ego in its highest potentiality, the all-embracing, unindividual Self (Paramâtman). 7 Greeks and Indians have in all probability a common ancestry, and yet how different are the goals which they attain! You see how the direction of mythical thought and the direction of the development of culture go hand in hand.
    But we must still linger for a moment over this first branching into two essentially different directions of the primeval myth of the identity of thinking and seeing; for we shall soon have to consider a variegated series of most highly complicated networks of thought, and these will only remain perceptible if we have from the beginning fixed our eyes clearly upon the mythical element. We are now acquainted with the great primitive myth, and we have just seen, how that same myth can give birth to two such different modes of contemplating the world, that nearly related peoples reach the opposite ends of the scale of thought. But it is easy for us to show the existence of these two chief branches in the souls of our

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thinkers down to the present day, and so to learn to recognise the perceptibly mythical where we imagine abstraction to be at work in its utmost potentiality.
    If I have up to the present spoken of man and world as in opposition to one another, I have done so because that is the conception with which we are chiefly concerned to-day. But these conceptions are too complicated and too abstract for unsophisticated nations; the first distinction, demonstrable even in the most primitive peoples, — a proved ethnological fact — is that which exists between those who are gifted with souls and those who are not so gifted. And since the idea of a soul is everywhere connected with that of breath, while breathing is the most important symptom of life, so the distinction between the man of soul and the man of no soul, is fused into that between a man who is alive and a man who is not alive. I, the man, the thinker, am gifted with soul and gifted with life; the stone that lies in my hand, the thing seen, the piece of nature, is evidently soulless and lifeless. But, upon more penetrating reflection, out of the primitive myth which makes the comparison of man and nature the foundation of all philosophy two opposite conclusions arise; for one school says, “I live and am gifted with soul, therefore everything lives and has a soul“; whereas the others have come to this conclusion: the world around me is a piece of mechanism, without life and without soul, therefore the Ego is the same. We will begin by making ourselves further acquainted with these two doctrines by examples; that will lead us to the workshop where the philosophies are hammered out.
    The group of the older Hellenic thinkers, however much their opinions may differ, are usually included under the name of Hylozoists, men who considered that all matter, that is to say, the whole Cosmos, was gifted with life. The often quoted saying of Thales that everything is full of Gods, 8 finds an exactly corresponding

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formula some 2250 years later in Bruno when, in the Spaccio, he says: la natura, come devi sapere, non é altro che Dio nelle cose, “Nature, you must know, is nothing else than God in things.“ Bruno, the dreamer, the man whose glance is altogether directed inwards and who therefore fancies that he discovers an “inner“ everywhere, — Bruno cannot imagine that even stones can be without senses and souls (non est, crede, lapis sine animâ et sine in suo genere sensu, I², 158). 9 And in the nineteenth century there lived an important, exact investigator of nature, Fechner, who pretended to have nothing to say to the phantasies of mythicism and mysticism, and who in spite of that looked upon the universe as a “Cosmorganism,“ and upon the constellations as half-way stations between their inhabitants and the “psycho-physical all-being“ God. 10 You can see how the myth, “I live, therefore everything lives,“ may lead to the most widely different thought, from the pure scholastic to the pure natural-scientific. Yet investigators and thinkers of equal importance created, and have created from the beginning of time, out of this same instinctive comparison of thought and seeing, a perception in contrast to it, that is to say, perception itself: nothing is alive, — nowhere in embodied nature are there any Gods. Such men direct their attention in the main to nature, and thence pay the more heed to the mechanism of occurrences; as a matter of consequence, in their view the part played by the soul shrinks away more and more. We need only think of the view held of nature by our exact science of to-day, and of the oscillations of the aether as they were treated of in the Leonardo lecture; that which is alive in light, that which in light is of direct significance for the human soul, — namely colour, entirely disappeared before our eyes; colour became in the end a superfluous, very inaccurate name for a number; then came the most advanced of the physicists and said, “we do not want

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your whole visible Cosmos; an empty space with energy is enough for us“ (see p. 130 seq.). The man who was the absolute first to bring forward the idea of oscillations, Descartes, had the consistency to penetrate further inwards, and by the setting up of his famous theory of automata, to quash the idea of life not only in stones and constellations, but even of life in living beings. The body of animals, and a fortiori the form of plants, is, according to him, a machine: Je ne reconnais aucune différence entre les machines que font les artisans et les divers corps que la nature seule compose; all motions can be explained en même façon que le mouvement d'une montre est produit par la seule force de son ressort et la figure de ses roues (Les passions de l'âme, XVI), and so Descartes reaches the firm conviction, that, with the single exception of mankind, all animals are automata, that is to say, unconscious, that they possess no in any way formed anima and no sensus; — in short, that they have no life. But Descartes goes further, or at any rate he is inclined to go further. In his Passions de l'âme, he confines even the soul of man to the action of the Will, and to those sensations which find a response in the will, and not long before his death he confessed to a specially insistent correspondent that he only referred the whole understanding of the senses (l'imaginer) and sensation (le sentir) to the living soul, in so far as they were bound up with the body; pure thought thus remains alone as something living, belonging to the soul, — a thought that neither imagines nor feels. 11 That is hardly more than an unthinkable phantom, a mere vindication of the soul. It would be difficult to explain what this man, who fought so hotly and unceasingly for pure perception, had in his mind here; difficult to explain at any rate as what it was, namely the mere reversal of the unsophisticated mythological Hylozoism, unless India had once more furnished us with the full clue through the development of the same

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idea pushed to its utmost possibilities, — Being insisted upon as opposed to Thought, Nature as opposed to Man. A thinker named Kapila, who lived some 2500 years before Descartes, and may have been almost a contemporary of Thales, taught as “a final, refined, infallible, absolute recognition“ the sacramental words, I AM NOT. Not only is everything not full of Gods, not only are neither stones nor beasts alive, — no — man himself is not alive, even I, who am thus thinking, am not alive. “With these words, I AM NOT,“ as an Indian commentator observes, “all that takes place inwardly, the distinctions of the organ of judgment, the delusions of the subjective organ, the consolidation of the inner sense, and the perceptions of the other senses, together with the outer functions of the body, are denied to the Ego.“ 12 But if both that which takes place within and that which takes place without are denied to life, then of all that is apparent only the original matter, the “root — primary-form,“ as Kapila calls it, remains, and my own body, together with the thoughts of the brain, and the feelings of the nerve-system, is a mechanical Automaton. Kapila was a freer man than Descartes, he did not live under the tyranny of Christian compulsory beliefs, and so he could dare to follow mechanical thought to its furthest possibilities, and said to himself: even that which chiefly distinguishes man, the power of coming to logical conclusions, to form judgments, is still bound up with a material organ, and this organ, the brain, is “since it belongs to matter, non-intellectual, and therefore that which it establishes (i.e. the conclusions) becomes just as unintellectual as a pot and other objects.“ Life becomes a mere hoax, since “the unintellectual inner body is perceived as apparently intellectual, and in the same way the soul which has no share in activity is represented as active.“ 13 This soul that has no share in activity is the pure Self free from all dross,

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from which all that is implied by doing is excluded; it is unconditioned and absolutely isolated, that is separated from matter,“ and as soon as the “delusion of subjectivity,“ as Kapila calls it, has lost itself, “it looks upon matter immovable and contented.“ 14 That corresponds with tolerable accurary to Descartes' idea of the pure intellection (II, 257) of the moi (literally the Self of the Indian), qui est entièrement distinct du corps, 15 of a soul (Descartes prefers the word Intellect), which is something else than the phantasy of the Senses (l'imagination purement corporelle, XI, 266). It may be a matter of surprise to you to meet with the expression soul or intellect here. Do not be too hasty in your judgment. I reminded you just now of the empty space of our physicists: here you have the exact counterpart, the empty soul, the empty Ego. That idea of the empty space with nothing in it but motion is no mere joke, no extravagance of thrashers-out-of-thought gone mad, but on the contrary a theoretical acceptation to which prosaic, positive, antimystic investigators of nature are driven; just as little is this empty soul of Kapila and Descartes a purposeless image of thought; follow to the end one of those two paths which branch out from it, and it becomes far rather the inevitable, necessary result of that first unconscious act of power, of the contrast between man and nature, between thought and perception. 16
    These examples are enough to show you how deeply
the simple primitive myth in all times, and even in the supposed newest results of human thought, reaches into the very inmost core of our philosophies. Whether the creation of form or the annihilation of form, whether the inclination to bestow a soul upon matter, or the inclination to materialise that which belongs to the soul be predominant; — both tendencies may be referred to dreamy mythical presumptions, from which they of necessity proceed. But I think that we are now able to

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observe in detail how far even series of thoughts, that are in appearance perfectly abstract, always go back to natural myths. We must in the first place take for our instruction a consistent concrete example, and it will be wise to confine ourselves to Greece, since Greek philosophy is universally known, and may be viewed in perspective from a sufficient distance: I must of course set to work with aphoristic brevity. But if once we obtain a clear idea of the development from Thales to Aristotle in main lines, we shall, I hope, be enabled to gain a complete perception of all those philosophies which are based upon myth, so that nothing will remain but the purely critical comprehension of the world-problem as opposed to every form of dogma, — that comprehension which Plato guessed at, and Kant developed in full perspicuity.
    Thales, who looked upon the world as full of the deity, nevertheless did not make use of the Godhead like the Jews as a Deus ex machinâ for the creation of the world: the belief in Gods with whom he afterwards peopled nature was rather the creation of his own soul. But when once he began to look not into himself but into nature, he saw, like Homer, that everything must take place according to the immutable laws of mechanical necessity, and he held the opinion that the world must have developed itself out of some primitive element or primitive matter (στοιχείον), and that this primitive matter, the first cause of all visible things, was Water. Whence did he get this idea? Aristotle saw its origin in the primeval Hellenic myth of Oceanus and his consort Tethys, the first creators of all things, and now we are in a position to point still further back, namely to the myth of creation of the Rig-Veda, according to which the earth, with its life and love, was in the same way developed out of the dark flood of the waters. Something of the same sort, but expressed in somewhat different words, is the doctrine of modern natural science.
 
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    There is then no actual conscious difference between man, God, and the World; the identity of that which is gifted with soul and that which is not so gifted, still seems a quite unsophisticated expression: everything possesses soul, everything is full of Gods, and at the same time everything is purely substantial and developed mechanically out of matter.
    Inasmuch as it already contains rather more logic and rather less perception, Philosophy becomes much more complicated in the first Hellenic thinker who markedly turns away from Thales. In theory Heraclitus is just as monistic and just as hylozoistic as Thales, but if we follow up the course of his thought we see that he takes  Man as his centre, — and distinguishes below him the World, above him the Divine. We may even say that Heraclitus is rather a thinker than an observer of nature,  though that should not, as our manuals tell us, be considered as progress; it is simply a question of personal disposition. Heraclitus exactly grasps at the primeval mythical idea of Breath, of the Breath of life, which is common to all Indo-Europeans, as the fundamental principle of the universal All. The Indian word prâna has exactly the same meaning as the Greek synonym of Heraclitus πνεύμα, in the first place wind, air, then breath, and thence also life, and finally, looked upon as the invisible part of life, intellect or soul. Even the hagion pneuma, the Holy Ghost of Christian mythology, is the descendant in a straight line of the sacred Prâna of the Vedas. You see how these two, Thales and Heraclitus, stand opposite to one another in the plainest mythical simplicity. The one looks out upon nature, and says, “there must be a fundamental element, — water“; the other looks inward into himself and says, “here there must be a fundamental element, the breath of life.“ That is much the same contrast as you saw before between Descartes and Bruno.

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    Now, however, we must go a step further, in the endeavour to investigate how Heraclitus out of this unity developed something double, that is to say, the world and that which is above the world.
    The fundamental element, the breath of man, the invisible principle of life, condenses itself according to him downwards into a visible world, — upwards into the empyrean, purified into a conception of Divinity; for both purposes Heraclitus again clings to mythical ideas. Fire he praises as the material bearer of the breath of life, and so far the Creator of the perceptible All, since for him the primitive being is called πνεύμα και πύρ, Breath and Fire. That too is a primeval Aryan myth, taken from a hundred observations of nature, followed by a comparison of thinking and action: Fire in heaven as daylight and warmth, Fire in lightning, Fire on the hearth, and as consumer of the sacrifice, — again the warmth of the body in life, in contradistinction to the cold of death; the glow of the flowing blood, and the warm bowels of the newly killed sacrificial victim, — is anything more wanted to prove that fire and life are one? Small wonder that the old Indian books expressly teach the equal significance of these two pneuma kai pur, “That fire which is this world, is also the Prâna, the breath of life.“ 17
    And now for the idea of Heraclitus as to the Godhead. It is wonderfully exquisite. Heraclitus is, as you have seen, fundamentally a monist: the meaning of his pneuma kai pur is this, — the essence of the invisible Ego (the breath of life) and the essence of the visible world (fire) is one and the same. This harmony between the invisible and the visible, between that which is thought and that which is perceived, is identical on one side with that which I feel as Destiny in the apparent accidents of my life, and on the other side with the inviolable divine necessity of that which has occurred, which I see in
 
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nature: if I look out upon nature (fire), I call that universal harmony the order of the world (cosmos), — if I think upon it in my Ego (in the breath of life), then I call it Logos, the Word that is from the beginning. 18 For sentient philosopher these different names are Harmony, Fate, Necessity, Order of the World, Logos, — all nothing but different designations for the one Divine principle: but if a man takes his stand not upon the  point of reflection, but of practical and political life, then he must honour this Divine principle under the idea of Zeus. That is why Heraclitus utters that deep simple, and for that reason only much-disputed, and in many ways misunderstood, saying, “The one, the only one that knows, may not, and yet may well be invoked under the name Zeus.“ 19
    That is the way in which the best men of Greece thought about God some five hundred years before the birth of Christ; it was a lofty and beautiful perception, hovering in harmony between nature as seen by the eyes and the invisible Ego, and full of incitements to thought. But then came the great split. In Greece up to that time the Ego and the world had been held without any more ado to be identical: not in any way as if men had dogmatised over this identity, but it was looked upon as an open fact, and not a matter brought in question. It was possible to insist with Thales on the visible element of Nature, or with Heraclitus upon breathing thought; but that there was or might be a double possibility, that was a point upon which there was as yet no mistake. Then came reflection, and so it was that Nature and the Ego separated. The desperate attempts of the Eleatists,  who shrank before no sophistry, to enforce the mathematical unity of all existence as dogma, are chiefly interestIng to us as a symptom of the rupture which had taken place and could never again be satisfactorily adjusted. And just as the Ego and Nature had fallen asunder, so

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too did now God and the World; consequently new conceptions had to be hammered out, new philosophies to be built up. But, in spite of all, visible nature never lost her dream-awakening power over our phantasy, and the fundamental myths held their own, as you will soon see, with slight and merely superficial changes. But from now on attention becomes necessary in order to disentangle the mythical element as such out of the fray.
    As you doubtless know it was Anaxagoras who, with his idea of νούς, founded a new conception of the Divinity. Nous is generally translated, though in admittedly unsatisfactory fashion, by “thinking essence,“ or more shortly by “reason.“ If I understand the explanations of the professed savants it corresponds more to the Latin mens, the English mind, translated by the French as intelligence. Really the exact translation is a matter of small importance: what you have to understand is this, that the nous signifies the exaltation of the Ego to the prejudice of Nature, and that means the exaltation of logical reflection at the expense of Seeing and Observation. Just as logic orders the thoughts of men, so Reason orders the world; “in the beginning everything was confusion (μιγμα), then came Nous and created the order of the world.“ You perceive that the primitive myth of chaos to a certain degree furnishes the foundation for this new belief of reason, but now rationalism assumes the autocracy, and it is not the forces of nature, but the powers of reason outside of nature, that bring the world into existence. That is why Anaxagoras is justified in calling his Nous άυτοκρατής — an autocrat. It is really remarkable to see to what a distance this new God is at once removed. Thales had seen Gods everywhere, Heraclitus had felt the presence of the divinity at every step; but now the Godhead, always invisible, fades away to the extreme boundary of the universe; it is only the
 
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“ordering power,“ the first “originator of movement,“ hardly more than a mere thought; and indeed not a mystic thought symbolising nature like Vâc-Logos, but abstractly concrete thought: itself as yet only immaterial unformed thought, not a form evident to the senses, but so far as the world is concerned a simply mechanical, not subjective, necessity.
    You will see directly what I mean.
    You remember that Descartes and Kapila by distinguishing the soul entirely from matter had, so to speak, at a purer, completely mechanical nature. The thing occurs here. Anaxagoras, by creating a God and outside the world, strips nature of its divinity, and considers it as more purely mechanical than his predecessors did: that is the salient point. For Anaxagoras himself the invention of Nous had not much more significance than the cogito, ergo sum had for Descartes. But our professional philosophers to whom everything abstract seems to be something specially exalted have manufactured an Anaxagoras, to whom the true one bears but slight relation: they sing praises like the priests of the temple in honour of the discoverer of “a higher purely spiritual conception of God,“ and do not see that Anaxagoras simply had in view a rational natural science, and only makes use of the God of his thoughts, in order to be quit of the Gods of direct perception. For his eye is fixed upon the World, not upon God; his mode of thought is entirely mechanical. He himself confesses simply that he only appeals to his God, when he is at a loss to know how to get on without him. In so far as he cannot imagine the rise of an orderly system without a Reason to create the order, he needs his God in the abstract: but he wastes no time over this rationalistic reflection, but hurries away to the visible world in which he now needs his God in the concrete, because he does not know how without him he can explain the cause and

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maintenance of the first all-comprehensive rotary movement: in no other way does he make any use of his God Nous.
    Here then there exists a very important departure from the completely unsophisticated identification of Thinking and Seeing. But how closely, in spite of that, Thought and Seeing here hang together, has been shown by Wilhelm Dilthey in his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Anaxagoras, like Thales before him, was a passionate watcher of the stars. When he was asked why man should prefer Being to Not-being he answered: on account of the starry heaven. But with him it was no mere question of sentimentality. It was rather that he possessed far more correct views of the cosmic relations than Aristotle. For example, he knew that the moon is great, and believed it to be inhabited: he knew that its light is light reflected from the sun, and he knew that the sun is more remote from the earth and greater than the moon. But above all there were two facts in the starry heaven which captivated his reflection: he saw, as his seafaring fellow-countrymen had done from immemorable times, the fixed star at the north pole of the firmament, and he then observed that the stars in its immediate neighbourhood revolved round it in very small circles, while the further stars moved in ever larger circles, and so he came to the idea that the whole heavenly globe moved round one axis. That was already an observation of fundamental importance. But besides this Anaxagoras possessed a sound physical instinct, such as perception alone can give, but thought never can. Gravitation was known to him, and inasmuch as he held the sun, the moon, the stars, not as Aristotle did later, as fixed to concentric spheres, but as independent bodies moving in space, he came to the conclusion that they must necessarily fall upon the Earth, unless the same centrifugal force which once drove the primeval elements asunder, swung them
 
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continually in a circle, “as we swing a stone in a sling.“ You see what a mass of truly scientific mechanical perception of Nature is at work here. Listen again. Dilthey informs us that “the northern final point (of the axis of the heavens) is the cosmic point, from which out of the nous of Anaxagoras, the circular motion in matter started, and from which it still at the present time woks. The nous began on a small scale; the point where that took place was the pole; from that point the circling became wider and wider, and will continue so widening, and it was thence that at the same time with the revolutions the division of the atoms took place.“ When we think of the state of knowledge of that time, we may well rank this idea as a scientific contribution to thought in a parallel line with the so-called Kant-Laplace hypothesis: the fundamental observations are few in number and not quite correct, but the prophetic conception of the state of facts is striking. For our theme to-day the one point of interest lies in the fact that the God of Anaxagoras and the unity of that God is not a metaphysical deduction, as is the case with Bruno and all monists, but that this contemplator of the world comes to his conclusion inductively out of the necessity for a First Being who should set the cosmic machine in motion, and out of the observation of the one and only axis of the starry heaven.
    You see that the great cleft of which I spoke a while ago was as yet relatively not very deep. This divine reason, — of which the ordering activity consists only in the maintenance of a common centrifugal motion, while all else occurs automatically, — is hardly more than a hypostatised fundamental force of nature. And yet the step which had here been taken, was one of great importance. The divine had been isolated from the world, and had been contrasted with it as an intellect without body in contradistinction to bodies without intellect; and that

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introduced firstly the method of Analysis, that is to say, of dissection, and secondly paved the way for considering the human intellect as related to the Nous, so that a loftier wisdom might be created directly out of it than out of the faithful contemplation of nature. Analysis at once does away with myth; for the latter is essentially combination, whereas the former is separation. The rationalistic importance assigned to logic, as if it were the fundamental law of nature, equally abolishes the myth, and replaces it by syllogisms. But inasmuch as without the myth to serve as bridge, without the assistance of some dream-form no unity and therefore no philosophy can be arrived at, the consequence was not that myths really disappeared, but that they were from that time forward introduced more clandestinely and violently. The old Indians, for instance, had expressly declared that their accounts of the creation were only to be taken figuratively, — only as an attempt to represent symbolically that which is unknowable; 20 these people then upon whom we think ourselves able to look down, knew precisely that their myths were myths, they did not demand for them that stupid belief which is required of us in religion and science. In the same way we find the Hellenic myths flowing steadily until the great break comes: from that time forth reason is dominant, believes itself to be of divine origin, sees nature at its feet, and deludes itself into the belief that it knows: that is why its assertions are dogma, and faith is demanded for its dreams. With the help of Socrates and Aristotle this connection of events will be made clear to us, and we shall see how in this way men became in a higher degree the slaves of their mythical ideas than their ancestors had been. What we call “Progress,“ a word with which childish unreflecting minds intoxicate themselves, is always dearly paid for.
    In the Phaedo there is a passage towards the end (96, seq.)

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which gives me the impression of a really historical report of remarks which probably often fell from Socrates; immediately upon that Plato steps in again with his doctrine of ideas; but what Socrates objects to in the doctrine of  Anaxagoras proceeds from Socrates himself. The latter tells us how in his youth he studied natural history zealously; but that his hope thereby “to discover the causes of things,“ and to learn “whether animals arose out of putrescence,“ how their growth took place, and so forth, was disappointed; that he discovered that he himself “had no aptitude for such investigations“; but that afterwards he comforted himself by the discovery that “the real essence of things lay in our human thoughts about them,“ and that men should guard themselves “against injuring their eyes“ by the contemplation of things themselves! 21 And so he laid hold upon the writings of Anaxagoras, because he had been informed that this philosopher had represented reason as the ordering law of all things, and this led him to hope, that in Anaxagoras he would find the solution of all the questions of nature. For if, for example, a man should wish to know whether the earth is round or flat, it “would not become him“ to establish this by investigation of  the facts, but he need only ask himself, — which is the more reasonable? which is the more advantageous for mankind? This must of necessity be right, because it was reason (the Nous) that organised the world. In the same way the question as to whether the earth is stationary in the middle of the universe, or whether, as the Pythagoreans had already long taught, it moved in space round a centre, could only be answered by the weighing in reason of the pros and cons of the advantage to be gained. “Is it better that the earth should stand in the middle?“ That, according to Socrates, is the question to be asked. “If Anaxagoras made this clear to me I made up my mind never again to listen to any other manner of proof.“

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Socrates soon came to grievous disappointment. For Anaxagoras looked upon the nous (as against nature) as a mere first cause of motion: beyond that he was dominated by purely scientifically conceived physical laws. “And so I fell right down from my wonderful hopes,“ Socrates complains, “when I saw that the man with his Reason establishes nothing, but brings forward all sorts of stories about air, and aether, and water, and similar wonderful things.“ That is the historical turning-point. Thus it was that mankind turned their backs upon nature, until in the thirteenth century the Teutonic renaissance burst into life. Socrates might well have deserved to be raised to the dignity of a Father of the Church. It is true that with the Epicurean Lucretius a reaction took place, which at least taught the love of nature, and the neo-Platonist monists worshipped it as the living Godhead; but no one took the pains to consult nature, to observe it, to copy it in thought with love and obedience, and in that way to wrest its secrets from it.
    Then there appeared the man for whom Socrates had longed but had not found, the man who “made reason the beginning of all things,“ and who to every question gave the apodictic answer, “as it had to be,“ without first attempting to see what it was in reality. Aristotle demonstrated that the earth must be a sphere, not in any way because he attached any special value to the observations which were already to the fore in his time about the height of the sun in different latitudes, but because it was the most perfect of all forms and therefore the undoubted property of the earth, to which he added the further precious reason, that the spherical form is peculiar to those bodies in which all movement is absolutely wanting. As forcibly he demonstrated that the earth was stationary and in the middle of the universe, and that there neither was nor could be any second constellation, but only luminary bodies attached to hollow spheres
 
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which circled round the earth, and so forth. But you must know that a hundred years before Aristotle, Philolaus had taught that the earth turned upon its axis, and that it circled round some unknown centre, and that the better informed of Aristotle's contemporaries knew that this centre was the Sun, even though the mathematical proof of the heliocentric system was not given till some seventy years after his death by Aristarchus of Samos; 22 it is not until you reflect upon this that you will realise what a fateful influence was exercised upon the culture of Europe by that supremacy of thought over seeing which was heralded by Anaxagoras, promoted by Socrates, and brought to perfection by Aristotle. From that time forth empirical proofs were of no account, — absolutely none; what Socrates had preached — never again to listen to any other mode of proof than that which was logically rational, had become an iron law for the cultured world; ratio locuta est, reason has spoken; the age of the tyranny of intellect had begun, — the domination of blind, sightless reason. What had taken place in the idea of the Cosmos, naturally happened also in the idea of the Divinity: it was fixed dogmatically: as Cicero in his historical retrospect of philosophy says: mentem volebant rerum esse judicem, solam censebant idoneam cui crederetur; “they asserted that mind should be the judge of all things, that mind alone was worthy of credence.“ 23 The nous of Anaxagoras was now on a more exalted throne, and other authorities were regarded as its delegates. In every single particular, Aristotle defined to a hair's-breadth, what, and how, and where, and why the intellect existed: and so the nous, after it had assimilated itself to the Jewish Jehovah, became God to the European world, — laying down the law for all Christian theology down to the present time. Kant dethroned the Nous-Jehovah for ever, a fact which the world does not yet realise, but will learn by degrees.

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    What must specially interest us in the connection of these achievements is the circumstance that although Aristotle, in the consideration of God and the world, went to work in so abstract and rationalistic a fashion, he too drew upon the collected material of perception and upon a purely mythical comparison between thinking and seeing, for his fundamental ideas and for everything that possesses power of formation and living energy in his conceptions. That his nous is rooted in the nous of Anaxagoras he himself confesses, and that may be taken as an indirect connection with nature. Even Aristotle looks upon God as before all the “unmoved first cause of motion“; he considers God as first and foremost the cause of the revolutions of the heaven of the fixed stars. But Aristotle as a keener analyst perceives something of which Anaxagoras, the more physical observer, had not thought; that is to say, that it is difficult to bring this extramundane bodiless intellect into union with the world of matter; certain intermediate steps are here necessary to bring into inner harmony the first and outermost motion. Thus Aristotle looks out upon the heavens, or rather he looks into the books of the astronomers, and sees that there is no unity in the movement of the constellations: between the fixed stars, the sun, the moon, and the planets move with all manner of shiftings forwards and backwards, standing still and so forth. Beside the comprehensive movement of the heaven of fixed stars, which alone Anaxagoras had taken in view, there are also other eternal motions which equally can only be ascribed to immovable intellects, even though they should be bred of the highest Nous; obviously there must be as many of these intellects as there are different visible motions in the heavens, and these reach one another reciprocally from the highest and outermost to the lowest and innermost. But Aristotle allows the method of reason, with its inclination to structures in

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harmony, to go still further. The world must be built up of just so many substances, no more and no less, as there are motions and intellectual causes of motion; and we must be able to distinguish just as many aims as active in nature. 24 You see what an endlessly artistic, and, at the same time, artificial, structure is set up here under the mask of reason. The next matter was to decide how many of these motions, intellects, substances, and aims are there? The answer to this question turned out to be more complicated than you might at first suspect. You might say to yourself, the Greeks recognised five planets, the sun and the moon, so we shall probably be right if we reckon upon seven motions, intellects, substances, and aims, adding to these the heaven of fixed stars as an eighth sphere. You would be far out. Sophistry is intolerant of simple solutions. The truthful perception of Anaxagoras and many of his contemporaries that every single fixed constellation is floating in space had been rejected at the outset by Aristotle as contrary to reason. There can only be one earth, and that must rest immovable in the centre of the All; that is dogma, for that is demanded by reason. But out of this postulate of reason the necessity arose once more to bring to the front the old fable of Anaximander of the heavenly spheres and the luminary bodies attached to them. But since the wandering stars, sun, moon, and planets apparently carry out extraordinarily complicated motions between the fixed stars, and it was nevertheless a dogma that all the motions in heaven complete themselves in perfect circles, 25 you will understand that in order to explain the phenomena in this way, it was necessary to accept the idea of spheres rather than of stars. In order to explain the motions of each separate wandering star between the fixed stars, it became necessary to accept the idea of several spheres, contained within one another, set in motion in various directions. So the question was not, —

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how many different wandering stars do we see in motion? but, — how many invisible spheres must we assume, in order to explain the motions which we observe in the visible fixed stars? It was necessary to assume at least four spheres for the relatively simple motions of the sun between the fixed stars, and correspondingly more for the other wandering stars, and so without reckoning the outermost all-embracing sphere of fixed stars, three-and-thirty spheres came to be assumed, “within which the stars really move.“ Yet even that was not sufficient mathematically to explain the movements of the planets according to the dogmatically immutable presumptions. Two-and-twenty auxiliary spheres had to be assumed in addition, in order, as Aristotle puts it, “to pack up the other spheres.“ 26 Think of the Plateforme roulante of the century exhibition at Paris, set up in a complete circle, and upon this regularly and symmetrically rotating platforms, a number of incandescent lamps securely nailed to it, — that would be a representation of the heaven of fixed stars. Now imagine to yourselves seven wheels of different sizes, running round at different speeds upon this disc; to every wheel a second wheel is attached in some special eccentric corner with a direction and speed of its own; on this wheel is placed another, and so on, and it is not until the last is reached that the illuminating body, alone visible to you out of this whole mechanism of wheels, comes into play: but you stand in the middle and watch the movements of the many luminous bodies circling round you with unalterable regularity, and of the seven other lights which move irregularly: in this way you will have an approximate idea of the spheres as Aristotle conceived them, with the exception that he was dealing with hollow balls, not as in this simile simple discs. Aristotle imagines to himself 55 of these balls partly boxed in one another, partly fixed to one another, and with different movements, and to

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these he adds one outermost 56th ball. From this strictly logical deduction he concludes that there are just as many “intellectual powers“ at work, that is to say, 56, creating motion, — an equal number of “substances“ building up the world, — an equal number of “aims“ whose decision settles all that happens.
    You will have remarked that even in this rationalistic cobweb of the brain which to-day seems to us so mad, the observation of Nature is nevertheless also co-operating and informing, and we evermore find Thinking and Seeing placed in direct relation to one another, in accordance with precisely the same presumption of identity between the two which we observed in the Indo-Aryan herdsmen. If the latter hungered after wisdom, they turned to the Sun: if Aristotle wishes to search out the numbers of the active “aims,“ he consults the stars. And it is precisely through Aristotle that one of the most primeval ideas of all Indo-European mythology, prettily tricked out with scientific frippery, once more comes to great honour: — Varuna, in Greek ουρανος, that is to say, the “all-embracing,“ the true God of heaven, in whom as the Rig-Veda expresses it, “the heavens are locked,“ literally as in Aristotle all the spheres are internally imprisoned in the outermost sphere of heaven. Not God alone is unconsciously borrowed from the myth, but also Substance, Matter, the idea which is set up in opposition to God. The Nous-God, the only completely purely intellectual Being, rests outside of the world, beyond the heaven of fixed stars. The primeval substance on the contrary (υλη πρώτη), that is the completely unintellectual matter, has its lair in the inmost depths of the world. So now the two extreme points, God and the World, stand contrasted in full logical clearness; between them are the 56 intermediary stages, the outer ones by increasing ratios more intellectual and less material, the inner ones by increasing ratios more material and less

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intellectual. The Nous-God, the pure intellect, is without matter and immovable; its being is only a thought, and it thinks no thought, for that would be transient, but “its thought is a thought of thought“; but the πρώτη υλη is so entirely matter that it neither has nor produces forms — for these would at once be thoughts — but only contains the inexhaustible power (δύναμις) of formation; just as thought could not think thoughts but only the process of thinking, so this material cannot be things, but only that which is no thing: in imitation of the Aristotelian language we might say of the primeval substance: its being is a being of being. It is impossible to push utter senseless scholastic abstraction further. But just as that God, looked at more closely, appeared as the old Varuna of the myth common to Aryans, and even now current with children as the Heavenly Father, so we may easily carry back the πρώτη υλη of Aristotle to the mythological ideas out of which this so-called purely logical comprehension arose. Among the Aryan Indians this primeval substance was called asad; they define it as the “non-being being,“ and with those three words you have exactly the idea upon which Aristotle wastes pages and pages of senseless dialectics. Under the guidance of this asad you reach the familiar primeval idea of chaos as a world not yet ordered by thought, or to speak more correctly, not yet disentangled inside any thought. Uranos and chaos are thus the perceptions out of which these apparently pure abstractions draw that modicum of the sap of life without which even shadows cannot enter upon existence. 27 As forms of conception, however, Nous and prote hyle (or God and World) are no more than the attempt to distinguish between Thinking and Seeing, in other words the dissection of the primeval myth of all myths into its component parts. But as we saw in the former lecture and shall soon explain again from another standpoint, something impossible is here
 
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demanded of human nature; and so the paradoxical result arises that the pure object of thought (God) no longer gives us the smallest point for thought to lay hold of, and can only be perceived in the visible rotary movement of the starry heaven, whereas the object of sight (the primeval substance) becomes imperceptible to the eye, and only has a sort of imaginary existence as a conception devoid of idea.
    With this we may claim to have left behind us the second stage of the road along which this excursus leads us. First, in Bruno and Fechner on the one side, in Descartes and Kapila on the other, we have seen how the dream-born identification of thinking and seeing can lead us either to endow all nature, — every constellation and every stone — with life and with soul, or else to look upon even living beings as mechanical automata, and indeed to say of our own Ego, I am not. We have now studied one of the possible developments of the primeval myth in a series of consecutive thinkers, and we have seen how in Greece in the course of some 250 years the distinction between Thinking and Seeing, the two roots of our human Being and so also of our Senses, was continually being more and more clearly felt, and more keenly worked out, until at last here also a perfect Paradox was brought into being, and the pure object of thought (God) could only be seen, — the pure object of sight (the substance of the World) could only be thought. As I have already pointed out, it is the dream-nature of our senses, as opposed to true critical reflection, which is ultimately responsible for contradictory results of that sort; we may admire and sing the praises of the bridge of the rainbow, but we can hardly hope that it will carry us over the yawning abyss. I think you will admit at once that the nous and the prote hyle of Aristotle are just as much dream-pictures as the Gods wandering upon earth, the world-creating primeval

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water of Thales, or the Pneuma-Logos and the fire of Heraclitus.
    Now I shall call upon you to face a third and more comprehensive consideration. I think that I shall be able to convince you that the fixed inter-relation between Seeing and Thinking, — the manner and way in which that original comparison takes place in every brain, or to retain our metaphor, the way in which the mythical rainbow bridge forms itself and of necessity must form itself in every one of us according to the capabilities of his brain, — is the determining power which influences the manner of thought in every individual. The possible forms of philosophy are all as it were ready to our hand, that is to say, prefigured: they are given by the nature of the human intellect; whoever analyses to its foundations that which is personal, will reach that which is beyond personality. And just as in biological sciences the recognition of the species helps the study of the individual, so will the recognition of the generally possible “species of philosophies,“ in opposition to eternal history with its eternally crooked judgments, be of great service in the accurate investigation of the individual.
    You must in no wise believe that what you have seen in Hellas, the issue out of the concrete into the abstract, and of simple monism into maturely considered dualism, is a necessary development. Such conceptions with which we have been tarred and feathered since Hegel's time, and under the influence of the prevailing Darwinism, hinder all true comprehension. We pronounce the magic word “development,“ driving the phenomenon into boundless distance, and when we have lost sight of it, we believe that we have “explained“ it. What “develops itself“ is always the subsidiary, whereas what we want to arrive at is the essence of the thing itself. The progress of the so-called “development“ may quite well be exactly the contrary in the gradual reversal of the philosophy of a
 
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people. Amongst us moderns we can see both at once: a progress towards more and more abstraction (Hegel and the new school), a progress towards the more and more concrete (Descartes and the investigations of Nature); in Greece also Democritus laid the foundation of scientific empirical materialism at the very time when Socrates was paving the way for the autocracy of logic. There can never be any true understanding of phenomena when that which is mutable in them is taken as the foundation instead of that which is stable and eternal. That is why, fortified by the historical example of Greek mental achievements, we must now go further, analyse more exactly, and endeavour to reach the eternal super-personal foundation out of which, as the necessarily constant ground of all human Thinking and Seeing, the differently natured, and yet again imperishable, philosophies, so peculiarly inter-chained the one with the other, proceed. Everywhere in nature, if we are unprejudiced and yet keenly observant, we can discover great simple relations: the same holds good with our brains; once these relations are clearly recognised and distinctly formulated, then we can the better penetrate the numberless eternally new phenomena of the Personal.
    With this view I will now propose to you a Scheme — a Scheme of the possible ways of Seeing and Thinking, and of their possible combinations; you will see how exactly our different philosophical systems are conditioned by these inborn aptitudes, and therefore by what we have hitherto for brevity's sake called the Manner of Seeing.
    My previous lectures have shown you what I think about Schemes. A Scheme must be schematic, it must never shift its ground into the place of living insight, of which it must only be the handmaid. You already possess a certain store of living insight, and the rest will

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follow by degrees, until the skeleton of the scheme is clothed with flesh and blood as in the case of Descartes.
    I offer you a twofold dichogamy, a double branching. The primeval simple myth of the complete identity of Thinking and Seeing forks in the first place into two chief branches, according as the balance leans towards Thinking or Seeing; that we have already fully explained by many examples: then the Thinking and Seeing themselves fork each into two branches, as will immediately be more nearly set out as soon as we have sufficiently made the first great division intelligible:

Scheme

    Analysis then, in the first place, gives us the distinction between men who are mainly Seers and those who are mainly Thinkers. For simplicity's sake I put it in this way; the contrast may be looked upon more narrowly or more broadly without being done away with, so that it comprises domains not necessarily differing in size, but different in general. That, however, need not trouble us here; each of the different possible contrasts is an exact symbol of the other; the contrast is clear and sharp; it is that between understanding and the power of the senses (see the previous lecture), between

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reason and empiricism, between the invisible Ego and the visible world, between ratiocination and observation, between the abstract and the concrete; Thinking and