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THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY -- VOLUMES 1 & 2 |
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FIRST CHAPTER: HELLENIC ART AND PHILOSOPHY
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, Holderlin, 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 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 uber die asthelische 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 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." [1] 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, 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 [2] -- 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. [3]
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 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; [4] 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 [5] 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. [6] 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. [7] If we consider 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. [8] 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 suits it. [9] There is no doubt that if we investigate with more care and insight the psychological life -- so far practically unknown to us -- of animals from remote classes, we shall everywhere find similar things. Thus the comparatively enormous development of the human brain [10] 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 ape, invents simpler instruments (anyone 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; [11] 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, 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 (02 + 01 = 03). 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 bluff" with him. Quod invenitur, juit, 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 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, 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. [12] 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, interests and endeavours to reach a living conscious unity. At this central point stands 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 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." [13] 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. [14] 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 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 pseudo-genius, 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 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; [15] 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, [16] 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 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." [17] 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" (Griech. Litteraturgesch., 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." [18] 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. 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.
says Goethe; this greatest gift -- hochstes Gluck -- 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 tutti quanti; the life-principle of this people is heroism; the individual steps forward alone: boldly crossing the boundary 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 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! [19] Where is there a great, creative natural scientist among the Romans? Surely not the industrious encyclopaedist, Pliny? Where is there a mathematician 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. [20] 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 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 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 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 Holderlin could exclaim to the artist of to-day:
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. 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 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 [21] 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! [22] And I am of opinion that what gives everlasting youth to the thought of a Democritus, a Plato, a Euclid, an Aristarchus [23] 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." [24] But its creations are lasting only when beautiful and perspicuous, that is, artistic.
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. [25] On the other hand, that which man in the capacity of 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, becomes deeper every day; [26] 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 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." 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 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. [27] 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 Pensees), 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 resistent a la mort, said the great Bichat; each living thing has therefore something fragmentary about it, something 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, [28] 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 shown to be most probable. [29] 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. [30] 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. [31] How different the Greek! Cost what it might, he must "body forth the forms of things unknown and give them shape." Read in this connection the laboured explanation in Plato's Theoetetus, 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. 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 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. [32] 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; [33] 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 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! 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 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 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: [34] 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." [35] 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 free-thinker Voltaire and to see what abuse he hurled at the palaeontologists even as late as the year 1768. [36] 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. [37] 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. [38] And so 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. [39] 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. [40] 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 Coela, 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. [41] -- The progress of mathematics and especially of geometry affords us in quite a different form a proof of the life-giving influence of Greek creative power. Pythagoras is the founder of scientific mathematics in Europe; that he owed his knowledge, especially the so-called "Pythagoreans theorem," the idea of irrational magnitudes, and -- very probably -- also his arithmetic, to the Indians is of course an established fact, [42] and with regard to abstract arithmetical calculation, the so-called "Arabian cyphers" which we owe to the Aryan Indians, Cantor says, "Algebra attained among the Indians to a height which it has never been able to reach in Greece." [43] But see to what transparent perfection the Greeks have brought formal mathematics, geometry! In the school of Plato was educated Euclid, whose Elements of Geometry are such a perfect work of art that it would be exceedingly regrettable if the introduction of simplified and more modern methods of teaching were to remove such a jewel from the horizon of educated people. Perhaps I should be expressing my partiality for mathematics too simply if I confessed that Euclid's Elements seem to me almost as fine as Homer's Iliad. At any rate I may look upon it as no accident that the incomparable geometrician was also an enthusiastic musician, whose Elements of Music, if we possessed them in the original form, would perhaps form a worthy counterpart to his Elements of Geometry. And here I may recognise the cognate poetical spirit, that power of bodying forth and of giving an artistic form to conceptions. This sunbeam will not readily be extinguished. Let me here make a remark which is of the highest importance for our subject: it was the almost pure poetry of arithmetical theory and geometry that caused the Greeks at a later time to become the founders of scientific mechanics. As in the case of everything Hellenic so here too the meditation of many minds received shape and living power in the life-work of one single all-powerful genius: the "century of mechanics" has, I think, every reason to venerate Archimedes as its father. Inasmuch as I am only concerned here with the achievements and the individuality of the Greeks in so far as they were important factors in our modern culture and living elements of the nineteenth century, much must be omitted, though in connection with what has been said, one would be tempted to go into more detail. Rohde told us above that creative art was the unifying force for all Greece. Then we saw art -- widening gradually to philosophy and science -- laying the foundations of a harmony of thinking, feeling and knowing. This next spread to the sphere of public life. The endless care devoted to the development of beautiful, powerful human frames followed artistic roles; the poet had created the ideals, which people henceforth strove to realise. Everyone knows how great importance was attached to music in Greek education; even in rough Sparta it was highly honoured and cultivated. The great statesmen have all a direct connection with art or philosophy: Thales, the politician, the practical man, is at the same time lauded as the first philosopher and the first mathematician and astronomer; Empedocles, the daring rebel, who deals the death- blow to the supremacy of the aristocracy in his native city, the inventor of public oratory (as Aristotle tells us), is also poet, mystic, philosopher, natural investigator and evolutionist. Solon is essentially a poet and a singer; Lycurgus was the first to collect the Homeric poems and that too "in the interests of the State and of morality." [44] Pisistratus is another instance: the creator of the Theory of Ideas is statesman and reformer; it was Cimon who prepared for Polygnotus a suitable sphere of activity, and Pericles did the same for Phidias. As Hesiod puts it, "Justice (Dike) is the maiden daughter of Zeus" [45] and in this observation is contained a definite philosophy embracing all state relations, a philosophy which though also religious is mainly artistic; all literature, too, even the most abstruse writings of Aristotle, and even remarks like that of Xenophanes (meant, indeed, as a reproach) that the Greeks were accustomed to derive all their culture from Homer, [46] testify to the same fact. In Egypt, in Judea, and later in Rome we see the law-giver laying down the rules of religion and worship; among the Teutonic peoples the king decrees what his people shall believe; [47] in Hellas the reverse holds good: it is the poet, the "creator of the race of gods," the poetical philosopher (Anaxagoras, Plato, &c.), who understands how to lead all men to profound conceptions of the divine and the moral. And those men who -- in the period of its greatness -- give the land its laws, have been educated in the school of these same poets and philosophers. When Herodotus gives each separate book of his history the name of a Muse, when Plato makes Socrates deliver his finest speeches only in the most beautiful spots inhabited by nymphs, and represents him as closing dialectical discussions with an invocation to Pan -- "Oh, grant that I may be inwardly beautiful and that my outward appearance may be in harmony with the inner!" -- when the oracle at Thespiae promises a "land rich in fruits of the soil" to those who "obey the agricultural teaching of the poet Hesiod" [48] -- such traits (and we meet them at every step) point to an artistic atmosphere permeating the whole life: the memory of it has descended to us and coloured many an ideal of our time. Hitherto I have spoken almost solely of a positive beneficial inheritance. It would, however, be entirely one-sided and dishonest to let the matter rest there. Our life is permeated with Hellenic suggestions and achievements and I fear that we have adopted the baneful to a greater extent than the good. If Greek intellectual achievements have enabled us to enter the daylight of human life, Greek achievements have, on the other hand -- thanks perhaps to the artistic creative power of this remarkable people -- also played a great part in casting a mist over the light of day and hiding the sun behind a jealous mask of clouds. Some items of the Hellenic inheritance which we have dragged into the nineteenth century, but which we had been better without, need not be touched upon until we come to deal with that century; some other points must, however, be taken up here. And in the first place let us consider what lies on the surface of Greek life. That to-day, for example, -- when so much that is great and important claims our whole attention, when we have piled up endless treasures of thought, of poetry and above all of knowledge, of which the wisest Greeks had not the faintest idea and to a share of which every child should have a prescriptive right -- that to-day we are still compelled to spend valuable time learning every detail of the wretched history of the Greeks, to stuff our poor brains with endless registers of names of vainglorious heroes in ades, atos, enes, eiton, &c., and, if possible, wax enthusiastic over the political fate of these cruel, short-sighted democracies, blinded with self-love, and based upon slavery and idleness, is indeed a hard destiny, the blame for which, however, if we do but reflect, lies not with the Greeks but with our own shortsightedness. [49] Certainly the Greeks frequently set an example of heroism, though indeed frequently also of the opposite; but courage is the commonest of all human virtues, and the constitution of such a State as the Lacedaemonian would lead us rather to conclude that the Hellenes had to be forced to be brave, than that they naturally possessed the proud contempt of death which distinguishes every Gallic circus-fighter, every Spanish toreador and every Turkish Bashi-bazouk. [50] "Greek history," says Goethe, "has in it little that is gratifying -- besides, that of our own days is really great and stirring; the battles of Leipzig and Waterloo, for example, after all throw into the shade Marathon and others like it. Our own heroes, too, are not behindhand; the French marshals, and Blucher and Wellington may well be put side by side with those of antiquity." [51] But Goethe does not go nearly far enough. The traditional history of Greece is, in many points, a huge mystification: we see that more clearly every day; and our modern teachers -- under the influence of a "suggestion" that has completely paralysed their honesty -- have falsified it worse than the Greeks themselves. With regard to the battle of Marathon, for example, Herodotus admits quite honestly that the Greeks were in this battle put to flight, where they were opposed by Persians and not Hellenes (iv. 113) ; how this fact is always explained away by us! And with what infantile credulity -- though we know quite well how utterly unreliable Greek numbers are -- all our historians still copy from the old stories the number of 6400 Persian slain and 192 Hoplites who met their death bravely, but omit to mention what Herodotus in the same chapter (vi. 117) relates with inimitable artlessness how an Athenian became blind with fright in that battle. This "glorious victory" was in reality an unimportant skirmish, in which the Greeks had rather the worst than the best of it. [52] The Persians, who had come to Greece in Ionian ships, not of their own accord, but because they were invited by the Greeks, returned in all tranquillity to Ionia with several thousand prisoners and rich booty, because these ever fickle allies thought the moment unfavourable (see Herodotus, vi. 118). [53] In the same way the whole description of the later struggle between Hellas and the Persian empire is falsified, [54] but after all we must not criticise the Greeks too harshly for this, as the same tendency [55] has manifested and still manifests itself among all other nations. However, if Hellenic history is really to mould the intellect and the judgment, it would need, one would fancy, to be a true, just history, grasping events by their deepest roots and revealing organic connections, not the immortalisation of half-invented anecdotes and views, which could only be excused by the bitterness of the struggle for existence, and the crass ignorance and infatuation of the Greeks. Glorious indeed is the poetic power by which gifted men in that land sought to inspire with patriotic heroism a fickle, faithless, corruptible people inclined to panic, and -- where the discipline was firm enough, as in Sparta -- actually succeeded in doing so. Here too we see art as the animating and moving power. But that we should impose as truth upon our children the patriotic lies of the Greeks, and not merely on our children, but also -- in works like Grote's -- should force them as dogmas upon the judgment of healthy men and let them become an influential factor in the politics of the nineteenth century, is surely an extreme abuse of our Hellenic legacy, after Juvenal 1800 years ago mockingly had said:
Still worse does it seem to me to force us to admire political conditions, which should rather be held up as an example to be avoided. It is no business of mine to take any side, either that of Great Greece or of Little Greece, of Sparta or of Athens, either (with Mitford and Curtius) that of the nobility, or (with Grote) of the Demos; where the political characters, individually or as a class, are so pitiful, no lofty political conditions could exist. The belief that we even received the idea of freedom from the Hellenes is a delusion; for freedom implies patriotism, dignity, sense of duty, self-sacrifice, but from the beginning of their history to their suppression by Rome, the Hellenic States never cease to call in the enemies of their common fatherland against their own brothers; indeed, within the individual States, as soon as a statesman is removed from power, away he hurries, it may be to other Hellenes, or to Persia or to Egypt, later to the Romans, in order to reduce his own city to ruin with their help. Numerous are the complaints of the immorality of the Old Testament; to me the history of Greece seems just as immoral; for among the Israelites we find, even in their crimes, character and perseverance, as well as loyalty to their own people. It is not so with the Greeks. Even a Solon goes over at last to Pisistratus, denying the work of his life, and a Themistocles, the "hero of Salamis," bargains shortly before the battle about the price for which he would betray Athens, and later actually lives at the court of Artaxerxes as "declared enemy of the Greeks," but rightly regarded by the Persians as a "crafty Greek serpent" and of little account; as for Alcibiades, treachery had become with him so entirely a life-principle that Plutarch can jokingly say that he changed colour "quicker than a chameleon." All this was so much a matter of course with the Hellenes that their historians do not disturb themselves about it. Herodotus, for instance, tells us with the greatest tranquillity how Miltiades forced on the battle of Marathon by calling the attention of the commander-in-chief to the fact that the Athenian troops were inclined to go over to the Persians, and urging him to attack as soon as possible, that there might not be time to put this "evil design" into execution; half an hour later, and the "heroes of Marathon" would have marched with the Persians against Athens. I remember nothing like this in Jewish history. In such a soil it is manifest that no admirable political system could flourish. "The Greeks," says Goethe again, "were friends of freedom, yes, but each one only of his own freedom; and so in every Greek there was a tyrant." If anyone wishes to make his way to the light through this primeval forest of prejudices, phrases and lies, which have grown up luxuriantly in the course of centuries, I strongly recommend him to read the monumental work of Julius Schvarcz, Die Demokratie von Athen, in which a statesman educated theoretically as well as practically, who is at the same time a philologist, has shown once for all what importance is to be attached to this legend. The closing words of this full and strictly scientific account are: "Inductive political science must now admit that the democracy of Athens does not deserve the position which the delusion of centuries has been good enough to assign to it in the history of mankind" (p. 589). [56] One single trait moreover suffices to characterise the whole political economy of the Greeks -- the fact that Socrates found it necessary to prove at such length that to be a statesman one must understand something of the business of State! He was condemned to death for preaching this simple elementary truth. "The cup of poison was given purely and simply to the political reformer," [57] not to the atheist. These ever-gossiping Athenians combined in themselves the worst conceit of an arrogant aristocracy and the passionate spitefulness of an ignorant impudent rabble. They had at the same time the fickleness of an Oriental despot. When, shortly after the death of Socrates, as the story goes, the tragedy Palamedes was acted, the assembled spectators burst into tears over the execution of the noble, wise hero; the tyrannical people lamented its mean act of vengeance. [58] Not a jot more did it listen to Aristotle and other wise men, on the contrary it banished them. And these wise men! Aristotle is wondrous acute and as a political philosopher as worthy of our admiration as the great Hellenes always are, when they rise to artistically philosophical intuition; he, however, played no part as a statesman, but calmly and contentedly watched the conquests of Philip, which brought ruin on his native land, but procured for him the skeletons and skins of rare animals; Plato had the success in statesmanship which one would expect from his fantastic constructions. And even the real statesmen -- a Draco, a Solon, a Lycurgus, yes, even a Pericles -- seem to me, as I said already in the preface to this chapter, rather clever dilettanti than politicians who in any sense laid firm foundations. Schiller somewhere characterises Draco as a "beginner" and the constitution of Lycurgus as "schoolboyish." More decisive is the judgment of the great teacher of Comparative History of Law, B. W. Leist: "The Greek, without understanding the historical forces that rule the life of nations, believed himself to be completely master of the present. Even in his highest aspirations he looked upon the actual present of the State as an object in which the philosopher might freely realise his theory, taking over from history as a guide only so much as might suit this theory." [59] In this sphere the Greek, lack all consistency and self-control; no being is more immoderate than the Hellene, the preacher of moderation (Sophrosyne) and the "golden mean"; we see his various constitutions sway hither and thither between hyperfantastic systems of perfection and purblind prejudice for the interests of the immediate present. Even Anacharsis complained, "In the councils of the Greeks it is the fools who decide." And so it is clear we should seek to admire and emulate not Greek history in truth, but Greek historians, not the heroic acts of the Greeks -- which are paralleled everywhere -- but the artistic celebration of their deeds. It is quite unnecessary to talk nonsense about Occident and Orient, as if "man" in the true sense could arise only in a definite longitude; the Greeks stood with one foot in Asia and the other in Europe; most of their great men are Ionians or Sicilians; it is ridiculous to seek to oppose their fictions with the weapons of earnest scientific method, and to educate our children with phrases; on the other hand, we shall ever admire and emulate in Herodotus his grace and naturalness, a higher veracity, and the victorious eye of the genuine artist. The Greeks fell, their wretched characteristics ruined them, their morality was already too old, too subtle and too corrupt to keep pace with the enlightenment of their intellect; the Hellenic intellect, however, won a greater victory than any other intellect has won; by it -- and by it alone -- "man entered into the daylight of life"; the freedom which the Greek hereby won for mankind was not political freedom -- he was and remained a tyrant and a slave-dealer -- it was the freedom to shape not merely instinctively but with conscious creative power -- the freedom to invent as a poet. This is the freedom of which Schiller spoke, a valuable legacy, for which we should be eternally grateful to the Hellenes, one worthy of a much higher civilisation than theirs and of a much purer one than ours. It has been necessary for me to discuss these matters as paving the way for a last consideration. If we realise the fact that the educationist has the power to restore dead bodies to life and to force mummies as models upon an active, industrious generation, then we must on closer investigation see that others can do the same thing in a still higher degree, since among the most living portions of our Hellenic inheritance we find a really considerable part of our Church doctrine -- not indeed its bright side, but the deep shade of weird and stupid superstition, as well as the arid thorns of scholastic sophistry, bereft of all the leaves and blossoms of poetry. The angels and devils, the fearful conception of hell, the ghosts of the dead (which in this presumably enlightened nineteenth century set tables in motion to such an extent with knocking and turning), the ecstatically religious delirium, the hypostasis of the Creator and of the Logos, the definition of the Divine, the conception of the Trinity, in fact the whole basis of our Dogmatics we owe to a great extent to the Hellenes or at least to their mediation; at the same time we are indebted to them for the sophistical manner of treating these things: Aristotle with his theory of the Soul and of the Godhead is the first and greatest of all schoolmen; his prophet, Thomas Aquinas, was nominated by the infallible Pope official philosopher of the Catholic Church towards the end of the nineteenth century (1879); at the same time a large proportion of the logic- chopping free-thinkers, enemies of all metaphysics and proclaimers of a new "religion of reason," like John Stuart Mill and David Strauss, &c., based their theories on Aristotle. Here, as is evident, we have to deal with a legacy of real living force, and it reminds us that we should speak with humility of the advances made in our time. The matter is an exceedingly complicated one; if in this whole chapter I have had to be satisfied with mere allusions, I shall here have to confine myself to hinting at allusions. And yet in this very matter relations have to be pointed out, which, so far as I know, have never been revealed in their proper connection. I wish to do this with all modesty, and yet with the utmost precision. It is the common practice to represent the religious development of the Hellenes as a popular superstitious polytheism, which in the consciousness of some preeminent men had gradually transformed itself into a purer and more spiritualised faith in a single God; -- the human spirit thus advancing from darkness to ever brighter light. Our reason loves simplifications: this gradual soaring of the Greek spirit, till it was ripe for a higher revelation, is very much in tune with our inborn sluggishness of thought. But this conception is in reality utterly false and proved to be false; the faith in gods, as we meet it in Homer, is the most elevated and pure feature of Greek religion. This religious philosophy, though, like all things human, compassed and limited in many ways, was suited to the knowledge, thought and feeling of a definite stage of civilisation, and yet it was in all probability as beautiful, noble and free as any of which we have knowledge. The distinguishing mark of the Homeric creed was its intellectual and moral freedom -- indeed, as Rohde says, "almost free-thinking"; this religion is the faith acquired through artistic intuition and analogy (that is, purely by way of genius) in a cosmos -- an "order of the world," which is everywhere perceived, but which we are never able to think out or comprehend, because we after all are ourselves elements of this cosmos -- an order which nevertheless reflects itself of necessity in everything, and which therefore in Art becomes visible and directly convincing. The conceptions which are held by the people, and have been produced by the poetical and symbolising faculty of each simple mind as yet innocent of dialectics, are here condensed and made directly visible, and that, too, by lofty minds, which are still strong enough in faith to possess the most glowing fervour and at the same time free enough to fashion according to their own sovereign artistic judgment. This religion is hostile to all faith in ghosts and spirits, to all clerical formalism; everything of the nature of popular soul-cult and the like which occurs in the Iliad and the Odyssey is wonderfully cleared, stripped of all that is terrible, and raised to the eternal truth of something symbolical; it is equally hostile to every kind of sophistry, to all idle inquiries regarding cause and purpose, to that rationalistic movement, therefore, which has subsequently shown itself in its true colours as merely the other side of superstition. So long as these conceptions, which had found their most perfect expression in Homer and some other great poets, still lived among the people, the Greek religion possessed an ideal element; later (particularly in Alexandria and Rome) it became an amalgam of Pyrrhonic, satirical, universal scepticism, gross superstitious belief in magic and sophistical scholasticism. The fine structure was undermined from two different quarters, by men who appeared to possess little in common, who, however, later joined hands like brothers, when the Homeric Parthenon (i.e., "temple of the Virgin") had become a heap of ruins within which a philological "stone-polishing workshop" had been set up: it was these two parties that had found no favour with Homer, priestly superstition and hypersubtle hunting after causality. [60] The results of anthropological and ethnographic study allow us, I think, to distinguish between superstition and religion. Superstition we find everywhere, over the whole earth, and that too in definite forms which resemble each other very much in all places and among the most different races, and which are subject to a demonstrable law of development; superstition cannot in reality be eradicated. Religion, on the other hand, as being a collective image of the order of the world as it hovers before the imagination, changes very much with times and peoples; many races (for instance the Chinese) feel little or no religious craving: in others the need is very pronounced; religion may be metaphysical, materialistic or symbolistic, but it always appears -- even where its external elements are all borrowed -- in a completely new, individual form according to time and country, and each of its forms is, as history teaches us, altogether transitory. Religion has something passive in it; while it lives it reflects a condition of culture; at the same time it contains arbitrary moments of inestimable consequence; how much freedom was manifested by the Hellenic poets in their treatment of the material of their faith! To what an extent did the resolutions of the Council of Trent, as to what Christendom should believe and should not believe, depend on diplomatic moves and the fortune of arms! This cannot be said of superstition; its might is assailed in vain by power of Pope and of poets; it crawls along a thousand hidden paths, slumbers unconsciously in every breast and is every moment ready to burst out into flame; it has, as Lippert says, "a tenacity of life which no religion possesses"; [61] it is at the same time a cement for every new religion and an enemy in the path of every old one. Almost every man has doubts about his religion, no one about his superstition; expelled from the direct consciousness of the so- called "educated" classes, it nestles in the innermost folds of their brains and plays its tricks there all the more wantonly, as it reveals itself in the mummery of authentic learning, or of the noisiest freethinking. We have had plenty of opportunity [62] of observing all this in our century of Notre Dame de Lourdes, "Shakers," phrenology, odic force, spirit photographs, scientific materialism, and "healing priestcraft," [63] &c. To understand rightly the Hellenic inheritance we must learn to make a distinction there too. If we do so, our eyes will open to the fact that even in Hellas, at the brilliant epoch of the glorious art-inspired religion, an undercurrent of superstitions and cults of quite a different kind had never ceased to flow: at a later period, when the Greek spirit began to decline and the belief in gods was a mere form, it broke out in a flood and united with the rationalistic scholasticism which had in the meantime been abundantly fed from various sources, till finally it presented in pseudo-Semitic neo-Platonism the grinning caricature of lofty, free intellectual achievements. This stream of popular belief, restrained in the Dionysian cult, which through tragedy reached the highest artistic perfection, flowed on underground by Delphi and Eleusis; the ancient soul-cult, the awe-stricken and reverent remembrance of the dead formed its first and richest source; with this became gradually associated, by inevitable progression (and in various forms) the belief in the immortality of the soul. Doubtless the Hellenes had brought the original stock of their various superstitions from their former home; but new elements were constantly added, partly as Semitic [64] imports from the coasts and islands of Asia Minor, but with more permanent and disturbing influence from that North which the Greeks thought they despised. It was not poets that proclaimed these sacred "redeeming" mysteries but Sibyls, Bacchides, female utterers of Pythian oracles; ecstatic frenzy took hold of one district after the other, whole nations became mad, the sons of the heroes who had fought before Troy whirled round in circles like the Dervishes of today, mothers strangled their children with their own hands. It was these people, however, who fostered the real faith in souls, and even the belief in the immortality of the soul was spread by them from Thrace to Greece. [65] In the mad Bacchantic dance the soul for the first time [among the Greek people] separated itself from the body -- that same soul about which Aristotle from the stillness of his study had so much that was edifying to tell us; in the Dionysian ecstasy man felt himself one with the immortal gods and concluded that his individual human soul must also be immortal, a conclusion which Aristotle and others at a later time attempted ingeniously to justify. [66] It seems to me that we are still suffering from something of this vertigo! And for that reason let us attempt to come to a sensible conclusion regarding this legacy which clings so firmly to us. To this belief in a soul Hellenic poetry as such has contributed nothing; it reverently adapted itself to the conventional -- the ceremonious burial of Patroclus, for instance, who otherwise could not enter on his last rest -- the performance of the necessary acts of consecration by Antigone beside the corpse of her brother -- and nothing more. It did unconsciously help to promote the belief in immortality, by maintaining that the gods must be conceived not indeed as uncreated but, for their greater glorification, as undying -- an idea quite foreign to the Aryan Indians. [67] The idea of sempiternity, that is, the immortality of an individual who at some time had come into being, was in consequence familiar to the Greeks as an attribute of their gods; poetry probably found it already existing, but at any rate it was first raised to a definite reality by the power of poetical imagination. Art had no greater share in it than this. Art rather endeavours as far as possible to remove, to temper, to minimise that "belief in daemons which has everywhere to be taken as primeval," [68] the conception of a "lower world," the story of "islands of the blest" -- in short, all those elements which, growing up out of the subsoil of superstition, force themselves on the human imagination -- and all this in order to gain a free, open field for the given facts of the world and of life, and for their poetically religious, imaginative treatment. Unlike art, popular belief, not being satisfied with a religion so lofty and poetic, preferred the teaching of the barbarous Thracians. Neither was it accepted by philosophy, which held a position inferior to such poetical conceptions, until the day came when it felt itself strong enough to set history against fable, and detailed knowledge against symbol; but the stimulus in this direction was not drawn by philosophy from itself nor from the results of empiric science, which had nowhere dealt with the doctrines of souls, the entelechies of Aristotle, immortality and the rest; it was received from the people, partly from Asia (through Pythagoras), partly from Northern Europe (as Orphic or Dionysian cult). The theory of a soul separable from the living body and more or less independent; the theory easily deduced therefrom of bodiless and yet living souls -- those, for example, of the dead, which live on as mere souls, as also of a "soul-possessed" divine principle (quite analogous to the Nous of Anaxagoras, that is, of power distinct from matter) -- furthermore, the theory of the immortality of this soul -- all these are, to begin with, not results of quickened philosophical thought, nor do they form in any sense an evolutional development, a glorification of that Hellenic national religion which had found its highest expression in the poets; it is rather that people and thinker here put themselves in opposition to poet and religion. And though obeying different impulses, people and thinker played into each other's hands, and together caused the decline and fall of poetry and religion. And when the crisis thus brought about was past, the result was that philosophers had taken the place of artists as the heralds of religion. To begin with, both poets and philosophers had of course derived their material from the people; but which of the two, I ask, has employed it the better and more wisely? Which has pointed the way to freedom and beauty, and which to bondage and ugliness? Which has paved the way for healthy empiric science and which has checked it for almost twenty centuries? In the meantime, from quite another direction, from the midst of a people that possessed neither art nor philosophy, a religious force had entered the world, so strong that it could bear, without breaking down, the madness of the whirling dance that had been elevated to a system of reason -- so full of light that even the dark power of purely abstract logic could never dim its radiance -- a religious power, qualified by its very origin to promote civilisation rather than culture; had that power not arisen, then this supposed elevation to higher ideals would have ended miserably in ignominy, or rather its actual wretchedness would never have remained concealed. If anyone doubts this, let him read the literature of the first centuries of our era, when the State-paid, anti-Christian philosophers entitled their theory of knowledge "Theology" (Plotinus, Proclus, &c.), let him see how these worthies in the leisure hours which remained to them after picking Homer to pieces, commenting on Aristotle, building up Trinities, and discussing the question whether God had the attribute of life as well as of being, and other such subtleties, wandered from one place to another in order that they might be initiated into mysteries, or admitted as hierophants into Orphic societies -- the foremost thinkers sunk to the grossest belief in magic, or if such reading appalls him, let him take up the witty Heinrich Heine of the second century, Lucian, and complete the information there given by the more serious but no less interesting writings of his contemporary Apuleius [69] -- and then say where there is more religion to be found and where more superstition, where there is free, sound, creative human power and where fruitless, slovenly working of the treadmill in a continual circle. And yet the men who stand in that Homeric circle seem to us childishly pious and superstitious, these on the other hand enlightened thinkers! [70] One more example! We are wont according to old custom to commend Aristotle more warmly for his teleological theory of the universe than for anything else, whereas we reproach Homer with his anthropomorphism. If we did not suffer from artificially produced atrophy of the brain, we should be bound to see the absurdity of this. Teleology, that is, the theory of finality according to the measure of human reason, is anthropomorphism in its highest potency. When man can grasp the plan of the cosmos, when he can say whence the world comes, whither it goes and what the purpose of each individual thing is, then he is really himself God and the whole world is "human"; this is expressly stated by the Orphics and Aristotle. But the poet's attitude is quite different. Every one quotes, and has done so even from the times of Heraclitus and down to those of Ranke, the charge which Xenophanes made against Homer that he forms the gods like Hellenes, but that the negroes would invent a black Zeus and horses would think of the gods as horses. No remark could be more senseless or superficial. [71] The reproach is not even correct in fact, since the gods in Homer appear in all possible forms. As K. Lehrs says in his fine but unfortunately almost forgotten book, Ethik und Religion der Griechen (pp. I36-7): "The Greek gods are by no means images of men, but antitypes. They are neither cosmic potencies (as the philosophers first regarded them) nor glorified men! They frequently occur in animal form and only bear as a rule the human form as being the noblest, most beautiful and most suitable, but every other form is in itself just as natural to them." Incomparably more important, however, is the fact that in Homer and the other great poets all teleology is wanting; for undeniable anthropomorphism did not appear till this idea did. Why should I not represent the gods in the image of man? Should I introduce them into my poem as sheep or beetles? Did not Raphael and Michael Angelo do the very same thing as Homer? Has the Christian religion not accepted the idea that God appeared in human form? Is the Jehovah of the Israelites not a prototype of the noble and yet quarrelsome and revengeful Jew? It would surely not be advisable to recommend to the imagination of the artist the Aristotelian "being without size which thinks the thing thought." On the other hand, the poetical religion of the Greeks does not presume to give information about the "uncreated" and to "explain according to reason" the future. It gives a picture of the world as in a hollow mirror and thinks thereby to quicken and to purify the spirit of man, and nothing more. Lehrs demonstrates, in the book mentioned above, how the idea of teleology was introduced by the philosophers, from Socrates to Cicero, but found no place in Hellenic poetry. "The idea of beautiful order, harmony, cosmos, which pervades Greek religion, is," he says (p. 117), "a much higher idea than that of teleology, which in every respect has something paltry about it." To bring the matter quite home to us, I ask, which is the anthropomorphist, Homer or Byron? Homer, whose personal existence could be doubted, or Byron, who so powerfully grasped the strings of the harp and attuned the poetry of our century to the melody, in which Alps and Ocean, Past and Present of the human race only serve to mirror, and form a frame for the individual Ego? I should think it almost impossible for each of us to-day, surrounded as we are by human actions and permeated with the dim idea of an ordered Cosmos to remain to so small a degree anthropomorphic, so very "objective" as Homer. It is essential to distinguish between philosophy and philosophy, and I think I have above warmly expressed my admiration for the Hellenic philosophy of the great epoch, particularly where it appeared as a creative activity of the human spirit closely related to poetry; in this respect Plato's theory of ideas is unsurpassed, while Aristotle appears to be incomparably great in analysis and method, but at the same time, as a philosopher in the sense given, the real originator of the decay of the Hellenic spirit. But here as elsewhere we must guard against over-simplification; we must not attribute to a single man what was peculiar to his people and only found in him its most definite expression. In reality Greek philosophy from the very beginning contained the germ of its fatal development later; the inheritance which still lies heavily upon us goes back almost to Homer's time. For it will be found upon reflection, that the old Hylozoists are related to the Neoplatonists: whoever, like Thales, without further ado "explains" the world as having arisen from water, will afterwards equally find an "explanation" of God; his nearest successor, Anaximander, establishes as principle the "Infinite" (the Apeiron), the "Unchangeable amid all changes": here in truth we are already in the toils of the most unmimtigated scholasticism and can calmly wait till the wheel of time sets down on the surface of the earth Ramon Lull and Thomas Aquinas. The fact that the eldest among the well-known Greek thinkers believed in the presence of countless daemons, but at the same time from the beginning [72] attacked the gods of the popular religion and of the poets -- Heraclitus would "gladly have scourged" [73] Homer -- serves only to complete the picture. However, one thing must be added: a man like Anaximander, so subordinate as a thinker, was a naturalist and theorist of the first rank, a founder of scientific geography, a promoter of astronomy; all these people are presented to us as philosophers, but in reality philosophy was for them something quite apart; surely we should not reckon the agnosticism of Charles Darwin or the creed of Claude Bernard among the philosophical achievements of our century? Here is a characteristic example of the many traditional consecrated confusions; we find the name of Sankara (certainly one of the greatest metaphysicians that ever lived) in no history of philosophy, while on the other hand the worthy olive-farmer Thales is ever paraded as the "first philosopher." And, if the matter be closely investigated, it will be found that almost all so-called philosophers at the zenith of Hellenic greatness are in a similar position: so far as we can judge from contradictory reports, Pythagoras did not found a philosophic school, but a political, social, dietetic and religious brotherhood; Plato himself, the metaphysician, was a statesman, moralist, practical reformer; Aristotle was a professional encyclopaedist, and the unity of his philosophy is due much more to his character than to his forced, half-traditional, contradictory metaphysics. Without therefore underestimating in any way the achievements of the Greek thinkers, We shall yet, I think, be able to assert (and so put an end to the confusion), that these men have paved the way for our science (including logic and ethics), and for our theology, and that they, through their poetically creative genius, have poured a flood of light upon the paths which speculation and intellectual investigation were afterwards to follow; as metaphysicians, in the real narrower sense of the word, they were, however, with the sole exception of Plato, comparatively of much less importance. That nothing may remain obscure in a matter so weighty that it strikes into the depths of our life to-day, I should like briefly to refer to the fact, that in the person of the great Leonardo da Vinci we have an example -- closely related to modern thought and feeling -- of the deep gulf which separates poetical from abstract perception, religion from theologising philosophy. Leonardo brands the intellectual sciences as "deceptive" (le bugiarde scientie mentali); "all knowledge," he says, "is vain and erroneous, unless brought into the world by sense-experience, the mother of all certainty"; especially offensive to him are the disputes and proofs regarding the entity of God and of the soul: he is of opinion that "our senses revolt against" these conceptions, consequently we should not let ourselves be deluded: " where arguments of reason and clear right are wanting, clamour takes their place; in the case of things which are certain, however, this does not happen"; and thus he arrives at the conclusion: "dove si grida non e vera scientia," where there is clamour there is no genuine knowledge (Libro di pittura, Part 1., Division 33, Heinrich Ludwig's edition). This is Leonardo's theology! Yet it is this very man -- and surely the only one, the greatest not excepted -- who paints a Christ which comes near being a revelation, "perfect God and perfect man," as the Athanasian creed puts it. Here we have close intrinsic relationship with Homer: all knowledge is derived from the experience of sense, and from this the Divine, proved by no subtleties of reasoning, is formed as free creation, with popular belief as its basis -- something everlastingly true. Thanks to special circumstances and particular mental gifts, thanks above all to the advent of men of great genius who alone give life, this particular faculty had become so intensely developed in Greece that the sciences of experience received a new and greater impulse, as they did later among us through the influence of Leonardo, whereas the reaction of philosophising abstraction was never able to develop freely and naturally, but degenerated either into scholasticism or the clouds of fancy. The Hellenic artist awoke to life in an atmosphere which gave him at the same time personal freedom and the elevating consciousness that he was understood by all; the Hellenic philosopher (as soon as he trod the path of logical abstraction) had not this gift; on the contrary he was hemmed in on all sides, outwardly by custom, beliefs and civic institutions, inwardly by his whole personal education, which was principally artistic, by everything that surrounded him during his whole life, by all impressions which eye and ear conveyed to him; he was not free: because of his talent he did achieve great things, but nothing that satisfied -- as his art did -- the highest demands of harmony, truth and universal acceptance. In the case of Greek art the national element is comparable to pinions that raise the spirit to lofty heights, where "all men become brothers," where the separating gulf of times and races adds to rather than detracts from the charm; Hellenic philosophy, on the contrary, is in the limiting sense of the word fettered to a definite national life and consequently hemmed in on all sides. [74] It is exceedingly difficult with such a view to prevail against the prejudice of centuries. Even such a man as Rohde calls the Greeks the" most fruitful in thought among nations" and asserts that their philosophers "thought in advance for all mankind"; [75] Leopold von Ranke, who has no other epithet for Homeric religion than" idolatry" (!) writes as follows: "What Aristotle says about the distinction between active and passive reason, only the first of which, however, is the true one, autonomous and related to God, I should be inclined to say was the best thing that could be said about the human spirit, with the exception of the Revelation of the Bible. We may say the same, if I am not mistaken, of Plato's doctrine of the soul." [76] Ranke tells us further that the mission of Greek philosophy was to purge the old faith of its idolatrous element, to unite rational and religious truth; but that the democracy frustrated this noble design, because it "held fast to idolatry" (i. 230). [77] These examples may suffice, though one could quote many others. I am convinced that this is all illusion, indeed baneful illusion, and in essential points the very opposite of truth. It is not true that the Greeks have thought in advance for all mankind: before them, at their time and after them there has been deeper thinking, more acute and more correct. It is not true that the red-tape theology of Aristotle ad usum of the mainstays of society is " the best thing that could be said": this Jesuitical scholastic sophistry has been the black plague of philosophy. It is not true that Greek thinkers have purified the old religion: they have rather attacked in it that very thing that deserved everlasting admiration, namely, its free, purely artistic beauty; and while they pretended to substitute rational for symbolical truth, they in reality only adopted popular superstition and set it, clad in logical rags, upon the throne, from which they -- in company with the mob -- had hurled down that poetry which proclaimed an everlasting truth. As regards the so-called" thinking in advance," it will suffice to call attention to two circumstances to prove the erroneous nature of this assertion: in the first place, the Indians began to think before the Greeks, their thought was profounder and more consistent, and in their various systems they have exhausted more possibilities; in the second place, our own western European thought only began on the day when a great man said, " We must admit that the philosophy which we have received from the Greeks is childish, or at least that it rather encourages talk than acts as a creative stimulus." [78] To pretend that Locke, Gassendi, Hume, Descartes, Kant, &c., chewed the cud of Greek philosophy is one of the worst sins of Hellenic megalomania against our new culture. Pythagoras, the first great Hellenic thinker, offers a conclusive instance in reference to Hellenic thought. From his Oriental journeys he brought back all kinds of knowledge, significant and trifling, from the idea of redemption to the conception of the ether and the forbidding of the eating of beans: all of it was Indian ancestral property. One doctrine in particular became the central point of Pythagoreanism, its religious lever, if I may say so: this was the secret doctrine of the transmigration of souls. Plato afterwards robbed it of the aureole of secrecy and gave it a place in public philosophy. But among the Indians the belief in the transmigration of souls long before Pythagoras formed the basis of all ethics; though much divided in politics, religion and philosophy, and though living in open opposition, the whole people was united in the belief in the never-ending series of rebirths. "In India one never finds the question put, as to whether the soul transmigrates: it is universally and firmly believed." [79] But there was a class there, a small class, which did not believe in the transmigration of souls, in so far as they considered it to be a symbolical conception, a conception which to those wrapt in the illusions of world-contemplation allegorically conveys a loftier truth to be grasped more correctly by deep metaphysical thinking alone: this small class was (and is to-day) that of the philosophers. "The idea of the soul transmigrating rests on ignorance, while the soul in the sense of the highest reality is not transmigratory": such is the teaching of the Indian thinker. [80] A really "secret doctrine," such as the Greeks following Egyptian example loved, the Indians never knew: men of all castes, even women, could attain to the highest knowledge; but these profound sages knew very well that metaphysical thought requires special faculties and special development of those faculties; and so they let the figurative alone. And this figure, this magnificent conception of the transmigration of souls, which is perhaps indispensable for morals though essentially but a popular belief, while in India it was prevalent among the whole people from the highest to the lowest with the exception of the thinkers alone, became in Greece the most sublime "secret doctrine" of their first great philosopher, never quite disappeared from the highest regions of their philosophical views, and received from Plato the alluring charm of poetical form. These are the people who are said to have paved the way for us in thought, "the richest in thought of nations"! No, the Greeks were no great metaphysicians. But they have just as little claim to be considered great moralists and theologians. Here too one example instead of many. The belief in daemons is everywhere current; the idea of a special intermediate race of daemons (between the gods in heaven and men on earth) was very probably derived by the Greeks from India (by way of Persia), [81] but that does not matter; in philosophy, or, as it may be called, in "rational religion," these creatures of superstition were first adopted by Plato. Rohde writes on this point as follows: [82] "Plato is the first of many to write about a whole intermediate hierarchy of daemons, entrusted with all that is wrought by invisible powers but seems beneath the dignity of the sublime gods. Thus the Divine itself is freed from everything evil and degrading." So with full consciousness and for the "rational" and flagrantly anthropomorphic purpose of " freeing" God of what seems evil to us men, that superstition which the Hellenes shared with bushmen and Australian blacks was adorned with a philosophical and theological aureole, recommended to the noblest minds by a noble mind and bequeathed to all future generations as an inheritance. The fortunate Indians had long before discarded the belief in daemons; it was retained only by the totally uneducated people; among the Indians the philosopher was bound no longer to any religious ceremony; for without denying their existence, like the superficial Xenophanes, he had learned to see in the gods symbols of a higher truth not able to be grasped by the senses -- what use then had such people for daemons? Homer, however, it should be noticed, had been on the same path. It is true that the hand of Athene stops the hastily raised arm of Achilles, and Here inspires the hesitating Diomedes with courage -- with such divine freedom does the poet interpret, inspiring all ages with poetical thoughts -- but genuine superstition plays a very subordinate part in Homer, and by his "divine" interpretation he raises it out of the sphere of real daemonism; his path was sunnier, more beautiful than that of the Indo-Aryan; instead of indulging in speculative metaphysics like the latter, he consecrated the empiric world and thereby guided mankind to a glorious goal. [83] Then came Socrates; -- old, superstitious, advised by Pythian oracles, taught by priestesses, possessed by daemons, and after him Plato and the others, O Hellenes! if only you had remained true to the religion of Homer and the artistic culture which it founded! If you had but trusted your divine poets, and not listened to your Heraclitus and Xenophanes, your Socrates and Plato, and all the rest of them! Alas for us who have for centuries been plunged into unspeakable sorrow and misery by this belief in daemons, now raised to sacred orthodoxy, who have been hampered by it in our whole intellectual development, who even to this day are under the delusions of the Thracian peasants! [84] Not one whit better is that Hellenic thought which follows neither the path of mysticism nor that of poetical suggestion, but openly links itself to natural science and with the help of philosophy and rational psychology undertakes to solve the great problems of existence. Here the Greek spirit at once falls into scholasticism, as already hinted. "Words, words, nothing but words!" In this case detailed treatment would unfortunately go far beyond the scope of this book. But if anyone is shy of the higher philosophy, let him take up a catechism, he will find plenty of Aristotle in it. Talk of the Divinity with such a man, and tell him that it " did not come into existence and was not created; that it has been from all time and is immortal," and he will think that you are quoting from the creed of an oecumenical council, whereas, as a matter of fact, it is a quotation from Aristotle! And if you further say to him that God is " an everlasting, perfect, unconditioned being, gifted with life, but without bulk, one who in eternal actuality thinks himself, for (this serves as explanation) thinking becomes objective to itself by the thinking of the thing thought, so that thinking and the thing thought become identical," the poor man will fancy that you are reading from Thomas Aquinas or at least from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but again it is a quotation from Aristotle. [85] The rational doctrine of God, the rational doctrine of the soul, above all the doctrine of a purposed order of the world suitable to human reason, or teleology (through which Aristotle, by the way, introduced such grotesque errors into his natural science), that was the inheritance in this sphere! How many centuries did it take till there came a brave man who threw this ballast overboard and showed that one cannot prove the existence of God, as Aristotle had made twenty centuries believe: -- till a man came who ventured to write the words, "Neither experience nor conclusions of reason adequately inform us whether man possesses a soul (as a substance dwelling in him, distinct from body and capable of thinking independently of it and therefore a spiritual substance), or whether life may not rather be a property of matter." [86] But enough. I think I have shown with sufficient clearness that Hellenic philosophy is only genuinely great when we take the word in its widest sense, somewhat in the English sense, according to which a Newton and a Cuvier, or a Jean Jacques Rousseau and a Goethe are called "philosophers." As soon as the Greek left the sphere of intuition -- right from Thales onward-he became fatal; he became all the more fatal when he proceeded to use his incomparable plastic power (which is so strikingly absent in the metaphysical Indian) in giving a seductive shape to shadowy chimeras and in emasculating and bowdlerising deep conceptions and ideas that do not lend themselves to any analysis. I do not blame him because he had mystical tendencies and a plainly expressed need of metaphysics, but because he attempted to give shape to mysticism in a way other than the artistically mythical, and, going blindly past the central point of all metaphysics (I always naturally except Plato), tried to solve transcendent questions by prosaic empirical means. If the Greek had continued to develop his faculties on the one hand purely poetically, on the other purely empirically, his influence would have become an unmixed and inexpressible blessing for mankind; but, as it is, that same Greek who in poetry and science had given us an example of what true creative power can effect, and so of the way in which the development of man has taken place, at a later time proved to be a cramping and retarding element in the growth of the human intellect. It may be that these last remarks rather trespass on the province of a later part of my book. But I had to face the difficulty. Great as has been the influence which the Hellenic inheritance has exercised upon our century, as upon those which preceded it, there has been no little confusion and no lack of misunderstanding concerning it. In order that the sequel might be understood, it was necessary that the mental condition of the heirs should be set out as clearly as the many-sided and complex nature of the inheritance which they received. No summary is needed. Indeed what I have said about our rich Hellenic inheritance, which so deeply penetrates our intellectual life, is of itself a mere summary -- a mere indication. If we were to carry this experiment further we should arrive at a point where every concrete idea would become sublimated, where the sinuous lines of Life would shrivel into mere degrees in a scale, and there would remain nothing but a geometrical figure -- a construction of the mind -- instead of the representation of that manifold truth which has the gift of uniting in itself all contradictions. The philosophy of history, even in the hands of the most distinguished men, such as Herder for example, has a tendency rather to provoke contradiction than to encourage the formation of correct opinions. My object, moreover, is not so far-reaching. It is no part of my plan to pronounce judgment upon or to explain historically the spirit of ancient Greece: it suffices for me to bring home to our consciousness how boundless is the gift which it has brought us, and how actively that gift still works upon our poetry, our thought, our faith, our researches. I could not be exhaustive; -- I have contented myself with the endeavour to give a vivid and truthful picture. In so doing I have inflicted upon my readers some trouble, but this could not be avoided. _______________ Notes: 1. Cf. Aesthetische Erziehung, Bd. 3, 25, 26. Further particulars in chap. ix. Div. 7 of this book (vol. ii.). 2. Cf. Etwas uber die erste Menschengesellschaft, div. I. 3. 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. 4. 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 Naturvolkern Brasiliens.) 5. See, for example, Whitney, The Life of Language (Fr. edit. p. 238 f). 6. Compare especially the instructive remarks of Topinard in his Anthropologie, pp. 159- 62. 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 Bestandige 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 Milner and others. 7. 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 posees sur les associations zoogeniques des plus humbles formes de la vie consciente. 8. See Carl Vogt's amusing Untersuchungen uber die Tierstaaten (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 Moller; now we can observe these animals in the Zoological Garden in London, where it is especially easy to follow the activity of the large-beaded "overseers," which rush forward and shake up the workers whenever they take things easy! 9. 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 resume 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 entomo
logiques 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
uber 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
10. 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.). 11. 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. 12. 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 Indoeuropaer, 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. 13. See, for example, the small work, Homer noch einmal, of the year 1826. 14. I must take care to avoid even the slightest assumption of a learning which 1 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 Entwickeltmg 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, combined 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). 15. See in particular Flach, Geschichte der griechischen Lyrik nach den Quellen dargestellt, I. pp. 45 ff, 90 ff. 16. Since the above was written, German science has had to deplore the death of this extraordinary man. 17. Seelenkult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen, pp. 35, 36. 18. Gesch, des Altertums, v. 566. 19. 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:
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. 20. Compare in vol. ii., chap. ix., the remarks about China, &c. 21. 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. 22. 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.). 23. Aristarchus of Samos, the discoverer of the so-called Copernican system of the world. 24. One sees that according to Goethe a creative act of the human mind is necessary, in order that life itself may become "living”! 25. 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 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 x868; 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 textbook 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 "metazoan” ('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 I the worms belong to 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- ishes and sea-urchins! (Cf. especially Karl Camillo Schneider: Grundzuge der tierischen Organisation in the Preussische Jahrbucher, 1900, July number. p. 73ff.) 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. 26. 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.) 27. “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.) 28. Cf. on this point Schroeder: Pythagoras und die Inder (1884). 29. The best summary account of recent times that is known to me is that of Garbe in his Samkhya-Philosophie (1894), p. 85 f.; there we also find the most important bibliography. 30. 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 Muller: Three Lectures on the Vedanta 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 Vedanta in Relation to the Metaphysical Doctrines of the West," Bombay, 1893. 31. “When Bahva was questioned by Vashkali, the former explained Brahmanism to him by remaining silent. And Vashkali 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 Sutra’s of Vedanta, 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." 32. 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." 33. Ideen zur Geschichte der Menscheit, XIIL. chap. v. 34. 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). 35. Quenstedt, Handbuch der Petrefaktenkunde, 2nd ed., p. 2. 36. See Des singularites de la Nature, chaps. xii. to xviii., and L'Homme aux quarante ecus, chap. vi., both written in the year 1768. Similar remarks in his letters (see especially, Lettre sur un ecrit anonyme, 19.4.1772). 37. 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). 38. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen, 5th ed., Pt. I., p. 414 ff. More technical, but explained with remarkable lucidity in the work of Schiaparelli, Die Vorldufer des Kopernikus im Alterium (translated into German from the Italian original by the author and M. Curtze, published in the Altpreussisch 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 altere Pythagoreismus (1897). p. 54 ff. 64 ff. &c. The essay too of Ludwig Ideler, Uber das Verhaltnis des Kopernikus zum Altertum in the Museum fur Altertumswissenschaft, published by Fr. Aug. Wolf. 1810, p. 391 ff., is still worth reading. 39. "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 to begin to think about the earth’s mobility.” 41. Cf. Franz Xaver Kraus in the Deutsche Literaturtzeitung, 1900, Nr. 1. 41. 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 Tycho de Brahe is also of Hellenic origin; see details in Schiaparelli, (p. 115); and especially p. 115); no possible combination could indeed escape the richness of this imagination. 42. See Leopold von Schroeder: Pythagoras und die Inder, p. 39 ff. 43. Cantor: Vorlesungen uber Geschichte der Mathematik, i. 511 (quoted from Schroeder, p. 56). 44. Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, Chap. iv. 45. Work and Days, 256. 46. Fragment 4 (quoted from Flach, Geschicte der griechischen Lyrik, p. 419). 47. The principle introduced at the time of the Reformation "cujus est regio, illius est religio" only expresses the old condition of law as it existed from time immemorial. 48. French excavation of the year 1890. (See Peppmuller: Hesiodos 1896, p. 152.) One should note also such passages as Aristophanes, Frogs, 1., 1037 ff. 49. I said "cruel" and in fact this trait is one of the most characteristic of the Hellenes, common to them and the Semites. Humanity, generosity, pardon were as foreign to them as love of truth. When they meet these traits for the first time in the Persians, the Greek historians betray an almost embarrassed astonishment: to spare prisoners, to give a kingly reception to a conquered prince, to entertain and give presents to envoys of the enemy, instead of killing them (as the Lacedaemionians and Athenians did, Herodotus, vii. 113). indulgence to criminals, generosity even to spies, the assumption that the first duty of every man is to speak the truth, ingratitude being regarded as a crime punishable by the State -- all this seems to a Herodotus, a Xenophon, almost as ridiculous as the Persian custom not to spit in presence of others, and other such rules of etiquette (cf. Herodotus i. 133 and 138). How is it possible that in the face of such a mass of indubitable facts our historians can go on systematically falsifying history? Leopold van Ranke, for instance, tells in his Weltgeschichte (Text edition, i. 129) the well known anecdote of the disgraceful treatment of the corpse of Leonidas, and how Pausanias rejected the proposal to avenge himself by a similar sin against the corpse of the Persian commander Mardonius, and continues: "This refusal affords food for endless thought. The contrast between East and West is here expressed in a manner which henceforth was to remain the tradition." And yet the whole of Greek history is filled with the mutilation not only of corpses, but of living people, torture, and every kind of cruelty, falsehood and treachery. And thus, in order to get in a high-sounding empty phrase, to remain true to the old absurd proverb of the contrast between Orient and Occident (how ridiculous in a spherical world!) in order to retain cherished prejudices and give them a stronger hold than ever, one of the first historians of the nineteenth century simply puts aside all the facts of history -- facts concerning which even the most ignorant man can inform himself in Duncker, Geschichte des Altertums; Gobineau, Histoire des Perses; Maspero, Les premieres Melees des peuples, &c. -- and the credulous student is forced to accept a manifest untruth with regard to the moral character of the different human races, on the basis of a doubtful anecdote. Such unscrupulous perfidy can only be explained in the case of such a man by the supposition of a "suggestion" paralysing all judgment. As a matter of fact, from India and Persia we derive the one kind of humanity and generosity and love of truth, from Judea and Arabia the other (caused by reaction) -- but none from Greece, nor from Rome, that is, therefore, none from the "Occident." How far removed Herodotus is from such designed misrepresentation of history! for, when he has told of the mutilation of Leonidas, he adds, "Such treatment is not the custom among the Persians. They more than all other nations are wont to honour brave warriors" (vii. 238). 50. Helvetius remarks exquisitely (De l'Esprit, ed. 1772, II. 52): "La legislation de Lycurgue metamorphosait les hommes en heros." 51. Conversation with Eckermann, Nov. 24, 1824. 52. Since these lines were written, I have received the well known English Hellenist Professor Mahaffy's A Survey of Greek Civilisation, 1897, in which the battle of Marathon is termed "a very unimportant skirmish." 53. See Gobineau: Histoire des Perses, ii. 138-142. 54. Particularly the famous battle of Salamis, of which one gets a refreshing description in the above-mentioned work of Count Gobineau, ii. 205-211): "C'est quand les derniers bataillons de l'arriere-garde de Xerxes eurent disparu dans la direction de la Beotie et que toute sa flotte fut partie, que les Grecs prirent d'eux-memes et de ce qu'ils venaient de faire et de ce qu'ils pouvaient en dire l'opinion que la poesie a si heureusement mise en oeuvre. Encore fallut-il que les allies apprissent que la flotte ennemie ne s'etait pas arretee a Phalere pour qu'ils osassent se mettre en mouvement. Ne sachant on elle allait -- ils restaient comme eperdus. Ils se hasarderent enfin a sortir de la baie de Salamine, et se risquerent jusqu'a la hauteur d'Andros. C'est ce qu’ils appelerent plus tard avoir poursuivi les Perses! Ils se garderent cependant d'essayer de les joindre, et rebroussant chemin, ils retournerent chacun dans leurs patries respectives " (p. 208). In another place (ii, 360) Gobineau characterises Greek history as "la plus elaboree des fictions du plus artiste des peuples." 55. The principal thing is clearly not what is found in learned books, but what is taught in school, and here I can speak from experience, for I was first in a French "Lycee," then in an English "college," afterwards I received instruction from the teachers of a Swiss private school, and last of all from a learned Prussian. I testify that in these various countries even the best certified history, that of the last three centuries (since the Reformation), is represented in so absolutely different ways that without exaggerating I may affirm that the principle of historical instruction is still everywhere in Europe systematic misrepresentation. While the achievements of our own country are always emphasised, those of others passed over or suppressed, certain things put always in the brightest light, others left in the deepest shadow, there is formed a general picture which in many parts differs only for the subtlest eye from naked lies. The foundation of all genuine truth: the absolutely disinterested love of justice is almost everywhere absent; a proof that we are still barbarians! 56. It is the first part (published 1877) of a larger work: Die Demokratie, the second part of which appeared in two volumes in 1891 and1898 under the title Die Romische Massenherrschaft. 57. Schvarcz, loc. cit. p. 394 ft. 58. According to Gomperz, Griechische Denker, ii. 95, this anecdote is an "empty tale": but in all such inventions, as in the eppur si muove, &c., there lives an element of higher truth; they are just the reverse of "empty." 59. Graeco-italische Rechtsgeschichte, pp. 589, 595, &c. 60. It matters little that in Homer's time there may have been no “philosophers"; the fact that in his works nothing is "explained," that not the least attempt at a cosmogony is found, shows the tendency of his mind with sufficient clearness. Hesiod is already a manifest reaction, but still too magnificently symbolical to find favour with any rationalist. 61. Christentum, Volksglaube und Volksbrauch, p. 379. In the second part of this book there is an instructive list of pre-Christian customs and superstitions still prevalent in Europe. 62. "Even the most civilised nations do not easily shake off their belief in magic.” – Sir John Lubbock, The Prehistoric Age (German edition, ii. 278) 63. F. A. Lange used the expression, "medizinisches Pfaflentum," somewhere in his Geschichte des Materialismus. 64. "The Semitic peoples in old times do not seem to have believed in the immortality of the individual soul; but their cults supplied the Hellene, as soon as he grasped this thought, with weighty stimulus. The Phoenician divine system of the Cabiri (i.e., the seven powerful ones) was found by the Greeks on Lemnos, Rhodes and other islands, and with regard to this Duncker writes in his Geschichte des Altertums, 14, 279, "The myth of Melcart and Astarte, of Astarte who was adopted into the number of these gods, and of Melcart, who finds again the lost goddess of the moon in the land of darkness and returns from there with her to new light and life -- gave the Greeks occasion to associate with the secret worship of the Cabiri the conceptions of life after death, which had been growing among them since the beginning of the sixth century." 65. We need not be surprised that this belief (according to Herodotus, iv. 93) was prevalent in the Indo-European race of the Getae and from there found its way into Greece; it was an old racial possession; it is very striking, on the other hand, that the Hellene at the period of his greatest strength had lost this belief or rather was quite indifferent to it. "An everlasting life of the soul is neither asserted nor denied from the Homeric standpoint. Indeed, this thought does not come into consideration at all" (Rohde, Psyche, p, 195); a remarkable confirmation of Schiller's assertion that the aesthetic man, i.e., he in whom the sensual and the moral are not diametrically opposed in aim "needs no immortality to support and hold him" (Letter to Goethe, August 9, 1796). Whether or not the Getae were Goths and so belonged to the Teutonic peoples, as Jacob Grimm asserted, does not here much matter; however, a full discussion of this interesting question is to be found in Wietersheim-Dahn, Geschichte der Volkerwanderung, i. 597; the result of the investigation is against Grimm's view. The story that the Getic King Zalmoxis learned the doctrine of immortality from Pythagoras is characterized by Rohde as an "absurd pragmatical tale" (Psyche, p. 329). 66. On this very important point, the genesis of the belief in immortality among the Greeks, see especially Rohde, Psyche, p. 296. 67. In an old Vedic hymn, which I quoted on p. 35. a verse runs, "The Gods have arisen on this side of creation" ; in their capacity as individuals, however, they too cannot, according to the Indian conviction, possess "sempiternity," and Cankara says in the Vedanta Sutra's, when speaking of the individual gods. "Such words as Indra, &c., signify, like the word 'General,' only occupation of a definite post. Whoever therefore occupies the post in question bears the title lndra" (i. 3, 28, p. 170 of Deussen’s translation). 68. Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, i. 39. See also Tylor. 69. See particularly in the eleventh book of the Golden Ass the initiation into the mysteries of Isis, Osiris, Serapis and the admission into the association of the Pastophori. Plutarch's writing On Isis and Osiris should also be read. 70. Bussell, The School of Plato, 1896, p. 345, writes of this philosophical period: "The daemons monopolise a worship, which cannot be devoted to a mere idea, and philosophy breathes out its life on the steps of smoking sacrificial altars and amid the incantations and delusions of prophecy and magic." 71. Giordano Bruno, enraged at this fundamentally wrong and pedantically narrow judgment, writes: "Only insensate bestie et veri bruti would be capable of making such a statement" (Italienische Schriften, ed. Lagarde, p. 534). One should compare also M. W. Visser, Die nicht menschengestaltigen Gotter der Griechen, Leyden, 1903. 72. Authenticated at least from Xenophanes and Heraclitus onwards. 73. I quote from Gomperz: Griechische Denker, i. 50; according to Zeller's account so violent an expression would seem unlikely. If I remember rightly, it is Xenophanes who assigns the words to Heraclitus. 74. Cf., further, vol. ii. pp. 135 and 364. 75. Psyche, p. 104. 76. Weltgeschichte (Text edition), i. 230. This axiom of wisdom reminds one perilously of the well-known story from the nursery: “Whom do you love most, papa or mamma? – Both!" For though Aristotle starts from Plato, one can hardly imagine anything more different than their theories of the soul (as well as their whole metaphysics). How then can both have said the best thing"? Schopenhauer has expressed the matter correctly and concisely. "The radical contrast to Aristotle is Plato." 77. O twenty-fourth century! What sayest thou to this? I for my part am silent -- at least with regard to personalities -- and follow the example if wise Socrates in sacrificing a cock to the idols of my century! 78. Bacon of Verulam: Instauratio Magna, Introduction. "Et de utilitate aperte dicendum est: sapientiam istam, quam a Graecis potissimum hausimus, pueritiam quandam scientiae videri, atque habere quod proprium est puerorum; ut ad garriendum prompta, ad generandum invalida et immatura sit. Controversiarum enim ferax, operum effoeta est." 79. Schroeder, Indiens Litteratur und Kultur, p. 252. 80. Sankara: Stra's des Vedanta, i. 2, 11. Of course Sankara lived long after Pythagoras (about the eighth century of our era) but his teaching is strictly orthodox, he makes no risky assertion which is not based on old canonical Upanishads. It is clear that an actual "transmigration" was, even at the time of and according to the oldest Upanishads, for the man who truly had insight, a conception only serving popular ends. Further proof with regard to this matter will be found in Sankara in the introduction to the Sutra's and in i. 1, 4, but especially in the magnificent passage ii. 1, 22, where the Samsara, in conjunction with the whole creation, is described as an illusion, “which like the illusion of partings and separations by birth and death does not exist in the sense of the highest reality." 81. Colebrooke, Miscellaneous Essays, p. 442. 82. In a short summary, Die Religion der Griechen, published in 1895 in the Bayreuther Blatter (also printed separately in 1902). 83. See, for example, in Book XXIV. of the Iliad (verse 300 ff.) the appearance "from the right" of the eagle which presages good. Very significant are the words of Priam in the same book with regard to a vision he has seen (verse 220 ff.): "Had any other of mortal men bidden me believe it, an interpreter of signs or prophet or sacrificial priest, I should have called it deceit and turned from it with contempt." Magnificent, too, is the conception of "spirits" in Hesiod, although he is much nearer to the popular superstition than Homer (Works and Days, 124 ff.): "They defend the right and hinder deeds of impiety: everywhere over the earth they wander, hidden in mist, and scatter blessings; this is the kingly office which they have received.” 84. Dollinger calls the "systematic belief in daemons" one of the “Danaan gifts of Greek imagining" (Akad. Vortrage, i. 182). 85. Metaphysics, Book XII. chap. Vii. 86. Kant: Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Tugendlehre, Part I., Ethische Elementarlehre, § 4.
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