Although consideration of the Cultures themselves should logically precede that of the relations between them, modern historical thought generally reverses the order. The less it really knows of the life-courses which together make up a seeming unity of world-happenings, the more zealously it searches for life in the web of relations, and the less it understands even of these. What a wealth of psychology there is in the probings, rejections, choices, transvaluations, errors, penetrations, and welcomings!--and not only between Cultures which immediately touch one another, wonder at one another, fight one another, but also as between a living Culture and the form-world of a dead one whose remains still stand visible in the landscape. And how narrow and poor, on the other hand, are the conceptions which the historians label “influence,” “continuity,” and “permanent effects”!

This is pure nineteenth century. What is sought is just a chain of causes and effects. Everything follows and nothing is prime. Since every young Culture superficially shows form-elements of older Cultures, these elements are supposed to have had continuing effect (_fortgewirkt_), and when a set of such effects has been strung together, the historian regards it with satisfaction as a sound piece of work.

At bottom, this mode of treatment rests upon that idea which inspired the great Gothics long ago, the idea of a significant singleness in the history of all mankind. They saw how, on earth, men and peoples changed, but ideas stayed, and the powerful impressiveness of the picture has not worn itself out even to-day. Originally it was seen as a plan that God was working out by means of the human instrument. And it could still be regarded as such at a far later stage, in fact so long as the spell of the “ancient-mediæval-modern” scheme lasted and its parade of permanence prevented us from noting that actuality was ever changing. But meantime our outlook also has altered and become cooler and wider. Our knowledge has long overpassed the limits of this chart, and those who are still trying to sail by it are beating about in vain. It is not products that “influence,” but creators that absorb. Being has been confused with waking-being, life with the means by which it expresses itself. The critical thought, or even simple waking-consciousness, sees everywhere theoretical units subjected to motion. That is truly dynamic and Faustian, for in no other Culture have men imagined history thus. The Greek, with his thoroughly corporeal understanding of the world, would never have traced “effects” of pure expression-units like “Attic drama” or “Egyptian art.”

Originally what happens is that a name is given to a _system of expression-forms_ conjuring up in our minds a particular complex of relations. But this does not last long, and soon one is suppositing {sic} under the name a being, and under the relation an effect. When we speak to-day of Greek philosophy, or Buddhism, or Scholasticism, we mean something that is somehow living, a power-unit that has grown and grown until it is mighty enough to take possession of men, to subject their waking-consciousness and even their being, and in the end to force them into an active conformity, which prolongs the direction followed by its own “life.” It is a whole mythology, and, significantly, it is only men of the Western Culture--the only mankind that lives with and in this picture is the Western--whose myth contains plenty of dæmons of this sort--“electricity” and “positional energy,” for example.

In reality these systems only exist in the human waking-consciousness, and they exist as modes of activity. Religion, science, art, are _activities of waking-consciousness_ that are based on a being. Faith, meditation, creation, and whatever of visible activity is required as outcome of these invisibles--as sacrifice, prayer, the physical experiment, the carving of a statue, the statement of an experience in communicable words--are activities of the waking-consciousness and nothing else. Other men see only the visible and hear only words. In so doing they experience something in themselves, but they cannot give any account of the relation between this experience and that which the creator lived in himself. We see a form, but we do not know what in the other’s soul begat that form; we can only have some belief about the matter, and we believe by putting in our own soul. However definitely and distinctly a religion may express itself in words, they are words, and the hearer puts his own sense into them. However impressive the artist’s notes or colours, the beholder sees and hears in them only himself, and if he cannot do so, the work is for him meaningless. (The extremely rare and highly modern gift, possessed by a few intensely historical men, of “putting oneself in the other’s place” need not be considered in this connexion.) The German whom Boniface converted did not transfer himself into the missionary’s soul. It was a springtide quiver that passed in those days through the whole young world of the North, and what it meant was that each man found suddenly in conversion a language wherein to express his own religiousness. Just so the eyes of a child light up when we tell it the name of the object in its hand.

It is not, then, microcosmic units that move, but cosmic entities that pick amongst them and appropriate them. Were it otherwise--were these systems very beings that could exercise an activity (for “influence” is an organic activity)--the picture of history would be quite other than what it is. Consider how every maturing man and every living Culture is continuously bathed in innumerable potential influences. Out of all these, only some few are _admitted_ as such--the great majority are not. Is choice concerned with the works, or with the men?

The historian who is intent upon establishing causal series counts only the influences that are present, and the other side of the reckoning--those that are not--does not appear. With the psychology of the “positive” influences is associated that of the “negative.” This is a domain into which no one has yet ventured, but here, if anywhere, there are fruits to be reaped, and it must be tackled unless the answer to the whole question is to be left indeterminate; for if we try to evade it, we are driven into illusory visions of world-historical happening as a continuous process in which everything is properly accounted for. Two Cultures may touch between man and man, or the man of one Culture may be confronted by the dead form-world of another as presented in its communicable relics. In both cases the agent is the man himself. The closed-off act of A can be vivified by B only out of his own being, and _eo ipso_ it becomes B’s, his inward property, his work, and part of himself. There was no movement of “Buddhism” from India to China, but an acceptance of part of the Indian Buddhists’ store of images by Chinese of a certain spiritual tendency, who fashioned out a _new_ mode of religious expression having meaning for Chinese, and only Chinese, Buddhists. What matters in all such cases is not the original meanings of the forms, but the forms themselves, as disclosing to the active sensibility and understanding of the observer potential modes of his own creativeness. Connotations are not transferable. Men of two different kinds are parted, each in his own spiritual loneliness, by an impassable gulf. Even though Indians and Chinese in those days both felt as Buddhists, they were spiritually as far apart as ever. The same words, the same rites, the same symbol--but two different souls, each going its own way.

Searching through all Cultures, then, one will always find that the continuation of earlier creations into a later Culture is only apparent, and that in fact the younger _being_ has set up a few (very few) relations to the older _being_, always without regard to the original meanings of that which it makes its own. What becomes, then, of the “permanent conquests” of philosophy and science? We are told again and again how much of Greek philosophy still lives on to-day, but this is only a figure of speech without real content, for first Magian and then Faustian humanity, each with the deep wisdom of its unimpaired instincts, rejected that philosophy, or passed unregarding by it, or retained its formulæ under radically new interpretations. The naïve credulity of erudite enthusiasm deceives itself here--Greek philosophic notions would make a long catalogue, and the further it is taken, the more vanishingly small becomes the proportion of the alleged survivals. Our custom is simply to overlook as incidental “errors” such conceptions as Democritus’s theory of atomic images,[60] the very corporeal world of Plato’s “ideas,” and the fifty-two hollow spheres of Aristotle’s universe, as though we could presume to know what the dead meant better than they knew themselves! These things are truths and essential--only, not for us. The sum total of the Greek philosophy that we possess, actually and not merely superficially, is practically nil. Let us be honest and take the old philosophers at their word; not one proposition of Heraclitus or Democritus or Plato is true for us unless and until we have accommodated it to ourselves. And how much, after all, have we taken over of the methods, the concepts, the intentions, and the means of Greek science, let alone its basically incomprehensible terms? The Renaissance, men say, was completely under the “influence” of Classical art. But what about the form of the Doric temple, the Ionic column, the relation of column to architrave, the choice of colour, the treatment of background and perspective in painting, the principles of figure-grouping, vase-painting, mosaic, encaustic, the structural element in statuary, the proportions of Lysippus? Why did all this exercise no “influence?”

_Because that which one_ (here, the Renaissance artist) _wills to express is in him a priori_. Of the stock of dead forms that he had in front of him, he really saw only the few that he wanted to see, and saw them as he wanted them--namely, in line with his own intention and not with the intention of the original creator, for no living art ever seriously considers that. Try to follow, element by element, the “influence” of Egyptian plastic upon early Greek, and you will find in the end that there is none at all, but that the Greek will-to-form took out of the older art-stock some few characteristics that it would in any case have discovered in some shape for itself. All round the Classical landscape there were working, or had worked, Egyptians, Cretans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, and Phœnicians, and the works of these peoples--their buildings, ornaments, art-works, cults, state-forms, scripts, and sciences--were known to the Greeks in profusion. But how much out of all this mass did the Classical soul extract as its own means of expression? I repeat, it is only the relations that are _accepted_ that we observe. But what of those that were _not_ accepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in the former category the pyramid, pylon, and obelisk of Egypt, or hieroglyphic, or cuneiform? What of the stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was _not_ accepted by Gothic art and thought in Spain and Sicily? It is impossible to overpraise the wisdom (quite unconscious) that governed the choice and the unhesitating transvaluation of what was chosen. Every relation that was accepted was not only an exception, but also a misunderstanding, and the inner force of a Being is never so clearly evidenced as it is in this _art of deliberate misunderstanding_. The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it. Only consider the praises addressed by the West to Plato! From Bernard of Chartres and Marsilius Ficinus to Goethe and Schelling! And the more humble our acceptance of an alien religion, the more certain it is that that religion has already assumed the form of the new soul. Truly, someone ought to have written the history of the “three Aristotles”--Greek, Arabian, and Gothic--who had not one concept or thought in common. Or the history of the transformation of Magian Christianity into Faustian! We are told in sermon and book that this religion extended from the old Church into and over the Western field without change of essence. Actually, Magian man evolved out of the deepest depths of his dualistic world-consciousness a language of his own religious awareness that we call “the” Christian religion. So much of this experience as was communicable--words, formulæ, rites--was accepted by the man of the Late-Classical Civilization as a means of expression for his religious need; then it passed from man to man, even to the Germans of the Western pre-Culture, in words always the same and in sense always altering. Men would never have dared to _improve upon_ the original meanings of the holy words--it was simply that they did not know these meanings. If this be doubted, let the doubter study “the” idea of Grace, as it appears under the dualistic interpretation of Augustine affecting a substance in man, and under the dynamic interpretation of Calvin, affecting a will in man. Or that Magian idea, which we can hardly grasp at all, of the consensus (Arabic _ijma_)[61] wherein, as a consequence of the presence in each man of a _pneuma_ emanating from the divine _pneuma_, the unanimous opinion of the elect is held to be immediate divine Truth. It was this that gave the decisions of the early Church Councils their authoritative character, and it underlies the scientific methods that rule in the world of Islam to this day. And it was because Western men did not understand this that the Church Councils of later Gothic times amounted, for him, to nothing more than a kind of parliament for limiting the spiritual mobility of the Papacy. This idea of what a Council meant prevailed even in the fifteenth century--think of Constance and Basel, Savonarola and Luther--and in the end it disappeared, as futile and meaningless, before the conception of Papal Infallibility. Or, again, the idea, universal in the Early Arabian world, of the resurrection of the flesh, which again presupposed that of divine and human _pneuma_. Classical man assumed that the soul, as the form and meaning of the body, was somehow co-created herewith, and Greek thought scarcely mentions it. Silence on a matter of such gravity may be due to one or the other of two reasons--the idea’s not being there at all, or being so self-evident as not to emerge into consciousness as a problem. With Arabian man it was the latter. But just as self-evident for him was the notion that his _pneuma_ was an emanation from God that had taken up residence in his body. Necessarily, therefore, there had to be something from which the human soul should rise again on the Day of Judgment, and hence resurrection was thought of as ἔκ νεκρῶν, “out of the corpses.” This, in its deeper meaning, is utterly incomprehensible for the West. The words of Holy Scripture were not indeed doubted, but unconsciously another meaning was substituted by the finer minds amongst Catholics; this other meaning, unmistakable already in Luther and to-day quite general, is the conception of immortality as the continued existence to all eternity of the soul as a centre of force. Were Paul or Augustine to become acquainted with our ideas of Christianity, they would reject all our dogmas, all our books, and all our concepts as utterly erroneous and heretical.

As the strongest example of a system that to all appearance has travelled unaltered through two millennia, and yet actually has passed through three whole courses of evolution in three Cultures, with completely different meanings in each, we may take _Roman law_.