Intellectual creativeness of the Late period begins, not with, but after, the Reformation. Its most typical creation is free science. Even for Luther learning was still essentially the “handmaid of theology,” and Calvin had the freethinking doctor Servet burnt. The thought of the Springtimes--Faustian like Egyptian, Vedic, and Orphic--had felt its vocation to be the justification of faith by criticism. If criticism did not succeed, the critical method must be wrong. Knowledge was faith justified, not faith controverted.

Now, however, the critical powers of the city intellect have become so great that it is no longer content to affirm, but must test. The stock of believed probables, and especially that part of it which was received by the understanding and not the heart, was the first obvious target for dissecting activities. This distinguishes the Springtime Scholasticism from the actuality-philosophy of the Baroque--as it distinguishes Neoplatonist from Islamic, Vedic from Brahmanic, Orphic from Pre-Socratic, thought. The (shall we say) profane Causality of human life, the world-around, the process and meaning of cognition, become a problem. The Egyptian philosophy of the Middle Kingdom measured up the value of life in _this_ sense; and akin to it, in all probability, was the late pre-Confucian philosophy of China from 800 to 500 B.C. Only the book ascribed to Kwan-tse (d. 645) remains to give us some dim idea of this philosophy, but the indications, slight though they be, are that epistemological and biological problems occupied the centre of the one genuine philosophy of China, now utterly lost.

Within Baroque philosophy, Western natural-science stands by itself. No other Culture possesses anything like it, and assuredly it must have been from its beginnings, not a “handmaid of theology,” but _the servant of the technical Will-to-Power_, oriented to that end both mathematically and experimentally--from its very foundations a practical _mechanics_. And as it is firstly technique and only secondly theory, it must be as old as Faustian man himself. Accordingly, we find technical works of an astounding energy of combination even by 1000.[520] As early as the thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste[521] was treating space as a function of light. Petrus Peregrinus in 1289 wrote the best experimentally based treatise on magnetism that appeared before Gilbert (1600). And Roger Bacon, the disciple of both, developed a natural-scientific theory of knowledge to serve as basis for his technical investigations.[522] But boldness in the discovery of dynamic interlinkages went further still. The Copernican system was hinted at in a manuscript of 1322 and a few decades later was mathematically developed by the Paris Occamists, Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Oresme.[523] Let us not deceive ourselves as to the fundamental motive-power of these explorations. Pure contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment for ever, but not so the Faustian symbol of the _machine_, which urged us to mechanical constructions even in the twelfth century and made “_Perpetuum mobile_” the Prometheus-idea of the Western intellect. For us the first thing is ever the _working hypothesis_--the very kind of thought-product that is meaningless to other Cultures. It is an astounding fact (to which, however, we must accustom ourselves) that the idea of immediately exploiting in practice any knowledge of natural relations that may be acquired is alien to every sort of mankind except the Faustian (and those who, like Japanese, Jews, and Russians, have to-day come under the intellectual spell of its Civilization). The very notion of the working hypothesis implicitly contains a dynamic lay-out of the universe. Theoria, contemplative vision of actuality, was for those subtly inquiring monks only secondary, and, being itself the outcome of the technical passion, it presently led them, quite imperceptibly, to the typically Faustian conception of God as the Grand Master of the machine, who could accomplish everything that they themselves in their impotence only dared to wish. Insensibly the world of God became, century by century, more and more like the _Perpetuum mobile_. And, imperceptibly also, as the scanning of nature became sharper and sharper in the school of experiment and technique, and the Gothic myth became more and more shadowy, the concepts of monkish working hypotheses developed, from Galileo onwards, into the critically illuminated numina of modern science, the collisions and the fields, gravitation, the velocity of light, and the “electricity” which in our electrodynamic world-picture has absorbed into itself the other forms of energy and thereby attained to a sort of physical monotheism. They are the concepts that are set up behind the formulæ, to endow them with a mythic visibility for the inner eye. The numbers themselves are technical elements, levers and screws, overhearings of the world’s secrets. The Classical Nature-thought--and that of others also--required no numbers, for it strove for no powers. The _pure_ mathematic of Pythagoras and Plato had no relation whatever to the nature-views of Democritus and Aristotle.

Just as the Classical mind felt Prometheus’s defiance of the gods as “hybris,” so our Baroque felt the machine as diabolical.[524] The spirit of Hell had betrayed to man the secret of mastering the world-mechanism and even of himself enacting the part of God. And hence it is that all purely priestly natures, that live wholly in the world of the spirit and expect nothing of “this world”--and notably the idealist philosophers, the Classicists, the Humanists, and even Nietzsche--have for technique nothing but silent hostility.

Every Late philosophy contains this critical protest against the uncritical intuitiveness of the Spring. But this criticism of the intellect that is sure of its own superiority affects also faith itself and evokes the one great creation in the field of religion that is the peculiarity of the Late period--every Late period--namely, Puritanism.

Puritanism manifests itself in the army of Cromwell and his Independents, iron, Bible-firm, psalm-singing as they rode into battle; in the ranks of the Pythagoreans, who in the bitter earnest of their gospel of duty wrecked gay Sybaris and branded it for ever as the city without morals; in the armies of the early Caliphs, which subdued not only states, but souls. Milton’s _Paradise Lost_, many surahs of the Koran, the little that we know of Pythagorean teachings--all come to the same thing. They are enthusiasms of a sober spirit, cold intensities, dry mysticism, pedantic ecstasy. And yet, even so, a wild piety flickers up once more in them. All the transcendent inwardness that the City can produce after attaining to unconditional mastery over the soul of the Land is here concentrated, with a sort of terror lest it should prove unreal and evanescent, and is correspondingly impatient, pitiless, and unforgiving. Puritanism--not in the West only, but in all Cultures--lacks the smile that had illumined the religion of the Spring--every Spring--the moments of profound joy in life, the humour of life. Nothing of the quiet blissfulness that in the Magian Springtime flashes up so often in the stories of Jesus’s childhood, or in Gregory Nazianzen, is to be found in the Koran, nothing in the palpable blitheness of St. Francis’s songs in Milton. Deadly earnest broods over the Jansenist mind of Port Royal, over the meetings of the black-clothed Roundheads, by whom Shakespeare’s “Merry England”--_Sybaris over again_--was annihilated in a few years. Now for the first time the battle against the Devil, whose bodily nearness they all felt, was fought with a dark and bitter fury. In the seventeenth century more than a million witches were burnt--alike in the Protestant North, the Catholic South, and even the communities in America and India. Joyless and sour are the duty-doctrines of Islam (_fikh_), with its hard intellectuality, and the Westminster Catechisms of 1643, and the Jansenist ethics (Jansen’s _Augustinus_, 1640) as well--for in the realm of Loyola, too, there was of inward necessity a Puritan movement. Religion is livingly experienced metaphysic, but the company of the “godly,” as the Independents called themselves, and the Pythagoreans, and the disciples of Mohammed, all alike experienced it, not with the senses, but primarily as a concept. Parshva, who about 600 B.C. founded the sect of the “Unfettered”[525] on the Ganges, taught, like the other Puritans of his time, that salvation came, not from sacrifices and rights, but only from knowledge of the identity of Atman and Brahman. In all Puritan poetry the place of the old Gothic visions is taken by an unbridled, yet withal jejune, spirit of allegory. In the waking-consciousness of these ascetics the concept is the only real power. Pascal’s wrestlings were about concepts and not, like Meister Eckart’s, about shapes. Witches were burnt because they were proved, and not because they were seen in the air o’ nights; the Protestant jurists employed the witches’ hammer of the Dominicans because it was built on concepts. The Madonnas of the early Gothic had appeared to their suppliants, but those of Bernini no man ever saw. They exist because they are proved--and there came to be a positive enthusiasm for existence of this sort. Milton, Cromwell’s great secretary of state, clothed concepts with shapes, and Bunyan brings a whole mythology of concepts into ethical-allegorical activity. From that it is but a step to Kant, in whose conceptual ethics the Devil assumes his final shape as the Radically Evil.

We have to emancipate ourselves from the surfaces of history--and, especially, to thrust aside the artificial fences in which the methodology of Western sciences has paddocked it--before we can see that Pythagoras, Mohammed, and Cromwell embody one and the same movement in three Cultures.

Pythagoras was not a philosopher. According to all statements of the Pre-Socratics, he was a saint, prophet and founder of a fanatically religious society that forced its truths upon the people around it by every political and military means. The destruction of Sybaris by Croton--an event which, we may be sure, has survived in historical memory only because it was the climax of a wild religious war--was an explosion of the same hate that saw in Charles I and his gay Cavaliers not merely doctrinal error, but also worldly disposition as something that must be destroyed root and branch. A myth purified and conceptually fortified, combined with rigorous ethical precepts, imbued the Pythagoreans with the conviction that they would attain salvation before all other men. The gold tablets found in Thurii and Petelia, which were put into the hand of the dead initiate, carried the assurance of the god: “Happy and blessed one, thou shalt be no more a mortal, but a god.” It is the same certainty that the Koran gave to all believers who fought in the holy war against the infidel--“The monasticism of Islam is the religious war,” says a hadith of the Prophet--the same which filled Cromwell’s Ironsides when they scattered the King’s “Philistines” and “Amalekites” at Marston Moor and Naseby.

Islam was no more a religion of the desert in particular than Zwingli’s faith was a religion of the high mountains in particular. It is incident, and no more, that the Puritan movement for which the Magian world was ripe proceeded from a man of Mecca and not from a Monophysite or a Jew. For in the northern Arabian desert there were the Christian states of the Ghassanids and Lakhmids, and in the Sabæan South there were religious wars waged between Christians and Jews that involved the world of states from Assuan to the Sassanid Empire. The Congress of Princes at Marib[526] was attended by hardly a single pagan, and shortly after this date South Arabia came under Persian--that is, Mazdaist--government. Mecca was a little island of ancient Arabian paganism in the midst of a world of Jews and Christians, a mere relic that had long been mined by the ideas of the great Magian religions. The little of this paganism that filtered into the Koran was later explained away by the Commentary of the Sunna and its Syro-Mesopotamian intellect. At most Islam was a new religion only to the same extent as Lutheranism was one.[527] Actually, it was the prolongation of the great early religions. Equally, its expansion was not (as is even now imagined) a “migration of peoples” proceeding from the Arabian Peninsula, but an onslaught of enthusiastic believers, which like an avalanche bore along with it Christians, Jews, and Mazdaists and set them at once in its front rank as fanatical Moslems. It was Berbers from the homeland of St. Augustine who conquered Spain, and Persians from Irak who drove on to the Oxus. The enemy of yesterday became the front-rank comrade of to-morrow. Most of the “Arabs” who in 717 attacked Constantinople for the first time, had been born Christians. About 650 Byzantine literature[528] quite suddenly vanished, and the deeper meaning of the fact has so far never been noticed--it was just that the Arabian literature took up the tale. The soul of the Magian Culture found at last its true expression in Islam, and therewith became truly the “Arabian,” free thenceforth from all bondage to the Pseudomorphosis. The Iconoclastic movement, led by Islam, but long prepared by Monophysites and Jews, advanced to and even beyond Byzantium, where the Syrian Leo III (717-41) raised this Puritan movement of Islamic-Christian sects--the Paulicians about 650 and the Bogomils later[529]--to predominance.

The great figures of Mohammed’s entourage, such as Abu Bekr and Omar, are the near relatives of the Pyms and Hampdens of the English Revolution, and we should see this relationship to be nearer still if we knew more than we do about the Hanifs, the Arabian Puritans before and about the Prophet. All of them had won out of Predestination the guarantee that they were God’s elect. The grand Old Testament exaltation of Parliament and the camps of Independency--which left behind it, in many an English family, even to the nineteenth century,[530] the belief that the English are the descendants of the ten Lost Tribes of Israel, a nation of saints predestined to govern the world--dominated also the emigration to America which began with the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620. It formed that which may be called the American religion of to-day, and bred and fostered the trait which gives the Englishman even now his particular political insouciance, an assurance that is essentially religious and has its roots in predestination. The Pythagoreans themselves, too (an unheard-of thing in the religious history of the Classical world) assumed political power for the furtherance of religious ends and sought to advance their puritanism from Polis to Polis. Everywhere else unit cults reigned in unit states, each of which left the other unconcernedly to its own religious duties; here and here only do we find a community of saints, and their practical energy as far surpassed that of the old Orphics as fighting Independency surpassed the spirit of the Reformation wars.

But in Puritanism there is hidden already the seed of Rationalism, and after a few enthusiastic generations have passed, this bursts forth everywhere and makes itself supreme. This is the step from Cromwell to Hume. Not cities in general, not even the great cities, but a few particular cities now become the theatre of intellectual history--Socratic Athens, Abbassid Baghdad, eighteenth-century London and Paris.[531] “Enlightenment” is the cliché of that time. The sun bursts forth--but what is it that clears off the heavens of the critical consciousness to make way for that sun?

Rationalism signifies the belief in the data of critical understanding (that is, of the “reason”) _alone_. In the Springtime men could say “_Credo quia absurdum_,” because they were certain that the comprehensible and the incomprehensible were _both_ necessary constituents of the world--the nature which Giotto painted, in which the Mystics immersed themselves, and into which reason can penetrate, but only so far as the deity permits it to penetrate. But now a secret jealousy breeds the notion of the Irrational--that which, as incomprehensible, is _therefore_ valueless. It may be scorned openly as superstition, or privily as metaphysic. Only critically-established understanding possesses value. And secrets are merely evidences of ignorance. The new _secretless_ religion is in its highest potentialities called wisdom (σοφία), its priests philosophers, and its adherents “educated” people. According to Aristotle, the old religion is indispensable only to the uneducated,[532] and his view is Confucius’s and Gotama Buddha’s, Lessing’s and Voltaire’s. Men go away from Culture “back to nature,” but this nature is not something livingly experienced, but something proved, something born of, and accessible only to, the intellect--a Nature that has no existence at all for a peasantry, a Nature by which one is not in the least overawed but merely put into a condition of sensibility. Natural religion, rational religion, Deism--all this is not lived metaphysics, but a comprehended mechanics, called by Confucius the “Laws of Heaven” and by Hellenism τύχη. Formerly philosophy was the handmaid of transcendent religiousness, but now comes sensibility, and philosophy must therefore become scientific as epistemology and critique of nature and critique of values. No doubt there was a feeling that this philosophy was, even so, nothing but a diluted dogmatism, for the idea that pure knowledge was _possible_ itself involved a belief. Systems were woven out of phenomenally guaranteed beginnings, but in the long run the result was merely to say “Force” instead of “God,” and “Conservation of Energy” instead of “Eternity.” Under all Classical rationalism is to be found Olympus, under all Western the dogma of the sacraments. And so our Western philosophy swings to and fro between religion and technical science, and is defined thus, or thus, according as the author of the definition is a man with some relic of priesthood still in him, or is a pure expert and technician of thought.

“_Weltanschauung_” is the characteristic expression for an enlightened waking-consciousness that, under the guidance of the critical understanding, looks about it in a godless light-world and, when sense-perceptions are found not to square with sound human reason, treats sense as a “lying jade.” That which was once myth--the actualest of the actual--is now subjected to the methods of what is called Euhemerism. The learned Euhemerus, about 300 B.C., “explained” the Classical divinities to the public that they had formerly served so well, and the process occurs under one form or another in every “age of enlightenment.” We have our Euhemeristic interpretations of Hell as a guilty conscience, the Devil as evil desire, and God as the beauty of nature, and it is the same tendency that declares itself when Attic tomb-inscriptions of about 400 invoke, not the city-goddess Athene, but a goddess “Demos”--a near relation, by the way, of the Jacobins’ Goddess of Reason--and where the δαιμονίον for Socrates, νοῦς for other philosophers, take the place of Zeus. Confucius says “heaven” instead of “Shang-ti,” which means that he believes only in laws of nature. The “collection” and “ordering” of the canonical writings of China by the Confucians was a colossal act of Euhemerism, in which actually almost all the old religious works were literally destroyed and the residue subjected to rationalist falsification. Had it been possible, the enlighteners of our eighteenth century would no doubt have served the Gothic heritage in the same way.[533] Confucius belongs to the Chinese “eighteenth century” through and through. Lao-tse (who despised him) stands at a midpoint in the Taoist movement, which manifested traits of Protestantism, Puritanism, and Pietism in turn, and both finally propagated a practical world-tone based upon a wholly mechanistic world-view. The word “_tao_” underwent in the Late period of China just the same continuous alteration of its fundamental content, and in the same mechanistic direction, as the word “Logos” in the history of Classical thought from Heraclitus to Posidonius, and as the word “Force” between Galileo’s day and ours. That which once had been grandly moulded myth and cult is called, in this “religion of educated people,” _Nature_ and _Virtue_--but this Nature is a reasonable mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge.[534] Confucius and Buddha, Socrates and Rousseau are at one in this. Confucius contains little of prayer or of meditation upon the life after death, and nothing at all of revelation. To busy oneself overmuch with sacrifices and rites stamps one as uneducated and unreasoning. Gotama Buddha and his contemporary Mahavira, the founder of Jainism[535]--both of whom came from the political world of the lower Ganges, east of the old Brahmanic Culture-field--recognized, as everyone knows, neither the idea of God nor myth and cult. Of the real teaching of Buddha little can now be ascertained--for it all appears in the colours of the later fellah-religion baptized by his name--but one of the unquestionably authentic ideas concerning “conditioned arising”[536] is the derivation of suffering _from ignorance_--ignorance, namely, of the “Four Noble Truths.” This is true rationalism. Nirvana, for them, is a purely intellectual release and corresponds exactly with the “Autarkeia” and “Eudaimonia” of the Stoics. It is that condition of the understanding and waking-consciousness for which Being no longer is.

The great ideal of the educated of such periods is the Sage. The sage goes back to Nature--to Ferney or Ermenonville, to Attic gardens or Indian groves--which is the most intellectual way of being a megalopolitan. The sage is the man of the Golden Mean. His askesis consists in a judicious depreciation of the world in favour of meditation. The wisdom of the enlightenment never interferes with comfort. Moral with the great Myth to back it is always a sacrifice, a cult, even to extremes of asceticism, even to death; but Virtue with Wisdom at its back is a sort of secret enjoyment, a superfine intellectual egoism. And so the ethical teacher who is outside real religion becomes the Philistine. Buddha, Confucius, Rousseau, are arch-Philistines, for all the nobility of their ordered ideas, and the pedantry of the Socratic life-wisdom is insurmountable.

Along with this (shall we call it) scholasticism of sane reason, there must of inner necessity be a rationalistic mysticism of the educated. The Western Enlightenment is of English origin and Puritan parentage. The rationalism of the Continent comes wholly from Locke. In opposition to it there arose in Germany the Pietists (Herrnhut, 1700, Spener and Francke, and in Württemberg Oetinger) and in England the Methodists (Wesley “awakened” by Herrnhut, 1738). It was Luther and Calvin over again--the English at once organized themselves for a world-movement and the Germans lost themselves in mid-European conventicles. The Pietists of Islam are to be found in _Sufism_, which is not of “Persian” but of common Aramæan origin and in the eighth century spread all over the Arabian world. Pietists or Methodists, too, are the Indian lay preachers, who shortly before Buddha’s time were teaching release from the cycle of life (_sansara_) through immersion in the identity of Atman and Brahman. But Pietists or Methodists, too, are Lao-tse and his disciples and--notwithstanding their rationalism--the Cynic mendicants and itinerant preachers and the Stoic tutors, domestic chaplains, and confessors of early Hellenism.[537] And Pietism may ascend even to the peak of rationalist vision, of which Swedenborg is the great example, which created for Stoics and Sufists whole worlds of fancy, and by which Buddhism was prepared for its reconstruction as Mahayana. The expansion of Buddhism and that of Taoism in their original significations are closely analogous to the Methodist expansion in America, and it is no accident that they both reached their full maturity in those regions (lower Ganges and south of the Yang-tse-kiang) which had cradled the respective Cultures.