اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

Chapter Eleven

BEAUTY AND TRUTH

Thus art moves towards its own dissolution, and in doing so— most illuminatingly —it touches on all the phases, its beginnings, its childhood, its incompleteness, its earlier ventures and trespasses, and in its decay interprets its growth and becoming.

NIETZSCHE

From this gradual conquest of nature, which is really her successful deception by the human intelligence, we can make our way back to the individual psychological interpretation of play and the personal pleasure which pertains to it — that is, to the problem of esthetic. The exemplar from which play proceeded certainly lacks its essential characters of freedom and pleasure. Originally play was a matter of very serious and significant ceremonies which Aad to be held at definite occasions if the life and well-being of the community were not to be endangered. Therefore at these pre-religious ceremonies neither the life nor the blood of the individual was spared to compel the favour of destiny in the community. If we contrast with this the character of the games which developed out of it, we see that their freedom amounts to a liberation from the compulsion of nature, and the attainment of pleasure to the feeling of superiority that is its outcome. We have almost to invert the usual view of the “excess ”-theory of play and say that instead of play originating in excess of force, it produces this force or, more exactly, sets it free. Man sees that he need not continually sacrifice life to nature; he separates the ceremony from natural process and the idea of tribute, so that he can enjoy it freely as a triumph over nature. Play is therefore not a ceremony which has sunk to a mere show, but one which has been raised to freedom — indeed, it is only as such an expression of man’s increasing dominion over nature that we can explain the change of ceremony into play; so far from being meaningless or interpretable only as a survival, the activity thereby acquired a higher sense. On the other hand, our explanation also makes intelligible the pleasure which the individual gets from this sham activity, in that we regard this as a saving of vitality and, indeed, of life. Here, obviously, lies also the origin of art, which, for all that it is supposed to be derived from an “art for art’s sake ” attitude, in reality, as we Lave seen, from the beginning subserved spiritual purposes of a magical or religious sort. Art, like play, passes from the condition of being a compulsory activity necessary for life into the realm of freedom — even if (again as in play) this liberation can never be wholly successful. Hence we have the explanation of the two types of artist: that which creates from an inner need and that which does so from an inner surplus. But in both cases the greatest part of creative force can come only from an excess that arises during and out of the actual creation, just as in play the playing itself is needed to liberate the energy in the individual. The productive process itself, combined with the incessant struggle for individual freedom against the bonds of the data (collective ideology or material), sets free excess forces with a greater accompaniment of pleasure the further its successful progress continues. This cumulative excess of force in the process we shall study separately in the next chapter, in its effect on the creative artist. At present we will begin by trying to make use of the artideological element in the understanding that we now have of play. For the ceremony, in rising from the compulsory sacrifice to nature into the realm of pleasure by the individual’s liberation from nature, acquired not only the psychical quality of play, but its esthetic quality also. When it is still tied to nature, the ceremony is more or less an imitation thereof, whereas the freedom of play tends rather towards stylization — the one being, even in the deeper sense, nearer to truth, and the other to beauty. When I say “in the deeper sense,” I mean that man’s acceptance of his dependence on nature is more honest, while freedomideology, beyond a certain point, presumes the negation of that dependence and is therefore, also in a deeper sense, dishonest. This fundamental dishonesty towards nature then comes out as the consciousness of guilt, which we see active in every process of art, and which is not wholly absent from play. This feeling of guilt, of human hybris — of which the Greeks were the first to become conscious — also allows neither play nor the exercise of art to rise wholly from compulsion to freedom; nay, the more strongly man feels his freedom and his independence, the more intense on the other hand is the consciousness of guilt, which appears in the individual partly restrictive, partly creative, but in the community is accompanied by the gradual growth and formation of another ideology, that of truth, which acts paralysingly on the freedom of the ideology of beauty. This scientific ideology born of the feeling of guilt therefore appears first in Greece, where the idea of artistic beauty also attained its greatest freedom. This is the profound reason for Plato’s exclusion of artists from his ideal republic; for in their extreme type, the poet, he saw the truth-falsifying element, which his scientific ideologism condemned as lying. Owing to this scientific guiltfeeling in the Greeks, the only art-ideology permitted to their philosophers was one that had to be content with the imitation of nature, whereas their real works represent a much higher spiritual truth. And so the Greek identification of the true with the good and the beautiful appears as the effort of a man, nervous of his likeness to god, to reconcile the freedom-ideology of art with the guilt-ideology of science. But this latter also leads to “ hybris,” since its over-valuation of the intellectual faculties of knowledge in man is only possible by the denial of his animal nature. The artistic ideology of the “head,” which, as we have seen, rose from the chthonian mother earth to the majesty of self, never in fact escaped from this mother earth entirely: the animal content was but changed into an esthetic form. The scientific ideology of the “head,” on the other hand, is formal and phenomenological, and the thought-processes regard it as beneath their dignity to occupy themselves with the animal content. This latter comes but gradually, and it found its clearest expression in the materialistic outlook of the last century which culminated —and collapsed — in psycho-analysis. In Classical Greece we can watch this struggle of the two ideologies, on which even today every controversy still turns, growing out of humanity’s own development. The truth of the dependence of man on nature, which play and art deny, reappears out of this guilt-feeling as the impulse to scientific knowledge; nay, more, as a compulsion not only to admit, but to profess it. But art itself is influenced by it, so that we find it, when at its highest point, already infected by scientific ideas, and particularly with the laws of geometric proportion (in architecture and sculpture) and of mathematics (in music and metre). But far more important than these special influences — which in fact had already begun in the East, in Egypt and Babylon — is the general influence of the scientific idea of truth on the esthetic idea of beauty. For it was not science that was born in Greece, but only the type of scientific man, just as Greece was the cradle, not of art, but of the artistic type. We will take two examples (which are fundamental for the whole artistic development of Europe) to illustrate the influence of this idea of truth on that of beauty. The one is portraiture, the other tragedy. The problem of the beginnings of Greek pictorial art brings us again into a regular wasps’ nest of art-history; namely, the question of when the beginning of actual portraiture came. Ernst Pfuhl, in a recent monograph on this subject, discusses concisely the scanty material and its various interpretations, and we will begin by following his rather polemical attitude, so as to get some true insight into the actual problem itself from the contradictions involved. There is a passage in Pliny (Naturalis Historia, XXXV, 153) where he says that “ Lysistratos, brother of Lysippos, was the first to make complete likenesses of his model; till then men had been represented as beautiful as possible.” *

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1E. Pfuhl: Die Anfange der griechischen Bildnishunst. Ein Beitrag xur Geschichte der Individualitat (Munich, 1927).

This. state ment—to which the greatest importance has been attached in the history of art — is taken in conjunction with the accounts given of the technical methods that were used by Lysistratos; he is said to have made plaster casts from life, filled these with_ wax, and finally only “retouched” them, as we say. Pfuhl, at the beginning of his book, objects to the rash adoption of this technical statement, which would make of Lysistratos not only a realist, but a mere philistine, below the artistic level; he thinks Pliny was really talking of casts used for study. As regards the statement itself, apart from this technical question — namely, the assertion that Lysistratos was the first to produce exact likenesses — Pfuhl thinks it must be taken cum grano salis. Indeed, he thinks that the idea of a likeness 1m our sense is lacking not only in archaic art but in that of the whole fifth century, and that it is only at the end of that century, and in the minor arts, that we get traces of individualization in heads which are clearly meant to be copies of real life. In monumental art there is no single real portrait throughout the fifth century. Pfuhl thinks that the common view flourishes in arthistories because of the intrusion of our own ways of thought, which have been schooled for centuries on the individual portrait and consequently are apt to take the traditional likeness of famous poets and philosophers as representing the individual personalities instead of the ideal type. For ourselves we are naturally not concerned with the conflict of opinion, which depends ultimately on a matter of dating, except in so far as it is one of the sources for studying the underlying problem. Although the fifth century was “ only the necessary prelude, or at most the first uncertain step to a future portraiture, and not itself such,” we can detect the truth-ideology already beginning to influence that of beauty. The likeness was no longer to be an ideal type of poet, philosopher, etc., but the particular individual, who-is unique and not to be confused with others. And even if we take up no definite attitude to the purely academic question of date, it still seems very remarkable — even more so than the supposed miracle of an early portraiture —that Pfuhl should “feel compelled to take the first individual likeness, in the purely realistic sense,” to be that of Aristotle,” the very man, he adds, who created a literary biography out of earlier attempts; and, we may add, who is the admitted prototype of scientific ideology, which thus found pictorial expression in this individual head. If we add also that the first individual portrait in the general form is, according to Pfuhl, that’ of Plato (for the oldest Socrates portraits owe their individual character only to the fact that this philosopher happened to be cast in the Silenus type), we have a coincidence of individual portrait art with the growing type of the thinker, which, at any rate in the light of our own views, we cannot take to be a matter of chance. The very fact, too, that these individual philosopher portraits contrast with the ideal likeness of the poets whom we feel as individualistic heads (Homer, Sophocles, Euripides) is rather to be understood from the standpoint of cultural than from that of art history, as due to the contrast between the collective nature of the poetic material and the purely personal attitude of the philosopher. For the philosopher, who first came into existence in Greece, represents a new individual type, while the artist is as old as humanity itself and links up —in point of subject and even partly of form—to a millennial tradition. If we now pass to our second example and inquire how the early scientific ideology springing from the guilt-sense shows its influence in poetry and, especially, tragedy, we have only to take the three great tragedians in their historical succession in order to obtain a right view.” The dithyrambic #Eschylus is followed by the psychologizing Sophocles, and he by the moralizing Euripides.

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1 In this he follows Studniczka: Das Bildnis des Aristoteles (Leipzig, 1908): it can hardly have been sculptured much before 325, since the philosopher died in 322, in his sixty-second year.

2 There is no personal portrait of Aischylus; the date of the Sophocles head is disputed (Pfuhl, op. cit., p. rr); i.e., it is of the transition period; the portraits of the consciously interpreting Euripides have a strong individualistic effect.

In Sophocles’ Edipus — which therefore psycho-analysis is quite right in taking as its example — we see the new truth-ideology victoriously attacking the esthetic laws of dramatic action. The Edipus gives us an action developed in reverse order, which is as much as to say that it provides a psychological genesis for the destiny_ theory; thus a direct path leads thence to Ibsen’s Wild Duck, which was the product of the materialistic science of the nineteenth century. CEdipus pays for the solution of the Sphinx’s riddle, if not directly with his life, at least with his happiness; but the impulse to penetrate to the truth behind appearances is stronger than any other ideology. Sophocles’ CEdipus is no longer a tragic hero who, like Aischylus’ Prometheus, atones for a deed of sin, but an intellectually arrogant man who crashes because of his mere striving for knowledge, so that it is unimportant what he wanted to discover.’ What is not unimportant, however, is that this impulse to discover discloses itself more or less as a confession of faith; that is, that it is psychological rather than philosophical. The CEdipus of the Sophoclean age could no longer be a hero, even if he went through the same process of development as his heroic predecessor; he was so far sicklied over by the paleness of thought that he could no longer act, but only examine introspectively the psychological motives of his potential actions. He is thus not only the distant ancestor of Ibsen’s Gregers Werle, who tries to cure men by showing up their life’s lie, but the patron saint of psycho-analysis, which makes the same attempt in the name of a scientific ideology, but only succeeds therapeutically in so far as it is untrue.” Between CEdipus and Gregers stands their spiritual kinsman Hamlet, who, however, is not the pattern for the truth-seeking healer, but the godfather of the thought-obstructed neurotic. But however far the influence of scientific ideology on art may go, art always remains interested in the representation of the type, though it has to exemplify the type individually, and if possible by something real.

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1 See my remarks on this aspect of the Edipus myth in Modern Education. p. 192.¢t seq. 2 I have discussed these ideas in Truth and Reality.

Science on the other hand is interested primarily in the study of the special case and the profound knowledge of individual variations, and only in the end may it perhaps reach its general formulations. Thus not only CEdipus, but Hamlet and Gregers too are types, as is every true poetic figure, regardless of how much or how little we know of its creator. It does not make the Edipus Rex less intelligible that we know so little of Sophocles; indeed, the few facts we do know might rather mislead us than otherwise in the understanding of his work. And the type-symbolism of The Wild Duck gains nothing from the scanty biography of Ibsen, who all his life-time was more of a sober pharmacist than a great poet. And that we cannot even be sure in Shakspere’s case of the actual author is reckoned by Hermann Bahr as an invaluable advantage which the English poet possesses over Goethe, about whom every schoolboy can quote the facts which are supposed to explain the growth and meaning of his work. In this sense the modern “ psychological” biography represents the latest intrusion of the ideology of science into that of art. This conflict between the ideologies of truth and beauty, which only worked its way into the full consciousness of mankind in Greece, is actually as old as humanity itself, because in last analysis the root of it is the dualism between mortality and immortality. For, in our view, even the most primitive art consists in the attempt to make the abstract idea of the soul “true” by making it concrete; that is, esthetically satisfying, or, in other words, beautiful. The question whether primitive likenesses were portraits or of symbolic character could therefore become prominent in art-history only as and when truth and beauty fell apart, as they have increasingly done in the European spiritual culture from the time of the Greeks onwards. For primitive artists the question was quite meaningless, for their truth was not realistic, but spiritual. Historians of primitive art are in fact unanimous in taking the first pictures of men to be those of the dead, symbolizing their continued existence; not real portraits, but a Pictorially concrete representation of their soul — when possible in the permanent material of stone, or at any rate in wood, which typifies resurrection. Among those are the African poles of the dead and the totempoles of the American Indians, and also the schematic menhir statues (of which about a dozen have been found in France) of the stone age: stones of “about human size, of a rounded shape, showing eyes, nose, necklace, and sometimes uncouth suggestions in relief of arms and legs.” Schuchhardt, who (op.cit., p. 66) gives this description, adds that “ without doubt these were the models for the similar-formed reliefs in the graves of Petit Morin, whose outline is otherwise inexplicable (see our illustration). Schuchhardt has, moreover, gone the right way to explain these primitive works of art, when he compares them with the later grave-stele as the resting-place of a soul moving freely in space: and in actual fact we find on Egyptian and Cretan obelisks birds to represent the soul. But when he finds the schematically indicated outline of the menhir statues coarse in comparison with the superb observation of nature shown in the small human figures of the palzolithic caves, he overlooks, as his materialistic theories force him to do, the difference in the ideological will to art in the two periods. This, on the contrary, Herbert Kiihn emphasizes: “The dead man is represented on the menhir statues, not naturalistically, but, in accord with the thought of the time, imaginatively. Nose and eyebrows are indicated by a stroke, the eyes are usually circular chisellings ; arms or fingers are often represented. Some are masculine and have weapons, but the majority are female, with breasts.” These strongly stylized portraits of late neolithic times are followed by the still more schematic representations of the bronze age which have progressed into the geometric style.

The reason for this no doubt lies in the increasing development of the soul-idea, which made a literal reproduction of man more and more unnecessary, while the abstract soul-idea, as the essential, received more and more expression. If we want to get back to the realistic core of the portrait, we must go right to pre-artistic times, when there were as yet no representations of man, but the embalmed corpse was the real image of the dead. This is true of the mummified forms of so-called crouched graves, of which Klaatsch gives some good illustrations, and also of the prepared skulls which many primitive peoples set on poles. This would throw light also on the question of priority between painting and sculpture. The oldest representation of man that we know is the plastic figures, flat and round, of palzolithic times, which, as works of art, only reproduce the essential without being true to nature. Thus I would see in the exaggeration of the female forms in (for instance) the Venus of Willendorf and other stone-age sculptures, not a naturalistic reroduction of a fat-bodied type of woman, but the “ artistic ” emphasis of the female, perhaps the maternal, principle. However that may be, plastic aims more at reality because it grows out of the desire to preserve the body as a whole; though all the same it does not reproduce an exact portrait of reality, because the belief in the soul (which is the necessary preliminary to artistic form) permits, or rather demands, an abstract representation of the essential. Painting, on the other hand, is from the first rather a subjective reproduction of what is seen, not of what is, and is therefore employed rather for the representation of animals than of men. Accordingly man is at first shown only when dead, but animals when alive; and hence the naturalism of animal pictures — which are not imitation of nature, but a representation of life — along with the stylization of human representations which are a concrete picture of the soul-idea. But it is not long, as we have shown, before the animal becomes the concrete bearer of the human soul and thence onwards the two forms mingle, because animals also can be represented as having a soul, and man also as being alive.* In any case we believe we have made it clear that the truthand-beauty ideology which corresponded to the mortal and immortal, to life and death, originally found expression in different art-forms before it split into two different spiritual attitudes in Greece. These, the scientific and the esthetic, thereafter influence also the further development of art-ideology in Western Europe. It might be said that until the Greeks living man was never the subject of artistic, certainly not of plastic, representation, but only the dead; that is, the soul that lived on after death. What enabled the Greeks, however, to override this tabu, which is still held among savages, and to represent living men as well, was the fact that they had in the mean while achieved a philosophical notion of the soul through their ideology of scientific truth and so had disembarrassed themselves of the one great problem, which had always exercised the artist hitherto, that of the concrete representation of the soul. When the Greek idea of the soul became that of the Psyche, man acquired living that soul which earlier had been something into which death changed him, and thereafter the art of human portraiture more and more depicts the soul of the living. This artistic freedom in the representation of the living soul found its highest expression in portraiture, which does not represent the actual, but the essential, man — that is, the soul.

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1 It is generally agreed today that the animal representations of primitive times have some ‘'religious’’ character. This is true both of the Pyrenees finds of French scientists and of African rock-paintings, at the base of which Frobenius found burial grounds. The problem, still unsolved in the history of art, of the relation between Bushman art and the South European cave-paintings can be left at the moment; but ‘‘even in these oldest times there is no sharp line between sculpture and painting; outline drawings probably arose out of sculpture" (Klaatsch, op. cit., p. 55).

But whereas in pre-Greek art the dead man’s soul could only be represented abstractly, and not as living, the representation of the living soul, which reached its culmination in portraiture, required a living soul for its very purpose of giving the picture life. And thus finally the living soul was no longer taken from the object depicted, but “added” by the working artist himself, of whom we then say that he has “put his soul into” the work and given it both life and immortality. The beginning of this development came in Greek portraiture of the Late Classical period, in which we admire — and for that matter the Greeks themselves admired — not the realistic likeness, even if it were photographically true, but the artistic ideology which made such work possible and, apart from the portrait-likeness, disclosed the spirit of the poet or the philosopher. Even if the artist aimed at an individual likeness or induced this effect, nevertheless the work in its spiritual expression was collective, since it showed in some indefinable way the ruling ideology of art or philosophy in the heads of the artist or philosopher. From Egypt, too, we have pictures and masks which seem to have been good likenesses, but no one will put these portraits, which served the purpose of the cult of the dead, higher than the ideal portraits of Classical Greece because the latter had less likeness and more spirit. To reproduce a likeness is not yet art—or no longer art. For the Egyptians the dead man had to live on in the Beyond just as he was, and so his portrait had to be as like as possible. But the Greek philosopher or poet was actually exchanging his material for an ideal immortality, and therefore that portrait was best which gave the purest expression of this spirituality: it was beautiful, while the other was only true.’ In order to show how far the realistic representation in art depends on belief in the dead and the cult of the soul, and only in that context aimed at the true reproduction of nature, we need only refer to the Egyptian ka.

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1 The same holds good for Roman portraiture, which was nearer an ancestral mask, however true it is that, in contrast to the Egyptian, ‘‘ the self-consciousness of a people of marked force of will lies behind’’ (Pfubl, op. cit., p. 17).

The ka is a life-principle, different from body and soul, which protects and blesses man and after death becomes the real representative of his personality. The body has to be preserved out of regard for the ka, so that it may at any time resume possession of it. “The ka has to be, looked after with food and drink, which are put on the altar-table of the grave. If this were forgotten, the dead man might be driven to such a pass that, tortured by hunger or thirst, he would have to drink of his own urine and eat of his own dung — the most awful idea which could occur to an ancient Egyptian.” * Soon, however, it was only at the actual funeral and on memorial days that food and drink from one’s own meal were set at the grave, and the everyday food, bread and beer, were painted on the table (the dead also being depicted as sitting at the entrance of the tomb), and so the nourishment which was necessary for continued existence was made external. Moreover, a magic formula was written below, which the ka had only to utter in order to have real nourishment. So, in addition to the magic power of the picture, there was the magic power of the word. Finally the dead man received his food in the tomb, in imperishable copies, so as to guarantee food and drink to the ka for ever by the magic formula; further, besides the alabaster cakes of bread and wooden mugs of beer there were earthenware figures of wives, servants, and slaves. “The walls of the mastabas, the subterranean gravechambers of the nobility of the Old Kingdom, and the rock tombs of the great men of the Middle Kingdom, are, moreover, covered with coloured reliefs or frescoes from the life of the dead and the various activities of his profession. They give a picture in colour and form of what the earthenware figures (of which up to three hundred are found in a tomb) are meant to imply by their mere presence —a representation of the real } life of the dead so that the ka, by virtue of the magic formule, may thereafter live on for ever.” In contrast to this Egyptian realism, which was part of the cult of the dead, Greek art rose higher and gave even living man a soul, a process which began with the affirmation of sexuality as a victory over death, and in the Classical period became the philosophical conception of the Psyche of the living.

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1This and the following come from E. Huber: Das Trinkopfer in Kulte der Volker (Hanover, 1929), p. 108.

This whole process, which began with liberation from the chthonian mother-principle and leads, via the glorification of the masculine symbol of reproduction, the phallus, to the notion of the living Psyche concentrated in the head, may still be followed in detail in the development of Greek art as well as of Greek science. The god who was most frequently and at all times depicted was Hermes, whose many-sidedness in itself shows an old and long history. Perhaps the oldest form of symbolic representation is the piles of stones, named after the god, “ which from the oldest time were heaped up everywhere on the roads as boundary stones and signposts and as thankofferings from passing travellers to the god who had speeded them.”* In these herms of the road we can easily recognize an individual development of the official Omphalos signs, whose chthonian maternal origin we have already shown. Side by side with them we have very early the ithyphallic representation of Hermes as a vegetation-god fertilizing mother earth. A third, and the really artistic form of the representation, is the anthropomorphic figure of the deity which “only gradually grew from the pillar-like stone or wood into human form, and found its expression first of all in the head, which is the noblest part of the body” (Brunn, 1884). In this process, revealed in the herms that were everywhere to be found, and especially in Arcadia and Attica? we can easily recognize the cultural movement from below upwards, from the chthonian mother-principle, via the reproductive father-principle,’ to the head-culture of the soul, which culminates in the Classical portrait bust. The phallus on the herm represents a symbol not only of the masculine reproductive faculty, but of the human knowledge of natural processes which we may call the beginning of scientific thinking.

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1All quotations relating to Hermes are taken from Roscher’s Lexikon der Mythologie.

2 The peculiar mark of this art-form is the four-cornered pillar, with the head and neck of the god above; in place of arms were mere projections, on which wreaths could be hung, and on the pillar itself was the phallus as the symbol of generative power’’ (Roscher).

3 For the conflict between the two principles in Greece see Bachofen’s Mutterrecht.

Now, an exact knowledge of these processes presupposes speculative insight, but over and above that, has its application in agriculture and cattle-breeding. Hermes is therefore not only the god of these — with his symbol of the ram he is the patron of Arcadian shepherds—but also the representative of cleverness and inventions, even of thieves and cheats, a point not unconnected with the old deception of nature. On the other side his function as guide of the road and direction—in which the four sides of the pillar correspond to the four points of the compass and the four winds—may be regarded as a prescientific beginning of road-making and surveying. This significance of the god as a symbol of orientation related originally to special parts of the body (cf. the arm-stumps of the herms) and was only later concentrated in the head as the essential part of the body. The phallus is less a representation of the primitive animal principle—for that is female — than the symbol of the deliberate control of nature by man’s knowledge. Since speech also is necessary for cleverness, we find Hermes figuring in Hellenistic plastic as the god of oratory, and the wings which used to be on the feet (cf. the Hermes in Naples) are transferred to the head or hat. At this later stage the original wind-god (pneuma) not only appears as god of speech (Jogos), but almost as such an allegorization of thought (speed) as has been given spiritual expression in modern times by Rodin. The same artistic development towards the head-culture, which reached its final form—saturated with the scientific ideology — in post-Classical portraiture, may also be traced in Greek culture generally. We have already referred to the layout of temples, cities, and streets on the Omphalos plan, and to the egocentric outlook which produced the competitiveness and quarrelsomeness of the various Greek tribes, cities, and heroes that is evidenced even in the Trojan War stories. Greek science also, and especially its geography, mathematics (or physics), and medicine, developed out of very old traditions of folk-lore and myth. One of the most striking proofs of this is the dominance of the numbers seven and nine— obvious mythological figures, as Roscher has shown in a series of works.’ He has also shown that, in a treatise on the number seven, ascribed to Hippocrates, we have a much older and more original document, dating from pre-Pythagorean times, which gives us a glimpse into the world of the Ionic philosophy. It is enough for our purposes to take only the main idea out of this confused and fragmentary work. We can do so the more easily since we already know its micro-macrocosmic foundation from the world-picture of the ancient East, but there is this difference, that in Greece everything seems to be subordinated to the seven. Both the world as a whole and the separate parts are under its dominion; there are seven spheres, and seven worlds within the earth, and everything, except the earth (which is imagined as the centre of the universe) is in circular motion. Further, there are seven constellations, which regulate time, seven winds, seven seasons, and seven ages. Both the universe and the single individual are constituted of seven parts — bones, flesh, marrow, blood, intestinal juices, breath, and reason. So too there are seven parts of the body — head, hands, entrails, diaphragm, veretrum, longabo, and legs; there is even a sevenfold purpose of the head. The seven vowels in speech are also included in the system. Finally there are seven parts of the soul. Of especial interest to us here—as based upon the microcosm-macrocosm doctrine —is the author’s sevenfold division of the known world according to the parts of the human body: the Peloponnese corresponds to the head, the Isthmus to the neck, Ionia to the diaphragm, the Hellespont to the legs, the two Bosporoi to the feet, Egypt and the Egyptian sea to the upper trunk, the Euxine sea and Meotic sea to the lower trunk and rectum.

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1W. Roscher: Die Enneadischen und Hebdomadischen Fristen und Wochen der altesten Griechen (Leipzig, 1903); Die Sieben- und Neunzabl im Kultus und Mythus der Griechen (1904); Die Hebdomadenlehre der griechischen Philosophen und Arzte (1906); Uber Alter, Ursprung und Bedeutung der hippokratischen Schrift von der Siebenzabl (1911); Die hippokratische Schrift von der Siebenzahl und ihr Verbalenis zum Altpythagorismus (1919). The mythical significance of the seven and nine is affirmed also among other peoples; €.g., Germans, Mexicans, Indians, Persians, Celts, etc. Cf. F. Andrian: “Siebenzahl im Geistesleben der Volker'’ (Mitteil. d. anthrop. Gesellschaft, Vienna, gor). These figures in theit association of cosmic and human periodicities—phases of the moon, periods, etc.—stand not for arithmetical but for mystical values; they are, as Bergaigne (La Religion védique, II, 156) admirably puts it, not the expression of an undefined manifold, but of a totality, and are thus equivalent and may be substituted one for the other.

It is noteworthy that the author, whose home Roscher places in Miletus, identifies Ionia, in which philosophy began to flourish in his times, with the diaphragm and not with the head. He concludes that the treatise is really older because in earlier views the diaphragm and not the head was regarded as the seat of the highest function of the soul. The Hippocratean author, in making these valuations, saw no preference in the attribution of the head to the Peloponnese. This simply symbolized the undisputed fact of the hegemony of Sparta over the Greeks. The Spartans ruled by a conscious effort of will directed to the training of the body, but the true spirit, the centre of spiritual life, was Ionia, which is therefore identified with the diaphragm, as the seat of the highest spiritual faculties. We must leave it open, as an interesting problem of folk-psychology, how far this valueclassification of their countries not only described but actually influenced the character of their inhabitants.’ We shall also have to abstain from any attempt to follow out the importance of this treatise for the development of medicine, geography, and philosophy; as to its scientific importance, we shall only remark that so far as is known, the author was first to maintain the spherical shape of the earth, the inviolability of the laws of nature, especially those that were mathematically formulable in the macrocosm and the microcosm alike, and finally the principles of the condensation and rarefaction of substances. We cannot, however, omit to point out how the ground for the later floraison of the high culture of Greece was prepared by the philosophical distinction that was established between the transitory human body and the eternal spirit by these lonian thinkers, who yet were themselves rooted in the chthonian.

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1 Similarly in Egypt the qualities of different peoples were deduced from the correspondence between their homes and the different parts of the body. Cf. Roscher: Die hippokratische Schrift, etc., p. 10. The peculiar position of the Jews, with their favoured land as the centre of the earth, has already been alluded to.

Greek humanity remained fixed, with its bodily parts, to the earth, but the people who dwelt in the diaphragm, and therefore incorporated their spiritual psychical qualities, became the cradle of a scientific human type that as yet had nothing to do with the practical intelligence of the head. It was only at the full flower of the Greek culture that Athens became the undisputed head of Hellenism, and the head became both the seat of the soul and of the highest human faculties — and then, indeed, the culture culminated. Everything that was chthonian and animal was banished to the depths of Orcus to make way for the spiritual head-culture which appears personified in the works of Athenian poets, orators, and sculptors and later in their portrait busts. The characteristic and peculiar quality of this flower of Greek culture seems to me to lie precisely in the reciprocal influence of the ideologies of truth and beauty. We observe in Tonia sciences like philosophy, physics, mathematics, geography, and medicine growing from a chthonian, animal ideology, which was transformed in other cultures into zsthetic artideologies; and on the other hand we have seen that Greek art, just at its highest point, came under the influence of an increasingly powerful scientific ideology. In other words, in Greece human dualism reached its maximum of inner intensity. With nature thus partly dominated and still more defied by negation, the resultant guilt-feeling was so strong that it impelled men not only to humanize their art and religion, but also to create for themselves in science a special ideology to justify this drive to truth, The Greek culture possesses the importance that it does, not because the beginnings of science lie in Greece, but because the scientific ideology was born there, the specific attitude to life which will always be characteristic of, and necessary to, science and the scientist. And this ideology did not restrict itself to the above-mentioned special sciences, but permeated the whole of Greek intellectual life and finally the spiritual life, which is the foundation of every ideology. And so Greece became the home of psychology also, in that it was there that, out of the religious idea of the soul and its artistic manifestations, there developed the first scientific psychology in the sense of soul-doctrine. This doctrine, too, like the original idea of the soul itself, was dualistic: the spiritual side, which had been earlier expressed in religious immortalitybelief, was built up by Plato ideologically into a philosophy of the soul, while the material side was reduced by Aristotle into a psycho-physiology. The development of Greek views on the soul, which was first outlined in Rohde’s fundamental work, but has been corrected in many ways since,” is not only of basic importance for our present-day technical psychology, but had ideologically a decisive influence on the whole Christian evolution as well as on the whole art-ideology of the West. Homer, who gives us the oldest and best evidence for Greek views of the soul, has as yet no unified idea of it, any more than the primitive peoples who, both conceptually and (as a rule) verbally, distinguished the soul of the dead from the spiritual functions of the living: “ Psyche” in Homer, according to the latest studies, denotes only the soul of the dead, while the various spiritual functions of the living (such as the reason, emotions, etc.) are ascribed to special important organs of the body, like the diaphragm. These qualities and functions of the soul, which were located differently according to the different experiences, were only later unified into one living soul, and this was still later identified with the “Psyche” which had hitherto indicated the soul of the dead only. The development of the idea of the soul thus leads from an original contrast between the multiplicity of living function and the unity of the soul of the dead to an explicit dualism as between the soul of the living and the dead, and thence to an ultimate unification which assumed a “psyche” (that is, a soul of the dead) to exist also in the living.

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1E, Rohde: Psyche, Seelenkult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (1893). W. Otto:Die Manen oder von den Urformen des Totenglaubens (Berlin, 1923). J. Béhme: Die Seele und das Ich im Homerischen Epos (Leipzig, 1929).

Thus the inner dualism of Greek humanity — expressed respectively in the artistic and the scientific ideologies of the beautiful (that is, the immortal) and of the true (that is, the mortal soul) -- was harmoniously unified in the unitary soul of philosophy, which led thereafter in Christianity to the complete spiritualization of man. But it emerges, too, that the artideology is always collective and spiritual even where, as in portraiture, it uses an individual appearance for the expression of the general and typical. We can understand, therefore, how it is that the ideology of the beautiful can never be explained by individual psychology, for it is collective and its collective content is the quality of soul which is expressed artistically in beauty and religiously in faith. The concept of truth, on the other hand, in spite of its ideological elaboration in science, remains in the last resort qualitatively subjective (as I have shown in Truth and Reality), and consequently psychology is the most subjective of all the sciences and, basically, only the intellectual heir of the old soul-concept (Seelenglaube und Psychologie). We can perhaps have no better example for the study of the mutual influence of the scientific soul-ideology on art, and of the artistic ideology on science, than Greek music — which, moreover, will serve to lead us up to the form-problem as the art-problem par excellence. The influence of Greek mathematics, especially of the Pythagorean theory of numbers, on the development of Greek music is of course undisputed; and there is equally little doubt as to the artistic ideologizing of the physics of the cosmos, which is expressed most distinctly in the “music of the spheres” and the revolutions of the planets. Music also was originally a pure body-art, and its essential quality of rhythm followed from the spontaneous movements of the body, long before the Greeks gave it a mathematical foundation. This mathematic itself, however, as we have seen, was not so purely scientific as it seems to us nowadays, since it rested in the main on the hebdomadal system, and the origin of the latter was undoubtedly mythic (and therefore macro-microcosmic) in kind. Not only are the seven vowels of the voice, to which later the seven notes of the scale corresponded, pre-mathematical—and in all probability purely microcosmic (see above) — but the seven strings of the lyre and the seven stops of the oldest syrinx, which corresponded to the seven Muses (only later increased to nine) and the seven-membered chorus, seem to have been definitely mythic in origin. The doctrine of the seven tones of the heptachord and the associated harmony of the spheres are Pythagorean in origin *— indeed, the interconnexion of the ideologies of music and physics is a characteristic of his general doctrine. We must content ourselves here with this mere reference to the growth of a scientifically established music from an original rhythm of the body — not failing to note that the intermediate link is once again a macrocosmic extension: namely, the harmony of the spheres. The driving motive seems to have been, here too, the creative guilt-feeling which followed from the strict application of the rule that man is the measure of all things. The projection of this human measure on to the universe — which (as the pseudo-Hippocratean treatise on the heptad shows us) holds for the Greek culture as for others — gives the conscience-stricken individual a cosmic and no longer a divine justification and so leads straight to the scientific ideology. For man can thus again find his place in the workings of nature, and now at a higher ideological level where the nature is what he himself makes it, or as he himself interprets it— subordinating himself to it at the same time, even if only in appearance. The fundamental problem to which this whole discussion of the conflict of the different ideologies, the esthetic and the scientific — with all its effects in religion, philosophy, and art —leads is the problem of form.

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1 See the excursus on the number of the strings on ancient instruments in Roscher Uber Alter, Ursprung, etc., p. 129.

We saw how the older artideologies grew out of the religious concepts of the peoples and their chthonian background; and the justifiable question now presents itself: in what ways has the scientific ideology, first appearing in Greece and culminating in modern realism and verism, influenced the art-ideology of the West. As far as we at present can see from the purely phenomenological point of view, science manifested in the affirmative sense the same natural and primitive content of which the denial had led to an esthetic creation of art-forms. In other words, the truthideology of science arises from the need to rediscover that nature which had been formally denied in the ideology of religious art. In science, truth is a problem of content; in art and its ideology, beauty a problem of form. But what happens when, as in Greece, the ideology of truth intrudes on art, and that of beauty on science? To answer this question we have to go rather further afield and, for a start, to link up with what we have so far been able to say on the form-problem. The various kinds of metaphor, which survived from mythical prehistory and its micromacrocosmic world-view to be the ornamental symbol of a general identity and to figure even in our own poetry as simile, throw back a light on to the most primitive forms of art: ornament and music. Both of these have rhythm as principle of form, which is manifested in music as temporal and in ornament as spatial repetition. Music we may therefore regard, analogically, as a pure temporal metaphor, and ornament as an extreme instance of spatial metaphor. In their developed forms they display still more clearly than the metaphorical speech the fundamental essence of metaphor: namely, extenston into the infinite. For while metaphors of speech only succeed in retaining and recalling some past by association with the present, rhythmic ornament, in drawing or music, tends to connect the whole past as such, in abstract form, with the future, since a rhythmic line or a tone-succession can in principle be continued to infinity. We may perhaps at this point deal more precisely than we have done in our previous discussion with the differences in the forms of speech-metaphor, in relation to the particular past which they revive. The spacemetaphors of Homer aim at fixing a collective pristine age of his people, and consequently, even in form, they adhere most losely to the strict rhythm of primitive abstract art: consider, for instance, the balance of the hexameter, which yet never becomes monotonous. The temporal metaphor of Proust tries to recall a personal past of the individual, and therefore it does not employ the ready-made language of poetry, but creates a mode of expression which is personal to the point of peculiarity and, even beyond that, arbitrariness and has been not unfairly compared to the twisted thought-paths of the victim of neurosis. Shakspere’s dynamic metaphor is, in this respect too, half-way between the two others, in that the author seeks to connect his personal problems with those of his nation and of history. This explains his predilection for mythical and historical material, in which at times he is a nodding Homer and regardless of periods. But this confusion of times is not because of any negligence in the poet, but an essential quality of poetry, which enhances rather than disturbs the poetic effect — unless we insist on using the unfortunate poet as a historical source. The anachronisms of Macbeth or those of the Hermann battle in Kleist have hitherto not upset any spectator.’ Returning from this digression to the rhythmic prototype of metaphor which we find in music and ornament, we see that the potential extension to infinity which is common to these primitive art-forms expresses the eternalizing impulse par excellence. Ornament in line and melody in music are not only abstractions of what is seen or felt in space and time, but abbreviations of the infinite, in spatial form in the one case, in temporal in the other. The fragment of wave-line or meander represents an infinite series of the same kind, and the monotonous rhythm of primitive instruments expresses it temporally, like Wagner’s “infinite melody”; such representation of an infinite totality by a partial symbol which is spatially or temporally limited corresponds to the biological distinction of individual and species and the cosmic relation of microcosm and macrocosm; and the same is true of the word also, which in point of content condenses the changes of meaning that have taken place in the course of many generations or ages, and in point of form symbolizes the primal cry of the animal as sublimated in the human voice.

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1Cf, my article: ‘‘ Das Volksepos, 11. Die dichterische Phantasicbildung.”’ Psychologische Beitrage zur seiner Entstehung (Imago, V, 1917). 351

Dance, again, represents a combination of the temporal and the spatial rhythms of infinity, in which the circle symbolizes the rebirth idea par excellence —the line in space that returns upon itself in time. Some light has already been thrown on the dance, in our discussion of play, and it is only mentioned here as a combination of space- and time-rhythms. The lineal symbol of this eternal rebirth, the circle, was of great importance in early art, and in the bronze age, especially, together with the spiral, it almost dominated all ornament; of the two, the circle, not only artistically but, in our view, ideologically also, represents a higher development of art, though perhaps the peculiarities of bronze as a material may have had something to do with this. However this may be, we must first of all obtain a clearer idea of primitive ornament itself: a subject which has been studied in a brief but valuable monograph by the ethnologist Heinrich Schurtz. He discusses “the ornament of the eye and related problems” (Leipzig, 1895), especially among the north-west American Indians, but also in Melanesia and the South Seas, and reaches a conclusion which is entirely in harmony with our view that “ eye-ornament in the last resort may be traced back to totemistic figures, and thus does not owe its origin to leisurely trifling nor yet to any marvellous feeling for beauty, but is closely connected with the spiritual life of the people and springs from it.” It is not only interesting but important in this connexion to follow the line of development which Schurtz has traced for eye-ornament. He shows that this developed out of head- (or face-) ornaments, and these latter he traces back to the well-known totem-poles, which consist of a set of superposed figures, crouching or sitting, and sometimes highly stylized, “of human, animal, or mythical form.” This simple and obvious deduction of eye-ornament from an ever-increasing “ abstraction” of the whole figure into one essential part of it—in this case the eye —not only confirms the “symbolic” character of ornament but shows with astonishing clearness the same line of development from animal (totem) via the whole man (the ancestor) to the visage (head). Finally there is left as the last and highest abstraction of man —I would almost say of his soul — the eye, which (cf. the eagle totem) is of outstanding importance to the Indians.” Whether in this eye-ornamentation (which, as Schurtz shows, is common also in the South Seas) the sun plays in any way the part of the macrocosmic eye, as it does in the cosmogonies of civilized peoples, I will leave undecided. In the artistic development of higher cultures — Chinese, Persian, and German — the spiral, whose chthonian animal origin we have demonstrated, had also a solar significance.” But in this macrocosmic view of the spiral as the solar year which returns upon itself and yet continues, we have the same ideological elevation of animal mortality to immortal rebirth, which we have shown to be the fundamental impulse in all artistic creation. It would be particularly fascinating to expound this principle of psychic development in terms of the spiral (for which we have masses of material) because we should in this way come to a harmonious reconciliation of the various possibilities of explanation. All authorities recognize that the spiral was originally an “organic” ornament, but there is hesitation in choosing between an animal interpretation deriving from the snake and a plantinterpretation of the tendril. Our own conclusion, that it comes from the entrail-motive, makes provision for the organic meaning, though what we have in that case is not an imitation of an animal or plant body but a representation of the chthonian animal principle, into which the snake as the first immortalitysymbol was artistically introduced.

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1I had previously, from the pure psychological point of view, surmised that these totem-poles embodied the conflict of the maternal and the growing paternal immortality-ideologies.

2 The phases of the moon seem also to have provided the pattern for a definite ornamentation (see Fuhrmann: Der Sinn im Gegenstand).

The plantlike stylization of the spiral, as we see it culminating on the Kamares vases of Crete, represents rather a purely esthetic effect, though there also religious influences no doubt play some decisive part as well. To understand this geometrization of the organic spiral motive, which we already find in the beginning of the neolithic, we must turn to the vessel which carries the meander spiral.* This question of ceramics, of which we have already studied the preliminaries, leads from the problem of the origin and development of ornament to the problem of its purpose. Most authorities agree in regarding ornament as essentially something subordinate in purpose to a greater whole (Schurtz) or indeed as deriving all its meaning from the object with which it is associated (Scheltema) ; but there is considerable difference of opinion as to what this purpose was. Since we first find ornament on vases after it has appeared on the body, however, we may properly inquire into the meaning of the vessel-form itself. Now, this is unquestionably modelled on the human body and, as we have shown, discloses the same principle of development as lies at the root of all human art-forms: the vase signified at first the lower body, then the whole body (the neck and shoulder of the vase), and finally the head (with mouth and ears). Indeed, for thousands of years before the wheel was invented, pots were produced by the coiling technique in which already Fuhrmann saw an imitation of the disposition of the intestines. Scheltema, too, though he did not himself put forward this human significance of the pot, nevertheless regarded the development of ceramic ornamentation as a continuation of body-ornament and worked it out by degrees to a point at which we can regain contact with our main subject. Already in his first essay (“ Zur Lehre vom Ornament” *) he comes to the conclusion that ornament, which was originally an essential constituent of the vase that bore it, finally appeared independent of its vehicle, like a spirit separated from the body.

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1 Hornes (Urgeschichte der Kunst, pp. 293 et seq.) puts the spiral meander ware at the einee of all neolithic styles. The best accounts of the spiral are in Schuchhardt and cheltema,

2 Zeitschrift fiir Aesthetik, XV (1921). I have already mentioned the later book.

But he recognizes also the general cultural significance of the belief in the soul:* “The emancipation of ornament as a spiritual form from the natural body of its carrier implies a belief in the independence of spirit in relation to body, a belief, that is, in the independence of the soul.” Applied to the spiral, which is one of the earliest as it is the most widespread of ornaments, this would give a startling confirmation to our cultural-psychological view that out of the least permanent part of the body — namely, the intestines — the process of a creative transformation eventually makes an abstract picture of the immortal soul. And in this creative transformation artistic forms do not play an ancillary or merely illustrative part, but are the actual source of production, since without them the concretization of the prevailing idea of the soul would be impossible. Here, then, we have our linkage between this order of ideas and the view which we reached psychologically in our study of the modern artist-type: namely, that artistic productivity, not only in the individual, but probably in the whole development of culture, begins with one’s own human body and ascends to the creation and artistic formation of a soul-endowed personality. From the colour-painting of the body or its adornment with animal attributes — feathers, shells, etc.—a direct path leads to decoration in the narrower sense, the development of which is a very interesting part of cultural history.” Whereas fixed body-ornament makes its effect immediately as an emphasis of the actual body, ornaments which are hung or applied serve merely decorative purposes. Even this decoration, however, has a symbolic meaning, in which the primitive purpose survives ® in fusion with the equally old ideology. But apart from the practical object of body-painting, which Scheltema has proved so decisively, what interests us here is the ideological importance, which will no longer cause us any trouble, as far, at least, as the addition of animal ornament is concerned; for the animal dances of the Indians and the hunting ceremonies of the Bushman prove clearly enough that the object to be achieved by ornament, of frightening an enemy or of attracting friends, involves total or partial identification with the animal. But this identification, again, has not a mere external aim, to acquire strength or superiority, but depends on a pre-animistic identity with the animal which it imitated in the ceremony or the disguise.

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1 He mentions, though only incidentally, the transition from burial to cremation in the bronze age CAltnordische Kunst, p. 118).

2 See E. Selenka: Der Schmuck des Menschen (1900). 3 Cf. the illuminating remarks in Fuhrmann (Neu Guinea, pp. 15 et seq.), who puts the origin of ornament in the idea of the circle, macrocosmic ideologies (the sun’s orbit, gold) appearing thus fused in one whole with microcosmic (human life, immortality).

If this is certain in the case of the feathers or skins of other adornment, we are justified in asking how far the artistic painting of the body in tattooing represents the same principle at a higher level, at which man is trying to liberate himself from the animal at least to this extent, and to become independent in the self-creative adornment of his own person. If this were so, this primitive painting (of which the traces survive in the feminine world even today) would be the origin of artistic activity not only in the sense assumed by the pragmatic and mimetic theories, but also in the psychological sense of a self-creative liberation of man from his dependence on nature and her purposiveness.* If we add that music too, in its origins in song and dance, was a pure body-art” which only later and under the influence of mathematics developed into an abstract practice of art, we find here again the path leading from the rhythmically continuous repetition of the body and its organs to the infinite melody, elevated to cosmic immortality, of the music of the spheres.

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1 Clothing, which replaces tattooing in harsher climates, has obviously the aim of making man independent of nature. This is presumably the meaning of Joest when he says (op. cit., p. 56): ‘‘The less a man clothes himself, the more he tattoos, and the more he clothes himself, the less he tattoos.’’ Tattooing as a primitive form of drawing, indeed as the essential beginning of a pictorial writing (as Taylor takes it to be), is discussed elsewhere.

2 Robert Lach in his Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der ornamentalen Melopote CLeipzig, 1913) also emphasizes the primitive-ornamental origin of music in the tonalization of the primal cries. He distinguishes three stages: first, the primitive substrate; second, the original esthetic grouping (symmetry, parallel movement); third, the architectonic influence, which leads from ornament into melody-formation. Cf. also the interesting though critical remarks of Scheltema (op. cit., p. 54, n.) on the relation of temporal rhythm (in dance and music) to ornament.

Now, this special study of the form-problem in ornament and music opens up yet further perspectives in relation to the essential difference between the Greek art-ideology and all its predecessors. In relation to Egyptian culture particularly, which was so important for Greece, the difference is one not merely of quantity, but of fundamental quality. Egyptian culture, and especially its art, is spatial and dumb, Greek is temporal and eloquent; and in this sense not only in its religion but in its whole idea Egypt was a land of the dead, Greece a land of the living. Even Egyptian architecture, with its dark cavernous temples and vast subterranean pyramid-tombs, exhibits this chthonian “underworld style” in contrast to the high airy temples of Greeks who raised their head proudly to heaven and fought against gods by word and deed, whereas Egyptian figures of god and man, with their animal heads, are dumb. The temporal element explains the dynamic movement of Greek sculpture which Lessing in his Laocoon rightly takes to be the essence of Greek plastic. In myth this Greek ideology, mobile and eloquent, is characteristically expressed in an extensive victory over cosmic time (on which Oriental as well as primitive culture is wholly dependent) and in an emphasis on dynamic — that is, purely human —temporality, which is expressed practically in thought and word, theoretically in mathematical formulation, and artistically in music and sculpture. In myths the old nature-gods are killed, the compulsion of cosmic time defeated, and all that remained of chthonian and animal in the new god of heaven was violently removed. The old god of heaven, Uranus, is castrated by Kronos, the symbol of the human time-idea, and thenceforward Kronos rules.

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1 This conception of Kronos as the time-god is not so self-evident as might appear, because of the similarity of sound with the Greek xpovés. The etymology of ‘*Kronos”’ is one of the most disputed in language and mythical study: a Phrygian or Pelasgian origin being adduced by the opponents of the ‘‘time"’ interpretation. But it is certain that the Greeks themselves changed “‘Kronos"’ into ‘‘Chronos’’ and regarded or Orphic already regarded Zeus the father as Time, and the Stoics tried later to deepen the idea and to establish it physically by help of the myth (Roscher: ‘*Kronos,"’ Etym.). This dispute, like some others, seems to me insoluble historically; it can only be explained on the basis of spiritual ideas; i.c., the elevating process as we have assumed it is reflected in this etymological evolution of Chronos also. Thus our view would support and explain the time significance of the god; but conversely it does not need the latter for its own support.

This conquest of the old nature-principle is due to the reason; and the victory is achieved less through force than cunning — which is a common virtue in Greek heroes, such as Prometheus, CEdipus, and Odysseus, but also their ruin. If our view is correct, there-must be a connexion between the two cultural lines of development which we have found to determine that of the different art-ideologies also. First, there is the development from the chthonian underworld or bellyculture which grows essentially out of architecture, to the heavenly upper world or head-culture which produces the true arts of the Muses — speech, poetry, and music. Secondly, there is a line through the spatial and the dynamic form to the temporal. The real problem of form occurs within the first, which changes an ugly and rejected content into an admired and beautiful form, manifested spatially, dynamically, or temporally as the case may be. These last form-categories (in the Kantian sense) are, however, already given in the cultures: for example, in Egypt we have the perfection of dumb, static space and in Greece of eloquent, dynamic time. The actual artistic form, however, which arises from the spiritual victory over the (lower) content, is a psychological problem in the narrower sense. Form seems to represent the spontaneous objectification of inner processes, which make use of an external object in order to achieve material expression of that inner form. In other words, the form comes first, as an expression of a change in the inner attitude of man towards life, as for instance in the denial of nature (of the animal, for example); this denial produces (or presupposes) a new psychic dynamism which is “functionally ”* adapted to the form in which objects are now seen and presented: thus the serpent no longer represents the intestines, but the sun-spiral. The form is thus determined by the collective will-ideology, the content by the partially independent will-psychology of the creator. Intimately as form and content may be united, especially in the finest work, this unity seems to be the result of a harmonious unification of two contraries: not merely in the sense that form is given collectively in style, while the content is in every case a matter of free selection (and therefore, amongst others, in that of the subjective choice of the artist himself), but also since a strong and powerful form often compensates a weak content and vice versa. The view which we have reached by an analysis of the genesis of art-forms—namely, that the form is the spontaneously given expression of the particular human ideology prevailing at the moment — finds its anticipation and support in the view of certain historians of art — Grosse, Scheltema, Sydow — that body-ornament is prior to that of decorative gear, and that the latter only took over its art therefrom. The discovery of esthetic forms by cultural ideologies, then, is the continuation and elaboration of the same subjective process at a higher objective level. In the body-art, form and content were still largely one, while at the other end, in our highly differentiated modern art, we have an unending conflict between the two: a struggle between the artist and his material to reduce it to form, or a struggle for new forms which are to dominate the material in some new way. Here we come to a point where the role of the individual artist again acquires significance for us; we have already analysed the psychological genesis of the human impulse to create and shown it to be common to all culture and have seen that the particular forms which grew from it and the ideologies associated with it are collective. In primitive art both the cultural urge to creation, as ideologically manifested in the form-principle, and also the content, which is a matter of religion and cult, are collective. The practice of such art is spontaneous, but it is of vital interest: a truly effective cultural factor, without which not merely further development but further life would be impossible. If we take modern art as a comparison ready to hand, we find that both, form as well as content, are becoming more and more individually subjective, and that the impulse to create, which is still fundamentally the same, is more and more a matter of consciousness in the artist. But there is a certain limit to subjectivity which the most individual of artists cannot pass; and for two reasons: because the creative impulse, which is fundamentally always the same, implies a similar principle of form, or, better, impulse to form; and secondly because, if the work is to have some general influence, it must manipulate some collective content of general human significance. Thus, subjectively, there does exist in the artist the creative impulse which in the individual, as arising from the conflict between the lower and the higher self, corresponds to what in the history of culture we have traced out as a gradual defeat of the animal by the spiritual principle. This impulse includes those elements of the conflict which strive towards the voluntary control and domination of the lower by the higher self; the actual victory comes, in art, from the will-like impulse to form, which at first aims at no more than a cessation of the conflict by delimiting and ordering it. This impulse to form seeks, and at first finds, collective traditional forms, which had been produced by similar conflicts in the course of cultural development, and which in many cases carry with them their particular content. These collectively transmitted or dominant forms constitute what in their totality we call style, by accepting which (in whatever degree) the artist does subject himself to a principle outside his individual self, And though it may be collective, it is yet a man-created collectivity, and not one prescribed by nature. Here too our earlier formulation of the imitation-ideology fits into its place, for while we allowed imitation its full importance, we showed besides that it is no matter of simply copying nature, but of representing nature as already altered or interpreted by man in his own sense (macrocosm-microcosm),

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1 These terms were used by H. Silberer in describing the psychological phenomenon whereby the pictorial and tangible representation of abstract thought-processes is retained.

The artist, then, represents the type in which the primeval conflict between the lower and higher self is still so intense that he cannot merely fall back for a solution upon the collective forms which are ready to hand, but were created by past generations in relation to their religious, artistic, and (games, sport) social institutions. He certainly uses these forms to some extent, but actively as an individual, not passively as one of the crowd. In his inner conflict, then, which corresponds potentially to that of earlier cultures, he looks instinctively — later, perhaps, consciously — for collective forms to justify and to liberate himself, but he also looks for a collective (material) content, so that he may achieve simultaneously personal freedom and collective effect. This explains the religious content of Egyptian and partly even of Greek art (though already the latter owes its significance to the humanizing tendency); it explains also the choice of biblical subjects by Christian artists, and in general the choice of historical subjects. With this view of the genetics of culture, it becomes clear not only that the individual artist, at any rate the great artist, must (at least potentially) recapitulate in himself the whole evolution from collective to individual art in its separate, though perhaps not necessarily chronological, stages, but that it is only by the subjugation in himself of these collective forms and contents that the really mature works of great masters are created. Moreover, the value set on great artists depends on the predominant ideology of their time; if it is still collective, that artist will be regarded as the greatest of his time, and the finest representative of it in the future, who has expressed the collective elements in their purest and most vigorous form. If on the other hand the general ideology is interwoven with individualistic tendencies, as at the Renaissance and in the succeeding “age of genius,” the greatest artist will be he who embodies this individualized collective ideology in the purest form—which means, who has most definitely impressed on traditional forms the stamp of his personality, or (speaking in collective terms) individualism. The highest type of artist is he who can use the typical conflict of humanity within himself to produce collective values, which, though akin to the traditional in form and content — because in principle they spring from the same conflict — are yet individual, and new creations of these collective values, in that they present the personal ideology of the artist who is the representative of his age.