Romans of the same period were Stoics — that is, as having been educated in the philosophy and rhetoric of the Greek East. All were finished orators and all from time to time wrote on philosophy, Cæsar and Brutus no less than Cato and Cicero, but they did so not as professional philosophers, but because otium cum dignitate was the habit of cultivated gentlemen. In business hours they were masters of fact, whether on battle-field or in high politics, and precisely the same is true of the Chancellors Chang-I and Su-tsin;[1] the dreaded diplomatist Fan-Sui who overthrew Pe-Ki, the general; Wei-Yang the legislator of Tsin; Lui-Shi, the first Emperor's Mæcenas, and others.
The Culture had bound up all its forces in strict form. Now they were released, and "Nature" — that is, the cosmic — broke forth immediate. The change from the absolute State to the battling Society of nations that marks the beginning of every Civilization may mean for idealists and ideologues what they like — in the world of facts it means the transition from government in the style and pulse of a strict tradition to the sic volo, sic jubeo of the unbridled personal regime. The maximum of symbolic and super-personal form coincides with that of the Late period of the Culture — in China about 600, in the Classical about 450, for ourselves about 1700. The minimum in the Classical lies in the time of Sulla and Pompey, and for us will be reached (and possibly passed) in the next hundred years. Great interstate and internal conflicts, revolutions of a fearful kind, interpenetrate increasingly, but the questions at issue in all of them without exception are (consciously and frankly or not) questions of unofficial, and eventually purely personal, power. It is historically of no importance what they themselves aimed at theoretically, and we need not know the catchwords under which the Chinese and Arabian revolutions of this stage broke out, nor even whether there were such catchwords. None of the innumerable revolutions of this era — which more and more become blind outbreaks of uprooted megalopolitan masses — has ever attained, or ever had the possibility of attaining, an aim. What stands is only the historical fact of an accelerated demolition of ancient forms that leaves the path clear for Cæsarism.
But the same is true also of the wars, in which the armies and their tactical
- ↑ Both, like most of the leading statesmen of the time, were pupils of Kwei-ku-tse, whose knowledge of men, deep sense of the historically possible, and command of the diplomatic technique of the age (the "Art of the vertical and the horizontal") must have made him one of the most influential personalities of the period. Another figure of the same sort of weight after him was the thinker and war-theorist above alluded to, Sun-tse, who amongst others was the tutor of the Chancellor Lui-Si.
[Sun-Tse's book of war, as presented in Calthrop's translation, is comparable to nothing in Western military literature short of Clausewitz's Vom Kriege. Clausewitz was a contemporary and product of the Napoleonic epoch, and the glow of Romanticism has not yet passed from him; Sun, on the other hand, came "later," and his atmosphere is the shrewd factual atmosphere of pre-Cæsarism. — Tr.]
date also). The high point of historical comprehension, which presumes an equivalent experience in life, must for China have lain in the period of the Contending States, as it lies for us in the nineteenth century and after.
