persistent legends of islands of tin and lands of gold. The primary trade of all is the metal trade, and with it the economics of production and of work are joined intrusively by a third — alien, venturesome, free-ranging over the lands.
On this foundation, now, arises the technique of the higher Cultures, expressive in quality and colour and passion of the whole soul of these major entities. It need hardly be said that Classical man, who felt himself and his environment alike Euclidean, set himself a priori in hostile opposition to the very idea of technique. If by "Classical" technique we mean something that (along with the rest that we comprehend in the adjective) rose with determined effort above the universal dead perfection of the Mycenæan age, then there was no Classical technique.[1] Its triremes were glorified row-boats, its catapults and onagers mere substitutes for arms and fists — not to be named in the same breath with the war-engines of Assyria and China — and as for Hero and his like, it was flukes and not discoveries that they achieved. They lacked the inner weight, the fatedness of their moment, the deep necessity. Here and there men played with data (and why not?) that probably came from the East, but no one devoted serious attention to them and, above all, no one made a real effort to introduce them into the ensemble-picture of life.
Very different is the Faustian technics, which with all its passion of the third dimension, and from earliest Gothic days, thrusts itself upon Nature, with the firm resolve to be its master. Here, and only here, is the connexion of insight and utilization a matter of course.[2] Theory is working hypothesis[3] from the outset. The Classical investigator "contemplated" like Aristotle's deity, the Arabian sought as alchemist for magical means (such as the Philosophers' Stone) whereby to possess himself of Nature's treasures without effort,[4] but the Western strives to direct the world according to his will.
The Faustian inventor and discoverer is a unique type. The primitive force of his will, the brilliance of his visions, the steely energy of his practical ponderings, must appear queer and incomprehensible to anyone at the standpoint of another Culture, but for us they are in the blood. Our whole Culture has a discoverer's soul. To dis-cover that which is not seen, to draw it into the light-world of the inner eye so as to master it — that was its stubborn passion from the first days on. All its great inventions slowly ripened in the deeps,
- ↑ What Diels has managed to assemble in his work Antike Technik amounts to a comprehensive nullity. If we take away from it what belongs to the older Babylonian Civilization (such as water clocks and sun-dials) and to the younger Arabian Springtime (such as chemistry or the wonder-clock of Gaza), there is nothing left but devices, such as door-locks of a sort, that it would be an insult to attribute to any other Culture.
- ↑ The Chinese Culture, too, made almost all these European discoveries on its own account — including compass, telescope, printing, gunpowder, paper, porcelain — but the Chinese did not wrest, but wheedled, things out of Nature. No doubt he felt the advantages of his knowledge and turned it to account, but he did not hurl himself upon it to exploit it.
- ↑ P. 301.
- ↑ It is the same spirit that distinguishes the Jewish, Parsee, Armenian, Greek, and Arab ideas of business from that of the Western peoples.
