notwithstanding all the cleverness of the religious, philosophical and, especially, political forms in which it is wrapped — just the old zoölogical up-and-down of the primitive age again. Whether the lords sitting in Babylon were wild war-hordes like the Kassites or refined inheritors like the Persians, when, for how long, and with what success they kept their seats, signified nothing from the standpoint of Babylon. The comfort of the population was affected by such things, naturally, but they made no difference either way to the fact that the soul of this world was extinct and its events, therefore, void of any deep meaning. A new dynasty, native or foreign, in Egypt, a revolution or a conquest in China, a new Germanic people in the Roman Empire, were elements in the history of the landscape like a change in the fauna or the migration of a flock of birds.
In the history, the genuine history, of higher men the stake fought for and the basis of the animal struggle to prevail is ever — even when driver and driven are completely unconscious of the symbolic force of their doings, purposes, and fortunes — the actualization of something that is essentially spiritual, the translation of an idea into a living historical form. This applies equally to the struggle of big style-tendencies in art (Gothic and Renaissance), of philosophy (Stoics and Epicureans), of political ideals (Oligarchy and Tyrannis), and of economic forms (Capitalism and Socialism). But the post-history is void of all this. All that remains is the struggle for mere power, for animal advantage per se. Whereas previously power, even when to all appearance destitute of any inspiration, was always serving the Idea somehow or other, in the late Civilization even the most convincing illusion of an idea is only the mask for purely zoölogical strivings.
The distinction between Indian philosophy before and after Buddha is that the former is a grand movement towards attaining the aim of Indian thought by and in the Indian soul, and the latter the perpetual turning-up of new facets of a now crystallized and undevelopable thought-stock. The solutions are there, for good, though the fashions of expressing them change. The same is true of Chinese painting before and after the Han dynasties — whether we know it or not — and of Egyptian architecture before and after the beginning of the New Empire. So also with technics. The West's discoveries of the steam-engine and of electricity are accepted by the Chinese to-day in just the same way — and with just the same religious awe — as bronze and the plough were accepted four thousand years ago, and fire in a still remoter age. Both, spiritually, differ in toto from the discoveries which the Chinese made for themselves in the Chóu period and which in each instance signified an epoch in their inner history.[1] Before and after that time, centuries play a vastly less
- ↑ The Japanese belonged formerly to the Chinese Civilization and again belong to a Civilization — the Western — today. A Japanese Culture in the genuine sense there has never been. Japanese Americanism must, therefore, be judged otherwise than as an outgrowth of what never was there.
