time or class or Culture. The supreme generalization possible to each Culture as a major being is a primary and, for it, symbolical image of its own world-as-history, and all self-attunements of the individual — or of the group livingly effective as individual — are with reference to that image. Whenever we describe another person's ideas as profound or superficial, original or trivial, mistaken or obsolete, we are unwittingly judging them with reference to a picture which springs up to answer for the value at the moment of a continuous function of our time and our personality.[1]
Obviously, then, every man of the Faustian Culture possesses his own picture of history and, besides, innumerable other pictures from his youth upwards, which fluctuate and alter ceaselessly in response to the experiences of the day and the year. And how different, again, are the typical history-images of men and different eras and classes, the world of Otto the Great and that of Gregory VII, that of a Doge of Venice and that of a poor pilgrim! In what different worlds lived Lorenzo de' Medici, Wallenstein, Cromwell, Marat, and Bismarck, a serf of the Gothic age, a savant of the Baroque, the army officer of the Thirty Years' War, the Seven Years' War, and the Wars of Liberation respectively ! Or, to consider our own times alone, a Frisian peasant whose life of actuality is limited to his own countryside and its folk, a high merchant of Hamburg, and a professor of physics! And yet to all of these, irrespective of individual age, status, and period, there is a common basis that differentiates the ensemble of these figures, their prime-image, from that of every other Culture.
But, over and above this, there is a distinction of another kind which separates the Classical and the Indian history-pictures from those of the Chinese, the Arabian, and, most of all, the Western Cultures — the narrow horizon of the two first-named. Whatever the Greeks may (and indeed must) have known of ancient Egyptian history, they never allowed it to penetrate into their peculiar history-picture, which for the majority was limited to the field of events that could be related by the oldest surviving participant, and which even for the finer minds stopped at the Trojan War, a frontier beyond which they would not concede that there had been historical life at all.[2]
The Arabian Culture,[3] on the other hand, very early dared the astounding gesture — we see it in the historical thought alike of the Jews and of the Persians from Cyrus's time — of connecting the legend of creation to the present by means of a genuine chronology; the Persians indeed comprised the future as well in the sweep of the gesture, and predated the last judgment and the
- ↑ Original: ("So geschicht dies stets ...) im Hinblick auf das im Augenblick geforderte Bild als der beständigen Funktion der Zeit und des Menschen." — Tr.
- ↑ Even at the level of the Trojan War the timeless mythological figures of gods and demigods are still involved, intimately and in detail, in the human story. See, on the whole question of the Greek attitude towards time and history, Vol. I, p. 9 and passim. — Tr.
- ↑ See Chapter VIII below. — Tr.
