A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 2. The General Theory of the Modal Spheres

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Chapter III
The opening-process¹ in the anticipatory meaning-structure of the law-spheres.

§ 1 - The functional structure of the opening-process and the relation between concept and transcendental idea in the two fundamental directions of the cosmic temporal order

The modal structure of a law-sphere is primarily expressed in the continuous coherence (systasis) of its nuclear moment and retrocipations, at least insofar as it has substrata in the cosmic temporal order.

The modal retrocipations are inseparable from the modal nuclei of all the law-spheres - with the sole exception of the numerical - so that, in general, modal meaning cannot express itself outside of the retrocipatory coherence of meaning.

1 The Dutch text has ‘ontsluitingsproces’. The term ‘opening-process’ though occasionally replaced by the words ‘unfolding-process, process of disclosure, or process of expansion,’ seems to be preferable.

The primary structure of a founded meaning-modus.

For this reason the coherence of a modal nucleus and its modal retrocipations is to be called the primary structure of a modal aspect which is founded in one or more others. That is why, for instance, in the primary modal meaning of an illegal act there must of necessity be an analogy of energy-effect in the factual juridical causality if we are to speak of a legal fact. No act of human behaviour can be illegal if it does not causally encroach upon the retributive harmony of the communal and inter-individual interests, thereby yielding a juridical ground for legal consequences on the law-side of the juridical aspect. Juridical causality is also pre-supposed in cases where human behaviour formally deviates from a legal norm which does not mention a particular effect of the unlawful deed or

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omission. Otherwise, why should this action have been forbidden by a legal order?¹

It is quite possible, however, that the anticipatory functions of the modal meaning of retribution have not yet been opened out in temporal reality. This state of affairs has already been noticed in the preceding inquiry into the modal structure of the juridical aspect. But now it demands special attention in the general context of an analysis of the opening-process in the normative law-spheres.

1 Cf. my treatise: Het juridisch causaliteitsprobleem in het licht der Wetsidee (Anti-Revolutionaire Staatkunde, driemaandelijks orgaan, 1928).

The expression of the modal meaning of retribution in a primitive legal order.

In a primitive society - apart from some scarce indications of a distinction between accident and intention - criminal law is based on the principle of ‘Erfolgshaftung’ (responsibility for the factual consequences of the deed).

As a legal ground for a juridical consequence to take effect (on the law-side), the causal legal fact is generally sufficient here. The juridical causal relation, as a retrocipation of the physical effect, shows the complex structure examined in the case of other retrocipations in the preceding section².

Retribution - as expressed in the criminal law of a primitive tribal community - still clings rigidly to its modal substrata without having deepened itself into the anticipatory principle of accountability for guilt.

2 The juridical causality of a legal fact, as the juridical basis for the juridical effect on the law-side, is e.g. evidently impossible but for the substratum of logical causality which itself has an analogical character. This analogy finds expression on the law-side of logical causality in the principle of the sufficient ground. On the basis of the analytical principle juridical causality implies normative imputation either to objective legal facts (as fire, storm, hail in the case of insurance against damage), or to subjective legal facts (delicts, delay in the performance of contractual duties etc.). The legal extent of the causal nexus imputed to a legal fact is always dependent on juridical principles of responsibility (the principle of risk or the principle of guilt, respectively). The legal causal nexus in the last analysis presupposes a physical nexus as its ultimate substratum. But it is never to be identified with the latter on penalty of involving legal theory in insoluble antinomies. The most striking example of such antinomies is to be found in the contradictions resulting from the attempt to reduce the famous causation by omission to a natural scientific concept of causality.

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In the same way the legal subjectivity of man and the validity-area of the norms are still rigidly bound up with the unopened aspect of social intercourse restricted to the members of the tribe.

The foreigner as such is still hostis, exlex. He is excluded from peaceful intercourse, from juridical and moral relations, as well as from relations of faith. (The primitive communal order is an undifferentiated whole whose modal functions have not yet been explicitly distinguished).

A gratuitous donation, as an act of liberality, is unknown in the primitive legal order. The principle of do ut des rigorously governs the whole of the primitive law of contract, even the mutual exchange of gifts.

The primitive law of contract (as yet little developed) is characterized by a strict formalism, frequently exhibiting magic traits, in which there is no room for the anticipatory principles of good faith, of ‘justa causa’, of ‘equity’ etc., as little as there is a possibility to challenge a declaration of will on the ground of error, compulsion and deceit.

On the inert substratum of primitive thought all juridical acts are still tied down to the sensory symbol. A juridical act that has not been represented by means of a sensory symbol cannot be understood by the primitive mind. That is why the subjective rights to things are not understood if they are not expressed in a sensory way in the ‘wer’ or ‘Gewehre’, the actual possession of a thing visible to all. Hence it testifies to a lack of real insight into legal history if the attempt is made to find in a primitive legal order the abstract right of property (protected by a civil lawsuit) quite apart from the ‘wer’.

Also the normative substratum-spheres of a primitive juridical order are still in a rigid condition, not yet deepened by the opening-process.

Nevertheless, primitive legal life, as a component of the undifferentiated communal order, is to a high degree directed by primitive popular faith. This state of affairs gives rise to a new problem which can be discussed only in a later phase of our inquiry.

The primitive closed structure of the feeling-aspect in animal life.

In the psychical law-sphere the modal meaning-structure of feeling still manifests itself in the primary, rigid form in animals. There may be different degrees of differentiation and of higher

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development in psychical animal life, in accordance with the stage of organic development that an animal has reached. There may even be found proofs of ‘intellect’ in the psychical reaction upon new factual situations, resting upon a deliberate presentiment of causal and teleological relations (not upon rational analysis). But an animal's subjective psychical feeling remains in a closed state with regard to the meaning of the normative law-spheres. It is not susceptible of anticipation in the axiological sense of the word; it is not capable of a deepening of meaning under the direction of normative functions of consciousness.

The closed structure of the aspect of energy-effect.

The aspect of energy-effect shows its modal meaning in a rigid closed structure in physical-chemical processes that are not guided and directed by higher modal functions. But in the inner individuality-structure of a living organism the physical-chemical processes are deepened by anticipating the directing impulses of organic life. In an animal organism they also reveal psychical anticipations¹, in the human living organism even anticipations of the normative aspects.

1 Cf. e.g. Pawlov's experiments with dogs concerning the secretion of spittle under the direction of psychical associations, or the physical-chemical reactions in a psychical state of rage or fear.

The law-sphere in its restrictive function and in its expansive function. Guiding modal-functions.

In all cases in which the opening-process has not yet started, the anticipatory spheres of the modal structure are still closed and the modal aspect still shows itself in a rigid, restrictive function.

When the anticipatory spheres are opened out, the modal meaning is deepened and expresses itself in an expansive or deepened function. This opening is possible only under the guidance of the anticipated law-spheres. But, because it is only an opening-process that manifests itself here, the possibilities of anticipation must be implied and latent in the modal meaning-structure of all the aspects preceding the second terminal sphere.

In future the modal anticipations will be called guided or directed meaning-functions, and the modal meaning-functions

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of the anticipated spheres guiding or directing functions. The guiding meaning-function points the way to the guided function towards the opening of its meaning.

The numerical meaning-aspect for instance is not self-sufficient with regard to the opening of its meaning, it has no self-guarantee in the matter of its modal anticipations. Only through the guiding function of later aspects do the anticipatory-spheres of the numerical meaning open out into the ‘approximating numerical functions’. The irrational and differential functions of number are ‘limiting’ functions of the numerical aspect. They point forward to the original meaning of space and motion, which are not given in the arithmetical aspect proper.

The psychical meaning-aspect is opened through the guiding function of the analytic aspect into deepened logical feeling. The modal meaning of feeling has no self-guarantee with regard to its deepening into logical feeling. Logical feeling is a modal limiting function of the psychical aspect in which the latter approximates the analytic meaning which is not given in the modal structure of the psychical law-sphere proper.

Only through the guiding function of the moral aspect does the moral anticipatory sphere in the juridical modality open itself. The retributive meaning in itself has no guarantee for its anticipatory functions in juridical guilt, good faith, good morals, etc. All these juridical figures are limiting functions of the retributive aspect, in which the latter approximates the modal meaning of morality which is not to be found in the meaning of retribution itself.

Deepening of the modal retrocipations through the opening-out of the anticipatory spheres of the modal aspect.

The modal anticipations deepen the entire primary meaning of the law-sphere in the coherence of its nucleus and retrocipations.

Thus subjective juridical guilt deepens the primary meaning of an illegal act. It deepens the unlawfulness, the juridical causality, the juridical imputation, etc., as it approximates the moral attitude of the agent in the subjective meaning of retribution. For this reason it is unscientific to treat causality, illegality and guilt as three absolutely separate elements of a punishable fact, as is done in the current doctrine of criminal law.

The isolating treatment of these three basic concepts of criminal law disturbs the intermodal coherence of meaning and is

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due to an un-juridical view of causality and guilt, owing to which unlawfulness, too, cannot be conceived in its material modal retributive sense.

The internal antinomies into which this treatment entangles the doctrine of criminal law have been analysed elaborately in my treatise: Beroepsmisdaad en Strafvergelding in het licht der Wetsidee (1926)¹.

Another example of the deepening influence of the anticipations upon the primary structure of a modal meaning-aspect is found in the modal sphere of feeling. Logical feeling, cultural feeling, linguistic feeling etc. deepen the modal retrocipations in the latter. Sensory perception, e.g., as a biotic retrocipation in human feeling has its own meaning deepened, when the opening-process in the psychical law-sphere has started and raises human sensibility on account of its anticipatory function above the sensory life of the animals.

1 Professional Crime and Penal Retribution in the Light of the Cosmonomic Idea (published in the quarterly review Antirevolutionaire Staatkunde, 1929).

Concept and Idea of the modal meaning-aspect and their relation in the foundational as well as in the transcendental direction of time.

On the distinction between the primary and the deepened modal meaning rests the distinction between concept and Idea of a specific aspect.

Especially since Kant this distinction has been universally adopted in philosophy but it could not be fathomed in its full import in immanence-philosophy.

Of each law-sphere it is possible to form a theoretical concept of its modal meaning as well as a theoretical Idea.

The modal structure in its ‘restrictive function’ is grasped by a synthetical concept, but its ‘expansive function’ is only to be approximated in a synthetical Idea of its meaning, which, as a transcendental ὑπόϑεσις, seizes upon the anticipated modal structures in advance.

In this way the number-concept and the number-Idea, the concept of space and the Idea of space, the concept of feeling and the Idea of feeling, the concept of law and the Idea of justice, etc., both theoretically comprehend the modal meanings of the same respective law-spheres. But the theoretical Idea points in another direction of time, viz. the transcendental or

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anticipatory direction, and it cannot be closed up in time. Hence every conception of the theoretical Idea as a concept destroys the theoretical meaning of the Idea and draws philosophical thought away from its true transcendental direction.

The theoretical antinomy in mistaking the Idea for a concept.

And now the inquiry quite naturally reverts to the question raised in the first explanation of the method of antinomy, viz. in how far the abuse of the theoretical Idea as a rational concept gives rise to the special theoretical antinomies.

The matter stands in fact as follows: if the Idea of a modal meaning-aspect is used as if it were a concept, the necessary consequence is a theoretical eradication of the modal boundaries of the law-spheres. This appeared to be the very origin of the special theoretical antinomies. In the Idea of a modal aspect theoretic thought can only approximate the intermodal coherence between the law-spheres, their radical unity and Origin; it can never really comprehend these transcendental presuppositions in a concept. The theoretical Idea is a transcendental limiting concept.

Anyone who tries to overstep the temporal limits of the modally qualified Idea, and thinks he can comprehend the coherence and the totality of meaning theoretically in the Idea of a specific aspect, lapses into absolutizing the modal speciality of meaning. This procedure is incompatible with the due observance of the modal sovereignty of an aspect in its own sphere.

All the ‘-isms’ in immanence-philosophy are guilty of the abuse of the modal theoretical Idea as a concept. Also transcendental idealism has not avoided this misconception of the Idea, in so far as it identifies a modal Idea with the meaning-totality of the cosmos¹.

With equal right it can be said that the concept founds the modal Idea, and that the modal Idea is the foundation of the concept.

In the transcendental direction pointing to the totality of meaning every concept is dependent on the Idea; in the found-

1 The distinction between theoretical and practical Ideas in Kant cannot be adduced against this. Also Kant's Idea of the ‘homo noumenon’ is a theoretical Idea in our sense, since it rests on a synthetical abstraction of meaning. That Kant restricts science to the sensory experience of nature is irrelevant to this point.

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ational direction of time the Idea of the meaning-modus is dependent on the concept of that modus.

Only the cosmonomic Idea, as the transcendental basic Idea, is the presupposition both of the concept and the Idea of every meaning-modality.

When a normative meaning-modus in temporal reality still expresses itself in a restrictive, closed structure, this primitive expression shows a certain formalistic character. An example of this can be found again in primitive law, enclosed as it is within the totality of the primitive social order. How rigid the view of justice is which has not yet grasped the Idea of the modal meaning of retribution appears even in the name given to primitive customary law with the old Germanic tribes. In Old-Germanic the latter was called êwa (in Old-English texts: aew)¹. It is possible to explain the meaning of this Old-Germanic word in more than one way - but one thing is certain, it implied a rigorous kind of unchangeability.

Such a legal order in its primitive meaning-structure is nonetheless a juridical one. As regards its validity it is founded in the rigid, non-anticipatory principles of retribution which have been realized in it. It is no arbitrariness. And yet, only on the basis of the Idea of justice can the meaning proper of such a primitive legal order be grasped, because it is only in an Idea that philosophical thinking can be directed towards the religious fulness of meaning, and all meaning is rooted in religion and has a Divine origin.

If the opening of the anticipatory spheres of the modal meaning of the juridical aspect is to be accomplished, the opening of the meaning of its substratum spheres must also have started.

1 Indo European: aiwôn, Greek αἰών, meaning: age, eternity, are cognate with Latin: aevum; and with primitive Germanic êwa, meaning law; from this came Old English - ae -, or aew, meaning: divine or human law, custom, religious rite, marriage, faith, religion; the literal meaning is given as: ‘something established from time immemorial’.

The retrocipatory and the anticipatory directions of time in the opening-process of the normative anticipatory spheres.

In the cosmic temporal order the correlation between the retrocipatory and anticipatory directions of time is indissoluble. Therefore the opening-process in a modal aspect cannot be set going in the transcendental direction of time without its found-

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ation in the disclosure of its substratum-spheres; at least, if this modal aspect itself does not serve as the ultimate basis for the opening-process in the later law-spheres.

The preceding chapter terminated with the formulation of the philosophical problem evoked by the opening-process in the normative and in the non-normative law-spheres, the latter as far as their normative anticipatory spheres are concerned¹.

It appeared then that every ‘guiding normative function’ must first open its own anticipatory spheres if it is to direct the earlier spheres in cosmic time in the process of the opening of their meaning. The whole opening-process seemed to get stuck in the last limiting sphere of our cosmos, i.e. that of faith, which has no modal anticipatory spheres. And the historical law-sphere was the first to make us aware of the problem.

The entire opening-process in the normative aspects proved to be dependent on a ‘higher level of historical development’. Of a higher level of historical development there can, however, be no question unless the modal meaning of history has been deepened in the opening of its anticipatory spheres.

1 As to the pre-logical modal spheres one can speak of normative anticipatory spheres only in the sense of their anticipatory coherence with original normative meaning-modalities. The pre-logical aspects, as such, are not ruled by norms proper. Legal or moral feeling for instance remain subjected to the laws of emotional life which lack normative character. But the latter have opened their modal psychical meaning under the direction of the anticipated normative aspects.

Does the opening-process of the normative anticipations start in a particular law-sphere?

Where does the opening-process of the anticipatory spheres of the modal aspects start in the normative dynamics of our cosmos? When this question is raised, the cosmic order of time is again to be considered in its two directions.

The transcendental (or anticipatory) direction of time cannot be arrested; it points unalterably above time. If it appears to be the modal function of faith that ultimately leads every opening of the normative anticipations, this can only show that the whole opening-process is not self-sufficient in the transcendental direction. This fact confronts philosophy with a fundamental problem, because the modal function of faith is the modal limiting function in the opening-process, and as such it has no modal anticipatory spheres.

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If, however, the question regarding the starting-point of the opening-process is related to the retrocipatory direction of time, it must be possible to point out a normative law-sphere on whose modal opening of meaning the whole opening-process depends in all the other normative law-spheres.

In the analysis of the modal retrocipations our attention was always directed to a law-sphere in whose modal nucleus the retrocipation is ultimately founded. In other words, the retrocipatory direction of time offers to theoretical thinking, at least provisionally, some resting-points in the original meaning-nuclei. It is true that these resting-points are again done away with by the transcendental direction of time without which they would become rigid and meaningless. Nevertheless, the first consideration provides a sufficient ground for the supposition that in the foundational direction there must exist a normative law-sphere in which the opening-process of the normative anticipatory spheres gets started. The only reserve to be made is that the point of comparative rest in this way offered to philosophic reflection on the possibility of the modal meaning-opening, is only a provisional resting-point. In the transcendental direction of thought it must necessarily be resolved into the essential unrest of meaning.

Provisionally it will be assumed that the law-sphere required is that of the historical aspect. According to this supposition the opening-process of the normative spheres must start here in the retrocipatory direction of time.

The historical law-sphere as the foundation of the entire opening-process of the normative anticipatory spheres of the modal aspects.

In the sequel of these investigations it will become more and more transparent that the historical aspect must really have this special place assigned to it in the retrocipatory temporal direction as regards the entire opening-process of the normative anticipatory spheres. The historical sphere must in fact be called the nodal point of the entire normative meaning-dynamics within cosmic time, in so far as all normative deepenings of meaning in the law-spheres have the raising of the cultural level in the historical process for their foundational ὑπόϑεσις.

If the historical law-sphere is indeed to have this foundational function in the opening-process of the normative anticipations

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within the modal structures, the opening of its own anticipatory spheres cannot have an earlier foundation in time. Every attempt to find its foundation in an earlier law-sphere must in this case land us in a vicious circle.

It is true that with reference to the logical sphere the modal opening of the historical aspect is the first ὑπόϑεσις in the transcendental or anticipatory direction of time. This has been shown in the brief analysis of the principle of economy of thought. But the opening-process of the historical law-sphere as such cannot be founded in that of the logical aspect, since the meaning-disclosure of the logical sphere itself proved to be possible only at a higher cultural level of development.

It is possible that in the historical and in the post-historical law-spheres the opening-process has already started without naïve logical thinking having been deepened into scientific theoretical thought. So, for instance, the Carolingian renaissance of science and arts had the establishment of the Carolingian empire as a real state-power for its historical foundation. It will be shown in Vol. III that a real State cannot appear at a closed historical stage of culture. But it is not possible that science starts without the guidance of a deepened manifestation of human power in the opening-process of history. As long as a rigid historical tradition has the exclusive mastery over the human mind and wards off any progressive conception of culture, science lacks the primary conditions of its rise and development.

Here we are indeed confronted with a peculiar feature in the functional structure of the normative opening-process. In all the substratum-spheres of the historical aspect the opening of the normative anticipatory spheres appears to be one-sidedly dependent on the beginning of the meaning-disclosure in cultural development. With regard to the opening of the preceding law-spheres this beginning, consequently, lies in the transcendental direction of time. In all the post-historical law-spheres, on the other hand, the process of disclosure has a ὑπόϑεσις both in the foundational and the transcendental temporal direction.

In a strict sense the beginning of the disclosure in the historical law-sphere is not the foundation of the normative meaning-disclosure in the preceding law-spheres. But all the same, here too, there is a one-sided irreversible relation of dependence entitling us to call the historical law-sphere, in the foundational direction, the nodal point of the entire process of disclosure in the normative anticipatory spheres of the other aspects.

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The expression of the foundational direction of time within the transcendental direction of time itself.

After all, even the foundational relation in the normative process of disclosure is a relation that functions within the transcendental direction of time, because the deepening of the modal meaning is, as such, of an anticipatory character, no matter in which law-sphere it takes place. So it appears that the twofold direction of time finds expression in the transcendental temporal direction itself. A correct insight into the special position of the historical aspect in the opening-process, however, is entirely dependent on the view that historical development, as such, is really enclosed in a specific modal law-sphere. But this is a view that must rouse the opposition of modern Historism in all its forms (the naturalistic as well as the spiritualistic). Even in Christian thought this conception may be called, to say the least, a very unusual one. Therefore in the first place this point must be made clear if our whole line of thought is not to lack its basis. And for this reason it is necessary to give a more detailed analysis of the ‘modal meaning of history’.

§ 2 - The modal meaning-nucleus of history

The pre-theoretical and the theoretical conceptions of history.

In the pre-scientific language of every day it is, of course, quite legitimate to talk of history as the complex of successive events that have really happened in the past. Non-scientific linguistic usage is integrated into the mental attitude of naïve experience, which lacks a theoretical analysis of the aspects.

When, e.g., a Christian statesman in opposition to speculative political constructions repeatedly appeals to the adage: ‘It is written, and it has happened!’¹, it must be clear that history is not conceived here in an abstract theoretical sense, but rather in the fulness of the concrete temporal coherence of meaning, revealed within typical structures of totality and individuality.

But in this non-theoretical attitude of experience the modal meaning of history in that concrete coherence of past events is

1 This adage was directed by the famous Dutch Christian statesman and historian Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer against the natural law constructions of the state, familiar to the French revolution. Cf. The Authorized (King James) Version Matthew 4:4.

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undoubtedly meant implicitly. Only this modal meaning has not been theoretically conceived here in an explicit way; it has not been made a theoretical ‘Gegenstand’ of analysis; it has not yet become a problem of thought.

If, however, in the theoretical attitude of thought the question is asked: ‘What is history?’ the answer: ‘All that happened in the past’ does not really get us a step further.

That you had dinner, smoked a cigar, and took a cup of coffee yesterday, all this at the present moment no doubt belongs to the past.

It cannot be denied that these concrete actions have an inherent historical aspect, since in the Middle Ages people did not smoke cigars and drink coffee. The introduction and general adoption of these luxuries undeniably belong to the realm of historical development. For this very reason, however, it is extremely important to know what exactly constitutes the historical aspect of these activities, in other words what is the modal meaning of history.

The ‘past’ taken in an unqualified sense comprises a great deal that cannot be considered as historical in a modal sense. The fact, e.g., that I breathed yesterday is no less a thing of the past, but the merely ‘natural’ aspects of this event do not fall within the scope of ‘history’.

Besides, the restriction of history to what has happened in the past cannot be essential even to the pre-theoretical attitude of experience. Everybody experienced the great moment of the invasion of France as a historical event, as the decisive turning-point in the second world-war.

History unites the present, the past and the future. It is exactly in its historical aspect that time assumes this threefold articulation. The present is the historical orienting-point between what has passed away and what is coming. The past and the future meet in the historical present. The latter is the point of reflection in our experience of historical time. But what is the historical mode of experience?

Many historians are satisfied by the statement that the historical viewpoint refers to becoming, genesis or evolution. The famous Dutch historian Robert Fruin, e.g., defined the science of history as ‘the science of becoming’.

But becoming, or genesis is an analogical concept which in analytical scientific thought demands its modal delimitation of meaning, since the term genesis here has very different modal

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significations. It is also used in chemistry, in geology, in biology, in psychology, in linguistic science, in jurisprudence¹, and so on.

The equally analogical concept of evolution lacking all modal specification of meaning, also does not offer a real criterion, if we want to characterize the historical mode of experience. In the organic processes of the life of plants and animals there is also question of ‘evolution’, and it is here that the term doubtless has its original sense. ‘Evolution’ is a concept applied to phenomena in all the modal aspects of reality founded in the biotic law-sphere. It is therefore especially important to know what modal meaning is grasped in historical evolution.

1 The juridical concept of genesis is related to the formal sources of law and the origin of legal relations (obligations, rights, and so on).

Different views of the meaning of history.

What then is the modal meaning of history? Many answers are given in modern philosophy to the question what is the end or telos of history, and what is the specific method of historical science. But the modal meaning of the historical view-point has never really been investigated.

Many writers, following the footsteps of Comte's positivism, look upon history as the progressive evolution of mankind which in the course of its successive phases is subject to ‘sociological’ laws erroneously interpreted as ‘laws of nature’.

Others, oriented to the neo-Kantian view of the South-Western German School, consider the historical aspect to be a transcendental-synthetic relation of human judgment. By means of this the transcendental subject of judgment is supposed to relate empirical reality, which in itself is ‘wertblind’, i.e. devoid of value, (and which is identified with the sensorily perceptual phenomena of ‘nature’), to universally acknowledged values in human society (the state, art, religion, economy, law, etc.).

Historical science, as cultural science, is supposed to pay special attention to the individuality of the phenomena that are thus considered as ‘Sinngebilde’ (meaning-formations). In contrast to this method of thinking natural science is said to proceed in a generalizing way and to be ‘blind to values’.

The adherents of Hegelian idealism view history as the temporal mode of development of ‘spiritual reality’ in which the

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‘objective Mind’ immanently unfolds its infinite wealth of meaning. Each individual phenomenon in history is a particular figure or shape adopted by that Mind in its dialectical course through the history of the world; it is an individual moment in the spiritual totality, only intelligible in the coherence of the whole.

And then there are others (Spengler, etc.) who are of the opinion that history is a stream of life which in the course of centuries produces parallel, self-contained types of culture growing up, maturing, and dying, just like natural organisms.

And lastly, the philosophy of existence holds that history is the typical mode of being of human existence as such. Here ‘history’ is taken in the purely subjective and individual sense of the free project of one's personal existential being, not in the ‘objective’ social sense intended by the science of history.

Behind all these conceptions there is no difficulty in recognizing the fundamental structure of the cosmonomic Idea of Humanistic immanence-philosophy analyzed in great detail in Volume I. They cannot reveal the modal meaning of history because they do not recognize modal law-spheres. And they cannot accept modal law-spheres because they start from the dialectical religious basic motive of nature and freedom which disturbs the insight into the modal structures of meaning.

In the preceding chapter the modal meaning-nucleus of the historical law-sphere has been provisionally circumscribed as the controlling manner of moulding the social process. Strictly speaking, this nuclear moment should only be designated by the term control or mastery, since the additional moment of the circumscription has an analogical character. But control or mastery in its original (non-analogical) sense was assumed to be an irreducible modal manner of formation according to a free project. And this is exactly the original meaning of the term culture which is generally used to designate the ‘Gegenstand’ of historical science in contradistinction to the fields of research of natural science.

We have first to show that the term ‘culture’ according to its original sense really refers to an original and irreducible modal nucleus by means of which a genuine law-sphere is delimited which is to be indicated as the historical.

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The modal nuclear meaning of the term culture and the ambiguity of the term history.

Doubtless, the indication of the specific field of research of the science of history by the term ‘culture’ is not complete. The historian studies the cultural process of development of human society. But it must be clear that in this more ample circumscription the process of development can only be an analogical moment which, as such, is not suitable to qualify the historical viewpoint proper. Rather it must derive all its modal qualification from the preceding adjective.

Apart from their reference to the cultural modality of social development the terms ‘history’ and ‘historical’ lack every relation to the scientific field of research of the historian and are ambiguous.

Occasionally the term ‘natural history’ occurs, but it does not denote the specific field of research of the science of history proper. In the common use of the term the substantive ‘history’ is taken in the neutral Greek sense of ‘enquiry’ and is related to the study of animal life, especially as set forth for popular use. There is still another use of the term history when it refers to the natural genesis of geological formations and of species of plants and animals. But here, too, the term lacks any relation to the specific modal aspect of experience delimiting the historical viewpoint proper.

Geology and palaeontology can, doubtless, render important services to the historian who is confronted with ancient phases of cultural development. It is, however, only the cultural modality of development itself which can determine the historical field of enquiry. Consequently, there can be no question of an historical aspect of experience apart from the cultural one. If the meaning-nucleus of the cultural modality is only to be found in control or mastery we must establish that this nuclear moment, as such, implies a vocation and task which can only be accomplished in a successive cultural development of mankind in its temporal social existence.

The terms ‘historical’ and ‘history’, viewed merely etymologically, have indeed no specific modal sense. It is only the cultural modality with its nuclear moment of mastery or control that can give them the pregnant meaning of an irreducible aspect of human experience. Apart from it there can be no question of an historical law-sphere at all.

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The universality of the historical view-point.

There is no ground for the fear that, through a modal limitation of the historical viewpoint and the concept of culture in the sense indicated, the scientific field of research of the historian will lose anything of its legitimate material extent. With regard to this point I may refer to what has been said about the modal limitation of the psychological viewpoint. There remains room for a history of human intercourse and language, for an economic and a legal history, a history of morality and of faith, of science and of the fine arts, a history of human society in its typical structures of individuality. When historical research is specialized according to modal aspects which, as such, lack historical character and come later in the cosmic temporal order, the historical viewpoint must anticipate them as leading modal functions. In this case the historian is obliged to take over from other sciences the specific scientific concepts necessary for the theoretical delimitation of these aspects of the phenomena whose historical development is to be examined. But this does not detract from the fact that his own specific viewpoint remains qualified by the modal nuclear moment of mastery.

The study of legal history for instance is not the same as an examination of the legal institutions in their successive juridical appearance and disappearance. The juridical modality of genesis and change is not the historical one¹. A really legal-historical inquiry has to provide us with the insight into the entire cultural background of the legal institutions in the coherence of an historical period. It has to show the development of the historical power-formations of the different social circles concerned in the process of law-making, as well as the cultural influence of the legal institutions themselves (for instance that of Roman or canon law upon the Germanic peoples).

It is always the cultural viewpoint, the controlling manner of giving form to the social process, which characterizes historical inquiry proper.

1 See p. 194 note.

Cultural and natural formation.

Mastery or control, in its original modal sense, elevates itself above what is given and actualized after a fixed pattern apart from human planning. It pre-supposes a given material whose

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possibilities are disclosed in a way exceeding the patterns given and realized by nature, and actualized after a free project of form-giving with endless possibilities of variation.

It always seeks new roads in such a way that what precedes fructifies that which follows, and thus a certain continuity is preserved in cultural development. This is why the cultural mode of shaping is fundamentally different from all manner of formation in nature. It is neither a physical-chemical, nor a biotic, nor an instinctive psychical modus expressing itself in animal constructions. A spider spins its web with faultless certitude. But it does so after a fixed and uniform pattern, prescribed by the instinct of the species. The web is not the result of a free project due to reflection and productive fantasy; the animal lacks the free control of the material of its construction. Even the admirable works built by beavers or termites in social cooperation do not have a cultural character. They are the result of a social instinct, a social feeling-drive proceeding after a fixed model.

Mastery over persons and over things (‘Personkultur’ and ‘Sachkultur’) and the analogy of this distinction in the legal sphere.

Culture discloses itself in two directions which in the modal structure of the aspect concerned correspond to the historical subject-object relation. On the one hand culture appears in mastery over persons by giving cultural form to their social existence; on the other hand it appears in a controlling manner of shaping things of nature. The Germans speak of ‘Personkultur’ and ‘Sachkultur’. It will appear later on that mastery over persons is an essential requirement in the leading figures who are called ‘formers of history’ and who give positive content to the cultural principles proper. In the present context we provisionally observe that in the modal structure of the juridical aspect there is to be found an essential analogy of this state of affairs. Legal power over persons (competency) is an essential requirement of law-making. Legal power over things is essential to the jura in rē as well as to the legal possession of things. But it has appeared that legal or juridical power is never to be reduced to mastery or power in its original cultural sense, though it is founded in the latter.

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Culture and civilization.

In addition to the distinction between ‘Personkultur’ and ‘Sachkultur’ sometimes a further distinction is made between ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ (Zivilisation, civilisatio), meant as the difference between inner and outward culture. This further distinction is neither unambiguous nor generally accepted, because the word civilization itself can be understood in this twofold sense¹. In any case it cannot be derived from the modal structure of the cultural or historical aspect. In general it seems to concern the psychology of culture rather than cultural development itself. In a special sense it is related to the modal aspect of human intercourse in which the moment of cultural form can only have an analogical meaning. Forms of fashion, good manners, courtesy, etc. can be appropriated internally or outwardly only. As such they are not forms of mastery proper, although they are always founded in the latter. The controlling manner of social shaping of the human mind and human behaviour on which they are based, has not itself the modal meaning of fashion, courtesy etc. As legal power has an intrinsical juridical and not a cultural sense, so the leading rôle of the higher circles in human intercourse is only an analogy of mastery in its original signification. This leading function must be founded in historical power proper if it is to maintain itself.

A democratic or a proletarian revolution can annihilate the historical power-formation on which the leading position of the higher ranks in the relations of intercourse was based. The bolshevist revolution gives a striking recent example of this state of affairs.

1 The term civilization betrays its origin from the Greek conception of the polis, which as bearer of the cultural religion of the Olympian Gods was supposed to be an essential condition for the complete development of the ‘essential form’ of human nature. In this sense civilization was opposed to barbarism. Barbaros was anyone lacking the cultivating influence of the polis.

Culture and human society.

The cultural mode of form-giving is always a social human modality. That is to say, it is nothing but a modal aspect of empirical human society. The terms ‘social’ and ‘society’ are not used here in the specific modal sense of the aspect of human intercourse;

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rather they are taken in the signification of an essential trait of temporal human existence as such. The latter is rooted in the central religious community of mankind, and therefore temporal human existence, in all its modal aspects, is pervaded by social relations of every kind.

Our transcendental critique of theoretical thought has brought to light that the temporal horizon of human experience with its modal diversity of aspects finds its individual point of concentration in the I-ness, but that the latter participates in the central spiritual community of mankind. So it must be clear that this temporal horizon of human experience itself is the transcendental condition both of individual and social temporal experience, and that it must be essentially related to mankind in its temporal social existence.

If, however, the cultural manner of form-giving is only a modal aspect of social experience and temporal human society, it is not permissible to identify it with the latter. Historism, whose historical mode of thinking is often pervaded by a universalistic and irrationalist sociological view, has done so. The Historical legal school, founded by v. Savigny, was led astray by the noun-form of the word ‘culture’. They spoke of the culture of a people as of a social historical whole with different aspects and originating from the individual ‘Volksgeist’. So the pitfall concealed in the historicist view of social reality was masked by the identification of the ‘culture’ and the social life of a national community.

Positivistic sociology, founded by de St Simon and Auguste Comte, replaced the irrationalist conception of the individual national community as origin of human culture by the rationalist and naturalist conception of human society, taken over from the physiocratic and the classical schools of economics.

‘Culture’ viewed as an objective social whole resulting from human society could, consequently, no longer be conceived of as a specific modal aspect of social human experience and social reality. Its original modal meaning was lost sight of on account of an unqualified analogical use of the term, whose specific modal qualifications (as economic, legal, ethical, aesthetical, etc.) were interpreted as modalities or special ‘realms’ or ‘sides’ of ‘culture as such’.

It is higly important to get a clear insight into the inner coherence between the historicistic view of social reality and the theoretical transformation of the original cultural modality of

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social experience into an unqualified analogical collective concept.

As soon as this transformation takes place the historical viewpoint loses any modal delimitation, and every obstacle impeding its absolutization seems to be cleared away. Nevertheless, there does remain an ultimate obstacle: cultural life cannot be identified with social life because the latter also encompasses the pre-logical aspects of human experience and temporal reality, whereas ‘culture’ has always been opposed to ‘nature’. It makes no sense to say that human social life, in contradistinction to that of animals, lacks ‘natural’ aspects; and that it is restricted to the ‘spiritual realm’ of existence. The real state of affairs is that there cannot exist any temporal human society without pre-logical social aspects, realized in a genuine human sense. Even the human body originates from social sexual relations in which the biotic aspect is essential. ‘Culture’, on the other hand, cannot have pre-logical aspects, and consequently it cannot be a social reality on the same footing as human society. It is, as such, nothing but a modality which can only be realized in an unbreakable coherence with the non-cultural modalities of empirical reality. As soon as it realized in a concrete phenomenon we are confronted with a typical total structure which is more than its cultural aspect.

The neo-Kantian school of Windelband, Rickert and Lask must have seen this to a certain degree, since they denied the reality of culture, and made it into a transcendental mode of judging ‘nature’ by relating the latter in an individualizing manner to the realm of values. But in this conception, too, the original modal meaning of the term ‘culture’ has been entirely eliminated. The very nucleus of this meaning: the controlling manner of shaping, is lacking in this neo-Kantian circumscription which is clearly influenced by Fichte's considerations on the methodology of historical science and Kant's Critique of teleological Judgment.

Every attempt at a conceptual delimitation of the cultural sphere and the corresponding historical viewpoint which eliminates this nuclear moment, has only resulted in the introduction of unqualified analogies and collective pseudo-concepts.

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K. Kuypers' view concerning tradition as the modal nucleus of the historical aspect.

In different methological and epistemological investigations much attention has been given to the meaning of fundamental historical concepts like those of historical development, historical causality, historical time and its periodizing, etc. But all these analogical concepts remained unqualified so long as the modal nucleus of the historical aspect was not laid bare, and the original modal sense of the term ‘culture’ was not distinguished from its analogical meanings.

K. Kuypers¹ in his important thesis Theorie der Geschiedenis (1931) has tried to show on the basis of the theory of the modal law-spheres that the modal nucleus of the historical aspect is not to be found in culture but rather in the moment of tradition². To my mind, he has not succeeded in making this view plausible. By holding to the current unqualified concept of culture he has lost sight of its equivocal character.

It will appear below how important the moment of tradition really is in the modal structure of the historical process. Nevertheless, it cannot function as the nuclear moment in this meaning-structure. A closer analysis immediately shows its retrocipatory character.

Tradition is what has been handed down from generation to generation, from ancestors to posterity. It can manifest itself in customs which are followed without any consciousness of their origin. What distinguishes it from the rigid instinct of the species in which the continuity of inheritance handed down from ancestors to posterity is also implied, but in a sense quite different from really historical tradition?

This characteristic moment can only be found in the cultural mode of shaping the social relations between men. Historical tradition is qualified by formative power in its original modal sense. It is not only its cultural content but in the first place its cultural modality as form-giving power which distinguishes it from blind animal instinct. By this, and by this alone it exceeds the natural patterns of instinctive tradition imposing themselves upon animal behaviour by the irresistible force of a non-controlled feeling-drive of the species.

1 At present professor of philosophy at the University of Utrecht.

2 Theorie der geschiedenis voornamelijk met betrekking tot de cultuur (thesis, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam 1934 (publ. H.J. Paris), p. 105 ff.

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The indirect test of the correctness of our conception concerning the modal nucleus of the historical viewpoint.

That ‘culture’, in the sense of ‘formative control’, must really be an original meaning-nucleus was already made clear indirectly. In the logical law-sphere the moment of formative control (or command) appeared to be an evident analogy anticipating the historical meaning-aspect, and in the later law-spheres there was repeatedly found a retrocipatory analogical moment of power and formation in our previous analyses. In these non-historical law-spheres this meaning-moment could not be original, as it was qualified by the specific modal nuclei of these spheres. This made it necessary to try and find the law-sphere whose modal structure is qualified by the controlling manner of formgiving as its irreducible meaning-nucleus. And then only the historical aspect conceived as that of cultural development, could be considered.

This indirect method to establish the existence of a modal law-sphere has universal validity. It has been applied continuously in our analysis of the modal structures.

The cultural modality and its typical empirical contents.

Meanwhile it should not be forgotten that in the present context we are only concerned with an analysis of the modal structure of the historical aspect of experience. This implies that great stress is laid upon the original modal meaning of the term culture, and that this modality is considered apart from the rich diversity of its empirical contents. The typical structures of individuality expressing themselves in every modal aspect alike bring about an enormous amount of variation in the cultural phenomena especially in a differentiated society. They cannot be examined before the termination of our inquiry into the modal structures of the different law-spheres.

For the moment we can only refer to what has been said about the material extent of the historical field of research. There are cultural realms of science and fine arts, of technics and industry, of Church and State etc. And it will appear in Vol. III that this implies a great diversity of typical qualifications of cultural phenomena (scientific culture, aestatic culture, political culture, ecclesiastical culture etc.).

So the term ‘culture’ can be used in this concrete and material

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sense. But this does not derogate from the modal character of the aspect in which this collectivity of concrete culture¹ can only present itself as such.

Current opinion, however, has always tried to resolve the nuclear-moment of ‘the cultural modality’ into really unqualified general concepts. In so far as ‘culture’ was conceived as the ‘material meaning-content’ of history, the attempt was made to comprehend it in a modally unqualified concept of relation. ‘Culture’ was defined as natural reality to which values cling (Rickert) as ‘the synthesis of nature and freedom’; as the ‘realization of values in time’; as an ‘immanent meaning-structure’; as the ‘formation of nature and society related to Ideas’ (Münch)², etc.

In the nature of the case this deprived the moment of ‘culture’ of all of its modal character.

1 It must be denied that in our modern, highly differentiated, western society this collectivity of concrete culture can be a ‘social whole’. If this were the case, it would be possible to indicate a typical social structure of individuality giving all the differentiated realms of modern culture the same typical total character, or at least to indicate a typical community (e.g. the church) which through its uniting power could impregnate all of the different cultural realms with its spirit and leading ideas. In a primitive society, or in the ecclesiastically unified medieval society, we may find examples of such a cultural unity. In modern western culture, however, such a uniting power is not to be found, and the universalist conceptions of it are nothing but a priori constructions lacking any foundation in empirical social reality.

2 The latter circumscription contains at least the moment of formation. But the modal nuclear moment of mastery or control is lacking. As an adherent of Rickert's neo-Kantian standpoint, Münch is obliged to seek the meaning of culture in a transcendental relation between reality and values or Ideas.

The origin of the Humanistic concept of culture.

The entire eradication of the original modal character of the historical viewpoint can only be explained by the fact that the prevailing tendencies in the recent philosophy of history have not really derived their concept of culture from an analysis of the modal horizon of human experience but from the Humanistic ideal of personality.

The attempt was made to comprise the whole of the rational temporal activity of human personality with all its objective

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results, in the notion of ‘culture’, in contrast to the realm of ‘natural reality’, as a mere ‘Gegenstand’ of theoretical enquiry. The concept of culture became a truly collective concept of all the normative aspects of temporal experience, whose unity was supposedly grasped in the idea of the free personality as ‘practical reason’.

Since thus the temporal material meaning of history lost its character as an irreducible modus of experience, it became necessary to try and find a formal ‘epistemological’ criterion for the historical field of research. By its means the attempt was made to delimit the specifically historical view-point from cultural-theoretical view-points that are specifically different, such as the ‘sociological’, the ‘economical’, the ‘juridical’, the ‘aesthetic’, the ‘linguistic’ and the ethical points of view.

But then an insoluble difficulty cropped up. The recent epistemological investigations into the criterion of the historical field of research have their essential background in modern Historism, which has reduced all the normative aspects of reality to the historical basic denominator. The attempt may be made to put up some resistance to the relativistic consequences of this Historism by holding fast to formal, supposedly super-temporal values of justice, beauty, truth, holiness, etc. But that positive law, positive morality, positive doctrines of faith, positive aesthetic norms, etc., are essentially historical phenomena, is such a deep-rooted opinion that it rouses scarcely any opposition. In this state of affairs a specific historical viewpoint seems hardly to be found.

Troeltsch's and Dilthey's struggle with the problems of Historism.

The influence of this relativistic Historism has at last also undermined the rational faith in absolute super-temporal ‘Ideas’ or ‘values’ in the prevailing modern ‘Lebensphilosophie’.

Troeltsch has carried on a truly titanic struggle with the problems of this Historism, in order to rescue the faith in the Humanistic ideal of personality from the rising tide of the historistic philosophy of life. He has, however, been affected by this trend of thought to such a degree that he merges all material ‘values’ and ‘norms’ into the creative historical development of culture. Appealing to the Leibnizian idea of the monad, he only retains an unprovable faith in the coherence of this development with the ‘Absolute’ in the concurrence of the factual

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and the ideal. In this way he tries to justify the entire personality's throwing itself into the historical struggle for values¹. According to him, all the standards of the so-called ‘objective ethics’, of communal life (in the family, the state, and industry), of art, of law etc., must be acquired from historical development by means of conscious formative power. Formal ethics, as it was absolutized by Kant in the Idea of the categorical imperative, can only furnish these material cultural-historical standards of human activity, directed to the future, with the form of normative necessity².

An essentially similar historical relativizing of the absolute is found in Dilthey, who thought he had regained the idea of the sovereign freedom of human personality, freed from the last remnants of dogmatic restriction, in the ‘historical consciousness’. Consider the following utterance of this famous thinker:

‘The historical consciousness of the finiteness of every historical phenomenon, every human or social condition, and of the relativity of every kind of belief, is the last step to the liberation of man.

By its means man attains to the sovereign power to appropriate the contents of every experience, to throw himself entirely into it, unprejudiced, as if there were not any system of philosophy or belief which could bind men. Life becomes free from conceptual knowledge; the mind becomes sovereign with regard to all the cobwebs of dogmatic thought. Every beauty, every kind of holiness, every sacrifice, revived, and explained, opens vistas disclosing a reality. And similarly we apprehend evil, terror, deformity as having their place in the world, containing a reality that must have its justification in the coherence of the world. Here we are confronted with something that cannot be spirited away. And, in contrast to relativity, the continuity of the creative force asserts itself as the most essential historical fact’³.

1 Cf. his standardwork: Der Historismus and seine Probleme, p. 200-221.

2 Hauptprobleme der Ethik (Ges. Schriften II, p. 618 ff.).

3 Ges. Werke VII, 290/1:
‘Das historische Bewusstsein der Endlichkeit jeder geschichtlichen Erscheinung, jedes menschlichen oder gesellschaftlichen Zustandes, von der Relativität jeder Art von Glauben ist der letzte Schritt zur Befreiung des Menschen. Mit ihm erreicht der Mensch die Souveränität, jedem Erlebnis seinen Gehalt abzugewinnen, sich ihm ganz hinzugeben, unbefangen, als wäre kein System von Philosophie oder Glauben das Menschen binden könnte.
Das Leben wird frei vom Erkennen durch Begriffe; der Geist wird souverän allen Spinnweben dogmatischen Denkens gegenüber. Jede Schönheit, jede Heiligkeit, jedes Opfer, nacherlebt und ausgelegt, eröffnet Perspektiven, die eine Realität aufschliessen. Und ebenso nehmen wir dann das Schlechte, das Furchtbare, das Hässliche in uns auf als eine Stelle einnehmend in der Welt, als eine Realität in sich schliessend, die im Weltzusammenhang gerechtfertigt sein muss. Etwas was nicht weggetäuscht werden kann. Und die Relativität gegenüber macht sich die Kontinuität der schaffenden Kraft als die kernhafte historische Tatsache geltend.’

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Nevertheless, on his 70th anniversary the famous thinker clearly saw the impasse in which this Historism involves theoretical thought.

‘The historical world-view,’ he observed, ‘has broken the last chain not yet broken by philosophy and natural science. Everything is flowing, nothing remains. But where are the means to conquer the anarchy of opinions which threatens us?’

Rickert's distinction between individualizing and systematic cultural sciences.

In the light of the historicistic conception there could at most be room for a formal differentiation between the historical and the ‘specific cultural-scientific’ view-points. In this cadre of thought, e.g., Rickert's later distinction between systematic and individualizing cultural sciences finds its place in which historical science proper was qualified as individualizing¹.

The subject-matter of all cultural sciences, however, according to Rickert's later more exact conception, is an historical material ‘which according to its essence is cultural life filled with meaning’². The theoretical ‘relation to values’ (Wertbeziehung) has been adapted to this historical material. It is only a formal method³. Just as Rickert expresses it himself: ‘In the way indicated they’ (i.e. the general cultural values) ‘constitute the concrete meaning-formations clinging to the historical processes,

1 Cf. Rickert's work: Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (4th and 5th Edition 1921), p. 125 ff.

2 ‘welches seinem Wesen nach sinnerfülltes Kulturleben ist.’

3 Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (1924), p. 68 ff. In his: Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung (3rd and 4th edition 1921) the distinction between individualizing and systematic cultural sciences was still absent. Cf. Kuypers, op. cit., p. 182.

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hence to the actual State, actual art, actual religion, actual scientific organizations, and they give to these real objects the intelligible meanings which render them into historical objects or to bearers of historically important forms of meaning. In so far the historian must ever be an historian of culture’ (I italicize)¹.

We saw that, contrary to post-Kantian monistic idealism, Rickert does not include the meaning of history in reality itself, but considers the (psycho-physical) ‘reality’ only as the bearer of that meaning.

It is, however, not important in this connection that he will not hear of an immanent realization of the ideal values. The chief thing is that, in accordance with the prevailing conception, he reduces all the normative aspects of temporal experience to the historical denominator of culture.

But from what source then can a criterion arise for the distinction of the ‘specifically historical view-point’ from specifically sociological, linguistic, juridical, economic and other aspects?

According to their material modal meaning, all these aspects have become modi of the historical meaning of culture in this conception.

A ‘theory of values’ cannot furnish a delimitation of the scientific historical viewpoint in a philosophy of culture that does not recognize a ‘specific value’ to which to relate history itself.

1 Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, p. 80:
‘Sie’ (nl. die allgemeinen Kulturwerte) ‘konstituieren in der angegebenen Weise die konkreten Sinngebilde, die an den geschichtlichen Vorgängen, also am wirklichen Staat, an der wirklichen Kunst, an der wirklichen Religion, an der wirklichen wissenschaftlichen Organisationen haften, und sie geben diesen realen Objekten die verständlichen Bedeutungen, die sie zu historischen Objekten oder zu Trägern von geschichtlich wesentlichen Sinngebilden machen. Insofern muss der Historiker immer Kulturhistoriker sein.’

The confusion caused by the application of the form-matter schema to the relation between the post-historical modi and the historical aspect of empirical reality.

Neo-Kantianism resorted to the form-matter-schema, when defining the relation of the historical aspect to the other post-logical modi of empirical reality. Rudolph Stammler conceived, e.g., positive law as an historical-economic material in the ‘legal

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form of thought’. By means of this ‘critical’ conception Stammler thought he had conquered Historical Materialism!¹.

But economic science and the science of history were equally in need of a ‘specific view-point’ for the delimitation of their methods of research. On this point Rickert's conception of the rigorous adaptability of the transcendental-logical historical form of knowledge to the ‘material’ was useless, since the ‘material’ of all the cultural sciences had been assumed to be identical.

This could not but lead to an internally antinomic exclusivism of the ‘transcendental-logical forms of knowledge’ in the epistemology of ‘cultural’ or ‘mental sciences’². The material (the content of experience), assumed to be grasped in these ‘forms of knowledge’, was in fact outlawed. The ‘pure theory of law’ transferred this content to sociology, psychology, and the science of history. ‘Formal sociology’ referred it back to the other ‘cultural sciences’, and ‘pure economics’, ‘pure grammar’, ‘pure aesthetics’ or ‘ethics’ could not give shelter to the ‘historical material of experience’ either. If Kelsen's or Stammler's ‘pure theory of law’ were correct, ‘pure economics’ and ‘formal sociology’ would be precluded. If ‘pure or formal sociology’ with its formalistic conception of the sociological categories were right, there would be no room left for a ‘pure theory of law’ or ‘pure economics’.

And the science of history would in truth have to pay the piper if the form-matter schema were applied in this way. For then the consequence was inescapable that history can only furnish a material of experience, and lacks any constitutive logical form of its own. If according to the critical view-point, the material of experience is only determined by the logical forms of thought, and there are no specific historical categories, it follows that there is no room for an historical science proper, as distinct from the natural and the special social sciences.

Thus Rudolph Stammler denied economic and historical sciences a particular ‘transcendental logical view-point’. He was the first to apply the epistemological form-matter schema to the province of law. He thought the historical-economical

1 Cf. his Wirtschaft und Recht nach der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung and the destructive criticism of it by Max Weber in his: Stammler's ‘Ueberwindung’ der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung (Ges. Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, Tübingen, Mohr, 1922, p. 291 ff.).

2 i.e. the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ in the sense meant by Dilthey.

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phenomena could only be logically determined as ‘material’ by means of the ‘forms of juridical thought’ or those of ‘social convention’ (intercourse) respectively, just as only the Idea of justice was supposed to give history its unity of meaning¹.

In sociology the form-matter schema was introduced by Georg Simmel, though not in a merely epistemological function. Hans Kelsen, in his Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre, compared the ‘pure theory of law’ to geometry in so far as it only attended to the form of the social phenomena. Similarly Simmel, in his Sociology, made use of the figure of the geometrical form to delimit the view of formal sociology from that of the ‘material social sciences’.

As geometry states what constitutes the spatiality of spatial things, sociology fixes the social forms in the actual social structures.

Simmel assumes, to be sure, that the ‘social forms’, unlike the ‘theoretical thought-forms of nature’ do not originate from mere theoretical thought. They are supposed to be a priori conditions, included in the historical-psychical life of the social individuals themselves (since they are consciously and synthetically active), as ‘elements of society’. By means of the social forms the individuals combine into the ‘synthesis’ of society. But the supposedly fundamental social category of psychical interaction to which is attributed the task of delimiting the science of ‘formal’ sociology from ‘material’ social sciences, remains a purely formal criterion. The investigation of the feeling-drives which cause the different forms of social interaction is assigned to social psychology, that of the different aims and interests to which these social forms are serviceable is reserved to jurisprudence, economics, ethics, theology and so on.

All these causes and interests are supposed to be the ‘material’ of the social relations. The insuperable difficulty, however, in Simmel's conception is that this ‘material’ is considered to be psycho-historical. The sociological basic category of ‘interaction’ was supposed to have been abstracted from the content of the psychical processes. The latter are as such, i.e. in their subjective character, to be subsumed under the purely ‘psychological categories’ of scientific explanation². The same psychical material is, consequently, subjected to two kinds of formal categories

1 Cf. his: Lehrbuch der Rechtsphilosophie (1922), 177.

2 Soziologie (1908), p. 23.

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excluding one another per definitionem. The ‘contents’ of the ‘social’ phenomena are supposed to consist of ‘interests, aims, motives’, which only function as actual social phenomena in the form of the ‘interaction between the individuals’.

These actual social phenomena, constituted in the indissoluble coherence of form and content, are identified with ‘historical reality’. They can be viewed from three different standpoints: either ‘with regard to the individuals who are the real bearers of the conditions;’ or ‘with regard to the forms of interaction between the individuals, realized, to be sure, in their individual existence, but considered only from the view-point of their being together with one another and for each other’; or finally ‘with regard to the conceptually expressible contents of conditions and events. In the last case the subjects and their formal social relations are not inquired after but only the purely objective signification of the contents intended: viz. industry and technics, fine art and science, legal rules and the products of the life of feeling’¹.

In this way Simmel tried to delimit formal sociology as a method of research from psychology, the science of history and the ‘material social sciences’.

But he also held to the neo-Kantian form-matter schema for the epistemological constitution of the scientific historical field of experience. In his well-known book: Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, the first edition of which appeared in 1892, he turned sharply against the ‘naïve-realistic’ conception that the historian finds his ‘Gegenstand’ in a cut and dried form in the reality of experience.

He tried to analyze the historical forms of thought which are supposed to constitute this ‘Gegenstand’: the individualizing view of reality in its special sense of ‘objective mind’ (objektiven Geist), (in contradistinction to the generalizing way of

1 Op. cit., p. 16:
‘auf die individuellen Existenzen hin, die die realen Träger der Zustände sind; auf die formalen Wechselwirkungsformen, die sich freilich auch nur an individuellen Existenzen vollziehen, aber jetzt nicht vom Standpunkte dieser, sondern dem ihres Zusammen, ihres Miteinander und Füreinander betrachtet werden; auf die begrifflich formulierbaren Inhalte von Zuständen und Geschehnissen hin, bei denen jetzt nicht nach ihren Trägern oder deren Verhältnissen gefragt wird, sondern nach ihrer rein sachlichen Bedeutung, nach der Wirtschaft und Technik, nach der Kunst und der Wissenschaft, nach den Rechtsnormen und den Produkte des Gefühlslebens.’

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thought directed to what is conformable to law in natural sciences), the ‘category of development’, etc.¹.

From such a use of the form-matter schema the greatest possible confusion must result. The social forms of the historical-social phenomena are abstracted from the contents of the psychical processes, whereas the subjective motives of the latter come under the cognitive forms of natural science. The ‘historical’ viewpoint itself is constituted by a ‘category of thought’, the category of the individualizing understanding of reality in its individual meaning and continuity of development.

But how can truly social phenomena then be qualified as historical? In his treatise: ‘Der Fragmentcharakter des Lebens’ Simmel distinguishes theoretical cognitive forms and quite a series of non-theoretical forms (of art, law, religion, etc.). They are supposed to constitute a parallelism of different worlds of forms, and to individualize themselves in ‘psycho-historical reality’. Here he observes: ‘A real overlapping and interlacing of one world into another is impossible, as each of them already expresses the totality of the world-contents in its special language’².

This implies the recognition of the impossibility of defining the relation between formal sociology, the science of history, and ‘material social sciences’ according to the form-matter schema. If also the legal, the aesthetic, the moral fields, etc., are constituted by absolutely independent forms, ‘formal sociology’ can no longer be opposed as formal to the material ‘social sciences’. Thus Simmel later on abandoned the conception of a purely formal sociology.

The form-matter schema, applied as a methodical criterion to the delimitation of sociology, historical science, and the special ‘cultural sciences’ of law, language, morality, etc. disintegrates itself. And Kelsen correctly concluded from this schema the impossibility of a ‘formal sociology’ with categories of its own and distinct from a ‘pure theory of law’. He abandoned sociology as a merely ‘empirical science’ entirely to the causal view of natural science.

1 Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (4th ed., 1922), p. 156-ff.

2 Logos, Bnd. VI, p. 35: ‘Ein eigentliches Uebergreifen und Sich-Verflechten der einen Welt in die andere ist unmöglich, da eine jede schon die Gesammtheit der Weltinhalte in ihrer besonderen Sprache ausdrückt.’ Cf. my ‘Crisis in de Humanistische Staatsleer, p. 190-ff., (also for the formal sociology of von Wiese).

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Rickert could only distinguish the historical from the ‘particular view-point of the special sciences of culture’ by means of a formal discrimination between the ‘individualizing’ and the ‘systematical’ (typisierende) methods of ‘relating to values’.

Especially in the light of his view that the individualizing method of historical research is rigorously adapted to the material of culture, this distinction could not fail to reveal itself as internally contradictory. The ‘material’ of the systematic sciences of culture was supposed not to be different from that of the science of history! How then can it allow of a generalizing method of relating to values by means of type-concepts?

The neo-Hegelian philosophy of culture yields no criterion for the historical law-sphere either.

The neo-Hegelian philosophy no longer conceives of culture in a schema of form and matter as neo-Kantianism had done. Rather it considers it as the creation of the ‘objective Mind’ accomplished before all theoretical reflection. This ‘objective Mind’ is the transpersonal acting reason (‘Vernunft’) unfolding itself in time in the communities of nation and state, and attaining self-consciousness in dialectal philosophy.

This view is also unable to offer us a material criterion of history as a law-sphere. It might consider ‘Ideas’ as practical constitutive principles of the ‘objective Mind’, and as such have them really enter into historical development. But its dialectical basic Idea of the meaning-coherence in the meaning-diversity does not allow of the acknowledgement of the cosmic boundaries between the modal law-spheres.

The distinction between the juridical and the specifically historical view-point in Julius Binder.

In the same strain the neo-Hegelian legal philosopher Julius Binder¹ writes in his voluminous Philosophie des Rechts about the relation of the systematic juridical science to the science of legal history:

‘The “Gegenstand” both of the systematic and the historical sciences of law is at bottom the actually operative legal order of the present, which as a meaning-figure has an historical essence which must be looked upon as the unifying point for the two disciplines of empirical law’².

1 Only the immanence of the Ideas in historical reality is not accepted by Binder. Cf. my: De Beteekenis der Wetsidee voor Rechtwetenschap en Rechtsphilosophie (1926), p. 51 ff.

2 Philosophie des Rechts (1925), p. 1012.

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In the same way positive language, rules of social inter-course, art, ‘religion’, etc., are essentially of an historical character to Binder. They are modi of ‘history’, which comprises all the normative meaning-aspects of reality; and ‘history’ itself, in a material sense, is ‘cultural development’.

This cultural development is not constituted by a ‘specific’ Idea in time (as the Idea of justice), but is rather conceived of as the dialectical-temporal development of the absolute reason in the totality of its Ideas. Consequently, Binder, too, lands in an insuperable impasse when delimiting the specifically juridical from the specially historical view-point. Legal science is supposed to be an historical, interpretative discipline, which works according to an individualizing method of ‘relating to value’ in the sense intended by Rickert. But Binder cannot deny that the science of legal history cannot be identical with the so-called dogmatic legal doctrine. ‘It is certain,’ he writes, ‘that there is a close connection between the two sciences of law, which does not only consist in their both being related to law but has a much deeper foundation. For the essence of all law is history and can only be understood historically. The meaning of law and its forms reveals itself to the historical view, and therefore also the “jurist” needs history in order to apprehend his “Gegenstände”. But it is equally certain that legal history means something different from jurisprudence. The jurist trying to form concepts of the contents of his legal order needs the historical conception, but does not pursue historical studies proper. It may be that his interest, just like that of the historian, is concentrated on the understanding of a certain juridical system in its uniqueness and its individual character, so that the concepts formed by him are concrete or individual. It may be that in this characteristic nature of his concepts the historical kernel of law is manifested. But we think of something else and something more, when we speak of legal history’¹.

Unintentionally, Binder sharply formulates here the antinomy in which the theoretical obliteration of the modal boundaries of meaning between the historical and the juridical aspects of reality gets entangled. The temporal meaning of law is supposed to be entirely historical. Accordingly, legal science is to be viewed as a specific historical science, but all the same it is something different from the science of legal history. And indeed, no one who seriously examines the meaning of his legal concepts will be able to assert that fundamental juridical concepts such as that of juridical volition, of juridical validity, juridical causality, of competence and subjective right, lawfulness and unlawfulness have an intrinsic historical sense.

The historian must borrow the original modal meaning of these concepts from jurisprudence. And in this sense he must take them for granted if he really wants to understand the historical background of a positively operative legal order. In Binder's line of thought it is the specific Idea of justice as the ‘Idea of a coercive

1 Op. cit., p. 1011.

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human community’, which alone makes empirical law possible as a part of historical reality. He supposes he can infer from this Idea some ‘transcendental juridical categories’ (sovereignty and subjection, the personality of a community and individual personality, compulsion as a means of community), which are considered as ‘ideal norms for all kinds of legal formations’, and not as forms of thinking¹.

These categories, just like Binder's Idea of justice itself, are, however, analogical notions without any inner definiteness of sense. Binder has not even approximately obtained them from a real analysis of the modal meaning of law. But he realizes as a jurist the necessity of distinguishing them sharply from other ‘categories of culture’.

Remarkable enough, he even distinguishes them from those of history as well as from those of morality, religion, etc.². But he forsakes this momentary pure juridical intuition in the exposition of the relation between jurisprudence and the science of legal history, and denatures law again to an essentially historical phenomenon. And so he no longer finds a criterion to distinguish the historical from the juridical viewpoint, although he has admitted the necessity of this distinction.

Legal history, according to Binder, is: ‘the genesis of law as the necessary form of life of a nation in time, its rise from the depths of the national mind in its own nature, conditioned by the external relations of nature, economy and morals, and the influence of other nations; its conscious formation in the course of legislation, its adoption of foreign juridical material and the elaboration of this material by the living organism of the nation’³.

If, however, positive law is essentially of a historical meaning, and jurisprudence is essentially an historically interpretative discipline, it is no longer possible to discover a boundary-line between the latter

1 Compare my: De Beteekenis der Wetsidee voor Rechtswetenschap en Rechtsphilosophie (1926), p. 51-60.

2 Binder: Philosophie des Rechts, p. 411:
‘...in which, however, we must bear in mind... that these legal categories, like other categories of culture, of history, of morals, of religion, etc., are of an essentially different character from that of nature.’ [‘...wobei wir uns aber bewuszt bleiben... dass diese Kategorien des Rechts ebenso wie andere Kategorien der Kultur, der Geschichte, der Moral, der Religion, etc., von wesentlich anderer Art sind als die der Natur.’]

3 Op. cit., pp. 1041/2: ‘das Werden des Rechtes als der notwendigen Lebensform der Nation in der Zeit, sein Hervorwachsen aus der Tiefe des Volksgeistes in seiner Eigenart, bedingt durch die äuszeren Verhältnisse der Natur, der Wirtschaft und Gesittung, durch die Einflüsze anderer Völker; seine bewuszte Gestaltung auf dem Wege der Gesetzgebung, seine Aufnahme fremden Rechtsstoffes und dessen Verarbeitung durch den lebendigen Organismus der Nation.’

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and the science of legal history. As a matter of fact Binder does not mention this boundary any more.

But the necessity of the distinction forces itself on Binder as a jurist. Thus he himself has furnished the evidence that the levelling of the modal boundaries between the historical and the juridical law-spheres cannot be consistently carried through.

The modal nuclear moment of cultural development is irreducible.

All this is sufficient evidence of the impasse into which the obliteration of the modal boundaries between the law-spheres in the Humanistic concept of culture has brought the theory of science as to the delimitation of the historical viewpoint.

There is really no possibility of finding the qualifying nucleus of the modal meaning of history in anything else but in ‘the cultural’ in the sense defined by us above. Every attempt to eliminate this nucleus in a general concept like ‘wertbezogen Wirklichkeit’ (reality related to values), results in the theoretical abrogation of the historical aspect. Then the meaning-boundaries between the normative law-spheres are theoretically merged into one another in an internally antinomic way.

‘The cultural’ cannot be turned into a modally unqualified relation between ‘natural reality’ and values, nor into a dialectically conceived totality of all the normative aspects of temporal reality, without eliminating its original modal meaning-character. It is simply untrue that the modal sense of positive law, positive morality, positive art, positive language, science, or contents of belief, etc., can be reduced to the meaning of cultural development.

The cultural, as such, is never right or wrong in the modal sense of social intercourse, of retribution, of love, of belief. It cannot as such be qualified as logically correct or false, as aesthetically beautiful or ugly, as economical or uneconomical. And it is not at all a kind of supra-modal concentration-point of the aspects of experience.

‘Culture’ does not find its original temporal modal standards outside the historical law-sphere. The positive norms of the law-spheres founded in the historical modality are not ‘cultural norms’ proper. But they appeal to the aspect of cultural development in their positive modal meaning. Inversely, cultural development refers forward in the anticipatory direction of time to the deepened meaning of the later law-spheres.

Of course, the historical modality detached from the inter-

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modal coherence of the modal aspects would shrink into a form without any material meaning. But this statement also holds for all the other modalities. Consequently, it cannot be objected to the conception of cultural development as an original modal aspect of human experience.

The historicistic view tries to break through the modal boundaries of the normative aspects of temporal human society by means of a modally undefined concept of culture. This procedure is in accordance with the continuity-postulates of the Humanist freedom-motive and the Humanist science-ideal.

In its irrationalist turn it must necessarily historicize the modal law-sides of the different normative aspects. The irrationalist historicistic conception of culture has no room for them in their irreducible modal character. All positive norms of the law-spheres concerned are conceived of as subjective historical phenomena following the course of historical development. This leads to a result whose internal antinomy is emphasized rather than removed by means of a metaphysical theory of values¹.

The subject-side of a law-sphere taken apart from its irreducible modal law-side, cannot maintain its modal meaning. If we should try to relate the modal norms of logical thinking, language, intercourse, law, morals, etc., to the historical subject-side of reality, we should only evoke an inescapable internal theoretical conflict between the modal aspects concerned.

1 Cf. Rickert.

§ 3 - The internally antinomic character of the humanistic concept of culture as the basic denominator of all the normative aspects of reality.

To demonstrate this in greater detail we shall use the method of antinomy and show that every attempt at reducing the modal meaning of the other normative law-spheres to the historical meaning-modus of cultural development is bound to dissolve itself into internal contradictions. We shall start with the attempt to conceive scientific thought as a historical phenomenon of culture.

The specific sciences in their temporal development have their immanent meaning in the theoretical analysis and synthesis of the different aspects of concrete phenomena. These aspects are all bound to their own modal structure and to irreducible

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modal laws. Science pre-supposes a scientific standard of truth which, as such, cannot have an historical meaning, though as a concrete social process science doubtless has its historical development.

In this immanent theoretical sense of the deepened analysis and synthesis of its modal ‘Gegenstand’ scientific thought can never be conceived of in the modal meaning of cultural development without cancelling its scientific character. As soon as we try to bring scientific activity with regard to the intrinsic character of its theoretical meaning, under the historical denominator - as is done in irrationalistic and relativistic Historism - we lapse into a self-refuting scepticism.

Spengler's historicizing of the intrinsic meaning of science.

In a radical way this historicizing of scientific thought has been carried through by Spengler in the first volume of his Untergang des Abendlandes. The internal antinomies inherent in the reduction of theoretical analysis and synthesis to an ‘expression of culture’ can be best demonstrated by this radical attempt.

To the historist Spengler ‘nature’ as the subject matter of physical science is only the dead, rigid content of thought entirely dependent on our mental cognitive activity. And the latter is, as such, a living, historical activity, entirely dependent on, and determined by the morphological characteristics of a particular culture: ‘And indeed, in the eyes of the historically-minded there is only a history of physics. All its systems do not appear to him either right or wrong, but historically, psychologically conditioned by the character of the period and more or less perfectly representative of it’¹.

Mathematics, too, can only be valid as a phenomenon of historical culture: ‘There are more arithmetical worlds than one, because there are more kinds of culture than one. In the course of history we find systems of numbers that differ from civilization to civilization. Thus there are Indian,

1 Der Untergang des Abendlandes I, p. 167:
‘Und in der Tat, für den Blick des historisch eingestellten Menschen gibt es nur eine Geschichte der Physik. All ihre Systeme erscheinen ihm jetzt nicht richtig oder unrichtig, sondern historisch, psychologisch, durch den Charakter der Epoche bedingt und ihr mehr oder weniger vollkommen repräsentierend.’

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Arabic, classical, western types of number. Each of them is fundamentally single of its kind and has a character of its own. Each expresses a different emotional attitude with regard to the world and symbolizes a particular kind of validity that is, also scientifically, exactly restricted to this type of culture. Each of them represents the structural principle of an order of things that history has led up to, and reflects the deepest essence of one, and only one soul as the centre of this culture and of no other’¹.

Kant's conception of a priori forms of cognition, supposed to be invariably valid, is due to a delusion. To the historist there are only historical styles of cognition².

Spengler saw very clearly that this entire historicistic view must result in radical scepticism. But even this scepticism is interpreted as a typical symptom of the decline of western culture. After the systematical and the ethical periods of philosophy (in our terminology those of the science-ideal and the ideal of personality) this declining culture offers only the possibility of a last historical phase of philosophizing: that of historical relativism openly avowing its scepticism.

With regard to the latter Spengler writes in the introduction to his work: ‘Scepticism is the expression of a pure civilization; it disintegrates the world-picture of the culture that has preceded. Here all the older problems are resolved into the genetic. It implies the conviction that what is, also has become; that the natural and cognizable is rooted in the historic; that the world as actual has an Ego at its foundation as the potential actualized in it; it implies the insight that the “when” and the “how long” contain as deep a secret as the “what”. This conviction and this insight lead to the fact that whatever else it may be, everything must at any rate also be the expression of something living. In what has become, the becoming reflects itself.’ Therefore ‘also the

1 Der Unterg. d. Abendl., p. 86/7:
‘Es gibt mehrere Zahlenwelten, weil es mehrere Kulturen gibt. Wir finden einen Indischen, Arabischen, antiken, abendländischen Zahlentypus, jeder von Grund aus etwas Eignes und Einziges, jeder Ausdruck eines anderen Weltgefühls, jeder Symbol von einer auch wissenschaftlich genau begrenzten Gültigkeit, Prinzip einer Ordnung des Gewordenen, in der sich das tiefste Wesen einer einzigen und keiner andern Seele spiegelt, derjenige, welche Mittelpunkt gerade dieser und keiner anderen Kultur ist.’

2 Op. cit., p. 88.

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claim of the higher thinking to detect universal and eternal truths must be abandoned. There are only truths with respect to a particular type of mankind. My own philosophy is, accordingly, only the expression and reflection of the western mind as distinct for instance from the classical and Indian. Its view of the world, its practical implications and its range of validity are determined by the present civilized stage of this mind.’

But Spengler, as a ‘Lebensphilosoph’, has evidently not considered the ultimate consequences of this sceptical Historism. If science as such were actually only a cultural historical phenomenon, it would be impossible to form a theoretical concept of history. Then every attempt at a scientific establishment of historical facts, and their interpretation in the historical coherence, would be meaningless.

The whole line of thought in Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes in which he tries to interpret the meaning of history theoretically, pre-supposes the possibility of abstracting the historical aspect of experience theoretically. He has absolutized this aspect. But history cannot be isolated and absolutized in a theoretical way by a consciousness which is supposed to be entirely enclosed in it. All theoretical absolutizing of a meaning-modus pre-supposes theoretical analysis and synthesis of meaning in the fundamental Gegenstand-relation².

But at the same time this absolutization destroys the meaning¹

2 Cf. Vol. I, p. 45 fl.

1 Op. cit., p. 64/65:
‘Des Skeptizismus ist Ausdruck einer reinen Zivilisation; er zersetzt das Weltbild der vorausgegangenen Kultur. Hier erfolgt die Auflösung aller älteren Probleme ins Genetische. Die Ueberzeugung, dass alles was ist, auch geworden ist, dass allem Naturhaften und Erkennbaren ein Historisches zugrunde liegt, der Welt als dem Wirklichen ein Ich als das Mögliche, das sich in ihr verwirklicht hat, die Einsicht, dass nicht nur im Was, sondern auch im Wann und Wie lange ein tiefes Geheimnis ruht, führt auf die Tatsache dass alles, was immer es sonst sei, auch Ausdruck eines Lebendigen sein muss. Im Gewordenen spiegelt sich das Werden.’ (And therefore) ‘fällt auch der Anspruch des höheren Denkens, allgemeine und ewige Wahrheiten aufzufinden. Wahrheiten gibt es nur im bezug auf ein bestimmtes Menschentum. Diese Philosophie selbst würde demnach Ausdruck und Spiegelung der abendländischen Seele, im Unterschiede etwa von der antiken und indischen, und zwar nur in deren zivilisierten Stadium sein, womit ihr Gehalt als Weltanschauung, ihre praktische Tragweite und ihr Geltungsbereich bestimmt sind.’

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of history by eliminating its constant modal structure. How could we speak of historical development if its historical character itself were a variable phenomenon, dependent on a particular type of civilization in a particular phase of its development? How could Spengler speak of a diversity of cultures with their specific morphological traits, if the philosophy of culture and the science of history were nothing but historical expressions of a typical cultural mind in a particular phase of its development?

How could he attempt to understand the inner mind of the Arabic, Indian, and Greco-Roman cultures, if his philosophy of world-history were unable to keep theoretical distance from the historical development of modern western civilization? How could he establish the existence of non-western cultures, if his whole scientific conception of the cultural process were only a historical expression of the ultimate phase of western civilization?

Historical experience can maintain its historical character and meaning only in the inter-modal coherence of the historical and the non-historical aspects, which are bound to their own modal structures.

No true history of science would be possible if the intrinsic meaning of scientific thought were reducible to the historical meaning of civilization. The consequence of Spengler's Historism is therefore its own refutation.

The simple mention of different ‘cultural styles of scientific thought’, of different ‘Zahl- und Raumwelten’¹ pre-supposes the identical original intentional meaning of scientific thought and the constant modal meaning of number and space.

As soon as these original meaning-structures are theoretically denatured into changing expressions of self-contained historical cultures, it is no longer legitimate to speak of historical types of conceiving ‘number’ and ‘space’, and of historical types of science in general.

1 Worlds of number and space.

The modal meaning of language is irreducible to that of cultural development. The historical retrocipation in the modal meaning of language.

Is it possible to reduce the internal modal meaning of language to a specific phenomenon of civilization taken in the historical sense of cultural development? Is not language an historical phe-

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nomenon sui generis, whose genesis falls entirely within historical time?

Let the attempt be made to reduce its modal meaning to that of the cultural aspect and it will appear that there is no escape from internal antinomy.

The nuclear moment of the lingual aspect is symbolic signification related to the lingual understanding of signs. This modal meaning fits all the concrete symbolic meaning-functions of a language into an internal functional coherence within which specific linguistic laws are valid.

This meaning-modus is really founded historically, containing as it does a modal retrocipation of the meaning of cultural development, viz. the inner formation of language.

But this internal moulding of language is not an immanent-historical affair. It follows immanent principles (irreducible in their modal meaning), as, e.g., the phonological principles and those of syntax. These principles can only be conceived as internal laws of formation in the modal structure of symbolic signifying. But they have an unbreakable inter-modal coherence with historical development¹.

A theoretical eradication of the modal limits of meaning between the two law-spheres, however, if carried through consistently, would cancel both the concept of language and that of lingual history. If the modal meaning of language were in itself only a specific phenomenon in the modal meaning of cultural development², a univocal symbolic signifying of cultural develop-

1 On the concept of the ‘innere Sprachform’ (the internal form of speech) as the ‘Bildungsgesetz des tragenden Bedeutungsgefüges der Sprache’ (the formative law of the structure of linguistic signification) cf. Gunther Ipsen: Sprachphilosophie der Gegenwart (Philos. Forschungsberichte Heft 6, Berlin 1930), p. 19/20. (The term itself was introduced by Von Humboldt).

2 The philosophical theory of language founded in the positivism of H. Paul's Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte has in fact identified linguistic science with the scientific research of the history of language.
The invariable ‘principia’ on which Paul thought he had to base the historical development of language, have not at all been conceived of in the modal meaning of language (which, of course, is unknown to this historical positivism). Rather they are viewed as the psycho-physical substratum-conditions of historical development, as ‘permanent forces and relations that remain unalterably the same, neither increasing nor decreasing’ (‘konstante Kräfte und Verhältnisse, die unverrückbar die gleichen bleiben, sich weder vermehren noch vermindern’). Their interaction, their typical interlocking is alleged to be the proper field of research for the science of the ‘Principles of Linguistic History’ (‘Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte’). Explicitly and emphatically this fundamental science is subordinated to a universal philosophy of history. ‘On the basis of the experimental sciences, which seek to reduce the facts to general laws, this philosophy of history has to establish the general fundamental conditions forming the necessary basis for any kind of historical development’.
In this positivistic line of thought language has indeed been turned into a specific branch of culture.

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ment would become impossible and we would not be able to speak of a history of language. That which has a history cannot be an historical phenomenon.

The historical aspect of experience cannot distinguish itself analytically from other modal aspects, nor can it signify its meaning by means of a symbol.

In cultural development there cannot dwell an original linguistic sense. Language can only signify the modal meaning of history, and the latter must be kept distinctly apart from the modal function of signifying and its intentional meaning of designating. There would be no theoretical concept of language possible, if the modal meaning of language were only an historical phenomenon enclosed in the stream of cultural development. For this modal meaning of language creates the possibility of all the actually formed separate languages.

The symbolizing of an historical event by means of a memorial remains modally outside the meaning of cultural development. Nevertheless, the concrete act of building the monument was occasioned by an historically qualified fact, and the monument itself, as an individual thing, has its objective modal function in history (e.g., it will be destroyed by the invasion of a hostile army or at the outbreak of a revolution).

If the modal meaning of language proper cannot be historicized without internal antinomy, then the formation of a particular language, viewed in its lingual aspect, can no more be qualified as an historical phenomenon. Within the modal aspect of symbolical signifying and understanding we can no more experience historical meaning-functions than we can experience them in the juridical or in the economic aspect as such.

The interpretation of the historical analogy in the modal aspect of language as an original historical phenomenon remains internally antinomic.

In the fulness of reality, of course, the modal meaning of

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language in its concrete individual manifestations is included in a continuous temporal meaning-coherence with the historical aspect and those preceding the latter. As soon, however, as theoretical thought is concentrated on the law-sphere of language, it is of primary importance to guard against possible shiftings of the modal meaning. Such shifts do not really account for what has been given in experience, but rather falsify the data theoretically.

Remark: Modern phonology and the new trends in semantics.

In this respect, at least, I think it a great advance in modern phonology, as compared with the naturalistic conception of the sound-laws in the development of language, that efforts are made to understand the expressive articulated sounds as speech-sounds (phonemes) from the meaning-structure of language itself (J. Stenzel, Ipsen, Trubetzkoy, Sievers, and others)¹.
In this way the linguistic concept of the phoneme could be clearly distinguished from the physical and psychological sound-concepts. This was indeed an important advance, notwithstanding the fact that in many respects the erroneous view was maintained that actual language is an historical phenomenon².
The effort, on the other hand, undertaken by Husserl to maintain the a priori structure of language in a ‘pure grammar’ as a ‘theory of pure significations’, against any kind of psychologizing or historicizing of the symbolic meaning of the verbal phrases, could not really yield any insight into the modal meaning of language. This must be established without detracting anything from the correct intention of this theory. For to Husserl the ‘pure theory of significations’ (reine Bedeutungslehre) becomes a part of ‘pure logic’ (reine Logik). In this conception the lingual anticipation in the analytical meaning-modus, (logical symbolism), is interpreted as the original meaning of symbolical signification³. And this logicizing of

1 The concept of articulation as a characteristic of speech-sounds was introduced by the Genevan linguist de Saussure (Cours de linguistique générale 1916), whose theory, for the rest, was more psychological than linguistic.

2 Cf. Ipsen, op. cit., p. 14, against Husserl's idea of ‘pure grammar’: ‘......no more can the philosophy of language adopt the idea of “pure grammar” without cancelling itself. For this would mean sacrificing the reality of language in history.’ (Italics are mine). [‘......ebenso wenig kann die Sprachphilosophie die Idee einer reinen Grammatik...... zu der ihrigen machen, ohne sich selbst aufzugeben. Denn das hiesze, die Wirklichkeit der Sprache in der Geschichte zu opfern.’]

3 Cf. Logische Untersuchungen II, I, especially the IVth Untersuchung, § 14, concerning the ‘idea of a purely logical Grammar’ (Idee der reinlogischen Grammatik). By this I do not deny the stimulating value of Husserl's investigations. But from the point of view of the modal analysis of language the theory of the pure significations as a branch of pure logic is misdirected. The signified meaning abstracted from its relation to the subjective function of signifying and symbolical understanding is not lingual at all. A ‘pure signification’ in Husserl's sense is, strictly speaking, a contradictio in terminis. A signified intentional meaning is not the same as ‘meaning as such’.

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the modal meaning of lingual signification could not fail to provoke the reaction of the Diltheyan historical school. Husserl's abstract conception of ‘pure signification’ broke the actual subject-object relation connecting the symbolic sign and its signification indissolubly with the subjective symbolical function of signifying and that of inter-individual understanding. To the Diltheyan school this was tantamount to disregarding the historical life of language. The historically-psychologically conceiced ‘vivo’, as an act of inter-individual understanding related to the ‘signs’ and their ideal meanings as fundamental forms of the ‘objective Mind’, was supposed to connect Husserl's ‘pure significations’ with the historical stream of experience (Freyer, Litt). This again turned the philosophy of language into a dialectical-phenomenological philosophy of culture.

Husserl's structural conception of the lingual sign.

But in this way no justice could be done to the modal structure of the subject-object relation in the intrinsic meaning of symbolical signifying. Husserl had himself developed a remarkable structural theory of the lingual sign which was generally acknowleged as an important progress in comparison with the psychological theory of de Saussure. He distinguished three structural moments: 1^o. the expression (Ausdruck) as a complex psycho-physical process manifesting itself in the vocal movements of speaking and the sound-waves produced or in the writing of alphabetical symbols; 2^o. the meaning-intentions (Bedeutungsintentionen), i.e. acts which give the physical phenomenon an inherent sense and make it into a word or sentence; 3^o. the intentional relation of the psycho-physical phenomenon in its inherent meaning to a signified object or an objective state of affairs. This signifying the object or the objective state of things intended is done via the signification (Bedeutung) of the word or the sentence.
It must be clear that the psycho-physical aspects of the concrete acts of speaking or writing cannot function within the modal linguistic subject-object relation proper. It can only be the linguistic function of meaning-intention and signifying by which the spoken sounds (or written characters) in their articulation and particular lingual value acquire an objective linguistic sense as signs.

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The real failure in Husserl's ‘reine Bedeutungslehre’.

By introducing his theory of the ‘pure significations’ it was doubtless Husserl's intention to make a clear distinction between the linguistic meaning proper and its psycho-physical foundation.

The failure of this theory cannot be this distinction as such but only the logicizing of the ‘Bedeutung’ by its abstraction from the subjective meaning-intention and the subjective function of signifying. Husserl considered the latter as a psychical act which can only intend the linguistic meaning but which as such belongs to the field of psychological research. Here the lack of a modal delimitation of the psychological viewpoint and the lack of distinction between the different modal aspects of the act seriously affected the linguistic theory. It was overlooked that the modal function of intending and signifying meaning cannot be identified with the concrete act in which it is realized. Consequently, the dialectical phenomenological school inspired by Dilthey found no other way to restore the subject-object relation in language than by relating the signs and their meanings to the concrete act of consciousness understood in an historical-psychological sense.

But it is not in this manner that linguistic theory has to regain its relation to the dynamical historical aspect of human experience. This relation is guaranteed by the historical retrocipation in the modal structure of the aspect of symbolic signification itself. It is by virtue of the inner structural moment of lingual formation that the change in the intentional meanings of symbols adapts itself to the cultural development. But this does not detract from the modal irreducibility of the lingual law-sphere.

The same must be established with regard to the intermodal relation between the latter and the psychical and logical aspects of experience.

Husserl has clearly seen that in language the reference of the symbol to the things or states of affairs signified is made only via the meaning-intention and subjective signifying. But the latter are to be conceived as modal linguistic functions of the real act, and consequently they are no longer to be identified with the psychologized act itself. Then we can completely account for what is called the conceptual, the emotional and the associational components of the meaning-contents of words¹ without any violation of the modal boundaries of the lingual aspect. There does not exist a ‘logical meaning-kernel’ (logischer Bedeutungskern) of the lingual signification itself, but only an intentional reference of the latter to the pre-theoretic or scientific concept signified by the symbol. What is called the feeling-tone (Gefühlston) of a word is not the same as the emotional effect evoked by its use in a concrete context and situation, but only its intentional reference - within the modal subject-object relation of language - to feeling-values. The intentional reference itself to what is signified, remains bound to the inner modal structure of the lingual aspect.

1 Cf. K.O. Erdmann, Die Bedeutung des Wortes (4th ed. Leipzig 1925).

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The same can be observed with regard to the association of representations evoked by the intentional reference of the symbol. This reference cannot be interpreted in an original psychological way¹, without abandoning the modal structure of the semasiological subject-object relation. The intentional reference of a symbol retains its lingual character in its modal nuclear meaning of symbolical signification.

1 This is done by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards in their book The Meaning of Meaning (2th ed., p. 11 ff.).

The irreducibility of the modal meaning of intercourse to that of cultural development.

If it is granted that the modal meaning of language cannot be reduced to that of cultural development, the further question may arise: Is not at least the meaning of intercourse expressing itself in the social forms of courtesy, modesty, politeness, tact, fashion, etc., to be conceived in the modal meaning of history? Are not the norms observed in our intercourse with our fellowmen entirely dependent on the historical development of our Western civilization? And are they not, as such, quite different from those of a primitive African tribe, or those of a highly civilized Eastern culture, such as that of the Chinese?

I do not deny this in the least. The modal meaning of intercourse has an historical foundation, which appears from the presence in this meaning-modus of the historical retrocipation of positivizing formation. This historical analogy will be investigated in detail in the next §². It has a necessary inner coherence with formative power in its original historical sense. The modal meaning of intercourse can indeed only express itself in the historically founded forms of courtesy, politeness, etc. Even in its still ‘closed’ function it cannot maintain its character as meaning outside the meaning-coherence with cultural development. But the attempt to reduce the original meaning of intercourse to that of cultural development must lead to antinomies.

The modal function of intercourse is founded in that of symbolical signification as its substratum. Consequently, the antinomy resulting from the reduction of the aspect of symbolical signification to that of cultural development, will manifest itself even more forcibly when we try to reduce the meaning of intercourse to that of history. A brief analysis of this state of affairs may suffice in this context.

2 Cf. p. 237 ff.

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The modal meaning of intercourse is founded in that of language.

Every form of intercourse and every subjective instance of social behaviour giving expression to it, e.g. making a bow, giving a handshake, lifting one's hat, letting a superior precede, necessarily refer back in the modal meaning of intercourse to symbolical signification, and would become meaningless but for this lingual substratum.

History, at least in its closed structure, continues its course though it is not symbolically signified, in spite of its necessary connection with the symbolical aspect in the transcendental direction of time. But social intercourse, even in its restrictive modal function, cannot manifest itself without symbolical signification. It is inevitably a signified meaning, as such, however, lying outside of the meaning of language proper. Anyone who historicizes the meaning of intercourse, primarily historicizes the meaning of language.

The historian has to take the modal meaning of social intercourse for granted if he is to theoretically grasp the history of the social forms of intercourse, i.e. the cultural development in which these forms are founded in their positive changes. Forms of courtesy, politeness, etc., cannot have the original meaning of historical power.

If the historian really assumes he can conceive the modal meaning of social intercourse as a species of cultural development proper, he lapses into the same vicious circle as the psychologist who supposes he can derive the meaning of retribution from the feeling of justice. And inescapably he involves himself in the antinomy that we are now going to analyse.

If a history of the social forms of intercourse is to be possible, these forms must lie outside the modus of cultural development as regards their intrinsical modal meaning.

There is, indeed, a history of the forms of intercourse, just as there is a history of language and of science. Intercourse, language, and science, with regard to their modal, or synthetic theoretical meaning respectively, are something different from their history. This history is the development of their cultural moulding of the human mind in its social relations by means of the concrete acts in which they are realized. There is also a history of the different States, of their wars, their town-planning, etc. State, war, and town-planning, as typical total structures of individuality, are more than their historical aspect. A history of

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an historical phenomenon, however, is a contradictio in terminis. The historical function of a thing, of a human social group, or of a concrete event presents itself only in the modal meaning of cultural development, but cannot have a history of its own.

The historical aspect of experience can maintain its cultural meaning only in its intermodal coherence with the other modal aspects. So, if the original meaning of intercourse were historical, it could not have a history of its own, unless the historical meaning were something more than, or different from the historical, which is contrary to the principium identitatis and the principium contradictionis.

By this we have also laid bare the contradiction arising from the theoretical attempt to reduce the modal meaning of intercourse to a historical phenomenon sui generis.

If the attempt at reducing the modal meaning of the other normative law-spheres to that of history is continued, still more complicated antinomies are bound to arise. For our purpose it was sufficient in the present context to apply the attempted reduction to three of these spheres. By means of the method of antinomy we have made clear the internal sovereignty of their modal meaning-structures within their own spheres.

The further analysis of the modal basic meaning of history may convince the reader that the historical modus can reveal its temporal meaning only by maintaining the modal sovereignty within its own sphere.

§ 4 - Analysis of the modal meaning of cultural development with regard to its retrocipatory structure.

The logical analogies in the modal meaning of culture and the normative character of the historical law-sphere.

Provisionally, we found the cultural or controlling manner (of form-giving) to be the original nuclear moment in the modal structure of the historical law-sphere. Only in the coherence with its retrocipatory and its anticipatory moments can this nucleus maintain its determinative meaning-character. The first retrocipations revealed by a continued analysis of the modal structure concerned refer back to the logical aspect. In the pre-logical aspects of temporal reality there is no original cultural meaning to be found. The use of the term ‘natural history’ in the Romantic sense of a genetic view of ‘nature’ in its ascending potentialities of creative freedom, is primarily due to the confusion of biotic

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with historical development. It shows a lack of insight into the truth that the concept of development without any modal determination of meaning is multivocal and consequently confused¹. It is doubtless true that in principle natural events and things can have a modal function in the historical law-sphere. But they can function here only in the historical subject-object relation, i.e. in a cultural relation to the subjective power-formation of man. They cannot have a subjective but only an objective function in history.

Cultural development is not a ‘natural’ process; in its internal meaning-structure it is not subject to the laws of nature. Only creatures with a rational power of distinction, with an analytical ‘sense of meaning’, as K. Kuypers put it quite correctly, can be subjects in history.

The historical modality is based on the logical aspect and this inter-modal coherence finds expression within the modal structure of the historical law-sphere in retrocipatory moments; in the first place in the historical relation of identity and diversity. This relation is indeed a retrocipatory analogy of the corresponding analytical basic relations and a necessary condition of every historical distinction. Historical experience is not possible without the implicit or explicit awareness of the historical identity of cultural events in the diversity of their moments.

Even to pre-theoretical experience the battle of Waterloo is not given in the manner of a natural sensorily perceptible event. What gives this battle its historical identity by which it can be distinguished from events not belonging to it? The famous economist Hayek has raised the question whether the battle of Waterloo also included the actions of the farmers who hurriedly tried to get in their harvest on the battle-fields². This question is very instructive because it shows that historical events have no objective limitation in the sensory space of perception. Therefore animals cannot distinguish them, whereas they do dis-

1 At first also Rickert used the term natural history from a merely methodological conception of history. In the modern philosophy of history, inspired by Dilthey, it is emphatically stated that history belongs to the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ in contradistinction to the natural sciences. Later on also Rickert has admitted that the historical viewpoint cannot include an individualizing view of nature. Cf. Fritz Kaufmann, Geschichtsphilosophie der Gegenwart (1931), p. 9.

2 Hayek, The Facts of the Social Sciences (Ethics, Vol. LIV, 1943, p. 1-13).

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tinguish natural things and events within their natural ‘Umwelt’. Historical facts are only accessible to human experience. Their historical identity and their diversity from other events rest on the basis of analytical distinction, without being themselves of an analytical character. For they are modally determined by the nuclear moment of the cultural aspect only: that of formative control. The battle of Waterloo is historically delimited from other events as a decisive contest between the military powers of Napoleon and his allied adversaries viewed as subjects of political power-formation. What belongs to this historical event, and what does not, depends on historical imputation, not on objective sensory data.

Doubtless, its individual identity cannot be deduced from the modal structure of the historical aspect alone, because it has a typical structure of individuality which exceeds the boundaries of this aspect. But this does not detract from the modal-historical character of its identity as an historical fact, since in the historical aspect of experience the different structures of individuality can exclusively express themselves within the modal structure of this aspect.

The modal nuclear meaning of the historical law-sphere also implies the imputation of cultural deeds to the subjects of formative power. The cultural mode of form-giving is a controlling manner of moulding after a free project. This modal meaning of cultural activity excludes its equation with natural events in a functional series of causes and effects. The pseudo-natural scientific conception of the historical process is irreconcileable with the modal structure of cultural development.

Even historical mastery over persons does not detract from the fact that the latter are cultural subjects whose behaviour is to be historically imputed to them, and not objects of cultural moulding which are not accountable for the course of cultural development.

In close connection with the logical analogy of identity and diversity implying the historical relation of imputation, it is necessary to pay attention to another logical analogy in the modal structure of the historical aspect, viz. that of historical contradiction.

It is impossible to experience any continuity in cultural development without distinguishing between what is in agreement with it, and what is contrary to it. This distinction is doubtless based on the logical principle of contradiction, but it has a

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modal historical meaning. It reveals the intrinsically normative character of the historical law-sphere.

In a consistently positivistic attitude of thought the attempt may be made to abandon the concept of development in history, but this will not do. Though this development can only be an analogical moment in the modal structure of the historical aspect, viz. a biotic retrocipation referring to the aspect of organic life, it is nevertheless essential. If it is eliminated, there is no possibility of rising beyond the chronological enumeration of facts which can never be conceived in their historical coherence. Such a procedure is tantamount to an elimination of the historical modus of experience as such. As soon as the concept of development was introduced in historical thought, it was implicitly or explicitly conceived in a normative sense. Even the positivist sociological view of history has done so, though it masked its normative criterion of development by giving it the form of a natural law.

The Historical school and the normative conception of historical development. Fr. J. Stahl's view of the secondarily normative character of God's guidance in history.

Herder had introduced the Leibnizian Idea of development in historical thought, and had connected it with his conception of the individual ‘Volksgeist’. It was the Historical school which gave this Idea a central position in the science of history. Von Savigny and his adherents conceived historical development to be continuous, and distinguished between the vital and the intrinsically dead elements in cultural tradition. In contrast to all artificial and revolutionary constructions of the state and of human society all stress was laid on ‘natural growth’. Doubtless, this conception displays a normative tendency. The influence of Fichte's and Schelling's idea of a hidden law of Providence lying at the foundation of history and giving it its inner coherence is here clearly perceptible. This hidden law-conformity of the historical process was from the outset sharply opposed to the rationalist and determinist conception of the laws of nature. In the line of Schelling's transcendental idealism Von Savigny had conceived it as a dialectical synthesis between natural necessity and freedom. Consequently, this hidden historical law could not fail to assume an irrationalist normative sense and it was the Lutheran legal philosopher and statesman Fr.

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Julius Stahl who openly accepted this consequence. In his opinion all that has come about in a long process of historical development under the influence of secretly operating forces, without the interference of rational human planning, ought to be respected as a manifestation of God's guidance in history, in so far as it does not contradict a positive commandment of Divine Law.

This conception of God's guidance in history was quite in accordance with the conservative mind of the Restoration. Apart from its romantic-quietistic formulation, it had a great influence in the so-called Christian-historical political theory. The latter accepted the new historical manner of thinking as a powerful ally in the contest with the principles of the French Revolution.

Meanwhile serious objections could be raised against this ascription of normative sense to God's guidance in history. They were amply explained in a remarkable thesis¹ defended in 1911 at the University of Leyden by A.C. Leendertz.

From the theological viewpoint this author argued that God's guidance in history embraces all that happens, both good and evil. For this very reason this guidance cannot imply any norm for human behaviour. Only God's revealed Will, not his hidden intentions guiding the course of history, can direct our practical life in a normative (ethical) sense.

From the philosophical viewpoint Leendertz attacks the normative conception of God's guidance in history with the Kantian argument that facts and norms belong to different worlds. If the factual course of history is elevated to the rank of a norm this is tantamount to a continuous acceptance of the ‘fait accompli’. If a governing dynasty is supposed to be justified by the fact that it has maintained its power in a long course of time, then also a revolution overthrowing this dynasty must be regarded as justified after the lapse of time by a succesful maintainance of its position.

This criticism must fail insofar as it starts from the Kantian separation between what is and what ought to be, a dualism founded in the dialectical Humanist motive of nature and freedom. It overlooked that historical facts are not given in the way of natural events and that in the normative aspects of human experience every fact has a normative qualification,

1 De grond van het overheidsgezag in de anti-revolutionnaire staatsleer (Leiden, 1911).

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without being itself a norm. The fact that a certain person in a certain place and on a certain day has committed a theft, cannot be established without a legal norm which indicates the criterion of theft.

When we say that at present Winston Churchill is prime minister in the English cabinet, we establish a fact implying a certain legal competency of the bearer of this office. And legal competency is a normative meaning-figure.

The concept of historical development cannot have a merely factual content apart from a normative criterion for the establishment of the historical coherence between the facts and for the distinction between what is in keeping with this development and what is not. This is what v. Savigny meant when he distinguished between the vital and the intrinsically dead elements in historical tradition, and what Stahl intended when he opposed the organic development of history to the revolutionary encroachments upon God's guidance in it. The only question is whether this normative criterion can be derived from the subject-side of the historical process. The Historical School thought it could do so by elevating the so-called ‘Volksgeist’ in its subjective individuality to the true standard of cultural development. This implied the view that the individual character of a folk or a nation has a value in itself.

Taking the natural development of a living organism as a pattern, v. Savigny and his adherents supposed that the continuity of historical development was only guaranteed by the directive potency of the individual national mind. Cultural goods imported from abroad and contradicting the national mind of a people were viewed as an encroachment upon true historical development, as a revolutionary violation of its continuity.

Starting from this conception of historical development, the Germanists of the Historical legal School in the eighteen forties launched their vehement attack upon the reception of Roman law in the Germanic countries¹.

It was quite in keeping with the dialectical synthesis of nature and freedom that this irrationalist standard of historical development was considered both as an inner necessity resulting from the individual nature of a people, and as a norm which can be

1 v. Savigny and Puchta did not agree with this attack because they denied that the reception of Roman law contradicted the Germanic ‘Volksgeist’.

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violated by revolutionary encroachments. Therefore it must imply an inner antinomy.

Granting that we can establish and describe the individual subjective mind of a nation in a scientific way, this national mind can never be a cultural norm in itself. It may show both good and bad traits. It is no use elevating this ‘Volksgeist’ to the rank of a gift of Divine Providence, or in a more secular way, regarding it as the destiny (Schicksal) of a people which has a historical right to the complete development of its individual cultural potentialities. From the Christian viewpoint it should be remarked that such irrationalist conceptions of the norm of historical development show a complete disregard of the effects of sin in the subjective cultural disposition of the nations. This fundamental un-Christian trait cannot be rendered harmless by subjecting this irrationalist conception of the historical norm to the ultimate test of the decalogue.

If there really are genuine historical norms irreducible to ethical laws, they can no more be subjected to the latter than the logical or the aesthetic principles. Although such historical norms cannot be separated from the subject-side of the historical aspect, they cannot be reduced to the latter. This does not mean that in the positive and variable forms in which the supposed historical norms appear there cannot be a subjective element. This question must be examined presently. But if they are in any way to be acknowledged as modal norms, they must contain a super-arbitrary standard of judging the factual course of cultural development. And this standard must have an intrinsically historical meaning, irreducible to the meaning of any other normative aspects.

For the present the contents of such norms have not yet been discovered. But the modal structure of the historical aspect doubtless reveals the normative character of its modal law-sphere in the logical analogy of historical contradiction. Let us examine this structural state of affairs somewhat more in detail, and consider what is meant when we speak of an unhistorical line of conduct.

The adjective ‘unhistorical’ has the meaning of ‘deviating from a norm of historical development’. Is anti-normative behaviour really possible in this historical sense?

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Reaction as an anti-historical meaning-figure.

Anti-normative behaviour in a historical sense is certainly possible. It is denounced as historical reaction in an unfavourable signification. It may be that in the political contest this term is often abused to put a stamp of backwardness upon political parties who do not agree with a certain ideology of social progress. Nevertheless, even this misuse of the terms reaction and progress appeals to a norm of historical development. For it is meaningless to speak of progressive and reactionary trends in politics without accepting a normative criterion of an historical character. And the very fact that even national socialism availed itself of these terms, shows the necessity of seeking for a super-arbitrary standard in the modal structure of history itself.

The political criterion can only be a political-historical one, i.e. it must be founded in a historical standard which is typically related to the state in its structure of individuality.

The historical meaning-figure of reaction is in no way to be reduced to an anti-normative line of behaviour in another modal sense. In its modal meaning it is neither illogical, nor un-economical; neither contrary to the norms of social intercourse, nor unlawful or immoral. Anyone who after the French revolution wanted to put the clock back to the political order of the ‘feudal régime’ was indeed guilty of reaction in the typically historical sense of the word.

Nobody who really thinks historically will hesitate to agree with this judgment. Every historian will say that the partial restoration of the undifferentiated seigniorial rights in the Netherlands in the years 1814 and 1815 was an atavism. But why does he come to this conclusion? The answer will be: because the restoration of these rights contradicted the modern idea of the State which in the course of historical development had conquered the undifferentiated particularism of the feudal system. But this ‘course of historical development’ is the very problem that is to be solved. This course is by no means to be understood as a natural process. From the modal historical viewpoint it seems to imply a norm for the development of political power-formation, to be formulated as follows: the development concerned ought to proceed from a state of undifferentiated particularism to that of political integration based on the monopoly of authoritative power of the sword in the hands of a central government. In the legal or juridical aspect of the social process this

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development has to express itself in a juridical sense, because this aspect is founded in the historical modus.

But from what does this historical norm derive? It is not yet possible to give a sufficient answer to this question at this stage of our inquiry. Only by means of a further analysis of the modal structure of the historical aspect is there any possibility to detect the general criterion for the distinction between really progressive and reactionary trends in the factual course of the cultural process.

Typical political norms of historical development cannot be deduced from this modal structure alone, but must be found by means of an analysis of the structures of individuality of human society giving the modal standard its typical individualization. For the rest the problem does not concern the State only. The meaning of reaction is not restricted to the historical aspect of political life. Reaction is a retrocipatory modal meaning-figure that can assume all kinds of meaning-individuality. Its general sense is an anti-normative attitude with respect to historical development, a falling back on the historical past, while disregarding the norms of historical evolution.

The peculiar character of the modal structure on the law-side of all the post-logical law-spheres. The relation between the temporal normative principle and human formation. Positivizing formation as an historical analogy in all the post-historical law-spheres.

Although it is not yet possible to indicate the contents of these norms, it is possible to establish a peculiarity of their modal structure, directly resulting from the logical retrocipations. This peculiarity will be found again on the law-side of all the post-historical aspects by virtue of the historical retrocipations in their modal structure.

From the logical sphere onwards the modal laws are only given as regulative principles which cannot be realized on the subject-side without rational consideration and distinction.

From the historical law-sphere onwards these normative principles require a variable formation, even in an as yet closed structure of their modal meaning. By means of this variable formation they become positive norms accommodated in a more or less adequate way to the course of cultural development.

In the pre-logical aspects of reality the modal laws are realized in the facts without human intervention, at least inso-

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far as in this realization the normative anticipations of their modal structure are not concerned. It is an essential characteristic of genuine modal norms that they do not realize themselves in this way. They only offer a rule of conduct to human judgment, a principle requiring human formation for its further specification.

The logical norms of thinking are only valid as analytical principia (principium identitatis, contradictionis, rationis sufficientis, exclusi tertii). The same state of affairs must be established with regard to linguistic norms, norms of social intercourse, economic, aesthetic, legal, ethical norms, and norms of faith: their super-arbitrary Divine content has been given in principle only. This is immediately connected with the founding of all the later normative law-spheres in the logical or analytical sphere. Upon the latter every free rational judgment is in the last instance based. Temporal normative freedom, thus founded in the logical aspect of thought, is for this reason most sharply distinct from the free scope manifested on the subject-side of the pre-logical law-spheres in individuality qua talis. This free scope does not imply an appeal to rational judgment.

The moment of free formative control appeared to be original only in the modal structure of history. In the modal structures of the later law-spheres this moment is to be understood as a retrocipation of the original meaning of cultural development.

Consequently, every positivizing formation of the modal norms of these later law-spheres is founded in the original formation of the cultural principles.

The formation of the historical principles makes an appeal to the will of the formers of history. This is the cause of the peculiar interlacing on the law-side of the historical sphere of super-arbitrary principles and human formative will. This is a state of affairs that holds good in an analogical way for all the later normative law-spheres, and can only be understood from the cosmic meaning-coherence of the modal aspects. It has again and again been theoretically misinterpreted by immanence-philosophy, either in an idealistic or in a positivistic sense. In the idealistic line of thought normative principia were absolutized and elevated to the rank of supertemporal values or ideas, sharply separated from the positive norms. In the positivist

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standpoint, the human formative will was absolutized into the creator of the positive norms. As far as legal philosophy is concerned, I may refer to the struggle between the rationalistic theory of natural law and the positivistic legal theory.

Although we acknowledge the elements of truth contained in each of these views, we must hold fast to our insight into the nature of a normative principle. In the historical and post-historical aspects the laws acquire a concrete sense through human positivizing of Divine normative principles. The human formative will is then to be conceived of as a subjective moment on the law-side of these law-spheres themselves. It may be that natural laws of the pre-logical aspects of experience do not appeal to the human formative will for their realization, insofar as in the latter the normative anticipations of their modal structure are not concerned. But the disclosure of their normative anticipatory spheres is certainly dependent on historically founded human formation. They have, therefore, only a restrictive independence of historical development.

The distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘empirical’ norms is untenable.

The well-known distinction between the so-called ‘absolute’ and ‘empirical’ norms, meant as a discrimination between two fundamentally different kinds of norms, loses every semblance of justification in the light of this state of affairs. It is closely connected with the modern Humanistic philosophy of values, rooted in the ideal of the autonomous (or rather ‘sovereign’) personality.

According to Windelband¹, the logical, aesthetic, and ethical norms have an absolute character, in the sense of being fundamentally elevated above time and therefore not subject to temporal change. They are the norms claiming with immediate evidence that they ought to be realized. Following Windelband, the well-known Hungarian legal theorist Felix Somlo has tried to interpret the difference between legal rules and social conventions on the one hand, and logical, moral and aesthetic standards, on the other, as the difference between empirical and absolute norms. We refer to the following utterance of this author: ‘Norms’ in this sense (i.e. absolute), ‘are therefore merely the immediately evident, not deducible, and not further reducible

1 Präludien (3th ed.) p. 292/3.

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rules with which we are confronted as the last data which are indicated as necessary and universally valid in this sense. We may also call them the highest, like the logical, the ethical and the aesthetic norms, which are the usually coordinated kinds of standards of the true, the good and the beautiful. Opposite to these are the merely accidental or empirical norms, not logically necessary, the most different kinds of rules and prescriptions which do not give expression to the absolute values, and which cannot be designated as norms in the narrow sense of the word’¹.

This entire way of representing things gets entangled in insoluble antinomies. The notion of a merely ‘accidental’, arbitrary norm contains a contradictio in terminis. Arbitrariness can never be elevated to a norm, to an obligatory rule of conduct.

Qualifying the positive legal norms and those of social intercourse as ‘arbitrary’ or ‘accidental’ is equal to denying their normative character. But this would imply a denial of the entire law-side of the modal aspects in which they function, since the latter cannot be reduced to other law-spheres without violating their intrinsic modal meaning.

On the other hand, the notion of absolute logical, ethical and aesthetic norms is thoroughly contradictory. It is an attempt to conceive of the specific meaning-modi of the logical, the ethical and the aesthetic aspects of experience apart from their intermodal coherence with all the others. But our previous enquiry has shown that this attempt must result in a theoretical destruction of their modal meaning. The aspects concerned can only express themselves in the retrocipatory and the anticipatory meaning-coherence with all the earlier and the later modal spheres and among these is also the historical modus.

The aesthetic norms positivized in modern architecture, modern music, modern painting and belles lettres, have a different concrete content from that of the early Renaissance, the High Middle Ages, or Greek antiquity, notwithstanding the invariability of the primary principles that have received their positive forms in them.

The ancient dramatic norm of aesthetic unity of time, place and action, formulaled by Aristotle, is no longer valid in modern dramaturgy.

1 Juristische Grundlehre, p. 59.

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The same state of affairs must be established with regard to the ethical norms. The positive content of modern economic ethics (Wirtschaftsethik) is entirely different from that of medieval times. The prohibition of interest had a positive-moral sense on the substratum of a cultural level in history at which the modern credit system in money-economy had not yet been introduced. Once the progress of historical evolution had reached a sufficiently advanced stage, this medieval norm could not remain unaltered.

And, lastly, it may be that the logical norms do not yet require formative positivizing in their ‘restrictive function’, because naïve thought in its logical aspect does not show any theoretical-systematic tendency to anticipate historical development. But when the logical meaning-aspect is opened, the logical principles of thinking do require theoretical forming by the human will to think scientifically.

The formation of history and law-formation. The historical struggle for power between tradition and formative will. Tradition as the guardian of historical continuity, and the principle of continuity as a modal normative principle.

Notwithstanding, there remains a fundamental modal difference between the original formative control in the sense of cultural development and forming or positivizing in the modal meaning of the post-historical law-spheres.

In the juridical sphere, for instance, the positivizing activity is necessarily dependent on competency in the material meaning of the modal aspect of retribution. The historic adage ‘might is right’ results in an inner antinomy due to the theoretical levelling of the modal boundaries between the historical and the legal aspects of experience.

Historism thinks that its view in this respect is eminently ‘realistic’, but it really gives an erroneous theory of the real structural relations.

Usually this view is especially defended by referring to successful usurpations, revolutions, conquests, etc. Nevertheless, it cannot account for the real states of affairs. Although law-formation is founded in historical power-formation, it cannot be reduced to the latter.

Legal competency as such has no historical meaning; it is impossible to speak of a legal competency to form history,

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whereas the jurist can never understand the forming of law apart from a competent law-forming organ¹.

Law-formation itself is not the formation of history, neither is it simply the dependent reflex of it, but rather the adaptation of the legal norms in their original retributive meaning to their substratum in historical development.

There is, however, a second point by which the original ‘formation of history’ (giving positive direction to historical development on the law-side) is fundamentally distinguished in its modal meaning from all manner of norm-positivizing in the later law-spheres. In the modal meaning of cultural development the formation of new cultural norms is always the result of a struggle between the guardians of tradition and the representatives of new ideas. So long as this struggle for power has not been decided, the party of tradition can never be accused of reaction. For reaction pre-supposes a regressive running counter to a positive norm that has already been formed in the evolution of civilization; it is a falling back to a past which, culturally speaking, is dead.

As long as the traditionalist party simply acts as the guardian of the positive norms prevailing up to now, it normally represents an extremely beneficial factor in the development of culture, viz. that of continuity. For it must be evident that no real cultural life would be possible if every new generation could begin with the revolutionary year One. Every generation is historically bound to all the former by tradition. The power of tradition is enormous, since in a condensed form it embodies cultural treasures gathered in the course of centuries. Therefore it is the main factor in the cultural formation of the human mind. We all are dominated by it to a much higher degree than we are conscious of. But it would be a serious error to seek in it the norm of historical development itself. This would result in a bad traditionalism and conservatism, which forgets that the fulfilment of the cultural task of mankind demands a continuous striving forward.

The task of tradition is only to guarantee the continuity in cultural development.

1 In my theory of the sources of law I have shown that this is even the case with respect to customary law. Custom, as such, is no legal source at all, but only a mode of indirect law-formation which supposes original legal competence to do so.

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The shapers of history have to fight in order to secure general acceptance for their new cultural principles. These principles are thus purified of their revolutionary subjectivity, and adapted to the modal norm of historical continuity. For it can no longer be doubted that we are confronted here with a real normative principle of an intrinsically historical character. But in this stage of our enquiry its normative content cannot yet be indicated as to the direction of cultural development, since the criterion for distinguishing historical reaction and historical progress has not yet been detected. This criterion can only reveal itself in our further analysis of the modal structure of the aspect concerned, in which its entire intermodal meaning-coherence with the other aspects must be laid bare.

For the present it must be borne in mind that the moment of the struggle for power between tradition and progress¹ is inherent in the shaping of history and that the principle of the continuity of cultural development is a normative principle for all really formative processes within the aspect concerned.

It is the great merit of Dr K. Kuypers' Theorie der Geschiedenis to have established in such a pregnant way a connection between the modal meaning-moment of tradition and this principle of historical continuity. By this he has indeed fixed an essential meaning-moment in the modal aspect of cultural development, although this moment itself cannot be considered as the modal nucleus of the meaning of history.

1 By ‘progress’ I do not mean to pronounce an appreciation such as is implied in the term Fortschrittsgedanke.

The historical formative will as a psychical retrocipation on the law-side of the modal meaning of cultural development.

The analysis of the logical analogy in the historical modus, has implicitly revealed quite a series of other modal retrocipations; for this logical analogy became apparent on the law-side in the interweaving of the normative principle and the human formative will. The moment of this formative will compels us to direct our analytical glance behind the logical sphere, and to study first the sphere of its psychical analogies.

The formative will in the great leaders of history, such as Ceasar, Galilei, Luther, Calvin, Rembrandt, Napoleon, Bismarck, etc., in its modal meaning necessarily refers back to the modal

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sense of the psychical law-sphere, especially to the psychical function of volition, i.e. emotional striving and desiring.

The historical formative will is not a craving and striving in the meaning-modus of emotional feeling, although it cannot exist without the latter for its foundation.

As such it functions in the normative meaning of history only on the substratum of this psychical desire and this striving, just as the will of the law-maker can only be understood as such in the modal meaning of retribution, but in a retrocipatory coherence with the psychical aspect of volition. The formative will here intended is an essential moment in historical mastery over persons. It concretizes, positivizes, elaborates, the modal developmental principles of the historical law-sphere in the typical total structures of the various cultural spheres.

In founding the Frankish Kingdom Clovis positivized a principle of historical development which will be explained presently as a further regulative determination of that of continuity: i.e. the principle of cultural integration. What his personal psychical motives were, is irrelevant to his significance as a moulder of history. It may be that in connection with Clovis' leading function in the political-cultural development of the German peoples these personal psychical motives cannot be neglected by the historian. But the real historical importance of Clovis' conquests and of his political organization of the new Frankish empire lies outside of the psychical aspect of experience. His formative volitional function in the historical process could not follow the course of his feeling-drives and emotional desires. He broke through the narrow limits of the sib, the populace and the tribe that hemmed in the primitive culture and had doomed it to internal barrenness.

In this way he enabled civilization to expand. The moulder of history sees how his ideas are realized, and how the development of civilization is affected in a quite different way from what he had subjectively desired and intended. This is what Wundt called the heterogenesis of aims in history. In the same way the political law-maker finds the legal norms which he has enacted still imputed to his juridical will as legislator, while they gradually detach themselves entirely from his original conception and intention.

The shaper of history is only the leader, or perhaps only one of the leaders in a historical group-function (a cultural sphere, a nation, a school, etc.)

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In this group-function the power of tradition in an immensely complicated system of factors - of whose full significance no single contemporary is fully aware individually - forces his formative will along the paths of historical continuity.

This is what German historical idealism used to call the ‘objective Spirit’ in history, - if we strip the states of affairs here intended from any speculative idealistic interpretation doubtless connected with this term.

The historical past with its condensed treasure of cultural factors permeates the present and the future in the normative continuity of cultural development. It is in no one's power to dissociate himself from this supra-individual group-tradition.

The rôle of great personalities in history.

With this we automatically touch upon the old controversy about the question whether after all history is ‘made’ by the great personalities, or if these personalities themselves are only products of a particular supra-individual historical spirit of the times.

This way of formulating the question is unacceptable. History is not ‘made’ by men, but shaped, formed only. Moreover, the dilemma of an individualistic or a universalistic-sociological conception of this formation of history ought to be rejected in principle, if insight is to be gained into the meaning-structure of the historical formative will.

At a primitive stage of culture, civilization seems to be immersed in the lethargy of a rigid group-tradition which the members of a primitive social group undergo in many respects as an unalterable supernatural power. But civilization has got into this state in consequence of the sinful human formative will. The guardians of the group-tradition remain responsible individual personalities. They cannot be denatured to a kind of indifferent passage-way of an unconscious group-will.

And when, at a higher cultural level, the individual genius interferes with the process of the forming of history, such an individual moulder of history is neither to be simply considered as the product of the group-mind, nor as an autarchic individual, drawing exclusively from his own genius. He is rather nurtured by the rich supra-individual tradition of the group, without which he could never be an individual shaper of cultural development whose free projects open new roads to the history of mankind.

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Power as a normative historical mission in the modal meaning of history. Mastery over persons and social-psychical influence.

What is it that makes a man the former of cultural development in a particular period of history? It is not any casual historical subject that makes, or rather moulds history. For this task power over men in a particular cultural sphere is essential.

In our previous examinations it has repeatedly been stated that this historical modus of social influence is no brute natural force. Nor can it be reduced to social-psychical influence, a modal shift of meaning regularly found in the treatment of the fashionable sociological theme of ‘the leader and the masses’.

In the present context it is necessary to explain in somewhat greater detail the radical modal difference of meaning between power over men in the process of cultural formation of human society and the psychical mode of influencing social human behaviour. This is the more necessary because in modern Christian ethics inspired by dialectical theology there is often noticeable a real horror of power-formation, which is considered as something essentially un-Christian. In positivistic sociology power is always regarded as a psycho-physical phenomenon, and so it is quite understandable that, according to the usual opposition of facts and norms, mastery over persons was supposed to be an entirely a-normative social relation. But since the analysis of the logical analogies in the modal structure of the historical aspect has laid bare the normative meaning of its law-sphere, it is no longer possible to accept this current view.

In addition, from the Christian standpoint this conception is hardly to be reconciled with the Divine cultural commandment mentioned in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, according to which the subjection of the earth and the mastery over it is expressly posited as a normative task of mankind. There is no explicit mention of power-formation in the social relations between men in this passage. But without the latter cultural development of mankind would be impossible. Culture is bound to human society, which, in its turn, demands cultural formation, i.e. a controlling manner of shaping the social relations between men. All human power is derived from God as the absolute Origin of every earthly mastery. Jesus Christ has said that all power on earth and in the Heavens was given in His hands. The horror of power-formation for the sake of the fulfilment of the Christian task in the cultural develop-

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ment of mankind is, consequently, un-biblical. The Church itself is historically founded in power over men by means of the organized service of the Word and the Sacraments.

Doubtless, every power given in the hands of man implies a serious risk of abuse. But this state of affairs can only accentuate its normative meaning, it can never justify the opinion that power in itself is an evil.

The positivistic sociological view that power over men can be reduced to social-psychical influence, eventually (in the case of sword-power) supported by ‘physical means’, rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding.

Power over men has indeed a social-psychical substratum in the feeling-drive of submission to the leadership of superior figures. The latter exercise a considerable emotional influence upon their social environment. But real formative power in its original cultural sense does not function in the feeling-aspect of human experience, as little as the formative will in its historical function can be identified with the psychical aspect of volition.

Whereever real power over men manifests itself, it is always consolidated in cultural forms which transcend the psychical life of the individuals in their social interaction.

This is why history can never be reduced to social psychology. The construction of a collective soul as the psychical origin of the cultural forms of human society is nothing but a metaphysical speculation. And it is indeed surprizing that this metaphysical construction was laid at the foundation of the positivistic sociology of Emile Durkheim, who at the same time emphatically denied that the social institutions can be examined in a psychological way.

Power over men, as the irreducible cultural modality of social influence, cannot be realized apart from the other modal aspects of social life, consequently, not apart from the social-psychical relations between men. But in this realization it maintains its cultural modal meaning. Its factual side remains bound to the normative cultural principle of power-formation founded in the Divine order of creation, and cannot be experienced apart from it in its original historical sense.

Historical power is not an a-normative meaning-figure, but it is the power of a normative mission in the sense of formative control. The possessor of historical power does not possess it as a kind of personal property that he has at his subjective disposal. He has a normative task and mission in the

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development of human civilization either to guard or to mould culture further, in subjection to the principles laid down by God in His world-order. If he thinks he can trample on these cultural principles, which are elevated above any subjective arbitrariness, he will discover his own powerlessness. Real power to form history can only unfold either in obedient, or in compulsory subjection to the Divine principles of cultural development. This important point is essential to a true insight into the intrinsic meaning of historical power, and it will be explained in the further analysis of the principles of historical development.

The glory of power has been tarnished because its normative modal meaning was lost sight of.

It ought to be completely restored in its irreplaceable value within the Divine world-order by considering its modal sense in the light of the Biblical basic motive. For it is of Divine origin and finds its religious consummation¹ in Christ Jesus as the Incarnate Word, in Whom God's omnipotence finds its pure expression, not tainted with sin.

It has not been included in the world-order because of sin only. For God created man after His own Image as ruler and lord of the earthly world².

Through sin the power of man was turned away from its religious fulness; instantly the striving after its absolutization came into existence, the disregard for its temporal meaning-coherence, root and Origin. And in this apostate direction of the human craving for power man was reduced to relative powerlessness. The power of the kingdom of darkness revealed itself in the history of the world, - power as the citadel of Satan in its struggle with the power of the kingdom of Christ. This central theme of the Christian view of history will presently demand all our attention.

1 Matth. 28¹⁸; John 3³⁵

2 Genesis 1^{26, 28}.

The romantic quietist conception of God's guidance in history.

With the acceptance of the human will as an essential formative factor in the historical process, and the acknowledgment of the normative meaning of power as a historical mission, our view of history is inexorably opposed to all manner of romantic quietism. Under the influence of Schelling and the

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Historical School, this quietism - which found a fertile soil in the dialectical Lutheran view of the Law in its relation to Christian freedom - has also penetrated into the conception of history propounded by Fr. Julius Stahl.

Stahl's view of the normative sense of historical continuity appeared to be infected by an irrationalist organological trait. What had come about by the activity of the national mind in a supposedly unconscious process, was surrounded by a special aureole of sanctity, because it was due to ‘organic growth’ and not to the actions of men. And Stahl thinks he can recognize in the unwritten customary law something that grew out of the ‘mind of the people’ as a product of ‘God's guidance’ (Gottes Fügung). This ought to have a higher value accorded to it than to legislation in which the human formative will is so very much in evidence.

But history is never formed without human interference, though the latter is only instrumental with regard to God's government of the world. The interlacing of normative principle and human formative will is founded in the modal meaning of history itself and in the Divine world-order in which its modal law-sphere has been given its proper place. The historical development sets Christianity an eminent, normative task, a Divine mission, viz. the laying of the historical foundation, through the power of Christ, for the realization of Christian principles in this sinful world. This conclusion can no longer be evaded since it has been shown that the historical law-sphere is really the basis in the retrocipatory direction of time for the entire normative dynamics revealing itself in the opening-process of the other normative law-spheres.

If the Christian principles of justice, morality etc. are to find acceptance in this world, then it is only possible on the historical basis of power-formation in a continuous struggle with the powers of apostasy. True, God Himself guarantees the Honour of His Name, the victory of His Kingdom over the kingdom of darkness. But He uses human instruments in this struggle. Those who in the manner of the quietists make an appeal to ‘God's guidance in history’, as a kind of an unconsciously operating irrational factor outside of human intervention, corrupt the meaning of this Christian motif. For the latter is a summons to activity, not to resignation.

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The biotic analogies in the retrocipatory structure of the historical aspect.

After our examination of the psychical retrocipations in the modal structure of history the biotic analogies once more demand our attention. These were already mentioned in the analysis of the logical analogies and in the discussion of the normative sense of historical development. But in the present context it is necessary to make some additional remarks about their retrocipatory structure.

Historical development is inherent in cultural life and constitutes an indispensable element of historical experience. But any dialectical abuse of these biotic analogies should be carefully avoided.

The danger of such an abuse can be clearly seen from the organological view of history in which cultural unfolding was conceived of as a higher stage of natural development, so that the former was construed after the pattern of the growth of a living organism. It may be that this biologistic conception was dialectically connected with the motive of cultural freedom; but this could not retrieve the fundamental levelling of the modal boundaries between the biotic and the historical aspects, implied in this view.

On the other hand, the distinction between living and intrinsically dead elements of cultural tradition was very useful and even indispensable. It appeared that the Historical legal school conceived it in a normative sense, but failed to indicate a serviceable criterion. Here, too, the dialectical-organological view of historical development lost sight of the fundamental modal difference between natural growth, in the sense of organic life, and the historical process of cultural unfolding.

This does not detract from the value of the distinction as such. But the normative criterion cannot be found in the biotic retrocipations of the historical law-sphere alone, nor in its retrocipatory structure as a whole. As long as the modal structure of history is considered only in its closed or restrictive function every attempt to detect the regulative content of the normative principles of cultural development is doomed to failure.

This is undubitably a very interesting state of affairs, since it deviates from what was found in our analysis of the retrocipatory structure of other normative aspects. In the logical, the legal and the moral law-spheres, for instance, we detected a material content of the normative principles even in their closed structure.

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And it is especially the biotical analogy of historical development in which this deviating state of affairs manifests itself. This may be a new indication of the particular position of the historical law-sphere with regard to the opening-process of the normative meaning-aspects.

For the present our analysis of the retrocipatory structure of history must be continued by considering the analogies of the aspect of energy-effect. This will direct our attention to the famous problem of causality in its historical meaning.

The intermodal meaning-coherence between the historical aspect and that of energy-effect. The problem of historical causality and Toynbee's idea of ‘challenge’.

The analysis of the logical analogies in the modal meaning of the historical aspect has brought to light that the identity and diversity of historical events is not to be established in the way followed in verifying natural facts. What belongs to an historical occurence, and what does not, appeared to depend on historical imputation. One should not be led astray by the fact that natural events, too, can have an historical signification. For this appeared to be possible only in an historical subject-object-relation. In this relation the historical meaning of such facts depends on particular subjective cultural situations affected by them.

This state of affairs must be of great importance for the insight into the physical analogies within the modal structure of history which reveal the inner meaning-coherence of the latter with the aspect of energy-effect.

Every historical event - either subjective or objective - implies historical effects in cultural development. Without such effects it would be historically irrelevant. But if historical events themselves cannot be established without normative imputation the same thing must apply to the historical relation of cause and effect.

In their epistemological reflections on the historical concept of causality historians have been troubled by the naturalist philosophical view of the causal nexus inspired by the deterministic Humanist science-ideal.

Starting from the so-called physico-psychical image of temporal reality they considered that a particular effect can only result from the whole of physical and psychical antecedents by which it is necessarily determined. And since the series of causal

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conditiones sine qua non in the case of historical processes seemed to be immensely complex, and the knowledge of its totality transcends human possibility, the historian should be content with making a relatively arbitrary selection from this series. This is, for instance, the view of the famous Dutch historian Huizinga and of the German philosopher Georg Simmel.

It needs no further argument that in this way the problem of historical causality is completely misunderstood since it is conceived outside of the modal meaning of history.

An historical causal nexus can only be found between cultural events, just as a juridical causal nexus can only exist between legal facts, and a psychical one only between psychical phenomena. It is true that the historical modality of causal relations has an unbreakable intermodal coherence with the other modal aspects of a real causal process. But it cannot be reduced to the latter.

Let me illustrate this state of affairs by an example. In the discussion of the question: Which historical situations have caused the rise of the feudal system in the Frankish kingdom? historians usually mention two facts: in the first place the invasions of the Arabs, whose cavalry by far surpassed that of the Frankish army, whose horsemen only consisted of the royal antrustiones; and secondly the interior danger caused by the formation of a private cavalry by the mighty Frankish seigneurs. The Carolingians conquered both dangers at once by a compulsory incorporation of the private vassals in the Frankish army.

The causal factors alleged here are doubtless historical. Two power-formations threatened the Frankish kingdom. They were a real ‘challenge’ in the sense meant by Toynbee, and their historical effect was a dangerous situation. The latter became the historical ground for a measure of political genius by which the challenge was answered and the military and political power-integration of the Frankish empire was assured.

Every attempt to reduce this intrinsically historical causal nexus to a physico-psychical complex would be meaningless, though it is evident that the former can reveal its historical meaning only in the inter-modal coherence with other modalities of causal relations.

The ‘challenge’ in Toynbee's sense is, in fact, at the same time an appeal to the normative task of the real formers of history, a historical test of their qualification as leaders in the process of cultural development of mankind. This is to say that the histori-

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cal causal relation in the case mentioned shows a factual side and a norm-side, which are insolubly related to one another. The factual effect of the Arabian invasions and of the private power-formation of the Frankish seigneurs was the rise of a serious danger to the Frankish empire. This was the ‘challenge’, which, on the normative law-side of the historical law-sphere, became the ground for the fulfilment of an historical task: the military and political integration of the Frankish kingdom into a real state. There was no guaranty in advance that the Carolingian rulers would be able to conquer the dangers. We cannot say that the maintenance of an imperium, originated from conquests, and viewed by the Merovingian conquerors as their private dominium, was in itself a normative requirement of cultural development. From the historical viewpoint the only question was how the Carolingian rulers would answer the ‘challenge’, whether or not in the line of a cultural principle which turns out to be a real norm of historical development.

The affirmative answer to this question supposes again that an historical norm is to be assumed implying the task of the political formers of history indicated above. And this can only appear from our further analysis of the modal structure of history.

For the present it must be established that neither the psychical nor the physical aspects of causality implied in the realization of the Arabian invasions, the private power-formations of the Frankish seigneurs and the political-historical projects of the Carolingians, touch at the intrinsically historical causal relation explained above. The historian who examines the political-historical development of the Frankish kingdom during the 8th century, cannot escape from taking account of the psychical and physical aspects of the events. But he must be aware that he is then in the same position as the jurist, who, for instance, confronted with the question whether a murder has been committed in the legal sense of the word, must in advance establish whether a certain dose of arsenic can be medically considered as lethal.

To the judge this is a prelimenary question lying at the basis of the real juridical causal problem, and when he is in doubt, he will consult a specialist.

In the same way the historian should consider that the psychical and physical aspects of a causal process functioning in the historical law-sphere do not belong to the real historical causal nexus.

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It is the modal structure of the latter which determines its meaning. Therefore the analysis of this modal meaning-structure is necessary.

The so-called individual causality in history and the rejection of the concept of historical causality by the Diltheyan school.

It is not sufficient, after the manner of ^Rickert, to work with the category of ‘individual causality’ which is not further determined in its meaning. Neither will it do to speak of a ‘lack of causal equation’ as distinct from the natural scientific ‘causal equation’ (Kausal-Ungleichung; Kausal-Gleichung). With regard to the concrete historical causality the mathematical-physical principle of equivalence doubtless does not hold, because it has no historical sense at all. In the meaning of cultural development ‘small causes’ may have ‘great consequences’. But this ‘individual causality’ is by no means inherent only in the historical side of reality. It is revealed wherever our attention is directed to the subjectivity of the events in their structures of individuality, as they are expressed within the different modal aspects of experience.

Considered modally, individuality remains an ἄπειϱον, so long as our theoretical view is not directed to the ‘guiding functions’ opening the infinite number of possibilities, implied in the structures of individuality and their modal aspects.

This disclosure within the concrete structural coherence of the individual totality takes place in a definite anticipatory direction.

In any case the moment of individuality cannot determine the modal structure of an historical causal nexus. As soon as (with Rickert, Troeltsch, and other methodologists of historical thought) individuality is considered as an a-priori determining moment of the historical aspect as such, the order of investigation is inverted. It is forgotten that historical individuality as such can only be determined from its historical modus, and not the other way about.

When our theoretical attention is prematurely directed to the incalculable diversity of individuality manifested in concrete things and events we can no longer read its rich modal diversity.

The unjustified identification of causality with the natural-scientific conception of it, explains why the Diltheyan trend in

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the philosophy of history wishes to ban the entire category of causality from historical science. In the opinion of the Diltheyans causality belongs to explanatory spatial thinking, and they hold that ‘historical thought’ should be directed to the interpretative understanding of the historical meaning-coherences, and not to explanatory analysis.

The truth of the matter is that the relation of cause and effect is an inseparable retrocipatory element in the modal structure of history itself, but in this meaning-aspect it cannot be reduced to any non-historical function of causality.

Historical causality, as such, is necessarily qualified by the nuclear meaning-moment of formative control. It is a cultural relation.

The retrocipation of movement in the modal structure of history.

There can be no doubt that our experience of historical development is ultimately founded in the pure intuition of movement. It may be that this development, as such, is a biotic retrocipation; but the previous provisional analysis of the modal structure of the biotic aspect has shown that the moment of development cannot be the modal nucleus of the latter. It is only an indirectly founded analogy of movement in its original sense.

Historical or cultural development is, consequently, a much more complicated retrocipation, since its intermodal foundation is mediated by all the modal aspects following that of movement and preceding the historical sphere. As was remarked in an earlier context, it is not the logical compulsion of a pre-conceived philosophical system which leads to this conclusion. Rather it is the unavoidable result of an exact analysis of the modal meaning-structures.

Insofar as historical or cultural life is founded in organic life, historical development implies the analogy of biotic potentiality, and the analogical moments of vital and intrinsically dead components of tradition. Insofar as it is founded in the physical aspect of energy-effect, it implies the analogy of historical cause and its consequences. But the dynamical moment, as such implied in the experience of cultural development, can have no other ultimate foundation than the pure intuition of movement.

It is no use explaining it from the experience of historical time. For such an explanation appeals to the historical meaning-modus

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of time whose modal structure is the very subject matter of our analysis.

If historical time implies historical movement, which can hardly be denied, we are confronted with the question concerning its ultimate foundation, since in its historical qualification it reveals it analogical character. Analogies cannot exist without this basis, if they are not to be meaningless. They refer to an original modal meaning-nucleus as their ultimate temporal point of reference. And a serious philosophical analysis should not rest before this point of reference has been laid bare.

But then it is inevitable that, together with the analogy of movement, we shall detect spatial and numerical analogies in the modal structure of history. The horror of ‘spatial thought’ in the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, which we remarked in Dilthey and his adherents in the philosophy of history, should not refrain us from bringing to light also these ultimate retrocipatory moments in the modal structure concerned. Only it should be borne in mind that they are analogies and not mathematical concepts.

Numerical analogies in power.

The numerical retrocipations require no special attention. Every historical fact and every historical relation implies (in a cultural sense) the moments of unity and multiplicity founded in arithmetical relations.

Power implies a quantitative analogy in its different gradations. But it cannot be really quantified in its inner cultural meaning. Its numerical analogies are ruled by cultural standards, not by arithmetical measures. Political power, for instance, cannot be measured by the number of men over which it extends, but only by the degree to which this multitude is formed to a political-historical unity. A numerically great people may be weak as a political power-formation. The same holds good with respect to other types of historical formations of mastery.

For the rest, these quantitative analogies can only be examined via the spatial retrocipations.

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The spatial analogies in the modal moment of the cultural area. The normative call to win the control over nature, and the positivizing of this modal historical principle in technical industry. The instrument as a document of civilization and its relation to the cultural area.

The spatial analogies in the modal structure of history already demanded attention in our introductory consideration of the analogical basic concepts of scientific thought. There it appeared that the science of history is bound to a historical notion of space which is called cultural area. A cultural area is qualified by the modal nuclear moment of formative control (or power) in the correlation of power over persons and power over objects. Since this nuclear moment appeared to have an intrinsically normative meaning, this spatial analogy, too, is only to be conceived in a normative sense. It appeared to be a sphere of human power-expansion which, to be sure, is founded in the space of sensory perception, but is not perceptible in its modal cultural meaning to the eye of sense.

A cultural area may be more or less extensive and this gradation shows its intra-modal coherence with the quantitative retrocipations of power briefly discussed above. This extension, too, just like its gradation, has an intrinsically cultural measure; it cannot be conceived in mathematical equations, though in its realization it doubtless has a mathematical foundation so that by nature it has an inner meaning-coherence with spatial magnitude. It is an historical magnitude bound to cultural movement and development, consequently, a dynamical supersensory meaning-figure. As such it is a spatial analogy which can only be conceived in the historical subject-object-relation. Let us consider this relation in somewhat greater detail, though in so doing we cannot escape anticipating our later general examination of this subject.

Already in its restrictive retrocipatory structure the modal meaning of culture implies the normative historical principle of the call to win the control over nature in its objective cultural potentialities. This principle appeared to be founded in the Divine ordinance of the creation (Gen. 1:26-28). Though the fall into sin deprived man of the fulness of this power, the principle itself has retained its modal validity in the development of culture. It is positivized in technical industry in the sense intended in the Greek word τεχνή, i.e. formative control.

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Wherever tools are found to control nature, be it in ever so primitive a form, we are on historical ground, in a cultural area.

The term ‘agriculture’ clearly indicates the cultural subject-object-relation between human technè and the soil in its objective cultural potentiality. And even the primitive control of nature in the still undeveloped technè is based on a logical meaning-substratum. Without logical thinking it is impossible to gain the control of nature.

At first sight this technical control, as a historical meaning-figure, seems to expand itself only in the objective direction. And if only this objective direction is considered, the normative character of the modal principle of power-expansion over nature positivized in technical industry cannot immediately catch the eye.

Especially at its modern highly developed level, technics is usually viewed as a purely material factor of culture whose predominant power threatens human personality. In its impersonal sphere there seems to be no room for subjects but for objects only. And it can hardly be denied that an excessive expansion of the power of technical industry implies serious dangers for mankind. But this is the subject of later examinations. For the present it should be borne in mind that in technical industry we are confronted with the modal subject-object-relation which renders any merely objectivistic conception really meaningless. Technical industry, as a historical phenomenon, is itself ruled by principles which, as such, refer to subjective formative activity. Their normative content in the formative process of history on the law-side is subjected to development in a progressive direction.

Technical industry is never to be understood in an individualistic sense. It always means a historical expansion of formative power both in subjective and in objective directions. In the former direction it is primarily a communal factor. The formation of the technical principles is only possible through the agency of historical authorities within a cultural group.

If on the basis of natural-scientific thought the technical control of nature is to be raised to a higher level, the authority of the formers of history must intervene in the cultural community in order to conquer reactionary conservatism. The latter is not identical with tradition, the guardian of historical continuity; but is rather the power of inertia that simply opposes any novelty. Progress in technical industry is impossible with-

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out the basis of historical power over persons, manifesting itself in the general acceptance of new technical ideas: the deepened technical principles must find sufficient support in a cultural community and cultural area.

An individual discovery or invention that has no historical consequences because it is not generally accepted, and consequently lacks the character of a formative factor in human society, cannot form history.

We have now almost imperceptibly passed on to the chief theme of our enquiry connected with the opening-process in the historical law-sphere. Our previous investigations of the retrocipatory structure of history have served only as, a preparation.

§ 5 - The anticipatory structure of the historical aspect and the transcendental idea of historical development.

The rigidity of the cultural meaning in the still closed primitive cultures. The historical norm of integration and its divine foundation.

In the restrictive as yet unopened function of the historical law-sphere in a primitive society, civilization is still enclosed between the rigid walls of small sibs, tribes, or populaces. The typical structures of these communities have as yet no differentiated determinating or leading function¹. The historical authorities in primitive society are the guardians of a rigid group-tradition, often deified by a pagan faith.

So long as such communities maintain their isolation in history, there is no question of any development of culture in the proper sense of the word, as it is taken in the science of history.

The primitive group must come into contact with other groups that are at a higher cultural level. Its historical tradition, rigidly tied down to an idolatrous belief in nature, must be affected.

1 The concept of the ‘determinating or leading function’ as the guiding structural function of things and human social groups can only be explained in the third Volume. There we shall analyze the structures of individuality further. In the present context a preliminary explanation of the term must suffice. The determinating or leading function is the typically guiding structural function in the entire architecture of a ‘thing’ and of social groups. Thus, e.g., the temporal community of the church has its typically guiding structural function as a community of believers on the basis of a common positive confession of Christian faith. The determinating function of the temporal ecclesiastical institution is, consequently, enclosed in the aspect of faith. It gives this institution its typical qualification.

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The isolating walls of partition must be broken through if there is to be any normative dynamics, any deepening of the meaning of a primitive civilization. Very often it is the historical power of the sword that makes the opening-process possible here, but other (peaceful) powers like that of the Christian mission, of trade, etc. are also frequently active.

In the removal of the rigid walls of isolation, historical development moves in the line of cultural integration. The latter has its counter-part in the process of an increasing differentiation. This process of cultural integration and differentiation should be sharply distinguished from the levelling tendencies which in our days threaten to penetrate the so-called underdeveloped cultures with secularized factors of Western civilization. In its genuine sense it is highly important to our enquiry.

Here Christian philosophy is directly confronted with the problem whether the modal structure of historical development on its law-side implies a normative principle of cultural integration and differentiation which can really be employed as a criterion of historical progress. In our previous examination of the problem of historical causality such a norm was only hypothetically introduced. At the present stage of our enquiry this hypothesis ought to find its justification. For it has appeared that the normative principle of historical development can reveal its material content only in the opening-process of the historical law-sphere.

It deserves special attention that the biologistic school in sociology has indeed accepted the principle of cultural integration and differentiation as a norm of historical development, though they transformed it into a natural law of higher organical life. Emile Durkheim, too, though not belonging to the adherents of this school, assumed a necessary development of culture from an undifferentiated primitive stage to the level of increasing differentiation and integration. Both Herbert Spencer, the founder of the biologistic school, and Durkheim seemingly based this principle of cultural development on biotic analogies in the historical process of social life.

The previous examination has shown that these analogies, in their merely retrocipatory sense, cannot furnish any material standard of cultural development.

But in fact, the biologistic school, and also Durkheim, based their conception on the evolutionistic theory of Darwin. And, as will appear presently, this theory, in its application to human

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culture, implies a normative Idea of historical development masked in a natural-scientific garb. This Idea was, consequently, not derived from biotic analogies only. Its transformation into a natural law was a pure mystification. The simple fact that there exist primitive tribes which from times immemorial have remained in an undifferentiated state of culture, suffices to refute any natural scientific view of the principle of historical development.

If the principle of cultural differentiation and integration is really a modal norm of historical development, it must be founded in the modal structure of the historical opening-process, and in the Divine world-order as a whole. That this is indeed so will appear from our further analysis of the anticipatory structure of the historical meaning-modus.

Provisionally it is necessary to stress the fact that without the realization of the principle concerned, the anticipatory spheres of the historical aspect will remain closed. This is a strong indication that the principle of cultural differentiation and integration must be founded in the modal structure of the cultural opening-process.

In addition, it must be stated that without the process of cultural differentiation and integration there can be no question of a free unfolding of the structures of individuality in human society. As long as culture remains in an undifferentiated condition there is no room for a state, a church, a free industrial or trade-life, free associations, a free unfolding of fine arts, a scientific community etc. Even the matrimonial community and family-life are often denatured by being intersected through artificial undifferentiated power-formations, like those of matriarchal or patriarchal sibs or clans, which impede a free unfolding of the natural matrimonial and family relations.

God has created everything according to its own inner nature; and in the temporal order of genesis and development this inner nature must freely unfold itself. This also holds good with regard to the structures of individuality determining the inner nature of the different typical spheres of human society. Only in connection with the whole order of creation is it permitted to refer to the development of a human being from an undifferentiated impregnated egg-cell to a highly differentiated individuum, and to an ascending series of undifferentiated and more or less differentiated living beings in nature. In so doing, the Christian philosopher does not fall back into the error of de-

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riving a norm of cultural development from the closed biotic analogies in the structure of the historical aspect. Rather he appeals to the universal order of creation which has to unfold itself within all aspects of the real process of temporal development, in the biotical, as well as in the psychical, and the post-psychical law-spheres.

For the rest more arguments may be alleged for the thesis that from the Biblical standpoint the principle of cultural differentiation and integration is to be acknowledged as a fundamental norm of historical development. The history of the building of the tower of Babel, viewed in the light of the cultural commandment of Genesis I, shows that seclusion and isolation in cultural development is contrary to the Divine ordinance.

Cultural expansion, the spread of humanity over the surface of the earth in the differentiation of the cultural groups, and the cultural contact between these groups, have been set as a task to mankind.

The unity of mankind in its spiritual root does not allow a continuous cultural isolation of separated peoples. The task of winning the control over the earth is set to mankind, as a whole, in its historical development.

Meanwhile, the Biblical basic motive of the Christian religion does not permit the historical process of differentiation and integration to be considered only in the light of the order of creation.

Though the Divine cultural commandment has retained its complete validity, it should not be forgotten that in the process intended the historical power of sin must also develop in an increasing degree. And the influence of sin cannot fail to manifest itself also in the human formation of the cultural principles. This is why the Christian can never agree with an optimistic view of cultural progress. On the other hand, he should not surrender to the radical pessimism of a modern philosophy of cultural decline, or resign to a abandonment of culture to the power of apostasy. In the light of the Christian basic motive of Redemption, culture belongs to the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. And the task set to mankind in the cultural commandment of creation should be fulfilled in a continuous contest with the historical development of the power of sin, a contest to be waged through the spiritual δύναμις of the Redeemer. This theme will require special attention in a later context.

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The problem of the original historical state of civilization and the Idea of progress.

But is the primitive condition of civilization in which the meaning of history manifests itself only in its closed restrictive function the original state of mankind? Is the factual side of historical development a steadily progressive evolutionary course? It is remarkable that already in Greek philosophy this evolutionistic view of history presented itself under a neutral positivistic mask. Protagoras, the great founder of Greek sophism, was one of the first to construe the factual human cultural development in an ascending line.

Before him the idea of a golden age at the commencement of history had been prevalent. Even Plato in his dialogues Timaeus, Critias and Politicos adopted it. But Protagoras in his ‘Prometheus-myth’ advanced the idea of a natural state of mankind as a life without justice, morality or body politic, though in possession of a limited amount of technical skill in controlling nature¹. Religion² and language are supposed to have existed in this natural state. But justice and morality are said to have developed only in the civil state as the ‘general conviction’ or ‘general will’ of the united citizens. Owing to this view Protagoras sharply opposed the idea of a ‘natural law’ and a pre-political moral standard. That is why he looks upon ‘civilization’ as a higher stage of development of the ‘culture’ existing in the state of nature.

In modern times the Idea of progress in its naturalistic form was propagated especially by the consistent adherents of the Humanistic science-ideal, in its mathematical orientation. The philosophy of the Enlightenment with its preponderately empiristic-positivistic tendency was permeated by this Idea.

At present it hardly needs special argument to say that the

1 The credit of having pointed out the great importance of Protagoras' theory of cultural development for later theories in the same strain, is undoubtedly due to Adolf Menzel (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Staatslehre, Sitzungsberichte der Wiener Akademie der Wissensch. Phil. hist. Klasse, Bnd. 210, Abh. I, 1929, pp. 192 ff). Cf. also W. Graf Uxkull-Gyllenband, in the work: Griechische Kulturentstehungslehren (1924), p. 22 ff.

2 Doubtless Protagoras here meant the older nature-religion with its basic motive of the eternally flowing stream of Life, which in his philosophy was depreciated in favour of the form-motive of the cultural religion of the Greek polis.

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Idea of historical development, in the sense of a steady progress under the guidance of ‘reason’, cannot be maintained on a positivistic foundation but contains a hidden axiological standard.

The transcendental Idea of historical development, as such, necessarily points beyond and above the modal temporal meaning of history. As a transcendental Idea it is unavoidably directed to the Origin and the consummation of the meaning of culture.

It may be that the concept of history has to start with the primary, as yet unopened meaning of the historical law-sphere; but this is in no way decisive for the question concerning the original historical conditions.

The question about the original historical condition of mankind necessarily refers back to that concerning the origin of history itself. Therefore it cannot be answered by historical science on the ground of the positive historical material only. In the same way physical science cannot explain to us the problem of the origin of ‘energy’, and biology cannot explain to us the origin of ‘organic life’.

Darwinistic evolutionism, conceived as a genetic world- and life-view encompassing the origin of human culture and society, is a sheer metaphysics of the Humanistic science-ideal. So is Fichte's hypothesis of a highly gifted original people which, as the individual embodiment of a given qualitative morality in a moral nature, is supposed to be the bearer of the original civilization. The origin of mankind cannot be found by science independently. The origin of culture is therefore a meta-historical question, answered for the Christian by the Divine Revelation of creation. And the original historical condition is indissolubly bound up with the origin of mankind.

Pre-history has doubtless furnished extremely important indications concerning the oldest testimonies of human culture. But every attempt at a reconstruction especially of the palaeolithic periods of cultural development contains a good deal of hypothesis. This is partly due to the lack of sufficient scientific material. But chiefly it is caused by the transcendental pre-suppositions of the pre-historical viewpoint.

But does it follow from this state of affairs that historical science, in accordance with the neutrality postulate, should refrain from giving an opinion on the direction of cultural development? Is it to relinquish the normative Idea of development? We shall see that it cannot do so if it is not to lose hold of

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the historical aspect itself. It would be tantamount to sacrificing its position as a science with a limited sphere of its own. Only the historical aspect can guarantee historical science its own field of inquiry. And the modal meaning of culture, as we have now sufficiently demonstrated, just as any other modal meaning-structure, cannot be conceived apart from a transcendental basic Idea.

Historical science works with a transcendental Idea, and not with a rigid concept of historical development. Its relation to ethnology and the science of pre-history.

In analysing this modality we are necessarily confronted with the relation between primitive and deepened culture. The science of history is not interested in primitive closed cultures that have not been taken up in the stream of cultural development. It leaves the study of these civilizations to ethnology, the science of the so-called pre-history, and to sociology. Primitive cultures are important to historical science only insofar as they are referred to by an opened and deepened form of cultural development. The investigation of Old Germanic and pre-Germanic Celtic civilizations for instance is not merely important for ethnology or for ‘pre-history’. Historical science includes these cultures at their primitive stage in its own field of enquiry, because they have been taken up by the stream of development of modern civilization. As far as the source material goes, they are subject-matter for the historian. Nevertheless, they are also rightly investigated by ethnology and pre-history, insofar as cultural development in ‘closed cultural groups’ is submitted to a comparative (or a non-comparative) method of investigation.

On the other hand the theoretical inquiry into, e.g., the pre-historical cave-cultures, the culture of the Neanderthal-man, etc., is not a genuine historical theme, unless documentary evidence should enable us to trace the historical advancement of these primitive closed cultures into the stream of opened and deepened cultural development. At least with regard to the Neanderthal culture it has been established that this is not the case; and with respect to the cave-cultures it will appear presently that the discoveries of pre-history are not susceptible of scientific-historical interpretation in its proper sense.

The opened and deepened cultural development is undeniably found in the anticipatory and no longer in the retrocipatory direction of the historical aspect.

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The anticipatory direction of history appeared to be understandable only in an Idea of cultural development. In the present context this point is very important. For here it appears that genuine historical science is itself oriented to the normative Idea of cultural development, although the current conception holds that it ought to abstain from any kind of ‘value judgments’.

It is necessary to examine this state of affairs in somewhat greater detail.

The necessity of a normative Idea of cultural development for historical thought.

The merely retrocipatory moment of cultural development of which it is possible to form a concept, is rigidly bound up with biotic organic development, and as such it also occurs in the as yet closed primitive cultures.

These cultures may have their periods of historical rise, maturity and decline, just as a living organism has its developmental periods. The duration of their existence is dependent on that of the small popular or tribal communities that are their bearers. They vegetate upon the developmental potentialities contained in their isolated existence; and incidental influences from abroad (for instance the borrowing of new forms of tools) are only undergone receptively without giving rise to new cultural ideas. They may vanish from the scene altogether without leaving any trace in the history of mankind.

Quite different is the situation in the historical development of opened cultures. From the ancient cultural centres of world-history: Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Crete, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, Palestine etc. essential developmental tendencies have passed over into medieval and modern Western civilizations. They have fecundated the Germanic and Arabian cultures and this fecundation has given rise to new forms of civilization. This disclosed or opened cultural development has been freed from the rigid dependence upon the vital conditions of popular or tribal communities. It does not vegetate within the narrow boundaries of closed and undifferentiated cultural groups, but, like a fecundating stream, it always forms new channels to continue its course.

The merely retrocipatory element in cultural development, its closed biotic analogy, does not interest historical science. The fact that a primitive cultural group as the Marind-anim in New-

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Guinea vanishes from the earth, owing to the dying out of the greater part of the tribe and the total decline of its culture, may interest ethnology¹, but it is irrelevant to historical science. Only the anticipatory development of culture is drawn within its horizon.

If, therefore, historical science is denied its right to be guided by an Idea of historical development, this means that it is deprived of its necessary ὑπόϑεσις.

The science of history - though the historian does not realize it - has indeed taken its stand with regard to the relation between primitive and deepened civilization.

Historical inquiry is only concerned with the latter, and with the development of primitive cultures to deepened civilizations insofar as documentary evidence is available.

Therefore historical thought moves in principle in the direction of the historical Idea, which is not possible, however, without the historical concept.

Is this Idea to remain without any direction; is it to be restricted to an immanent ‘Kultursynthese’²? This is the opinion of modern Historism; it has prevailed also in the science of history, since the foundations of the Humanistic personality-ideal were undermined by sceptical relativism.

But a genuine Idea of historical development cannot be derived from an immanent synthesis of cultural facts in their typical structures of individuality.

The Christian Germanic cultural development is doubtless not to be understood without taking into account the influence of the powerful factors of Greek-Roman culture. In the Greek cultural development there were important Egyptian and other individual historical factors at work. But the ancient Greco-Roman factors operate in the Christian-Germanic history as in a new dynamic historical totality, and thereby assume an entirely new cultural nuance.

The individual historical structural totalities formed in this course of development must, consequently, stand in a functional relation which cannot be the result of these historical totalities themselves but which, inversely, is their very condition. This functional relation is that of historical development in the

1 Cf. the thesis of J.v. Baal, Godsdienst en Samenleving in Nederlandsch-Zuid-Nieuw-Guinea (Leiden, 1934).

2 The term is Troeltsch's.

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opening-process of its modal meaning. And the factual side of this opening-process is not to be established apart from normative cultural principles, which in their anticipatory character point beyond the immanent boundaries of the historical law-sphere.

This is why an immanent theoretic synthesis of Western culture in the sense meant by Troeltsch presupposes a transcendental Idea of historical development, if it is to be more than an arbitrary selection of separate elements lacking historical coherence. Western culture cannot be conceived of as a closed civilization whose positive cultural measures are only to be found in its immanent tradition.

Historical development is guided in the anticipatory transcendental direction by later modal functions, and the opening-process that takes place here is impossible without a definite direction.

In the older science of history, oriented to ‘Universal-’ or ‘World-History’, this was not doubted and historians were fully conscious of the historical Idea they laid at the basis of their researches.

The developmental Idea of progress. Its ὑπόϑεσις in the Humanistic science-ideal.

It was a new Idea of development by means of which the ‘Enlightenment’ definitively accomplished the breach with the Christian conception of history that had prevailed from Eusebius and St Augustine up until Bossuet. This new Idea was that of the steady advance of mankind towards autonomous freedom guaranteed by reason becoming conscious of itself (reason taken in the sense of natural scientific thought).

Voltaire was the first to formulate the Humanistic idea of culture in this pregnant way. ‘Culture’, in the absolutely immanent, ‘profane’ conception in which the philosopher of the ‘Enlightenment’ opposed it to the soterological facts of Christian religion, as well as to the military struggle for power among the different states, became the central theme and the slogan of the Humanistic view of history.

The normative standard in which this conception of historical development was founded, was that of the Humanistic science-ideal oriented to Newton's principles of natural science. This ideal had gained its supreme historical power in the very period of the Enlightenment. Every possible progress, every possible

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happiness for mankind was expected of the progressive realization of this ideal. In a deeper sense the Humanistic personality-ideal was itself active in the background of this idea of the steady progress of culture.

Voltaire collected the gigantic poly-historical factual material of his time from the results of the investigations of nature, the reports of travellers and missionaries, and the work of special historical science. From the view-point of the new Idea of culture he re-shaped this material in order to adapt it to a pre-conceived course of development of world-history, supposed to be in strict conformity to the causality of nature.

‘World-history’ in this sense became an illustration of the expansion of the power of sovereign scientific research. It ended in the apotheosis of the ideals of the Enlightenment, the glorification of its own culture. Compared with this, all the previous phases in the development of history could only be called inferior earlier stages, a spectacle of the stupidity of the world, which had to give way more and more to the light of reason¹.

The new Idea of culture was sustained by the optimistic belief in the possibility of perfecting man by means of science, and by the rationalistic-individualistic view of the similarity of the ‘rational nature of man’ in all its world-wide ‘specimens’. This similarity was oriented to the Humanistic idea of ‘natural law’ and was supposedly maintained in the entire process of historical development.

The developmental Idea of progress, as the purest precipitation of the French and the English ‘Enlightenment’, was presently led into collectivistic-sociological paths by the positivistic view of history of Count de St Simon and of August Comte.

Subsequently the influence of the Darwinistic theory of evolution undermined one of the foundations of this developmental Idea: the belief in the universal similarity of human nature. Spencer, who introduced Darwin's biologistic evolutionary principle into the conception of history, could impregnate this principle with a genuine Idea of historical development only because he elevated modern economic industrialism and British liberalism to the normative final purpose of historical development. By representing this normative standard as the result of natural causes the illusion of a positivist biological view of history was main-

1 Cf. Gerhard Masur, Ranke's Begriff der Welt-Geschichte, Beiheft 6 der Historischen Zeitschr. (1926) p. 26, and Sackmann, Voltaire, p. 295.

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tained. But the factual course of cultural development did not fit this preconceived evolutionistic Idea.

It is quite understandable that the biologistic principle of evolution found adherence especially in pre-history and ethnology (Morgan, Tylor, Frazer and others), whereas the historians in their special field of research could hardly be interested in it¹. For in the course of development of primitive cultures, in which the typically anticipatory process of differentiation and individualization has not yet started, the biotic retrocipations must necssarily come to the fore². Nevertheless, even in ethnology the evolutionist hypothesis has been refuted by the facts, since the unscientific manner of arranging and interpreting the material of research after a preconceived scheme has been replaced by a serious cultural scientific method of investigation. Thereby its claim to the rôle of an explanatory principle which can account for the factual course of cultural evolution has been lost.

I will revert to this important point below.

1 Wells' The outline of history is a history of the world, and may be alleged as an exception. It is indeed founded on Spencer's evolutionistic ideas, to some degree mixed with socialistic conceptions. For the rest it ascribed a great rôle to the initiative of the human mind.

2 This is also remarked by Troeltsch in his important work Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922), p. 432/3.

Kant's Idea of development oriented to the Humanistic personality-ideal in its rationalistic conception.

The developmental Idea of the steady progress of mankind oriented to the Humanistic science-ideal still found pregnant expression in Comte's law of the three stages. But against this Idea the Humanistic personality-ideal in Rousseau's pessimistic philosophy of culture had begun its reaction, which was at first absolutely destructive. Later on Rousseau developed his natural-law theory of the State according to which culture can lead mankind to a higher condition of freedom than nature can, viz. by guaranteeing him political freedom in the form of the unalienable rights of the citizen. But this was no longer viewed as the result of a natural causal process, but rather as a normative goal of culture.

In the latter line of thought Kant introduced a positive modification of the Humanistic view of history in accordance with the personality-ideal. From the standpoint of the Kritik der

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teleologischen Urteilskraft he oriented the historical Idea of development to the normative moralistic Idea of liberty of the personality-ideal. In this way the Idea of progress was fundamentally changed. There could, of course, no longer be any question of a real advance in the development of history, explicable in terms of natural science.

But Kant's teleological view-point enabled him to judge the development of history as if the final aim of practical reason were realized in it. It might be that this development must be thought of as an ‘empirical process’ subjected to natural causality, but it was the victory of the rational-moral nature of man over empirical sensibility that should lead it as a regulative principle or practical end. The ‘empirical development of history’ was thus founded in a normative standard to bear ‘the burden of actual history’.

Kant fully shared Rousseau's criticism of the Idea of culture of the ‘Enlightenment’. ‘Rousseau was not so very wrong,’ he writes, ‘when he had a predilection for the condition of the savages, that is to say as soon as this last stage is omitted to which our race still has to rise’ (i.e. the attainment of some form of a ‘cosmopolitan union of states’). ‘We have been cultivated in a very high degree by Art and Science. We have been civilized so as to be polite in society and to have a sense of propriety, until it has become overburdening. But we are still a long way from having become moralized’¹.

A real advance in the development of history can only be oriented to the Idea of autonomous morality. But the inner norm of this morality, the dutiful disposition of the will, in the nature of the case, is useless as a norm for the advance of historical development. Only in its special application to the so-called ‘external’ behaviour of mankind, hence only as the Idea of legality, does Kant base the judgment of historical development upon the supersensory Idea of freedom.

1 Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht (W.W. Groszh. Wilh. Ernst-Ausg. I) p. 235: ‘Rousseau hatte so unrecht nicht, wenn er den Zustand der Wilden vorzog, sobald man nämlich diese letzte Stufe, die unsere Gattung noch zu ersteigen hat, weglässt. Wir sind im hohen Grade durch Kunst und Wissenschaft kultiviert. Wir sind zivilisiert, bis zum Überlästigen, zur allerlei gesellschaftlicher Artigkeit und Anständigkeit, Aber uns für schon moralisiert zu halten, daran fehlt noch sehr viel.’

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And as such the idea of the League of Nations is introduced by Kant as the ‘final aim of the history of the world’. The general history of the world is then conceived teleologically as the realization of a providential plan of ‘nature’, directed to the ‘perfect civil union of the human race’. This means the creation of an institution by which the natural condition of the ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ between the states is replaced by a ‘civil legal condition’ in which these states settle their disputes in the peaceful way of a civil law-suit.

But this historical Idea of development remains a fictitious criterion to Kant. He himself calls it a ‘chiliasm of the philosophy of history’¹ for which ‘experience’ gives us only ‘a little’ to go on.

Besides, Kant's Idea of development was oriented to a rationalistic, formalistic conception of the Humanistic personality-ideal, which, as such, lay entirely outside the modal meaning of history. Real historical development remains a process of natural causality, which only acquires its meaning through its teleological relation to the Idea of autonomous liberty.

1 op. cit., p. 235.

The essential function of individuality in the historical developmental Idea.

Only the irrationalizing of the personality-ideal², oriented to the historical process itself, could provide an Idea of development really able to make the method of historical research fruitful.

In this respect Herder's Ideëen zur Philosophie der Geschichte was the great turning-point in comparison with the rationalistic view of history of the ‘Enlightenment’. It is true that this philosopher himself continued to hold to the optimistic confidence of the Enlightenment in the ‘perfectibility’ of human nature. He still started from the developmental Idea of Leibniz which owed its origin to the mathematical science-ideal, and as such had no historical but rather a metaphysical meaning. But the irrationalizing of the personality-ideal began in the period of ‘Storm and Stress’ of which he was a representative. And already in Herder it oriented itself to a fine intuitive insight into the unfolding of the individual totalities in historical development.

2 This turning-point in Humanistic philosophy has been submitted to a critical investigation in the second part of Volume I.

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In the present context this point is indeed of the very greatest importance. Before this we dismissed every interference of the moment of individuality as premature, because we were chiefly concerned with grasping in a concept the modal meaning of history with respect to its retrocipatory structure.

Individuality, we argued, can never be a constituent in the primary meaning-modus of history. It rather has to derive every delimitation of its meaning as a historical individuality precisely from this modal aspect. But in the anticipatory structure of this aspect individuality assumes a special modal meaning. The process of individualization lies in the transcendental direction of historical development.

In primitive, closed cultural groups the individual character, as such, is certainly not wanting. But on account of the rigid attachment of culture to the ‘natural’ sides of reality this individuality retains a certain traditional uniformity, which from generation to generation displays the same essential features in civilization. This remains true notwithstanding the fact that highly gifted leaders may be found in such primitive groups. So long as these leaders do not use their formative power in an integrating and differentiating direction, they cannot break through the traditional character of the primitive cultural community. For this reason the science of history proper takes no interest in these cultural individualities.

It is only in the opening-process of historical development that a dynamic individualizing tendency assumes essential importance. Again and again new cultural figures make their appearance¹. Especially the individuality of the formers of history comes to the fore. All these phenomena are unmistakable characteristics of the opening-process of the meaning of history.

Historical individuality now assumes a directed, deepened meaning.

1 These individual cultural figures can themselves no longer be conceived from the general modal viewpoint, but only with the aid of a structural idea of individuality which, as such, must exceed the boundaries of the historical aspect.

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The rise of nationalities in the opening-process of history. Nationality and the idea of ‘Volkstum’ in national-socialism.

This deepened meaning of historical individuality is also manifested in the rise of nationalities in the cultural opening-process.

A nation viewed in its historical aspect should be sharply distinguished from the ethnological notions of popular and tribal communities. The former can only develop after the decline of the latter as primitive political power-formations. It will appear from our further inquiry that after the rise of national communities as integrated political power-formations, the ethnical characteristics of the older popular and tribal communities may continue to reveal themselves in popular customs, dress, dances, superstitions etc. They belong to the field of folk-lore.

It was a typical reactionary trait of German national-socialism that it tried to conquer the idea of nationality and to revive the primitive idea of ‘Volkstum’. This was in accordance with its myth of ‘blood and soil’. The reactionary character of its totalitarian political system was evident from the pattern after which it was built, viz. the primitive old-Germanic trustis, a military power-formation of the popular and tribal chiefs, dukes or kings, which in its turn was an articifical expansion of the old undifferentiated (and consequently totalitarian) domestic power of the Germanics.

It is the transcendental Idea of historical development, lying at the foundation of the science of history proper, which has to provide the criterion of reaction and progress. And it can provide a real criterion only if it is oriented to the anticipatory modal structure of the historical aspect, as it is founded in the Divine world-order.

The modal norm of individualization for the opening-process in the historical law-sphere. Its connection with the norm of differentiation and integration.

As the modal norm of the opening-process in the historical law-sphere, the norm of differentiation and integration is thus at the same time a norm of individualization. The individual dispositions and talents of peoples, nations, and individual formers of history must expand in the process of cultural development in their typical cultural spheres, and this expansion is set mankind as a normative task.

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This norm is, however, not to be understood in an irrationalistic sense. The subjective individual dispositions and talents intended are not themselves to be viewed as the normative standard of the disclosed process of cultural development. They ought to be unfolded in accordance with the normative principles implied in the anticipatory structure of the historical law-sphere.

The further analysis of this structure will show that these principles have an unbreakable mutual coherence so that the norm of cultural individualization is never to be conceived apart from the other anticipatory principles.

The normative process of individualization in history is only possible in a differentiation of the typical cultural spheres under the guidance of typical non-historical normative modal functions which have themselves opened their meaning.

In the primitive tribes or the primitive populaces the cultural community is an undifferentiated whole. In general there is as yet no question of differentiated cultural spheres typically ‘guided’ by a theoretical (logical), a social¹, an economic, an aesthetic, a juridical, a moral function, or by the function of faith.

As soon as the differentiating process has started, however, the task of the individual talent becomes manifest. In the mutual contact between the differentiated cultural communities their historical individuality becomes essential. They are in need of one another because they each have something individual, something characteristic to give, and because only in the cultural coherence of the individual complexes can the deepened and disclosed historical development continue.

The opened historical individuality can therefore only be conceived theoretically in the coherence of the entire cultural community and in the historical interlacing of the different disclosed cultural spheres. And every individualistic atomistic conception of the deepened historical development is for this reason a misinterpretation of the historical ‘Gegenstand’.

It is undeniable that historical science proper only takes an interest in cultures that have been taken up in the historical process of individualization. The historical method of forming concepts proceeds indeed along individualizing lines². These

1 The term ‘social’ is used here in the modal sense of the aspect of human intercourse.

2 In this respect we can do full justice now to the important elements of truth in Rickert's methodology of historical thought. Rickert's error lies in his assumption that he can resolve the modal meaning of history into an unqualified concept of relation, in other words, that he introduces the moment of individuality too soon.

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facts, too, prove that historical science does not orient itself to a rigid concept, but rather to an Idea of cultural development.

For as soon as historical individuality is considered to be without any direction and self-sufficient, in other words, as soon as it is conceived apart from the anticipatory meaning-coherence, it turns into an ἄπειϱον. Then it offers no standard for the selection of what is historically significant.

Herder's irrationalistic Idea of humanity and his conception of historical individuality.

After Vico, Herder was one of the first thinkers fully alive to the above-mentioned state of affairs.

He realized the fundamental importance of structural totalities like a nation in the process of the deepened development of culture. He saw the intrinsic impossibility of genuinely individualizing historical thought without orienting this individualizing thinking to an Idea of cultural development. And he conceived this Idea as the Idea of humanity, a typically irrationalistic conception of the Humanistic personality-ideal, strongly oriented to Shaftesbury's aestheticism. In it the value of personality was no longer sought in some abstract kind of intellectuality but rather in an absolutely autonomous, harmonious expansion of every individual natural disposition and ability. In this individual aesthetic expansion the ‘general dignity of man’ was to acquire its greatest possible content, as Von Humboldt put it¹.

Only in this orientation to the irrationalistically conceived aesthetic Idea of humanity does the historical individuality of the national cultural communities find its foundation in Herder's trend of thought. His thesis that every nation has the standard of its perfection absolutely in its own self², would necessarily have resulted in cancelling the Idea of cultural development if it had not been connected with the Idea of humanity. For what nation has ever had an ‘isolated’ course of development in history, in which the expansion of its individual abilities took place like some vegetable growth from its own seed?

Are not things rather quite different, as Ranke already saw so clearly and sharply, namely, that national individuality itself

1 W. von Humboldt, Werke, I, p. 283.

2 Ideen XV, 3.

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does not begin to unfold until the historical development has been disclosed and includes the nations in a larger dynamic cultural coherence?

In Herder there remains a certain tension between the individuality of the nations as cultural communities and the Idea of humanity that has been related to the universal development. This is due to the strongly naturalistic-organological strain in his view of the individuality of a nation. His historical Idea of development threatens to stiffen into biological analogies. The history of the world is seen in a semi-naturalistic light as the development of all the seeds and of every natural disposition that mankind possesses. And also his Idea of humanity really lacked the constant transcendental direction that alone can give the historical Idea of development its determinateness. This deficiency was inherent in the naturalistic aesthetic conception of his philosophy of feeling.

In a review of Herder's Ideeën Kant rightly blamed the writer for this lack of direction in his Idea of the history of the world.

The ‘universally human’ in Herder's Idea of humanity is used as a standard of value for historical development. But it is, after all, nothing but the harmonious unfolding of every individual natural ability without any reference to the international cultural contact giving historical individuality its deepened meaning. Therefore, it cannot really guide the investigation of the differentiated and integrated cultural development, in which the isolated seclusion of the individual cultural communities is broken through.

The numbing of the Idea of development in the organological conception of the Historical School, and the crux of the historical explanation of the reception of Roman Law by an appeal to the national mind.

The same defect was to manifest itself presently in a pregnant way with regard to the organological Idea of development of the Historical School in jurisprudence, which tried to conceive historical development exclusively from the point of view of the individuality of the ‘national mind’.

That's why, e.g., to Von Savigny and Puchta the reception of Roman Law in Germanic countries became a true crux of legal history.

Quite rightly v. Jhering and the Germanist Georg Beseler argued that it was a hopeless task to try and explain this recep-

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tion historically by appealing to the Germanic ‘Volksgeist’.

We have shown that the organological Idea of historical development, as conceived of by v. Savigny and his followers, originated in Schelling's romantic idealism, which had passed through Kant's transcendental philosophy. This idealism sought to undermine the mathematical science-ideal in order to introduce the continuity-postulate of the transcendental Idea of liberty, founded in the new conception of the personality ideal. ‘Nature’ itself was viewed organologically as ‘the Spirit that is coming into existence’ (‘werdender Geist’). Nature and history were declared to be two different developmental series of the Absolute (as ‘Indifference’), and hence to be radically identical. In both series the Absolute differentiates itself into a succession of ‘grades’ or ‘potentialities’. In history we must assume that there is a synthesis of nature and freedom. In this synthesis free action, it is true, is founded in a hidden, unconscious necessity, in Providence or Fate (‘Schicksal’). But, at the same time in our development from ‘stage’ to ‘stage’ (‘Stufe zu Stufe’), history realizes our elevation from the numb state of unconscious subjection to ‘Fate’, to the free consciousness of Providence in the historical process.

Schelling's System des transzendentalen Idealismus really aimed at a new aesthetical culture as the final goal of history in accordance with the cultural ideal (‘Bildungsideal’) of Romanticism. This was a cultural Idea which, in accordance with Kant's and Schiller's doctrine, glorified the reconciliation of mind and sensibility, of nature and freedom, in fine art. At the same time this aesthetical Idea, conceived as the ever original and individual embodiment of the profoundest unity, was to replace Kant's moralistic Idea of the homo noumenon (Troeltsch).

The Idea of development from nature to freedom, and the deeper identity of these two has been taken over by the Historical School, but severed from the romantic cultural ideal. Von Savigny and Puchta have carried it through in their historical theory of law¹.

From the ‘Stufe’ (i.e. stage) at which law starts growing unconsciously out of the mind of the people, the development leads

1 Cf. the well-known passage in v. Savigny's introductory article in the Zeitschr. für geschichtl. Rechtwissenschaft, Band I, 1815, p. 2-4, for his view of historical development as a synthesis of ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’.

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to a higher ‘Stufe’. Here the free and conscious formative activity of the jurists intervenes, as a higher scientific organ of the ‘people's mind’. At the same time a place is assigned to legislation, - although a modest one - in the process of development.

Hence it cannot be said that this idea of development is without any direction. It did not belie its origin from romantic idealism. But there is no doubt that it had been entirely detached from Schelling's romantic aesthetic ideal of culture. The Idea of development was completely irrationalized and enclosed in the individual ‘Volksgeist’. There was no longer any room left for a real insight into the historical coherence of the individual cultural totalities in the progressive course of the opened development of culture. That is why this organological Idea of development bore an extremely nationalistic conservative stamp (though in Puchta this trait comes to the fore much more strikingly than in v. Savigny). It was soon submerged into a technical positivistic attitude of mind in the epigones of the Historical School. And in consequence historical research lapsed into antiquarian ‘Klein-Krämerei’ (i.e. the retailing of trifles; pedantry).

The intensive conception of world-history in Hegel. The orientation of his dialectical Idea of development to the Humanistic personality-ideal in a transpersonalistic conception.

In Hegel's dialectical Idea of development world-history is conceived of as ‘Fortschritt im Bewusstsein der Freiheit’ (progressive advance in the consciousness of freedom). The romantic organological conception of the national mind has in principle been superseded. The ‘Volksgeister’, as the true subjects of the ‘Weltgeschichte’ (world-history), have become manifestations of the ‘objective Mind’. They are considered as channels in the dialectically conceived process of the disclosed cultural development. Exactly because of its individualizing tendency this process is as sharply distinguished as possible from any kind of pre-history, rigidly tied down to nature. In this Hegelian conception there can be no question of an initial stage of purely vegetative development of the mind of the people: ‘It is only in keeping with philosophical thought and also worthy of it if we start with history at the moment when “Vernünftigkeit” enters earthly existence, not when it is still a possibility “an sich”, but

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when there is a state of things in which it makes its appearance in consciousness, volition and action’¹.

Owing to this conception of the Idea of development, - which really constitutes history, so that there is no room left for an as yet closed meaning of the latter - history is identified with world-history. And all those peoples are denied a function in history whose cultural community cannot be considered as a ‘preliminary stage’ of modern European culture in the dialectical development. Consequently, Africa and India fall entirely outside history. The Hegelian Idea of development is a logical dialectical one, whose content is the self-development of the Humanistic freedom-motive in its irrationalistic trans-personalistic conception.

Historical development is thus made a dialectical totality in which the concept itself becomes historical and fluid, realizing itself concretely in the individual national minds. At the same time these minds are recognized only as individual passage-ways in the process of Mind becoming conscious of itself. This is the ‘List der Vernunft’ (the stratagem of Reason) that individuality as a necessary precipitation of the Mind is at the same time no more than a means in this process. In the dialectical logicizing of this idealistic Idea of development the Idea of world-history has changed from an extensive into a intensive conception.

The naturalistic ‘Fortschritts’-Idea (the Idea of progressive advance) of the ‘Enlightenment’ borrowed its material from all parts of the world. The ratio in its natural scientific mode of thought only used this material as an illustration of the progressive enlightenment of mankind by the science-ideal.

Herder's idea of the history of the world embraced the entire globe and made him carry ‘a hundred peoples under his mantle to market’. But Hegel's Idea of development is incompatible with such an extensive conception because he related it to the universalistic idealistic conception of the personality-ideal.

The motif of world-history necessarily asserts itself in the view of every ‘individual national mind’. In this trend of thought

1 Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (hrg. von Georg Lasson, 1917) p. 142/3: ‘Der philosophischen Betrachtung ist es nur angemessen und würdig die Geschichte da aufzunehmen, wo die Vernünftigkeit in weltliche Existenz zu treten beginnt, nicht wo sie noch erst eine Möglichkeit nur an sich ist, sondern wo ein Zustand vorhanden ist, in dem sie in Bewusstsein, Willen und Tat auftritt.’ -

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it is impossible to consider an individual cultural community as enclosed in a self-contained organic development. It is equally impossible to go into individuality as such with an open mind, or rather with a historical abandonment that lacks any direction. The dialectical Idea of development here permeates every moment. Every individual moment contains the whole course of world-history in nuce.

This intensive view of world-history has passed over into Ranke's Idea of development, notwithstanding all his criticism of Hegel's dialectical logicizing of the historical process. Ranke recognizes as the scene of world-history only the coherence in the disclosed cultural development between the cultural communities of Asia Minor and those of the Occident.

For him, as for Hegel, history starts only at the moment ‘when the monuments become intelligible and trustworthy, when there are written records’¹; when, in other words, the modal meaning of culture begins to anticipate symbolical signification.

Fundamental objections may be raised to such a centripetal direction of the entire Idea of development to the modern culture of the West. It is conceived from the idealistic conception of the Humanistic personality-ideal, or, as in Ranke, from a synthesis between the Lutheran belief in Providence and the modern Idea of humanity.

Especially Hegel's dialectical logicizing of the process of the disclosed cultural development may be denounced as a fundamental denaturing of the meaning of historical evolution. And from the point of view of the Christian cosmonomic Idea the direction of Hegel's developmental Idea to the Humanistic personality-ideal in its trans-personalistic conception, and its enclosure within the latter, may be deemed objectionable. But all this should not prevent us from recognizing the important element of truth contained in the intensive conception of the historical Idea of development as such. For only an intensive developmental Idea is able indeed to grasp the supra-individual historical connections between the disclosed cultural communities. Such an Idea is the unavoidable ὑπόϑεσις also of every genuine special-scientific conception of history.

1 Weltgeschichte. Bnd. I, 1, p. V.

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The necessity of an intensive Idea of historical development.

The insufficiency, or the fundamental unacceptableness from the Christian viewpoint, respectively, of Ranke's and Hegel's Ideas of development can, consequently, never be ascribed to their intensive character. Rather their failure is only to be sought in their inner rigidity, due to the absolutizing of the cultural dominators of Western civilization, or in the false direction of the Idea to a Humanistic conception of freedom, respectively.

Genuine historical thought cannot do without an intensive Idea of development. In its opening process the historical aspect of reality itself everywhere shows intensive developmental connections.

It is a dogmatic prejudice on the part of the irrationalist historistic relativism to suppose that by immediate empathy or a direct entry into the historical material the ‘historical consciousness’ can grasp these cultural coherences quite apart from an Idea of development at least used intuitively.

Thinkers like Dilthey and Troeltsch trace the lines of historical development between the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the ‘Enlightenment’ etc. They try to show that the entire historical process centres in an absolutely autonomous Idea of culture, in which Christianity has been coordinated as an important factor together with others. This whole conception continues to be determined by a Humanistic Idea of development, although its content is strongly affected by Historism.

No doubt, modern Historism has undermined and abandoned earlier conceptions of world-history founded in the science-ideal of the ‘Enlightenment’ and in the Idea of humanity in the idealistic forms of the Humanistic personality-ideal. Ranke's pupil J. Burckhardt was already fully aware of the mental revolution of the latter part of the 19th century. He could no longer accept his great teacher's Idea of ‘Weltgeschichte’ (world-history). But a genuinely historical Idea of development could only be given up under the influence of a relativistic kind of Historism that knows no direction. This sacrifice must be considered, as Masur rightly observes, as an ‘expression of the total disorganisation of the realm of values in the western world at the end of the 19th century’¹. It is a phenomenon of the crisis that undermines

1 Cf. Gerhard Masur, Ranke's Begriff der Welt-Geschichte, Beiheft 6 der Historischen Zeitschr. (1926), p. 130: ‘...Ausdruck der totalen Desorganisation der abendländischen Wertwelt am Ausgang des 19. Jahrhunderts’.

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the foundations of all genuine historical thought by means of its scepticism. For no special-scientific historical technique in the investigation of the sources and in the study of details can avail the historian if real historical insight into the deepened developmental coherence of his subject matter is lacking.

Directionless Historism destroys the Idea of development, and deprives scientific historical thought of its necessary ὑπόϑεσις. Spengler's morphology of the civilizations of the world.

Spengler's ‘morphology of the civilizations of the world’, born of the mind of relativistic Historism, shows us the consequences of this standpoint for the insight into historical connections and coherences. There is no longer any room for an Idea of development in this relativism. Historical thought tightly clings to a concept of historical development, within which evolution shows merely biotic retrocipations.

Only parallels in the historical development of the great cultural totalities are accepted here. This drawing of parallels, however, leads to the disturbance of the real historical coherences. It also results in an unhistorical view of time, though Spengler thinks he has delimited the historical concept of time once and for all from every kind of natural-scientific time-concept. He eliminates the concept of causality and replaces it by the irrationalistic idea of ‘Fate’ (‘Schicksal’)¹.

Our previous analysis of the retrocipatory structure of the historical aspect has shown that without a historical concept of causality no single historical fact can be established.

1 Cf. Der Untergang des Abendlandes, I, p. 161, where the concept of simultaneity is developed:
‘I call two historical facts simultaneous when they, each in its own culture, make their appearance in exactly the same relative conditions, and therefore have an exactly corresponding significance. It has been shown that ancient and western mathematics have developed in perfect congruency’. [‘Ich nenne gleichzeitig zwei geschichtliche Fakta, die, jedes in seiner Kultur, in genau derselben relativen Lage eintreten und also eine genau entsprechende Bedeutung haben. Es war gezeigt worden, wie die Entwicklung der antiken und der abendländischen Mathematik in völliger Kongruenz verläuft.’] In this conception civilizations really grow rigid and become self-contained organisms.

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§ 6 - Continued: the coherence of the anticipatory spheres of the historical aspect and the relation between power and faith.

In the preceding paragraph we gave an account of the absolute necessity of an historical Idea of development, as the hypothesis of genuine historical thought.

In the Idea of a meaning-modus philosophical reflection oriented to our cosmonomic Idea passes through a process of successive meaning-coherences in the transcendental direction of time. The internal unrest of meaning drives it on from anticipatory sphere to anticipatory sphere, and so from one anticipatory connection to another. At last we arrive at the transcendental terminal sphere of our cosmos and reflect on the insufficiency of the modal Idea.

We then direct our glance to the transcendent meaning-totality and the Origin, in which at last our thought finds rest in its religious root.

In our previous investigation various modal anticipations were already made manifest in the historical aspect.

The symbolical anticipation in the modal aspect of history.

In the first place the symbolical anticipation is revealed, together with the transcendental coherence between the meaning of cultural development and that of language.

We saw how Hegel and Ranke held that history proper does not start before the need arose to preserve the memory of historical events by means of deliberate symbolical signification. This, of course, is something quite different from the myths of primitive peoples preserved in oral traditions.

In his: Die Vernunft in der Geschichte Hegel observes: ‘It is to be supposed that historical narrative appeared simultaneously with historical deeds and events; it is a common internal basis from which both arise’¹.

For disclosed history, the field of inquiry of historical science in the narrower sense, this statement is correct. Every historian who knows the limits of his field will agree with it. But what is of the utmost importance in this connection is the insight that

1 Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, p. 145: ‘es ist dafür zu halten, dass Geschichtserzählung mit eigentlich geschichtlichen Taten und Begebenheiten gleichzeitig erscheine; es ist eine innerliche gemeinsame Grundlage, welche sie zusammen hervortreibt.’

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this necessary coherence with the modal meaning of language only exists with regard to the really disclosed anticipatory meaning of cultural development. Primitive history does not have the need of symbolic signification. Its relatively uniform course does not yet give Mnemosyne any subject matter worth recording as memorable.

The genuinely disclosed meaning of history, on the other hand, is necessarily signified meaning. The opened historical function of consciousness refers to the lingual meaning, whereas in the deepened cultural development itself there is an unfolding of cultural symbolism which marks off the significant from the insignificant.

It needs no further argument that historical signification is not identical with lingual meaning inherent in words, sentences etc. Nor can the historical interpretation of facts and source material be the same as a linguistic interpretation of symbols.

But the unbreakable inter-modal meaning-coherence between the two modal aspects concerned, revealed in the anticipatory direction of history, on the one hand, and in the retrocipatory structure of language on the other, is undubitable.

Just as symbolism in historical consciousness, marking off the significant from the insignificant, anticipates symbolical signification in historical narratives, monuments etc., so the lingual signification of words and sentences refers back to its historical substratum and is not to be conceived apart from the latter.

The ‘social’ anticipation in the modus of history.

In the differentiating and integrating process of disclosed history, investigated in an earlier context, is further revealed the anticipation in the historical aspect of the meaning of social intercourse.

The opened and deepened cultural development can only begin its course in historical intercourse between the nations, in the mutual exchange of historical treasures of the mind between the cultural communities. It is exactly the isolation of a primitive cultural community, its mental seclusion from the disclosed cultural communities, that causes its historical rigidity.

It should be borne in mind that the modal meaning of social intercourse anticipated in the opened structure of historical development, is itself to be conceived in a disclosed and anticipatory sense.

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For it must be evident that in its closed or restrictive function it is not able to guide the opening-process of history. In this function it is also found in primitive tribal communities. But regular social intercourse is here restricted to the members of the group.

The economic anticipation. The historical principle of cultural economy.

‘Social’ anticipation points beyond itself to one that appears further on in the transcendental direction of time, viz. the economic anticipation.

In the formative process of history the various cultural spheres have the call to take an active share in it while maintaining their own individuality in historical intercourse. Then only can the differentiation and integration, inherent in every really disclosed historical development, be fruitful in a historical sense. But this implies that the different cultural factors ought to be prevented from expanding their power in an excessive sense.

Here a modal principle of the greatest importance is revealed, viz. that of cultural economy. This economy points beyond itself forward to the aesthetic and the juridical anticipatory spheres of the historical modus, presently to be examined.

In the sequel the importance of the principle mentioned will become more and more clear. In the nature of the case it has a normative character, and may be positivized in a better or in a worse way. In the case of some formers of history there may even be a fatal tendency to set this principle aside. But this tendency results in the total dislocation and ruin of an entire cultural complex, unless in due time the unbridled, excessive striving after power of some particular cultural sphere is broken, and the encroachment of this particular cultural factor on the other cultural areas is checked.

Here we touch on the anticipatory meaning-coherence of the historical aspect with the aesthetical and the juridical law-spheres, a coherence which demands special attention.

The inner connection between the economic and the aesthetical anticipations in history.

It must be clear that the economic anticipation in the modal structure of historical development is necesarily connected with an aesthetical anticipatory sphere. The modal principle of

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cultural economy appeals to the principle of cultural harmony.

As soon as the undifferentiated cultural community is broken into a rich diversity of differentiated cultural spheres the necessity of a really harmonious relation between these different power-formations becomes evident. But how can these spheres of formative power be harmonized? If every excessive expansion of the one at the expense of the others must lead to disharmony in the development of culture, what then is the normative criterion of an excessive expansion of a differentiated sphere of power?

The principle of cultural harmony can provide this criterion only in coherence with the whole order of creation. The inner nature of the typical cultural spheres must unfold itself in the historical process of differentiation, and this inner nature is founded in the Divine order of creation.

As long as the expansion of power occurs within the boundaries of the typical structural principles by which this inner nature is determined, there can be no question of disharmony in cultural development. But when, for instance, the cultural sphere of natural science or that of technical industry try to expand their formative power at the expense of that of justice, morality and the Christian faith¹, they exceed the boundaries of their inner nature and evoke a cultural conflict.

The same effect will result from a totalitarian expansion of the political power of the state, i.e. the attempt to assimilate the typical spheres of formative power of the church, of science, fine arts, industrial life, and so on, to its own political ends. It is a delusion if the totalitarian political leaders think they can thus increase the power of the body politic to a supreme degree. The truth of the matter is that the authority of the state needs the support of the other cultural spheres of formative power, but this support can only have real value so long as their inner nature is left intact.

Their assimilation to the political ends of the state results in their denaturation, in their reduction to cultural corpses which do not increase the power of the body politic, but rather affect it with dissolution.

1 It should be borne in mind that modal aspects can be realized and given a typical cultural sphere of formative power only within social structures of individuality, such as, the state, the church, family-life, industry etc.

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In a certain historical period the ecclesiastical institute may also try to expand its formative power excessively.

It is quite understandable that those who do not accept the Roman-Catholic view of human society are inclined to seek the most striking instance of such an excessive power-expansion of the church in the times of the ecclesiastically unified culture. But one should guard against a hasty and unhistorical generalization in the judgment of this cultural period. It should not be forgotten that after the dissolution of the Carolingian state the ‘secular’ organization of medieval society fell back into an undifferentiated condition. And it was only the church as a differentiated institute of grace, together with the continued influence of Greco-Roman culture, which could prevent this society from falling asunder into primitive closed communities. Through the church and the christianized Roman idea of the holy Roman empire medieval society was integrated into a community embracing the whole of Christianity with a spiritual and a secular head.

There is no reason to idealize this social condition. From a cultural viewpoint it meant that the formative power of science, philosophy, art, education, industry and even of secular government was one-sidedly bound to the ecclesiastical authority: The latter was really able to impede the propagation of new ideas in the secular cultural spheres if these ideas did not agree with ecclesiastical politics; for excommunication had serious consequences in worldly life. This structural trait in medieval society doubtless favoured an excessive expansion of ecclesiastical power. Many instances may be alleged from medieval history which show that the church did not resist this temptation.

But it should not be forgotten that the church has never defended a really totalitarian view of ecclesiastical authority.

At least in principle it did not intend to interfere with the inner spheres of ‘secular’ culture. Since the introduction of the scholastic basic motive of nature and grace this intention found expression in the thesis that natural life has an inner autonomy with respect to the supernatural authority of the church. One should only be aware of the fact that this scholastic conception could not provide a real criterion for a harmonious relation between the different cultural spheres in their typical structures of individuality.

It could not do so because its view of nature was ruled by

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the Greek form-matter motive in its accommodation to the doctrine of creation, and not by the genuine Biblical creation-motive.

The juridical anticipations and the true meaning of the ‘Wellgericht’ in world-history.

The economic and the aesthetical anticipations in the opened modal structure of historical development appeal to the juridical anticipatory sphere.

It is from this intra-modal meaning-coherence that the real signification of the Hegelian adage of world-history as ‘Weltgericht’ is to be understood. This adage cannot be true in the sense meant by Hegel himself (as if in the struggle for power among the states a ‘higher kind of justice’ were revealed than in the legal order, viz., ‘the justice of the Absolute Mind in the history of the world’)¹. According to Hegel, that which is doomed to decline manifests itself as unworthy in the dialectical process of world-history: it is relinquished by the Idea. But Hegel does not consider that justice in the anticipatory meaning of history is modally different from justice in the original modal sense of retribution and, consequently, cannot be compared with the normative measures of law. The jurisdiction of world-history has not the task of maintaining a legal order, as has jurisdiction in its original juridical sense.

In the factual course of world-history there is even no positive guarantee that the struggle for power is instrumental to a higher cultural justice in the sense that the culturally superior is destined to win.

Such a view would ignore the working of sin in history. It may occur that what is culturally superior is conquered by what is inferior. In our sinful world the course of history is often marked by blood and tears, and in the struggle for power the principles of justice are often trampled down. But doubtless in the opening process the deepened historical principles become manifest which anticipate the meaning of retribution.

The question if in the historical process of power-formation and power-expansion these principles are willingly positivized is something quite different. But world-history unquestionally reveals itself as an ‘historical jurisdiction’ in the sense that God

1 Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, p. 127. Hegel acknowledges that no state may make an appeal to this ‘higher justice’.

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maintains His world-order and the principles founded in it, in spite of any kind of human arbitrariness and ὕβϱις. God does not suffer His world-order to be trifled with. Any excessive or extravagant striving after power that ignores the fundamental modal principles of cultural economy and harmony, dashes itself to pieces against the power of the other differentiated cultural spheres. Or, if these have already lost the power to resist the usurper, it ends in the collapse of an entire culture. The history of the world offers many illustrations of this fundamental truth.

God's guidance in history as a realization of the juridical anticipations.

The Christian Idea of God's guidance in history here indeed assumes a normative meaning, but not as the execution of God's hidden counsel in the process of the history of the world! In this latter sense God's guidance doubtless embraces everything, including the outbursts of sin in the process of cultural development. But this hidden counsel can never become the normative standard for human activity, nor for the judgment of the course of world-history. In this respect Mr Leendertz's previously mentioned criticism of the irrationalistic view of history is really irrefutable.

The idea of God's guidance can have normative-historical meaning only insofar as it refers to the juridical anticipations disclosed in the course of history. They are brought to light in the sense of an historical retribution even when a former of history proceeds subjectively counter to the normative principles invested in the anticipatory structure of the historical law-sphere. For a time it may seem that an excessive and arbitrary expansion of power is prosperous. The Christian, however, clings to the unshakable belief that in the history of the world judgment will be passed on such human ὕβϱις. And this belief has not been built on idle speculation. In the wide perspective of world-history the delusion vanishes that the cultural process obeys no laws at all, and that the Divine call to the historical task enables man to dispose of his power as an absolute sovereign.

The moral anticipatory sphere in the modal structure of history. Cultural love and cultural guilt.

The juridical anticipatory sphere in the opened modal structure of history in its turn refers to a sphere of moral anticipa-

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tions. The historical right of the differentiated cultural spheres to accomplish their formative task in accordance with their own typical nature appeals to the true cultural ἐϱῶς, i.e. the love of this cultural call as a real formative power in history.

Without this cultural erōs no single great work has come about in the course of the opened development of civilization. But this moment of erōs in formative power can only disclose itself in a right way if the principles of cultural economy and harmony are respected. Otherwise cultural love is denatured to idolatry. We shall see in the sequel that nevertheless an idolatrous cultural love may bring about great things in the development of civilization. But it also implies the historical guilt of mankind, revenged by cultural tensions, conflicts and catastrophes.

One should again guard against reducing these moral anticipations to the original modal meaning of morality. They presuppose the latter, but retain their inner cultural sense.

The anticipation of the function of faith in the opening-process of history.

Following the process of disclosure in the historical law-sphere in the transcendental direction, we at last come upon its cosmic meaning-coherence with the function of faith, the second terminal function of our cosmos.

It is this function which ultimately guides the opening process without itself being guided by a later temporal meaning-function. In the process of the disclosed cultural development the shapers of history in the various specific cultural spheres may be guided by an Idea of science, an Idea of technical mastery of nature, economic welfare, beauty, justice, or the love of one's neighbour. But in the final analysis the entire opening-process makes an appeal to faith in its modal functional structure. And this holds good notwithstanding the great variety of specific tasks that the formers of history have undertaken in connection with the typical structures of their cultural spheres, their office, and their abilities.

The rise of modern natural science in the XVIth and XVIIth centuries was, historically considered, primarily conditioned by the growing power of the new functionalistic-mathematical ideal of science in cultural development. Owing to this power-formation of the new science-ideal, the scholastic-Aristotelian conception of nature that had prevailed before the Renaissance, was

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driven from its leading historical position. But the new Humanistic Idea of science itself can never be understood apart from its background in the Humanistic belief in the sovereignty of mathematical thought. As shown in the second part of Volume I, the Humanistic science-ideal was primarily directed to the domination of ‘nature’. The belief in the sovereignty of mathematical thought, however, appeared to be rooted in the Humanistic basic motive of autonomous freedom.

In the next period of the development of western civilization the natural-scientific way of thought gained the upper hand¹, also outside the typical cultural sphere of science. This was due to the powerful influence of a Humanistic life- and world-view, in which primacy was ascribed to the classical science-ideal in its deterministic form.

On the basis of this historical power, which for the rest did not remain unchallenged, the belief in the science-ideal during the period of the Enlightenment also began to guide the opening-process in the post-historical law-spheres. The Idea of civilization in the time of the Enlightenment has its last functional ὐπόϑεσις in this faith.

1 It will no doubt be superfluous to observe that by the ‘cultural sphere of science’ we understand that typical sphere of power-formation which finds its guiding and qualifying function in the scientific logical aspect. We have now made sufficiently clear that we do not consider science qua talis to be a cultural phenomenon in the merely historical sense of the term.

The so-called ‘Religionsoziologie’ of Weber and Troeltsch and the schema of a sub-structure and a super-structure in the Marxist view of history.

It is in πίστις that the inquiry into the functional commencement of the opening-process ends in the transcendental direction of time. It is doubtless possible to investigate the typical social effects of a particular doctrine of faith as has been attempted, e.g., by the so-called Religionssoziologie of Weber and Troeltsch, although their so-called ideal-typical method may evoke seriour objections².

But then we look backwards to that which has already been realized in the foundational direction of cosmic time under the guidance of πίστις, viz. in the historical, social, economic, aesthetic, juridical and moral substrata of faith. The real

2 E. Salin is quite right when he remarks in his Geschichte der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Berlin, 1932), p. 41, that there is a reversion of meaning hidden in Max Weber's ‘Religionssoziologie’, with regard to the problem that this thinker had posed in his well-known study Die Protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Arch. f. Sozialw. und Socialp. 1904/5): ‘A first study, as a valuable supplement to Sombabt's work, had proved in exemplary lucidity, what Puritanism had meant for the rise of capitalism. But in the later work the basic problem is methodically replaced by that of the influence of economic and social conditions on the religious systems.’ [‘Hatte eine erste Studie in müstergültiger Klarheit, eine wertvolle Ergänzung des Sombartschen Werkes, die Bedeutung des Puritanimus für die Entwicklung des Kapitalismus herausgestellt, so kehrt sich allmählich das Grundproblem ins Gegenteil um, zur Frage nach dem Einflusz der wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Verhältnisse auf die Religionssysteme’]. For the rest also the results of Weber's first study have evoked serious criticism on the part of other scholars.

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problem, however, lies in the transcendental direction of the temporal order of the cosmos, in the possibility of the opening of the aspect of faith itself.

This real problem is especially to be borne in mind, if we want to evaluate the well-known sub-structure and super-structure schema of the Marxian view of history.

The basic error of Marxism is not that it assumes a historical-economic sub-structure of aesthetic life, justice, morals, and faith. But it separates this conception from the cosmic order of meaning-aspects, and in all seriousness assumes it can explain the aesthetic conceptions and those of justice, morals and faith in terms of an ideological reflection of a system of economic production.

Faith, as the transcendental terminal function of the entire process of disclosure in the meaning-structure of the cosmos, is driven on directly by impulses from the religious root of human existence, either for good or for evil. Every modern attempt at explaining faith psychologically, sociologically, or in terms of history and economics, is based on the well-known ὕστεϱον πϱότεϱον. It ignores the transcendental direction of time in the order of the creation and entangles itself in a vicious circle. For all these rationalistic attempts at explanation stand or fall with the belief in the Humanistic science-ideal and therefore presuppose what they want to explain! The modal meaning of faith, it is true, has a psychical, historical, and economic foundation. In so far it is dependent on the meaning-coherence with the law-spheres concerned; but it can never be reduced to the meaning of its substratum-spheres.

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The meaning of history in the light of the Divine Word-Revelation.

Directing our glance to historical development from the temporal aspect of faith as the transcendental terminal function of the whole process of disclosure, we see this process inevitably related to the religious fulfilment of meaning and the Origin of history.

In the religious root of our cosmos (hence also in the root of the whole of historical development) irreconcilable war is waged between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena. The temporal function of faith in determining the direction of the opening-process in the earlier law-spheres is itself immediately directed by religious basic motives in which this radical contest expresses itself.

This gives the Idea of cultural development its true and only possible fulfilment of meaning in the religious self-reflection of the Christian.

St Augustine grasped the Biblical thought for the entire Christian view of history when he stated that, at bottom, the course of the history of the world is a struggle between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena. In the last analysis, therefore, history becomes meaningless if it is detached from this religious root.

No Christian philosophy of history will ever be able to give to its Idea of cultural development another religious direction than this. Any other view is bound to lapse into the developmental Ideas of Humanistic immanence-philosophy, or into the Greek Idea of the eternal return of things in the circular movement of time.

The modal temporal meaning of history has, to be sure, its meaning-nucleus in culture as (formative) control, which has been set as a responsible task to man. But the historical law-sphere can only maintain this meaning in its absolute dependence on the religious fulness of meaning of history. The possibility of human formative control has its guarantee in the victory over the kingdom of Darkness gained by the kingdom of God in Christ Jesus, in Whom the call to historical power, as well as Christian faith, find their consummation. For Christ, to Whom ‘all power is given in heaven and in earth’¹, is also ‘the finisher of our faith’².

1 Matth. 28:18.

2 Hebr. 12:2.

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The struggle between civitas Dei and civitas terrena is carried on through the whole of the temporal creation in all its meaning-aspects. It finds its pregnant and dramatic expression in the temporal course of world-history, since here the whole opening-process in its normative direction is founded. Adam's fall into sin and Christ's incarnation, although both concern the root of the entire cosmos, also signify historical turning-points of all-deciding importance in the history of the world.

The history of salvation is and remains, in a modal-historical sense, the central theme in whose light even the pagan and Humanistic ideas of culture only become fully understandable in their apostate meaning.

But it was a premature and incorrect opinion of the earlier Christian philosophy of history to assume that Holy Scripture itself has revealed a theoretical Idea of historical development, so that it is possible to read in the Word of God a kind of scientific division of world-history into periods.

This misconception had a deeper foundation in an erroneous conception of Christian science.

A truly Christian philosophical Idea of the history of the world pre-supposes a laborious work of theoretical analysis. The meaning of history must be distinguished in the whole of the meaning-coherence of the temporal law-spheres, in the transcendent light of the Divine Word-Revelation. And the science of history, if it is not to lapse into idle speculation, can never attempt a division into periods independent of the actual course of historical development. In addition, every attempt at such a division is bound to the provisional phase of history in which the historian himself lives. The latter should not risk predicting the periods that belong to the future. He will have to conceive of the scene of world history, not in an extensive sense, but intensively. His task is to investigate the historical coherences in the process of the disclosed development of history in strict conformity to the historical material.

This is the reason why the question as to the handling of the Christian Idea of development in historical science requires further investigation. For this question, as will appear in the sequel, confronts us with some new and extremely difficult problems.

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Objections raised on the part of some of our fellow-Christians against the conception of the modal meaning of history as cultural development, and the misunderstanding from which they spring.

Viewed in this light, it must be due to some misunderstanding when on the part of some of our fellow-Christians exception is taken to our characterization of the temporal modal meaning of history as cultural development. This misconception is due to the fact that only the religious consummation of meaning of history is considered. But the same Christian-religious view demands the recognition of the temporal world-order in which history functions as an irreducible aspect of reality. Anyone who does not recognize this, falls a prey to a Historism which cannot accept the modal sovereignty of the other law-spheres. The kingdom of Christ not only comprises history, but the whole of creation in all its modal-aspects.

In the Christian Idea of cultural development the modal meaning of history as a temporal law-sphere is related to the religious fulness of meaning. At the same time it implies the recognition that only in this relation can the specific meaning of history be maintained. This Idea also determines our view of the original historical condition of mankind. As remarked above, this question implies a problem which science can never elucidate independently. This problem is inseparably bound up with the question about the origin of the human race, which directly touches the religious root of our cosmos. The idea of an original cultural state, as Fichte rightly observed, is really a (subjective) transcendental a priori of historical science, for which, we would add, the historian has to account in his religious self-reflection. In the primitive undisclosed cultural conditions we recognize the subjective falling-away on the part of man from his own self and from his Creator.

Primitive culture as an apostate state of the cultural aspect.

For primitive culture (in the pregnant sense to be explained in the next section) is characterized exactly by the undisclosed state of the modal cultural aspect in the transcendental direction of time. Here man does not realize that he transcends the things of nature. His sense of being a personality is diffuse, dispersed: he even incorporates personality into animals, plants or lifeless objects.

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The primitive control of nature which develops in such cultures is unable to bring home to man that he transcends the things of nature. The whole of the closed cultural aspect, and also logical thought, is here rigidly tied down to its pre-logical substrata. And the fear of the powers of nature which cannot yet be controlled by ordinary means is at the base of the content of primitive faith.

Is there really no meaning-coherence in such primitive cultures between the cultural aspect and the later law-spheres? Certainly there is. The subjective apostasy of man cannot set aside the temporal world-order, in which all the law-spheres have been woven into an indissoluble coherence. The apostate primitive function of faith even plays a dominant part in keeping the cultural aspect closed. It binds all the normative aspects of reality rigidly to their pre-logical substratum-spheres, because it deifies the closed forces of nature. It may be said that primitive culture in its essential traits is guided by this primitive faith in nature, and that this faith draws away all the normative meaning-functions of human consciousness from their super-temporal root and Origin. The guidance of faith here means guidance in the falling away of the personality to the pre-logical natural complex. The night of closed ‘nature’ covers up the primitive cultural communities. For from a deification of closed natural forces no guidance may be expected which could lead the other normative modal functions to an opening and deepening of their meaning. That is why this direction of civilization by faith does not at all result in a disclosure of the meaning of history.

The new problem.

At this point a problem arises that is very important to the Christian conception of history, viz. how the expansive development of the cultural aspect is possible or, for that matter, how the entire process of disclosure in all the normative aspects of experience may be realized, if the guiding terminal function of temporal human existence is not activated in this process by the Spirit of the Civitas Dei. A satisfactory answer to this question will bring us nearer to the insight into the peculiar function that the Idea of historical development has to fulfil in a Christian philosophy of history, if it is indeed to be a useful ὑπόϑεσις for scientic thought.

For this purpose it is necessary to direct our attention to the

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modal aspect of faith and the way in which it is interwoven in the Divine world-order with the other law-spheres. For, although the historical sphere is basic in the normative process of disclosure, that of faith is the guiding function in the transcendental direction of time.

Without an insight into the position that the function of faith has in the opening-process the new problem raised in this stage of our inquiry cannot be solved.

§ 7 - The position of the aspect of faith in the opening-process

The modal law-sphere of faith is often identified with religion, which is very detrimental to religious self-knowledge. Up to now we have always spoken of faith as of a modal meaning-function, viz. as the second terminal function of temporal human experience and temporal reality. As a subject-function faith is at the same time the terminal function of human existence in the transcendental direction of time. As such it is found in all human beings, in believers in Christ as well as in those whose faith reveals itself in an apostate direction. There is an apostate faith, and there is a faith which can only come into action in man through the Spirit of God. But both function within the modal structure of a law-sphere, implanted in human nature at creation. In both a sharp distinction must be made between the subjective function, the principium, the content, the direction and the root of belief. And in both cases it is obvious that the function of faith cannot be identifified with the religious root of temporal existence or, in the words of the Ecclesiastes, with the heart from which spring the issues of life. Believing, logical distinction, feeling, etc. are temporal functions delimited from one another in law-spheres of mutually irreducible meaning-modalities. But the religious root of our entire existence is not a function; religion is not enclosed in a temporal law-sphere.

Dr A. Kuyper's conception of πίστις as a function.

Holy Scripture clearly points out the temporal limiting character of true Christian faith, which will find its fulfilment in the religious ‘vision face to face’, in the βλέπειν πϱόσωπον πϱὸς πϱόσωπον. The epistle to the Hebrews expresses the limiting character of the function of belief in its content and direction

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in this way: ‘Now faith is the ultimate ground (ὑπόστασις) of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’¹.

The great Dutch theologian Dr A. Kuyper has observed that these words do not refer to faith in the special soterio-logical sense, but rather to the function of believing as such, in whatever direction it may manifest itself². I doubt whether the text is meant in this general sense. But, in my opinion, it cannot be doubted that the function of believing has a general modal structure, founded in the temporal order of creation.

Only in the ‘heart’ does the function of faith find its religious concentration, and from this spiritual root of our existence the direction of our believing is determined. True Christian faith is directed to the religious fulness of God's Revelation in Christ Jesus, to the invisible, super-temporal wealth bestowed on us in the Redeemer. But, as a function, it is not super-temporal itself, since it is interwoven with the whole temporal coherence of our existence. Faith as a particular modal function is not to be viewed in an exclusively soteriological orientation but in a much wider perspective. This view was no doubt first developed by Dr A. Kuyper in his famous Encyclopedia of Theology. In a masterly way he analyzed πίστις as an irreducible function in the whole process of human knowledge.

It is true, that his first formal and provisional epistemological definition of πίστις as ‘that function of our psyche through which we obtain direct and immediate certainty, without any discursive reasoning’, did not touch at the special modal meaning of faith. This circumscription was almost identical with the usual conception of intuitive evidence. But in the continuation of his inquiry this formal definition is related to a material one in which the essential reference of the function of faith to divine Revelation is clearly explained. In this material sense πίστις is laid at the foundation of every form of immediate certainty which manifests itself both in the different spheres of theoretic knowledge and in practical life³.

Since Kuyper calls all these forms of certainty particular

1 Hebr. 11.

2 Dr A. Kuyper, Encycl. der H. Godgeleerdheid, dl. II (2e druk, 1909), p. 74.

3 Therefore Kuyper (op. cit. II, p. 83/4) warns emphatically against a simple identification of the formal act of πίστις with the usual conception of intuitive knowledge.

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manifestations of πίστις, it is clear that he meant the anticipations of faith in the other functions of human consciousness.

This has been completely misunderstood by those who supposed that Kuyper's formal conception of πίστις has nothing to do with faith in its ‘theological’ sense. The truth of the matter is that the latter is fundamental in Kuyper's whole explanation¹.

He showed that the function of faith in this original and material sense, implanted in human nature at creation, has not been lost by the fall into sin. Its essential structure has been maintained by God's common grace. But owing to the radical antithesis between the spiritual δύναμις of apostasy and that of the Holy Ghost, it now develops in an apostate as well as in a soteriological direction².

This was a deep Biblical conception whose great importance is far from being sufficiently recognized in theological circles.

The psychologizing of faith into a function of feeling, or its logicizing into an actus intellectus due to a super-natural gift of grace (Thomas Aquinas), was thus cut off at the root.

At the same time the modern irrationalistic-idealistic and transcendental-psychologistic views of faith as a religious a priori (Troeltsch, Otto) are rejected in Kuyper's conception.

1 See my treatise Kuyper's Wetenschapsleer in the quarterly review Philosophia Reformata, 4th Year, 1939, p. 228 sqq., where Kuyper's conception of πίστις has been analyzed in greater detail.

2 Kuyper, op. cit. II section 1, chapter II, 11. Cf. also V. Hepp: Het Testimonium Spiritus Sancti, p. 157.

The Barthian conception of faith.

On the other hand this conception also disagrees with the view nowadays defended by Karl Barth, according to which the human subject of Christian belief originates from a new creation, since it is only constituted by the relation of this belief to Jesus Christ³. The latter view can be hardly accepted from a Biblical standpoint. It is true that a veritable Christian faith presupposes a radical regeneration of man, and that in this sense the Christian is a new creature. But the term ‘new’ can here only mean ‘renewed’. Regeneration in Jesus Christ is not a creation, it does not add a new ‘organ of believing’ to the created nature of man. The function of believing, implanted in this human nature at creation, is the same in Christians and non-Christians; it has a

3 Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, Bnd IV, 1 (1953), p. 837.

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modal structure which guarantees its unbreakable meaning-coherence with all the other modal aspects of the temporal order. If not, unbelief or apostate belief could not be the opposite to Christian faith. It would belong to an entirely different order and could have no point of comparison with the belief in Jesus Christ.

Barth considers Christian faith entirely apart from the modal aspect of belief. It does not appear that he has seen this terminal aspect of human existence, and I suppose he is obliged to deny its existence. True, he accepts that the Christian as the subject of belief participates in the double solidarity of creation and sin with the other members of mankind. But he does not distinguish the regeneration of the religious centre of human existence from Christian faith in its functioning within the second terminal aspect of the temporal order. On the contrary, he identifies the regeneration of man in Jesus Christ, with the constitution of the subject of Christian belief as an act of new creation originating in the Redeemer. The subject-function of believing is in Barth ‘the Christian subject’ itself, in the sense of the new individual root of human existence. So there remains no room for a modal aspect of faith founded in the temporal order of creation.

But if Christian belief has no point of connection with this temporal order, all the analogies of the other meaning-modalities, which reveal themselves in the analysis of the modal aspect of faith, lose their basis. And all that is said in the New Testament about the analogical relations between natural life and the life of faith should be interpreted as mere metaphors. Which is, however, impossible without abandoning the concrete meaning of the texts concerned.

In fact, we are again confronted here with the dialectical basic motive of nature and super-natural grace in an antithetic and dualistic conception.

It is true that in his Kirchliche Dogmatik Barth has relinquished the extreme dualism of his earlier writings. It appears that he now seeks to understand the original nature of creation from the super-natural grace revealed in Jesus Christ. But the dialectical scholastic basic-motive itself has not been abandoned. It appears in a new antithetic and dualistic form in the conception of regeneration as a new creation, and in the denial of any connection between Christian faith and the innate function of believing which belongs to the temporal order of human exi-

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stence. This is the more deplorable because there are really masterly and magnificent traits in Barth's reflections on Christian faith.

The importance of a clear insight into the modal function of faith.

It is quite understandable why the conception of belief as a function implanted in human nature at creation has raised serious objections not only on the part of Barthian theologians.

At first sight it might seem that in this way Christian faith is reduced to a common human faculty, whereas the New Testament lays full stress on the radical impotence of carnal man to believe in Jesus Christ. But this is a radical misunderstanding of the true meaning of the conception concerned.

The question is not whether in the state of sin man can come to Christ by means of a natural faculty of faith alone. The only question is whether Christian belief can function outside of the temporal order of creation in which the modal aspect of faith has an essential and undeniable terminal position.

According to the order of creation this terminal aspect was destined to function as the opened window of time through which the light of God's eternity should shine into the whole temporal coherence of the world. That this window has been closed by sin, and cannot be opened by man through his own activity, does not mean that it cannot be disclosed by the Divine power of the Holy Ghost. It does not mean that sin has the power to render this essential terminal function of temporal human existence unavailable as an instrument of God's grace in Jesus Christ, so that God would be obliged to create a new organ of believing outside of the ‘natural’ order of creation. Sin cannot destroy anything that is implied in the order of creation. Otherwise it would be a real counter-power over against the Creator, whereas in fact it derives its power only from creation itself.

We shall see that the modal structure of the function of faith itself guarantees that it cannot be conceived apart from the ‘heart’ as the religious root of human existence and the spiritual δύναμις operative in the latter. So it must be evident that Christian belief cannot be understood apart from the δύναμις of Jesus Christ operative in the hearts of those who by regenetion are implanted in Him.

But this does not detract from the necessity of distinguishing

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between faith as a modal function in the temporal order of creation, and its religious δύναμις, which transcends its functional character and determines its content and direction.

The misinterpretation of this state of affairs has occasioned a great deal of confusion in many fields, especially in the view of the relations between the State and the institution of the Church, and between ‘believing’ and ‘thinking’, etc. On the other hand, the usual identification of the function of faith with religion was fatal to the sense of the central, super-modal and radical position of the latter. It created a habit of looking upon religion as a particular aspect of human life comparable with the others. It led to the distinction of special ‘religious norms’ coordinated with ethical, juridical and social rules of conduct. Or, inversely, it became fatal to the insight into the temporal function of πίστις in elevating the Christian faith proper above temporal life within the ‘ordinances’.

Compared with all these misunderstandings Kuyper's really Biblical conception of faith as a temporal function must be considered as breaking new ground.

His view, however, can only be understood in its full significance and scope in the general and special theories of the law-spheres. For here is revealed the position occupied by the function of faith in the whole of the temporal coherence of our cosmos. Here also its significance as transcendental terminal function becomes clear. At the same time it appears to be impossible to identifiy the function of faith with cognitive intuition, as Volkelt does¹.

It may be that in the last instance intuition refers to faith in its original sense, but it lacks the very terminal character of the latter and the immediate relation to Divine revelation.

But we cannot go into this last question before the more detailed treatment of the epistomological problem.

1 Erfahrung und Denken, p. 184; Die Quellen der menschlich. Gewissheit, p. 72 ff; Gewissheit und Wahrheit, p. 538 ff.

The transcendental character of the modal meaning-nucleus of πίστις. The Greek conception of πίστις as δόξα and its revival in Husserl's phenomenology.

If we want to comprehend the aspect of faith in its original modal meaning we must abandon the Greek philosophical concept of πίστις. The latter was conceived of as δόξα, a hypothetical

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opinion, bound to sensory perception and representation. In this sense it is the opposite of the certainty of ἐπιστήμη which theoretically seeks for the ultimate grounds of truth.

Husserl's phenomenology revived this Greek concept of belief. Belief (Glaube) is conceived of as a noetic character of the intentional act of sensory perception or sensory representation (remembrance), respectively; it can assume different modalities and on the noematic side it corresponds to different characters of being.

In this sense belief is called ‘doxa’. The original perceptional certainty implied in a normal perception is called ‘Urdoxa’, and its modifications (as presumption, doubt etc.) are designated as ‘doxische Modalitäten’. The ‘Urdoxa’ corresponds to the being-character of reality on the noematic side. The ‘doxische Modalitäten’ refer to the different modalities of being, as possible, probable, questionable, doubtful¹.

This phenomenological analysis of πίστις in the sense of ‘doxa’ is not at all oriented to the modal structures of experience. In so far as it starts from the perceptional certainty as ‘Urdoxa’, it has touched at an anticipation of faith in the modal meaning of sensory perception, without accounting for its meaning-coherence with belief in its original sense.

The irreducible meaning of the function of faith proper is bound to be entirely misinterpreted if its character as a transcendental terminal function is not recognized, i.e. its immediate relatedness to the transcendent root and to the Origin of temporal existence. As a modal function πίστις cannot exist without the revelation of God as the Origin. Only in orienting itself to this revelation of the absolute Archè can the function of faith reveal its irreducible meaning-character.

Therefore the modal meaning-nucleus of faith can only be theoretically approximated as an original transcendental certainty, within the limits of time, related to a revelation of the Ἀϱχή which has captured the heart of human existence.

This is the only modal meaning-nucleus that points above time without the intermediary of modal anticipations. And that is why, strictly speaking, no concept of the faith-aspect is possible. Its meaning-nucleus cannot be isolated in its essential transcendental character from that which is beyond all comprehension.

1 Ideen I, p. 214 ff.

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This fact should be recognized and it should also be admitted that the function of faith is not merely a subjective terminal function of our individual human existence, but the transcendental terminal function of the entire (earthly) empirical reality. Without faith this reality cannot exist. The view that it is possible to find a hold on reality neutral with respect to belief will then prove to be a fundamental error. Such a hold is no more possible in our immanent subjective functions of consciousness than in any objective function of temporal reality. In virtue of their meaning-structure, both offer an unconquerable resistance to any theoretical attempt at enclosure or at obtaining a grasp on reality in time, independent of faith.

Can the function of faith occur in a closed state as well as in a deepened condition? If so, how is this to be understood?

The transcendental terminal character of the aspect of faith confronts Christian philosophy with the most difficult problems. If πίστις, as the transcendental terminal function of the cosmos, has a law-sphere of its own, it must have a law-side and a subject-side. And the law-side can only be the norm prescribing the subjection of our belief to Divine Revelation, as the ultimate guarantee of certainty. The religious consummation of the meaning of Revelation is Christ Jesus, as the Word that was made flesh (John 1:14). This Word-revelation in its aspect of faith establishes the norm and contains the principium of Christian belief.

The Divine Revelation, finding expression in the whole of creation, shows its meaning-coherence with history in its temporal aspect of faith. This appears from its progressive character (also as the special Revelation of salvation). This Revelation, also in a soteriological sense, has entered into history¹, and has its historical aspect.

From this it appears that the meaning of faith, even in its soteriological function, is susceptible of dynamics, of meaning-disclosure. Notwithstanding the irreducible modal character of πίστις, it can never be conceived of as detached from historical development. If in the modal structure of πίστις there is a

1 Cf. Dr H. Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation (Stone-lectures 1908), Vth Lecture, pp. 95-120.

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possibility of meaning-disclosure, and if this is actualized in reality, we must distinguish between faith in a restrictive or closed function, and faith in a deepened and disclosed state.

But does not this distinction cancel the transcendental character of faith qua talis on which we have laid so much emphasis?

This conclusion would be inevitable, if the ‘closure’ and ‘rigidity’ of the modal function of belief is taken in the same sense as that of all the preceding meaning-functions.

Then our assertion would be invalidated that the meaning-nucleus of πίστις is the only one that already in its primary state points beyond the boundary-line of time. But then the function of faith as the second terminal aspect of temporal reality, irreducible in its modal meaning, would also be cancelled. For as soon as the attempt is made to abstract it from its direction to the Divine, from its relatedness to the Revelation of the Ἀϱχή, the meaning-nucleus of faith is itself eliminated. Then one may continue to speak of ‘faith’ in the phenomenological sense of ‘doxa’; in the psychological meaning of an irresistible ‘feeling’ of certainty and confidence; or in the purely epistemological sense of ‘intuitive evidence’; but the modal meaning of faith proper has been lost to sight. We shall presently revert to the analogical use of the word faith. Provisionally it must be established that when πίστις, as the transcendental terminal function of our temporal cosmos, disappears from our theoretical view, every possibility of explaining the functional structure of the opening-process is precluded. That is why we must bear in mind from the outset that the terms ‘restrictive’ and ‘disclosed function’, used with reference to the modus of faith, can only have a special signification. This particular and really exceptional sense is connected with the position occupied by faith as the transcendental terminal function in the entire opening-process of temporal meaning.

What is then the particular meaning of the terms here in question?

The Revelation of God in ‘nature’ and in His Word.

Christian theology has from the outset distinguished between the universal Revelation in ‘nature’ (i.e. creation), and the universal and the particular Word-revelation. The starting-point of our inquiry into the special sense of the ‘restrictive’ or ‘closed’ function of faith is doubtless to be sought in the ‘Revelation

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in nature’. It is necessary to draw attention to the original essential connection between the ‘revelatio naturalis’ and the universal Word-revelation. God revealed Himself at the creation of the cosmos in the religious root and the temporal meaning-coherence of the world. He created man after His own image. He gave expression to His Divine fulness of Being in the whole of His creation, as a totality of meaning. From the very beginning, however, this revelation of God in the nature of the cosmos was borne and explained by the Word-revelation. At the outset, also after the fall into sin, this Revelation by no means had a private but rather a universal character. It was directed to the whole human race.

The independent line of development of a revelatio particularis, which was no longer universal, did not start before Abraham. Presently the people of Israel was to be the provisional bearer of this special revelation. Israel, which was to bring forth the Redeemer, was separated from the other nations because of the treatening general apostasy from the Word-revelation, until the Word appeared in the flesh¹.

In the Word-revelation God addresses the human race in its religious root, and man has only to listen faithfully. As this Word-revelation was originally a revelation to a community, and not to individuals, its addressee was not each individual believer a part, but mankind in community with its first head, Adam. The function of faith can likewise again be truly directed to God only in Christ, as the Head and root of the regenerate human race. But now in such a way that only Christ is the Finisher and the Subject of the Covenant of faith (Hebr. 12:2). Only in faithfully listening to the Divine Word is the true meaning of God's revelation in ‘created nature’ revealed to man.

The uncorrupted ‘natural’ knowledge about God was not a kind of knowledge originating from a reason that was self-sufficient in this ‘natural domain’. It was not the ‘theologia naturalis’ of speculative philosophy; but it was knowledge which, in its temporal character, was in the last instance exclusively guided by faith in the Word of God. Through this Word alone the eyes of the mind were opened to the understanding of the universal revelation of God in created nature. Only the function of faith

1 Gen. 14:18-20; 20:3 ff; 21:22 ff; 23:6; 24:-50; 26:19; 40:8 etc.
Jos. 24:2, 14, 15; Deut. 26:5 etc. see also Bavinck's exposition in his Philosophy of Revelation (1908), pp. 161 ff.

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was able to direct the logical function of thought to the Divine Revelation, and only the Word-revelation could disclose to faith the Revelation in nature.

That's why apostasy from God started with a refusal to listen any longer to Him, with the repugnance of the heart to what God had said. The function of faith was thus drawn away from the Divine Word.

God's Revelation in the whole of created nature, and primarily in the heart of man, became man's doom when he fell away from the Divine Word-revelation. Where the heart closed itself and turned away from God, the function of πίστις was closed to the light of God's Word. As a result faith began to manifest its transcendental direction in an apostate way, in the search for an absolute firm ground in the creation itself. The inevitable consequence was the idolatrous absolutizing of meaning.

The thesis that there can be no conflict between God's Revelation in ‘nature’ and God's Word-revelation becomes a superficial attempt at accommodation, as soon as, contrary to the Scriptures, the natural Revelation of God is set apart and attributed to a self-sufficient ‘naturalis ratio’¹. ‘Natural reason’ then can start spinning one part of the thread of the explanation of the world, and the other end is supposed to have been prepared by the Word-revelation of God's special grace, as a supernatural one. The two parts are finally brought together by a kind of natural harmony². But such a harmony is a delusion!

The ‘natural revelation of God’, detached from the Word-revelation, subjects apostate functional faith to the law of sin. This is the Divine Law which turns into a curse and a Divine judgement on man, because it is drawn away from its religious fulness and fulfilment in Christ by the apostate human consciousness.

The reason is that even apostate faith is not purely arbitrary, but subject to normative principles of natural Revelation.

1 The Roman-Catholic appeal to St Paul's utterance in 1 Romans 19-23 is unacceptable. The apostle does not speak here of a natural knowledge of God from an autonomous natural reason. On the contrary, he states emphatically that God was knowable from a general revelation:
‘διότι τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ ϑεοῦ φανεϱόν ἐστιν ἐν αὐτοῖς· ὁ ϑεὸς γὰϱ αὐτσῖς ἐφανέϱωσεν. The word φανεϱῶσις means a general revelation in the works of creation, not a particular one.

2 Cf. Bavinck's Philosophy of Revelation, p. 180, on the ‘Vermittlungs-theologie’ of the 19th century.

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The revelation of God's common grace, on the other hand, by which the effects of sin were checked and retarded, is not to be separated from the Word-revelation in its general sense.

This common grace cannot be understood in the subjective apostate function of faith. Apart from Christ it does not become a blessing, but a judgment on humanity. Consequently, every fundamental dualism in the conception of the relation between gratia communis and gratia specialis, in the sense that the former has an independent meaning with respect to the latter, is essentially a relapse into the scholastic schema of nature and grace. It is even a greater set-back than the Thomistic-Aristotelian conception, which at least conceived of ‘nature’ as a ‘praeambula gratiae’.

The restrictive function of the faith-aspect as the extreme limit of the transcendental apostasy of πίστις.

Apostate faith can only manifest itself in the modal aspect of πίστις; in other words the extreme degree of apostasy in the pistic¹ function still remains a function of faith.

This modality of meaning must therefore also have a restrictive structural law which - unlike the restrictive structures of the earlier meaning-aspects - must be conceived of as a transcendental restrictive structure in apostasy².

This means that the modal aspect of πίστις retains its transcendental terminal character, even in this ‘restrictive function’. This character is essential in this meaning-modus, though in its closed sense the true direction to the Absolute Origin has been reversed in the absolutizing of what has been created³. The ‘restrictive function’ expresses that cosmic limit of the possibility of apostasy in πίστις by which all the normative anticipatory spheres of the earlier law-spheres remain closed in the transcendental direction, in other words: that structural con-

1 The adjective ‘pistic’ is construed from the Greek word pistis (πίστις).

2 The term transcendental here means: pointing beyond the limits of time to a Deus absconditus, revealing itself in the world.

3 Cf. the extremely pregnant exposition given by Kuyper, op. cit. II, p. 254 ff. of the so-called ‘theologia naturalis’ in the sense of an innate knowledge of God, and especially this statement: ‘Christianity and paganism are related to one another in the same way as the plus- and minus-directions of the same series.’

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dition of faith in which, as the guiding terminal function, it makes impossible the entire opening-process in this direction.

In this condition the function of faith must be considered as having reached the terminal point of its apostasy from the Word-revelation. There are primitive forms of faith-in-nature and of myths that make a pathological impression, and seem no longer to show any trace of the original universal phaneroosis of the Divine Logos. Nevertheless they can only be understood in the sense of the modal aspect of faith, which has its own sphere-sovereignty. They can never be explained in a causal psychological way e.g., in terms of sexual passions or demonic affects of fear, although the temporal meaning of faith has the emotional meaning of feeling as its necessary substratum.

Two kinds of starting-points for the opening-process in the transcendental direction.

Taken in this restrictive sense πίστις can never be the starting-point for the positive development and deepening of meaning of the function of faith implanted in man at creation. It must rather be viewed as the transcendental limit in the devolution, the degeneration and the running to waste of the true nature of faith¹.

But it can serve as the starting-point for the transcendental deepening of meaning in the process of the apostasy of πίστις about which we shall have to say more below.

There is, however, also a positive development and deepening of meaning of the pistic function to the fulness of the Christian faith. Its starting-point must be sought in the structure of πίστις as it was implanted in man by God at the creation, i.e. in its primary openness to the Divine Word-revelation.

After the fall into sin this primary disclosure is only possible by means of the working of God's Spirit in the opening of the heart by grace. The apostate function of faith as such does not offer any starting-point for the development of the Christian faith. First the religious root of human existence must be directed to God, if πίστις is to be a useful organ for listening to the Word-revelation.

1 Kuyper, op. cit., pp. 255/6, relates this absolute deterioration of the natural knowledge of God to what St Paul repeats three times in Romans I, viz. that at last God abandoned (παϱέδωϰε) the idolatrous sinner to the apostate inclination of his heart.

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In this process no new function of faith is created, but the primary opening of the πίστις to the Divine Logos is a radical reversal of the direction of faith, which cannot possibly be brought about by the apostate nature of man.

Thanks to God's gratia communis, the semen religionis (as Calvin calls it) has been preserved in the human heart. And in many apostate religions important remnants of the original Word-revelation have been retained. It is even possible that through contact with the Jewish race or with Christianity some religions show moments of Biblical origin. They can, therefore, not be called pagan. But these moments of truth in the apostate faith are baffled because of the radically false direction of the basic motive of the pseudo-religion.

The elements of truth left in the apostate ‘theologia naturalis’¹ can only be understood in the light of God's Word-revelation. And even the structure of the entire process of devolution, in the apostate knowledge about God, can become transparant only in this light.

This statement has a much more universal implication. The function of faith is the essential transcendental terminal function, both of the whole of the temporal cosmos and of human consciousness. In the light of the Divine Word-revelation the recognition of this state of affairs will enable us to get an insight into the true meaning of the important elements of truth discovered through God's grace also by apostate philosophy in general. This at the same time explains why Christian philosophy does not and cannot simply cancel the whole of immanence-philosophy.

We must strongly emphasize, however, what we have already said in the Prolegomena about the meaning-structure of truth. No single partial truth is a self-sufficient moment that can be set apart. The partial elements of truth are falsified when interpreted from the immanence-standpoint. This is not a question of incidental misunderstandings, or errors of thought, which no sinful human thinking is exempt from. Rather it is evidence of a conscious repugnance in the human mind to the root and fulness of meaning of the Truth.

1 This term is here intended in the general sense of ‘natural knowledge about God’, and not in the special, theoretical sense.

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The revelational principle of faith in its restrictive function and the theme of magic and cult.

It may have become sufficiently clear now that πίστις in its subjective manifestations cannot exceed its modal structure. Also in transcendental apostasy faith remains subject to the structure of its law-sphere, even in its closed, restrictive state. Its normative revelational principle is elevated above any human invention and arbitrariness, and remains valid, even when belief has reached the last stage of apostasy. In an earlier context we saw that the normative principle of πίστις is only to be found in the faith-aspect of the Divine Revelation. We shall therefore have to seek for the contents of the restrictive revelational principle which determines and limits the actualization of belief in temporal reality as a norm.

In early Humanistic rationalism the attempt was made to find a kind of natural, rational, original faith of which all positive dogmatic doctrines were no more than higher or lower forms of development. The attempt was hopeless. It originated from the Humanistic belief in the uniformity of human nature, in its supposed root of ‘sovereign reason’. It has long since been given up by science. But this does not mean that the constancy of the structural law of πίστις has to be given up in the case of the restrictive function of faith. Even for the scientific research of the pistical phenomena of primitive religions the restrictive revelational principle is a necessary ὑπόϑεσις without which it cannot delimit its special field of investigation. This appears already in the question as to whether or not magic belongs to ‘religion’¹.

James Frazer, the first to raise this problem in the well-known chapter ‘Magic and Religion’ of his book The Magic Art, gives a negative answer.

In a purer form the question ought to have been framed as follows: ‘Is magic indeed a phenomenon belonging to a cult in the modal meaning of faith?’ Frazer really meant this, - witness his definition of ‘religion’².

This question must be answered by the inquirer if he is ever

1 Cf. also Edward Westermarck: Early beliefs and their social influence (1932), first lecture Religion and Magic, and H. Bergson, Les deux sources de la Morale et de la Religion (2ième ed. 1932), pp. 171 ff.

2 ‘a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.’

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to be able to start his specific inquiry into primitive belief. It cannot be answered without arbitrariness, if the investigator does not make use of a restrictive normative principle of revelation regulating the aspect of faith on the law-side. If, in theory, the subjection of the primitive subjective πίστις to such a restrictive revelational principle is ignored, the essentially transcendental, terminal character of functional faith is lost sight of.

Then the way is paved for no end of confusion as regards the modal aspects resulting in constructive efforts to explain the meaning of faith which pre-suppose the very thing in need of explanation¹.

The same is true of Frazer's own theory about the origin of cult. According to him a period of magic precedes every kind of ‘religion’ (read: cult). Magic is directed to the impersonal forces of nature and does not strive after the propitiation of a deity, but aims at controlling and dominating the forces of nature. The discovery of the inefficacy of magic is supposed to cause in man a feeling of helplessness and a consciousness of the power of invisible things around him.

From this feeling the primitive forms of ‘the religion of nature’ are supposed to spring: the worship of the personified forces of nature and that of death. The principle of the economy of thought is then used to account for the transition from animism to polytheism, and from the latter to monotheism.

People would come ‘to limit the number of the spiritual beings of whom their imagination at first had been so prodigal’².

In this theory, the construction of magic being the necessary preliminary stage of ‘religion’ is not only open to question. It is

1 The most deterrent instance of such explanations is S. Freud's attempt at explaining the function of faith, which he identifies with ‘religion’, in a pycho-analytical way as a universally human compulsive neurosis. This is supposed to originate from the infantile ‘Oedipuscomplex’, the ‘relation to the father’. Primitive man is said to attribute the character of a father to the forces of nature and to deify them, just as a child elevates its father to ‘God’. The father, admired and feared at the same time, is the primitive image of every form of deity. The ‘father complex’ on the one hand, helplessness and the need of protection on the other, are assumed to be very closely connected in the ‘origin of any religon’, and all dogmatic doctrines thus bear the stamp of an ‘illusion’. (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927, pp. 26, 36 ff. 50). That this entire theory already presupposes the irreducible transcendental meaning of faith, has apparently not dawned upon the author.

2 The Worship of Nature I, pp. 17 ff.

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actually refuted by the simple fact that magic and the cult of deities function simultaneously, side by side, and are interrelated. In addition, the principle of the economy of thought is abused in Frazer's rationalistic construction of the evolution from animism to monotheism. But apart from these serious objections, the transition of a phenomenon which in essence is not qualified as faith, in the true sense of the word, to πίστις proper, is a leap which is simply not permissible in an explanatory theory.

This leap was only made possible through the misinterpretation of the irreducible modal meaning of faith and of the necessary revelational principle functioning in it. If one tries to give a ‘natural explanation’ of the essentially transcendental terminal function of human consciousness, one cannot avoid an obliteration of the modal boundaries between the aspects. This is the reason why all the constructive developmental theories of the origin of the different kinds of cult are doomed to fail. In trying to find the restrictive structure of the aspect of πίστις we in no way want to follow the path of this evolutionistic construction. This path must already come to a dead end in the indeterminateness of the meaning in which the concept of time is used.

A truly historical division into periods of the development of the different forms of faith presupposes, - as the minimum of scientific seriousness, - the insight that it is indeed the history of faith to which the investigator ought to devote his attention. He should refrain from framing any evolutionistic hypotheses about the origin of the pistic cult from phenomena of a different nature.

Even from the evolutionistic standpoint the hypothesis that the magical phase was the oldest and therefore the ‘original’ one is already obsolete, since Beth and Vierkandt discovered a pre-magical cultural stage. This stage was characterized by the total lack of any magical meaning of human actions, and it is supposed to have left clear traces in the pre-historical period of the Aurignacians¹.

Scientific inquiry cannot shed light on the true origin of the pistic function and its original structure. This is the domain of the cosmonomic Idea which, as its hypothesis, lies at the basis

1 Cf. Karl Beth: Religion und Magie (2e Aufl. 1927); Vierkandt: Die Anfänge der Religion und Zauberei, Globus 1907, pp. 21-25; 40-45; 61-65; and H. Kühn: Kunst und Kultur der Vorzeit Europas (1929), pp. 478 ff.

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of all theoretical investigations. In the light of our Christian cosmonomic Idea we could not accept the closed state of history as the original one. Nor can our examination of the restrictive meaning-structure of the revelational principle of faith be understood as an inquiry into the original phase of belief preceding all the other developmental phases. The restrictive pistic revelational principle, in the sense intended by us, can only be understood from the cosmonomic order itself, in the light of the Divine Word-revelation.

The restrictive function of the logical and post-logical aspects proved to be characterized by their rigid attachment to the pre-logical aspects of reality. The restrictive function of faith is the extreme transcendental limit reached in the apostasy of faith, in which under its guidance the normative anticipatory spheres of all the earlier aspects remain rigidly closed.

This limit is consequently to be found in that stage of apostasy in which primitive man deifies the unknown forces of nature regulating life and death, fertility and barrenness etc., i.e., generally speaking, the whole of the biotic-sensory substratum of a closed society.

Man, fallen away from truth to this primitive faith, even lacks any awareness of his transcendental freedom and of his transcendence above the things given in nature. In his function of believing he directs himself to some deification of the natural forces whose normative anticipatory spheres have not yet been opened¹. He believes that they wield a mysterious kind of power over the natural functions of life in the entire primitive community to which he belongs. To him they are both good and destructive deities, who ought to be propitiated or warded off by religious rites. In other words, the restrictive structure of the subjective πίστις has no other revelational principle than the transcendental certainty about the deity revealing itself in the closed ‘forces of nature’, and entitled to religious worship.

1 It need hardly be stated explicitly that these mysterious forces of nature are not conceived of by primitive faith in theoretical abstraction. Rather they are wrapped in a phantastic web of mythology woven by primitive man, who interprets the pistic object-function of the things of nature according to his phantastic sense of the deity. This state of things cannot be made clear before our investigation of the subject-object relation. Compare also what Ed. v. Hartmann observes with regard to the faith in nature in his book Das religiöse Bewusstsein der Menschheit (2e Aufl. 1888), pp. 16 ff.

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Here, too, the Divine Revelation in ‘created nature’ primarily touches the heart of man's existence. Being completely closed to the Word-revelation this heart guides the function of faith in its restrictive apostasy.

This restrictive revelational principle turns into a curse to man in the depravity of his pistic function. Nevertheless, the principle itself is founded in the Divine world-order, and therefore elevated above all human arbitrariness. In the Word-Revelation, which finds its consummation in Christ, it is not set aside. But it is revealed in its true sense through its relation to the fulness of meaning of the Divine law: the service of God with our whole heart in Christian freedom.

The disintegration of the sense of personal identity in the belief in mana and in totemism.

In the restrictive function of its transcendental apostasy πίστις lacks any direction to religious self-reflection. The disintegration of personality-awareness, invariably seen in primitive peoples, finds remarkable expression in the belief that the divine is mana. Codrington was the first to draw attention to this idea in his well-known book: The Melanesians (1891). Other names are also used, such as orenda, wakonda, manitu, dema¹. It has been found that this belief has spread all over the earth.

After this discovery a lively controversy arose about the meaning of the mana-idea², which immediately resulted in a hypothesis of a pre-animistic phase of religious belief (King, Marett, Hubert, and Mausz). From this discussion it appears that the pistic mana-idea may safely be characterized as possessing a peculiar fluidity. In ‘mana’ the natural and the supernatural, the personal and the impersonal merge into one another in a singular way³.

Mana (with its negative counterpart: taboo) is the divine

1 Among the Marind-anim of Dutch Southern New-Guinea the ‘dema’, in a general sense, is conceived as ‘mana’. This has been demonstrated by P. Wirtz in his work: Die Marind-anim von Holländisch-Süd-Neu-Guinea, Bnd II, pp. 6 ff.

2 Cf. the critical survey of writings on this subject brought up to date till 1920 in Fr. Rud. Lehmann's monograph: Mana.

3 Cf. Cassirer: Phil. der symb. Formen II (1925), pp. 98 ff.
The mana-idea is considered as a kind of basic category of mythical thought by Hubert and Mausz: Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie, L'Année Sociologique 1902-1903. Paris 1909, pp. 1-146.

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mysterious force distributed in things everywhere. It is elevated above the familiar, every-day sphere of life which can be conceived by common sense. It is personified in mythical figures which, in a fragmentary and fluid way, embody themselves in visible beings such as plants, animals, men, and also in inorganic objets of a great size or with unfamiliar shapes, regarded as a kind of ‘masks’ of the mysterious mana¹

This is the heno-theistic feature in the primitive nature-belief, as Max-Müller styled it. For although this fragmentary personification of the divine lacks every kind of concentration of the personality-awareness, it does not cancel the belief in the deeper unity of mana².

In the case of some tribes it is possible to show that primitive belief assumes a distinct splitting-up of the personality. This happens during the critical transition that every member of the tribe passes through at his initiation into the life of the community (e.g., among the Kurnai in S.E. Australia)³.

After the initiation-rites another ‘self’ has arisen. In totemism the members of the clan identify themselves with the totem-

1 Thus Dr van Baal in his work already quoted (pp. 60, 61) writes about the dema-belief of the Marind-anim of Dutch Southern-New-Guinea investigated by Wirtz: ‘It is only to a certain extent that a distinction can be made between these personal demas which are the gods in the proper sense of the word and that universal all-pervading dema-power of which we spoke a moment ago. They are no more than special facets of one and the same thing, dema, which is now conceived in its specific form as a personal dema, now as a supernatural power operating in all things in general. How fluid this distinction between the two aspects is, can be clearly demonstrated by referring to the so-called dema-stones which are said to be the abodes of a dema. The shape of such a stone is decisive for the special dema incorporated in it: small round stones, e.g., are called coco-dema's. They cause the fruitfulness of the coconut-tree. Most dema-stones are found by accident, but there also exists a method to get possession of them deliberately. Only a messâv can manage this. When he thinks he has found a dema-place, he sets out for it, and knocks on the ground, whereupon the dema appears and tries to run away. The messâv seizes him and the dema changes into a stone in his hands.’

2 Cf. Ed. von Hartmann, op. cit., pp. 40 ff.

3 Cf. S. Howitt: The native tribes of South-East-Australia (1904) and P.W. Schmidt: Die geheime Jugendweihe eines australischen Urstamms (1923), pp. 26 ff.

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animal or the totem-plant. They are storks, or kangoroos or coconut-palms, etc.¹.

This clearly shows how diffuse primitive personality-awareness is².

1 We cannot agree with the explanation that Bergson (op. cit., pp. 195 ff.), gives of totemism. In his opinion the identification of the members of the clan with the totem-animal or the totem-plant should neither be taken in the literal sense, nor in a purely symbolical meaning. Rather it should be interpreted in connection with the phenomenon of exogamy as the primitive sensory indication of the biotical species-character of the different clans. Bergson takes no account of the pistic meaning of totemism, because of his vitalistic explanation of the entire ‘static’ primitive ‘religion’. In this respect E. Cassirer's striking criticism of Durkheim's explanation of totemism applies also to Bergson in its full force (cf. Cassirer's Philosophie der symbolischen Formen II (1925), pp. 237 ff.). Durkheim attempted to explain totemism as the outward projection of certain internal social clan-relations (cf. Durkheim's Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse). According to Durkheim totemism does nothing but transfer to the whole of nature the interindividual and kinship relations that man experiences immediately as a member of the clan. It simply depicts the social mikro-cosmos in the macrocosmos. The totem is then understood as an arbitrary sensory sign. Cassirer rightly objects that this attempt at explanation rests on some ὕστεϱον πϱότεϱον, in so far as it tries to infer totemism from the social organisation of the clan. And, besides, this theory leaves the particularity of the totem-symbol absolutely unexplained.

2 Cassirer has a striking remark in his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen II (1925), p. 226, on the identification of human beings and animals in totemism:
‘In all this it appears that animals and human beings stand in a continuous magical coherence in the primitive view. Their magical activities continually merge and change into one another.
But on the standpoint of mythical thought this unity of action would be impossible, if it was not based on some unity of essence. The condition of things obtaining in our theoretical division of nature into definite “species” and “classes” as distinct forms of life, is here reversed. The determining of the species is not founded on the empirical causal rules of generation. The idea of the “genus” does not depend on the empirical coherence between the gignere and the gigni. The primary fact is the conviction of the identity of the genus as it develops on the ground of the mutual magical relations between man and animal. The idea of common “descent” only indirectly fits into it.’

The transcendental moral retrocipation in the restrictive structure of the aspect of faith.

Even in this restrictive structure of the aspect of faith we find the retrocipatory connection with the earlier law-spheres maintained. The retrocipatory meaning-moments share in the tran-

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scendental terminal character proper to the meaning-nucleus of πίστις. The pistic law-sphere is directly founded in the moral aspect. The restrictive meaning of faith, therefore, retrocipates on the primitive modal meaning of love in its rigid adhesion to the pre-logical-sides of reality.

The meaning-nucleus of πίστις in its restrictive-transcendental function can only express itself in the cult. The worship of the good forces of nature and the exorcizing of the evil forces imply a moral analogy directly founded in the natural love of the revelation of the deity in the life-force, as well as in the natural hatred of the mysterious forces threatening the biotic existence of the primitive community, such as illness, death, barrenness, etc. The transcendental character of the cult as a necessary meaning-moment in the aspect of πίστις is revealed in its relation to the deity.

K. Beth in his book Religion und Magie bei den Naturvölkern (1914, p. 208) rightly emphasized the fact that the cult is simply not found without the ethical moment. This was the very reason why he sharply distinguished the primitive cult from mere magic.

From this moral retrocipation the other retrocipatory spheres may be analysed. In the present context we do not wish to continue this transcendental analysis¹. We only wanted to set the restrictive revelational principle of this law-sphere in its true light.

1 An ample analysis of the analogical moments in the modal structure of faith is to be found in the second Vol. of my Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy, which volume has not yet been published. Here I have shown that this analysis is highly important for theology insofar as it lays bare the meaninglessness of theological problems resulting from disregarding the analogical character of the theological basic concepts.

§ 8 - Continued: the opening of the function of faith in the apostatical direction

The central problem demanding special attention at the moment lies in the opening-process of πίστις in the apostatical transcendental direction. How is such an opening-process to be understood, and how is it made possible?

The answer to this question is also of supreme importance for the conception of the Idea of historical development. It is

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simply impossible to deny that in various religions after a period of a primitive and diffuse belief in nature there is an opening-process of πίστις in an apostatical direction.

This opening-process is immediately connected with the emergence of the respective peoples from a more or less primitive stage of civilization.

The aesthetic humanizing of Greek polytheism by Homer and Hesiod and the opening-process in the Greek cultural community.

Thus the peculiar aesthetic humanizing of Greek polytheism since Homer and Hesiod is doubtless based on a civilization that had been opened to a rather considerable degree. In his Theogony Hesiod had taught the Greeks how the younger gods of measure, order and harmony had conquered the older deities of indeterminateness (Uranos) and measurelessness (Kronos). He had related how the younger deities cleared the earth of ugly monsters and of measureless human beings and diffuse transitional beings. In the Homeric Epic these younger gods had arrived at individual-personal determinateness in their intercourse with each other and with men. In this way the pistic function is directed to the formation of personal cultural gods. Homer's and Hesiod's pistic conceptions of the world of the gods acquire a basis for historical power in the popular conviction. At the same time we see how the modal-historical norm of individualization begins to assert itself in the development of Greek civilization. This process is bound to the norms of differentiation and integration analysed in an earlier context.

Cassirer has also pointed out this evolution, although he started from a quite different point of view. First he makes the remark that in the primitive community in which e.g., totemism functions, all individuality of the members is entirely absorbed by the totality of the group. This is doubtless a strong exaggeration and generalization of the power of the primitive communal consciousness. Malinowski and other ethnologists of the so-called functionalist school have shown that this usual conception of the primitive mind does not agree with the social facts. In the common social relations within the group the individuality of the members is certainly not effaced or absorbed by the group-mind.

But if we restrict Cassirer's statement to the pistic aspect of primitive social life it is doubtless right.

In an earlier context we have explained in what sense it may

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be said that the individual in a primitive society lacks historical or cultural significance. The same restrictions and modifications should be applied to the sequel of Cassirer's argument.

He continues: ‘As soon as in this group the religious consciousness¹ rises to the thought and to the form of personal gods, the entanglement of the individual member in the totality of the group begins to disappear. Not before this stage of development does the individual get his independent peculiar character and his personal features in contradistinction to the life of the community. This direction to the individual is connected with a new tendency towards the universal - which fact seems to be contradictory, but is in reality correlated with it. For above the smaller unit of the tribe or the group now rise the more comprehensive social units. The personal gods of Homer are also the first national gods of the Greeks - and as such they have straightway become the creators of the general Hellenic consciousness. For they are the Olympians, the universal celestial gods, bound neither to one single locality or province, nor to a particular place of worship. In this manner the liberation to personal consciousness and the elevation to national consciousness are accomplished by one and the same fundamental act of religious formation’².

Under the guidance of this Greek popular faith, whose mythical forms were created by Homer and Hesiod, and in whose religious basic motive the dialectical tension with the earlier natural religion was retained, Greek art rose to a great height in epic poetry, tragedy and plastic art. We see the social, juridical and moral law-spheres opening themselves³ and the Greek body politic pass through its classical period of efflorescence.

And in Greek philosophy which continued to be in contact with mythology (witness the influence of Orphism), it is not really philosophical thought as such which gradually undermines polytheistic popular belief. It is rather the transcendental direction of πίστις to deified theoretical thought, which leads the Greek mind to philosophical theological self-reflection. Philo-

1 Cassirer, of course, does not recognize a modal aspect of faith and continually identifies religion with πίστις in the usual way.

2 Phil. der symb. Formen II, pp. 245/6.

3 In the formal principles of moderation and justice, the juridical and moral conceptions as they developed under the guidance of this popular faith, doubtless rise above the restrictive level of a kind of eudemonism that still clings to sensibility and to the biotic conditions of life. Even Plato and Aristotle started from this popular morality in their ethics.

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sophical speculation also remains guided by the function of faith, which in itself is not theoretical.

The true character of the disclosure of faith in transcendental apostasy.

In the apostasy from the Divine Word-revelation, the whole of the normative opening-process is guided by a deepening of the apostate direction of faith, as the transcendental terminal aspect. This deepening can only be understood as a process in which man arrives at transcendental self-consciousness in his falling away into the absolutization of the relative.

The faith-aspect has no functional anticipatory spheres in its modal structure. The only thing πίστις in apostasy can anticipate, is the religious root of temporal existence. The function of faith rises above its restrictive, rigidly closed state in the civitas terrena, as soon as apostate humanity becomes conscious of its freedom to transcend the merely foundational direction of time.

Then it realizes that it is free to anticipate the immanent revelation of the deity in the selfhood, in the root of human existence itself. But this revelation has been falsified in its religious meaning, because the human ego has been absolutized into self-sufficiency. This awakening of the tendency in the pistic function to anticipate the transcendent selfhood, is essentially a hopeless affair. It is the attempt of man to re-discover his selfhood, lost in the religious apostasy into the relative, by transcendental anticipation of a vain self-absolutization. In the primitive mana-belief the natural sense of the godhead is diffused among the mysterious forces of nature. These are still closed and incomprehensible to man, and to them the whole of temporal existence is rigidly bound. Man believes he is ‘possessed’ by them. But in the process of his rising to transcendental self-consciousness, apostate man discovers his freedom in faith to devise his idol in the image of the deified normative functions of his own personality. That which is typical for the deepening of πίστις in the apostate direction, is invariably the search after the human selfhood in the image of cultural idols who give expression to man's elevation above the blind forces of nature.

Nevertheless, also in this disclosure and deepening of its apostate direction faith remains bound to a principle of Divine revelation in the order of creation. This is the innate tendency of the human ego to transcend itself in the central relation to

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its Divine Origin, in order to discover itself in the image of God.

It is this central revelational principle of creation which, isolated from the Word-Revelation, leads man in the state of apostasy to a disclosure of his pistic function and makes him aware of his elevation above the things of nature. So there is at the same time a positive and a negative aspect in this opening-process of the meaning of πίστις. We should remember this state of affairs when presently we return to the developmental Idea of history.

The transcendental freedom of πίστις, deepened in its apostasy, in devising idols. Cassirer's critique of mythical consciousness.

The religious law of concentration of human existence retains its universal validity even in its apostate condition. All self-knowledge is dependent on knowledge of God. In the same way the apostate selfhood only arrives at self-knowledge through its idols, in which it absolutizes its temporal normative subject-functions¹.

This state of affairs has also struck Cassirer, who tries to explain it from the immanence-standpoint. In the second Volume of his important work Philosophie der symbolischen Formen he interprets every pistic conception of the human selfhood in its relation to that of Deity as a manifestation of mythical consciousness.

He wants to make a sharp distinction between this ‘mythical mind’ and critical ‘theoretical consciousness’. In a general sense he declares that the concentration of self-consciousness, above the diffuse idea of personality in the primitive belief in nature, is reached within the cadre of mythical consciousness only by projecting new images of the Deity².

1 Cf. H. Bavinck on the connection between self-consciousness and revelation in his: The Philosophy of Revelation (1908), pp. 62 ff.

2 Op. cit. II, p. 269: ‘Thus it invariably appears that man can only know and conceive his own existence insofar as he can make himself visible in the images of his gods. Just as he only learns to understand the structure of his body and his limbs because he forms tools and creates labour, he derives from his mental formations, his speech, his myth and his art, the objective measure by which he measures himself and through which he understands himself as an independent cosmos with characteristic structural laws.’ [‘So bewährt sich immer wieder, das der Mensch sein eigenes Sein nur in soweit erfaszt und erkennt, als er es sich im Bilde seiner Götter sichtbar zu machen vermag. Wie er nun dadurch, dasz er werkzeugbildend und werkbildend wird, das Gefüge seines Lebens und seiner Gliedmaszen verstehn lernt, so entnimmt er seinen geistigen Bildungen, der Sprache, dem Mythos und der Kunst die objektiven Masze, an denen er sich miszt und durch die er sich als einen selbständigen Kosmos mit eigentümlichen Strukturgesetzen begreift.’]

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This happens when faith frees itself of the primitive deification of the natural forces connected with the biotic conditions of life, and assumes a normative moral content¹.

The selfhood, too, is identified with a normative function of the personality: in this function faith seeks the deeper unity of the human ego.

In the Egyptian texts of the pyramids we presumably find the oldest historical documents of a gradual rise of mythical self-consciousness to the normative juridical and moral functions of the personality. Here we see the ethical conception of the selfhood accentuating itself more and more strongly in the belief in immortality and the cult of the dead. This depends on the increasing tendency in the pistic conceptions to consider Osiris, the god of the dead, as the judge of good and evil. In earlier texts this god could only be compelled by means of magic formulae to accord the soul of the deceased a favourable reception.

The same moral motive is found in the Iranian belief about the dead, and in the Vedic conception of the gods Varouna and Mitra, as the guardians of the rita, the astronomical world-order, which is at the same time the moral and the juridical order². In comparison with the earlier, magical view of Vedic polytheism, this conception strikes a fundamentally new note.

In the development of the speculation of the Indian Upanishads about the selfhood we even find a more elevated conception of I-ness (âtman). This is now conceived of as an absolutely abstract supra-temporal, actual centre of the contemplative intuition of essences. It transcends all that has the shape of a thing or bears a name, and it participates in the Brahman, the spirit of the world. But even this mystical speculative conception of I-ness in the Upanishads remains caught within the boundaries of the ‘mythical-religious consciousness’.

1 In his concept of the ‘mythical consciousness’ Cassirer merges animistic and pre-animistic pistic ideas into one another.

2 A conception which is probably due to the Chaldeans. Cf. R. Berthelot: ‘L'Astrobiologie et la pensée de l'Asie’. Essai sur les origines des sciences et des théories morales. (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 1934, 41, 3) pag. 378 ff.

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In Cassirer's opinion it remains separated by an unbridgeable cleft from the theoretical -I- of transcendental apperception, from Kant's transcendental-theoretical cogito. The method by means of which religious mysticism penetrates to its conception of the selfhood, the unity in the personality, is entirely different from that of the critical analysis in the theoretical cognitive attitude of mind.

Mythos and Logos. The criterion for the distinction between mythical and non-mythical thought.

Theoretical self-consciousness, however, is also guided in the transcendental direction of time by πίστις as the terminal function. It finds its super-temporal concentration-point in the religious root of human existence. As soon as this insight is gained, the contrast made by Cassirer becomes very questionable.

From the immanence-standpoint it seems hardly possible to find a tenable criterion for distinguishing mythical and non-mythical consciousness. The current standard of such a distinction depends upon the idea of ‘pure experience’ and ‘pure logos’ in a theoretical-scientific sense. But this criterion is ambiguous to a high degree and becomes mythical insofar as it implies an absolutization of theoretical and especially of mathematical and natural-scientific thought. L. Ziegler speaks of the ‘Mythos atheos’ of science¹.

In the last century it was current opinion that μῦϑος is the primitive phantastic and magical-sensible form of a life- and world-view preceding religion. Religion, philosophy and science were supposed to have originated from it in a process of differentiation. But this was nothing but an evolutionistic speculation. We do not know any instance of a real myth which does not give expression to a religious motive. And it is not true that mythical thought is necessarily bound to a magic view of the world. We are only entitled to say that it always implies an interpretation of things from the viewpoint of faith which may be connected with magic representations. But not every view of the world in the mode of faith is to be ascribed to mythical consciousness. The mythical view implies an essential moment of fiction, but not in the same sense as a tale or a legend.

Mythical consciousness is by no means exclusively bound to

1 L. Ziegler, Gestaltwandel der Götter (3th ed. 1922).

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a primitive stage of thought. It may have developed to a high degree of theoretic abstraction in a philosophic-theological speculation in which the viewpoint of faith is masked.

If the conception of âtman in the Upanishads is to be qualified as mythical, it is certainly not a primitive magical form of mythical thought. And if Cassirer's qualification of this conception is justified, it should also be applied to the idea of the transcendental-logical subject in Kant's epistemology. For our transcendental critique of this Kantian idea has shown that it has by no means resulted from a really critical analysis of the structure of theoretic human knowledge. Rather it appeared to depend on a Humanistic belief in the autonomy of theoretic reason and to interpret the structure of the logical aspect from the viewpoint of this belief.

The mythological character of this concept of the transcendental subject manifests itself in the Kantian circumscription that it is to be conceived as a logical unity without any multiplicity - an evident logical impossibility, but a possibility from the viewpoint of a mythical faith.

But we have observed that not every faith is to be qualified as mythical. The latter appeared to imply an essential moment of fiction. In what sense is this to be understood?

This question is all the more urgent since every real myth has the (not necessarily deliberate) tendency to reveal a religious truth which is essentially related to the modal function of πίστις and founded in a Divine revelation in the order of creation. In this respect it is sharply to be distinguished from a tale and a legend. Its time-aspect is that of faith, not that of aesthetic fantasy or history.

But mythical faith is characterized by its interpreting the natural Divine revelation in accordance with the fictitious conceptions of an ‘autonomous’ pistical fancy. This is the hybrid character of mythical consciousness by which it is sharply distinguished from the non-mythical. It is related to a truth which is necessarily misunderstood.

The ‘mythical’ is the pistic interpretation of the experience of the ‘deus absconditus’ in the apostate root of human existence.

Theoretical self-consciousness can no more avoid this than pre-theoretical self-awareness. Only in the opening of πίστις to the light of God's Word-revelation are the mystifications of mythology penetrated. In this disclosure the boundaries of ‘mythical consciousness’ are broken through by the transcendent

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power of Divine Truth. Without this Divine illumination even theoretical self-consciousness retains the fundamental characteristics of mythology. Plato became aware of the unity of the selfhood. He sought this unity in the absolutized ‘thinking part of the soul’. But this conception of the self was due to his mythical idea of the pure divine Nous which had been conceived by deepened apostate faith. Not before the mythical idea of the ‘intellectus geometricus archetypus’ had been devised in the disclosed apostate πίστις, did the supposed root of human personality reveal itself to Descartes and Leibniz. They identified the selfhood with mathematical thought, as the image of the ‘Divine geometer’.

Kant's philosophic thought assumed its transcendental direction to the super-sensory Idea of the homo noumenon (with which the apostate ego identified itself), only by the ‘faith of practical reason’ in the moralistic Idea of god.

Even the theoretical view of the coherence of temporal reality remains mythological under the guidance of faith in autonomous reason. ‘Mythological’ in this sense are both Hume's psychologistic and Kant's transcendental-idealistic conception of temporal reality.

The primitive-magical mythological conception of reality makes a fundamental separation between the sphere of the profane (or familiar), and that of the sacral (or the ‘mana’). The mystical conception of the Upanishads separates the brahman-âtman from maya. They are the counterparts of the dualistic separation in the cosmic meaning-coherence between noumenon and phenomenon in western metaphysical immanence-philosophy. All these dualistic views of reality in the last analysis originate in mythical consciousness.

The Platonic μὴ ὄν and ἄπειϱον bear a distinctly mythical stamp, just as Leibniz's πέϱας in the sense of ‘metaphysical evil’. The disclosure of the nature-myth into the cultural myth¹ in popular belief has its parallel in the history of modern immanence philosophy. There we see philosophers attain theoretical self-consciousness by ascending from a mythical belief in the deterministic image of nature devised by the classical science-ideal, to a mythical belief in creative human freedom in culture and morality.

1 ‘Culture’ taken in the indeterminate Humanistic sense of the complex of the normative aspects of temporal reality.

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In naturalistic thought, guided by the faith in the self-sufficiency of natural science, the theoretical self-consciousness is dispersed in its pre-logical ‘Gegenstände’ (= the modal aspects investigated). In transcendental thought the apostate selfhood reflects on its subjective, temporal, theoretical activity, identifying itself with those normative subject-functions of the personality that have been absolutized by the faith in self-sufficient reason. But only in dependence on the Idea of the Origin devised by πίστις does the Idea of the selfhood reveal itself to philosophical thought.

It should, however, be borne in mind that the faith in reason as such, no matter whether it expands in a naturalistic or in an idealistic sense, is never a πίστις of a restrictive structure, as is the primitive faith in nature.

Rather it is always the manifestation of an extreme stage of the deepening of meaning in the apostasy of πίστς. At the same time it reveals a refinement in the process of development of ἀπιστία which aggravates guilt.

Mythical consciousness under the guidance of the ‘magical’¹ faith in nature and of faith in reason. The problem of magical thought.

Faith in the sovereignty of natural-scientific thought guides both theoretical and pre-theoretical consciousness which is ruled by the Humanistic naturalistic science-ideal.

This faith also frees the mental attitude of naïve experience from its commitment to the magical-mythical ideas of the primitive faith in nature, at least, so long as this faith actually takes the lead in human life, which it never permanently does.

The only result, however, is that the mythical strangle-hold of the faith in the rational origin of the entire cosmic reality is tightened. We must bear in mind that, in contrasting rational faith and ‘magical’ faith in nature, and the two different ways in which these two control logical thought, magical thought must not be identified with naïve primitive thinking.

An essential feature in the ‘mana’ faith is the fundamental separation between what is ordinary, profane in reality and what is sacral, mysterious. The familiar can be understood in primitive thought by ‘common sense’.

1 The adjective ‘magical’ is not taken here in its strict sense but in the sense meant by Cassirer, viz. ‘mystical’, opposed to scientific logic.

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Only the mysterious is conceived by the mythical pistic imagination in a ‘magical context of activities’. For this reason it is impossible to accept the well-known theory advanced by Lévy-Bruhl. He holds that ‘primitive thought’ does not move in logical categories but in a pre-logical, mystical, collective-psychic sphere, lacking every kind of analytical character. The logical basic principles of identity, contradiction and sufficient ground are supposed to have been completely set aside. In the pre-logical sphere the collective representations are assumed to be ruled by the law of participation, which is indifferent to contradiction¹.

Cassirer's view of ‘magical thought’ has been strongly influenced by Lévy-Bruhl. Both identify the logical aspect with the theoretical logic of mathematical natural science. I suppose this is the reason why they have lost sight of some primordial states of affairs.

In the first place it is overlooked that primitive thought is not to be identified with the particular ‘magical’ way of thinking. But, in addition, ‘magical’ thought cannot function as such outside the primary structure of the logical law-sphere. As far as their logical aspect is concerned, the typically magical ideas are orientated to the primary logical principles².

The ideas of a possible splitting up of personality and of the identity of the members of the clan with the totem are not illogical. For logic alone neither yields an idea of personality nor of the difference between man and animal. We are con-

1 Lévy-Bruhl: Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris, 1922), p. 454: ‘The mentality of the inferior societies is of an essentially pre-logical and mystical character,...... it is differently orientated from ours,...... the collective representations are regulated by the law of participation, indifferent therefore to contradiction, and united by bonds and by preliminary connections disconcerting to our logic.’ [‘La mentalité des sociétés inférieures est de caractère essentiellement prélogique et mystique,...... elle est orientée autrement que la nôtre,...... les représentations collectives y sont réglées par la loi de participation, indifferentes, parsuite, à la contradiction, et unies entre elles par des liaisons et par des préliaisons déconcertantes pour notre logique.’]

2 How would the members of the clan otherwise be able to identify themselves with the totem-animal of their clan and distinguish themselves from the members of another clan? And how would they be able to express judgments of faith?

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fronted here with typically pistological¹ ideas which consciously rise above the concepts of ordinary primitive life². They are meant to give a pistological interpretation of the divine mystery, which is inexplicable to ordinary primitive thought and manifests itself in the dark forces of nature which also rule primitive society. This interpretation is really of a primitive mythological nature, and falsifies the true state of affairs within the pistical aspect of reality.

But the faith in reason also falsifies reality when deifying subjective reason. This fact renders Cassirer's distinction between critical-theoretical and mythical consciousness extremely misleading³. His criterion appears to be inadequate.

1 ‘pistological’ means: according to a logical retrocipation of faith. In this case logical thought is made to follow the lead of some faith, and distinguishes according to the standards of this faith.

2 See on this subject the well-founded and sober remarks of T.S.G. Moelia: Het primitieve denken in de moderne wetenschap (thesis, Leyden 1933), p. 52 ff.

3 Cf. Cassirer, op. cit., Vol. II, section 2 ch. I. [Der Grundgegensatz].