"errors" such conceptions as Democritus's theory of atomic images,[1] the very corporeal world of Plato's "ideas," and the fifty-two hollow spheres of Aristotle's universe, as though we could presume to know what the dead meant better than they knew themselves! These things are truths and essential — only, not for us. The sum total of the Greek philosophy that we possess, actually and not merely superficially, is practically nil. Let us be honest and take the old philosophers at their word; not one proposition of Heraclitus or Democritus or Plato is true for us unless and until we have accommodated it to ourselves. And how much, after all, have we taken over of the methods, the concepts, the intentions, and the means of Greek science, let alone its basically incomprehensible terms? The Renaissance, men say, was completely under the "influence" of Classical art. But what about the form of the Doric temple, the Ionic column, the relation of column to architrave, the choice of colour, the treatment of background and perspective in painting, the principles of figure-grouping, vase-painting, mosaic, encaustic, the structural element in statuary, the proportions of Lysippus? Why did all this exercise no "influence?"
Because that which one (here, the Renaissance artist) wills to express is in him a priori. Of the stock of dead forms that he had in front of him, he really saw only the few that he wanted to see, and saw them as he wanted them — namely, in line with his own intention and not with the intention of the original creator, for no living art ever seriously considers that. Try to follow, element by element, the "influence" of Egyptian plastic upon early Greek, and you will find in the end that there is none at all, but that the Greek will-to-form took out of the older art-stock some few characteristics that it would in any case have discovered in some shape for itself. All round the Classical landscape there were working, or had worked, Egyptians, Cretans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, and Phœnicians, and the works of these peoples — their buildings, ornaments, art-works, cults, state-forms, scripts, and sciences — were known to the Greeks in profusion. But how much out of all this mass did the Classical soul extract as its own means of expression? I repeat, it is only the relations that are accepted that we observe. But what of those that were not accepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in the former category the pyramid, pylon, and obelisk of Egypt, or hieroglyphic, or cuneiform? What of the stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was not accepted by Gothic art and thought in Spain and Sicily? It is impossible to overpraise the wisdom (quite unconscious) that governed the choice and the unhesitating transvaluation of what was chosen. Every relation that was accepted was not only an exception, but also a misunderstanding, and the inner force of a Being is never so clearly evidenced as it is in this art of deliberate misunderstanding. The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in
- ↑ I.e., that sensation consists in the absorption of small particles radiated by the object. — Tr.
