The Sleepwalkers (66 page)

the black troops, armed with unchivalrous weapons, sent out against us, yet these are only the vanguard. They shall be followed by the black hosts, by the terrors of the Johannine Apocalypse. For as long as the white races are incapable of overcoming this inertia of feeling, and casting from them

embraces honour, it is a lost generation and the dreadful darkness will be round it, and no one will come to help it and its.

the venom of the blasphemer and the adventurer, which infects not only the insolent capitals of the enemy, but has not spared our Fatherland. Like an inextricable network it lies invisibly over our cities

just as first our glorious campaign of 1870 had to come so as to unite the dispersed tribes of the German people, so it will be the glory of this far greater and more dreadful war not merely to have united whole races in brotherhood, but in a sense

and the Christian faith and the grace of freedom be ours again. Then we shall be able to say: “A Christian is a faithful servant of all things and subject to every man,” no less than: “A Christian is a free master over all things and subject to no man”; for both will be true, and that is how we should think of true freedom.

I do not know whether I have been able to make myself thoroughly understood, for I myself have had to wrestle for a long time in order to arrive at these truths, and am convinced that they are still fragmentary. But here too the words of General Clausewitz may apply: “The heart-rending spectacle of danger and suffering may easily make our feelings prevail over our reasonable convictions, and in the twilight of appearance it is so hard to gain a profound and clear insight into things that vacillation is understandable and excusable.
It is always out of a mere inkling and foreboding of the truth that man acts.
”

Thus did Major von Pasenow come to grips with the problem of the war and the future of Germany, and he found it hard work. War, for which his upbringing had been a preparation, war, for whose sake he had worn a uniform during the years of his youth and donned it again
four years ago, war had suddenly become no longer a matter of uniform, no longer a matter of red regimentals or blue regimentals, no longer an affair between gallant enemies who chivalrously crossed swords; no, war had proved neither the crown nor the fulfilment of a life in uniform, but had invisibly and yet more and more palpably shaken the foundations of that life, had worn threadbare the ties of morality holding it together, and through the meshes of the fabric grinned the Evil One. Spiritual forces trained in the cadet school of Culm were not adequate for the subjugation of the Evil One, and that was not surprising, since the Church itself, although much better equipped, has failed to overcome once and for all the antinomy of original sin. But the idea that once hovered before Augustine’s mind as the salvation of the secular world, the dream that the Stoics had dreamed before him, the idea of a religious State embracing within it all that bears the lineaments of mankind, this exalted idea shone through the picture of heart-rending danger and suffering, and had awakened—more as a feeling, it is true, than as a reasoned conviction, rather a vague divination than a profound and clear intuition—it had awakened in the soul of the old officer too; and so a connection, hazy, indeed, and sometimes misconceived, but continuously traceable, ran from Zeno and Seneca, perhaps even from the Pythagoreans, to the thoughts of Major von Pasenow.

Logical Excursus.

Although it cannot be denied that the style of thinking prevailing, say, in the Royal Prussian Cadet School at Culm is quite different from that in a Roman Catholic seminary, yet the concept “style of thinking” is so vague that it reminds one of the vagueness of those philosophical and historical tendencies which find the crux of their methodology in the word “intuition.” For the
a priori
unambiguity of thought and logic permits of no stylistic gradations, and so cannot countenance any other intuition than the mind’s
a priori
apprehension of itself, discarding everything else as empirical and pathological abnormality more fitted for psychological and medical research than for philosophy. An argument for the insufficiency of the human brain’s work-a-day and empirical
thinking in face of the absolute logic of the self, the absolute logic of God.

Or it could be argued that the absolute formality of logic is unassailable and cannot be changed even by human agency; all that changes being the content of its propositions, their interpretation of the nature of the world; so that the question of style is at most an epistemological question and can never be a logical one. Logic, like mathematics, is devoid of style.

But is the form of logic actually so independent of its content? For somewhere, curiously enough, logic itself is identified with content, and nowhere more clearly than in so-called formal concatenations of proof; for not only are the links of these chains axioms or axiomatic propositions—such as the principle of non-contradiction—which form an impassable limit to plausibility (until one fine day that limit is passed, all the same, as for instance in the principle of the excluded middle), and whose evidence is no longer based on formal proof but only on actual content, but more than that, there would be no syllogisms at all, the whole logical machinery of drawing and proving conclusions would not even work, without the application of extra-logical principles to set the whole in motion, principles that in the long run, however far one pushes the limit of definition, are ultimately metaphysical and substantive. The structure of formal logic thus rests on substantive foundations.

The idealism of intuitional psychologizers presupposes a “feeling for truth” which provides the resting-point in which every line of inquiry, beginning with the wondering question: “What is that?” and proceeding by posing reiterated “whys?” finally comes to an end with the assertion of an axiomatic plausibility: “That is so and not otherwise.” Now although in reference to the immutability of an
a priori
and purely formal logic this feeling for truth is a superfluous importation, yet in reference to the substantive element in logical proof it has claims to more reasonable respect. For the resting-points of evidence at the end of the lines of inquiry and chains of proof have detached themselves from formal immutability and yet are supposed to have a determining influence on the process of logical proof itself and on its form. The problem which this raises: “In what way can substantive content, be it a logical axiom or non-logical in its nature, so affect formal logic as to admit of variation in style of thinking while maintaining intact the
invariability of form?” this problem is no longer empirical and psychological, but methodological and metaphysical, for behind it stands in all its
a priority
the first question of all ethics: How can God permit error, how is it that a madman is allowed to live in God’s world?

One can imagine a line of inquiry that never comes to a conclusion at all. All inquiries into ultimate origins obviously have this peculiarity; the problem of matter, which advances from one fundamental concept to another, from primal substance to the atom, from the atom to the electron, from the electron to the quantum of energy, and each time reaches only a temporary resting-place, is an example of such an infinite line of inquiry.

Now the point at which such a line of inquiry terminates is obviously conditioned by a feeling for truth and evidence, conditioned, therefore, by whatever axioms prevail. The doctrine of Thales, for instance, that the terminal point, the point of plausibility for the inquiry into the origin of matter, was the substance “water” permits us to infer that for Thales there was an accepted system of axioms within which the watery nature of matter seemed probable. Here it is substantive and not logically formal axioms that stop the line of inquiry, axioms of the prevailing cosmogony,—but these substantive axioms must have some relation to those of formal logic, they must at the very least be incapable of formal contradiction, for if the substantive development of the evidence did not agree with the formal there would be no plausibility in the conclusion. (And yet the possibility of disagreement between substantive and logical axioms can be discovered in the doctrine of twofold truth.) Moreover, even if one were to take up a position of complete scepticism and say
Ignorabimus
, and, denying the existence of a plausibility depending on cosmogony and of its concomitant axioms, were to assume the non-terminable nature of inquiries and regard their termination at any fixed point as a purely purposeful and yet fictitious piece of arbitrariness, still it is clear that even the plea
Ignorabimus
as such possesses a definite attribute of plausibility, which again is supported by a definite frame of logic and a definite system of logical axioms.

Perhaps the number of axioms implicit and effective in any view of the world could provide some kind of conception of these relationships, a reasonable conception extending beyond the limits of pure intuition.
Naturally the precise quantity could neither be produced nor enumerated—one could only indicate the comparative multiplicity or dearth of axioms in extreme cases. The cosmogony of a primitive people, for instance, is of the utmost complexity; every object in the world has a life of its own, is in a sense
causa sui
; each tree is inhabited by its own god, each thing by its own demon; it is a world of an infinite number of things, and every line of inquiry relating to the objects in that world advances only a few steps, perhaps one step only, before stopping short at one of these axioms. In contrast with such a multiplicity of short chains of ontological reasoning, mostly chains of only one link, the chains of reasoning in a monotheistic world are already much lengthened, although not lengthened into infinity; they are lengthened, that is, to the point where they all converge in the sole First Cause, God. So that if one considers merely the ontological axioms of cosmogony—leaving out of account the others, those that are purely logical—in the two extreme cases represented by the polarized cosmogonies of primitive magic and of monotheism, the number of axioms varies from infinity to one.