THE CLASSICAL PREJUDICE

WE HAVE ALREADY indicated what we mean by the 'classical prejudice': it consists essentially in a predisposition to attribute the origin of all civilization to the Greeks and Romans. It seems scarcely possible to account for this attitude except by means of the following explanation: because their own civilization hardly goes any further back than the Greco-Roman period and derives for the most part from it, Westerners are led to believe that it must have been the same in every other case and they have difficulty in conceiving of the existence of entirely different and far more ancient civilizations; it might be said that they are mentally incapable of crossing the Mediterranean. Furthermore, the habit of speaking of 'civilization' in the absolute also contributes largely toward maintaining this prejudice. 'Civilization', understood in this way and regarded as one entity, is something that has never existed; in actual practice there have always been and there still are 'civilizations'. Western civilization, with its special features, is simply one civilization among others, and what is so pompously called 'the evolution of civilization' is nothing more than the development of that particular civilization from its comparatively recent origins, a devel-opment that is moreover far from having always proceeded by a regular and all-round 'progress': the remarks we have just made about the so-called Renaissance and its consequences could serve as a striking illustration of an intellectual retrogression which, furthermore, has gone on increasing down to the present time.

To the impartial observer it is plain that the Greeks, from the intellectual point of view at least, really borrowed very largely from the Easterners, as they themselves frequently admitted; however unveracious they may have been at times, on this point at least they cannot have lied, for they had no possible interest in doing so, indeed quite the contrary. As we said before, their originality principally lay in their manner of expressing things, by means of a faculty for adaptation one cannot deny them, but which was necessarily limited by the extent of their comprehension; briefly, their originality was of a purely dialectical order. Actually, since Greeks and Easterners differed in their characteristic ways of thinking, there were necessarily corresponding differences in the modes of reasoning that they employed; this must always be borne in mind when pointing out certain analogies, real though they be, such as for instance the analogy between the Greek syllogism and what has fairly correctly been called the Hindu syllogism. It cannot even be said that Greek reasoning is distinguished by an exceptional strictness; it only appears stricter than other methods of reasoning to people who are themselves in the habit of employing it exclusively, and this illusion is due solely to the fact that it is restricted to a narrower and more limited field and is therefore more easily defined. On the contrary, the faculty most truly characteristic of the Greeks, but which is little to their advantage, is a certain dialectical subtlety, of which the dialogues of Plato provide numerous examples; there is an apparent desire to examine each question interminably, under all its aspects and in minutest detail, in order to arrive finally at a rather insignificant conclusion; it would appear that in the West the moderns are not the first people to have been afflicted with 'intellectual myopia.'

Perhaps, after all, the Greeks should not be blamed too severely for restricting the field of human thought as they have done; on the one hand this was an inevitable result of their mental constitution, for which they cannot be held responsible, and on the other hand they did at least in this way bring within reach of a large part of humanity certain kinds of knowledge that were otherwise in danger of remaining completely foreign to it. It is easy to realize the truth of this if one considers what Westerners are capable of today, when they happen to come into direct contact with certain Eastern conceptions and set about interpreting them in a manner conforming to their own particular mentality: anything they cannot connect with the 'classical' idiom escapes them completely, and whatever can be made to tally with it, by hook or by crook, is so disfigured in the process that it becomes almost unrecognizable.

In short, the 'Greek miracle' as it is called by its enthusiastic admirers, is reduced to something of comparatively small importance, or at least, whenever it implies a fundamentally new departure, this departure is usually in the nature of a degeneration; it stands for the individualization of conceptions, the substitution of the rational for the truly intellectual, and of the scientific or philosophical for the metaphysical point of view. It matters little, moreover, whether the Greeks were or were not more successful than others in turning certain forms of knowledge to practical use, or whether they deduced consequences of this particular kind, whereas those who preceded them did not do so; it might even be said that, in this respect, they assigned a less pure and disinterested purpose to knowledge, because their turn of mind only allowed them to remain within the domain of principles with some difficulty and as though by exception. This inclination toward the 'practical' in the most ordinary sense of the word is one of those factors that were fated to become increasingly marked during the course of Western civilization, until in modern times the tendency became frankly predominant. Only the Middle Ages, being much more given to pure speculation, can be said to have escaped it.

As a general rule, Westerners have very little natural aptitude for metaphysics; a comparison of their languages with those of the Easterners would alone be sufficient to prove this point, provided of course that philologists were really capable of understanding the spirit of the languages they studied. On the other hand, Easterners show a strongly marked tendency to disregard applications. This is quite understandable, because anyone who above everything else cultivates the knowledge of universal principles can only take a lukewarm interest in special sciences, bestowing upon them at the most a passing curiosity, which would anyway be unlikely to call forth a large number of discoveries in this order of ideas. When one knows as a mathematical certainty, or one might even say as a more-than-mathematical certainty, that things cannot be otherwise than what they are, one becomes as a matter of course disdainful of experiment, because the verifying of a particular fact, whatever its nature, never proves anything more or anything different from the mere existence of that particular fact; at most, the observation of facts can occasionally provide an example to illustrate, but in no way to prove, a theory, and any belief to the contrary is to labor under a grave delusion. This being so, there is clearly no object in pursuing experimental sciences for their own sake, and from the metaphysical point of view they only possess an incidental and contingent value, like the objects they are applied to; quite often in fact the need is not even felt to deduce particular laws which could, however, be extracted from the principles themselves as applications to a given and specialized domain, if this appeared worth the trouble. Thus the magnitude of the gap separating Eastern 'knowledge' from Western 'research' becomes strikingly apparent; all the same, it remains an astonishing thing that research can have come to be regarded by Westerners as an end in itself, quite independently of any possible results.

Another point that should not be overlooked and that appears as a corollary of what has gone before, is that no one in the world has ever shown less inclination than the Easterners to follow the cult of nature, as it was followed in Greco-Roman times, since for them nature has always meant the world of appearances; appearances no doubt possess a reality of their own, but it is only transitory and impermanent, contingent and not universal. Therefore, to men who are metaphysicians by temperament, 'naturalism', in the many guises it is capable of assuming, only appears as an aberration, or even as a positive intellectual monstrosity.

It must however be admitted that the Greeks, in spite of their tendency toward naturalism, never went so far as to attach to experimentation the excessive importance that the moderns have given to it. One finds throughout antiquity, even in the West, a certain attitude of contempt toward experiment, which would be difficult to explain unless it be taken as revealing a trace of Eastern influence. It would otherwise be rather difficult to account for this attitude on the part of the Greeks, whose preoccupations were hardly metaphysical in character and for whom esthetic considerations very often took the place of the deeper reasons which escaped them. It is therefore these esthetic considerations which are usually invoked in order to explain their lack of interest in experiment, though we ourselves believe that there were other operative causes, at least in earlier times. In any case this does not alter the fact that in a certain sense one can already observe among the Greeks the point of departure of the experimental sciences as understood by the moderns, wherein the 'practical' tendency is linked to the 'naturalistic' tendency, neither of them being able to reach full development except at the expense of pure thought and disinterested knowledge. Thus, the fact that Easterners never devoted themselves to certain special branches of science is in no wise a sign of inferiority; from the intellectual point of view indeed it is quite the reverse, for it is nothing but the normal consequence of the fact that, in their case, their main activity was turned in another direction and toward totally different ends. It is precisely the different ways in which the mental activity of man can be exercised that stamp each civilization with its own particular character, by determining the basic direction of its development; here also lies the explanation of the illusion of progress among those who, being acquainted with one kind of civilization only, can conceive of no other line of development than their own, believing it to be the only way possible, so that they take no account of the fact that a development in one sense may be largely counterbalanced by retrogression in another.

If we turn to the intellectual order, which alone is essential to the Eastern civilizations, it will be seen that there are at least two reasons for thinking that the Greeks must have borrowed almost everything pertaining to that order from those civilizations, that is to say whatever is of real value in their conceptions: one of these reasons, the one we have hitherto stressed, follows from the rather limited aptitude of the Greek mentality in this respect; the other is that Hellenic civilization is of a much more recent date than the principal Eastern civilizations. This is particularly true of India, although whenever any connection between the two civilizations can be authenticated, some persons push the 'classical prejudice' to the point of declaring a priori that this connection must be due to Greek influence. However, if an influence of this sort was ever in fact felt by Hindu civilization, this could only have occurred very late, and the effects must necessarily have remained quite superficial. For instance, it is possible to admit the existence of an occasional artistic influence, though even from this special point of view Hindu conceptions always remained very different from those of the Greeks; but in any case, unmistakable traces of such an influence are only to be found in a certain period of the Buddhist civilization, extremely restricted both in space and in time; moreover, this civilization is not to be confused with Hindu civilization proper. However, this obliges us to say something on the subject of the relationship that may have existed in ancient times between different peoples dwelling more or less far apart, and we will also add a few words about the difficulties which, in a general way, are raised by chronological questions, so important in the eyes of the partisans of the notorious 'historical method.'