Note 156 — Chapter IV · THE PROBLEM OF WORLD-HISTORY

This is one of the eternal points of dispute in Western art-theory. The Classical, ahistorical, Euclidean soul has no “evolution”; the Western, on the contrary, extends itself in evolving like the convergent function that it is. The one is, the other becomes. And thus all Classical tragedy assumes the constancy of the personality, and all Western its variability, which essentially constitutes a “character” in our sense, viz., a picture of being that consists in continuous qualitative movement and an endless wealth of relationships. In Sophocles the grand gesture ennobles the suffering, in Shakespeare the grand idea (Gesinnung) ennobles the doing. As our æsthetic took its examples from both Cultures, it was bound to go wrong in the very enunciation of its problem.