MYTH AND HISTORY
23
endless chain of correspondences, cutting across the organic, the
moral, the esthetic, the social, and ultimately also of the political?
Disease, sex, the heightening of physical beauty, self-abandonment,
hot climates, drugs, certain animals and certain races, arrange them–
selves in a unity which science, with its unhappy preference for strictly
demarcated research, can only overlook or misrepresent. Hence, in
the mind's passage, necessarily erratic, towards completeness, science
as an absolute method of investigation must be left behind; while the
door of the philosophical myth opens upon measureless possibilities.
Especially inappropriate would seem a scientific approach to
history-for here is the high ground where humanity and nature
merge into a single whole, a plane continuously flooded and laid bare
by the perpetual exchange between the illusory and the intelligible.
Analogy alone, with its insights and flexibility, appears fitted to pre–
side over this unstable firmament.
But this analogical approach, if it is to replace science, cannot
content itself with the occasional intuitions of the poetic mind. It must
achieve the discipline of a systematic methodology. "From any tech–
nique of analogies," said Spengler, "we are far distant ... here is a
Joot, in fact the only root, from which can come a broad solution of
the problems of history." It is the technique of analogies that results
in
the new myth-which is supposed to be, to quote Troy's Spen–
glerian expression, "the concrete and dynamic image of the human
microcosm as a whole."
To gain a simplified picture of how this "technique" is devel–
oped, we might imagine Spengler or Mann asking themselves the
question: Why do Science and Life remain firmly opposed? And
answering: Because in the actual world all things tend to define
themselves as mechanical or living.
If
this conclusion is reached-and
in
Mann's work it is a major concept-the problem of Reality and
Science descends from the field of abstract thought, and its polar con–
cepts
become the formula for arranging facts and for judging them.
All organic, "life-sided" Irrationals line up on one side and pit them–
selves on principle against abstract and lifeless Forms. Thus we arrive
not merely at correspondences, which have always been noted, but at
a
logic of correspondences.*_J.nd, to be sure, logicians of correspon–
dences- who can decide on moral grounds which
po~itical
movement
• For example, the 'essay by Kenneth Burke on Thomas Mann, from which the following
il
quoted was written many years before Mann's attack on "the slo!lan·minded/'
ucastorp
descends,
Mt
to a specific European war, but to regimentation, to the relief, even the suicidal relief of
slogan-minded ... After years of vacillation he seeks the evasion of a monastery, though
these secular days, when the power of theology has dwindled, the dogmatic certainties for
people are burned will more often be those of patriotism, and the equivalent of churchly
becomes the advance in numbers under arms.,
Burke'~
later work consists of a com·
lioa
1nd rarification of such clisplace<Mnts of value•.
