What then was it that Classical man, whose insight into his own world- around was certainly not less piercing than ours, regarded as the prime problem of all being? It was the problem of ἀρχή, the _material origin and foundation_ of all sensuously-perceptible things. If we grasp this we shall get close to the significance of the fact—not the fact of space, but the fact that made it a necessity of destiny for the space- problem to become the problem of the Western, and only the Western, soul.[188] This very spatiality (Räumlichkeit) that is the truest and sublimest element in the aspect of _our_ universe, that absorbs into itself and begets out of itself the substantiality of all things, Classical humanity (which knows no word for, and therefore has no idea of, space) with one accord cuts out as the nonent, τὸ μὴ ὄν, that which _is not_. The pathos of this denial can scarcely be exaggerated. The whole passion of the Classical soul is in this act of excluding by symbolic negation that which it _would_ not feel as actual, that in which its own existence _could_ not be expressed. A world of other colour suddenly confronts us here. The Classical statue in its splendid bodiliness—all structure and expressive surfaces and no incorporeal _arrière-pensée_ whatsoever—contains without remainder all that Actuality is for the Classical eye. The material, the optically definite, the comprehensible, the immediately present—this list exhausts the characteristics of this kind of extension. The Classical universe, the _Cosmos_ or well-ordered aggregate of all near and completely viewable things, is concluded by the corporeal vault of heaven. More there is not. The need that is in us to think of “space” as being behind as well as before this shell was wholly absent from the Classical world- feeling. The Stoics went so far as to treat even properties and relations of things as “bodies.” For Chrysippus, the Divine Pneuma is a “body,” for Democritus seeing consists in our being penetrated by material particles of the things seen. The State is a body which is made up of all the bodies of its citizens, the law knows only corporeal persons and material things. And the feeling finds its last and noblest expression in the stone body of the Classical temple. The windowless interior is carefully concealed by the array of columns; but outside there is not one truly straight line to be found. Every flight of steps has a slight sweep outward, every step relatively to the next. The pediment, the roof-ridge, the sides are all curved. Every column has a slight swell and none stand truly vertical or truly equidistant from one another. But swell and inclination and distance vary from the corners to the centres of the sides in a carefully toned-off ratio, and so the whole corpus is given a something that swings mysterious about a centre. The curvatures are so fine that to a certain extent they are invisible to the eye and only to be “sensed.” But it is just by these means that