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International Phenomenological Society

Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics Author(s): Leo Spitzer Reviewed work(s): Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Dec., 1942), pp. 169-218 Published by: International Phenomenological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2102775 . Accessed: 12/02/2012 11:59
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MILIEU AND AMBIANCE: AN ESSAY IN HISTORICAL SEMANTICS


Continued

Before attempting to trace the development of the post-Newtonian milieu, let us glance back at the earlier stages of this word. In Old French it was regularly to be found in an exclusively "middle" meaning (en miliu del pre)-which seems likewise to have been true of its Latin etymon medics locus. But during the Renaissance an "intermediary" notion ("the midpoint between two extremes") began to develop with this word. At first this was limited to a reference to the "juste milieu." Such a development is only to be explained by the fact that milieu was elected deliberately by the Humanists to serve as a translation of medium = "aurea mediocritas," which may be found in Latin from the Late Classical period throughout the Renaissance; it represents an exact rendering of Aristotle's geo-ov(just as his gukrptov survives in mesure that refers to a moral quality). That the Latin word itself was familiar to the French Humanists is apparent from the procedure of Brantome who introduces it in a passage written in French: "le medium qu'il faut tenir en tout" (cf. Pliny: medium quiddam tenere and a similar use in Thomas Aquinas). The first use of French milieu in this meaning that Littre attests is taken from R6gnier: "Ce milieu, des vieux tant rebattu (!), Ouil'on mit par depit a l'abri la vertu" (Satire X). Essentially the same idea is involved in the example which he cites from Corneille (though he chooses to separate this from the milieu of R6gnier): "Et nous verrons apres s'il n'est point de milieu entre le charmant et l'utile."37 In all such examples dealing with the "golden mean" we have to do with a term of the moralists. But underlying the particular connotation involved there was nevertheless an essentially geometrical reference: the midpoint determined by two extremes. And it is with this geometrical reference that we find it used by Pascal in his famous section dealing with the position of man between the two extreme abysses of the "infiniment grand" and the "infiniment petit":38
37We may note the continuance, centuries later, of this moral "juste milieu," when Edmond de Goncourt writes (Journal IX, 64): "l'aspect un peu severe de la femme, le s6rieux de sa physionomie, le milieu de gravity m6lancolique dans sequel elle se tenait...." 38 Leibniz develops this idea of the infiniment petit and the infiniment grand when dealing with his theory of the monads ("Considerations sur les Principes de Vie et sur les Natures Plastiques" [1702-16]): II est raisonnable aussi, qu'il y ait des substances captablesde perception au dessous de nous, comme il y en a au dessus; et que nostre Ame, bien loin d'estre la derniere de touted, se trouve dans an milieu dont on puisse descendre et monter.

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Bornes en tout genre, cet etat qui tient le milieu entre deux extremes se trouve en toutes nos puissances (Pens~es II, 72, Brunschvicq edition). ... rien ne peut fixer le fini entre les deux infinis, qui l'enferment et le fuient. Cela etant bien compris, je crois qu'on se tiendra en repos, chacun dans l'6tat oui la nature l'a place. Ce milieu qui nous est echu en partage etant toujours distant des extremes, qu'importe qu'un homme ait un peu plus d'intelligence des choses

(ibid.).

Thus, no longer does this term suggest a relationship to be desired: this milieu of Pascal, this locus determined by the two poles of the absolute, is that to which finite man is "doomed." never to escape; he can only resign himself, that roseau pensant!39 And yet this same milieu, though essentially a geometrical term, is not purely an abstraction; in the last example above it is clear that Pascal is thinking of an actual place in which man lives. And as his description becomes more vivid, so milieu becomes more concrete:
Voila notre etat veritable: c'est ce qui nous rend incapables de savoir certainement et d'ignorer absolument. Nous voguons sur un milieu vaste, toujours incertains et flottants, pousses d'un bout vers l'autre Quelque terme oui nous pensions nous (ibid.) affermir, il branle et nous quitte.

In this magnificent passage, where Pascal makes poetry of his own geometry, an abstraction takes on substance, a locus becomes a vast ocean-the
391How different is this conception of man's intermediate position from that of Dante! Whereas Pascal saw man as isolated, excluded from the two extremes (and, at the same time, terrified by the infinity he could not know: "le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie!"), the poet of the Middle Ages saw him as enjoying serenely an advantageous mid-position from which he could communicate with the extremes: Si ergo homo medium quoddam est corruptibilium et incorruptibilium, cum omne medium capiat natural extremorum ... (De Mon. III, 16) (According to the will of God man has two purposes: one worldly, one spiritual; consequently he must be ruled by two God-given powers, the Monarch and the Pope). Here is a suggestion of that aurea mediocritas so utterly lacking with the tragic Pascal. Perhaps Pascal's conception of mankind as trapped and thwarted by two infinities may have been suggested by Montaigne's picture of man between the two chasms of Past and Future: Nous n'avons aulcune communication a l'estre parce que toute humaine nature est toujours au milieu, entre le naistre et le mourir . . . et si, de fortune, vous fichez votre pensee a vouloir prendre son estre, ce sera ne plus ne moins que qui vouldroit empoigner leau . . . ne pouvant rien apprehender de subsistant et permanent, parce que tout ou vient en estre et n'est pas encore du tout, ou commence a mourir avant qu'il soit n6. (Apologie de Raimond Sebond) Moreover, just as, with Pascal, the dualism of man's position does not exist for God, so, with Montaigne, God is presented, in contrast to man, as timeless.

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ocean of life on which we sail.40 It is true that the poetry barely softens the rigidity of Euclidean geometry; man must always sail between the two infinities, nor ever reach a haven. Yet the concreteness of which this term is capable should not be overlooked. It is evidence perhaps of the transparency of lieu in the word milieu-a factor which may arise again, to condition the last stages of the development of milieu as we know it today. There is nothing in this use of milieu ("intermediate point or place") which could explain the selection of the French word to render the functional medium of Newton; and as for milieu in the moralistic sense ("golden means"), this utterly non-scientific juste milieu is, if anything, still farther removed from the meaning of Newton's medium. Yet, in a sense, it is just this moralistic use of milieu which may explain the later development: the connection between the Latin and French word which the Humanists had established (if only in one connection) could not be undone: an equivalence medium = milieu had become possible, to be exploited in whatever field it might be desired.41 As it turned out, this was to be the field of science.
40 That an underlying geometrical concept is involved in Pascal's use of our ter.n is recognized by Littr6 who includes this example of milieu under the heading (13) Such an interpretation, however, "le lieu ideal ou' se passe la vie des hommes." fails to define the nature of this locus, which, according to Pascal's theory, is inMoreover, it is awkward by its exorably fixed between two extremes, two infinities. very attempt to combine a basic definition ("geometrical locus") with the particular reference of the term. Simply because in Pascal's metaphor a locus becomes the ocean of life, the term is hardly to he defined as meaning "a locus in which mall passes his life." Even less suited to this interpretation is the second example (an addition of Saint-Simon to the Journal de Dangeau) which he includes under (13): Le malheur de la France fut tel que ce grand homme [Louvois] fut employee dans un milieu qui fit le malheur du royaume pour plus d'un si'cle. Not only are the two extremes again ignored; this milieu of Louvois was not his habitat. From the context it is rather clear that the two extremes are Colbert the and Louis XIV; the milieu refers to a position determined by these two-to position which Louvois was forced to take toward Louis XIV because he found himself opposed by Colbert. In astronomical terms such a relation would be rendered by conjoncture-and indeed, at the beginning of this same passage, this very word is used to refer to the luckless position of the Minister of War: M. de Louvois etoit le plus grand homme en son genre qui ait paru depuis plusieurs siecles, mais dont les talents ont ete aussi les plus funestes a la France par les conjonctures oit il s'est trouv6. 41 As a matter of fact the French word whose development had been such to render it more nearly the equivalent of the medium of Newton was (le) moyen. This term, originally adjectival (medianus) had, unlike milieu, possessed from the beginning an exclusively "intermediate" idea insofar as this could be distinguished from the "middle" idea of which medius was capable: in post-Classical Latin medianus

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To what extent this exploitation had been realized before Mime du Chatelet I do not presume to determine. But that, already in the 17th century, milieu had penetrated into the vocabulary of French physicists, is rather clearly shown by the following example from La Fontaine, where the term is used to represent the (age-old) concept of the "medium of perception":
Que j'ai toujours ha! les pensers du vulgaire! Qu'il me semble profane, injuste, et temeraire, Mettant de faux milieu entre la chose et lui, Et mesurant par soi ce qu'il voit en autrui! (Fable XXVI)

From this example it is an easy step to Mime du ChAtelet's translation in which milieu is accepted as the general equivalent of that mighty toolword of Newton, medium. But, interestingly enough, of the several mediums which could be distinguished in Newton, it was the inconspicuous, perfunctory ambient medium which was to flourish most vigorously when transplanted to French soil. Such an expression as "le milieu interstellaire" to which Lalande42 familiarly refers is hardly a part of the living language; and such definitions as (n0 7) "tout ce qui sert a etablir une communication" or (n0 15)
mons (= "the mountain in between") could serve as a contrast to medius mons (= "the middle of the mountain") for a study of such expressions as medius [summus, inferior etc.] rnons cf. Sommer, Zum attributiven Adjektiven, Munchner Sitzungsberichte, 1938). The 'intermediate' idea of medianus was continued with OF moyen, and the substantive form gradually developed a functional interpretation: "means," And that this word was overlooked, and "medium" (moyen de communication). milieu chosen in its stead, would seem to suggest that the correspondence, long ago established arbitrarily between Latin medium and French milieu, was still present to the minds of the savants. However, another factor which may well have worked against the choice of moyen Such a connotation, while always latent is its outspoken functional connotation. with Newton, had become attenuated to the extent that medium could regularly be translated "element"; and for such a translation, moyen, with its unqualified functional emphasis, could perhaps hardly serve. As for later French words of "intermediate" reference, the first to appear, intermede, was limited to the specific meaning "entr'acte," and thus put out of general The words intermediaire, intermediat, creations of the seventeenth circulation. century, entered the language much too late to offer any competition to milieu, which by that time possessed the asset of being deeply entrenched and already possessed of a store of meanings: the proverb "on ne prete qu'aux riches" applies also to linguistics. s.v. milieu; the passage in question represents 42 Vocabulaire de la Philosophie, his resume of the observations of MM. Beaulavon, Couturat, LeRoy. The expression milieu interstellaire is said to be ". . assez ancienne; elle remonte au moins ('!) l'epoque de Newton."

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"tout corps, soit solide, soit fluide, qui peut etre traverse par un autre corps, specialement la lumiere" which one finds in Littre are based on eighteenth century examples of milieu. What was destined to survive, to become so deeply rooted in the language as to continue to put forth new fruit, is the phrase "milieu ambiant" = "the element immediately surrounding a given body.43 During the eighteenth century this phrase (or the word milieu alone) seems to have been restricted to the terminology
43 One also finds substance ambiante, corps ambiant, etc., with the same meaning; according to Michaelsson, the substantivized form les ambiants (= "les corps ambiants") is to be found in Leibniz and in some translations of Newton. This technical adjective became vulgarized already in the eighteenth century, as is shown by such a phrase as les maisons ambiante~s attested by Gohin: this vulgarization was undoubtedly fostered by a syntactical gap in French; whereas in English one may say simply the houses around, in German, die Hduser rundherum, the corresponding French expression, les maisons autour, has been forbidden by the veto of grammarians. Later we shall note a still further development of this technical ambiant (as But it is fitting at this milieu, its regular partner, itself develops in reference). point to call attention to that other ambiant, which owed nothing to Newton, which indeed had been firmly entrenched in the language during the two centuries preceding the translation of his works. This is ambiant as found in the particular expresAs used by Pare sion air ambiant, to which Michaelsson himself calls attention. it must obviously have represented a scientific term, but because of its large reference, because it described the air that all men breathe, it could not. remain forever a technical phrase; thus we find in the poetry of Lamartine a reference to "l'air ambiant et pur." Even more evidence of a subjective connotation with l'air ambiant is to be seen in the following passage from Rousseau (who would have his pupil trained to possess ''eyes at the ends of his fingers" with which to orientate himself in the dark): Etes-vous enferm6 dans un edifice au milieu de la nuit, frappez des mains; vous apercevrez, au resonnement du lieu, si l'espace est grand ou petit, si vous etes au milieu ou au coin. A demi-pied d'un mur, V'air moins ambiant et plus reflechi vous porte un autre sensation au visage. According to the original meaning of air ambiant ("the air surrounding all things"), such a qualification as moins ambiant would be nonsense. Or again, the narrowly local connotation of the Newtonian ambient could not possibly apply in this case: for the air close to the corner of the wall would be, not moins ambiant but plus ambiant! It would seem that the only way to interpret this ambiant of Rousseau is to forget both Par6 and Newton: to accept it as an epithet evoking the idea of free open space: a word reflecting the reaction of a human being to what he thinks of as "the air." Thus the Dictionnaire de l'Academie which lists air ambiant solely as a "terme de physique" (in the entry of 1776-which was not changed in the editions of 1778 or 1825) fails to represent the actual status of the word in the eighteenth and Ambiant was capable of a poetic, an "airy" connotation early nineteenth century. (a connotation which may have played its part, later on, in the development of ambiance).

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of the physicists; as for its development during the following century, let us consider the summary given by Berthelot, cited in Lalande:
De la langue des physicians, ce mot a passe a la langue des biologistes sous l'influence de Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire dont une des idees dominantes etait de transporter a l'etude des 8tres vivants les procedes et les concepts en usage dans la physique et la chimie. II disait d'habitude en ce sens, 'milieu ambiant.' II s'est introduit ensuite dans le langage des sciences morales par deux voies independantes. Auguste Comte, qui l'avait emprunte au naturalist Blainville, en a fait un frequent usage. Voir notamment Cours de philosophic positive, lecon XL, 13 et suiv. 'Milieu' y est imprime d'abord en italiques, et n'est employee qu'apr.es une explication prealable de l'idee qu'il represente.-D'autre part, Taine, qui a plus que tout autre vulgarise, ce terme, l'avait emprunte 'a 'Avant-propos de la Comedie Humaine de Balzac (1841)44 oU celui-ci assimile la society a la nature et les varieties
44 Years before his coinage of the sociological term milieu (a coinage, according to Berthelot, independent of that of Comte), Balzac uses the word in a quite different sense: in the following passage from his Louis Lambert (1822) in which he describes his protagonist's psycho-physical system, milieu is used to designate the seat of cerebral activity: A des idWesnouvelles, des mots nouveaux ou des acceptions de mots anciens elargies, 6tendues, mieux definies; Lambert avait donc choisi, pour exprimer les bases de son system, quelques mots vulgaires qui deja repondaient vaguement a sa pensee. Le mot de VOLONTR servait a nommer le milieu oui la pensee fait ses evolutions; ou, dans une expression moins abstraite, la masse de force par laquelle l'homme peut reproduire, en dehors de lui-meme, les actions qui composent sa vie exterieure. La VOLITION, mot df aux reflections de Locke, exprimait l'acte par sequel l'homme use de la volonte. Le mot de PENSEE, pour lui le produit quintessential de la volonte, designait aussi le milieu oui naissaient les IDEES auxquelles elle sert de substance. L' IDEE, nom commun a toutes les creations du cerveau, constituait l'acte par sequel l'homme use de la pens6e. Ainsi la volonte, la pensee, etaient les deux moyens generateurs; la volition, l'idee, etaient les deux produits. La volition lui semblait etre l'idee arrivee de son etat abstrait a un etat concret, de sa generation fluide a une expression quasi solide, si toutefois ces mots peuvent formuler des apercus si difficiles a distinguer. Selon lui, la Pensee et les idecs sont le mouvement et les actes de notre organism interieur, comme les volitions et la volonte constituent ceux de la vie exterieure. It is to be noted that this passage is not yet inspired by St.-Hilaire's application of milieu to biology. It would seem that here we have to do still with a term of the physicists: an echo of the Newtonian medium (and the mezzo ove si crea of Leonardo); note that it is identified with moyen generateur and masse de forces. A collection of examples of the word milieu as used by Balzac is offered by El. Kredel's "Hundert franzosische Schlagw6rter," p. 119-where no reference to our passage, however, is to be found. I have not been able to find Fr. milieu used of that fluide nerveux wherein the irritable fibres of the nerves were supposed to bathe, according to the physiological theories which have been current since the discovery by Sanctorius and Harvey of the circulation of the blood (cf. Schkommodau, Der franz. psycholog. Wortschatz der zweiten Hdlfte des 18. Jhs., Leipzig 1933, p. 22): this fluid was surely called medium

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individuelles de l'homme aux especes zoologiques, dependent de leur 'milieu'. Balzac l'avait pris lui-meme directement a Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

Thus in a quick glance we may see the evolution of the laboratory phrase milieu (ambiant) into the complex sociological term of Taine and others.45 The first step noted by Berthelot might seem at first to involve no change of meaning: milieu ambiant continues to refer to the "element surrounding a given body"-in biological terms, the media in which experiments with bacteria-culture were carried out. But now this "surrounding element" is that which environs, not an inert substance, as in physics, but a living being; milieu ambiant represents the element in which an organism lives and upon which it depends for sustenance46 (a ireptixov on an infinitesimal scale!). Thus once the term passes over into the vocabulary of the biologists its reference becomes necessarily enriched. The second step (from biology to sociology) seems inevitable when we consider the general tendency of the times; a half-century before Comte, Cabanis had proclaimed that the barriers between natural science and social science were dissolved, and there continued to be an ever-growing
in German (Herder [1778]: "dass auch hier bei den Sinnen ein Medium, ein gewisses geistiges Band stattfinde"-cf. the expression flutssiges Band used at the same time). The idea of irvdlA a-esprit vitaux found a late revival in the fluide nerveux. 45 It is impossible to tell from this excerpt cited by Lalande whether Berthelot recognized in milieu ambiant the ambient medium of Newton. If this is the case, then Lalande is offering two contradictory theories as to the origin of modern milieu, for in the "summary" which precedes Berthelot, we are given to understand that our term is to be understood by reference to a "milieu interstellaire!" Milieu ambiant is today completely forgotten in France: Dawzat, Le fran~ais moderne 1941 lists the phrase among other illogical (?) expressions of uncultured people. 46 The biological neologism milieu (ambiant) represents, obviously, no "new" idea; the concept of a biological milieu existed before the coinage of this term. Indeed, we may remember the passage already cited of Pare in which he represents the air as the breeding place of parasites. Brissaud himself (cf. note 18), while relegating this discussion to the notes, acknowledges Pare's anticipation of modern bacteriology, in the following lines where he uses nineteenth-century terminology to describe this sixteenth-century theory: on leur (i.e. aux parasites) assignait un milieu d'existence,en quelque sorte une humeur de culture et un mode de propagation determines d'avance, tant6t l'eau, tant6t l'air, tant6t la terre. . Malheureusement le parasite est, en reality, un infiniment petit; sa forme et ses moyens d'action sont inappreciables a l'oeil nu. Force est de s'en prendre a son "milieu." I cannot say whether in the painter Delacroix' utterance (1845, reported by Baudelaire in L'art romantique, 1868): "Comme un reve est place dans une atmosphere coloree qui lui abt propre, de meme une conception, devenue composition, a besoin d'un milieu colored qui lui soit particulier" the underlined phrase contains a milieu = 'milieu d'existence' or = 'le juste milieu.'

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feeling of the solidarity existing between man and nature (Histoire + Nature = one histoire naturelle). As a corollary to this feeling went the belief that the physical, the biological, must be the basis for the complete study of man; in Lesson XLVI of his Cours de Philosophie positive [1826], entitled "Physique sociale," Comte states:
Relativement a la biologie, la profonde subordination philosophique de la science sociale est tenement incontestable.... A toute epoque de revolution humaine, un aperqu sociologique direct ne saurait donc 6tre scientifiquement admis . . . s'il est contradictoire aux lois connues de la nature humaine....

In the section to which Berthelot refers (Lesson XL: "Sur l'ensemble de la biologie"), we have the sociologist Comte speaking as a biologist; and yet, as he describes the "organism," it is obvious that it is of man, too, that he is speaking. This is particularly evident in the passage in which he defines the "milieu" of this organism:
II serait superflu, j'espere, de motiver expressement l'usage frequent que je ferai desormais, en biologie, du mot milieu, pour designer specialement, d'une maniere nette et rapide, non-seulement le fluide ou l'organisme est plonge, mais, en general, l'ensemble total47des circonstances exterieures, d'un genre quelconque, n6cessaires a
47The French word ensemblewent over into English first as a technical term of painting; the Oxford Dictionary cites a passage (1703) which defines what painters call "the agreement of the tout ensemble." As for the French word itself in this connection, all the passages cited by Littre (he attested no example before the eighteenth century but this use must obviously have occurred earlier) contain an emphasis upon the "wholetone" of a painting as produced by the details; the word suggests a harmony pervading the work of art. The borrowing of this French word reflects perhaps the need of a term which will refer, not simply to the whole (the entirety), but to the whole as produced by the parts: the aggregate of the parts plus their relationship to the whole; the favor enjoyed by ensemblewas no doubt influenced by the theory of Hegel and Durkheim that the Whole possesses qualities which are lacking to the constituent parts. Such a word could, of course, lend itself easily to many purposes: in the passage above it has a biologico-sociological reference; in English it was applied by Spencer (1855) to psychology. Again it could become trivialized, limited to a specific reference, as is illustrated in German by its application to a theatrical troupe, or, in English, to a costume including a (harmonizing) dress and coat. In English, the original and more abstract connotation still persists; in German this is represented, not only by the French word, but by the native puristic expression das Gesamt(patterned after das All), coined by the GeorgeKreis. To this das Gesamt may be compared the Italian l'insieme, which likewise seems to represent a modern abstraction from an old term, used to render French ensemble;cf. the comment of Mussafia on the lines of the Decamerone(lIla giorn.,

introd.):

parendo loro ... di maravigliosa bellezza tuttoinsieme, piuiintentamente le parti di quello (a palace) cominciarono a guardare According to the editor: "Oggi si direbbe pessimamente (!) nell' insieme o nel suo
insieme."

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existence de chaque organism determine. Ceux qui auront suffisammeit m'dit' sur le r6le capital que doit remplir, dalns toute biologie positive, lidle correspondante, ne me reprocheront pas, sans doute, introduction de cette expression nouvelle. Quant a moi, la spontaneity avec laquelle elle sest si souvenit presentee sous ma plume, malgre ma constant aversion pour le neologisme systematique, ne me permet guere de douter que ce terme abstrait ne manquat reellement jusqu'ici a la science des corps vivants.

Thus the meaning of this biologico-sociological term becomes still further extended to include "the total ensemble of exterior circumstances, of whatever sort, upon which the existence of a given organism depends." And it was in this larger reference that Balzac, too, used milieu in his Introduction (1841) to that colossal work in which he attempted (as he did in his several Physiologies [!]) to analyze the relationship existing between the physical and social environment and the human subjects of his study. But much more than extension of meaning was involved as this word passed through its several stages; once the term is used to refer to the environment of a living being, be he man or beast, there must necessarily be present an emphasis on the determining, conditioning efficacy of the milieu, for it is indispensable to the life of the organism. As regards Comte himself the relationship between the organism and its milieu is represented as beneficent. That which conditions life is a protector, entering into union with that which it envelops; frequently he speaks of the harmony existing between the two. (thus echoing the "sympathy" of the ancients): ". . . une telle harmonie entre l'Atre vivant et le milieu correspondent ... tout ce qui entoure (!) les corps vivants" (cf. also pp. 206, 210, 276). It is to be noted however, that he speaks of the "milieu correspondent"and therefore is thinking of that ideal harmony which should obtain. But with those who follow Comte there is less concern with the "milieu correspondant," and any idea of harmony between the two tends to disappear; the milieu, all-powerful, is represented as mindless of man, who is its finished product, its creature. According to Taine the etat moral of a people is conditioned by mechanics ("II n'y a ici comme partout qu'un probl'me de mecanique"). 48 Taine was unable to see in nature anything
48 Introduction to the Histoire de la litterature anglaise (1863). Taine goes on to say that, just as a river, taking its source at the top of a hill, will spread its waters gradually until all the soil of the lowlands is penetrated, so the mental disposition of a people spreads to all aspects of its civilization. In connection with these two statements, I should like to quote a preceding passage, in which Taine develops his theme of race, milieu and momentas determining factors of man: Lorsqu'on a ainsi constatd la structure interieure d'une race, il faut considerer le milieu dans lequel elle vit. Car lhomme n'est pas seul dans le monde; la nature lenveloppe et les autres hommes lentourent; sur le pli

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else but the forces conditioning human life: a landscape for him, as Brunetiere puts it, n'est pas un paysage .. . mais un 'milieu'-what a strangely
primitif and permanent viennent s'etaler les plis accidentels et secondaires, et les circonstances physiques ou sociales derangent ou completent le naturel qui leur est livre. Tant6t le climat a fait son effet. . -Tantot -Tantot les circonstances politiques ont travaill.. enfin les conditions sociales ont imprime leur marque.... -Que 1'on regarde autour de soi les instincts r6gulateurs et les faculties implant6es dans une race . . . on y d6couvrira le plus souvent l'oeuvre de quelqu'une de ces situations prolongees, de ces circonstances enveloppantes, de ces persistantes et gigantesques pressions exerc6es sur un amas d'hommes ... lorsque nous avons considered la race, le milieu, le moment, c'est 'adire le ressort du dedans, la pression du dehors et l'impulsion d6ja' acquise, nous avons epuise. toutes les causes possibles du mouvement. To what indiscriminate borrowing from the natural sciences does Taine resort in his discussion of social and moral sciences! La nature les enveloppe, les circonstances enveloppantes, (echoes of ambiens and 7rEpteXov!) are based upon earlier biological phrases, and are themselves, with Taine, fused with references to geology (le pli permanent-les plis accidentels). Again, le moment unites the momentum, the impulse of the phycisists with the idea of the "moment": "l'impulsion d6ja' acquise" (in another passage we find" . . . outre l'impulsion permanent et le milieu donee, If we add to all this the above-mentioned appeal to il y a la vitesse acquise"). mechanics and to soil-erosion, we have an extraordinary welter of metaphors and analogies, no one of which alone is quite adequate, and the accumulation of which tends precisely to thwart that vigor and cogency which the great Positivist so greatly desired to introduce into his treatment of social theory. In an article dealing with the famous three factors of Taine, Mr. Winthrop H1. Rice (Romanic Review, XXX, 273) has sought to prove that le moment should be eliminated as a constituent part of the Tainian system, since it is itself a product of the other two; in making his point he appeals to the hesitations of Taine and his commentators in regard to the exact relation obtaining between the three factors. To assume, as does Mr. Rice, that le moment is the product of race and milieu as water is the product of hydrogen and oxygen (for such is his chemical analogy) is to betray a lack of historical feeling and to out-Taine Taine in the application of natural to social science. The "hesitations" of Taine, that is to say his elastic use of terms which prevent a "mutually exclusive" interpretation, represent rather a felix culpa: this positivist had at least so much of the feeling for history as to know that it could not be reduced to a given number of separate elements with quite the absolutism of chemistry. And it was perhaps out of remorse for his over-generous endorsement of the parallel between natural and social sciences that Taine introduced the temporal element along with race and milieu, thereby saving something of the rights of history. Le moment is not superfluous in Taine's system, but represents a recognition of the necessity to take into account the imponderable. It was, however, only a partial recognition, and neither the introduction of this term, nor his salutary "hesitations" were adequate to off-set his still too rigid adherence to naturalistic parallels-the fundamental error of which is clearly set forth by Hermann Gmelin, "Franzosische Geistesform in Sainte-Beuve, Renan und Taine" (1934), p. 75: Am schwierigsten endlich gestaltet sich die Zusammendraingung der

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anthropomorphic encroachment upon nature by a mechanics whose laws were ostensibly drawn from nature ! Little wonder, then, that the mechaunendlich ahgewandelten biographischl-biologischeni Entwicklungszustande Sainte-Beuve hatte hier biologisch empin den einen Knoten des Moments. findend an bestinm te gluckli che oder ungltickliche Wachstumsstadien an die Kr~ifte-z usammenwirkung gedachlt, Taine mechanisch-physikalisch (1Icel1 Produkt "Moment" dann selbst deIr Rasse- und 11Iilicukomponenten, aufgefasst werden kann. wieder als Kausalititskomponente Gerade hei der Betrachtung dieses Momentbegriffs erliebt sich am dringendsten (lie Frage, ob die dIei heriihmten methodisclien Grundbegriffe zu Taines als gestaltende Kriifte oder als methodische Gesichtspunkte betrachten sind, ob sie Triebfedern eines 1Lechanisnius oder Hilfsmnittel der Zergliederung und Darstellung sein sollen. Taine selbst hat auf diesel Frage verschiedene Antworten gegebein und sich von eiiner mathenmatischAuffassung zu cirner vorsichtfigeren "b)iomechanischen" mechanischen gewandelt. One might have expected that the Tainiarn theory could have been anticipated l)y such a thinker as Machiavelli, since for him "states" were comparable to products of nature: come tutte laltre cose della natura che nascono e crescono presto... non possono avere le bare e corresl)ondenzie loro in modo, che il primo tempo avverso non le spenga. But the Italian was more concerned with the problem of the aitiology of things (le cagioni delle cose) an(l it was his conviction that since man's conditions are everywhere the same, so history must nee(ls repeat itself. Thus, hy virtue of this causal trend of thought, he could not envisage the contrast existing between the ensemble of physical and mental conditions brought about l)y history, and the single phenomenon; Luigi Russo (Ritratti e disegni storici, p. 80) discusses the modern (as opposed to the Machiavellian) view: Noi inoderni venianmo abbandonando questo rapporto (Ii causality e le cause, nel loro valore causale esterno, sparisecono per cedlere alla logica interna che nasee e si sviluppa nell' intimo delle cose stesse e degli avvenimenti. On the other hand Machiavelli (like Guieciardini) accepte(l the existence of occult forces of nature, forces unfused with those working in the things themselves; he believed that spirits floated in the air, influencing the shape of things to come (thanks Ricordi politici e to . . . "quella virtii superior che muove tutto"-Guicciardini, civili na 211); he had not reached even the conception of Descartes according to which a fusion between aerial influences and the forces working within man, was the matiere subtile. realized-by Even less ahle to envisage the Tainian conception was Vico, the Italian father of modern Geisteswissenschaft: for him "nature" is identical with "history" (natura = is historicized; or, in the words of Auerbach, in his article on nascimento)-nature natura in Vico (Arch. ronw.XXI, 177): Die Natur der Dinge ist nichts ffir sich selbst; sie ist identisch mit der jeweiligen geschichtfichen Lage, aus dei (lie 1)inge entstehen. Vico, the fanaticist of "historicized nature," is in opposition to hoth of the naturalistic historians, Taine and Machiavelli.

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nistic explanation of man should appeal to the romanciers; Zola, basing himself upon Taine, was to set himself the task of exposing, in his experimental novel: "les rouages des manifestations intellectuelles et sensuelles, teller que la physiologic nous les expliquera, sous49 les influences de l'h6redite et des circonstancesambiantes50 . . . puis montrer l'homme vivant dans le milieu social... ." Indeed, man may even be considered to be the victim of his environment, as that which conditions and modifies life becomes the enemy of the living individual; already in the novels of Comte's contemporary, Balzac, there are many such victims to be found.5'
49 Adverbial locutions of this sort, introduced by sous, dans, etc., afford examples of what I have called "inszenierende Adverbialbestimmungen" (Stilstudien I, 7). Such expressions serve, as it were, as determinants of the "milieu" and, appearing with naturalists like Zola, Huysmans etc., they reveal the influence of a Weltanschauung on style. Taine himself, turned novelist, used the same stylistic device in his T'homas Graindorge: Un juge: il s'est desseche dans une salle trop chaude, sous le bavaradage des avocats, parmi les physionomies basses et inquietes, dans les mauvaises exhalaisons, parmi les odeurs douteuses. This passage brings out vividly the activity of the "milieu" as a determinant of the individual. 50 The ambient which is to be found in this expression of Zola's, and in other similar expressions: (cf. syste'me ambiant, nature ambiante, circonstances ambiantes of Comte, Lesson XL, pp. 201-02), most probably represents a continuation of the technical epithet which was formerly use to accompany milieu (medium ambiens, In spite of the fact that this adjective became rare in combination with milieu once this noun became possessed of a sociological reference (cf. however the physiologico-sociological milieu ambiant of Claude Bernard below), still it seems only reasonable to suppose that the long association between the two words made it possible for ambiant to suggest milieu in its new reference: indeed les circonstances amrbiantes would not be ill-translated as "les circonstances du milieu." 51 The widespread use of the English word mentality and of its descendants mentality and Mentalitdt is probably due to the desire of the nineteenth century to give a firm and scientific basis to the study of the human mind: mentality is a "bent of mind" which is itself non-creative but the product of influences. It is significant that this English word, coined in the seventeenth century and originally meaning "the fact of being intellectual" (cf. personality "the fact of being a person") came to acquire a fatalistic connotation in the European languages which borrowed it as a term of psychology (a borrowing for which Emerson was largely responsible: cf. "Hudibras has the same hard mentality"-1865). Mentality is something inevitably connected with a particular country, social setting, profession, etc.; its restriction to "types" made for a pejorative connotation. According to Dauzat (Dictionnaire Htymologique) Edmond Scherer (+ 1880) inveighed against this neologism in France; and Andre Therive (Querelles de language I [1929] pp. 168-9) tells the following anecdote which reveals the nuance of defeatism in the word rnentalite (particularly when taken together with the a-t-on and resigned: one has by fate a certain mentality): La derniere apres-midi qu'il vecut, (31 juillet 1914). Jaures rencontra a la buvette de la Chambre M. Bonnefous qui lui dit:

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Because of the emphasis of determinism so vividly present with this scientific term (for milieu was a scientific term whether used by the biologico-sociologist Comte or by the novelist Balzac), it was not long
-Quelle mentality a-t-on dans les milieux ouvriers? -On est rdsign6, r6pondit Jaures avec motion. Mais iHse ressaisit et ajouta: "Pourquoi employez-vous ce mot mentality? C'est un mot mal fait, obscur, qui ne peut pas signifier ce qu'on entend lui faire dire dans le langage courant, oAil a pris une place qu'il tient mal et ne merite pas." Thrive states that this "pedantic" word means simply "etat d'esprit, humeur, caractere, tour d'esprit, nature" and that it adds nothing to these terms; but I would object that it adds precisely the connotation of fatalism. Dauzat claims that the word became quite common in France after the first World War, but Proust attests the first beginnings of its flowering at the time of the Dreyfus case; his duc de Guermantes, prone as he is to accept neologisms in his speech because they sound progressive, says: Ah! mentality! j'en prends note, je le resservirai . Mentality me plait! Il y a comme cela des mots nouveaux qu'on lance, mais ils ne durent
pas....

This prophesy, however, has not been realized; one finds such sentences attested for 1909as Cl. de Hohenloheavait une mentalityde souverain (Bebernitz, Neubildungen u. Neuerscheinungen der frz. Spr.); in 1915 a pamphlet was published by Emile Durkheim entitled "'L'Allemagne au-dessus de tout,' la mentality allemande et la guerre." The persistence of the fatalistic nuance of mentality may also be seen in Levy-Bruhl's use of the phrase mentality primitive in reference to those tendencies
and habits which dominate and determine the primitive mind (". . . actives au plus

profond de nous-memes, rebelles a l'analyse, irreductibles a la pensee claire," Nouv. Rev. Fr. XLI, 352). The German Mentalitdt, borrowed in turn from the French, is first attested in the works of H. S. Chamberlain, the Englishman turned German, to whom its subsequent widespread use may perhaps be attributed ("das Denken und Empfinden des Franzosen, das, was er mit einem schlechten, dem amerikanischen (!) Englisch entnommenen Wort la mentality nennt"; cf. Schulz-Baseler, Fremdworterbuch). The pessimistic overtones of the term, especially as applied to a certain group to represent that which is alien to others, is reflected in such passages as the following
from von Billow (1917): ". . . vermag sich schwer in die M. anderer hineinzudenken. Diese Schwierigkeit, die Denkweise der anderen zu verstehen....." or from Lewin-

sohn (1925): "die Mentalitat der Inflationszeit, an der die deutsche Wirtschaft seit der Stabilisierung krankt und die sie noch nicht iuberwundenhat" (cf. also such an expression as Berufsmentalitdt,1926). The terms of the purists (Geistesrichtung) which retain something of the creative connotation of German Geist, Geistigkeit illustrate this fatalism to a much lesser degree. The Italian mentality may also be traced to French. Panzini in his Dizionario moderno (1927) gives this characteristic example: "La mentality dei tedeschi e diversa della nostra." Mentality is not a gift of the gods but an Apple of Discord; it diversifies rather than unites mankind. This restrictive connotation may be sensed in many of Mussolini's slogans: "Bisogna che gli Italiani a poco a poco si facciano una mentality insulare"; "gli Italiani debbono farsi una mentality' autarchica" (E. Adami, La lingua di Mussolini, p. 105); one may also note here the voli-

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before its spatial reference ("that which surrounds a living being")52was ignored. Thus Claude Bernard, thinking of milieu simply in terms of "an ensemble of determining factors" was able to coin a milieu interieur (organique, interne, intime), which he introduced as a counterpart of the environing "milieu"-this he was careful to designate as the milieu exte'rieur ambientt, cosmique).3 These terms are explained in the following passage from his "Introduction a l'etude de la medecine experimentale" (1865), where he refers to a theory of his previously outlined in his lectures on physiology at the School of Medicine in Paris (and, particularly, in his opening lecture of December 17, 1856):
Dans 1'experimentation sur les corps bruts, il n'y a a tenir compte que d'un seul milieu, c'est le milieu cosmique exterieur: tandis que chez les etres vivants eleves, tional twist given by the modern fashioners of autocracy to expressions of a fatalistic origin-as Barres did with climat. The original discovery of mentality, in England, was followed by the discovery, in Germany of "the . .. man" (der gothische Mensch, Worringer; der 6konomische Mensch, Spranger): that is, a national, racial, social type of man "conditioned" by objective factors. The name of this "man" goes back, in a sense, to such phrases as the Baconian homo faber; but whereas this suggests, optimistically, a faber quality which is characteristic of man in general, our modern homo oeconomicus, gothicus, etc., stems from the science of the zoologists and botanists which classifies by species and subspecies. 52 A reversal of the relationship expressed by the phrase l'homme et son milieu (this modern affirmation of an old concept), has lately taken place at the hands of the Genevan linguist, A. Sechehaye, who uses the word milieu in reference, not only to that which contains and determines man, but to man himself, seen as "container" and determinant factor: ... nous constituerons la linguistique, science de la langue, sur sa propre base qui est la science de la langue en soi.... Seulement nous ne pourrons le faire que si nous avons commence a l'emboiter tout entire dans son milieu

humain, c'est-a-dire dans toutesles conditions qui expliquentd'abord l'apparition du langage pregrammatical: connaissance de l'homme et son milieu, de ses reactions emotives.... (Vox romanica, V, p. 10) In the first lines language is presented as originating in a milieu (a "boxed-in" milieu: embotter) which, for Sechehaye, is none other than man himself-that human entity capable of producing language. Man, this "human milieu" has become an objective rEp Exov in relationship to language. Language achieves personification; it is a living thing engendered and fed by the human "factor," and man is seen as the "conditioning circumstance" by reference to which Language may be explained. (It may be noted, however, that the two concepts of milieu may live side by side; in the last line the theme "l'homme et son milieu" reappears.) 53 One may note a comparable semantic development in the case of the word In ancient physics this term was used to quintessence (= "the fifth essence"). designate the air (i.e. the fifth element) which surrounded an object, but, due to the alchemistic conception of air as representing the finest "part" of an object, there developed the meaning "innate, innermost quality" (the "essence"): what was originally outside is now within.

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et le

il y a au moins deux milieux A considered: le milieu exte'rieur, ou extra-organique, milieu int~rieur ou intra-organique (p. 108).

Chez tous les etres vivants le milieu interieur, qui est un veritable produit de lorganisme, conserve des rapports necessaires d'6echanges et d'equilibres avec le milieu cosmique exterieur; mais 'a measure que l'organisme devient plus parfait, le milieu organique se specialise et s'isole en quelque sorte de plus en plus du milieu ambient (p. 110). Le milieu interieur de l'animal 'a sang chaud se met plus difficilement en equilibre avec le milieu cosmique exterieur (p. 106). Les phenomenes exterieurs sont le resultat d'une foule de proprietes intimes d'elements organiques dont les manifestations sont li6es aux conditions physicochimiques de milieux internes dans lesquels ils sont plonges (p. 107).14

Thus Determinism insinuates itself even under the skin of the individual. Man is at the mercy, not only of the milieu exterieur of which he is the product, but also of the milieu interieur55 which his own organism has pro54 Anticipatory, to some extent of Bernard's theory of the milieu interieur is the very creation of the substantive inneite. The adjective itself was long entrenched in the language (cf. the idees innees of Descartes), but the formation of the abstract noun, representing that which is innate as a fixed entity, had to wait upon the phrenologist Gall who coined it in 1810 (Anatomie et physiologic du system nerveux en general et du cerveauen particulier). Thus the creation of the term inne'itenot only had a physical background; it is also the off-spring of a deterministic attitude (phrenology!) toward potential individual capacity. It is interesting, in this connection, to consider the ancient Eastern concept of Karman; the Sanskrit scholar, Professor Dumont of Johns Hopkins University, has written me the following analysis: "The idea of the 'milieu intdrieur' as a determining factor in the behavior of the individual, is strangely similar to the Karman theory of Indian philosophy-particularly to the Samskdra theory of the Yoga system of Patafijati (the Samskaras may be defined as the subsconscious impressions or tendencies of the individual). Every deed, (karman), every sensation, every experience leaves its impression on the mind of a being, and such impressions, accumulating in the course of a life-time, come to form an aggregate of tendencies which represent a constant factor. These tendencies moreover, are susceptible of revival in subsequent existences: after the death of an individual, his Karman, representing the sum total of the Sam.skaras which are the product of his (good or bad) actions, accompany him in his next existence, where they, in turn, determine to a certain extent, what his behavior, good or bad, shall be." 66 The catholic essayist Charles Du Bos has recently made use of the term coined by Claude Bernard, in his article "Sur le 'milieu interieur' chez Flaubert" (Approximations I, 1923). He deals with the "inner milieu" of Flaubert, as representing, not the creative essence of the novelist, but the passive, deterministic elements in his nature; as representing a kind of innate earthiness and fatal brutishness which only the will of the great artist that Flaubert was could eventually overcome. He comments as follows on this line from Flaubert's Correspondance: Au fond, je suis 1'hommedes brouillards et c'est a force de patience

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duced (and any possibility of equilibrium, of harmony, between the two milieu is granted only to the lower orders of creation); man must realize that he is a given sum total. Milieu is now tragic, and man's daily life, with its spiritual aspirations, its inept fight against the "moles" of milieu, tragicomic. (Cf. E. Auerbach, "Uber die ernste Nachahmung des Alltdglichen" in Travauxdu seminaire roman d'Istanbul I, 1932; as for the German term der Alltag, Sainte-Beuve felt a need for a French equivalent, and coined le tous-les ours through which to convey the Bovary-nuance of tedious dullness.) It is only reasonable to suppose that the exponents of the "milieutheory" took pleasure in their own belief; that they enjoyed exposing "les rouages" and took pride in their explanation of man as the product of determining factors. And many of those who read them, welcomed, perhaps, this teaching which relieved man of all individual responsibility. As Nietzsche ironically remarked in 1885: "the 'milieu-theory' is now the most satisfying; everything exerts influence and the result is man himself" (cf. also: "die Theorie vom milieu, eine wahre Neurotiker-Theorie"). But there were others to whom it was all-oppressive and who rebelled against it. Soon after the publication of Taine's Histoire de la literature anglaise, in which he sought to "explain" artists themselves, a protest was raised against him-by the artists! In the Journal of the Goncourt brothers (III, 9) we find a denial of the inevitable triumph of the milieu over the individual:
Taine proclame que tous les hommes de talent sont des produits de leur milieu. Nous soutenons le contraire.... Gautier vient a notre appui, et soutient que la cervelle d'un artiste est la meme du temps des Pharaons que maintenant ! Quant aux et d'6tude que je me suis d6barrass6 de toutela graisse blanchatre qui noyait mes muscles. "On ne saurait mieux d6crire "le milieu int6rieur" qui dans le cas de Flauune masse imposante par son seul volume, mais indiff6renci6e bert est donned: et comme engourdie, qui laisse voir a 1'examen des milliers de mouvements infinit6simaux dont chacun int6resse l'ensemble de la masse elle-meme: une bete allong6e oA se surprend en tous sens le travail aveugle des animalcules qui la composent. Mens agitat molem; mais ici c'est la moles seule dont, a l'origine, on constate la presence; la mens y est encore toute englu6e, toute abim6e. Nulle trace de ces accents, de ces differences de relief, de ces naissantes directions de cours d'eau par ou'le plus souvent le g6nie promis a la maitrise dessine les premiers lineaments de sa carte de g6ographie future" (p. 160). It is significant that this earth-bound Flaubert should be chosen as representing an example of the typical "milieu int6rieur." (One may have noted in this passage the mixture of metaphors, in the manner of Taine, drawn from various natural sciences.)

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bourgeois, qu'il appelle des neants fluides, il se peut que leur cervelle se soit modifie'e....

This hardly amounts to a thorough-going repudiation of the 'milieutheory," since it is here a question of the "homme du talent" alone; indeed Gautier seems quite willing to leave the masses to their fate, so long as the artist is safe from the clutches of the milieu. But with the Goncourts there is less snobbishness; they evidently resented the implications which this theory held for mankind in general. Their disbelief in the fatalistic dogmas of their time may perhaps be sensed in their use of the term milieu itself. The milieu of the passage below has no overtones of fatalism or materialism; it is used poetically to suggest a pleasant spiritual climate or atmosphere:
La description materielle des choses et des lieux n'est point dans le roman, telle que nous la comprenons, la description pour la description. Elle est le moyen de transporter le lecteur dans un certain milieu favorable a l'emotion morale qui doit jaillir de ces choses et de ces lieux.

Zola himself, when describing the technique of the Goncourts, suggests how keenly they feel that man belongsto his milieu:
Ils le [i.e., a person] voient dans son milieu, dans l'air ouiil trempe avec le rire de son visage, le coup de soleil qui le frappe, le fond56. .. sur sequel il se detache de
56 It is particularly interesting that in this passage fond is used to alternate with milieu, for in English, particularly in American English, the word backgroundhas much of the connotation of "milieu." This English word, introduced in the eighteenth century as a means of rendering fond (probably through the intermediary of GermanHintergrund),was originally a term of art-criticism; today, rather outmoded in this usage, it tends to be replaced by the French word decor. It may also refer, as an artistic term, to the aggregate, to the collective, as opposed to the detail. In a comment which I read of an exhibit of paintings at the National Gallery in Washington, the critic says of certain outstanding paintings: They are the exhibits that probably will be best and longest remembered, but they do not by any means overshadow the background against which they are set. It is that collective 'background,' a wholly inadequate word, I am aware, that the visitor will recall perhaps not in detail but as a splendid panorama of painting. Here, background is nearly identical with "panorama." How this artistic term came to express the idea of a 'cultural background' is to be explained perhaps by the influence of the language of that "narrative" school of French historians (Thierry, Michelet), who liked to sketch a (cultural) background for their heroes in their "historical tableaux." But this term differs in several re, spects from milieu as a reference to cultural background. In this reference it is largely retrospective; "a man of no background," "a man of college background," etc., is a person who gives the impression of having lived in a certain "milieu" in former days. It would be impossible to say "he is now living in an excellent back-

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tout ce qui le circonstancie et lui sert de cadre. L'art nouveau est la: on n'etudie plus les hommes comme de simples curiosities ... degages de la nature ambiante.

-belongs, not as a captive to his jailor, but as a man to his home. And finally in the phrase which served to express the program of the Goncourts we feel once again the warm embrace of the ireptExov:"l'habitant et la coquille, l'homme et le milieu." Finally in 1891 we find Edmond de Goncourt with the expression l'ambiance des milieu:
on soutenait que l'homme de l'Occident 6tait une individuality plus entire, plus d6tachee, plus en relief sur la nature, moins mange par l'ambiance des milieu, par cela m~me une individuality plus deteneuse d'une volont6 propre que l'homme de l'Orient.-7

This passage presents the conception of Western man as triumphant (at least in comparison with his brother of the East) over his environment, as possessing a will and an individuality of clear relief; his (relative) independence is assured, not only in the series of phrases introduced by plus, but also in the expression "moins mang6 par l'ambiance des milieux." And yet, in this one terrible phrase, the picture which we see (though its application to Western man is denied) is the picture of man being eaten by the thing that has spawned him: we see the "milieu" of Taine at its work, and more vividly than we may see it in all the dogmas of the sociologists. We hear the voice, not of a scientist, but of a man who aligns himself with suffering humanity-a man who is also a creative artist and a master of style. For it is technically a stylistic manoeuvre which is involved in the phrase First of all, it is evident that a reversal of roles l'ambiance des milieu. has taken place in regard to noun and modifier: the adjective ambient, once used to modify milieu, and later retained as an epithet suggestive of the quality of the "milieu," has now become the predominant element. The quality, the essence, of the "milieu" has been released, made supreme;
ground." Again, the "background" of an individual is something much more intimately associated with him than would be his "milieu"; it represents, perhaps, that part of one's "milieu" which one has absorbed, which can be carried around with one-a "milieu ext6rieur" become a "milieu int6rieur" (one has a background, one lives in a milieu). For this reason the word may serve almost as the equivalent of "training" (Webster's Dictionary, 1940ed. includes this among the several definitions of background). There is rather much of this implication in "a man of college background" (though a "milieu" is still suggested); and it is even possible to say
"she has (or even, " . . . is acquiring . . .") a background for statistical
57 This

work."

passage, cited from the first entry for 1891 in the Journal, represents the earliest appearance of the word ambiance in French, according to the evidence of Michaelsson's examples.

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a factual situation has been reduced to its abstract principle, by the postulation of an entity: i'ambiance des milieu; a definition has been achieved. And, simply to define an unhappy situation frees us somewhat from its oppression; the formulation of a principle, even a hated principle, partakes of the innate freedom of human thought. This much could have been achieved merely by the substantivization of the adjective :* l'ambiant des milieux."8 But, in the nineteenth century, such a coinage as l'ambiant was no longer possible: the procedure illustrated by such formations as l'expedient, l'inconvenient, etc. (once created to correspond to the substantivization of the neuter of the Latin participle by Thomistic writers) had fallen into desuetude. Another formation was necessary; this Goncourt (or the person who, according to his report, is represented as using the expression) found in the suffix -ance. And, due to this suffix, his new-born substantive was endowed with a connotation much greater than l'ambiant might have achieved, for -ance (derived from a substantivization of the neuter plural of the participle: -ant-ia, and always a learned formation in French and Romance generally cf. my remarks in Le fran~ais moderne276) has ever suggested the perpetuationof a state of being, even though this state may be the result of an act itself transient: la souvenance is an eternal residue. Revived by the Romanticists, who delighted in seeing the eternal even in the passing,59this suffix was kept alive by the Symbolists and Impressionists who followed them, thus Goncourt was enabled to create a word which would represent not only an essence, but an essence given form a quality with an existence, a subsistency, a consistency of its own. For the mere reversal of substantive and modifier may simply lift up out of the flow of things a passing sensation, in its relative and ephemeral autonomy; in the following passage of E. de Goncourt: from Les freres Zemrnrgano
tous les emois anxieux et les frissonnements qui se levent des choses contemporaines, et sous le gris et le sans couleur des apparences, leur tragique, leur dramatique,

leur poignant morne, elle (la clownerie anglaise) en fait sa proie pour les resservir au public dans l'acrobatisme,

an essence, an idea, is formulated (the grayness of things rather than things that are gray), but it is the idea of the transient: grayness is volatile,
53 The formulation of a principle is always involved when an erstwhile modifier takes oil the function of an abstractsubstantive: Emupar le tragiquede leur situation . leur situation tragique. But this does-not apply to such cases as instead of des luisants de satin (Daudet), for des luisants refers, not to an abstraction, a quality -but to activity: "glimmerings of satin." 59 Cf. the phrase coined by Chateaubriand: l'unissonance des vagues, which seems to assume a kind of pre-established harmony, "consonance," in the casual sounds of the waves.

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a bulle de savon, it is extracted from the things so that it is free to disappear. Similarly the coinage of a l'ambiant des milieu need show only that an essence had been perceived, had produced a sensation for the moment. But in the phrase with which we are concerned, the phenomenon of the "ambient," once perceived, has been given substance and eternality-a incorruptible body.60 Once coined, ambiance entered upon a brilliant career (traced by Michaelsson) in the literary language, a word evocative of a spiritual climate emanating from, hovering over, a milieu-or even a thing. or atmosphere,6"
60 It may be noted that with the Goncourts the suffix-ance was rare; indeed, nervous impressionists that they were, they seldom sought to fix the eternal and immobile, but rather to high-light, for the moment, the sensation-producing elements of the passing scene (even in their titles we find them focusing attention on sensation, while extracting therefrom an idea: "Id6es et sensations" !). 61 Comparable to ambiance are the words atmosphereand climat, which likewise may refer to a psychic atmosphere. It is interesting to note that the difference obtaining between the two on the natural plane exists also on the spiritual. The "atmosphere" of a group or of a place may be subject to continuous change, even as is the atmosphere we breathe; but the "climat," that ensemble of indefinable elements in which the soul of man will thrive or wither (as analyzed so acutely today by Maurois) is a comparatively constant factor. was created by seventeenth century physicists out of classical The word atmosphere word-material, as was the use of that time. According to the NED "the name was invented for the ring or orb of vapor or 'vaporous air' supposed to be exhaled from the body of a planet, and to be part of it, which the air itself was not considered to be; it was extended to the portion of surrounding air occupied by this, or supposed to be, in any way, "within the sphere of the activity" of the planet (Phillips 1896), and, finally, with the progress of science, to the supposed limited aeriform environment of the earth or other planetary or stellar body."-This "surrounding air" reminds us of aer ambiens. The transfer to the spiritual may be due to contemporary naturalistic explanations of the development of mental peculiarities, such as the theory of l'abb6 du Bos on the genius ostensibly depending "on the air": this in turn is supposed to depend " . . . de la quality des emanations que l'air enveloppe. Suivant que la terre est compose, 1'air qui l'enserre est diff6rent"-the "emanations" of the earth, i.e. the atmosphere of the earth, condition the mental development of man (the thesis of Montesquieu); consequently there must be different mental atmospheres. The literal German translation of atmo-sphaerais Dunstkreis; this word is well known from the passage of Goethe's Faust describing the particular atmosphere of Gretchen's room: Sie (= Gretchen) wird bei einer Nachbarin sein. Indessen konnt Ihr ganz allein An aller Hoffnung kfinftiger Freuden In ihrem Dunstkreis satt Euch weiden and Dunstkreis cf. Schulz(-Baseler) On the metaphorical use of the words Atmosphdre (he quotes, for example, from Bodmer's Noah: Atmosphdrdes Sterns; in this same work we find also Dunstkreis der Erde, Luftkreis um den Kometen, even Dunstmeer, welches die Sonn' -aus ihn [the comet] herauszieht); in general Dunstkreis seems to

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Charles Bally said of the French word chef, "(i]) m'apparalt envelopp6 d'une ambiance litteraire"; it is a word of pure poetry and one which
have come to possess a more pejorative meaning than Atmosphdre (though in Herder's time Atmosphdrewas rather pejorative: "[ die Muse] hat sich aus der Sphare der Katheder versetzt"): e.g., der Dunstkreis der Politik des Lebensin die Atmosphdre itself is no match suggests the mephitic vapours of murky intrigue. But Atmosphdre for the French or English word; it is rather Stimmung (that untranslatable term) that has the suggestiveness and wide reference that atmospherehas acquired in these languages. In regard to the word climat one should consult Michaelsson and the article of Miss Burkart, Arch. rom. XXI, p. 185, to which I would add only a few remarks. First, there is to be noted a curious use of climat by Thibaudet (a use other than that discussed by Miss Burkart, which involves the "geographic conditionedness" of spiritual phenomena). In fact, in the preface to his posthumous Histoire de la litteraturefrangaise (1936) Thibaudet bestows upon climat a temporal meaning (= "time area"), using it as synonomous with the term empires which Bossuet, in his Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle, applied to the successive civilizations of the ancient empires of the Assyrians, Persians, Greco-Macedonians, and Romans. Similarly, Thibaudet speaks of the quatregrands climats successifs (the Middle Ages, humanism, classicism and romanticism); there are also the quatre grandes natures (or: ordres) litteraires, or the ensembles of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France. With this writer there is the tendency to harmonize natural and historical phenomena, a tendency which expresses itself in the coupling of natures, climats with empires, ordres, and which culminates in the final sentence of his work which contains a tetralogy of the stages of physical development. Much more geometrical-minded than Spengler, Thibaudet delights in the homologous positions of phenomena and numerical symbolism: L'histoire d'une littdrature symbolise avec le fait 6lmentaire d'une personne: fait tellement elementaire qu'il pourrait 8tre incorpore A l'etat et la mort. civil et religieux comme la vie, la naissance, le marriage The verbal derivative of climat, s'acclimater, is first attested in 1787-88 (English to acclimate appears in 1792, and German akklimatisieren, Spanish aclimatarse in the second half of the eighteenth century); it originally meant "to habituate oneself to a certain climate," but, as the reference of climat itself broadened, the verb came to adopt the broader meaning "to adapt oneself to conditions." According to F. Gohin ("Les transformations de la langue frangaisependant la deuxieme moitie du XVIIIe siecle," p. 253) the figurative meaning is first attested in Delille's Les jardins (I was unable to find the passage in question). The German sich akklimatisieren is to be found in the same use in Gaudy (1839); in regard to modern usage, I have the feeling that it is the genuinely Germansich einleben, originally used to suggest what we call today Einfahlung, "empathy" (sich einleben in eine Zeit, eine Dichtung), which, in a secondary use, has come to take the place of sich akklimatisieren (e.g., wie haben Sie sich in diesemMilieu eingelebt,Herr Kollege?)-this would form a parallel to the secas a rendering of French milieu. (Obviously, this is not to say ondary use of Ulmwelt that the idea of adapting oneself to one's environment could not be expressed before the formulation of such a deterministic expression as s'acclimater; for example in Oudin's Spanish-French dictionary (ed. 1675) one finds, under the entry estar hallado (litt."to be in a state of having found oneself"): "quand un Estranger s'apprivoise & s'accomode hors de son pays"; this example is instructive for both languages.)

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reflectsonce more the warmembracingconnotationof ieptexov.

Now one

may well question (as 'Micha1sson does not question) how it came about
Finally, it is interesting to note the metapllorical use of another word of similar reference: temperature. A. Gregoire (Melanges Bally, 1939) has recently pointed out the tendency of the financiers to refer to the rise and fall of the stock exchange in terms of the thermometer and barometer: la temperaturede la Bourse (a German would say the Stimmung der Borse; Michaelsson calls attention to the use of the word ambiance also in this connection). Thus the stock exchange is endowed with the unpredictable and capricious qualities of the weather (or of persons: the Frenchman
might also say les hurneurs de la Bourse). Michaelsson, in his treatment of ambiance

de la Bourse, stresses this unpredictable, mysterious factor which is attributed to the Exchange, and has elicited the sarcastic remark from Dauzat, his reviewer (Le franfais moderneVIII, 188): "Je ne vois pas les financiers cherchant a exprimer le mystere et lindicible." But such a comment seems to me to represent too much the attitude of the Frenchman sans myst're; he does not perceive that beneath the fagade of the matter-of-fact business man there lives a primitive and superstitious being who watches the fluctuations of the stock exchange much as primitive man himself once watched the play of the elements, conscious of occult and fatal forces which transcend him, which he cannot understand-but which he sees to exist. So far as he himself knows, what the stock exchange jobber really wants (cherched) to do is to play the part of a shrewd, clever, practical person, and it is as such that he envisages himself; but, unwittingly, he helps shape the conception of an incalculable and mysterious divinity whose moods one may observe but not determine. Thus if he speaks of the temperaturede la Bourse, he may profess to be the meteorologist capable of predicting changes in the weather; but secretly he professes his unbelief in the predictableness of the meteorology of la Bourse. (Even more drastic an implication is involved in the expression climat de la Bourse: here we have to do, not merely with the fluctuations of a given climate, but with a change from one climate to another: from the torrid to the frigid zone.) Temperatureis also to be found in the expression temperature morale, in a meaning akin to "moral climate," "ambiance," or "milieu"-in fact, in Taine's Philosophie de 'art it is to be found coupled with milieu (we may be reminded of the juxtaposition, which temperature is a literal rendering-and reptexov): in Greek, of Kpuais-of De m~me qu'on dtudie la temperature physique pour comprendrel'apparition de telle ou telle espece de plantes ... de m~me il faut dtudier la temperature morale pour comprendre l'apparition de telle espece d'art .... Les

productions de l'esprit humain, comme celles de la nature vivante, ne s'expliquent que par leur milieu. In nineteenth century German I have found frequent examples of Temperaturin a use comparable to that which atmospherehas acquired: The Minister of War, von Roon, in addressing the Prussian Parliament in 1862,said: ich habe bereits zweimal Gelegenheit gehabt, die angenehme Temperatur, welche in diesernHause in Betreff jener grossen Massregel (a bill on auxiliary service) herrschte, zu ffihlen .... and Bismarck spoke, half ironically, of the "sehr behagliche Temperaturder Demokratie" (cf. H. BlUnmner, "Bismarck's Sprache," p. 172); the comic effect perhaps is due to the present association between "temperature" and "thermometer" (and perhaps also of the prevalent phrase, die Temperaturfihlen, said of the doctor). It may be that Bismarck himself, the Realpolitiker, he who had discovered "das

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that the bitter phrase of Goncourt, created in an attempt to define and exorcise an evil thing, could have led to the aery, hazy ambiance that we know today-a word offering not a definition but an escape into the poetry of the vague and the imponderable: the antithesis of the deterministic milieu (ambiant). It would be interesting to assume that l'ambiance (des milieux, once it was created, was able to break its syntactical link and its spiritual association with the technical milieu, enabled by its suffix to exist independently, and purged of its harsh connotations by the very fact that it represented an essence-and an essence is always spiritual. Thus it might be considered as a poetic revenge wreaked upon the milieu of the sociologanze Gewicht der Imponderabilien, die viel schwerer wiegen als die materiellen Gewichte," was well aware, in this ironical use of Temnperatur, of the contradiction involved in making the imponderable ponderable. Another metaphorical allusion to weather or atmosphere is to be seen, perhaps, in such expressions, current in modern European languages, as there is something in These are generally used in the air, etwas ist in der Luft, quelque chose est dans lair. speaking of some idea, discovery, event which cannot be traced back to any definite factor-least of all to any one human agent. Indeed, one usually consigns such things to the "air" in order to exclude such a possibility: to dely, for example, that a given person borrowed the ideas of another-"it was simply in the air." I know nothing of the age of such expressions or just where the exact explanation is to be sought; but it is quite possible that originally there was involved the simile of lightening or storm (ever latent in the air, determined by the conditions of the air): the "flash" of an idea, the "storm" of a historical movement. We may compare such expressions in German as etwas liegt in der Luft 'eine strdmung, ein regen. ein ungewitter' (Deutsches Wb., s.v. Luft, 3 f.); es war ich weissnicht was, das einem seltsanm bang und schwer macht, in der Luft (Wieland); das beste was Nmanlernt, muss in der Luft der Zeit liegen (Auerbach): this is cited in the Deutsches Wb. under the heading "geistige Atmosphare" and explained as "eine geistige oder gemtitliche strdmung oder auch druck." (Cf. l'air du ternps, note 18). To conceive an analogy between atmospheric conditions and the ripening of an idea is evidence of an irrational conception of the workings of the intellect. Today, nothing of that analogy is present when we say, in an off-hand manner, "at that time, the theory of relativity was in the air"; in this stereotyped, intellectualized expression we are far from any "stormy" conception of the life of the mind. It remained for Herr Hitler, in his use of in der Luft, to achieve a return to the "stormy" connotation, with the addition of an activistic emphasis, cloaked though this was in an irrationalistic, a would-be poetic turn of phrase; in my newspaper of February 26, 1941, I read: When Hitler declared with sinister humor that "particularly now I feel better than ever" because "I feel that spring is in the air," he approached the theme that really concerns the world as well as a dutifully enthusiastic Nazi audience. Spring is in the air, and we all know that in the Reich's military meteorology that means that the hour for new action soo5f will be at hand. Such a man it is who has succeeded in transforming the poetry of FrThiingsrau1schen into the reality of death-spelling thunderstorms from the air.

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gists. But this is a daring assumption, in general, and to suppose that the development suggested had already taken place a year later is perhaps even more daring; in 1892 Daudet is reported to have said to Goncourt:
C'est tree'scurieux, moi, les gens, je les juge par le regard, par l'observation.... Vous, c'est par une sorte d'intuition de l'amnbiance. (The last five words are italicized.)

here already we seem to have our modern word. There are several explanations that are more convincing than the one we have tentatively suggested: (1) Perhaps the ambiance of Goncourt's phrase does not represent the original appearance of the word; it may be observed that it is not printed in italics as were most of his neologisms, and it is quite possible that, before him, there was coined an "airy ambiance" (based upon l'air ambiant instead of the airless milieu ambiant) which would represent the source of ambiance as this was generally used-perhaps the source of Daudet's own expression. But while this is quite possible, it would change nothing of the explanation of Goncourt's phrase itself: V'ambiance des milieu could not possibly have been based upon such a hypothetical ambiance-if only because an "airy ambiance" does not devour. If an earlier ambiance is postulated, one may only assume that l'ambiance des milieu represents an individualistic expression unheralded and unechoed. (2) Again, it is possible that the expression of Edmond de Goncourt does indeed represent the first appearance of the word ambiance, but that it failed to influence the later development of the word; it may be that after him, if not before him, an "airy ambiance" was coined which should be considered as the real source. (3) Finally, the original tentative assumption could be accepted, with a qualification: ambiancedes milieu may represent both the first appearance and the real source of modern ambiance-but the later develoment of the word was definitely influenced by that "other" ambiant of which we have spoken, and which was already so poetic a term with Rousseau and Lamartine. The word ambiance alone, used out of its context in the Goncourt passage, could easily have suggested something quite other than that intended at the moment of its creation. While ambiance seems to have remained in France, even today, a part of the literary language, the word milieu came to be the property of the people. Such a transference was facilitated by the existence of the Bouvard et Pecuchet type of bourgeois who delighted in adopting abstract, scientific terms (cf. the paradigmatic example given by Flaubert: "une promenade Ksera salutaire" instead of the simple "faisons un tour")-which

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become thereby less abstract and only pseudo-scientific.62 Little of the Comtian or Tainian connotation was preserved in this popular milieu; that which was once a "factor" in the biological or cultural development of a species, became rather "a place where one may (more or less comfortably) live"; that is to say that the eternally latent lieu ("place") has come again to the fore.63 Also important, however, is the new emphasis
62 An interesting, and extreme, example of the vulgarization of this term is to be seen in its use as a specific reference to "the milieu of the prostitutes and gangsters." That milieu has become frequent in this particular association (so that dictionaries entitled l'cargot du "Milieu" are written by linguists - e.g., Lacassagne) is undoubtedly due to the fact that the sociologists who made such capital of the term were themselves so largely concerned with the influence of sordid environments; it is the Jukes and Kallikaks who afford the most vivid material for study. From the vocabulary of these sociologists, milieu could easily have passed into what A. Thrive has called the "parler gendarme"; the police sergeant who must submit a report, has doubtless heard such ironically compassionate phrases as "dans le milieu des malfaiteurs, des prostitutes, tout est permis," and, by way of showing his familiarity with learned terminology, makes reference to the "milieu" par excellence. Still later it is taken over by the denizens of this milieu themselves, with all the pride of prostitutes and gangsters; they accept the term as they have accepted their condition (cf. the history of the Fr. word gueux). 63 It might be objected that popular phonetics which have transformed the pronunciation of this word would speak against the revival of the etymological function of lieu: the phonetic cluster -li- has become -y-: miyeu (cf. also escalier > escayer); in addition, milieu has been attacked by that popular dissimilation i-i > e-i which extends from Vulgar Latin (vicinus > Romance *vecinus) to the modern language (dessiper instead of dissiper): the Petit Dictionnaire du people of Desgranges (1821) warns against such false pronunciations as that of "Meilieu ou Meyeu pour milieu, fautes. Dites: C'est au mi-lieu, un juste mi-lieu"; and already as early as the seventeenth century the same dissimulated form is attested as "Parisian" (cf. G. Gougenheim, "La langue populaire dans le premier quart du XIXe siecle," p. 7). But if this phonetic change were itself proof that lieu is not felt as a living element of modern milieu, then it must also be argued that, in the seventeenth century, when milieu had the quite obvious meaning "middle part, place," the people no longer sensed lieu (or mi) in the word! This is obviously absurd: however pronounced, milieu, today as in the seventeenth century, must surely suggest "place" (and One may note how lieu and milieu may be found coupled in a play on "midst"). words: "Sa place partout etait faite. II ne modifie nullement sa maniere selon les And it is significant that lieux et les milieu" (Sainte-Beuve in his essay on Taine). Faguet, "Politiques et moralistes" III, 265, sums up Taine's theory in the phrase "(un homme) de telle race, de tel lieu, et de telle date." Indeed, I am convinced that it is milieu that helps keep alive its own derivative; lieu itself is in a decadent stage, used mostly in a stilted or technical reference: "le juge d'instruction se rendit sur le lieu du crime"; "la representation n'aura pas lieu," etc. It is endroit and place which figure in modern usage to refer to an actual place: place (originally "the occupied place" < plateau = "street, plaza") suggests today the idea of the place belonging to a person, and endroit, according to its etymology, once referred to the "right place." Thus the locus naturalis pushes into the background the locus.

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on the mi of milieu: this now reflects a subjective attitude of being "in the midst of, surrounded by"64 an attitude ever renascent in man who likes to feel himself protected by a shell, and one which still makes him prefer to sleep with his back to the wall, or to have the doors of his room (even of his closet) shut behind him. Thus, not only is the word less technical, it is also less deterministic, now that the "victim" himself applies it to his own environment; its pejorative implication has been tempered, and what remains (for something of it does perhaps still remain) is accepted philosophically. The grumbling concierge who says "on peut pas viv' dans c' miyeu-1a" admits readily, that his is not the ideal environment suitable to his particular personality-but then, "on pett pas choisir son miyeu !" The fangs of the word have been drawn, and there would be no popular impulse to react against it, as the litterateurs reacted against the "milieu" of Taine.65
64 What was once itself "in the middle," "a middle place," now becomes a place one is! After all its various cycles: in-the-middle-of-which middle place intermediate point, place; "golden means" medium of communication; element considered as a factor surrounding element environment considered as a factor the place surrounding us, in the middle of which we are the word has come again to have a "middle" meaning. The circle is completed. that the deter65 However, the mellowing of milieu cannot be taken as indication ministic attitude toward man in society has been abandoned; other words offer themselves as at least partial substitutes of the Tainian "milieu," as the social struggle stiffens. For example, the phrase cadre social, in the writings of C. BouglM, is used according to the to render much the same idea as Durckheim's milieu social-though, French sociologist, the individual is only modified, not "created," by the cadre social. The This expression has a strong connotation of the will to order and regimentation. individual, or the state of mind of the individual, are conceived of as dominated by a social "frame" imposed upon him; even the fight for improvement of his own condition must be led by organized forces superior to him. Moreover, according to Halwachs in his studies on suicide (he was also author of the dissertation "Les cadres sociaux de la memoire"), this frame is necessary for the psychic balance of the individual; he is driven to suicide as a result of a social disencadrement or disintegration, of a vide social (the old vacuum of the physicists here applied to sociology.) The implications of this expression can be fully sensed only if we remember that it is of military origin, passing thence into political terminology (from military bureaucracy to political bureaucracy!), and if we bear in mind the function of the military cadre; a batallion is said to have a "framework" of officers, a framework which may always be replaced by another of identical build, if the individuals themselves are wiped out in battle (the corresponding military term in German is "ErsatzAnd similarly, the cadres sociaux not only permit of regimentation, bataillon"). but also have the power of surviving in the abstract, as it were, independently of the They must survive, because the cadre as a whole, the social class as a individual.

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But there is another connotation present in this milieu of the concierge (as in that of the Goncourts, too, perhaps); not only does the term represent a place, but a "filled-in" place. The milieu of an individual (like the world which Stevenson presented to the child) is "full of a number of things." The individual thinks of himself as au milieu d'un milieu, as surrounded by things, familiar things- each of which goes to make up the final quality of his particular milieu, and on each of which he leaves some imprint of himself: they are a part of a whole but also a part of him, and he a part of them.66 Thus everywhere in the "milieu" there is contact. This homey, padded "milieu" takes us even farther away from the original term of the physicists: milieu ambiant. And as for that more general milieu, once used as an equivalent of Newton's medium of transmission of attractive forces-this, as we have seen, represented a concept which played no part in the development of our modern term. Indeed the word itself (milieu = medium) has all but disappeared from the lantake this hill or abandon that position according to the whole, must conquer-must strategic plans of military-minded party leaders. Even the word climnatitself has come to mean, with some authors, not an essence emanating freely from a milieu or a group of persons, but a factor which can be manipulated, exploited, by those who would influence their fellows. Compare such an expression as Nleves dans le climat du regime fasciste (cited by Miss R. Burkart in her article on "climat" in Archivum Romanuin XXI, (1937). There is something of this in Barres, "climat de la terre"; for though the moral climate is inherent to "la terre et les morts," still, it is possible for forces conscious of the past and its implications (Such an attitude follows from the Tainto provoke this climate for their purposes. ian approach to history, which Bourget (Revue des deax mondes XLIV, 249) describes: l conserver devrait 'tre le premier objet ... que le problem des milieu d crker et That this distortion, due to the intervention of the volitional du legislateur.") element, has not taken place with atmosphere is perhaps to be explained by the fact that an "atmosphere," natural or moral, is variable in its very nature and may not be so harnessed; moreover it has never been conceived of as possessing the efficacious, conditioning qualities which, for two centuries, have been granted to "le climat." 66 This feeling is admirably illustrated in the following passage from the Goncourts: Se trouver en hiver, dans un endroit'ami, entre des murs families, alt milieu de choses habituees au toucher distrait de vos doigts, sur un fauteuil fait a votre corps . . . . (Journal III, 9) It is in such descriptions of an interior setting that the idea of the "milieu" (enclosing, and "filled-in") is presented most forcefully; we have the immediate milieu of the One may remember the vogue which paintings of this same type enindividual. depicting the coziness and comfort of welljoyed in the preceding century-interieurs furnished human dwellings; and it is surely no coincidence that the Goncourts themselves delighted in this aspect of eighteenth century art. The world-embracing, metaphysical, cupola that once enfolded mankind has disappeared, and man is left to rattle around in an infinite universe. Thus he seeks all the more to fill in his immediate, his physical, environment with Things.

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guage of the physicists, who have adopted the "field" of Maxwell. Consequently, all material traces of a once-existant connection (medium ambiens -medium aetherium) have disappeared. Yet, curiously enough, we may find the word milieu used by the poetscientist Valery ("Essai d'introduction a la methode de Leonard de Vincy," Variety 1)07in a discussion of modern physics. At first glance this might seem to be a continuation of the old milieu = medium; but in fact it is no continuation of a scientific terni-it is a new application of the "humanized" sociological term, which is applied precisely to the modern concept of "field,"'"8 the sphere in which forces work. For, to the modern
67 It is significant that in out citations from nineteenth and twentieth century French writers we have had so frequently to quote from "Introductions" (Balzac, Taine, Zola, Val6ry). The rational formulation of programs in the fields of art and science is a characteristic French trait, and one on which Curtitis, in his hook on French civilization. has adequately commented. 68 The modern concept of the physicists who have adopted the term field is sketched in the following statement of Einstein's collaborator, Leopold Infeld, taken from his book "Quest" (New York, 1941, p. 257): The old theory states: particles and the forces between them are the basic The new theory states: changes in space, spreading in time concepts. through all of space, are the basic concepts of our descriptions. These basic changes characterize the field. Electrical phenomena were the birthplace of the field concept. The very words used in talking about radio waves-sent, spread, received-imply changes in space and therefore field. Not particles in certain points of space, but the whole continuous space forms the scenery of events which change with time. The transition from particle physics to field physics is undoubtedly one of the greatest, and, as Einstein believes, the greatest step accomplished in the history ot human thought. Great courage and imagination were needed to shift the responsibility for physical phenomena from particles into the previously empty space and to formulate mathematical equations describing the changes in space and time. . . . I see an object; how can I understand its existence? From the point of view of a mechanical theory the answer would be obvious: the object consists of small particles held together by forces. But we can look upon an object as upon a portion of space where the field is especially dense. The mechanist says: here is the object localized at this point of space. The field physicist says: field is everywhere, but it diminishes outside this portion so rapidly that my senses are aware of it only in this particular portion of space. It is well known that this "greatest step" in physics is due to the activity of Faraday and Maxwell. Faraday, by his theory of the "dielectric polarization" of nonconductive substances that served to explain the (so-called) "activity at a distance" of electricity, had anticipated the "field" theory. His own term, however, dielectric, expresses nothing of the new idea taking shape, representing as it does only a Grecianized alternate of medium.; cf. "My view is that electric induction is an action of the contiguous particles of the insulating medium or dielectric" (1838), to which is

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physicist who has abandoned the infinitism of Newton and his theory of "activity at a distance," space is now filled with contiguous particles; everywhere, in the field, there is contact. Accordingly, Valery was inspired to use this popular milieu, suggestive of intimacy between the parts of a "filled-in" background, when he referred to the new vision of Faraday who, endowed with the imaginative logic of a Leonardo, saw
par les yeux de son esprit, des lignes de force traversant tout l'espace, oui les mathematicians voyaient des centres de force s'attirant A distance; Faraday voyait un milieu ou ils ne voyaient que la distance.

And he continues, in a comparison of macro- and microphysics:


L'etude du milieu, . . . siege des actions electriques et lieu des relations interCet moleculaires, demeuie la principal occupation de la physique moderne.... esprit ne fait aucun effort pour passer de l'architecture crystalline a celle de pierre ou de fer; il retrouve dans nos viaducs, dans les symetries des trabes et des entretoises, les symetries de resistance que les gypses et les quartz off rent a la compression, appended a note: "I use the word dielectric to express that substance through or across which the electric forces are acting." It was Maxwell who, in 1887, coined the term electric field (after the pattern of magnetic field (1863)-and the much earlier "field of a microscope" [1747]), where the word field indicates an "area or sphere of action, area or space under the influence of, or within the range of, some agent." This originally anthropomorphic metaphor suggests less, perhaps, the field worked by the ploughman than the training field of an artillery unit (cf. English range), but it is permissable to assume that both connotations were felt in this word of the physicist; in either case this would suggest the idea of forces at work. It represents, too, the idea of one whole within which the parts form a coherent system, each part functionally conditioning, and being functionally conditioned by, the other parts (here the chess-board simile of the linguist de Saussure may come to mind). And it may also imply an idea of a neatly circumscribed area which can be "covered," since the new physic tends, in opposition to that of Bruno and Newton, toward finitism. The description given by Infeld of the object in the field shows that the conception substitution of substance has been abandoned, and replaced by that of function-a which Dr. Gurwitsch notes also in the Gestalttheorie of the modern psychologists. When a colored spot detaches itself from its environment we must (according to this school) analyze the structure of the segregated res within the total field. (Lichtenberg, as early as the 18th c. had said: "Wenn wir auf einen Gegenstand hinsehen, so sehen wir noch viele andre zugleich mit, aber weniger deutlich," quoted by F. II. Mautner, PMLA LVI, 694.) The "field" concept of the physicists has been applied by a German school of linguistics (J. Trier, Weisgerber) to semantics: a Bedeutungsfeld represents the ensemble of synonyms existing at a certain time in a certain language; such an ensemble conditions the functioning of the parts of the semantic field and is conditioned by it., disclosing the ruling forces in the semantic area (cf. A. Gotze in Behagel-Festschrift, p. 171). In the words of E. Borling, commenting on the Charakterologie of L. Klages, " . . . der gesamte Kosmos, auch die sogenannte tote Welt, ist ein ungeheures Ausdrucksfeld" ("Darstellung u. Kritik der Charakterologie von L. Klages," Giessen 1929).

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au clivage-ou, differemment, au trajet de l'onde lumineuse.... Grace aux vues moins simplistes des physiciens d'aujourd'hui, l'espace, des que nous voulons nous le figure, cesse aussitot d' etre video, se remplit d'une foule de constructions arbitraires et peut, dans tous les cas, se remplacer par la juxtaposition de figures qu'on sait rendre aussi petites qu'il est ne(cessaire. Un edifice, si complexe qu'on pourra le concevoir, multiplied et proportionnellement rapetisse, representera 1'element d'un milieu dont les proprietes dependront de celles de cet element.

Thus, at the touch of a poet's hand, a cycle is completed: from physics to biology, to sociology, to popular speech and thence to the new physics !69 What admirable constancy of word-material, surviving through the flux of changing conceptions ! It is as if Western man were better fitted for multiplying the shades and connotations, the inner wealth, of the words at hand, than of creating new word-material; a new thought seems to seek to clothe itself in old familiar trappings. Vossler once said that "der Gedanke nicbt anders zum Begriff werden kann, als indem er aus der Larve seines sprachlichen Vorlebens ausschlupft und die tote Puppe abwirft." But he overlooked the truth that in language the chrysalis can live on, along with the butterfly. We are forever carrying with us the chrysalises, the primeval "eggshells" of human thought.70
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

This paper has represented an attempt to trace the reflections of Greek We have sought on the one hand, to follow as this was continued by the Rothe history of a word: the word 7rEptExov mance ambiens: "that which embraces, envelops, enfolds." This 7rEPt6Xovambiens has suffered peripeties as great as the rise and fall of the world empires pictured by Bossuet: once the expression of sympathy and harmony between universe and man, it became, at the hands of Newton, a trivial stereotyped epithet applicable to any substance serving in an experiment. But then, infused with vitality by the biologists, its contact through the centuries. 7rEPLEXOv
69 -if only in an individualistic expression. Obviously this popularized sociological term has not been accepted into the vocabulary of modern physics-nor is it possible to imagine that milieu, with its connotations of limitedness and stability, could ever serve in the stead of field. But in this one passage it was chosen by Valery as the word best suited to oppose the emptiness of Newton's universe. of the European solidar70 In this paper there must have appeared much evidence ity that has existed throughout: solidarity in the word material (which was exclusively that of the ancients), and solidarity in the semantic developments which, through the ages, have made their contributions to the original material. From this it must needs follow, as a practical assumption, that our departmentalized organization of philology rests on an artificial basis. There is no such thing as "modern philology," or modern philologies; they all naturally tend to merge into one unified Western Philology which would have as its aim to trace the developments of the two and a half millennia of Western cultural life.

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with -mankind, too, renewed, it has finally come into its old inheritance of warmth and sympathy; ambiance is our spiritual 7rEPLEXOV. On the other hand, our concern with 7rE~ptxov involved more than the study of a word; since 7rEPtEXoV was used to refer to space, it has been necessary to consider the changing conceptions of the cosmos that have developed, from the enclosed universe of the ancient and medieval thinkers, to the interstellar space of Newton, to the gravitational field of Einstein. In following this development, ambiens has now and again been lost from view, but we have come upon another great word, medium. And we have seen that the two of them have come to have a strange and indissolvable relationship: indissolvable purely, yet never constant or restful. They have met from time to time (even in Greek the 7rEptExo was the 0icov of perception), perhaps just to touch each other, and as if electrified by this contact, each starts anew in a direction of its own. In Renaissance Italian, mezzo and ainbiente were often comparable, never quite identical; in French, the subordinate epithet ambiant, at first absorbed by milieu,7 reappears in the synonymous circonstancesambianitesof Comte and Taine, finally achieves autonomy as the substantive ambiance, which distinguishes itself from milieu -yet only as the soul from the body of the same entity. For, while as we have said, ambiance is a spiritual 7rEptExo0, milieu is much more concrete, more earthy, more bounden, than was that Greek term; thus neither quite represents the concept of 7rEpLxoov----a concept which perhaps is forever lost. But, of the two, it is milieu which comes the closest to our Greek word; and, interestingly enough, it is in milieu, this newcomer into the orbit of 7rEpLExov-ambiens, that is reflected that ancient idea of the "shell." To the Greeks, it was space in which mankind was sheltered as in a receptacle, and in the Middle Ages, too, he lived within the confines of a walled-in, God-loved universe. These confines were dissolved forever by the science of the Renaissance -but several centuries later the idea of the receptacle again returns, in the modified form of the biological milieu (ambiant). Anrdwhen the term was applied to mankind, this same idea was citing to, in spite of Taine, by the people and the poets: "1'habitant et la coquille, l'homnmeet le milieu." Afaturamexpellasfurca, tamen ?usquc recurret. And indeedthe recurrence of this concept is due to nature, to otir human nature: there seems to be at bottorn an (rgedan1k, born with al idee-mnere fiomn an 'r(>qfAl, ('Inanating man---a projection of the feeling of the ebild within its shell, protected as it is in its mother's womb. It wsasthis samue,healthy, sense of protected71 Before this absorption had taken place, w while milieu aitibiant was a stock phrase of the physicists, the two of them, mnediumn and ambiens, actually lived together. But, as so often happens in wedlock, this association brought out only the minor, the trivial, qualities of each of the two partners.

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ness which made Goethe once defy the cosmology of Newton, projecting his feeling into the universe itself. M\Iantoday is content with a more modest receptacle, nor need it be all-protective, so long as he can feel to "belong" somewhere in this chaotic and complex modern world.72 LEO SPITZER.
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, BALTIMORE, AM ARYLAND.
72 Karl Jaspers prophetically defined in 1931 "die geistige Situation significantly enough bis as essentially "ungeborgen" ("unprotected"); translated into Spanish by Ramon de la Serna under the title "Ambiente paradoxically enough, what should de nuestro tiempo" (1933)-thus, is characterized by lack of protection. protect us (ambire, repLexeav)

der Zeit" book was espiritual ostensibly

APPENDIX: EUROPEAN SYNONYMS OF THE TAINIAN milieu


I. IN ITALIAN

When the Tainian concept of the "milieu" came to Italy, the Italians had simply to turn hack to their native ambiente, the "surrounding element," the "medium," which had been such a vital word in that language. At the same time, however, this resurrected ambiente was able to give the impression of a new word; cf.:
Ogni opera d'arte. . . .e in qualche modo ii prodotto di elementi soggettivi ed oggettivi, e a determinarne la natura. . . contribuiscono da una parte la mente e lanima dell' artista, dall' altra quella somma di circostanze esterne che noi, con parola novissima, chiamiamo 1'ambiente.

This passage, from Foffano's Il poemia cavalleresco II, 3, shows that as late as 1904 ambiente (in the new meaning "milieu") was felt as a new word, though it must have re-entered Italian several decades earlier. The stages of the gradual acceptance of ambiente as a loan-word translation of milieu are reflected in the different editions of Panzini (1905-1935), and have been outlined by Michaelsson. An attempt to use a word which would seem to be more directly comparable to milieu was made by Carducci in the preface to his Letture del risorgimento;' here, in order to represent the idea of "milieu intellectual" (or, as Panzini defines it "focolare di operosita e produzione intellettuale") he uses the archaic Gallicism miluogo ("middle"). This word, according to Paolo Monelli (Barbaro Dominio, 1933, p. 204) he had found in the Tuscan trecentistaFrate Giordano da Rivolta; thus it had the appearance of a genuine Italian word, while representing at the same time a literal translation of (the original meaning of) milieu. But this represents only a single attempt; it was much more consistent that the pure Italian word ambiente, known since Galileo, which had been all along the twin brother of the milieu of the physicists, should also take upon itself the meaning which milieu had acquired at the hands of the biologists and sociologists, than that this patina-covered miluogo should be revived-a word which shared with milieu only the meaning which milieu had sloughed off. At times it may be difficult to tell whether we have to do with the old ambiente of Galileo, or with the new ambiente "milieu," as in the following passage from D'Annunzio's Trionfo della morte (1894), p. 60:
II benessere ambiente non era favorevole a quello sforzo interiore [of love]. senso di benessere gli avvolgeva lo spirit come una fascia molle. Un

1 -according to Panzini: I was not able to find the passage in question in the reprint of this preface in Opere XII, 482.

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Indeed it was precisely a master device on the part of this clever word magician to revive a deep-iooted Italian word (with all its flexibilityserving either as noun or as adjective) without exposing it to the charge of exoticism. His turn of phrase, revealing no foreign inspiration, was the happier thereby, illustrating the JIoratian theme: "Multa renascentur quae jam cecidere ... vocabula" (the motto of Passerini's Vocabolariodella prosa dannunziana, 1913). It is in fact well-known how D'Annunzio in his coinages of words for modern things was able to make use of archaic wordmaterial, whereby the new thing took its place in an old (verbal) tradition (one may remember his proposal of velivolo for "air-plane"-cf. 13. Migliorini, "Gabriele D'Annunzio e la lingua italiana," 1939). But the new note which he strikes in the passage above by using il benessereambiente is the introduction, under cover of an archaism, of a feeling utterly modern, very much fin de siecle: the consciousness of the disruption of man and milieu (this is what Croce has called the "fragmentary" in his attitude toward things [Letteraturadella nuova Italia IV, 52]). D'Annunzio himself has said of his novel Trionfo della morte: "lo ho circumfuso di luce, di musica e di profumo le tristezze e le inquietudini del morituro"; he has artificially woven an ambiente around his protagonist: man and milieu are not fused. Naturally enough, Italian ambiente came to inherit all the special references that accrued to the French word milieu: we have ambiencesocial, ambiente morale; in some cases indeed the word seems to express not so much man's concrete surroundings as the subjective mood in which he is enveloped-in such cases it is best translated perhaps by Stimmung. For example Terracini writes in Vox romanica V, 204:
.

l lingua[asopposedto dialect]. . . e riccadi sfumature .a affettive (gatto micio)


Siamo d'accordo sulla piu ricca

o di connotazioni di ambiente (gatto :felino).

sfumaturadi ambiente, legata alla maggiorcomplicazione sociale rappresentata appuntoda una lingua In the first case (sfumature effective) the word is to be explained by the ambiencee)social of the following line. But a few pages later there seems to be a nearly perfect identification between "tone" (mood) and ambiente: qui [by a journalisticuse of an originallylofty word]siamo in prcsenzadi una speciedi anacolutotonale, di un salto troppobruscodi ambiente Among the European languages, Italian is particularly loyal to its indigenous word-material, tending to enrich its old words with a new semantic nuance.
II. IN SPANISH

In Spain, where the milieu of Taine was borrowed, and where the Italian (and other Spanish),word ambiente an(I the native word medio (cf. Diccio-

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nario de Autoridades s.vv.) also served to represent this concept, a new del Quijote")1 which, term was coined by Ortega v Gasset ("MAeditaciones like French ambiance,should be free of the tinge of sociological determinism. Cf. "i La circunstancia! ICirctim-stantia! i Tas cosas mudas que estan en
nuestro proximo derredor!"2

According to this conservative thinker, so concerne(l with Spanish values, the task before man today is to revive the logos, the meaning of the "silent" things immediately surrounding us: the things which have become "illogical" or insignificant to those influenced by the biologistico- and sociopolitical trends of the nineteenth century: "Yo soy yo y mi circumstancia . . . Benefac loco illi quo natus es." In contrast to the menacing, deterministic connotation of milieu, the words la circanstancia, lo circunstante

represent the freely accepted"data" of historical development: thus according to Ortega, the two Spanish writers Baroja and Azorin represent two Spanish "eircunstancias," just as truly as the Guadarrama mountain near Madrid.
Cf., for example, p. 194: El organism es inserto en el medio fisico, como una figura en el tapiz. Ya no es el quien se mueve, sino el medio en el. El medio as el unico protagonista. Se habla de producir el "ambiente". It may be noted that the word anmbiente, as used by Ortega, regularly appears in quotation marks; when speaking in a media vox he uses niedio. Circunstancia has not yet been absorbed by Spanish writers in general, who continue to use ambiente and medio-the latter more in the Tainian sense of the social milieu (medio social etc.), the former witlh the vaguer connotations of ' atmosphere," Stimmung. Pedro Salinas (Literatura espaiiola siglo XX, Mexico 1941, p. 63) quotes a poetic passage of Azorin on gardens which, in a calin hour of the night, "entran en las rodean." Salinas harmonia y communion intima con el aiobiente y con las cosas qzue himself sometimes uses the neuter lo circiinstancial in reference to the abstract character of the ambience (compare el prosdico ambiente moderno, p. 90 with al amparo de lo circunstancial, p. 128), thereby reintroducing, into the only Romance language which has preserved a neuter, the equivalent of the abstract Greek r6 wTEpLExov. The word ambiente has taken on a strange development of meaning in Argentina; as Castro (La peculiaridad lingiiistica rioplatense, p. 116) points out-with obvious is being used as a recherche expression for "room" (= habitacion in disapproval-it This is due to the psychology of house-owners and realmetropolitan Spanish). estate agents who want to provide "rooms with atmosphere" to their customersand anticipate with al sort of 'empathy' the feelings of the customers themselves; it is the same which in the United States prompts the use of the sentimental word home instead of the colorless house (Smiith has a lovely eight-room. home, cf. L. Bloomfield, Language, 1933, p. 442; a person who owns a house is always a "home-owner," never a "house-owner"). With Portuguese writers a meio, used for milieu (literally "the middle") appears still today in quotation mairks-a clear indication of the small degree to which the Tainian conception has penetrated the thinking of the general l)ublie. 2 This present immediacy suggested by circunstancia must needs exclude that aura of vagueness surrounding the ambiance of the French symbolist-s.

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Ortega could not have been aware of the threatening nuance which had accrued to the Latin circumstare (v. note 12); I feel confident that, conversant as he is with German philosophy and poetry, he has simply translated the German Umwelt (does not "the silent things" remind us of Rilke?) while, at the same time, he has introduced something of his "Mediterranean" philosophy, according to which the "presence" of a phenomenon is more important than its "essence." La circunstancia is as "present" as is the ego: man, living with his ego in the circunstancia, must restore its significance and thus free himself from the tyranny of biology. Am6rico Castro, speaking of Ortega's egotistic manner of philosophizing, comments: "The Iberian mind can never 'take off' from the vital base on which it is grounded"; this leads up to his final statement about Spanish civilization: "for the Spaniard, man and his milieu form a vital unity"-a statement which should be interpreted in the light of Ortega's yo y mi circunstancia.3
III. IN ENGLISH

The first attestation of the English word environment,coined by Carlyle, appears in a curious context-a context ignored by the NED. The passage in which it appears is taken from Carlyle's article on Goethe, in Miscellanies (1827); and what is particularly interesting is the fact that the lines in question are themselves a translation of Goethe (Dichtung und Wahrheit, book XIII): following upon a passage in which Goethe had emphasized the gloominess of contemporary "Poetical Literature" in England, comes a new paragraph (separated by asterisks from the preceding one to indicate the omission of some lines):
In such an element, with such an environmentof circumstances, with studies and tastes of this sort; harassed by unsatisfied desires . . .; with the sole prospect of dragging on a languid, spiritless, mere civic, life [it is easy to understand that young Germans of the Werther type should be tempted to commit suicide]

The underlined words are a rendering of Goethe's "In einem solchen Element, bei solcher Umgebung, bei Liebhabereien und Studien dieser Art...." But the Element and Umgebungof Goethe are only to be understood by reference to his lines which Carlyle omitted: a passage in which Goethe states that Ossian had found a perfect "Locale" for English melancholy: the heath, a "Caledonian night" lit by the moon, when dead heroes and maidens once fair came back to ghostly life. Thus Goethe, thinking of the Ossianic landscape, was speaking of an "element" of nature, while Umgebungrepresented a mid-term between natural and spiritual surround3 For Ortega's conception of circunstancia ef. H. D. Casanueva, Das Bild vom Menschenbei Ortegay Gasset, Jena diss. 1937;he seeks herein to harmonize the Spaniard's philosophy with modern pedagogical tendencies in Germany.

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ings (this is shown clearly by the words that follow, Liebhabereienand Studien, which are definitely concerned with the spiritual).' Thus Carlyle's translation is no real interpretation: the bombastic and overstuffed phrase environmentof circumstancesis quite powerless to render the imperceptible Goethian flow from a natural to a spiritual climateand the element which he adds for good measure has been dragged into a context where it cannot fit: it stands ironically apart. The substitution of the pleonastic (yet inadequate) environment of circumstances is probably to be explained by the influence on Carlyle of contemporary French biological research into the problem of the milieu ambiant: thus Goethe's own term Umgebungis fitted into a conception of the "milieu" to which Goethe was particularly averse. As for the fatalistic nuance of Carlyle's expression, this was no doubt prompted by Goethe's own description of those causes which appeared fatally to determine the Werther-fever of the period, accompanied by a suicide wave. This awkward coinage, ostensibly fathered by Goethe, but actually the result of a misconception of Goethe, seems to have enjoyed a great success! Later, Carlyle uses the word environmentin a purely geographical reference: Bayreuth, with its picturesque environment(1830); The whole habitation and environmentlooked overtrim and gay (1831): this would indicate that, from the beginning, the word had a rather definitely circumscribed nature-otherwise, as used in the first passage, it would hardly have needed the complement, .. . of circumstances": today, environmentalone is sufficient. As regards the French word milieu itself, this appears as a loan-word in English (undoubtedly under the influence of the Tainian theory), but not until a much later date than Carlyle's own phrase: it is first attested in 1877. Cf. ".... the intellectual and moral milieu created by personalities ... that formed the motive force of milieu" (Symonds). The word is also to be found in its earlier, biological reference ("I prepared a Milieu ... to which I wished to habituate the Microb," Fortnightly Review, 1893). Though the two words milieu and environmentare often interchangeable, there is nevertheless a distinct difference of emphasis to be noted in their
'Gundolf is right in stating, in his biography of Goethe (pp. 406 if. and pp. 620 if.), that the latter conceived of his own autobiography, not according to the "milieu"-theory which represents man as a passive victim of objective circumstances, but on the contrary, saw in his personality the "Geistwerdung . . . auch der aussermenschlichen Wesenheiten"; the cultural and the natural forces of what Gundolf himself calls Umwelt (in quotation marks-Tainian milieu), represented to Goethe the "Geist und Atmosphare der unpersonlichenWelt"; to Goethe, Mother Nature and Father Spirit were at peace: they were one spiritual-material element ("geistigstofflich"). Thus, the fanciful Ossianic setting of which Goethe speaks is for him both a landscape and a spiritual climate ("Lokal," "Element," "Umgebung")just as was true of his own Frankfort setting.

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use today (compare the similar situation existing in German in the case of Umwelt and Milieu); milieu is much more flexible of reference than is environment, and has a much more subjective connotation than has the native English word; both words suggest a "quality" inherent to the surroundings, but with milieu the quality is more personal and more intangible than with environment-and less deterministic: environmentis the term of a sociologist who thinks in terms of fixed factors, milieu the more spontaneous expression of a human being who feels, rather thananalyzes. (According to a report in the New Yorker,a certain manager of the Jollity Building is appointed because "he understands the milieu"-note the verb understands and the emphasis on the human element; environmentwould not have been appropriate.) Moreover, one tends somewhat to think of the "environment" as already having influenced the individual ("the child was broughtup in such and such an environment"; "his early environment"), while the "milieu" (more subtly conditioning) is ever-present. Circumstance, too, has served in English to render "environment"before this latter term had become fixed: Byron (1821): "Men are the sport of circumstance"; "I am the very slave of circumstance." Disraeli (1827), in opposition to the saying of Herodotus, states: "Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of man." As late as 1887 F. Galton opposes education to circumstances. (All quotations in this paragraph are taken from Mencken's A New Dict. of Quotations, s.v. nature vs. nurture.) Surroundings, which renders the Fr. les environs, appears only rarely with a meaning close to that of environment: Kim (the hero of Kipling's novel, 1901) feels his soul to be "out of gear with its surroundings-a cogwheel unconnected with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel of a cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in a corner." As a reaction against the deterministic element prevalent in environment, William James used the word tone (in the meaning of ro'vos"tension," tonic = "strengthening," etc., and yet also with a punning allusion to the musical tone) in reference to that part of the ambiente which can and, according to James' activistic philosophy, which should, be created by man; cf. his essay "Great Men and their Environment "(1880): "the tone created bl) these great men is taken (over) by others."
IV. GERMAN UMWELT

The G"erman word Umwelt (which is not, incidentally-as it might appear at first glance-a translation, a Lehniibersetzungof "ambiens [medium]") has had a curious history. The origin of this word has offered a problem: G6tze, the editor of the final edition of the Etymologische Wbrterbuchof Kluge, is convinced that German Umwelt was borrowed from Danish

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umverden(though Kluge himself expressed his uncertainty of the theory of Danish origin, in his Wortforschungund Wortgeschichte,1912). It is true that the Danish word is not attested before 1822, whereas Umwelt, its alleged offspring, appears as early as 1800. But the late attestation of omverdenwas rather disregarded (probably on the assumption that it is possible for a word to have been in use some time before its appearance in literature) in favor of another fact, deemed conclusive: that Umweltappears first in the (German) poetry of a Danish poet, Baggesen; moreover this same Baggesen, when writing in Danish, used the word omland (a parallel formation with omverden,that comes to light later). Thus, by taking for granted the existence of an unattested omverden,there was presupposed a Danish pattern (reinforced by omland), and the German word Umwelt was accepted as cut to this pattern. I have become convinced, personally, that Umwelt was not based upon omverden,but that the reverse was probably the case. In the first place, the late attestation of oniverdenis suspect: oddly enough, the word omland, which is not supposed to have influenced German is found as early as 1807, and one must wonder why omverden,as the origin of Umwelt, should have waited until 1822 to appear in literature. Moreover it is a generally recognized fact that it was not Danish that enriched German, but German, Danish: and the fact that an omverdenwas ever created is probably due to the use of Umwelt--and, in particular, to its use with Goethe. And, finally, though the word is found for the first time with a Dane, still, it was when writing German poetry that Baggesen used this word. And it is in German poetry that I feel the clue to the origin of Umwelt is to be sought. Now Baggesen was an admirer of Voss (one of his poems is dedicated to the German poet), who, like Klopstock before him, had imitated in his verse the Homeric hexameter, according to which a spondee is required for the final measure. Both poets had insisted upon the value of this final spondaic foot: Klopstock had said, "Der Schluss mit den langen oder kurzen Silben ist nicht gleichgtiltig," and he is known to have corrected such a verse-ending as Pforten der Tiefe to Pforten des Abgrunds. Voss continued in the same vein: "Keine Gleichf6rmigkeit der Endungen, zumal in Schlussrythmen, wo das leidige -en sich so gern einstellt." (The dissertabei Klopstock und Voss, Strassburg, tion of E. Linckenheld, Der Hexamneter 1906, p. 58, establishes the fact that only eight per cent of the verses of Voss' Luise have feminine endings.) Nor did Voss, in his enthusiasm for spondees, restrict himself to the final foot-and for this overuse he was taken to task by Jakob Minor (NeuhochdeutscheMetrik, p. 274), who ridicules the pattern "Sechs Schilfsessel umstanden den Steintisch, welchen der Hausknecht....." The effects of this innovation at the hands of such

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influential poets cannot be overlooked; as a result, a need arose in the language for words of two syllables that would fit into a spondaic foot-a need perfectly fulfilled by Umwelt (and which, it might be added, only a compound word could fulfill). And, interestingly enough, in the two passages of Baggesen containing the word Umwelt, this appears at the end of the hexameter. Thus our Umwelt represents a German neologism created, only incidentally, in order to meet the requirements of German metrics. For it is very doubtful that it also met the need for a new concept: it adds little if anything (at least in the beginning of its career) to the content of Aussenwelt (attested since the Middle Ages) that now appears unwieldy with its three syllables. Once created, however, it fitted admirably into German philosophical thought, and, from the grammatical point of view, it is a formation that fits easily into established German patterns of wordcomposition: (1) Um-: Umgang (= Latin ambitus), Umfang (= circumiferentia), Umstand (= circumstantia), Umlautf(= cursus circularis); and particuumbekreisder welte ("Umlarly MHD umbeschrank(= circiutmfercntia), kreis"), umbesweif ("Kreislatuf,lI mkieis") and umbering (= gyrus, orbis) (2) -welt: Aussenwelt, Inneitnwelt, TVelt. The first two words had probably a pietistic origin; A ussenwleltis also to be found in the writings of iBettina von Arnim, and, after 1811, Innenwelt appears in Goethe: ". . . daher war die hdhere i\Iatheniatik ihm [Newton] als das eigentliche Organ gegeben, durch das ei eine inticre. Welt und die dussere zu gewaltigen sucht" (Sdmtl. TVcl1lc 35, p. 178). Before this period, however, he contented himself with Ielt to express the idea of the inner world: "Das ist deine TWelt, das heisst cine 1W elt (Faust I; note the use of the pronoun with the first Welt which emphasizes its identity with Innenwelt); "mein Blusen war so yoll uid lballg, von hundert Welten trachtig" ("Kenner und Enthusiast"; here we have a conception of the inner realm of the soul that goes back ultimately to the idea of the microcosm, the "little world"). I shall not attempt to trace back the metaphor of the "inner world" to its origin: suffice it to say that the pietistic use of Innenwelt rests, ultimately, on the Augustinian sentence: noli foras ire in interiore aniimaehabitat veritas: the soul grasps its real reality--that is, God-in itself. The outward world is the world of deception. Every mystic movement (as was that of the pietists) had to renew this conception. Thus the metrical "accident" ex post facto seems like a necessary developmnentof the German language. In the beginning, as used by Baggesen and Goethe, Umwelt seems to indicate the outer world as opposed to the inner:

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Baggesen:
... dass vonfern (!) erscheinet der Umwelt Ein' atherische Feste die Schicksalshdlle des Dichters (Elegy on Napoleon) ... Hier auf dem blumigen Grase, wo rings euch schirmet die Wolbung Schroffer Gebirgshohe, fern von begegnenden Blicken der Umwelt (Alpenreise)

Goethe:
ungestbrt, und die herbstlichen Bilder der Sinn, sie rufen ihn vielmehr, von Bewegung und freier Luft begleitet, nur desto schneller hervor (Italienische Reise) Der Tag ist so lang, das Nachdenken

Umwelt verdrangen keineswegs den poetischen


... ihm sei, durch einen ...

Freund, die Umweltaufgeschlossen

(Wilhelm Meisters

Wanderjahre)'

But later on, under the influence of the biologico-sociological "milieu" of Taine, Umwelt was deflected from its course in the direction of milieu; thus a second "accident" influenced the career of this word. Originally of a vague and intangible reference at the beginning, it came to be invested with the sharply circumscribed task of translating a technical term of science. But Umwelt was never swept completely within the orbit of milieu; even today its original subjective nuance has not been lost for it
1 It is perhaps not mere coincidence that Umweltis attested precisely in the "Entwicklungsroman" Wilhelm Meister, in regard to which Elena Eberwein, Romanische Forschungen LIII (1939), 370, rightly points out that the expression Entwicklung ("evolution") suggests an organic growth from within and implies an indictment of the exterior world: after the Sturm und Drang that gave us the disjunction of the individual and of the world, seeing the "chaos of a world which had become meaningwhich was only given to the artist was "das, was dem Kunstler nunmehr less"-that neu zu schbpfen ist (i.e., his inner life)": the outer world is necessary only for the strengthening of character (which, however, crystallizes from within); one remembers Goethe's lines: "Es bildet das Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt." It is significant that the modern critic A. Schirokauer, "Bedeutungswandel des Romans" (Mass und Wert III [1940], 579), must use the word Umweltin referring to Goethe's "Bildungsroman" Wilhelm Meister; to quote: "Das Auftreffen des Ausfahrenden und Lehrlings auf die Umwelt, seine Reaktionen auf allerlei Reize, die schleifsteinartig seinen Charakter zu klaren und kristallisieren " Here Umwelt is used rather in the sense of Gegenwelt:it is not somehatten. thing amorphous which may fuse with man's character, but is resistant, opposing its strong materiality to the inner life. "Ich kehre in mich selbst zurilck, und finde eine Welt," says Werther, repeating the Augustinian terminology. The idea of the necessity of retreating within oneself is still evident in the expressions of many German scholars: from among hundreds of possible examples one may note the ideas of title of his article in "Germanica, the linguist Porzig on "Sondersprache"-the Festgabe Sievers (1925)"; the prefix sonder-suggests to him an actual exclusion of the outer world: semantic change is explained as happening in the individual language of the individual.

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refers to the "milieu" not simply as to objective environment, but in so far as this is seen from the point of view of the individual. Umwelt is also, even today, I feel, a more poetic word than is the technical milieu, become
prosaic.'

It is also much more flexible and comprehensive than milieu. Cf. the following passage from Petsch's article (obviously influenced by Heidegger), "Der Aufbau der dramatischen Personlichkeit und ihrer 'Welt' (Deutsche VierteljahrsschriftXIII, 229):
Hier (in the drama) wie in der Erzahlung sind es ja 'Menschen', von denen der Vorgang ausgeht, die ihn tragen oder erleiden; und hier wie dort stehen die Menschen in einer "Welt", die dem Vorgang seinen Boden bereitet, ihn mannigfach bestimmt und auch durch ihn verandert wird. Diese Welt ist zum Teil wieder von personlicher Art: sie lebt in den Menschen, die den Helden umgeben, die aber im Vergleich zu seiner Personlichkeit und Eigenkraft leicht etwas Mittelbares, Halb-Personliches erhalten. An dieser "Als-Ob Personlichkeit" hat aber auch, in verschiedenen und oft wechselnden Graden, die dingliche Umwelt teil (der Zeit-Raum der Handlung mit seinem "Milieu" und seiner "Atmosphdre") und vor allem jene Triebkrafte des Vorgangs, die wir unter dem Namen des "Schicksals" zusammenfassen.

Here Milieu and Atmosphdre are subordinated to the (dingliche) Umwelt which forms a part of the "Welt" of each of the characters. The two terms Milieu and Umwelt live side by side in the language, much as do environment and milieu in English-though environment, coined by Carlyle to render a biological term, was confined from the start to a narrower sphere
2 The etymological transparency of Umwelt, in contrast with the "opaqueness" of ambiente, ambiance, milieu (though this to a lesser extent) and environment, may serve as a further example of what Fichte, A. W. Schlegel, and, more recently, H. L. Chamberlain (with great exaggeration), have considered to be a characteristic trait of German: according to them this is an "ursprangliche Sprache," whereas the Romance languages are largely of a derivative nature-and thus "half dead" (cf. Zufallhasard). The quality of being etymologically transparent often reflects a greater nuance of warmth and intimacy: in English, where words of both types so often alternate, one may compare hearty and cordial, or-what is more in line with our subjectinner and interior. And how much colder are the French interieur, exterieur than German innerlich, lusserlich (cf. e.g., "das Xussere ist ein in Geheimniszustand erhobenes Inneres." "[the soul] Bertihrungspunkt der iusseren und inneren Welt" of Novalis); interestingly enough the Vocabulaire de la philosophic of Lalande has only insignificant examples to offer under the heading interieur: the term monde interieur = Innenwelt is lacking. But French too has been influenced by the transparency of Umwelt, if one may judge by the title of Lintilbac's book "Les F6libres d travers leur monde et leur poesie (1895)," where the "world" represents an opaque medium which the eye of the critic may be able to pierce; or by such an expression as monde social, as used for example by Bougld (l.c. p. 20): "Un acte volontaire tend toujours 'a s'extdrioriser, a agir sur le monde materiel, et il n'agit sur le monde materiel que par l'interm6diaire d'un monde social"-the author could have used equally well the French neologism cadre

social.

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than Umwelt; moreover, with its French word-parentage, it represents a term less indigenous. Goethe himself, in order to render the milieu ambientt) of contemporary French biologists, used, not Umwelt but UTmqebungen.We have already noted one example of this word in Goethe (in connexion with Carlyle's coinage of environment); below are several other interesting passages in which it is to be found:
Saugamme und XrWdter'in, Vater oder VoriunId, Lehrer und Aufseher sowie alle die ersten Urnqgebungen, an Gespielen, leindlicher oder stddtischer Lokalitdt, alles ("Tyche") bedingt die Eigentiimlichkeit Jeder Irrtum, der aus dlen Menschenrund aus den Bedingungen, die ihn wingeben, (Sdintl. Werke ed. Cotta 35, p. 181) unmittelbar entspringt, ist verzeihlich Mangel (in the Royal Society of London), (lie in der Urngebung and in der Zeit liegen (ibid., p. 142)

-this last is a title of a chapter which could well be translated by Taine's le milieu et le moment: it is as though the circumstantiaehad polarized the fatally determined errors and deficiencies of man. Solger, in a letter disSchriften I, 1826) cussing Goethe's TWahlverwandtsclhaften (ANachgelassene says:
Seht wohin selbst das Studium der Natur (liesen wahrhaf teenDichter des Zeitalters gefiuhrt hat! In der Natur selbst erkennt er die Liebe, das sind die WahlverwandtEben dazu geh6ren die Details der Urmgebungen. Gerade diese sind das schaften. Und sic haben noch eine andere hohe sichtbare Kleid der Persdnlichkeiten. Sic sind das tfigliche Leben, worn sich die Pers6nlichkeit ausdrtickt, Bedeutung. sofern sic mit andern in iiussere Bertuhrung kommt und sich von ihnen unterscheidet.

And further:
tVber die Details der Urngebungen habe ich mich schon geliussert. So wie diese das ganz tagliche wirkliche Leben der Personen immer in gleicher Schwebung halten unci gleichsam als Folie dienen....

Thus, two years before Taine was born, we have the essence of his "milieu" theory: the idea of the determining influences that mould individuals. We may notice, too, the attitude expressed here toward everydayv life"its fortuitousness, its disintegrated ("detail-ed") texture. But the German word Umgebungenwas not destined to become the representative of milieu: the singular form of the word could not serve, limited as it was to a purely geographical reference, and the plural was doubtless not felt fit to render the French singular. Thus Umwelt won-with the limitation (or rather, extension) noted above. welt and Innenwelt have been analyzed The three terms Umgebung, UmT1' in terms of animal life by the biologist von IUexkiull("Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere", 1909). He opposes the objective Umgebung,the surround-

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ings of the animal, to the subjective Umwelt-that ensemble of things which it is able to perceive, an ensemble which must needs vary much more widely with each individual animal than with human beings: "jedes Tier besitzt seine eigene Umwelt." Corresponding to this personal outer world is the Innenwelt (also called Gegenwelt,which is a word probably coined on Gegenstand = objectum,Konterfei = "image, counterfeit") which consists of the sensorial images of the outer world as these exist in the mind of the animal. Von Uexkiill goes on to suggest that the dog's act of urinating against trees and posts represents a type of wilfull delimitation of its Umwelt; he suggests moreover that when a dog does what we like to call "obeying his master," it is simply reacting to a familiar object (the Master) within the frame of its Umwelt (Montaigne asked long ago: "do I play with my cat or my cat with me?"). Another work of Uexkiill's, a book of popularized science published in 1934, has as its title, "Streifziige durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen, ein Bilderbuch unsichtbarer Welten," containing an interesting example of the plural of Umwelt,hitherto unused, but quite. logical in the system of the author ("every animal its own Umwelt"), and illustrating also the old connection between Umwelt and the "invisible" inner world.3 In Heidegger's "Existenzphilosophie" the same kinship between Umwelt and Welt is evident; to this philosopher IWeltimplies the fact of in-derWelt-sein (this is parallel to the development we have noted "to be au milieu," & Ou > "le milieu, gYaov"); this Welt may be either "die 6ffentliche Wir-Welt" or "die 'eigene' und ndchste (hausliche) Umwelt"; cf. Sein und Zeit 1, 1929, 66:
Die ndchstc Welt des alltdglichen Daseins ist die Umwelt. Die Untcrsuchung nimmt den Gang von diesem existenzialen Charakter des durchschittlichen In-derWelt-seins zur Idee von Weltlichkeit iuberhaupt. Die Wcltlichkeit der Urnwelt (die Umweltlichkeit) suchen wir im Durchgang durch eine ontologischc Interpretation des ndchstbegegnenden inner-inweltlichen Seienden. Der Ausdruck Umrwclt 3 Except for the lack of infinitism in his system of "words," von Uexkiill's conceptions are reminiscent of Lcibniz' "monadology"; cf. "il y a comme autant dc differents univers, qui ne sont pourtant que les perspectives d'un scul"; "'Iunivers nest pas un: il se reproduit autant de fois qu'il exists des substances." An animal is a monad which "perceives" even as you and I-except that it perceives from the point de vue of an animal: hencc the Leibnizian expression points metaphysiques, synonomous with "monads"; the monad, "ut anima, est velut mundus quidam proprittsj" it is an "univers concentre" (here we have to do with an ultimate derivation from the idea of the microcosm: mundo abreviado, petit monde, inonde abrege, etc.). H. Heimsoeth, Die sechs grossen Thenen der abendldndischen Metaphysik (1934), p. 100, speaks of Leibniz' universe as "diese Welt Realitat gewordener Blicke": a world of perspectives which have gained reality, and upon which the Creator looks, "es gleichsam drehend nach allen Seiten"; (p. 137) "Die Seele ist nicht mehr im Raume ... sondern die Aussenwelt . . . ist ein Erseheinen in der Scele."

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einen Hinweis auf Rdumlichkeit, Das "UImherumr", enthalt in dem "Umr"4 das fur die Umwelt konstitutiv ist, hat jedoch keinen primer "raumlichen" Sinn. Der einer Umwelt unbestreitbar zugehorige Raumcharakter ist vielmehr erst aus der Struktur der Weltlichkeit aufzuklaren. Von hier aus wird die ... Raumlichkeit des Daseins phenomenal sichtbar. Die Ontologie hat nun aber gerade versucht, von der Raumlichkeit aus das Sein der "Welt" als res extensa zu interpretieren. Die extremste Tendenz zu einer solchen Ontologie der "Welt" und zwar in der Gegenorientierung an der res cogitans, die sich weder ontisch noch ontologisch mit Dasein deckt, zeigt sich bei Descartes. Durch die Abgrenzung gegen diese onto-, logische Tendenz kann sich die hier versuchte Analyse der Weltlichkeit verdeutlichen.

Heidegger argues against Descartes' conception of space as a container encompassing the "Welt"; to him it is evident (p. 101):
wie das Umhafte der Umwelt, die spezifische Raumlichkeit des in der Umwelt begegnenden Seienden selbst durch die Weltlichkeit der Welt fundiert und nicht umgekehrt die Welt ihrerseits im Raum vorhanden ist.3a
3a Readers of this journal will have noticed how much Heidegger is endebted to his teacher Husserl; the article by L. Landgrebe, "The World as a Phenomenological Problem" (here I, 39 ff.) offers all the data we need for the comparison. Husserl had begun with the theory of "perception"; this is, according to him, an "exception," a singling out of the perceived object from a background more or less distinctly perceived along with it; he speaks of the ever-present "horizon" around a percept: first of all, a spatial horizon, our surrounding world. Broadening the narrow proportions of this theory of perception he considers "the world" as "the all-embracing doxic basis, the total horizon that includes every particular positing," "the horizon of our To quote a significant passage from "Ideen," ? 27-28 ("Die Welt total attitude." der natiirlichen Einstellung: Ich und meine Umwelt"): Aber auch nicht mit dem Bereiche dieses arnschaulich klar oder dunkel, deutlich oder undeutlich Mitgeqenwartigen, das einen bestaindigen Umring des aktuellen Wahrnehmungsfeldes ausmacht, ersch5pft sich die Welt, die fur mich in jedem wachen Moment bewusstseinsmassig 'vorhanden' ist. Sie reicht vielmehr in einer festen Seinsordnung ins Unbegrenzte. Das aktuell Wahrgenommene, das mehr oder minder klar Mitgegenwartige oder Bestimmte ist teils durchsetzt, teils umgeben von einem dunkel bewussten Horizont unbestimmter Wirklichkeit .... In dieser Weise finde ich mich im wachen Bewusstsein allzeit, und ohne es je andern zu konnen, in Beziehung auf die eine und selbe, obschon dem inhaltlichen Bestande nach wechselnde Welt. Sie ist immerfort fMr mich 'vorhanden', und ich selbst bin ihr Mitglied. Dabei ist diese Welt fMr mich nicht da als eine blosse Sachenwelt, sondern in derselben Unmittelbarkeit als Wertewert, Guterwelt, praktische Welt. [The italics are Husserl's.] The "different worlds" surrounding various individuals, shaped by the particular communities to which the individuals belong "here," and differentiated according to the criterion of distance and the ensuing degree of familiarity (Ichnahe-Ichferne), are themselves absorbed in the all-embracing World or Nature ("Sein in der Welt" is the main characteristic of "natiurliche Einstellung"). The choice of the word Horizont is to be explained by Husserl's start from a theory of perception: it is obvious that Husserl has transferred the field-theory (cf. the Notizen zur Raumkonstruktion posthumously published in this Journal), first to per-

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Thus Umwelt, with its quasi-spatial connotations (as indicated by the prefix uM-4) becomes the constituent character of man's existence; he lives
ception itself (as is indicated by the German expressions Gesichtsfeld, Wahrnehmungsfeld) and then to the "world," which, in Husserl's restricted use, is generally equivalent to Umwelt. Thus Umwelt triumphs as Welt takes on the connotations of the former word, and the worldwideness of Welt is forgotten-striking evidence of the meditative isolation of this German thinker in the midst of a world which at no time has been so open and so wide! This Welt of Husserl's (which is Umwelt bereft of the is rendered into English by Landgrebe as the "life-world" (a coinage 7rep -[um-]), which must mean simply "the world in which we live"); thus he has unwittingly reverted to the etymology of world (wer-alt "age, life of man," "saeculum"). The term does not mean "environment" nor yet "milieu": it is primarily concerned with the "field" theory and, in the terminology of Husserl, it is privileged to render this technical term of physics (contrary to milieu which, as we have seen, has not entered the vocabulary of modern science). It is well-known that Husserl, in accord with Condillac's aphorism "Une science nest qu'une langue bien faite," shaped for his needs a language of his own by making explicit the connotations accruing to German words, sometimes restoring literal or archaic word usages (for an example of the latter, cf. the medieval numberingreappearing in the Umring cited above); he did not, however, indulge in this procedure to the excess characteristic of Heidegger. Heidegger, who in general adopted his master's approach, did not concern himself with the concept of the "field" (thus with him there is an emphasis on the prefix of Um-welt); he shows us man frantically entrenching himself within his Umwelt; Umhaftes der Welt is the main feature of his Dasein = In-der-Welt-sein: with him 7repL-is reestablished in full force. The concern of Heidegger is not to clarify the structures in the open field, so much as to focus on the "surroundedness" of man. It is not surprising that he abandoned the Horizont of Husserl's: it may have been that a foreign word did not suit his linguistic tastes; moreover, this term, so explicative of nature, clearly reveals its connection with the theory of perception; and it has connotations of remoteness, whereas Heidegger prefers rather the "pathos of proximity"; he is more fascinated by the phenomena manifesting Ichnrhe: "Im Dasein liegt eine wesenhafte Tendenz auf Ndhe." To him the radio is a symbol of the absorption of the world by man (an "Ent-fernung"), who thereby broadens his Umwelt (though this so-typical manifestation of worldwideness may just as well be thought of in terms of the absorption of man into ether and distance-a "Fernung"). And so, in order to free himself of his boxed-in feeling, Heidegger must needs imitate the great desperate moves of his Fuihrer, by a sudden turn to activism which is a far cry from Husserl's meditativeness: he leads his teacher's praktische Welt via an Arbeitswelt toward the Lebensraum of a world-annexing Germany. Thus Welt acquires a new worldwideness born out of narrowness and despair. The spatialization of Umwelt, evident in Husserl, is implemented by the animization of another of Husserl's pupils, the linguist H. Ammann, who sees (Festschrift E. Husserl, 1929, pp. 1 ff.) in the impersonal "it" of es ist kalt "die raumliche Umwelt schlechthin," the "Lebensraum"; in that of es ddmmert ['it dawns"] "das immer gegenwdrtige Antlitz der Welt": "Als tiefste Wurzel des verbalen Ausdrucks fthlen wir das Verbundensein mit der Welt, das Durchdrungensein von ihrem Pulsschlag." (We have become familiar with "the pulse of life"; here it is Welt, [that, as in Husserl, is equivalent to Umwelt] which has a "pulse.") [Pedro Lain Entralgo in his article "Quevedo und Heidegger" (Deutsche Vierteljahrsschr. XVII [1939], 403) has contrasted Heidegger's morbid heroism in the face

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first, in his daily life, in an um-, then in a Welt-which is characterized by the fact of "being in the world." Of the cosmic vision of the "world-yolk" nothing remains but the idea of "within-a-yolk." Gone is the superb pride of the Cartesian ego cogitans in the face of the res extensa; this defeatist philosophy spatializes the human mind, representing in this much more the outgrowth of Tainian determinism and Spenglerian Untergangsstimmung, than the idealistic German philosophy. Indeed, Heidegger defines life as a "readiness to death" (zrumTode sein). The pietistic innerworldliness had been replaced by a deterministic Umweltlichkeitthat knows only one radical possibility of liberation: the "heroic" life which accepts death. Only a slight shift was necessary (an ironical shift for the alert critic)
of Nothing, his utter lack of that Renaissance feeling "I and the World," with the philosophy of Quevedo which, while representing the decadence of that same Renaissance feeling, nevertheless knows of a consolation for man: donec requiescat in Te.] 4 Heidegger's interpretation of Umwelt is based on his personal feeling for the living language: he does not attempt to deal with word-history. Such a procedure is perfectly legitimate since it is the aim of philosophy in general to clarify the usages of human speech and to bring into the open its hidden tendencies; moreover, in this particular case, the Urgefuihl of "In-der-Welt-sein" tends ever to assert itself. In other cases, however, Heidegger has recourse to historical etymology, as when, in line with Jakob Grimm, he analyzes the prepositions in and an (English on) in order to show the imprint of "In-der-Welt sein" in language: 'in' stammt von innen-wohnen, habitare, sich aufhalten; 'an' bedeutet: ich bin gewohnt, vertraut mit, ich pflege etwas; es hat die Bedeutung von colo im Sinn von habito und diligo . . . Der Ausdruck 'bin' hdngt zusammen mit 'bei'; 'ich bin' besagt wiederum: ich wohne, halte mich auf bei . . . der Welt, als dem so und so Vertrauten. Although these etymological speculations are highly questionable (ich bin, for example, is now generally explained as equal to pvojiaL"to become"; bei = a&wL-, amb-, umbi-), Heidegger is quite justified in his attempt to restore the original atmosphere, the "warmth of the milieu," to such a trite preposition as in (comparable, in its relation with Anglo-saxon inne "house," English inn, to the French chez = casa "in the house of"). But I tend to become sceptical of an appeal to etymology when a philosopher arbitrarily chooses one particular rung of the semantic ladder, in order to vindicate his own philosophy with the aid of the "lessons taught by language." In regard to um- Heidegger limits himself to the meanings suggested by present-day German usage, ignoring the original idea present in the Indo-European root (we have already discussed the relation of Greek a4iypL-, Latin amb- with a,4sp,, ambo which suggest the idea "on both sides" [cf. beide "both" and bei], not "around" as does circus); as for in, an, bin, he is guilty of fanciful linguistic speculation on wordhistory. While he is quite justified in defining as he pleases any given term according to its use in the contemporary language, it is not permitted to give the impression that the words of any one language (in this case, German) have, by nature, the meaning which one may desire to attribute to them. Moreover, the universitality of Heidegger's statements is undermined by his attempts to buttress his philosophy by means of the etymological relation of words in one language alone: he borders oIn the pseudo-philosophical punster, the rhetoriqueur against whom Rabelaisian laughter was a healthy reaction.

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to turn the Umwelt, this "being surrounded by things," into world claims upon things; the German protest against determinism has taken the shape of a will to world-domination. For it is but a short step from this Umwelt, in which the individual finds himself narrowly fettered, to the geopolitician's concept of Lebensraumj which is necessary to the existence of men
5The idea of "Lebensraum" and of "Umwelt" was anticipated to some extent iil von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl (1814). that story of the man without a shadow. In answer to those who inquired as to the meaning of the shadow the novelist, who was also a scientist, replied: l'ombre repr6sente un solide dont la forme depend a la fois de celle du corps lumineux, de celle du corps opaque et de la position de celui-ci a l'6gard Mon imprudent ami a convoit6 l'argent dont il du corps lumineux.... connaissait le prix, et n'a pas song au solide; la legon qu'il a ch6rement pay6e, il veut qu'elle nous profite, et son experience nous crie: songez au solid! (Preface to the French translation of 1838.) Here is the notion of a halo around the personality: a halo born with the personality the term and comparable to a solid body. As used by this semi-Romanticist "shadow" reminds us rather of the prelogical psychology of primitive folk-tales, and of the Christian conception of "shadow" = "soul" (the soul, if pledged to the devil, is but a shadow, unreal). In regard to the word Lebensraurn itself, Erik Vogelin, Journal of Politics II, 191, comments as follows: . . . the word Lebensraurn cannot be translated into a western language. Its translation by 'living space' shows that the translator can use a dictionary, but that is all . . . no combination of English words is able to convey adequately the biological, collectivist, geopolitical, and metaphysical connotations of the German term.

note: The argument of this paragraph may seem to dwell unduly on philoIt should be understood, therefore, that the real problem of logical niceties. the translation from one set of language symbols into another is the differThe German language, ence of cultural values as expressed in language. as an evolving instrument of German cultural processes, has developed since the second half of the eighteenth century a universe of neopagan meanings which is unparalleled in the West.... Indeed Lebensraum (as well as other modern neopagan coinages such as raumgeistig, Blutgedanke, Leibseelentum) betrays a tendency the reverse of the reditus in se ipsum: it suggests a movement outward of the solitary and insulated soul seeking space in which it may assert itself and lose its estrangement from the world-and a But now the Germans endow space with bodily rather than a spiritual movement. a pagan spirituality: once they were geistig, now they are raumgeistig-a paradoxical fusion of les deux Allemagne! Lebensraum is a far cry from that Weltinnenraumn (in which the soul should grow like a tree) as conceived by Rilke, that lonely thinker who reconciled the Augustinian inner world with the world of 'things' and fustigated Germany for her post-war aspiration for regaining lost territory! The same "outward" trend may be observed in the use of the word Reich. In the Christian terminology of German is to be found the expression Reich der Seele, in accordance with the innerworldly emphasis of "realm" in the Gospels (mein Reich ist nicht von dieser Welt). The retention of the official phrase Deutsches Reich

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(and nations) as are air and food. In an article in Der Alemanne (III, 1934) Heidegger, now a Nazi philosopher, seeks to explain what the wellloved landscape around the Schwarzwald meant to him-this landscape which he refused to give up even for a position at the University of Berlin; it was not something to be "enjoyed" or "contemplated": it was his "Arbeitswelt"wherein he must act and work (my attention was called to this article by Dr. L6with). This Arbeitswelt (an expression coined after Arbeitsfeld)supplies the missing link between the Umwelt "the world about the individual as seen by him," and the Lebensraum "the world in which he (and his people with him) must be enabled to live"-that is, a world which he must expand by means of conquest. The inner world of the mystics has become extraverted: in the index of the Einfiihrung in die irolkerpsychologie(1938) by Willy Helpach, the former Democratic candidate for the presidency of the Reich who turned Nazi, is listed "Umwelt, pp. 42 f." (in fat characters), referring, ostensibly to the principal passage in which the milieu-idea is treated; and what is actually written on page 42 of the text is "Der Volkslebensraum:Klima und Landschaft"! An article published in 1940 in Beitrage zur Gesch. d. deutschen Sprache und Lit., entitled "Die politische Umwelt des deutschen Rolands]iedes" announces as its theme: "die Umwelt und den Raum seiner Entstehung zu erschliessen." Today Umwelt is no more than a fashionable paraphrase for "place," "locale" (in the radical change from Innerweltlichkeittoward the local, we may perhaps sense a certain correspondence with the conception among modern physicists of the "object-in-the-field," and with their abandoninent of infinitism).6
by the German Republic was very characteristic in its emphasis on the continuity of German worldly claims. Professor Worner, in a post-war Reichsgrundungsfeier, sought at least to establish the expression das innere Reich, as if to offset the loss of their outward empire by an innerworldly patriotism oii the part of the Germans (Wilrzburg 1928). But the Stefan George school used the word Reich which implies domination and a ruler in terms of nation and country; thus, in this regard at least, they may be considered as having set the pace for the new imperialism of those who take delight in foras ire ... 6 How the metaphysical ideas underlying contemporary physics may pass over to political thinking, is shown by a Russian parallel. Here is an incident taken from "Darkness at Noon" (1940) by A. Kostler: one of the victims of the Russian political trials is assailed in his hour of death by the temptation to indulge in the mystic experience of merging with the universe (a feeling which he calls the "oceanic sense"; the personality in ecstasy dissolves like a grain of salt into the sea), when there flashes through his mind the image of a page from a magazine article on the finitism of modern astrophysics which he had read years before, and he now remembers the parallel indictment by the Party of mystic exaltations: The Party disapproved of such states. It called them petit bourgeois mysticism, refuge in the ivory tower . .. The 'oceanic sense' was counter-

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For in a struggle one must have both legs firmly planted on revolutionary. the earth. The Party taught one how to do it. The infinite was a politically suspect quantity, the 'I' a suspect quality. With the solidification of space in modern physics, there reveals itself in modern aesthetic thinking a conception akin to that of the ancients: Rudolf von Laban in his treatise on dancing ("Die Welt des Tanzers," Stuttgart 1920) speaks, in terms reminiscent of Aristotle, of a Raumkbrper as a kind of "crystallized field." K. E. Gilbert reports on his theories in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 1, 112 in the following words: The sequence of gestures . . . requires a proper receptacle to contain it. This receptacle is the so-called Raumkorper. The spatial body, which is to be the place of a meaningful sequence, must itself harmonize with the expression . . .; it must even take part in that expression, for it functions in the dance as well as it contains it. Not thus functional is the threedimensional space in which the ballet dancer cuts his figures. What surrounds him is an indifferent environment, not a plastic partner. Order in space means for him a track on the floor, a collection of linear figures, the so-called five positions orienting the only accepted relations of his two feet to each other, and his own three dimensions. . . . "The Raumk6rper, the space-body," says Elizabeth Selden, "is to the dancer as substantival and real as his physical body".... The dancing of Mary Wigman, the first and chief disciple of von Laban, has, according to Gilbert, much in common with that of her master: she emphasizes the Raumkorper, the determinant tensions and crystallizations in the choreic medium.

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