THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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shows this origin), in general the distribution of force and weight, the basic business of statics, is of course subject to naturalistic laws. The builder has always been half
an engineer, indeed into no art, apart from music, do so many mathematical and physical relationships enter from outside, even into its foundations not just into its
details, and in no art have they been so greatly respected, for the sake of statics and of harmony. Certainly therefore, all this is true: and yet the house itself, this
complete and unified element of his work, had to be invented or discovered by the architect in accordance with guiding images which do not lie in what is immediately
given in the outside world, at least not in its fixed immediacy. Music, which of course likewise possesses very marked mathematical­physical foundations, but far less
immediate models of the world than architecture, once imagined in this situation a harmony of the spheres. And it did so, instructively enough, not without an ancient
oriental influence, that is, from the same cosmic standpoint which, as we have seen, also ordered Babylonian and Egyptian architecture from the point of view of a
cosmic scale. The astronomical harmonic theory admittedly hindered rather than promoted the development of music, in contrast to the faith in a cosmic scale in
architecture. This faith in a scale brought this art, as one that was objective from the start, the whole heathen half of its realm. It gave it, as an objective art but one
which could not be found in the immediately given outside world and which removed the very homelessness of man, a cosmic house, a foothold and a specific image of
perfection. And if Egypt is the most radical approximation to it, then astral­geometrical and inorganic­crystal elements have certainly continued to influence architecture
long beyond that time. Their influence here is on both a small and a large scale, in the noble desire and search for pure forms as well as in the clarified order which is
only partially described by the term classical. As far as the most beautiful individual forms are concerned, they are of course always introduced from the life from which
they may be taken, but also then preferably geometrized. Thus the egg itself, although it is certainly a detail, provides a static model, which can be traced down to the
modern streamline. Thus in classical times the wavy and even serpentine line was geometrized as the most perfectly beautiful: ‘the serpentine line, by its waving and
winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety’. as the painter and aesthetician Hogarth had decreed in his
famous ‘Analysis of Beauty’, 1753, and in which Lessing's theory of art followed him. Thus in the epigonic classicism of the nineteenth century the golden section was
characterized by particularly clear