Full text of "The decline of the West"

THE DECLINE
OF THE WEST

[DER UNTERGANG DES
ABENDLANDES]

BY
OSWALD SPENGLER

VOLUME ONB

FORM AND ACTUALITY

[GESTALT UND WIRKLICHKEIT]

VOLUME TWO

PERSPECTIVES OF
WORLD-HISTORY

[WELTHISTORISCHE PERSPEKTIVENJ

PERSPECTIVES OF WORLD-HISTORY

BY
OSWALD SPENGLER

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION
WITH NOTES BY

CHARLES FRANCIS ATKINSON

VOLUME TWO

LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C 1

Tu-

Originally published as

Der Untergang des Abendlandes
Welthistorische Perspektiven

C. H. Becksche, Verlagsbuchhandlung,
Munchen

V- V

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

IN the annotations to this volume I have followed the same course as in the
first namely, that of giving primary references to the Encyclopedia Britan-
nica as being the most considerable work of the kind that is really widely
distributed in both the English-speaking fields, though occasionally special
encyclopaedias or other works are referred to. Owing to the more definitely
historical character of this volume, as compared with its predecessor, and
particularly its stressing of a history that scarcely figures as yet in a regular
education the "Magian" such references are necessarily more numerous.
Even so, more might perhaps have been inserted with advantage. The Trans-
lator's notes have no pretension to be critical in themselves, though here
and there an argument is pointed with an additional example, or an obvious
criticism anticipated. In each domain they will no doubt be resented by an
expert, but the same expert will, it is hoped, find them useful for domains not his
own.

In the first volume of the English version, references to the second were
necessarily given according to the pagination of the German. A comparative
table of English and German page numbers has therefore been inserted. A list
of corrigenda to Vol. I is also issued with this volume.

London, July 1928 C. F. A.

Vlll

TABLE OF GERMAN AND ENGLISH PAGES

GERMAN

ENGLISH

GERMAN

ENGLISH

VOL. II

334

2-73

403

317

342-

2-79

42-1

340

343

z8o

42-7

345

z8i

441

355

346

z8z

48z

388

z86

488

392-

354

2.88

416

357

Z 9 I

52-9

42-2-

358

Z 9 Z

539

430

359

2-93

5 6z

449

360

2-93

577

460

362-

2-95

589

47i

363

z 9 6

603

481

365

2-97

607

484

368

2-99

610

486

369

300

616

490

370

301

618

492-

373

303

6z4

499

376

306

6z 5

500

378

307

6z6

501

38i

310

6z 7

501

385

3i3

631

504

CONTENTS OF VOLUME II

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE v

REFERENCES FROM VOLUME I vii

CHAPTER I. ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE. (A) THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM i

Plant and animal, p. 3. Being and waking-being, p. 6. Feeling, understanding, thinking,
p. 9. The motion problem, p. 14. Mass-soul, p. 18.

CHAPTER II. ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE. (B) THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CUL-
TURES ii

History-picture and nature-picture, p. 2.3. Human and world history, p. z8. Two ages:
primitive and high Cultures, p. 33. Survey of the high Cultures, p. 39. Historylcss mankind,
p. 48.

CHAPTER III. ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE. (C) THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE
CULTURES 53

"Influence," p. 55. Roman law, p. 60. Magian law, p. 67. Western law, p. 75.

CHAPTER IV. CITIES AND PEOPLES. (A) THE SOUL OF THE CITY 85

Mycenz and Crete, p. 87. The peasant, p. 89. World-history is urban history, p. 90. Figure
of the city, p. 91. City and intellect, p. 96. Spirit of the world-city, p. 99. Sterility and disin-
tegration, p. 103.

CHAPTER V. CITIES AND PEOPLES. (B) PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES in

Streams of being and linkages of waking-being, p. 114. Expression-language and communi-
cation-language, p. 115. Totem and Taboo, p. 116. Speech and speaking, p. 117. The house as
race-expression, p. no. Castle and cathedral, p. izz. Race, p. 114. Blood and soil, p. 12.7.
Speech, p. 131. Means and meaning, p. 134. Word, grammar, p. 137. Language-history, p. 145.
Script, p. 149. Morphology of the Culture-languages, p. 151.

CHAPTER VI. CITIES AND PEOPLES. (C) PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLA-
HEEN 157

People-names, languages, races, p. 159. Migrations, p. 161. People and soul, p. 165. The
Persians, p. 166. Morphology of peoples, p. 169. People and nation, p. 170. Classical, Arabian,
and Western nations, p. 173.

CHAPTER VII. PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE. (A) HISTORIC PSEUDO-
MORPHOSES 187

"Pscudomorphosis," p. 189. Actium, p. 191. Russia, p. 191. Arabian chivalry, p. 196.
Syncretism, p. zoo. Jews, Chaldeans, Persians of the prc-Culture, p. 104. Mission, p. 109.
Jesus, p. ziz. Paul, p. no. John, Marcion, p. 115. The pagan and Christian cult-churches,
p. zz8.

x CONTENTS

CHAPTER VIII. PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE. (B) THE MAGIAN
SOUL 13 1

Dualism of the World-cavern, p. 133. Time-feeling (era, world-history, grace), p. 138.
Consensus, p. 242.. The "Word" as substance, the Koran, p. 144. Secret Torah, commentary,
p. Z46. The group of the Magian religions, p. 148. The Christological controversy, p. 155.
Being as extension (mission), p. 158.

CHAPTER IX. PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE. (C) PYTHAGORAS, MO-
HAMMED, CROMWELL 2.63

Essence of religion, p. 165. Myth and cult, p. 2.68. Moral as sacrifice, p. 171. Morphology
of religious history, p. 2.75 . The pre-Culturc : Franks, Russians, p. 177. Egyptian early period,
p. 179. Classical, p. 2.81. China, p. 185. Gothic (Mary and Devil, baptism and contrition),
p. 2.88. Reformation, p. 195. Science, p. 300. Rationalism, p. 305. "Second Religiousness,"
p. 310. Roman and Chinese emperor- worship, p. 313. Jewry, p. 315.

CHAPTER X. THE STATE. (A) THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES: NOBILITY AND
PRIESTHOOD 315

Man and woman, p. 317. Stock and estate, p. 319. Peasantry and society, p. 331. Estate,
caste, calling, p. 332,. Nobility and priesthood as symbols of Time and Space, p. 335. Training
and shaping, customary-ethic and moral, p. 340. Property, power, and booty, p. 343. Priest
and savant, p. 345. Economics and science, money and intellect, p. 347. History of the es-
tates, early period, p. 348. The Third Estate, City-Freedom, Bourgeoisie, p. 354.

CHAPTER XI. THE STATE. (B) STATE AND HISTORY 359

Movement and thing-moved; Being "in form," p. 361. Right and might, p. 363. Estate
and State, p. 366. The feudal State, p. 371. From feudal union to Estate-State, p. 375. Polis
and Dynasty, p. 376. The Absolute State, Fronde, and Tyrannis, p. 385. Wallenstein, p. 389.
Cabinet politics, p. 391. From First Tyrannis to Second, p. 394. The bourgeois revolution,
p. 398. Intellect and money, p. 40x3. Formless powers (Napoleonism), p. 404. Emancipation of
money, p. 410. "Constitution," p. 4iz. From Napoleonism to Czsarism (period of the "Con-
tending States"), p. 416. The great wars, p. 419. Age of the Romans, p. 411. From Caliphate
to Sultanate, p. 42.3. Egypt, p. 4x7. The present, p. 418. Cscsarism, p. 431.

CHAPTER XII. THE STATE. (C) PHILOSOPHY OF POLITICS 437

Life is politics, p. 439. The political instinct, p. 441. The statesman, p. 441. Creation of
tradition, p. 444. Physiognomic (diplomatic) pulse, p. 445. Estate and party, p. 448. The
bourgeoisie as primary party (liberalism), p. 449. From Estate, through party, to the magnate's
following, p. 451. Theory, from Rousseau to Marx, p. 453. Intellect and money (democracy),
p. 455. The press, p. 460. Self-annihilation of democracy through money, p. 464.

CHAPTER XIII. THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE. (A) MONEY 467

National economics, p. 469. Political and economic sides of life, p. 471. Productive and
acquisitive economy (agriculture and trade), p. 473. Politics and trade (power and spoil), p. 475.
Primitive economy, and economic style of the high Cultures, p. 476. Estate and economic class,
p. 477. The cityless land, thinking in goods, p. 480. The city, thinking in money, p. 481.
World-economics, mobilization of goods by money, p. 484. The Classical idea of money, the
coin, p. 486. The slave as money, p. 487. Faustian thinking in money, the book-value, p. 489.
Double-entry book-keeping, p. 490. The coin in the West, p. 490. Money and work, p. 491.
Capitalism, p. 493. Economic organization, p. 494. Extinction of money-thought; Diocletian;
the economic thought of the Russian, p. 495.

CONTENTS xi

CHAPTER XIV. THE FORM-WORLD OF ECONOMIC LIFE. (B) THE MA-
CHINE 497

Spirit of technics, p. 499. Primitive technics and style of the high Cultures, p. 500. Classical
technics, p. 501. The will-to-power over nature, the inventor, p. 501. Intoxication of modern
discovery, p. 501. The man as slave of the machine, p. 504. Entrepreneurs, workers, engineers,
p. 504. Struggle between money and industry, p. 505 . Last battle of money and politics, vic-
tory of the blood, p. 507.

INDEX FOLLOWS PAGE 507

CHAPTER I
ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(A)
THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM

CHAPTER I

ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(A)
THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM

I 1

REGARD the flowers at eventide as, one after the other, they close in the set-
ting sun. Strange is the feeling that then presses in upon you a feeling of
enigmatic fear in the presence of this blind dreamlike earth-bound existence.
The dumb forest, the silent meadows, this bush, that twig, do not stir them-
selves, it is the wind that plays with them. Only the little gnat is free he
dances still in the evening light, he moves whither he will.

A plant is nothing on its own account. It forms a part of the landscape in
which a chance made it take root. The twilight, the chill, the closing of
every flower these are not cause and effect, not danger and willed answer to
danger. They are a single process of nature, which is accomplishing itself near,
with, and in the plant. The individual is not free to look out for itself, will
for itself, or choose for itself.

An animal, on the contrary, can choose. It is emancipated from the servitude
of all the rest of the world. This midget swarm that dances on and on, that
solitary bird still flying through the evening, the fox approaching furtively
the nest these are little worlds of their own within another great world. An animal-
cule in a drop of water, too tiny to be perceived by the human eye, though it
lasts but a second and has but a corner of this drop as its field nevertheless is
free and independent in the face of the universe. The giant oak, upon one of whose
leaves the droplet hangs, is not. 1

Servitude and freedom this is in last and deepest analysis the differentia
by which we distinguish vegetable and animal existence. Yet only the plant
is wholly and entirely what it is; in the being of the animal there is something
dual. A vegetable is only a vegetable; an animal is a vegetable and something
more besides. A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger,
a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a
way into his God all these are seeking to return out of the life of freedom
into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated into individuality
and loneliness.

The seeds of a flowering plant show, under the microscope, two sheath-

1 In what follows I have drawn upon a metaphysical work that I hope shortly to be able to
publish.

4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

leaves which form and protect the young plant that is presently to turn towards
the light, with its organs of the life-cycle and of reproduction, and in addition
a third, which contains the future root and tells us that the plant is destined
irrevocably to become once again part of a landscape. In the higher animals,
on the contrary, we observe that the fertilized egg forms, in the first hours of its
individualized existence, an outer sheath by which the inner containers of the
cyclic and reproductive components i.e., the plant element in the animal
body are enclosed and shut off from the mother body and all the rest of the
world. This outer sheath symbolizes the essential character of animal existence
and distinguishes the two kinds in which the Living has appeared on this earth.

There are noble names for them, found and bequeathed by the Classical
world. The plant is something cosmic, and the animal is additionally a micro-
cosm in relation to a macrocosm. When, and not until, the unit has thus separated
itself from the All and can define its position with respect to the All, it becomes
thereby a microcosm. Even the planets in their great cycles are in servitude,
and it is only these tiny worlds that move freely relative to a great one which
appears in their consciousness as their world-around (environment). Only
through this individualism of the microcosm docs that which the light offers
to its eyes our eyes acquire meaning as "body," and even to plants we
are from some inner motive reluctant to concede the property of bodiliness.

All that is cosmic bears the hall-mark of periodicity; it has "beat" (rhythm,
tact). All that is microcosmic possesses polarity; it possesses "tension."

We speak of tense alertness and tense thought, but all wakeful states are in
their essence tensions. Sense and object, I and thou, cause and effect, thing
and property each of these is a tension between discretes, and when the
state pregnantly called "detente" appears, then at once fatigue, and presently
sleep, set in for the microcosmic side of life. A human being asleep, discharged
of all tensions, is leading only a plantlike existence.

Cosmic beat, on the other hand, is everything that can be paraphrased in
terms like direction, time, rhythm, destiny, longing from the hoof-beats of
a team of thoroughbreds and the deep tread of proud marching soldiers to the
silent fellowship of two lovers, the sensed tact that makes the dignity of a
social assembly, and that keen quick judgment of a "judge of men" which I
have already, earlier in this work, 1 called physiognomic tact.

This beat of cosmic cycles goes on notwithstanding the freedom of micro-
cosmic movement in space, and from time to time breaks down the tension of the
waking individual's being into the one grand felt harmony. If we have ever fol-
lowed the flight of a bird in the high air how, always in the same way, it
rises, turns, glides, loses itself in the distance we must have felt the plantlike
certainty of the "it" and the "we" in this ensemble of motion, which needs
no bridge of reason to unite your sense of it with mine. This is the meaning
1 For instance, Vol. I, p. 154. Tr.

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM 5

of war-dances and love-dances amongst men and beasts. In this wise a regi-
ment mounting to the assault under fire is forged into a unity, in this wise does
the crowd collect at some exciting occasion and become a body, capable of
thinking and acting pitifully, blindly, and strangely for a moment ere it falls
apart again. In such cases the microcosmic wall is obliterated. It jostles and
threatens, it pushes and pulls, // flees, swerves, and sways. Limbs intertwine,
feet rush, one cry comes from every mouth, one destiny overlies all. Out of a
sum of little single worlds comes suddenly a complete whole.

The perception of cosmic beat we call "feel (Fuklen)," that of microcosmic
tensions "feeling (Empfinden)." The ambiguity of the word " Sinnlichkeit"
has obscured this clear difference between the general and plantlike side and
the specifically animal side of life. If we say for the one race- or sex-life, and
for the other sense-life, a deep connexion reveals itself between them. The
former ever bears the mark of periodicity, beat, even to the extent of harmony
with the great cycles of the stars, of relation between female nature and the
moon, of this life generally to night, spring, warmth. The latter consists in
tensions, polarities of light and object illuminated, of cognition and that which
is cognized, of wound and the weapon that has caused it. Each of these sides of
life has, in the more highly developed genera, taken shape in special organs,
and the higher the development, the clearer the emphasis on each side. We
possess two cyclic organs of the cosmic existence, the blood system and the sex-organ,
and two differentiating organs of microcosmic mobility, senses and nerves. We have
to assume that in its origin the whole body has been both a cyclic and a tactual
organ.

The blood is for us the symbol of the living. Its course proceeds without
pause, from generation to death, from the mother body in and out of the body of
the child, in the waking state and in sleep, never-ending. The blood of the
ancestors flows through the chain of the generations and binds them in a
great linkage of destiny, beat, and time. Originally this was accomplished
only by a process of division, redivision, and ever new division of the cycles,
until finally a specific organ of sexual generation appeared and made one moment
into a symbol of duration. And how thereafter creatures begat and conceived,
how the plantlike in them drove them to reproduce themselves for the mainte-
nance beyond themselves of the eternal cycle, how the one great pulse-beat
operates through all the detached souls, filling, driving, checking, and often
destroying that is the deepest of all life's secrets, the secret that all reli-
gious mysteries and all great poems seek to penetrate, the secret whose tragedy
stirred Goethe in his " Selige Sehnsucht" and "Wahlverwandtschaften," where
the child has to die because, brought into existence out of discordant cycles of
the blood, it is the fruit of a cosmic sin.

To these cosmic organs the microcosm as such adds (in the degree to which
it possesses freedom of movement vis-a-vis the macrocosm) the organ "sense,"

6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

which is originally touch-sense and nothing else. Even now, at our own high
level of development, we use the word "touch" quite generally of contacts by
eye, by ear, and even by the understanding, for it is the simplest expression of
the mobility of a living creature that needs constantly to be establishing
its relation to its world-around. But to "establish" here means to fix place,
and thus all senses, however sophisticated and remote from the primitive they
may seem, are essentially positive senses; there are no others. Sensation of all
kinds distinguishes proper and alien. And for the positional definition of the
alien with respect to the proper the scent of the hound serves just as much as the
hearing of the stag and the eye of the eagle. Colour, brightness, tones, odours,
all conceivable modes of sensation, imply detachment, distance, extension.

Like the cosmic cycle of the blood, the differentiating activity of sense is
originally a unity. The active sense is always an understanding sense also.
In these simple relations seeking and finding are one that which we most ap-
positely call " touch." It is only later, in a stage wherein considerable demands
are made upon developed senses, that sensation and understanding of sensation
cease to be identical and the latter begins to detach itself more and more clearly
from the former. In the outer sheath the critical organ separates itself from the
sense-organ (as the sex-organ does from that of blood-circulation). But our
use of words like "keen," "sensitive," "insight," "poking our nose," and
"flair," not to mention the terminology of logic, all taken from the visual
world, shows well enough that we regard all understanding as derived from sen-
sation, and that even in the case of man the two still work hand in hand.

We see a dog lying indifferent and then in a moment tense, listening, and
scenting what he merely senses he is seeking to understand as well. He is
able, too, to reflect that is a state in which the understanding is almost alone
at work and playing upon mat sensations. The older languages very clearly ex-
pressed this graduation, sharply distinguishing each degree as an activity of a
specific kind by means of a specific label e.g., hear, listen, listen for (lau-
schen); smell, scent, sniff; see, spy, observe. In such series as these the reason-
content becomes more and more important relative to the sensation-content.

Finally, however, a supreme sense develops among the rest. A something in
the All, which for ever remains inaccessible to our will-to-understand,
evokes for itself a bodily organ. The eye comes into existence and in and with
the eye, as its opposite pole, light. Abstract thinking about light may lead (and
has led) to an ideal light representable by an ensemble picture of waves and rays,
but the significance of this development in actuality was that thenceforward
life was embraced and taken in through the light-world of the eye. This is the su-
preme marvel that makes everything human what it is. Only with this light-
world of the eye do distances come into being as colours and brightnesses;
only in this world are night and day and things and motions visible in the ex-
tension of illumined space, and the universe of infinitely remote stars circling

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM 7

above the earth, and that light-horizon of the individual life which stretches
so far beyond the environs of the body.

In the world of this light not the light which science has deduced in-
directly by the aid of mental concepts, themselves derived from visions (" theory"
in the Greek sense) it comes to pass that seeing, human herds wander upon
the face of this little earth-star, and that circumstances of light the full
southern flood over Egypt and Mexico, the greyness of the north contribute
to the determination of their entire life. It is for his eye that man develops the
magic of his architecture, wherein the constructional elements given by touch
are restated in relations generated by light. Religion, art, thought, have all
arisen for light's sake, and all differentiations reduce to the one point of whether
it is the bodily eye or the mind's eye that is addressed.

And with this there emerges in all clarity yet another distinction, which is
normally obscured by the use of the ambiguous word "consciousness (Bewusst-
sein)." I distinguish being or "being there" (Dasein) from waking-being
or waking-consciousness (Wachsein). 1 Being possesses beat and direction,
while waking-consciousness is tension and extension. In being a destiny rules,
while waking-consciousness distinguishes causes and effects. The prime ques-
tion is for the one "when and wherefore?" for the other "where and how?"

A plant leads an existence that is without waking-consciousness. In sleep
all creatures become plants, the tension of polarity to the world-around is
extinguished, and the beat of life goes on. A plant knows only a relation to the
when and the wherefore. The upthrust of the first green shoots out of the
wintry earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole mighty process of blooming,
scent, colour glory, and ripening all this is desire to fulfil a destiny, constant
yearning towards a "when?"

"Where?" on the other hand can have no meaning for a plant existence. It
is the question with which awakening man daily orients himself afresh with
respect to the world. For it is only the pulse-beat of Being that endures through-
out the generations, whereas waking-consciousness begins anew for each micro-
cosm. And herein lies the distinction between procreation and birth, the first
being a pledge of duration, the second a beginning. A plant, therefore, is bred,
but it is not born. It "is there," but no awakening, no birthday, expands a
sense-world around it.

With this we are brought face to face with man. In man's waking-conscious-
ness nothing disturbs the now pure lordship of the eye. The sounds of the night,
the wind, the panting of beasts, the odour of flowers, all stimulate in him a
"whither" and a ''whence" in the world of light. Of the world of scent, in which
even our closest comrade the dog still co-ordinates his visual impressions, we

1 Sec Vol. i, p. 54. Tr.

8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

have no conception whatever. We know nothing of the world of the butterfly,
whose crystalline eye projects no synthetic picture, or of those animals which,
while certainly not destitute of senses, are blind. The only space that remains to
us is visual space, and in it places have been found for the relics of other sense-
worlds (such as sounds, scents, heat and cold) as properties and effects of light-
things it is a seen fire that warmth comes from, it is a seen rose in illumined
space that gives off the scent and we speak of a certain tone as violin-tone. As to
the stars, our conscious relations with them are limited to seeing them over
our heads they shine, describing their visible path. 1 But of these sense-worlds
there is no doubt that animals and even primitive men still have sensations that
are wholly different from ours; some of these sensations we are able to figure
to ourselves indirectly by the aid of scientific hypotheses, but the rest now escape
us altogether.

This impoverishment of the sensual implies, however, an immeasurable
deepening. Human waking-consciousness is no longer a mere tension between
body and environment. It is now life in a self-contained light-world. The body
moves in the space that is seen. The depth-experience 2 is a mighty out-thrust
into the visible distance from a light-centre 3 the point which we call "I."
"I" is a light-concept. From this point onward the life of an "I" becomes
essentially a life in the sun, and night is akin to death. And out of it, too,
there arises a new feeling of fear which absorbs all others within itself
fear before the invisible, fear of that which one hears or feels, suspects, or observes
in its effects without seeing. Animals indeed experience fear in other forms,
but man finds these forms puzzling, and even uneasiness in the presence of still-
ness to which primitive men and children are subject (and which they seek
to dispel by noise and loud talking) is disappearing in the higher types of man-
kind. It is fear of the invisible that is the essence and hall-mark of human
religiousness. Gods are surmised, imagined, envisaged light-actualities, and
the idea of an " invisible' ' god is the highest expression of human transcendence.
Where the bounds of the light-world are, there lies the beyond, and salvation
is emancipation from the spell of the light-world and its facts.

In precisely this resides the ineffable charm and the very real power of eman-
cipation that music possesses for us men. For music is the only art whose means
lie outside the light-world that has so long become coextensive with our total
world, and music alone, therefore, can take us right out of this world, break
up the steely tyranny of light, and let us fondly imagine that we are on the verge
of reaching the soul's final secret an illusion due to the fact that our waking
consciousness is now so dominated by one sense only, so thoroughly adapted

1 Even scientific astronomy, when applied to everyday work, states the movements of the heav-
enly bodies in terms referred to our. perception of them. Tr.

2 See Vol. i, p. 171. Tr.

3 A very similar notion of the light-world diffused from the light-centre forms the cardinal point
of the philosophy of Robert Grossctcstc, Bishop of Lincoln (i 175-1173). Tr.

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM 9

to the eye-world, that it is incapable of forming, out of the impressions it re-
ceives, a world of the ear. 1

Man's thought, then, is visual thought, our concepts are derived from vision,
and the whole fabric of our logic is a light-world in the imagination.

This narrowing and consequent deepening, which has led to all our sense-
impressions being adapted to and ordered with those of sight, has led also to
the replacement of the innumerable methods of thought-communication known
to animals by the one single medium of language, which is a bridge in the light-
world between two persons present to one another's bodily or imaginative eyes.
The other modes of speaking of which vestiges remain at all have long been
absorbed into language in the form of mimicry, gesture, or emphasis. The
difference between purely human speech and general animal utterance is that
words and word-linkages constitute a domain of inward light-ideas, which
has been built up under the sovereignty of the eyes. Every word-meaning has
a light- value, even in the case of words like "melody," "taste," "cold," or of
perfectly abstract designations.

Even among the higher animals, the habit of reciprocal understanding by
means of a sense-link has brought about a marked difference between mere
sensation and understanding sensation. If we distinguish in this wise sense-
impressions and sense-judgments (e.g., scent-judgment, taste-judgment, or aural-
judgment), we find that very often, even in ants and bees, let alone birds of
prey, horses, and dogs, the centre of gravity has palpably shifted towards the
judgment side of waking-being. But it is only under the influence of language
that there is set up within the waking-consciousness a definite opposition between
sensation and understanding, a tension that in animals is quite unthinkable
and even in man can hardly have been at first anything more than a rarely
actualized possibility. The development of language, then, brought along
with it a determination of fundamental significance the emancipation of under-
standing from sensation.

More and more often there appears, in lieu of the simple comprehension of
the gross intake, a comprehension of the significances of the component sense-
impressions, which have hardly been noticed as such before. 2 Finally these
impressions themselves are discarded and replaced by the felt connotations of
familiar word-sounds. The word, originally the name of a visual thing, changes
imperceptibly into the label of a mental thing, the "concept." We are far from
being able to fix exact meanings to such names that we can do only with
wholly new names. We never use a word twice with identical connotation,
and no one ever understands exactly as another does. But mutual comprehen-

1 The coming of radio broadcasting has in no way altered, but has rather confirmed, the validity
of this. The listener cither translates his aural impressions into those of the light-world or else
yields even more readily than usual to the "illusion" here discussed. Tr.

2 The original reads: "An Stelle des vollig einhcitlichcn vtrstehcndcn Empfindens crschcint oft und after
tin Verstehen der Bedeutung von kattm noch beachteten Sinneseindrucken. " Tr.

.ID THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

sion is possible, in spite of this, because of the common world-outlook that has
been induced in both, with and by the use of a common language; in an ambiance
common to the lives and activities of both, mere word-sounds suffice to evoke
cognate ideas. It is this mode of comprehending by means of sounds at once
derived and detached (abstract) from actual seeing which, however rarely we
can find it definitely evidenced at the primitive level, does in fact sharply sepa-
rate the generic-animal kind of waking-consciousness from the purely human
kind which supervenes. Just so, at an earlier stage, the appearance of waking-
consciousness as such fixed a frontier between the general plantlike and the
specifically animal existence.

Understanding detached from sensation is called thought. Thought has introduced
a permanent disunity into the human waking-consciousness. From early times
it has rated understanding and sensibility as "higher" and "lower" soul-power.
It has created the fateful opposition between the light-world of the eye, de-
scribed as a figment and an illusion, and the world-imagined (" vorgestellte," "set
before" oneself), in which the concepts, with their faint but ineffaceable tinge
of light-coloration, live and do business. And henceforth for man, so long as
he "thinks," this is the true world, the world-in-itself. At the outset the ego
was waking-being as such (in so far, that is, as, having sight, it felt itself as
the centre of a light-world); now it becomes "spirit" namely, pure under-
standing, which "cognizes" itself as such and very soon comes to regard not
only the world around itself, but even the remaining component of life, its own
body, as qualitatively below itself. This is evidenced not only in the upright
carriage of man, but in the thoroughly intellectualized formation of his head,
in which the eyes, the brow, and the temples become more and more the vehicles
of expression. 1

Clearly, then, thought, when it became independent, discovered a new mode
of activity for itself. To the practical thought which is directed upon the con-
stitution of the light-things in the world-around, with reference to this or
that practical end, there is added the theoretical, penetrating, subtilizing
thought which sets itself to establish the constitution of these things "in
themselves," the natura rerum. From that which is seen, the light is abstracted,
the depth-experience of the eye intensifies itself in a grand and unmistakable
course of development into a depth-experience within the tinted realm of word-
connotations. Man begins to believe that it is not impossible for his inner eye
to see right through into the things that actually are. Concept follows upon con-
cept, and at last there is a mighty thought-architecture made up of buildings
that stand out with full clarity under the inner light.

The development of theoretical thought within the human waking-con-
sciousness gives rise to a kind of activity that makes inevitable a fresh conflict

1 Hence we call that which we observe in the faces of men who have not the habit of thought
"animal" admiringly or contemptuously as the case may be.

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM n

that between Being (existence) and Waking-Being (waking-consciousness).
The animal microcosm, in which existence and consciousness are joined in a
self-evident unity of living, knows of consciousness only as the servant of exis-
tence. The animal "lives" simply and does not reflect upon life. Owing, how-
ever, to the unconditional monarchy of the eye, life is presented as the life of a
visible entity in the light; understanding, then, when it becomes interlocked
with speech, promptly forms a concept of thought and with it a counter-concept :
of life, and in the end it distinguishes life as it is from that which might be.
Instead of straight, uncomplicated living, we have the antithesis represented
in the phrase "thought and action." That which is not possible at all in the
beasts becomes in every man not merely a possibility, but a fact and in the end
an alternative. The entire history of mature humanity with all its phenomena
has been formed by it, and the higher the form that a Culture takes, the more
fully this opposition dominates the significant moments of its conscious being.
The plantlike-cosmic, Being heavy with Destiny, blood, sex, possess an
immemorial mastery and keep it. They are life. The other only serves life.
But this other wills, not to serve, but to rule; moreover, it believes that it does
rule, for one of the most determined claims put forward by the human spirit
is its claim to possess power over the body, over "nature." But the question
is: Is not this very belief a service to life? Why does our thought think just
so? Perhaps because the cosmic, the "it," wills that it shall? Thought shows
off its power when it calls the body a notion, when it establishes the pitifulness
of the body and commands the voices of the blood to be silent. But in truth
the blood rules, in that silently it commands the activity of thought to begin
and to cease. There, too, is a distinction between speech and life Being can
do without consciousness and the life of understanding, but not vice versa.
Thought rules, after all, in spite of all, only in the "realm of thought."

It only amounts to a verbal difference whether we say that thought is a
creation of man, or higher mankind a creation of thought. But thought it-
self persistently credits itself with much too high a rank in the ensemble of life,
and through its ignorance of, or indifference to, the fact that there are other
modes of ascertainment besides itself, forfeits its opportunity of surveying the
whole without prejudice. In truth, all professors of thought and in every
Culture they have been almost the only authorized spokesmen have taken
it as self-evident that cold abstract thought is the way of approach to "last
things." Moreover, they have assumed, also as self-evident, that the "truth"
which they reach on this line of advance is the same as the truth which they
have set before themselves as an aim, and not, as it really is, a sort of imaginary
picture which takes the place of the unknowable secrets.

Sec Vol. i, p. iz6. Tr.

ii THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

For, although man is a thinking being, it is very far from the fact that his
being consists in thinking. This is a difference that the born subtilizer fails to
grasp. The aim of thought is called "truth," and truths arc "established"
i.e., brought out of the living impalpability of the light-world into the form
of concepts and assigned permanently to places in a system, which means a
kind of intellectual space. Truths are absolute and eternal i.e., they have
nothing more to do with life.

But for an animal, not truths, but only facts exist. Here is the difference
between practical and theoretical understanding. Facts and truths 1 differ as
time and space, destiny and causality. A fact addresses itself to the whole
waking-consciousness, for the service of being, and not to that side of the wak-
ing-consciousness which imagines it can detach itself from being. Actual life,
history, knows only facts; life experience and knowledge of men deal only
in facts. The active man who does and wills and fights, daily measuring him-
self against the power of facts, looks down upon mere truths as unimportant.
The real statesman knows only political facts, not political truths. Pilate's
famous question is that of every man of fact.

It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science
with the problem of the value of truth and knowledge cheap and even blas-
phemous though this seems to the born thinker and savant, who regards his
whole raison d'etre as impugned by it. Descartes meant to doubt everything,
but certainly not the value of his doubting.

It is one thing, however, to pose problems and quite another to believe in
solutions of them. The plant lives and knows not that it lives. The animal
lives and knows that it lives. Man is astounded by his life and asks questions
about it. But even man cannot give an answer to his own questions, he can
only believe in the correctness of his answer, and in that respect there is no
difference between Aristotle and the meanest savage.

Whence comes it, then, that secrets must be unravelled and questions an-
swered? Is it not from that fear which looks out of even a child's eyes, that
terrible dowry of human waking-consciousness which compels the understand-
ing, free now from sensation and brooding on images, to probe into every deep
for solutions that mean release? Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us
from the nightmare of the grand questions?

"Shuddering awe is mankind's noblest part." He to whom that gift has
been denied by fate must seek to discover secrets, to attack, dissect, and destroy
the awe-inspiring, and to extract a booty of knowledge therefrom. The will-
to-system is a will to kill something living, to "establish," stabilize, stiffen it,
to bind it in the train of logic. The intellect has conquered when it has com-
pleted the business of making rigid.

This distinction that is usually drawn between "reason" (Vernunff) and
1 Sec Vol. i, p. 101. Tr.

"understanding" (VcrstancT) is really that between the divination and flair
belonging to our plant side, which merely makes use of the language of eye
and word, and the understanding proper, belonging to our animal side, which
is deduced from language. "Reason" in this sense is that which calls ideas
into life, "understanding" that which finds truths. Truths are lifeless and can
be imparted (mitgeteili); ideas belong to the living self of the author and can
only be sympathetically evoked (mitgefu'blt). Understanding is essentially
critical, "reason" essentially creative. 1 The latter begets the object of its
activity, the former starts from it. In fact, understanding criticism is first
practised and developed in association with ordinary sensations it is in
sensation-judgments that the child learns to comprehend and to differentiate.
Then, abstracted from this connexion and henceforward busied with itself,
criticism needs a substitute for the sensation-activity that had previously
served as its object. And this cannot be given it but by an already existing mode
of thought, and it is upon this that criticism now works. This, only this,
and not something building freely on nothingness, is Thought.

For quite early, before he has begun to think abstractly, primitive man
forms for himself a religious world-picture, and this is the object upon which
the understanding begins to operate critically. Always science has grown
up on a religion and under all the spiritual prepossessions of that religion, and
always it signifies nothing more or less than an abstract melioration of these
doctrines, considered as false because less abstract. Always it carries along
the kernel of a religion in its ensemble of principles, problem-enunciations,
and methods. Every new truth that the understanding finds is nothing but a
critical judgment upon some other that was already there. The polarity be-
tween old and new knowledge involves the consequence that in the world of
the understanding there is only the relatively correct namely, judgments of
greater convincingness than other judgments. Critical knowledge rests upon
the belief that the understanding of to-day is better than that of yesterday.
And that which forces us to this belief, is again, life.

Can criticism then, as criticism, solve the great questions, or can it merely
pose them? At the beginning of knowledge we believe the former. But the
more we know, the more certain we become of the latter. So long as we hope,
we call the secret a problem.

Thus, for mankind aware, there is a double problem, that of Waking-
Being and that of Being; or of Space and of Time; or of the world-as-nature 2
and the world as history; or of pulse and tension. The waking consciousnes
seeks to understand not only itself, but in addition something that is akin to
itself. Though an inner voice may tell one that here all possibilities of knowl-

1 Hence Bayle's profound observation that the understanding is capable only of discovering
errors.

2 Sec Vol. I, p. 94. Tr.

i 4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

edge are left behind, yet, in spite of it, fear overpcrsuadcs everyone and
one goes on with the search, preferring even the pretence of a solution to the
alternative of looking into nothingness.

Waking-consciousness consists of sensation and understanding, and their
common essence is a continuous self-adjustment in relation to the macrocosm.
To that extent waking-consciousness is identical with ascertainment (Fest-
stcllen), whether we consider the touch of an infusorian, or human thinking
of the highest order. Feeling, now, for touch with itself in this wise, the
waking-consciousness first encounters the epistemological problem. What do
we mean by cognition, or by the knowledge of cognition? And what is the
relation between the original meanings of these terms and their later formula-
tions in words? Waking and sleep alternate, like day and night, according to
the course of the stars, and so, too, cognition alternates with dreams. How do
these two differ?

Waking-consciousness, however whether it be that of sensation or that
of understanding is synonymous with the existence of oppositions, such as
that between cognition and the object cognized, or thing and property, or
object and event. Wherein consists the essence of these oppositions? And so
arises the second problem, that of causality. When we give the names "cause"
and "effect" to a pair of sensuous elements, or "premiss" and "consequence"
to a pair of intellectual elements, we are fixing between them a relation of
power and rank when one is there, the other must be there also. In these
relations, observe, time does not figure at all. We are concerned not with
facts of destiny, but with causal truths, not with a "When?" but with a law-
fixed dependence. Beyond doubt this is the understanding's most promising
line of activity. Mankind perhaps owes to discoveries of this order his hap-
piest moments; and thus he proceeds, from these oppositions in the near and
present things of everyday life that strike him immediately, forward in an
endless series of conclusions to the first and final causes in the structure of nature
that he calls God and the meaning of the world. He assembles, orders, and
reviews his system, his dogma of law-governed connexions, and he finds in it
a refuge from the unforeseen. He who can demonstrate, fears no longer. But
wherein consists the essence of causality? Does it lie in knowing, in the
known, or in a unity of both?

The world of tensions is necessarily in itself stiff and dead namely,
"eternal truth," something beyond all time, something that is a state. The
actual world of waking-consciousness, however, is full of changes. This
does not astonish an animal in the least, but it leaves the thought of the thinker
powerless, for rest and movement, duration and change, become and becoming, 1
1 Sec Vol. I. pp. 53, ct seq. Tr.

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM 15

arc oppositions denoting something that in its very nature ' 'passeth all under-
standing" and must therefore (from the point of view of the understanding)
contain an absurdity. For is that a fact at all which proves to be incapable of
distillation from the sense-world in the form of a truth? On the other hand,
though the world is cognized as timeless, a time element nevertheless adheres
to it . tensions appear as beat, and direction associates itself with extension.
And so all that is problematical for the understanding consciousness somehow
gathers itself together in one last and gravest problem, the problem of motion.
And on that problem free and abstract thought breaks down, and we begin
to discern that the microcosmic is after all as dependent as ever upon the
cosmic, just as the individualness of a being from its first moment is consti-
tuted not by a body, but by the sheath of a body. Life can exist without
thought, but thought is only one mode of life. High as may be the objectives
that thought sets before itself, in actuality life makes use of thought for its
ends and gives it a living objective quite apart from the solution of abstract
problems. For thought the solutions of problems are correct or erroneous
for life they are valuable or valueless, and if the will-to-know breaks down
on the motion problem, it may well be because life's purpose has at that point
been achieved. In spite of this, and indeed because of this, the motion problem
remains the centre of gravity of all higher thought. All mythology and all
natural science has arisen out of man's wonder in the presence of the mystery
of motion.

The problem of motion touches, at once and immediately, the secrets of
existence, which are alien to the waking-consciousness and yet inexorably
press upon it. In posing motion as a problem we affirm our will to compre-
hend the incomprehensible, the when and wherefore, Destiny, blood, all that
our intuitive processes touch in our depths. Born to see, we strive to set it
before our eyes in the light, so that we may in the literal sense grasp it, assure
ourselves of it as of something tangible.

For this is the decisive fact, of which the observer is unconscious his
whole effort of seeking is aimed not at life, but at the seeing of life, and not at
death, but at the seeing of death. We try to grasp the cosmic as it appears
in the macrocosm to the microscosm, as the life of a body in the light-world be-
tween birth and death, generation and dissolution, and with that differenti-
ation of body and soul that follows of deepest necessity from our ability to
experience * the inward-proper as a sensuous alien.

That we do not merely live but know about "living" is a consequence of
our bodily existence in the light. But the beast knows only life, not death.
Were we pure plantlike beings, we should die unconscious of dying, for to
feel death and to die would be identical. But animals, even though they hear
the death-cry, see the dead body, and scent putrefaction, behold death with-
1 Original: "aus dent Erlebnis." Tr.

16 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

out comprehending it. Only when understanding has become, through lan-
guage, detached from visual awareness and pure, does death appear to man as
the great enigma of the light-world about him.

Then, and only then, life becomes the short span of time between birth
and death, and it is in relation to death that that other great mystery of gen-
eration arises also. Only then does the diffuse animal fear of everything become
the definite human fear of death. It is this that makes the love of man and
woman, the love of mother and child, the tree of the generations, the family,
the people, and so at last world-history itself the infinitely deep facts and
problems of destiny that they are. To death, as the common lot of every human
being born into the light, adhere the ideas of guilt and punishment, of existence
as a penance, of a new life beyond the world of this light, and of a salvation
that makes an end of the death-fear. In the knowledge of death is originated
that world-outlook which we possess as being men and not beasts.

There are born destiny-men and causality-men. A whole world separates
the purely living man peasant and warrior, statesman and general, man
of the world and man of business, everyone who wills to prosper, to rule, to
fight, and to dare, the organizer or entrepreneur, the adventurer or bravo or
gambler from the man who is destined either by the power of his mind or
the defect of his blood to be an "intellectual" the saint, priest, savant,
idealist, or ideologue. Being and waking-being, pulse and tension, motives
and ideas, cyclic organs and touch-organs there has rarely been a man of
any significance in whom the one side or the other has not markedly pre-
dominated. All that motives and urges, the eye for men and situations, the
belief in his star which every born man of action possesses and which is some-
thing wholly different from belief in the correctness of a standpoint, the voices
of the blood that speak in moments of decision, and the immovably quiet
conviction that justifies any aim and any means all these are denied to the
critical, meditative man. Even the footfall of the fact-man sounds different from,
sounds more planted than, that of the thinker, in whom the pure microcosmic
can acquire no firm relation with earth.

Destiny has made the man so or so subtle and fact-shy, or active and
contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole man,
whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without (and even
against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries to master
actuality as well as its own world, for then we get all those ethico-
politico-social reform-projects which demonstrate, unanswerably, how things
ought to be and how to set about making them so theories that without
exception rest upon the hypothesis that all men are as rich in ideas and as
poor in motives as the author is (or thinks he is). Such theories, even when

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM 17

they have taken the field armed with the full authority of a religion or the
prestige of a famous name, have not in one single instance effected the slightest
alteration in life. They have merely caused us to think otherwise than before
about life. And this, precisely, is the doom of the "late" ages of a Culture,
the ages of much writing and much reading that they should perpetually
confuse the opposition of life and thought with the opposition between thought-
about-life and thought-about-thought. All world-improvers, priests, and
philosophers are unanimous in holding that life is a fit object for the nicest
meditation, but the life of the world goes its own way and cares not in the
least what is said about it. And even when a community succeeds in living
" according to rule," all that it achieves is, at best, a note on itself in some
future history of the world if there is space left after the proper and only
important subject-matter has been dealt with.

For, in the last resort, only the active man, the man of destiny, lives in
the actual world, the world of political, military, and economic decisions, in
which concepts and systems do not figure or count. Here a shrewd blow is
more than a shrewd conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which
statesmen and soldiers of all times have regarded the "ink-slinger" and the
"bookworm" who think that world-history exists for the sake of the intellect
or science or even art. Let us say it frankly and without ambiguity: the
understanding divorced from sensation is only one, and not the decisive, side
of life. A history of Western thought may not contain the name of Napoleon,
but in the history of actuality Archimedes, for all his scientific discoveries,
was possibly less effective than that soldier who killed him at the storming of
Syracuse.

Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at
the head and not in the train of great events. They misunderstand completely
the role played, for example, by the political Sophists in Athens or by Voltaire
and Rousseau in France. Often enough a statesman does not "know" what he
is doing, but that does not prevent him from following with confidence just
the one path that leads to success; the political doctrinaire, on the contrary,
always knows what should be done, and yet his activity, once it ceases to be
limited to paper, is the least successful and therefore the least valuable in
history. These intrusions happen only too frequently in times of uncertainty,
like that of the Attic enlightenment, or the French or the German revolutions,
when the ideologue of word or pen is eager to be busy with the actual history
of the people instead of with systems. He mistakes his place. He belongs
with his principles and programs to no history but the history of a literature.
Real history passes judgment on him not by controverting the theorist, but by
leaving him and all his thoughts to himself. A Plato or a Rousseau not to
mention the smaller intellects could build up abstract political structures,
but for Alexander, Scipio, Czsar, and Napoleon, with their schemes and

i8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

battles and settlements, they were entirely without importance. The thinker
could discuss destiny if he liked; it was enough for these men to be destiny.

Under all the plurality of microcosmic beings, we are perpetually meeting
with the formation of inspired mass-units, beings of a higher order, which,
whether they develop slowly or come into existence in a moment, contain
all the feelings and passions of the individual, enigmatic in their inward char-
acter and inaccessible to reasoning though the connoisseur can see into and
reckon upon their reactions well enough. Here too we distinguish the generic
animal unities which are sensed, the unities profoundly dependent upon Being
and Destiny like the way of an eagle in the air or the way of the stormers
on the breach from the purely human associations which depend upon the
understanding and cohere on the basis of like opinions, like purposes, or like
knowledge. Unity of cosmic pulse one has without willing to have it; unity
of common ground is acquired at will. One can join or resign from an intel-
lectual association as one pleases, for only one's waking-consciousness is
involved. But to a cosmic unity one is committed, and committed with one's
entire being. Crowds of this order of unity are seized by storms of enthusiasm
or, as readily, of panic. They are noisy and ecstatic at Eleusis or Lourdes, or
heroically firm like the Spartans of Thermopylae and the last Goths in the
battle of Vesuvius. 1 They form themselves to the music of chorales, marches,
and dances, and are sensitive like human and animal thoroughbreds to the effects
of bright colours, decoration, costume, and uniform.

These inspired aggregates are born and die. Intellectual associations are
mere sums in the mathematical sense, varying by addition and subtraction,
unless and until (as sometimes happens) a mere coincidence of opinion strikes so
impressively as to reach the blood and so, suddenly, to create out of the sum
a Being. In any political turning-point words may become fates and opinions
passions. A chance crowd is herded together in the street and has one con-
sciousness, one sensation, one language until the short-lived soul flickers out
and everyone goes his way again. This happened every day in the Paris of
1789, whenever the cry of "A la lanterne!" fell upon the ear.

These souls have their special psychology, 2 and the knowledge of this
psychology is for the public man an essential. A single soul is the mark of
every genuine order or class, be it the chivalry and military orders of the
Crusades, the Roman Senate or the Jacobin club, polite society under Louis XIV
or the Prussian country "Add," peasantry or guilds, the masses of the big
city or the folk of the secluded valley, the peoples and tribes of the migrations
or the adherents of Mohammed and, generally, of any new-founded religion
or sect, the French of the Revolution or the Germans of the Wars of Libcra-

1 A.D. 553 (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xliii). Tr.

2 G. Lc Bon's Psycbologie dts faults (which has been translated into English under the title The
Crowd} is the pioneer work on this subject, and though unduly coloured perhaps by the author's
personal prepossessions, still retains its interest and value. Tr.

THE COSMIC AND THE MICROCOSM 19

tion. The mightiest beings of this kind that we know arc the higher Cultures,
which are born in great spiritual upheavals, and in a thousand years of exist-
ence weld all aggregates of lower degree nations, classes, towns, genera-
tions into one unit.

All grand events of history are carried by beings of the cosmic order, by
peoples, parties, armies, and classes, while the history of the intellect runs its
course in loose associations and circles, schools, levels of education, "ten-
dencies" and "isms." And here again it is a question of destiny whether such
aggregates at the decisive moments of highest effectiveness find a leader or are
driven blindly on, whether the chance headmen are men of the first order or
men of no real significance tossed up, like Robespierre or Pompey, by the surge
of events. It is the hall-mark of the statesman that he has a sure and pene-
trating eye for these mass-souls that form and dissolve on the tide of the times,
their strength and their duration, their direction and purpose. And even so,
it is a question of Incident l whether he is one who can master them or one who
is swept away by them.

1 See Vol. I., pp. 139, et scq. Tr.

CHAPTER II
ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

(B)
THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES

CHAPTER II

ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE
(B)

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES

Now, man no matter whether it is for life or for thought that he is born
into the world so long as he is acting or is thinking, is awake and therefore
in focus i.e., adjusted to the one significance that for the moment his light-
world holds for him. Everyone knows that it is almost sharply painful to
switch off suddenly in the middle of, say, an experiment in physics, in order
to think about some event of the day. I have said earlier that the innumerable
settings that take turns in man's waking consciousness fall into two distinct
groups the worlds of destiny and pulsation, and the worlds of causes and ten-
sions. The two pictures I have called world-as-history and world-as-nature. In
the first, life makes use of critical understanding. It has the eye under com-
mand, the felt pulsation becomes the inwardly imagined wave-train, and the
shattering spiritual experience becomes pictured as the epochal peak. In the sec-
ond, thought itself rules, and its causal criticism turns life into a rigorous process,
the living content of a fact into an abstract truth, and tension into formula.

How is this possible? Each is an eye-picture, but in the one the seer is giv-
ing himself up to the never-to-be-repeated facts, and in the other he is striving
to catch truths for an ever-valid system. In the history-picture, that in which
knowledge is simply an auxiliary, the cosmic makes use of the microcosmic.
In the picture which we call memory and recollection, things are present to us
as bathed in an inner light and swept by the pulsation of our existence. But
the chronological element 1 tells us that history, as soon as it becomes though
history, is no longer immune from the basic conditions of all waking-con-
sciousness. In the nature- (or science-) picture it is the ever-present subjective
that is alien and illusive, but in the history-picture it is the equally inelim-
inable objective, Number, that leads into error.

When we are working in the domain of Nature (science), our settings and
self-adjustments should be and can be up to a certain point impersonal
one "forgets oneself" but every man, class, nation, or family sees the
picture of history in relation to itself. The mark of Nature is an extension that
is inclusive of everything, but History is that which comes up out of the dark-

1 Meaning here names, dates, numbers the chronology in the usual extensive sense, and not
the intensive or deep sense. See Vol. I, pp. 97, 153 (foot-note). Tr.

2.4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

ness of the past, presents itself to the seer, and from him sweeps onward into the
future. He, as the present, is always its middle point, and it is quite impossible
for him to order the facts with any meaning if he ignores their direction
which is an element proper to life and not to thought. Every time, every
land, every living aggregate has its own historical horizon, and it is the mark
of the genuine historical thinker that he actualizes the picture of history that
his time demands.

Thus Nature and History are distinguishable like pure and impure criticism
meaning by "criticism" the opposite of lived experience. Natural science
is criticism and nothing else. But in History, criticism can do no more than
scientifically prepare the field over which the historian's eye is to sweep.
History is that ranging glance itself, whatever the direction in which it ranges.
He who possesses such an eye can understand every fact and every situation
"historically." Nature is a system, and systems can be learnt.

The process of historical self-adjustment begins for everyone with the earliest
impressions of childhood. Children's eyes are keen, and the facts of the nearest
environment, the life of the family and the house and the street, are sensed
and felt right down to the core, long before the city and its population come
into their visual field, and while the words "people," "country," "state,"
are still quite destitute of tangible meaning to them. Just so, and so thor-
oughly, primitive man knows all that is presented to his narrow field of view
as history, as living and above all Life itself, the drama of birth and death,
sickness and eld; the history of passionate war and passionate love, as ex-
perienced in himself or observed in others; the fate of relatives, of the clan,
of the village, their actions and their motives; tales of long enmity, of fights,
victory, and revenge. The life-horizon widens, and shows not lives, but Life
coming and going. The pageant is not now of villages and clans, but of remote
races and countries; not of years, but of centuries. The history that is actually
lived with and participated in never reaches over more than a grandfather's
span neither for ancient Germans and present-day Negroes, nor for
Pericles and Wallenstein. Here the horizon of living ends, and a new plane
begins wherein the picture is based upon hearsay and historical tradition, a
plane in which direct sympathies are adapted to a mind-picture that is both
distinct and, from long use, stable. The picture so developed shows very
different amplitudes for the men of the different Cultures. For us Westerners
it is with this secondary picture that genuine history begins, for we live under
the aspect of eternity, whereas for the Greeks and Romans it is just then that
history ceases. For Thucydidcs 1 the events of the Persian Wars, for Cxsar
those of the Punic Wars, were already devoid of living import.

1 He affirmed, on the" first page of his history (about 400 B.C.) that before his time nothing of
significance had happened (06 jue-ydXa VOU'L^U yevtaOai 6vre KO.T& TOVS iro\knovs o&re is TO. &XXa. Thu-
cydides, I, i.).

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 15

And beyond this plane again, other historic unit-pictures rise to the view
pictures of the destinies of the plant world and the animal world, the land-
scape, the stars which at the last fuse with the last pictures of natural science
into mythic images of the creation and the end of the world.

The nature- (science-) picture of the child and the primitive develops out
of the petty technique of every day, which perpetually forces both of them to
turn away from the fearful contemplation of wide nature to the critique of the
facts and situations of their near environment. Like the young animal, the
child discovers its first truths through play. Examining the toy, cutting
open the doll, turning the mirror round to see what is behind it, the feeling of
triumph in having established something as corrrect for good and all no
nature-research whatsoever has got beyond this. Primitive man applies this
critical experience, as he acquires it, to his arms and tools, to the materials
for his clothing, food, and housing i.e., to things in so far as they are dead.
He applies it to animals as well when suddenly they cease to have meaning
for him as living beings whose movements he watches and divines as pursuer
or pursued, and are apprehended mechanically instead of vitally, as aggre-
gates of flesh and bone for which he has a definite use exactly as he is con-
scious of an event, now as the act of a dasmon and a moment afterwards as a
sequence of cause and effect. The mature man of the Culture transposes in
exactly the same way, every day and every hour. Here, too, is a " nature "-
horizon, and beyond it lies the secondary plane formed of our impressions of
rain, lightning, and tempest, summer and winter, moon-phases and star-courses.
But at that plane religiousness, trembling with fear and awe, forces upon man
criteria of a far higher kind. Just as in the history-picture he sounds the ul-
timate facts of life, so here he seeks to establish the ultimate truths of nature.
What lies beyond any attainable frontier of knowledge he calls God, and
all that lies within that frontier he strives to comprehend as action, cre-
ation, and manifestation of God causally.

Every group of scientifically established elements, therefore, has a dual
tendency, inherent and unchanged since primitive ages. The one tendency
urges forwards the completest possible system of technical knowledge, for the
service of practical, economical, and warlike ends, which many kinds of animals
have developed to a high degree of perfection, and which from them leads,
through primitive man and his acquaintance with fire and metals, directly to
the machine-technics of our Faustian Culture. The other tendency took shape
only with the separation of strictly human thought from physical vision by
means of language, and the aim of its effort has been an equally complete
theoretical knowledge, which we call in the earlier phases of the Culture re-
ligious, and in the later scientific. Fire is for the warrior a weapon, for the crafts-
man part of his equipment, for the priest a sign from God, and for the scientist
a problem. But in all these aspects alike it is proper to the "natural," the

z6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

scientific, mode of waking-consciousness. In the world-as-history we do not
find fire as such, but the conflagration of Carthage and the flames of the fag-
gots heaped around John Hus and Giordano Bruno.

I repeat, every being livingly experiences every other being and its destiny
only in relation to itself. A flock of pigeons is regarded by the farmer on whose
fields it settles quite otherwise than by the nature-lover in the street or the
hawk in the air. The peasant sees in his son the future and the heritage, but
what the neighbour sees in him is a peasant, what the officer sees is a soldier,
what the visitor sees is a native. Napoleon experienced men and things very
differently as Emperor and as lieutenant. Put a man in a new situation, make
the revolutionary a minister, the soldier a general, and at once history and the
key men of history become for him something other than what they were.
Talleyrand saw through the men of his time because he belonged with them,
but had he been suddenly plumped down in the company of Crassus, Cassar,
Catiline, and Cicero, his understanding of their measures and views would
have been either null or erroneous. There is no history-in-itself. The history
of a family is taken differently by each member of it, that of a country differently
by each party, that of the age by each nation. The German looks upon the
World War otherwise than the Englishman, the workman upon economic
history otherwise than the employer, and the historian of the West has a quite
other world-history before his eyes than that of the great Arabian and Chinese
historians. The history of an era could be handled objectively only if it were
very distant in time, and the historian were radically disinterested; and we
find that our best historians cannot judge of or describe even the Peloponnesian
Wars and Actium without being in some measure influenced by present in-
terests.

It is not incompatible with, rather it is essential to, a profound knowledge
of men that the appraiser should see through glasses of his own colour. This
knowledge, indeed, is exactly the component that we discern to be wanting in
those generalizations that distort or altogether ignore that all-important fact,
the uniqueness of the constituent event in history 1 the worst example of
this being the "materialistic" conception of history, about which we have
said almost all there is to say when we have described it as physiognomic
barrenness. But both in spite of this and on account of this 2 there is for every
man, because he belongs to a class and a time and a nation and a Culture, a
typical picture of history as it ought to appear in relation to himself, and
equally there are typical pictures specific to the time or class or Culture, qua

1 Original: " Alles Bcdtutcndc, namlicb das Einmaligt dtr Geschicbte." Tr.
1 I suppose the meaning of these words to be that generalization and flair arc not really op-
poscd, but interdependent. Tr.

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES z 7

time or class or Culture. The supreme generalization possible to each Culture
as a major being is a primary and, for it, symbolical image of its own world-
as-history, and all self-attunemcnts of the individual or of the group livingly
effective as individual arc with reference to that image. Whenever we
describe another person's ideas as profound or superficial, original or trivial,
mistaken or obsolete, we are unwittingly judging them with reference to a
picture which springs up to answer for the value at the moment of a contin-
uous function of our time and our personality. 1

Obviously, then, every man of the Faustian Culture possesses his own
picture of history and, besides, innumerable other pictures from his youth
upwards, which fluctuate and alter ceaselessly in response to the experiences
of the day and the year. And how different, again, are the typical history-
images of men and different eras and classes, the world of Otto the Great and
that of Gregory VII, that of a Doge of Venice and that of a poor pilgrim!
In what different worlds lived Lorenzo de' Medici, Wallenstein, Cromwell,
Marat, and Bismarck, a serf of the Gothic age, a savant of the Baroque, the
army officer of the Thirty Years' War, the Seven Years' War, and the Wars of
Liberation respectively ! Or, to consider our own times alone, a Frisian peas-
ant whose life of actuality is limited to his own countryside and its folk, a
high merchant of Hamburg, and a professor of physics! And yet to all of
these, irrespective of individual age, status, and period, there is a common
basis that differentiates the ensemble of these figures, their prime-image,
from that of every other Culture.

But, over and above this, there is a distinction of another kind which
separates the Classical and the Indian history-pictures from those of the Chi-
nese, the Arabian, and, most of all, the Western Cultures the narrow horizon
of the two first-named. Whatever the Greeks may (and indeed must) have
known of ancient Egyptian history, they never allowed it to penetrate into
their peculiar history-picture, which for the majority was limited to the field
of events that could be related by the oldest surviving participant, and which
even for the finer minds stopped at the Trojan War, a frontier beyond which
they would not concede that there had been historical life at all. 2
v The Arabian Culture, 3 on the other hand, very early dared the astounding
gesture we see it in the historical thought alike of the Jews and of the
Persians from Cyrus's time of connecting the legend of creation to the present
by means of a genuine chronology; the Persians indeed comprised the future
as well in the sweep of the gesture, and predated the last judgment and the

1 Original : ' (" So geschieht dies stets . . .) im Hinblick auf das im Augenblick gefordcrtc Bild ah
der bestandigen Funktion der Zeit und des Menschen. ' ' Tr.

2 Even at the level of the Trojan War the timeless mythological figures of gods and demigods
arc still involved, intimately and in detail, in the human story. See, on the whole question of
the Greek attitude towards time and history, Vol. I, p. 9 and passim. Tr.

8 See Chapter VIII below. Tr.

2.8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

coming of the Messiah. This exact and very narrow definition of human
history the Persian reckoning allows twelve millennia from first to last,
the Jewish counts less than six up to the present is a necessary expression of
the Magian world-feeling and fundamentally distinguishes the Judseo-Persian
creation-sagas from those of the Babylonian Culture, from which so many of
their external traits are derived.

Different, again, arc the primary feelings which give historical thought
in the Chinese and the Egyptian Cultures its characteristically wide and
unbounded horizons, represented by chronologically stated sequences of
dynasties which stretch over millennia and finally dissolve into a grey
remoteness.

The Faustian picture of world-history, again, prepared in advance by the
existence of a Christian chronology, 1 came into being suddenly, with an im-
mense extension and deepening of the Magian picture which the Western
Church had taken over, an extension and deepening that was to give Joachim
of Floris 2 in the high Gothic the basis of his wonderful interpretation of all
world-destinies as a sequence of three asons under the aspects of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Parallel with this there was an immense widen-
ing of the geographical horizon, which even in Gothic times (thanks to Vikings
and Crusaders) came to extend from Iceland to the remotest ends of Asia; 3 and
from 1500 onwards, the developed man of the Baroque is able to do what none
of his peers in the other Cultures could do and for the first time in human
history to regard the whole surface of the planet as its field. Thanks to com-
pass and telescope, the savant of that mature age could for the first time not
merely posit the sphericity of the earth as a matter of theory, but actually feel
that he was living upon a sphere in space. The land-horizon is no more. So,
too, time-horizons melt in the double endlessness of the calendar before and after
Christ. And to-day, under the influence of this picture, which comprises the
whole planet and will eventually embrace all the high Cultures, the old Gothic
division of history into "ancient," "mediaeval," and modern, long become
trite and empty, is visibly dissolving. 4

In all other Cultures the aspects of world-history and of man-history co-
incide. The beginning of the world is the beginning of man, and the end of
man is the end of the world. But the Faustian infinity-craving for the first
time separated the two notions during the Baroque, and now it has made
human history, for all its immense and still unknown span, a men episode in
world-history, while the Earth of which other Cultures had seen not even

1 Introduced in Rome in 5^^ during the Ostrogoth domination, not until Charlemagne's times
did it make headway in the Germanic lands. Then, however, its spread was rapid.

2 See Vol. I, p. 19. Tr.

1 On the other hand and very significantly the field of the history-picture livingly ex-
perienced in the consciousness of the sincere Renaissance classicist markedly contracted.
Sec Vol. I, p. 16. Tr.

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 19

the whole, but only superficial fractions as "the world" has become a
little star amongst millions of solar systems.

The extension of the historical world-picture makes it even more necessary
in this Culture than in any other to distinguish between the everyday self-
attunements of ordinary people and that extreme self-attunement of which
only the highest minds are capable, and which even in them holds only for
moments. The difference between the historical view-field of Themistocles
and that of an Attic husbandman is probably very small, but this difference
is already immense as between Henry VI and a hind of his day, 1 and as the
Faustian Culture mounts up and up, the power of self-focusing attains to such
heights and depths that the circle of adepts grows ever smaller and smaller.
In fact, there is formed a sort of pyramid of possibilities, in which indi-
viduals are graded according to their endowments; every individual, according
to his constitution, stands at the level which he is capable at his best focus
of holding. But it follows from this that between Western men there are
limitations to the possibilities of reciprocal understanding of historical life-
problems, limitations that do not apply to other Cultures, at any rate in such
fateful rigour as they do to ours. Can a workman to-day really understand
a peasant? Or a diplomat a craftsman? The historico-geographical horizon
that determines for each of them the questions worth asking and the form in
which these are asked is so different from the horizons of the others that what
they can exchange is not a communication, but passing remarks. It is, of
course, the mark of the real appraiser of man that he understands how " the
other man" is adjusted and regulates his intercourse with him accordingly
(as we all do in talking to children), but the art of appraising in this sense
some man of the past (say Henry the Lion or Dante), of living oneself into his
history-picture so thoroughly that his thoughts, feelings, and decisions take on
a character of self-evidence, is, owing to the vast difference between the one's
and the other's waking consciousness, so rare that up to the eighteenth century
it was not even seen that the historian ought to attempt it. Only since 1800
has it become a desideratum for the writing of history, and it is one very seldom
satisfied at that.

The typically Faustian separation of human history, as such, from the far
wider history of the world has had the result that since the end of the Baroque
our world-picture has contained several horizons disposed one behind the other
in as many planes. For the exploration of these, individual sciences, more
or less overtly historical in character, have taken shape. Astronomy, geology,
biology, anthropology, one after the other follow up the destinies of the star-
world, the earth's crust, life, and man, and only then do we come to the
"world "-history as it is still called even to-day of the higher Cultures, to
which, again, are attached the histories of the several cultural elements, family
1 The Emperor Henry VI reigned 1190-7. Tr.

3 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

history, and lastly (that highly developed speciality of the West) biog-
raphy.

Each of these planes demands a particular self-focusing, and the moment
the special focus becomes sharp the narrower and the broader planes cease to
be live Being and become mere given facts. If we are investigating the battle
of the Teutoburger Wald, the growing up of this forest in the plant-world of
the North German plain is presupposed. If, on the other hand, we are ex-
amining into the history of the German tree-world, the geological stratifica-
tion of the earth is the presupposition, though it is just a fact whose particular
destiny need not be further followed out in this connexion. If, again, our
question is the origin of the Cretaceous, the existence of the Earth itself as a
planet in the solar system is a datum, not a problem. Or, to express it other-
wise, that there is an Earth in the star-world, that the phenomenon "life"
occurs in the Earth, that within this "life" there is the form "man," that
within the history of man there exists the organic form of the Culture, is in
each case an incident in the picture of the next higher plane.

In Goethe, from his Strassburg period to his first Weimar residence, the
inclination to attune himself to "world "-history was very strong as evi-
denced in his Cassar, Mohammed, Socrates, Wandering Jew, and Egmont
sketches. And after that painful renunciation of the prospect of high political
achievement l the pain which calls to us in Tasso even through the sober
resignedness of its final form this precisely was the attunement that he chose
to cut out of his life; and thereafter he limits himself, almost fiercely, to
the picture-planes of plant-history, animal-history, and earth-history (his
"living nature") on the one hand and to biography on the other.

All these "pictures," developed in the same man, have the same structure.
Even the history of plants and animals, even that of the earth's crust or that of
the stars, is a fable convenue and mirrors in outward actuality the inward tend-
ency of the ego's being. The student of the animal world or of stratification
is a man, living in a period and having a nationality and a social status, and
it is no more possible to eliminate his subjective standpoint from his treatment
of these things than it would be to obtain a perfectly abstract account of the
French Revolution or the World War. The celebrated theories of Kant,
Laplace, Cuvier, Lyell, Darwin, have also a politico-economic tinting, and
their very power and imprcssiveness for the lay public show that the mode of
outlook upon all these historical planes proceeds from a single source. And
what is accomplishing itself to-day is the final achievement of which Faustian
history-thinking is capable the organic linking and disposition of these
historical planes in a single vast world-history of uniform physiognomic that

1 During his Italian sojourn of 1786-8 Goethe made up his mind to resign his political offices
at Weimar, retaining merely a non-executive seat on the Council and definitely devoting himself to
art and science. This resolution he carried into effect on his return to Weimar in 1788; Tasso finally
appeared in 1790. Tir.

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 31

shall enable our glance to range from the life of the individual man without a
break to the first and last destinies of the universe. The nineteenth century
in mechanistic (i.e., unhistorical) form enunciated the problem. It is
one of the preordained tasks of the twentieth to solve it.

The picture that we possess of the history of the Earth's crust and of life
is at present still dominated by the ideas which civilized 1 English thought
has developed, since the Age of Enlightenment, out of the English habit of
life Lyell's "phlegmatic" theory of the formation of the geological strata,
and Darwin's of the origin of species, are actually but derivatives of the de-
velopment of England herself. In place of the incalculable catastrophes and
metamorphoses such as von Buch and Cuvier 2 admitted, they put a methodical
evolution over very long periods of time and recognize as causes only scien-
tifically calculable and indeed mechanical utility-causes.

This "English" type of causality is not only shallow, but also far too
narrow. It limits possible causal connexions, in the first place, to those which
work out their entire course on the earth's surface; but this immediately ex-
cludes all great cosmic relations between earthly life-phenomena and the
events of the solar system and the stellar universe, and assumes the impossible
postulate that the exterior face of the earth-ball is a^coffl^letely insulated re-
gion of natural phenomena. And, secondly, it assumes that connexions which
are not comprehensible by the means at present available to the human con-
sciousness namely, sensation refined by instruments and thought precised
by theory do not even exist.

It will be the characteristic task of the twentieth century, as compared with
the nineteenth, to get rid of this system of superficial causality, whose roots
reach back into the rationalism of the Baroque period, and to put in its place
a pure physiognomic. We are sceptics in regard to any and every mode of
thought which "explains" causally. We let things speak for themselves, and
confine ourselves to sensing the Destiny immanent in them and contemplating
the form-manifestations that we shall never penetrate. The extreme to which
we can attain is the discovery of causeless, purposeless, purely existent forms
underlying the changeful picture of nature. For the nineteenth century the
word "evolution" meant progress in the sense of increasing fitness of life to
purposes. For Leibniz whose Protogaa (1691), a work full of significant
thought, outlines, on the basis of studies made in the Harz silver-mines, a
picture of the world's infancy that is Goethian through and through and for
Goethe himself it meant fulfilment in the sense of increasing connotation of

1 For the special sense in which the word "Civilization" is used throughout this work see
Vol. I, p. 31. Briefly, the Civilization is the outcome of the Culture of which it is in one sense the
final phase, but in another the distinct and unlike sequel. Tr.

2 Christian Leopold von Buch, 1774-1853; Cuvier, 1769-1832.. Tr.

3 z THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the form. The two concepts, Goethe's form-fulfilment and Darwin's evolu-
tion, arc in as complete opposition as destiny to causality, and (be it added)
as German to English thought, and German to English history.

There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by
palaeontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be
test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolu-
tion, and there ought to be merely "transitional" types, no definition and no
species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persever-
ing through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness
principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not
thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally
disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in
ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings
which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping
of to-day. We see how, amongst fish, the Selachians, with their simple form,
appear first in the foreground of history and then slowly fade out again, while
the Teleostians slowly bring a more perfected fish-type to predominance. The
same applies to the plant-world of the ferns and horsetails, of which only the
last species now linger in the fully developed kingdom of the flowering plants.
But the assumption of utility-causes or other visible causes for these phe-
nomena has no support of actuality. 1 It is a Destiny that evoked into the world
life as life, the ever-sharper opposition between plant and animal, each single
type, each genus, and each species. And along with this existence there is
given also a definite energy of the form by virtue of which in the course of
its self-fulfilment it keeps itself pure or, on the contrary, becomes dull and
unclear or evasively splits into numerous varieties and finally a life-duration
of this form, which (unless, again, incident intervenes to shorten it) leads natu-
rally to a senility of the species and finally to its disappearance.

As for mankind, discoveries of the Diluvial age indicate more and more
pointedly that the man-forms existing then correspond to those living now;
there is not the slightest trace of evolution towards a race of greater utilitarian
" fitness. "3 And the continued failure to find man in the Tertiary discoveries indi-
cates more and more clearly that the human life-form, like every other, originates
in a sudden mutation (Wandlung) of which the "whence," "how," and "why"
remain an impenetrable secret. If, indeed, there were evolution in the English
sense of the word, there could be neither defined earth-strata nor specific an-
imal-classes, but only a single geological mass and a chaos of living singular
forms which we may suppose to have been left over from the struggle for exist-
ence. But all that we see about us impels us to the conviction that again and

1 The first proof that the basic forms of plants and animals did not evolve, but were suddenly
there, was given by H. de Vrics in his Mutation Theory (1886). In the language of Goethe, we sec
how the "impressed form" [See Vol. I, p. 157. Tir.] works itself out in the individual samples,
but not how the die was cut for the whole genus.

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 33

again profound and very sudden changes take place in the being of plants and
animals, changes which are of a cosmic kind and nowise restricted to the earth's
surface, which are beyond the ken of human sense and understanding in respect
of causes, if not indeed in all respects. 1 So, too, we observe that swift and deep
changes assert themselves in the history of the great Cultures, without as-
signable causes, influences, or purposes of any kind. The Gothic and the
Pyramid styles come into full being as suddenly as do the Chinese imperialism
of Shi-hwang-ti and the Roman of Augustus, as Hellenism and Buddhism and
Islam. It is exactly the same with the events in the individual life of every
person who counts at all, and he who is ignorant of this knows nothing of men
and still less of children. Every being, active or contemplative, strides on to its
fulfilment by epochs and we have to assume just such epochs in the history of
solar systems and the world of the fixed stars. The origins of the earth, of life,
of the free-moving animal are such epochs, and, therefore, mysteries that we
can do no more than accept. 2

That which we know of man divides clearly into two great ages of his being.
The first is, as far as our view is concerned, limited on the one side by that
profound fugue of planetary Destiny which we call the beginning of the Ice
Age and about which we can (within the picture of world-history) say no
more than that a cosmic change took place and on the other by the beginnings
of high cultures on Nile and Euphrates, with which the whole meaning of
human existence became suddenly different. We discover everywhere the sharp
frontier of Tertiary and Diluvial, and on the hither side of it we see man as a
completely formed type, familiar with custom, myth, wit, ornament, and
technique and endowed with a bodily structure that has not materially altered
up to the present day.

We will consider the first age as that of the primitive Culture. The only
field in which this Culture endured throughout the second age (though cer-
tainly in a very "late" form) and is found alive and fairly intact to-day is
north-west Africa. It is the great merit of Leo Frobenius 3 that he recognized
this quite clearly, beginning with the assumption that in this field a whole
world of primitive life (and not merely a greater or less number of primitive
tribes) remained remote from the influences of the high Cultures. The ethnolo-

1 With this it becomes unnecessary to postulate vast periods of time for the original states of
man, and we can regard the interval between the oldest man-type hitherto discovered and the be-
ginning of the Egyptian Culture as a span, greater indeed, but certainly not unthinkably greater,
than the 5,000 years of recognized cultural history.

2 It is perhaps not unnecessary to remark that the word "epoch" is used throughout this book
in its proper sense of ' ' turning point " or " moment of change ' ' and not in the loose sense of ' ' period
which it has acquired. Tr.

3 Und Afrika Sprach (1911); Paidcuma, Umrisse einer Kultur- und Setlenlchre (1910). Frobenius
distinguishes three ages.

34 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

gist-psychologist, on the contrary, delights in collecting, from all over the
five continents, fragments of peoples who really have nothing in common but
the negative fact of living a subordinate existence in the middle of one or
another of the high Cultures, without participation in its inner life. The
result is a congeries of tribes, some stationary, some inferior, and some de-
cadent, whose respective modes of expression, moreover, are indiscriminately
lumped together.

But the primitive Culture is not fragmentary, but something strong and
integral, something highly vital and effectual. Only, this Culture is so different
from everything that we men of a higher Culture possess in the way of spiritual
potentialities that we may question whether even those people which have
carried the first age very deep into the second are good evidence, in their present
modes of being and waking-being, for the condition of the old time.

For some thousands of years now the waking-consciousness of man has
had the impression of constant mutual touch between the tribes and peoples
as an obvious everyday fact. But in dealing with the first age we must not
forget that in it man, cohering in a very few small groups, is completely lost
in the immensity of the landscape, the ruling element therein being the mighty
masses of the great animal-herds. The rarity of our finds sufficiently proves
this. At the time of Aurignacian Man there were perhaps a dozen hordes,
each a few hundred strong, wandering in the whole area of France, and such
hordes must have regarded it as a deeply impressive and puzzling event when
(if ever) they became aware that fellow men existed. Can we imagine even
in the least degree what it was to live in a world almost empty of men we
for whom all nature has long since become a background for the human multi-
tude? How man's world-consciousness must have changed when, besides the
forests and the herds of beasts, other men "just like himself" began to be met
with, more and more frequently, in the country-side. The increase of man's
numbers this, too, doubtless took place very suddenly made experience
of "fellow men" habitual, and replaced the impression of astonishment by the
feelings of pleasure or hostility, and these again evoked a whole new world of
experiences and of involuntary and inevitable relations. It was for the history
of the human soul perhaps the deepest and most pregnant of all events. It
was in relation to alien life-forms that man first became conscious of his own,
and now the interior organization of the clan was enriched by a wealth of
intertribal forms of relation, which thereafter completely dominated primitive
life and thought. For it was then that, out of very simple modes of sensuous
understanding, the rudiments of verbal language (and, therefore, of abstract
thought) came into being, amongst them the particularly fortunate few, which
though we can form no idea of their structure we may assume as the
origins of the later Indogermanic and Semitic language-groups.

Then, out of this general primitive Culture of a humanity linked by inter-

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 35

tribal relations, there shot up suddenly (about 3000 B.C. 1 ) the Culture of Egypt
and Babylonia. Probably for a millennium before that date both these fields
had been nursing something that differed radically from every primitive Culture
in kind and in intent, something having an inward unity common to all its
forms of expression and directional in all its life. To me it seems highly proba-
ble that, if not indeed all over the earth's surface, at any rate in man's essence
a change was accomplished at that time; and if so, then any primitive Culture
worthy of the name that is still found living later, ever dwindling, in the midst
of higher Cultures, should itself be something different from the Culture of
the first Age. But, with reference to primitive Culture of any sort, that which
I call the pre-Culture (and which can be shown to occur as a uniform process
in the beginning of every high Culture) is something different in kind, some-
thing entirely new.

In all primitive existence the "it," the Cosmic, is at work with such im-
mediacy of force that all microcosmic utterances, whether in myth, custom,
technique, or ornament, obey only the pressures of the very instant. For us,
there are no ascertainable rules for the duration, tempo, and course of develop-
ment of these utterances. We observe, say, an ornamental form-language
not to be called a style 2 ruling over the population of a wide area, spread-
ing, changing, and at last dying out. Alongside this, and perhaps with quite
different fields of extension, we may find modes of fashioning and using weap-
ons, tribal organizations, religious practices, each developing in a special way
of its own, with epochal points of its own, beginnings and ends of its own,
completely influenced by other form-domains. When in some prehistoric
stratum we have identified an accurately known type of pottery, we cannot
safely argue from it to the customs and religion of the population to which it
belonged. And if by chance the same area does hold for a particular form of
marriage and, say, a certain type of tattooing, this never signifies a common
basic idea such as is indicated, for example, by the discovery of gunpowder
and that of perspective in painting. No necessary connexions come to light
between ornament and organization by age-classes, or between the cult of a god
and the kind of agriculture practised. Development in these cases means
always some development of one or another individual aspect or trait of the
primitive Culture, never of that Culture itself. This, as I have said before, is
essentially chaotic; the primitive Culture is neither an organism nor a sum of
organisms.

But with the type of the higher Culture this "it" gives way to a strong and
undiffused tendency. Within the primitive Culture tribes and clans are the only
quickened beings other than the individual men of course. Here, however, the
Culture itself is such a being. Everything primitive is a sum a sum of the

1 This work appeared before the discovery of the Sumerian (or Pre-Sumcrian) tombs of Ur. Tr.

2 See Vol. I, p. 108. Tr.

36 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

expression-forms of primitive groupings. The high Culture, on the contrary,
is the waking-being of a single huge organism which makes not only custom,
myths, technique, and art, but the very peoples and classes incorporated in
itself the vessels of one single form-language and one single history. The
oldest speech that we know of belongs to the primitive Culture, and has lawless
destinies of its own which cannot be deduced from those of, say, Ornament or
Marriage. But the history of script belongs integrally with the expression-
history of the several higher Cultures. That the Egyptian, Chinese, Baby-
lonian, and Mexican each formed a special script in its pre-Cultural age that
the Indian and the Classical on the other hand did not do so, but took over
(and very late) the highly developed writing of a neighbouring Civilization
that in the Arabian, again, every new religion and sect immediately formed
its particular script all these are facts that stand in a deeply intimate rela-
tion to the generic form-history of these Cultures and its inner significance.

To these two ages our knowledge of man is restricted, and they certainly do
not suffice to justify conclusions of any sort about possible or certain new eras
or about their "when" and "how" quite apart from the fact that in any
case the cosmic connexions that govern the history of man as a genus are en-
tirely inaccessible to our measures.

My kind of thought and observation is limited to the physiognomy of the
actual. At the point when the experience of the "judge of men" vis-a-vis his
environment, and that of the "man of action" vis-a-vis his facts, become in-
effective, there also this insight finds its limit. The existence of these two
ages is a fact of historical experience; more, our experiencing of the primitive
Culture consists not only in surveying, in its relics, a self-contained and closed-
off thing, but also in reacting to its deeper meaning by virtue of an inward
relation to it which persists in us. But the second age opens to us another and
quite different kind of experience. It was an incident, the sense of which
cannot now be scrutinized, that the type of the higher Culture appeared sud-
denly in the field of human history. Quite possibly, indeed, it was some
sudden event in the domain of earth-history that brought forth a new and
different form into phenomenal existence. But the fact that we have before us
eight such Cultures, all of the same build, the same development, and the
same duration, justifies us in looking at them comparatively, and therefore justifies
our treating them as comparable, studying them comparatively, and obtaining
from our study a knowledge which we can extend backwards over lost periods
and forwards over the future provided always that a Destiny of a different
order does not replace this form-world, suddenly and basically, by another.
Our licence to proceed thus comes from general experience of organic being.
As in the history of the Raptores or the Coniferse we cannot prophesy whether
and when a new species will arise, so in that of Cultural history we cannot say
whether and when a new Culture shall be. But from the moment when a

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 37

new being is conceived in the womb, or a seed sinks into the earth, we do know
the inner form of this new life-course; and we know that the quiet course of its
development and fulfilment may be disturbed by the pressure of external powers,
but never altered.

This experience teaches, further, that the Civilization which at this present
time has gripped the earth's whole surface is not a third age, but a stage a
necessary stage of the Western Culture, distinguished from its analogues
only by the forcefulness of its extension-tendency. Here experience ends,
and all speculation on what new forms will govern the life of future mankind
(or, for that matter, whether there will be any such new forms) all building of
majestic card-houses on the foundation of "it should be, it shall be" is mere
trifling far too futile, it seems to me, to justify one single life of any value
being expended on it.

The group of the high Cultures is not, as a group, an organic unit. That
they have happened in just this number, at just these places and times, is, for
the human eye, an incident without deeper intelligibility. The ordering of
the individual Cultures, on the contrary, has stood out so distinctly that the
historical technique of the Chinese, the Magian, and the Western worlds
often, indeed, the mere common consent of the educated in these Cultures
has been able to fashion a set of names upon which it would be impossible to
improve. 1

Historical thought, therefore, has the double task of dealing comparatively
with the individual life-courses of the Cultures, and of examining the incidental
and irregular relations of the Cultures amongst themselves in respect of their
meaning. The necessity of the first of these tasks, obvious enough, has yet
been overlooked hitherto. The second has been handled, but only by the lazy
and shallow method of imposing causality over the whole tangle and laying
it out tidily along the "course" of a hypothetical " world "-history, thereby
making it impossible to discover either the psychology of these difficult, but
richly suggestive, relations or to discover that of the inner life of any particular
Culture. In truth, the condition for solving the first problem is that the second
has been solved already. The relations are very different, even under the simple
aspect of time and space. The Crusades brought a Springtime face to face with
an old and ripe Civilization; in the Cretan-Mycenaean world seed-time and
golden autumn are seen together. A Civilization may stream over from im-
mense remoteness, as the Indian streamed into the Arabian from the East, or
lie senile and stifling over an infancy, as the Classical lay upon its other side.
But there are differences, too, of kind and strength; the Western Culture seeks
out relations, the Egyptian tries to avoid them; the former is beaten by them

1 Goethe, in his little essay " Geistesefochen," has characterized the four parts of a Culture its
preliminary, early, late, and civilized stages with such a depth of insight that even today there is
nothing to add. See the tables at the end of Vol. I, which agree with this exactly.

38 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

again and again in tragic crises, while the Classical gets all it can out of them,
without suffering. But all these tendencies have their roots in the spirituality
of the Culture itself and sometimes they tell us more of this Culture than does
its own language, which often hides more than it communicates.

A glance over the group of the Cultures discloses task after task. The
nineteenth century, in which historical research was guided by natural science,
and historical thought by the ideas of the Baroque, has simply brought us
to a pinnacle whence we see the new world at our feet. Shall we ever take
possession of that new world?

Even to-day uniform treatment of these grand life-courses is immensely
difficult, because the more remote fields have not been seriously worked up at
all. Once more, it is the lordly outlook of the West European he will only
notice that which approaches him from one or another antiquity by the proper
and respectful route of a Middle Age, and that which goes its own ways will
get but little of his attention. Thus, of the things of the Chinese and the
Indian worlds, certain kinds are now beginning to be tackled art, religion,
philosophy but the political history is dealt with, if at all, "chattily."
It does not occur to anyone to treat the great constitutional problems of Chi-
nese history the Hohenstaufen-destiny of the Li-Wang (842.), the first
Congress of Princes (659), tne struggle of principle between the imperialism
(Lien-heng) of the "Roman" state of Tsin and the League-of-Nations idea
(Ho-tsung) between 500 and 300, the rise of the Chinese Augustus, Hwang-ti
(zxi) with anything of the thoroughness that Mommsen devoted to the
principate of Augustus. India, again; however completely the Indians them-
selves have forgotten their state-history, we have after all more available ma-
terial for Buddha's time than we have for history of the Classical ninth and
eighth centuries, and yet even to-day we act as though "the" Indian had lived
entirely in his philosophy, just as the Athenians (so our classicists would
have us believe) spent their lives in beauty-philosophizing on the banks of the
Ilissus. But even Egyptian politics receive little reflective attention. The
later Egyptian historian concealed under the name "Hyksos period" the same
crisis which the Chinese treat of under the name "Period of the Contending
States" here, too, is something never yet investigated. And interest in the
Arabian world has reached to the frontier of the Classical tongues and no
further. With what endless assiduity we have described the constitution of
Diocletian, and assembled material for the entirely unimportant administrative
history of the provinces of Asia Minor because it is written in Greek. But
the Sassanid state, the precedent and in every respect the model of Diocletian's,
comes into the picture only occasionally, and then as Rome's opponent in war.
What about its own administrative and juristic history? What is the poor

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 39

sum-total of material that we have assembled for the law and economics of
Egypt, India, and China 1 in comparison with the work that has been done on
Greek and Roman law.

About 3000 2 after a long "Merovingian" period, which is still distinctly
perceptible in Egypt, the two oldest Cultures began, in exceedingly limited
areas on the lower Nile and the lower Euphrates. In these cases the distinc-
tions between early and late periods have long ago been labelled as Old and
Middle Kingdom, Sumer and Akkad. The outcome of the Egyptian feudal
period marked by the establishment of a hereditary nobility and the decline
(from Dynasty VI) of the older Kingship, presents so astounding a similarity
with the course of events in the Chinese springtime from I- Wang (934-909)
and that in the Western from the Emperor Henry IV (1056-1106) that a unified
comparative study of all three might well be risked. At the beginning of the
Babylonian "Baroque" we see the figure of the great Sargon (1500), who
pushed out to the Mediterranean coast, conquered Cyprus, and styled himself,
like Justinian I and Charles V, "lord of the four parts of the earth." And in
due course, about 1800 on the Nile and rather earlier in Sumer-Akkad, we per-
ceive the beginnings of the first Civilizations. Of these the Asiatic displayed
immense expansive power. The "achievements of the Babylonian Civiliza-
tion" (as the books say), many things and notions connected with measuring,
numbering, and accounting, travelled probably as far as the North and the
Yellow Seas. Many a Babylonian trademark upon a tool may have come to be

1 Another blank is the history of the countryside or landscape (i.e., of the soil, with its plant-
mantle and its weathering) in which man's history has been staged for five thousand years. And
yet man has so painfully wrested himself from the history of the landscape, and withal is so held
to it still by myriad fibres, that without it life, soul, and thought are inconceivable.

So far as concerns the South-European field, from the end of the Ice Age, a hitherto rank
luxuriance gradually gave place in the plant-world to poverty. In the course of the successive
Egyptian, Classical, Arabian, and Western Cultures, a climatic change developed all around the
Mediterranean, which resulted in the peasant's being compelled to fight no longer against the plant-
world, but for it first against the primeval forest and then against the desert. In Hannibal's
time the Sahara lay very far indeed to the south of Carthage, but today it already penetrates to
northern Spain and Italy. Where was it in the days of the pyramid-builders, who depicted sylvan
and hunting scenes in their reliefs? When the Spaniards expelled the Moriscos, their countryside of
woods and ploughland, already only artificially maintained, lost its character altogether, and the
towns became oases in the waste. In the Roman period such a result could not have ensued.

2 The new method of comparative morphology affords us a safe test of the datings which have
been arrived at by other means for the beginnings of past Cultures. The same kind of argument
which would prevent us, even in the absence of positive information, from dating Goethe's birth
more than a century earlier than the "Urfaust," or supposing the career of Alexander the Great to
have been that of an elderly man, enables us to demonstrate, from the individual characteristics of
their political life and the spirit of their art, thought, and religion, that the Egyptian Culture dawned
somewhere about 3000 and the Chinese about 1400. The calculations of French investigators and
more recently of Borchardt (Die Annalen und die ^eitliche Festlegung des Alttn Reiches, 1919) arc as un-
sound intrinsically as those of Chinese historians for the legendary Hsia and Shang dynasties.
Equally, it is impossible that the Egyptian calendar should have been introduced in 4141 B.C. As
in every chronology we have to allow that evolution has been accompanied by radical calendar
changes, the attempt to fix the exact starting-date a posteriori is objectless.

40 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

honoured, out there in the Germanic wild, as a magic symbol, and so may have
originated some "Early-German" ornament. But meantime the Babylonian
realm itself passed from hand to hand. Kassites, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Medes,
Persians, Macedonians all of these small l warrior-hosts under energetic
leaders successively replaced one another in the capital city without any
serious resistance on the part of its people.

It is a first example soon paralleled in Egypt of the "Roman Empire"
style. Under the Kassites rulers were set up and displaced by prastorians;
the Assyrians, like the later soldier-emperors of Rome (after Commodus),
maintained the old constitutional forms; the Persian Cyrus and the Ostrogoth
Theodoric regarded themselves as managers of the Empire, and the warrior
bands, Mede and Lombard, as master-peoples in alien surroundings. But
these are constitutional rather than factual distinctions; in intent and purpose
the legions of Septimius Severus, the African, did not differ from the Visigoths
of Alaric, and by the battle of Adrianople 2 "Romans" and "barbarians"
have become almost indistinguishable.

After 1500 three new Cultures begin first, the Indian, in the upper
Punjab; then, a hundred years later, the Chinese on the middle Hwang-Ho;
and then, about noo, the Classical, on the JEgezn Sea. The Chinese historians
speak of the three great dynasties of Hsia, Shang, and Ch6u in much the same
way as Napoleon regarded himself as a fourth dynasty following the Mero-
vingians, the Carolingians, and the Capetians in reality, the third coexisted
with the Culture right through its course in each case. When in 441 B.C. the
titular Emperor of the Chou dynasty became a state pensioner of the "Eastern
Duke" and when in A.D. 1793 "Louis Capet" was executed, the Culture in
each case passed into the Civilization. There are some bronzes of very great
antiquity preserved from late Chang times, which stand towards the later art
in exactly the same relation as Mycensean to Early Classical pottery and Caro-
lingian to Romanesque art. In the Vedic, Homeric, and Chinese springtimes,
with their " Pfal^en" and " Bur gen," their knighthood and feudal rulership,
can be seen the whole image of our Gothic, and the "period of the Great
Protectors" (Ming-Chu, 685-691) corresponds precisely to the time of Crom-
well, Wallenstein, and Richelieu and to the First Tyrannis of the Greek world.

The period 480-2.30 is called by the Chinese historians the "Period of the
Contending States"; it culminated in a century of unbroken warfare between

1 Eduard Meyer (Gescb. d. Altertums, III, 97) estimates the Persians, probably too highly, at
half a million as against the fifty millions of the Babylonian Empire. The numerical relation be-
tween the Germanic peoples and legions of the third-century Roman emperors and the Roman popu-
lation as a whole, and that of the Ptolemaic and Roman armies to that of the Egyptian people, was
of much the same order.

[H. Delbriick, in his well-known Gesch. dcr Kriegskitnst (1908), Vol. I, Part I, chapter i, and else-
where, deals in considerable detail with the strengths of ancient armies. Tr.]

1 A.D. 378. See C. W. C. Oman, History of the Art of War: Middle Ages (1898), ch. i; H. Del-
briick, Gesch. der Krie&skunst, Vol. II, book I, ch. x, and book II. Tr.

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 41

mass-armies with frightful social upheavals, and out of it came the "Roman"
state of Tsin as founder of a Chinese Imperium. This phase Egypt experienced
between 1780 and 1580, of which the last century was the "Hyksos" time.
The Classical experienced it from Chasronea (338), and, at the high pitch of
horror, from the Gracchi (133) to Actium (31 B.C.). And it is the destiny of
the West-European-American world for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

During this period the centre of gravity changes as from Attica to
Latium, so from the Hwang-ho (at Ho-nan-fu) to the Yang-tse (modern prov-
ince of Hu-pei). The Si-Kiang was as vague for the Chinese savants of those
days as the Elbe for the Alexandrian geographer, and of the existence of India
they had as yet no notion.

As on the other side of the globe there arose the principes of the Julian-
Claudian house, so here in China there arose the mighty figure of Wang-Cheng,
who led Tsin through the decisive struggle to sole supremacy and in zzi as-
sumed the title of Ti (literally equivalent to "Augustus") and the Cassar-
name Hwang-ti. He founded the " Pax Serica," as we may call it, carried out a
grand social reform in the exhausted Empire, and as promptly as Rome l
began to build his "Limes," the famous Great Wall, for which in zi4 he an-
nexed a part of Mongolia. He was the first, too, to subdue the barbarians
south of the Yang-tse, in a series of large-scale campaigns followed and con-
firmed by military roads, castles, and colonies. But "Roman," too, was his
family history a Tacitean drama with Lui-ti (Chancellor and stepfather
of the Emperor) and Li-Szu, the great statesman (the Agrippa of his day, and
unifier of the Chinese script), playing parts, and one that quickly closed in
Neronic horrors. Followed then the two Han dynasties (Western, 106 B.C.-
A.D. Z3 ; Eastern, A.D. 2.5-2.2.0), under which the frontiers extended more and
more, while in the capital eunuch-ministers, generals, and soldiery made and
unmade the rulers at their pleasure. At certain rare moments, as under Wu-ti
(140-86) and Ming-ti (58-76), the Chinese-Confucian, the Indian-Buddhist,
and the Classical-Stoic world-forces approached one another so closely in the
region of the Caspian that they might easily have come into actual touch. 2

Chance decreed that the heavy attacks of the Huns should break themselves
in vain upon the Chinese "Limes," which at each crisis found a strong emperor
to defend it. The decisive repulse of the Huns took place in 1x4-119 under the
Chinese Trajan, Wu-ti; and it was he, too, who finally incorporated Southern
China in the Empire, with the object of obtaining a route into India, and built
a grand embattled road to the Tarim. And so the Huns turned westward, and

1 In the case of Rome, the idea of a fixed frontier against the barbarian emerged soon after the
defeat of Varus, and the fortifications of the Limes were laid down before the close of the first
century of our era. Tr.

1 For at that time imperialistic tendencies found expression even in India, in the Maurya and
Sunga dynasty; these, however, could only be confused and ineffective, Indian nature being what
it was.

4i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

in due course they appear, impelling a swarm of Germanic tribes, in face of the
Limes of the Roman world. This time they succeeded. The Roman Imperium
collapsed, and thus two only of the three empires continued, and still continue,
as desirable spoil for a succession of different powers. To-day it is the "red-
haired barbarian" of the West who is playing before the highly civilized eyes
of Brahman and Mandarin the role once played by Mogul and Manchu, playing
it neither better nor worse than they, and certain like them to be superseded in
due course by other actors. But in the colonization-field of foundering Rome,
on the other hand, the future Western Culture was ripening underground
in the north-west, while in the east the Arabian Culture had flowered already.
The Arabian Culture l is a discovery. Its unity was suspected by late
Arabians, but it has so entirely escaped Western historical research that not
even a satisfactory name can be found for it. Conformably to the dominant
languages, the seed-time and the spring might be called the Aramaic and the
later time the Arabian, but there is no really effectual name. In this field the
Cultures were close to one another, and the extension of the corresponding
Civilizations led to much overlaying. The pre-Cultural period of the Arabian,
which we can follow out in Persian and Jewish history, lay completely within
the area of the old Babylonian world, but the springtime was under the mighty
spell of the Classical Civilization, which invaded from the West with all the
power of a just-attained maturity, and the Egyptian and Indian Civilizations
also made themselves distinctly felt. And then in turn the Arabian spirit
under Late Classical disguises for the most part cast its spell over the nascent
Culture of the West. The Arabian Civilization stratified over a still surviving
Classical in the popular soul of south Spain, Provence, and Sicily, and became
the model upon which the Gothic soul educated itself. The proper landscape
of this Culture is remarkably extended and singularly fragmented. Let one
put oneself at Palmyra or Ctesiphon, and, musing, look outwards all round.
In the north is Osrhoene; Edessa became the Florence of the Arabian spring.
To the west are Syria and Palestine the home of the New Testament and of
the Jewish Mishna, with Alexandria as a standing outpost. To the east Maz-
daism experienced a mighty regeneration, which corresponded to the birth of
Jesus in Jewry and about which the fragmentary state of Avesta literature
enables us to say only that it happened. 2 Here, too, were born the Talmud and
the religion of Mani. Deep in the south, the future home of Islam, an age of
chivalry was able to develop as fully as in the realm of the Sassanids; even
to-day there survive, unexplored, the ruins of castles and strongholds whence
the decisive wars were waged between the Christian state of Axum and the
Jewish state of the Himyarites on the two shores of the Red Sea, with Roman

1 Chapters vii-ix below.

2 On the history of the Avesta see Ency. Brit., XI ed., articles "Zend-Avesta" and "Zoroas-
ter." Tr.

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 43

and Persian diplomacy poking the fire. In the extreme north was Byzantium,
that strange "mixture of sere, civilized, Classical, with vernal and chevaleresque
which is manifested above all in the bewildering history of the Byzantine army
system. Into this world Islam at last and far too late brought a con-
sciousness of unity, and this accounts for the self-evident character of its vic-
torious progress and the almost unresisting adhesion of Christians, Jews, and
Persians alike. Out of Islam in due course arose the Arabian Civilization
which was at the peak of its intellectual completeness when the barbarians
from the West broke in for a moment, marching on Jerusalem. How, we may
ask ourselves, did this inroad appear in the eyes of cultivated Arabians of the
time? Somewhat like Bolshevism, perhaps? For the statecraft of the Arabian
World the political relations of " Frankistan" were something on a lower plane.
Even in our Thirty Years' War from that point of view a drama of the "Far
West" - when an English envoy l strove to stir up the Porte against the house
of Habsburg, the statesman who handled policy over a field stretching from
Morocco to India, evidently judged that the little predatory states on the
horizon were of no real interest. And even when Napoleon landed in Egypt,
there were still many without an inkling of the future.

Meantime yet another new Culture developed in Mexico. This lay so remote
from the rest that no word even passed between them. All the more astonish-
ing, therefore, is the similarity of its development to that of the Classical. No
doubt the archaeologist standing before a teocalli would be horrified to think of
his Doric temple in such a connexion; yet it was a thoroughly Classical trait
feebleness of the will-to-power in the matter of technics that kept the
Aztecs ill armed and so made possible their catastrophe.

For, as it happens, this is the one example of a Culture ended by violent
death. It was not starved, suppressed, or thwarted, but murdered in the full
glory of its unfolding, destroyed like a sunflower whose head is struck off by
one passing. All these states including a world-power and more than one
federation with an extent and resources far superior to those of the Greek
and Roman states of Hannibal's day; with a comprehensive policy, a carefully
ordered financial system, and a highly developed legislation; with adminis-
trative ideas and economic tradition such as the ministers of Charles V could
never have imagined; with a wealth of literature in several languages, an
intellectually brilliant and polite society in great cities to which the West
could not show one single parallel all this was not broken down in some
desperate war, but washed out by a handful of bandits in a few years, and so

1 Sir Thomas Roe, 1610. A similar mission went to Turkey on the part of Frederick and the
Bohemian nobles to ask for assistance and to justify to the Turk their action in deposing the Habs-
burg King. The answer they received was what might be expected of a great imperialist power
asked to intervene in the affairs of lesser neighbours namely, material guarantees of the reality
of the movement it was asked to support and pledges that no settlement would be made without
its agreement. Tr.

44 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

entirely that the relics of the population retained not even a memory of it all.
Of the giant city Tenochtitlan l not a stone remains above ground. The cluster
of great Mayan cities in the virgin forests of Yucatan succumbed swiftly to the
attack of vegetation, and we do not know the old name of any one of them.
Of the literature three books survive, but no one can read them.

The most appalling feature of the tragedy was that it was not in the least a
necessity of the Western Culture that it should happen. It was a private affair
of adventurers, and at the time no one in Germany, France, or England had any
idea of what was taking place. This instance shows, as no other shows, that
the history of humanity has no meaning whatever and that deep significances reside
only in the life-courses of the separate Cultures. Their inter-relations are un-
important and accidental. In this case the accident was so cruelly banal, so
supremely absurd, that it would not be tolerated in the wildest farce. A few
cannon and handguns began and ended the drama. 2

A sure knowledge of even the most general history of this world is now for
ever impossible. Events as important as our Crusades and Reformation have
vanished without leaving a trace. Only in recent years has research managed
to settle the outline, at any rate, of the later course of development, and with
the help of these data comparative morphology may attempt to widen and
deepen the picture by means of those of other Cultures. 3 On this basis the
epochal points of this Culture lie about two hundred years later than those of
the Arabian and seven hundred years before those of our own. There was a
pre-Cultural period which, as in China and Egypt, developed script and cal-
endar, but of this we now know nothing. The time-reckoning began with an
initial date which lies far behind the birth of Christ, but it is impossible now to
fix it with certainty relative to that event. 4 In any case, it shows an extraor-
dinarily strongly developed history-sense in Mexican mankind.

The springtime of the "Hellenic" Maya states is evidenced by the dated
relief-pillars of the old cities of Copan (in the south), Tikal, and somewhat
later Chichen Itza (in the north), Naranjo, and Seibal 5 about 160-450.

1 Mexico City, or, better, the agglomeration of towns and villages in the valley of Mexico. Tr.

2 According to Prcscott, Cortez's force on landing had thirteen hand firearms and fourteen
cannon, great and small, altogether. The whole of these were lost in the first defeat at Mexico.
Later a pure accident gave Cortez the contents of a supply-ship from Europe. In a military sense
horses contributed to the Spanish victories nearly if not quite as much as firearms, but these, too,
were in small numbers, sixteen at the outset. Tr.

3 The following attempt is based upon the data of two American works L. Spence, The Civiliza-
tion of Ancient Mexico (Cambridge, 1911); and H. J. Spinden, Maya Art: Its Subject matter and His-
torical Development (Cambridge, 1913) which independently of one another attempt to work
out the chronology and which reach a certain measure of agreement.

4 Since the publication of the German original, Spinden's further researches (^Ancient Civilisations
of Mexico) have placed the historical zero date at 613 B.C. (and the cosmological zero of back-reckoning
at 3373 B.C.). This historical zero seems to lie deep in the pre-Cultural period, if later events have
the dates given in the text. But compare Author's note on p. 39. Tr.

6 These arc the names of near-by villages serving as labels; the true names are lost.

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 45

At the end of this period Chichen Itza was a model of architecture that was
followed for centuries. The full glory of Palenque and Piedras Negras (in the
west) may correspond to our Late Gothic and Renaissance (450-600 = Euro-
pean 1150-1400?). In the Baroque or Late period Champutun appears as the
centre of style-formation, and now the "Italic" Nahua peoples of the high
plateau of Anahuac began to come under the cultural influence. Artistically
and spiritually these peoples were mere recipients, but in their political in-
stincts they were far superior to the Maya (about 600-960, = Classical 750-
400 = Western 1400-1750?). And now Maya entered on the "Hellenistic"
phase. About 960 Uxmal was founded, soon to be a cosmopolis of the first
rank, an Alexandria or Baghdad, founded like these on the threshold of the
Civilization. With it we find a series of brilliant cities like Labna, Mayapan,
Chacmultun, and a revived Chichen Itza. These places mark the culminating
point of a grandiose architecture, which thereafter produced no new style,
but applies the old motives with taste and discrimination to mighty masses.
Politically this is the age of the celebrated League of Mayapan, an alliance of
three leading states, which appears to have maintained the position successfully
if somewhat artificially and arbitrarily in spite of great wars and repeated
revolutions (960-1165 = Classical 350-150 = Western 1800-1000).

The end of this period was marked by a great revolution, and with it the
definitive intervention of the ("Roman") Nahua powers in the Maya affair.
With their aid Hunac Ceel brought about a general overthrow and destroyed
Mayapan (about 1190 = Classical 150). The sequel was typical of the history
of the over-ripened Civilization in which different peoples contend for military
lordship. The great Maya cities sink into the same bland contentment as
Roman Athens and Alexandria, but out on the horizon of the Nahua lands was
developing the last of these peoples, the Aztecs young, vigorous, barbaric,
and filled with an insatiable will-to-power. In 13x5 (= the Age of Augustus)
they founded Tenochtitlan, which soon became the paramount and capital
city of the whole Mexican world. About 1400 military expansion began on
the grand scale. Conquered regions were secured by military colonies and a
network of military roads, and a superior diplomacy kept the dependent states
in check and separated. Imperial Tenochtitlan grew enormous and housed a
cosmopolitan population speaking every tongue of this world-empire. 1 The
Nahua provinces were politically and militarily secure, the southward thrust
was developing rapidly, and a hand was about to be laid on the Maya states;
there is no telling what the course of the next centuries would have been. And
suddenly the end.

1 And was there an element of fanem et circcnses in the mass-sacrifice of captives? May it be that
the acceptance of the Spaniard as the expected manifestation of the god Quctzalcoatl C ' redtunt Saturnia
regna"~), and the serious disputations on matters of religion that took place between Montczuma
and the Christians, were presages of the phase which Spengler calls the "Second Religiousness"
(sec below, p. 310) of the Civilization? Tr.

46 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

At that date the West was at a level which the Maya had already overpassed
by 700; nothing short of the age of Frederick the Great would have been ripe
enough to comprehend the politics of the Mayapan League, and what the
Aztecs of A.D. 1500 were organizing lies for us well in the future. But that
which distinguished Faustian man, even then, from the man of any other
Culture was his irrepressible urge into distance. It was this, in the last resort,
that killed and even annihilated the Mexican and Peruvian Culture the
unparalleled drive that was ready for service in any and every domain. Cer-
tainly the Ionic style was imitated in Carthage and in Persepolis, and Hellen-
istic taste in the Gandara art of India found admirers. Future investigation
will probably find some Chinese in the primitive German wood-architecture.
The Mosque style ruled from Farther India to North Russia, to West Africa,
and to Spain. But all that amounts to nothing as compared with the expan-
sion-power of the Western Soul. The true style-history of that soul, it need
hardly be said, accomplished itself only on the mother soil, but its resultant
effects knew no bounds. On the spot where Tenochtitlan had stood, the Span-
iards erected a Baroque cathedral adorned with masterpieces of Spanish paint-
ing and plastic. Already at that date the Portuguese had got to work in Hither
India and Late-Baroque architects from Spain and Italy in the heart of Poland
and Russia. The English Rococo, and especially Empire, made for them-
selves a broad province in the Plantation States of North America, whose won-
derful rooms and furniture are far less well known in Germany than they
ought to be. Classicism was at work already in Canada and at the Cape, and
presently there were no limits at all. It was just the same in every other domain
of form; the relation between this forceful young Civilization and the still
remaining old ones is that it covers them, all alike, with ever-thickening
layers of West-European-American life-forms under which, slowly, the ancient
native form disappears.

In the presence of this picture of the world of man which is destined to
displace the older one of " Ancient-Medias val-Modern " that is still firmly
established even in the best minds it will become possible, too, to give a
new answer (and for our Civilization, I think, a final answer) to the old ques-
tion: What is History?

Ranke, in the preface of his World History says: "History only begins when
the monuments become intelligible, and trustworthy written evidences are
available." This is the answer of a collector and arranger of data; obviously,
it confuses that which has happened with that which happened within the
field of view open at the particular time to the particular student. Mardonius
was defeated at Platsa has this ceased to be history if two thousand years
later it has somehow dropped out of the ken of the historians? For a fact to
be a fact, must it be mentioned in books?

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 47

The weightiest historian since Ranke, Eduard Meyer, 1 says: "Historic
is that which is, or has been, effective. . . . Only through historical treat-
ment does the individual process, lifted by history from among the infinite mass
of contemporary processes, become the historical event." The remark is
thoroughly in the manner and spirit of Hegel. Firstly, its starting-point is
the fact and not any accidental knowledge or ignorance of the fact, and if there
is any mode of picturing history which necessarily imposes such a starting-
point, it is that presented in these pages, since it compels us to assume the
existence of facts of the first order in majestic sequences, even when we do not
(and never will) know them in the scientific sense. We have to learn to handle
the unknown in the most comprehensive way. Secondly, truths exist for the
mind, facts only in relation to life. Historical treatment in my terminology,
physiognomic fact is decided by the blood, the gift of judging men broadened
out into past and future, the innate flair for persons and situations, for the
event, for that which had to be, must have been. It does not consist in bare
scientific criticism and knowing of data. The scientific mode of experience is,
for every true historian, something additional or subordinate. It addresses to
the waking-consciousness, by the way of understanding and imparting, labo-
rious and repetitive proof of that which one moment of illumination has already,
and instantly, demonstrated to Being.

Just because the force of our Faustian being has by now worked up about us
a circumcircle of inner experiences such as no other men and no other time could
acquire just because for us the remotest events become increasingly sig-
nificant and disclose relationships that no one else, not even the closest con-
temporaries of these events, could perceive much has now become history
(i.e., life in tune with our life) that centuries ago was not history. Tacitus
probably "knew" the data concerning Tiberius Gracchus's revolution, but
for him it no longer meant anything effectively, whereas for us it is full of
meaning. The history of the Monophysites and their relation to Mohammed's
milieu signify nothing whatever to the Islamic believer, but for us it is recog-
nizably the story of English Puritanism in another setting. For the world-
view of a Civilization which has made the whole earth its stage, nothing is in
the last resort quite unhistorical. The scheme of ancient-mediasval-modern
history, as understood by the nineteenth century, contained only a selection of
the more obvious relations. But the influence that old Chinese and Mexican
history are beginning to exercise on us to-day is of a subtler and more intellectual
kind. There we are sounding the last necessities of life itself. We are learning
out of another life-course to know ourselves what we are, what we must be,
what we shall be. It is the great school of our future. We who have history
still, are making history still, find here on the extreme frontiers of histor-
ical humanity what history is.

1 " Zur Tbeorie und Methodik der Geschichte" (Kleine Schriftcn, 1910),' which is by far the best
piece of historical philosophy ever written by an opponent of all philosophy.

48 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

A battle between two Negro tribes in the Sudan, or between the Cherusci
and Chatti of Czesar's time, or what is substantially the same between
ant-communities, is merely a drama of "living Nature." But when the Che-
rusci beat the Romans, as in the year 9, 1 or the Aztecs the Tlascalans, it is
history. Here the "when" is of importance and each decade, or even year,
matters, for here one is dealing with the march of a grand life-course, in which
every decision takes rank as an epoch. Here there is an object towards which
every happening impels, a being that strives to fulfil its predestination, a tempo,
an organic duration and not the disorderly ups and downs of Scythians,
Gauls, or Caribs, of which the particular detail is as unimportant as that of
doings in a colony of beavers or a steppe-herd of gazelles. These are zoological
happenings and have their place in an altogether different orientation of our
outlook, that in which we are concerned not with the destiny of individual
peoples or herds, but with that of "man," or "the" gazelle, or "the" ants, as
species. Primitive man has history only in the biological sense, and all prehistoric
study boils down to the investigation of this sense. The increasing familiarity
of men with fire, stone tools, and the mechanical laws which make weapons
effective, characterizes only the development of the type and of its latent possi-
bilities. The objects for which one tribe employed these weapons against
another tribe are of no importance in this plane of history. Stone Age and
Baroque are age-grades in the existence of respectively a genus and a Cul-
ture i.e., two organisms belonging to two fundamentally different settings.
And here I would protest against two assumptions that have so far vitiated
all historical thought: the assertion of an ultimate aim of mankind as a whole
and the denial of there being ultimate aims at all. The life has an aim. It is the
fulfilment of that which was ordained at its conception. But the individual
belongs by birth to the particular high Culture on the one hand and to the type
Man on the other there is no third unit of being for him. His destiny must
lie either in the zoological or in the world-historical field. " Historical" man,
as I understand the word and as all great historians have meant it to be taken, is
the man of a Culture that is in full march towards self-fulfilment. Before this,
after this, outside this, man is historyless; and the destinies of the people to
which he belongs matter as little as the Earth's destiny matters when the plane
of attention is the astronomical and not the geological.

From this there follows a fact of the most decisive importance, and one that
has never before been established : that man is not only historyless before the
birth of the Culture, but again becomes so as soon as a Civilization has worked
itself out fully to the definitive form which betokens the end of the living
development of the Culture and the exhaustion of the last potentialities of its
significant existence. That which we see in the Egyptian Civilization after
Scti I (1300) and in the Chinese, the Indian, the Arabian to this day is
1 Varus's disaster in the Teutoburger Wald. Tr.

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 49

notwithstanding all the cleverness of the religious, philosophical and, es-
pecially, political forms in which it is wrapped just the old zoological up-
and-down of the primitive age again. Whether the lords sitting in Babylon
were wild war-hordes like the Kassites or refined inheritors like the Persians,
when, for how long, and with what success they kept their seats, signified
nothing from the standpoint of Babylon. The comfort of the population was
affected by such things, naturally, but they made no difference either way to
the fact that the soul of this world was extinct and its events, therefore, void
of any deep meaning. A new dynasty, native or foreign, in Egypt, a revolution
or a conquest in China, a new Germanic people in the Roman Empire, were
elements in the history of the landscape like a change in the fauna or the mi-
gration of a flock of birds.

In the history, the genuine history, of higher men the stake fought for and
the basis of the animal struggle to prevail is ever even when driver and
driven are completely unconscious of the symbolic force of their doings, pur-
poses, and fortunes the actualization of something that is essentially spirit-
ual, the translation of an idea into a living historical form. This applies
equally to the struggle of big style-tendencies in art (Gothic and Renaissance),
of philosophy (Stoics and Epicureans), of political ideals (Oligarchy and
Tyrannis), and of economic forms (Capitalism and Socialism). But the post-
history is void of all this. All that remains is the struggle for mere power,
for animal advantage per se. Whereas previously power, even when to all
appearance destitute of any inspiration, was always serving the Idea somehow
or other, in the late Civilization even the most convincing illusion of an idea
is only the mask for purely zoological strivings.

The distinction between Indian philosophy before and after Buddha is that
the former is a grand movement towards attaining the aim of Indian thought
by and in the Indian soul, and the latter the perpetual turning-up of new facets
of a now crystallized and undevelopable thought-stock. The solutions are
there, for good, though the fashions of expressing them change. The same is
true of Chinese painting before and after the Han dynasties whether we
know it or not and of Egyptian architecture before and after the beginning
of the New Empire. So also with technics. The West's discoveries of the
steam-engine and of electricity are accepted by the Chinese to-day in just the
same way and with just the same religious awe as bronze and the plough
were accepted four thousand years ago, and fire in a still remoter age. Both,
spiritually, differ in toto from the discoveries which the Chinese made for
themselves in the Chou period and which in each instance signified an epoch in
their inner history. 1 Before and after that time, centuries play a vastly less

1 The Japanese belonged formerly to the Chinese Civilization and again belong to a Civiliza-
tion the Western today. A Japanese Culture in the genuine sense there has never been. Jap-
anese Americanism must, therefore, be judged otherwise than as an outgrowth of what never was
there.

50 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

important r61c than decades and even years within the Culture, for the spans of
time are gradually returning to the biological order. This it is that confers upon
these very Late conditions which to the people living in them seem almost
self-evident that character of changeless pageantry which the genuine
Culture-man e.g., Herodotus in. Egypt and the Western successors of Marco
Polo in China has found so astonishing in comparison with his own vigorous
pulse of development. It is the changelessness of non-history.

Is not Classical history at an end with Actium and the Pax Romana? There
are no more of those great decisions which concentrate the inner meaning of a
whole Culture. Unreason, biology, is beginning to dominate, and it is becom-
ing a matter of indifference for the world though not for the actions of the
private individual whether an event turns out thus or thus. All great
political questions are solved, as they are solved sooner or later in every Civili-
zation, inasmuch as questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked.
Yet a little while, and man will cease to understand what problems were really
involved in the earlier catastrophes; what is not livingly experienced of one-
self cannot be livingly experienced of another. When the later Egyptians
speak of the Hyksos time, or the later Chinese of the corresponding period of
the "Contending States," they are judging the outward picture according to
the criteria of their own ways of life, in which there are no riddles more. They
see in these things merely struggles for power, and they do not see that those
desperate wars, external and internal, wars in which men stirred up the alien
against their own kin, were fought for an idea. To-day we understand what
was taking place, in fearful alternations of tension and discharge, round the
murder of Tiberius Gracchus and that of Clodius. In 1700 we could not have
done so, and in zioo we shall again be unable to do so. It is just the same with
that of Chian, a Napoleonic figure, in whom later Egyptian historians could
discover nothing more characterized than a "Hyksos king." Had it not been
for the coming of the Germans, Roman historians a thousand years later might
have put the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, and Cicero together as a dynasty which
was overthrown by Cassar.

Compare the death of Tiberius Gracchus with the death of Nero, when
Rome received the news of Galba's rising, or the victory of Sulla over the
Marian party with that of Septimius Severus over Pescennius Niger. If in these
later cases the event had gone otherwise, would the course of the Imperial
Age have been altered in any way? The distinction so carefully drawn by
Mommsen and Eduard Meyer 1 between the "principate" of Pompey and
Augustus and the "monarchy" of Caesar misses the mark completely. At that
stage, the point is merely a constitutional one, though fifty years before it
would still have signified an opposition between ideas. When Vindex and
Galba in 68 set out to restore " the Republic," they were gambling on a notion in

1 Casars Monarchie und das Principat des Pompejus (1918) pp. 501, ct scq.

THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES 51

days when notions having genuine symbolic force had ceased to be, and the only
question was who should have the plain material power. The struggle for the
Csesar-title became steadily more and more negroid, and might have gone on
century after century in increasingly primitive and, therefore, "eternal" forms.
These populations no longer possessed a soul. Consequently they could
no longer have a history proper to themselves. At best they might acquire
some significance as an object in the history of an alien Culture, and whatever
deeper meaning this relation possessed would be derived entirely from the will
of the alien Life. Any effective historical happening that does take place on
the soil of an old Civilization acquires its consistency as a course of events from
elsewhere and never from any part played in it by the man of that soil. And
so once again we find ourselves regarding the phenomenon of "world-history"
under the two aspects life-courses of the great Cultures and relations be-
tween them.

CHAPTER III
ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES

CHAPTER III

ORIGIN AND LANDSCAPE

ALTHOUGH consideration of the Cultures themselves should logically pre-
cede that of the relations between them, modern historical thought generally
reverses the order. The less it really knows of the life-courses which together
make up a seeming unity of world-happenings, the more zealously it searches
for life in the web of relations, and the less it understands even of these. What
a wealth of psychology there is in the probings, rejections, choices, trans-
valuations, errors, penetrations, and welcomings! and not only between
Cultures which immediately touch one another, wonder at one another, fight
one another, but also as between a living Culture and the form-world of a dead
one whose remains still stand visible in the landscape. And how narrow and
poor, on the other hand, are the conceptions which the historians label "in-
fluence," "continuity," and "permanent effects"!

This is pure nineteenth century. What is sought is just a chain of causes
and effects. Everything follows and nothing is prime. Since every young
Culture superficially shows form-elements of older Cultures, these elements
are supposed to have had continuing effect Qortgewirki), and when a set of such
effects has been strung together, the historian regards it with satisfaction as
a sound piece of work.

At bottom, this mode of treatment rests upon that idea which inspired the
great Gothics long ago, the idea of a significant singleness in the history of all
mankind. They saw how, on earth, men and peoples changed, but ideas
stayed, and the powerful impressiveness of the picture has not worn itself out
even to-day. Originally it was seen as a plan that God was working out by
means of the human instrument. And it could still be regarded as such at a
far later stage, in fact so long as the spell of the " ancient-media^val-modern "
scheme lasted and its parade of permanence prevented us from noting that
actuality was ever changing. But meantime our outlook also has altered
and become cooler and wider. Our knowledge has long overpassed the limits
of this chart, and those who are still trying to sail by it are beating about in
vain. It is not products that "influence," but creators that absorb. Being
has been confused with waking-being, life with the means by which it expresses
itself. The critical thought, or even simple waking-consciousness, sees every-

56 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

where theoretical units subjected to motion. That is truly dynamic and Faus-
tian, for in no other Culture have men imagined history thus. The Greek, with
his thoroughly corporeal understanding of the world, would never have traced
"effects" of pure expression-units like "Attic drama" or "Egyptian art."

Originally what happens is that a name is given to a system of expression-
forms conjuring up in our minds a particular complex of relations. But this
does not last long, and soon one is suppositing under the name a being, and un-
der the relation an effect. When we speak to-day of Greek philosophy, or
Buddhism, or Scholasticism, we mean something that is somehow living, a
power-unit that has grown and grown until it is mighty enough to take
possession of men, to subject their waking-consciousness and even their being,
and in the end to force them into an active conformity, which prolongs the
direction followed by its own "life." It is a whole mythology, and, signifi-
cantly, it is only men of the Western Culture the only mankind that lives
with and in this picture is the Western whose myth contains plenty of
daemons of this sort "electricity" and "positional energy," for example.

In reality these systems only exist in the human waking-consciousness, and
they exist as modes of activity. Religion, science, art, are activities of waking-
consciousness that are based on a being. Faith, meditation, creation, and what-
ever of visible activity is required as outcome of these invisibles as sacri-
fice, prayer, the physical experiment, the carving of a statue, the statement of
an experience in communicable words are activities of the waking-con-
sciousness and nothing else. Other men see only the visible and hear only
words. In so doing they experience something in themselves, but they can-
not give any account of the relation between this experience and that which
the creator lived in himself. We see a form, but we do not know what in the
other's soul begat that form; we can only have some belief about the matter,
and we believe by putting in our own soul. However definitely and distinctly
a religion may express itself in words, they are words, and the hearer puts his
own sense into them. However impressive the artist's notes or colours, the
beholder sees and hears in them only himself, and if he cannot do so, the work
is for him meaningless. (The extremely rare and highly modern gift, possessed
by a few intensely historical men, of "putting oneself in the other's place"
need not be considered in this connexion.) The German whom Boniface con-
verted did not transfer himself into the missionary's soul. It was a spring-
tide quiver that passed in those days through the whole young world of the
North, and what it meant was that each man found suddenly in conversion
a language wherein to express his own religiousness. Just so the eyes of a
child light up when we tell it the name of the object in its hand.

It is not, then, microcosmic units that move, but cosmic entities that pick
amongst them and appropriate them. Were it otherwise were these systems
very beings that could exercise an activity (for "influence" is an organic

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 57

activity) the picture of history would be quite other than what it is. Con-
sider how every maturing man and every living Culture is continuously bathed
in innumerable potential influences. Out of all these, only some few are ad-
mitted as such the great majority are not. Is choice concerned with the
works, or with the men?

The historian who is intent upon establishing causal series counts only the
influences that are present, and the other side of the reckoning those that
are not does not appear. With the psychology of the "positive" influences
is associated that of the "negative." This is a domain into which no one has
yet ventured, but here, if anywhere, there are fruits to be reaped, and it must
be tackled unless the answer to the whole question is to be left indeterminate;
for if we try to evade it, we are driven into illusory visions of world-historical
happening as a continuous process in which everything is properly accounted
for. Two Cultures may touch between man and man, or the man of one Culture
may be confronted by the dead form-world of another as presented in its com-
municable relics. In both cases the agent is the man himself. The closed-off
act of A can be vivified by B only out of his own being, and to ipso it becomes
B's, his inward property, his work, and part of himself. There was no move-
ment of "Buddhism" from India to China, but an acceptance of part of the
Indian Buddhists' store of images by Chinese of a certain spiritual tendency,
who fashioned out a new mode of religious expression having meaning for
Chinese, and only Chinese, Buddhists. What matters in all such cases is not the
original meanings of the forms, but the forms themselves, as disclosing to the
active sensibility and understanding of the observer potential modes of his own
creativeness. Connotations are not transferable. Men of two different kinds
are parted, each in his own spiritual loneliness, by an impassable gulf. Even
though Indians and Chinese in those days both felt as Buddhists, they were
spiritually as far apart as ever. The same words, the same rites, the same
symbol but two different souls, each going its own way.

Searching through all Cultures, then, one will always find that the con-
tinuation of earlier creations into a later Culture is only apparent, and that in
fact the younger being has set up a few (very few) relations to the older being,
always without regard to the original meanings of that which it makes its own.
What becomes, then, of the "permanent conquests" of philosophy and science?
We arc told again and again how much of Greek philosophy still lives on to-day,
but this is only a figure of speech without real content, for first Magian and then
Faustian humanity, each with the deep wisdom of its unimpaired instincts,
rejected that philosophy, or passed unregarding by it, or retained its formulas
under radically new interpretations. The naive credulity of erudite enthusiasm
deceives itself here Greek philosophic notions would make a long catalogue,
and the further it is taken, the more vanishingly small becomes the proportion
of the alleged survivals. Our custom is simply to overlook as incidental

58 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

"errors" such conceptions as Democritus's theory of atomic images, 1 the very
corporeal world of Plato's "ideas," and the fifty-two hollow spheres of Aris-
totle's universe, as though we could presume to know what the dead meant
better than they knew themselves ! These things are truths and essential
only, not for us. The sum total of the Greek philosophy that we possess,
actually and not merely superficially, is practically nil. Let us be honest
and take the old philosophers at their word; not one proposition of Heraclitus
or Democritus or Plato is true for us unless and until we have accommodated
it to ourselves. And how much, after all, have we taken over of the methods,
the concepts, the intentions, and the means of Greek science, let alone its
basically incomprehensible terms? The Renaissance, men say, was completely
under the "influence" of Classical art. But what about the form of the Doric
temple, the Ionic column, the relation of column to architrave, the choice of
colour, the treatment of background and perspective in painting, the principles
of figure-grouping, vase-painting, mosaic, encaustic, the structural element in
statuary, the proportions of Lysippus? Why did all this exercise no "in-
fluence?"

Because that which one (here, the Renaissance artist) wills to express is in him
a priori. Of the stock of dead forms that he had in front of him, he really saw
only the few that he wanted to see, and saw them as he wanted them namely,
in line with his own intention and not with the intention of the original
creator, for no living art ever seriously considers that. Try to follow, element
by element, the "influence" of Egyptian plastic upon early Greek, and you will
find in the end that there is none at all, but that the Greek will-to-form took
out of the older art-stock some few characteristics that it would in any case have
discovered in some shape for itself. All round the Classical landscape there
were working, or had worked, Egyptians, Cretans, Babylonians, Assyrians,
Hittites, Persians, and Phoenicians, and the works of these peoples their
buildings, ornaments, art-works, cults, state-forms, scripts, and sciences
were known to the Greeks in profusion. But how much out of all this mass did
the Classical soul extract as its own means of expression? I repeat, it is only the
relations that are accepted that we observe. But what of those that were not ac-
cepted? Why, for example, do we fail to find in the former category the pyra-
mid, pylon, and obelisk of Egypt, or hieroglyphic, or cuneiform? What of the
stock of Byzantium and of the Moorish East was not accepted by Gothic art and
thought in Spain and Sicily? It is impossible to overpraise the wisdom (quite
unconscious) that governed the choice and the unhesitating transvaluation of
what was chosen. Every relation that was accepted was not only an exception,
but also a misunderstanding, and the inner force of a Being is never so clearly
evidenced as it is in this art of deliberate misunderstanding. The more enthusias-
tically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in

1 I.e., that sensation consists in the absorption of small particles radiated by the object. Tr.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 59

truth we have denatured it. Only consider the praises addressed by the West
to Plato! From Bernard of Chartres and Marsilius Ficinus to Goethe and
Schelling! And the more humble our acceptance of an alien religion, the more
certain it is that that religion has already assumed the form of the new soul.
Truly, someone ought to have written the history of the "three Aristotles"
Greek, Arabian, and Gothic who had not one concept or thought in
common. Or the history of the transformation of Magian Christianity into
Faustian ! We are told in sermon and book that this religion extended from the
old Church into and over the Western field without change of essence. Actu-
ally, Magian man evolved out of the deepest depths of his dualistic world-
consciousness a language of his own religious awareness that we call "the"
Christian religion. So much of this experience as was communicable words,
formulas, rites was accepted by the man of the Late-Classical Civilization
as a means of expression for his religious need; then it passed from man to
man, even to the Germans of the Western pre-Culture, in words always the same
and in sense always altering. Men would never have dared to improve upon the
original meanings of the holy words it was simply that they did not know
these meanings. If this be doubted, let the doubter study " the" idea of Grace,
as it appears under the dualistic interpretation of Augustine affecting a sub-
stance in man, and under the dynamic interpretaion of Calvin, affecting a
will in man. Or that Magian idea, which we can hardly grasp at all, of the
consensus (Arabic ijma) 1 wherein, as a consequence of the presence in each man
of a pneuma emanating from the divine pneuma, the unanimous opinion of the
elect is held to be immediate divine Truth. It was this that gave the decisions
of the early Church Councils their authoritative character, and it underlies
the scientific methods that rule in the world of Islam to this day. And it was
because Western men did not understand this that the Church Councils of later
Gothic times amounted, for him, to nothing more than a kind of parliament for
limiting the spiritual mobility of the Papacy. This idea of what a Council
meant prevailed even in the fifteenth century think of Constance and Basel,
Savonarola and Luther and in the end it disappeared, as futile and meaning-
less, before the conception of Papal Infallibility. Or, again, the idea, universal
in the Early Arabian world, of the resurrection of the flesh, which again pre-
supposed that of divine and human pneuma. Classical man assumed that the
soul, as the form and meaning of the body, was somehow co-created herewith,
and Greek thought scarcely mentions it. Silence on a matter of such gravity
may be due to one or the other of two reasons the idea's not being there
at all, or being so self-evident as not to emerge into consciousness as a problem.
With Arabian man it was the latter. But just as self-evident for him was the
notion that his pneuma was an emanation from God that had taken up residence
in his body. Necessarily, therefore, there had to be something from which the

1 See Ch. VIII below. Tr.

66 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

human soul should rise again on the Day of Judgment, and hence resurrection
was thought of as &c VCKP&V, "out of the corpses." This, in its deeper mean-
ing, is utterly incomprehensible for the West. The words of Holy Scripture
were not indeed doubted, but unconsciously another meaning was substituted
by the finer minds amongst Catholics, this other meaning, unmistakable already
in Luther and to-day quite general, is the conception of immortality as the
continued existence to all eternity of the soul as a centre of force. Were
Paul or Augustine to become acquainted with our ideas of Christianity, they
would reject all our dogmas, all our books, and all our concepts as utterly
erroneous and heretical.

As the strongest example of a system that to all appearance has travelled
unaltered through two millennia, and yet actually has passed through
three whole courses of evolution in three Cultures, with completely different
meanings in each, we may take Roman law.

Law, in the Classical world, is law made by citizens for citizens and presupposes
that the state-form is that of the Polis. It was this basic form of public life
that led and self-evidently to the notion of the person as identical with
the man who, added to others like him, made up the body (o-w^a) 1 of the
State. From this formal fact of Classical world-feeling grew up the whole
structure of Classical law.

"Persona" then is a specifically Classical notion, possessing meaning and valency
only in the Classical Culture. The individual person is a body which belongs to
the stock of the Polis. It is with reference to him that the law of the Polis
is ordered, downwards into the law of Things with, as a marginal case, the
slave who was body, but not person and upward into the law of Gods
with, as a marginal case, the hero who from being person had attained god-
head and the legal right to a cult, like Lysander and Alexander in the Greek
cities and Divus Julius and his successors in Rome. This tendency, becoming
more and more definite in the development of Classical jurisprudence, explains
also the notion ofcapitis deminutio media, which is so alien to our Western ideas;
for we can imagine a person (in our sense of the word) as deprived of certain
rights and even of all rights, but the Classical man under this punishment
ceased to be a person although living on as a body. And the specifically Classical
idea of the thing, res, is only intelligible in contrast to and as the object of
persona.

As Classical religion was State religion through and through, there is no

distinction made as to the fount of law; real law and divine law were made,

like personal law, by the citizen, and the relations of things and of gods to

persons were precise and definite. Now, it was a fact of decisive significance

1 See R. Hirzcl, Die Person (1914), p. 7.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 61

for the Classical jurisprudence that it was always the product of immediate
public experience and, moreover, not the professional experience of the
jurists, but the practical everyday experience of men who counted in political
and economic life generally. The man who followed the public career in Rome
had necessarily to be jurist, general, administrator, and financial manager.
When he gave judgment as prastor, he had behind him a wide experience of
many fields other than law. A judicial class, professionally (let alone theo-
retically) specialized in law as its sole activity, was entirely unknown to the
Classical. The whole outlook of the later jurisprudence was determined by
this fact. The Romans were here neither systematists nor historians nor
theorists, but just splendidly practical. Their jurisprudence is an empirical
science of individual cases, a refined technique, and not in the least a structure of
abstractions. 1

It would give an incorrect idea to oppose Greek and Roman law to one
another as quantities of the same order. Roman law in its whole development
is an individual city law, one amongst hundreds of such, and Greek law as a unity
never existed at all. Although Greek-speaking cities very often had similar
laws, this did not alter the fact that the law of each was its own and no other's.
Never did the idea of a general Doric, still less a general Hellenic, legislation
arise. Such notions were wholly alien to Classical thought. The jus civile
applied only to Quirites foreigners, slaves and the whole world outside the
city 2 simply did not count in the eyes of the law, whereas even the Sachsen-
sfiegel 3 evidences already our own deep-felt idea that there can only really be one
law. Until far into Imperial times the strict distinction was maintained be-
tween the jus civile of citizens and the jus gentium for " other people" who came
within the cognizance of Rome's jurisdiction as sojourners. 4 (It need hardly
be added that this " law of nations" has no sort of resemblance to that which we
call by the same name.) It was only because Rome as a unit-city attained
as under other conditions Alexandria might have attained to "Imperium"
over the Classical world that Roman law became pre-eminent, not because of its
intrinsic superiority, but firstly through Rome's political success and afterwards
because of Rome's monopoly of practical experience on the large scale. The
formation of a general Classical jurisprudence of Hellenistic cast if we are
entitled to call by that name an affinity of spirit in a large number of separate
legal systems falls in a period when Rome was still politically a third-rate
power. And when Roman law began to assume bigger forms, this was only one

1 L. Wcngcr, Das Rccht der Griechen und Romer (1914), p. 170; R.v. Mayr, Romische TOtchtsgcscbichte,
II, i, p. 87.

2 A curious sidelight on this appears in the provisions of the savage law against recalcitrant
debtors, who (after certain delays and formalities) could be put to death and even hewn in pieces
by their creditors, or "sold as slaves beyond the Tiber." Tr.

3 A thirteenth-century collection by Eikc von Repgow of German customs and customary
law (ed. K. G. Homeyer, 1861). Tr,

4 And were judged by a different authority, the peregrin prartor. Tr.

62. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

aspect of the fact that Roman intellect had subjugated Hellenism. The work of
forming later Classical law passed from Hellenism to Rome i.e., from a sum
of city-states, which one and all had been impressively made aware of their in-
dividual impotence, to one single city whose whole activity was in the end
devoted to the upholding and exploitation of an effective primacy. Thus it
came about that Hellenism never formed a jurisprudence in the Greek tongue.
When the Classical world entered upon a stage in which it was ripe for this
science (the latest of all), there was but one lawgiving city that counted in the
matter.

In reality, insufficient regard has been paid to the fact that Greek and
Roman law are not parallel in time but successive. Roman law is the younger
and presupposes the long experience of the elder; : it was built up, in fact,
late and, with this exemplar before it, very swiftly. It is not without signifi-
cance that the flowering-time of the Stoic philosophy, which deeply affected
juridical ideas, followed that of Greek, but preceded that of Roman, law.

This jurisprudence, however, was built up by the mind of an intensely
ahistorical species of man. Classical law, consequently, is law of the day
and even the moment; it was in its very idea occasional legislation for particular
cases, and when the case was settled, it ceased to be law. To extend its validity
over subsequent cases would have been in contradiction to the Classical sense
of the present.

The Roman prastor, at the beginning of his year of office, issued an edict in
which he set forth the rules that he intended to follow, but his successor next
year was in nowise bound to them. And even this limitation of a year on the
validity of the rules did not mean that this was actually the duration of the
rules. On the contrary (particularly after the Lex sEbutza) the prastor formu-
lated in each individual case the concrete rule of law for the judges 2 to whom
he remitted the matter for judgment, which had to be according to this rule
and no other. That is, the praetor produced, and indeed generated, a present
law without duration. 3

Similar in appearance, but so profoundly different in meaning as to leave no
doubt as to the great gap which is set between Classical and Western Law, is
that inspired and truly Germanic notion of English jurisprudence, the creative
power of the judge who "declares" the law. His business is to apply a law

1 The "dependence" of Classical law upon Egyptian is, as it chances, still traceable. Solon
the wholesale merchant introduced into his Attic legislation provisions concerning debt-slavery,
contract, work-shyness, and unemployment taken from Egypt. Diodorus, I, 77, 79, 94.

2 The process is clearly explained in Goudy's article "Roman Law," Ency. Brit., XI ed.
Very roughly, the pra:tor corresponded to the judge, and the judges to the jury, of modern English
law, but such a parallel must not be pressed far. Tr.

* L. Wenger, Rccht der Griecben und Riimtr, pp. 166, et seq.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 63

which in principle possesses eternal validity. Even the application of the
existing body of laws he can regulate, according to the situations disclosed in
the course of the case, by means of his "rules" (which have nothing in common
with the prastor's). And if he should conclude in the presence of a particular
set of facts that current law is defective in respect of these, he can /// the gap
at once, and thus in the very middle of a trial create new law, which (if con-
curred in by the judicial body in the due forms) becomes thereafter part and parcel
of the permanent stock of law. This is what makes it so completely un-Classical.
In the old jurisprudence, the gradual formation of a stock of rules was due purely
to the fact that public life followed a substantially homogeneous course
thoughout a particular period, and produced again and again the same situations
to be dealt with rules not deliberately invested with validity for the future,
but more or less recreated again and again as empirical rulings ad hoc. The
sum of these rulings not a system, but a collection came to constitute
" the law" as we find it in the later legislation by praetor's edict, each successive
prastor having found it practically convenient to take over substantial portions
of his predecessor's work.

Experience, then, means for the ancient lawgiver something different from
what it means to us. It means, not the comprehensive outlook over a consistent
mass of law that contains implicitly every possible case, associated with prac-
tical skill in applying it, but the experimental knowledge that certain jural
situations are for ever recurring, so that one can save oneself the trouble of
forming new law on every occasion.

The genuine Classical form for the slow accretion of legal material is an
almost automatic summation of individual VO/J.OL leges, edicta, as we find it in
the heyday of the Roman prastor. All the so-called legislations of Solon,
Charondas, and the Twelve Tables are nothing but occasional collections of
such edicts as had been found to be useful. The Law of Gortyn, 1 which is more
or less contemporary with the Twelve, is a supplement to some older collection.
A newly-founded city would promptly provide itself with such a collection,
and in the process a certain amount of dilettantism would slip in (cf. the law-
makers satirized by Aristophanes in The Birds'). But there is never system in
them, still less any intention of establishing enduring law thereby.

In the West it is conspicuously the other way about. The tendency is from
the first to bring the entire living body of law into a general code, ordered
for ever and exhaustively complete, containing in advance the decision of
every conceivable future problem. 2 All Western law bears the stamp of the
future, all Classical the stamp of the moment.

1 See Ency. Brit. , XI ed . , Vol . XII, p. 501. Fragments of the older collection referred to were found
in the vicinity. Tr.

2 In English legal theory the judge does not make law by a new decision, but * ' declares" the law
i.e., makes explicit what has been implicit in the law from the first, though the occasion for its
manifestation has not hitherto arisen. Tr.

64 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

But this, it may be said, is contradicted by the fact that there actually were
Classical law-works compiled by professional jurists for permanent use. Un-
doubtedly so. But we must remember that we are completely ignorant of
Early Classical law (1100-700) and it is pretty certain that the customary law
of the country-side and the nascent town was never noted down as that of the
Gothic age was set forth in the Sachsenspiegel or that of the Early Arabian in
the Syrian Law-book. 1 The earliest stratification that we can now detect con-
sists of the collections (from 700 B.C.) ascribed to mythical or semi-mythical
personages like Lycurgus, Zaleucus, Charondas, and Dracon, 2 and certain
Roman kings. 3 That these existed the form of the saga shows, but of their
real authors, the actual process of their codification, and their original contents
even the Greeks of the Persian War period were ignorant.

A second stratification, corresponding to Justinian's code and to the "Re-
ception" of Roman Law in Germany, is connected with the names of Solon
(600), Pittacus (550), and others. Here the laws have already attained to a
structure and are inspired by the city; they are described as "politeiai,"
"nomoi," in contrast to old "thesmai" and "rhetrai." 4 In reality, therefore,
we only know the history of late Classical law. Now, why these sudden codi-
fications? A mere look at these names shows that at bottom they were not
processes of putting down the results of pure experience, but decisions of political
power problems.

It is a grave error to suppose that a law that surveys all things evenly and
without being influenced by political and economic interests can exist at all.
Such a state of things can be pictured, and is always being pictured, by those
who suppose that the imagining of political possibilities is a political activity.
But nothing alters the fact that such a law, born of abstractions, does not
exist in real history. Always the law contains in abstract form the world-
picture of its author, and every historical world-picture contains a political-
economic tendency dependent, not upon what this man or that thinks, but upon
what is practically intended by the class which in fact commands the power
and, with it, the legislation. Every law is established by a class in the name of
the generality. Anatole France once said that "our law in majestic equality
forbids the rich no less than the poor to steal bread and to beg in the street." 5

1 Sec Ency. Brit., XI cd., Vol XXVI, p. 315. Tr.

2 Sec Bcloch, Griecbiscbe Geschichte, I, "i, p. 350.

8 The background of this is Etruscan law, the primitive form of the Roman. Rome was an
Etruscan city.

* Busolt, Griechiscbe Staatskunde, p. 518.

6 Compare the famous ironical judgment of Mr. Justice Maule which led to the reform of the
divorce laws in England (1857): "... It is true that the course which you should legally have
taken] would have cost you many hundreds of pounds, whereas probably you have not as many
pence. But the Law knows no distinction between rich and poor." Tr.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 65

A one-sided justice no doubt. But equally the other side will always try to
win sole authority for laws derived from its outlook upon life. These legis-
lative codes are one and all political acts, and party-political acts at that in
the case of Solon a democratic constitution (TroXiTcia) combined with private
laws (vonoi) of the same stamp, in that of Dracon and the Decemvirs * an oli-
garchic constitution fortified by private law. It was left to Western historians,
accustomed to their own durable law, to undervalue the importance of this
connexion; Classical man was under no misapprehension as to what really
happened in these cases. The product of the Decemvirs was in Rome the last
code of purely patrician character. Tacitus calls it the end of right law (" finis
aqui juris" Annals, III, 27). For, just as the fall of the Decemvirs was followed
very significantly by the rise of another Ten, the Tribunes, so immediately the
jus of the Twelve Tables and the constitution on which it was founded began
to be attacked by the undermining process of the lex rogata (people's law),
which set itself with Roman constancy to do what Solon had achieved in one
act in the case of Dracon 's work, the Trarpios TroXtreta which was the law-ideal
of the Attic oligarchy. Thenceforward Dracon and Solon were the "slogans"
in the long battle between Oligarchy and Demos, which in Rome meant Senate
and Tribunate. The Spartan constitution associated with the name " Lycurgus
not only stood for the ideal of Dracon and the Twelve Tables, but concreted
it. We can see, parallel with the closely related course of events in Rome, the
tendency of the two Spartan kings to evolve from the condition of Tarquinian
tyrants to that of tribunes of the Gracchan kind; the fall of the last Tarquins
or the institution of the Decemvirs a coup d'etat of one kind or another
against the tribunician tendency 2 corresponds more or less to the fall
of Cleomenes (488) and of Pausanias (470); and the revolution of Agis III and
Cleomenes III (about 140) aligns itself with the political activity of C. Flamin-
ius, which began only a few years later. But never in Sparta were the kings
able to achieve any thorough-going success over the senatorial element repre-
sented by the Ephors.

In the period of these struggles, Rome had become a megalopolis of the late-

1 What is important to us, therefore, in the Law of the Twelve Tables is not the supposed con-
tents (of which scarcely an authentic clause survived even in Cicero's day), but the political act
of codification itself, the tendency of which corresponded to that of the overthrow of the Tarquinian
Tyrannis by senatorial Oligarchy a success which, now endangered, it was sought to stabilize
for the future. The text which schoolboys learned in detail in Csesar's time must have had the
same destiny as the consular lists of the old time, in which had been interpolated names upon names
of families whose wealth and influence was of much later origin. In recent years Pais and Lambert
have disputed the whole story of the Twelve Tables, and so far as concerns the authenticity of the
reputed text, they may well be right not so, however, as regards the course of political events in
the years about 450.

2 Only half a century separates the traditional dates of these events (509,451), in spite of the
wealth of traditional history afterwards attached to the period. The "coup," in the case of the
Decemvirs, was the capture by the patricians of a machine set up for the redress of plebeian griev-
ances. Tr.

66 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Classical type. The rustic instincts were more and more pushed back by the
intelligence of the city. 1 Consequently from about 350 we find side by side
with the lex rogata of the people the lex data, the administrative law, of the
prastor. With this the Twelve Tables idea drops out of the contest and it is
the prastor's edict that becomes the football of the party battle.

It did not take long for the prastor to become the centre of both legislation
and judicial practice. And presently, corresponding to the political extension
of the city's power, the jurisdiction of the prastor and the field of his jus civile
the law of the citizens begin to diminish in significance and the peregrin
prastor with his jus gentium the law of the alien steps into the foreground.
And when finally the whole population of the Classical world, save the small
part possessing Roman citizenship, was comprised in the field of this alien law,
the jus peregrinum of the city of Rome became practically an imperial law. All
other cities and even Alpine tribes and migrant Bedouin clans were civitates
from the administrative point of view retained their local laws only as
supplements, not alternatives, to the peregrin law of Rome.

It marked the close of Classical law-making, therefore, when Hadrian
(about A.D. 130) introduced the Edictum perpetuum, which gave final form to the
well-established corpus of the annual pronouncements of the prastors and for-
bade further modifications thereof. It was still, as before, the prastor's duty
to publish the "law of his year," but, even though this law had no greater de-
gree of validity than corresponded to his administrative powers and was not the
law of the Empire, he was obliged thenceforth to stick to the established text. 2
It is the very symbol of the petrified "Late" Civilization. 3

With the Hellenistic age began jurisprudence, the science of law, the system-
atic comprehension of the law which men actually apply. Since legal thought
presupposes a substance of political and economic relations, in the same way as
mathematical thought presupposes physical and technical elements of knowl-
edge, 4 Rome very soon became the home of Classical jurisprudence. Similarly in the
Mexican world it was the conquering Aztecs whose academies (e.g., Tezcuco)
made law the chief subject of study. Classical jurisprudence was the Roman's
science, and his only one. At the very moment when the creative mathematic
closes off with Archimedes, juristic literature begins with Alms's Tripertita, a
commentary on the Twelve (198 B.C.). 5 The first systematic private law was
written by M. Scasvola about 100. The genuine maturity of Classical law is in
the two centuries 100-0 although we to-day, with quaint perversity, apply

1 Cf. Ch. IV below.

2 Sohm, Institutional (14) p. 101. [This is the edict of "Julian" (Salvius Julianus, urban prz-
tor). Romanists arc not agreed as to how far, if at all, it included material derived from the deci-
sions of the peregrin prartor. See Professor Goudy's article "Roman Law," Ency. Brit., XI cd.,
p. 563. TV.]

3 Lenel, Das Edictum ptrpetttum (1907); L. Wengcr, p. 168.

4 Even the multiplication table of the children assumes the elements of dynamics in counting.
' V. Mayr II, i, p. 85; Sohm, p. 105.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 67

the time to a period which was really that of Early Arabian law. And from the
relics of these two literatures we can measure the greatness of the gap that
separates the thought of two Cultures. The Romans treat only of cases and
their classification; they never analyse a basic idea such as, for instance,
judicial error. They distinguish carefully the sorts of contracts, but they have
no conception of Contract as an idea, or of any theories as to invalidity or
unsoundness. "Taking everything into account," says Lenel, 1 " it is clear that
the Romans cannot possibly be regarded as exemplars of scientific method."

The last phase is that of the schools of the Sabiniani and Proculiani (Au-
gustus to about 160 A.D.). They are scientific schools like the philosophical
schools in Athens, and in them, possibly, the expiring stages of the conflict
between the senatorial and the tribunician (Cassarian) conceptions of law were
fought, for amongst the best of the Sabiniani were two descendants of Cassar's
slayers and one of the Proculiani was picked upon by Trajan as his potential
successor. While the method was to all intents and purposes settled and con-
cluded, the practical fusion of the citizen's statute-law (Jus civile) and the
prastor's edict (jus honorarium) was carried out here.

The last landmark of Classical jurisprudence, so far as we know, was the
Institutes of Gaius (about 161).

Classical law is a law of bodies. In the general stock composing the world it
distinguishes bodily Persons and bodily Things and, like a sort of Euclidean
mathematic of public life, establishes ratios between them. The affinity be-
tween mathematical and legal thought is very close. The intention, in both,
is to take the prima facie data, to separate out the sensuous-incidental, and to
find the intellectually basic principle the pure form of the object, the pure
type of the situation, the pure connexity of cause and effect. Life, in the
Classical, presents itself to the critical waking-consciousness of the Classical
man in a form penetrated with Euclidean character, and the image that is gen-
erated in the legal mind is one of bodies, of positional relations between bodies,
and of reciprocal effects of bodies by contact and reaction just as with
Democritus's atoms. It is juristic statics. 2

The first creation of "Arabian" law was the concept of the incorporeal person.

Here is an element entirely absent in Classical law, 3 and appearing quite
suddenly in the "Classical" jurists (who were all Aramaeans), which cannot be
estimated at its full value, or in its symbolic importance as an index of the new

1 En^yklofadie der Recktswtssmsch., I, 357.

2 Egyptian law of the Hyksos period, and Chinese of the Period of Contending States, in contrast
to the Classical and the Indian law of the Dharmasutras, must have been built up on basic ideas quite
other than the idea of the corporeality of persons and things. It would be a grand emancipation from
the load of Roman " antiquities ' ' if German research were to succeed in establishing these.

3 Sohm, p. zzo.

68 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

world-feeling, unless we realize the full extent of the field that this "Arabian"
law covered.

The new landscape embraces Syria and northern Mesopotamia, southern
Arabia and Byzantium. In all these regions a new law was coming into being,
an oral or written customary law of the same "early" type as that met with in
the Sachsenpiegel. Wonderfully, the law of individual cities which is so self-evident
on Classical ground is here silently transmuted into a law of creed-communities.
It is Magian, magic, through and through. Always one Pneuma, one like spirit,
one identical knowledge and comprehension of whole and sole truth, welds the
believers of the same religion into a unit of will and action, into one juristic
person. A juristic person is thus a collective entity which has intentions,
resolutions, and responsibilities as an entity. In Christianity we see the idea
already actual and effective in the primitive community at Jerusalem, 1 and
presently it soars to the conception of a triune Godhead of three Persons. 2

Before Constantine, even, the Late Classical law of imperial decrees (con-
stitutiones, placita') though the Roman form of city law was strictly kept, was
genuinely a law for the believers of the "Syncretic Church," 3 that mass of cults
perfused by one single religiousness. In Rome itself, it is true, law was conceived
of by a large part of the population as city-state law, but this feeling became
weaker and weaker with every step towards the East. The fusion of the faith-
ful into a single jural community was effected in express form by the Emperor-
cult, which was religious law through and through. In relation to this law
Jews and Christians 4 were infidels who ensconced themselves with their own
laws in another field of law. When in zn the Aramaean Caracalla, by the
Constitutio Antoniana, gave Roman citizenship to all inhabitants except dediticii
peregrins, 5 the form of his act was purely Classical, and no doubt there were
plenty of people who understood it in the Classical spirit i.e., as literally an
incorporation of the citizens of every other city in the city of Rome. But the
Emperor himself conceived it quite otherwise. It made everyone subject to the
" Ruler of the Faithful," the head of the cult-religion venerated as Divus. With

1 Acts XV. Herein lies the germ of the idea of a Church law.

* For Islam as a "juristic person" sec M. Morten, Die religio se Gedankmivelt dti Volhcs im beutigem
Islam (1917), p. xxiv.

3 See Ch. VII below. We can venture to make the label so positive because the adherents of all
the Late Classical cults were bound together in devout consensus, just as the primitive Christian
communities were.

4 The Persian Church came into the Classical field only in the Classical form of Mithraism,
which was assimilable in the ensemble of Syncretism.

6 It is difficult to describe this class in a few words. Roughly, they (and the "Junian Latins,"
so called, who were cxcepted with them) represented a stratum of Roman society, largely com-
posed of "undesirables," which was only just not servile. In the older legislation they were neces-
sarily lumped with the outer world as peregrins, but when Caracalla made this outer world
"Roman," there were obvious reasons against bringing these people into the fold as well. In some-
what the same way the word "outsider" is used in colloquial English with the dual meaning of a
foreigner or non-member, and a socially undesirable person. Tr.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 69

Constantine came the great change; he turned Imperial Caliph law on to the
creed-community of Christianity in lieu of that of Syncretism, and thereby consti-
tuted the Christian Nation. The labels ' ' devout ' ' and ' ' unbeliever ' ' ch anged places .
From Constantine onwards the quiet transformation of "Roman" law into
orthodox Christian law proceeded more and more decisively, and it was as such
that converted Asiatics and Germans received and adopted it. Thus a perfectly
new law came into being in old forms. According to the old marriage-law it was
impossible for a Roman burgher to marry the daughter of, say, a Capuan burgher
if legal community, connubium, was not in force between the two cities. 1 But
now the question was whether a Christian or a Jew irrespective of whether
he was Roman, Syrian, or Moor could legally marry an infidel. For
in the Magian law-world there was no connubium between those of different
faiths. There was not the slightest difficulty about an Irishman in Con-
stantinople marrying a Negress if both were Christians, but how could a
Monophysite Christian marry a Nestorian maiden who was his neighbour in
their Syrian village? Racially they were probably indistinguishable, but they
belonged to legally different nations.

This Arabian concept of nationality is a new and wholly decisive fact.
The frontiers between "home" and "abroad" lay in the Apollinian world
between every two towns, and in the Magian between every two creed-com-
munities. What the "enemy," the peregrin, was to the Roman, the Pagan
was to the Christian, the Amhaarez to the Jew. What the acquisition of Roman
citizenship meant for the Gaul or the Greek in Cassar's time, Christian baptism
meant for him now entry into the leading nation of the leading Culture. 2
The Persians of the Sassanid period no longer conceived of themselves, as their
predecessors of Achasmenid times had done, as a unit by virtue of origin and
speech, but as a unit of Mazdaist believers, vis-a-vis unbelievers, irrespective of
the fact that the latter might be of pure Persian origin (as indeed the bulk of
the Nestorians were). So also with the Jews, and later the Mandasans and
Manichasans, and later again the Monophysite and the Nestorian Christians
each body felt itself a nation, a legal community, a juristic person in a new
sense.

Thus there arises a group of Early Arabian laws, differentiated according to
religions as decisively as Classical laws are differentiated according to cities.
In the realm of the Sassanids schools arose for the teaching the Zoroastrian
law proper to them; the Jews, who formed an exceedingly large portion of the
population from Armenia to Saba^a, created their proper law in the Talmud,
which was completed and closed some few years before the Corpus Juris. Each
one of these Churches had its peculiar jurisdiction, independent of the geo-

1 In the Twelve Tables connubium was disallowed even between the patrician and plebian citi-
zens of Rome itself. [The hold of the patricians on this privilege, however, was already exceedingly
precarious, and it vanished a few years later in the lex Canuleia. Jr.]

4 a. Ch. VI below.

7 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

graphical frontiers of the moment as in the East to-day and the judge
representing the ground-lord judged only cases between parties of different
faiths. The self-jurisdiction of the Jews within the Empire had never been
contested by anyone, but the Nestorians and the Monophysites also began,
very soon after their separation, to create and to apply laws of their own,
and thus by a negative process i.e., by the gradual withdrawal of all heter-
odox communities Roman imperial law came to be the law of the Christians
who confessed the same creed as the Emperor. Hence the importance of the
Roman-Syrian law-book, which has been preserved in several languages. It
was probably * pre-Constantinian and written in the chancery of the Patriarch
of Antioch; it is quite unmistakably Early Arabian law in Late Classical form,
and, as its many translations indicate, it owed its currency to the opposition
to the orthodox Imperial Church. It was without doubt the basis of Mono-
physite law, and it reigned till the coming of Islam over a field far larger than
that of the Corpus Juris.

The question arises, what in such a tapestry of laws could have been the real
practical value of the part of them which was written in Latin? The law
historians, with all the one-sidedness of the expert, have hitherto looked at
this part alone and therefore have not yet realized that there is a problem here
at all. Their texts were "Law" unqualified, the law that descended from
Rome to us, and they were concerned only to investigate the history of these
texts and not their real significance in the lives of the Eastern peoples. What
in reality we have here is the highly civilized law of an aged Culture forced
upon the springtime of a young one. 2 It came over as learned literature, and in
the train of political developments which were quite other than they would
have been had Alexander or Csesar lived longer or had Antony won at Actium.
We must look at Early Arabian law from the standpoint of Ctesiphon and not
from that of Rome. The law of the distant West had long before reached in-
ward fulfilment could it be here more than a mere literature? What part
did it play, if any, in the active law-study, law-making, and law-practice
of this landscape? And, indeed we must further ask how much of Roman
or for that matter of Classical generally is contained in this literature
itself. 3

1 Lend, I, 380.

2 Here, as in every line of the history of the "Pseudomorphosis," we are reminded of Christ's
parable of new wine and old bottles (Matt, ix, 17), an expression not of mere abstract shrewdness,
as it seems to us now, but of intense living force and even passion. It is only one short verse, not
obligatory in its context, but leaping out of depths. Tr.

3 As long ago as 1891 Mitteis (JR.tichsrccht und Volksrtcht, p. 13) drew attention to the Oriental
vein in Constantine's legislation. Collinet (j-Ltudes historiques sur It droit de Justinien I, 1911), chiefly
on the basis of German researches, throws an immense amount back on Hellenistic law; but how
much, after all, of this "Hellenistic" was really Greek and not merely written in Greek? The
results of interpolation-research have proved truly devastating for the "Classical spirit" in Jus-
tinian's Digests.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 71

The history of this Latin-written law belongs after 160 to the Arabian
East, and it says a great deal that it can be traced in exactly parallel courses
into the history of Jewish, Christian, and Persian literature. 1 The "Classical"
jurists (i6o-zzo), Papinian, Ulpian, and Paul, were Aramaeans, and Ulpian
described himself with pride as a Phoenician from Tyre. They came, therefore,
from the same population as the Tannaim who perfected the Mishnah shortly
after zoo, and most of the Christian Apologists (Tertullian 160-22.3). Contempo-
rary with them is the fixation of canon and text for the New Testament by
Christian, for the Hebrew Old Testament by Jewish, 2 and for the Avesta by
Persian, scholars. It is the high Scholasticism of the Arabian Springtime.
The digests and commentaries of these jurists stand towards the petrified legal
store of the Classical in exactly the same relation as the Mishnah to the Torah
of Moses (and as, much later, the Hadith to the Koran) they are " Halak-
hoth " 3 a new customary law grasped in the forms of an authoritative and
traditional law-material. The casuistic method is everywhere the same. The
Babylonian Jews possessed a well-developed civil law which was taught in the
academies of Sura and Pumbeditha. Everywhere a class of law-men formed
itself the prudentes of the Christians, the rabbis of the Jews, later the ulemas
(in Perian, mollahs) of the Islamic nation who enunciated opinions, responsa
(Arabic, Fetwa). If the Ulema was acknowledged by the State, he was called
" Mufti ' ' (Byzantine, ex auctoritate principis). Everywhere the forms are exactly
the same.

About zoo the Apologists pass into the Fathers proper, the Tannaim into
the Amoraim, the great casuists of juridical law (jus) into the exegetes and
codifiers of constitutional law (lex). The constitutions of the Emperors, from
zoo the sole source of new "Roman" law, are again a new "Halakhah" laid
down over that in the jurists' writings, and therefore correspond exactly to the
Gemara, which rapidly evolved as an outlier of the Mishnah. The new
tendencies reached fulfilment simultaneously in the Corpus Juris and the
Talmud.

The opposition between jus and lex in Arabian-Latin usage comes to ex-
pression very clearly in the work of Justinian. Institutes and Digests are
jus; they have essentially the significance of canonical texts. Constitutions
and Novels are leges, new law in the form of elucidations. The canonical books
of the New Testament and the traditions of the Fathers are related to one
another in the same way.

As to the Oriental character of the thousands of constitutions, no one now
has any doubts. It is pure customary law of the Arabian world that the living

1 See Ch. VII below.

2 Coupled with the destruction of all other documents.

3 Fromer, Der Talmud (1910), p. 190. [The English student will find a fairly full account of
the main groups of Jewish literature in the article "Hebrew Literature" and cognate articles in
the Ency. Brit., XI ed. !>.]

72. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

pressure of evolution forced under the texts of the learned. 1 The innumerable
decrees of the Christian rulers of Byzantium, of the Persian of Ctesiphon, of the
Jewish (the Resh-Galuta 2 ) in Babylonia, and finally of the Caliphs of Islam
have all exactly the same significance.

But what significance had the other part of pseudo-Classical, the old jurists',
law? Here it is not enough to explain texts, and we must know what was the
relation between texts, jurisprudence, and court decisions. It can happen
that one and the same law-book is, in the waking-consciousness of two groups
of peoples, equivalent to two fundamentally different works.

It was not long before it became the habit, not to apply the old laws of the
city of Rome to the fact-material of the given case, but to quote the jurists'
texts like the Bible. 3 What does this signify? For our Romanists it is a sign
of decadence, but looked at from the view-point of the Arabian world, it is just
the reverse a proof that Arabian man did eventually succeed in making an
alien and imposed literature inwardly his own, in the form admissible for his
own world-feeling. With this the completeness of the opposition between
the Classical and the Arabian world-feeling becomes manifest.

Whereas the Classical law was made by burghers on the basis of practical
experience, the Arabian came from God, who manifested it through the in-
tellect of chosen and enlightened men. The Roman distinction between jus
and fas (such as it was, for the content even of fas had proceeded from human
reflection) became meaningless. The law, of whatever kind, spiritual or sec-
ular, came into being, as stated in the first words of Justinian's Digests, Deo
auctore. The authoritativeness of Classical laws rests upon their success, that
of the Arabian on the majesty of the name that they bear. 4 But it matters very
considerably indeed in a man's feelings whether he regards law as an expression
of some fellow man's will or as an element of the divine dispensation. In the
one case he either sees for himself that the law is right or else yields to force,
but in the other he devoutly acknowledges ("Islam" = to commit, devote).
The Oriental does not ask to see either the practical object of the law that is ap-
plied to him or the logical grounds of its judgments. The relation of the cadi to
the people, therefore, has nothing in common with that of the praetor to the
citizens. The latter bases his decisions upon an insight trained and tested in
high positions, the former upon a spirit that is effective and immanent in him

1 Mitteis (Rom. Privatrecht bis auf die Zeit Dioklt^ians (1908), preface) remarks how, "while
the ancient law-forms were retained, the Jaw itself nevertheless became something quite different."

* Head of the exilic Jews under Persian ovcrlordship. Tr.

8 Mayr, IV, pp. 45, et scq.

4 Hence the fictitious names of authors on innumerable books in every Arabian literature
Dionysius the Areopagite, Pythagoras, Hermes Trismegistus, Hippocrates, Enoch, Baruch, Daniel,
Solomon, the Apostle-names attached to the numerous gospels and apocalypses.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 73

and speaks through his mouth. But it follows from this that their respective re-
lations to written law the praetor's to his edict, the cadi's to the jurists' texts
must be entirely different. It is a quintessence of concentrated experience that
the prsetor makes his own, but the texts are a sort of oracle that the cadi esoteri-
cally questions. It does not matter in the least to the cadi what a passage origi-
nally meant or why it was framed. He consults the words even the letters
and he does so not at all for their everyday meanings, but for the magic rela-
tions in which they must stand towards the case before him. We know this
relation of the "spirit" to the "letter" from the Gnosis, from the early-
Christian, Jewish, and Persian apocalyptic and mystical literature, from the
Neopythagorean philosophy, from the Kabbalah; and there is not the slightest
doubt that the Latin codices were used in exactly the same way in the minor
judicial practice of the Aramaean world. The conviction that the letters con-
tain secret meanings, penetrated with the Spirit of God, finds imaginative ex-
pression in the fact (mentioned above) that all religions of the Arabian world
formed scripts of their own, in which the holy books had to be written and
which maintained themselves with astounding tenacity as badges of the re-
spective "nations" even after changes of language. 1

But even in law the basis of determining the truth by a majority of texts is the
fact of the consensus of the spiritual elect, the ijma. z This theory Islamic science
worked out to its logical conclusions. We seek to find the truth, each for
himself, by personal pondering, but the Arabian savant feels for and ascertains
the general conviction of his associates, which cannot err because the mind of
God and the mind of the community are the same. If consensus is found, truth is
established. " Ijma" is the key of all Early Christian, Jewish, and Persian
Councils, but it is the key, too, of the famous Law of Citations of Valen-
tinian III (4x6), which the law-men have universally ridiculed without in the
least understanding its spiritual foundations. The law limits the number of
great jurists whose texts were allowed to be cited to five, and thus set up a
canon in the same sense as the Old and New Testaments, both of which also
were summations of texts which might be cited as canonical. If opinions
differed, the law of Valentinian laid it down that a majority should prevail,
or if the texts were equally divided, the authority of Papinian. 3 The inter-
polation method, used on a large scale by Tribonian for the Digest of Justinian,

1 For example, Hebrew was supplanted by Aramaic for all ordinary purposes as early as the
Maccabees and to such an extent that in the synagogues the Scriptures had to be translated for
the people but has held its ground as a religious vehicle, and above all as a script, even to this
day. (The present use of a spoken Hebrew represents a revival in more recent times, after the wider
dispersion of the early Middle Ages had broken the connexion with the Aramaic lands.) In the
Persian field the older Zend survived alongside the newer Pehlevi. In Egypt somewhat similar in-
fluences were contemporaneously determining the evolution of popular Demotic and official Greek
into the Coptic language with Greek characters. Tr.

2 M. Horten, D. rel. Gedankenwelt d. Volkes im heut. Islam, p. xvi. Cf. Chapter VII below.

3 Mayr, IV, 45, ct seq. [Ency. Brit., XI cd., Vol. XXIII, p. 570. Tr.]

74 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

is a product of this same outlook. A canonical text is in its very idea true and
incapable of improvement. But the actual needs of the spirit alter, and so
there grew up a technique of secret modifications which outwardly kept up the
fiction of inalterability and which is employed very freely indeed in all religious
writings of the Arabian world, the Bible included.

After Mark Antony, Justinian is the most fateful personality of the Arabian
world. Like his "contemporary" Charles V he ruined everything for which
he was invoked. Just as in the West the Faustian dream of a resurrection of
the Holy Roman Empire runs through all the political romanticism that
darkened the sense of fact during and beyond the age of Napoleon and even
that of the princely fools of 1848 so also Justinian was possessed with a
Quixotic urgency to recover the entire Imperium. It was always upon dis-
tant Rome instead of upon his proper world, the Eastern, that his eyes were
fixed. Even before he ascended the throne, he was already in negotiation with
the Pope of Rome, who was still subordinate to the great Patriarch of Christen-
dom and not yet generally recognized even as primus inter pares. It was at the
Pope's instance that the dual-nature symbol was introduced at Chalcedon, 1 a
step which lost the Monophysite countries wholly and for ever. The conse-
quence of Actium was that Christianity in its first two decisive and formative
centuries was pulled over into the West, into Classical territories, where the
higher intellectual stratum held aloof. Then the Early Christian spirit rose
afresh with the Monophysites and Nestorians. But Justinian thrust this re-
vival back upon itself, and the result was that in the realms of Eastern Christ-
ianity the reformist movement, when in due course it appeared, was not a
Puritanism but the new religion of Islam. And in the same way, at the very
moment when the Eastern customary law had become ripe for codification, he
framed a Latin codex which, for language reasons in the East and for political
reasons in the West, was condemned from the first to remain a literary prod-
uct.

The work itself, like the corresponding codes of Dracon and Solon, came
into being at the threshold of a "Late" period, and with political intentions.
In the West, where the fiction of a continuing Imperium Romanum produced the
utterly meaningless campaigns of Belisarius and Narses, Latin codes had been
put together (about A.D. 500) by Visigoths, Burgundians and Ostrogoths for
subjugated Romans, and so Byzantium must needs get out a genuine Roman
code in opposition. In the East the Jewish nation has already settled its code,
the Talmud, while, for the immense numbers of people who were subject to
the Emperor's law, a code proper for the Emperor's own nation, the Christian,
had become a necessity.

For the Corpus Juris with its topsy-turviness and its technical faults is, in spite
of everything, an Arabic in other words, a religious creation, as evidenced

1 471. Sec Ency. Brit., XI cd., article "Chalccdon, Council of," and references therein. Tr.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 75

in the Christian tendency of many interpolations; 1 in the fact that the constitu-
tions relative to ecclesiastical law, which had been put at the end even in the
Theodosian codex, were now placed at the beginning; and very markedly in
the preambles of many of the Novels. Yet the book is not a beginning, but an
end. Latin, which had long become valueless, now disappears completely from
legal life (even the Novels are mostly in Greek), and with it the work so mis-
guidedly written in that language. But the history of the law pursues the way
that the Syrian-Roman law-book had indicated to it, and in the eighth century
arrives at works in the mode of our eighteenth, such as the Ecloga of the
Emperor Leo 2 and the Corpus of the great Persian jurist Archbishop Jesubocht. 3
In that time, too, came the greatest figure of Islamic jurisprudence, Abu Hanifah.

VII

The law-history of the West begins in total independence of Justinian's
creation. At that time it was in complete oblivion, so thoroughly unimpor-
tant, in fact, that of its main element, the Pandects (Digest), there was but one
manuscript, which by accident (an unfortunate one) was discovered about
1050.

The pre-Cultural phase, from about A.D. 500, had thrown up a series of
Germanic tribal codes the Visigothic, Ostrogothic, Burgundian, Prankish,
and Lombard which correspond to those of the Arabian pre-Culture that
survives for us only in the Jewish 4 Deuteronomy (c. 62.1, more or less our
Deuteronomy xii-xxvi) and Priestly History (c. 450, now represented
by the second, third, and fourth books of the Pentateuch). Both are con-
cerned with the values of basic significance for a primitive existence
family and chattels and both make use, crudely, yet shrewdly, of an old
and civilized law the Jews (and no doubt the Persians and others) working
upon the late Babylonian, 5 and the Germans upon some few relics of Urbs Roma.

The political life of the Gothic springtime, with its peasant, feudal, and
simple burgher laws, leads very soon to particular development in three great
branches of law which have remained distinct to this day and there has been
no unifying comparative history of law in the West to probe the deep meaning
of this development.

The most important by far, owing to the political destinies in which it was
involved, was the Norman law, which was borrowed from the Prankish. After
the Conquest of England in 1066, this drove out the native Saxon, and since

1 Wcnger, p. 180.

1 Krumbacher, Byzantinischc Literatur-Gtschichtc, p. 606.

8 Sachau, Syrischc Rcchtsbucher, Vol. III.

4 Bertholet, YLulturgcschichte Israels, pp. 2.00, et seq.

5 We ger a hint of this in the famous code of Hammurabi, though unfortunately we cannot tell
in what relation this single work stood, in point of intrinsic importance, to the general level of
contemporary jurisprudence in the Babylonian world.

76 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

that day in England "the Jaw of the great men has become the law of the
whole people." Its purely German spirit has developed it, without a catas-
trophe, from a feudal regime of unparalleled stringency into the institutions
of the present day which have become law in Canada, India, Australia,
South Africa, and the United States. Even apart from the extent of its power,
it is the most instructive in West Europe. Its development, unlike that of the
rest, did not lie in the hands of theoretical jurists. The study of Roman law at
Oxfoid was not allowed to touch practice; and at Merton in 1x36 the higher
nobility expressly rejected it. The Bench itself continued to develop the old
law-material by means of creative precedents, and it was these practical de-
cisions ("Reports") that formed the basis of law-books such as that of Brae-
ton. 1 Since then, and to this day, a statute law, kept living and progressive
by the court decisions, and a common law, which always vividly underlies the
legislation, exist side by side, without its ever becoming necessary for the
representatives of the people to make single large efforts at codification.

In the South, the law of the German-Roman codices above mentioned pre-
vailed in southern France the Visigothic (called the droit ecrit in contrast
to the Prankish droit coutumier of the north), and in Italy the Lombard
(which was the most important of them, was almost purely Germanic,
and held its own till well into the Renaissance). Pa via became a study-centre
for German law and produced about 1070 the " Expositio, " by far the greatest
achievement of juridical science in the age, and immediately after it a code, the
" Lombarda." 2 The legal evolution of the entire South was broken off by
Napoleon's Code Civil, which took its place. But this in turn has become in all
Latin lands and far beyond them the basis for further creative work and
hence, after the English, it is the most important.

In Germany, the movement that set in so powerfully with the Gothic
tribal laws (Sachsenspicgel, 12.30; Schwabenspiegel, 1174) frittered itself away to
nullity. A host of petty civic and territorial rights went on springing up
until indignation with the facts induced an unreal political romanticism in
dreamers and enthusiasts, the Emperor Maximilian among them, and law came
under attack with the rest. The Diet of Worms in 1495 framed its " Kammer-
gtrichtsordnung ' 3 after an Italian model. Now there was not only the "Holy
Roman Empire" on German ground, but "Roman law" as German common-
law. The old German procedures were exchanged for Italian. The judges
had to study their law beyond the Alps, and obtained their experience not from
the ambient life, but from a logic-chopping philology. In this country alone
are to be found, later, the ideologues for whom the Corpus Juris is an ark to be
defended against the profanation of realities.

1 Sec Professor Maitland's article "English Law" in Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. IX. Tr.

2 Sohm, Inst., p. 156.

3 See J. Jansscn, Hist. German People at the End of the Middle Ages, English translation, Book IV,
Ch. I-II. Tr.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 77

What, in fact, was it that under the high-sounding name passed into the
intellectual keeping of a handful of Gothic men? About iioo, at the University
of Bologna, a German, Irnerius, had made that unique manuscript of the
Pandects the object of a veritable Scholasticism. He transferred the Lombard
method to the new text, "the truth of which, as a ratio scripta, was believed in
as implicitly as the Bible and Aristotle." 1 Truth! but the Gothic under-
standing, tied to the Gothic life-content, was incapable even of distantly
guessing at the spirit of these texts, for the principles fixed in them were the
principles of a civilized and megalopolitan life. This school of the glossators,
like Scholasticism in general, stood under the spell of concept-realism; as
they held the genuine real, the substance of the world, to be not in things, but
in universal concepts, so they maintained that the law was to be found not in
custom and usage as displayed in the despised 2 Lombarda, but in the manipula-
tion of abstract notions. Their interest in the book was purely dialectical 3
never was it in their minds to apply their work to life. It was only after
1300, and then slowly, that their anti-Lombard glosses and sumnue made their
way into the cities of the Renaissance. The jurists of the Late Gothic, above
all Bartolus, had fused canon and Germanic law into one whole with a definitely
practical intention, and into it they brought ideas of actuality here, as in
Dracon's code and the Imperial Edicts from Theodosius to Justinian, the actu-
ality of a Culture that is on the threshold of its "Late" stage. It was the
creation of Bartolus that became effective in Spain and Germany as "Roman law";
only in France did the jurists of the Baroque, after Cujacius and Donellus, get
back from the Scholastic to the Byzantine text.

But Bologna witnessed, besides Irnerius's achievement in abstraction, an
event of quite other and decisive import the famous Decretum of Gratian,
written about ii4o. 4 This created the Western science of spiritual law. For by
bringing the old-Catholic, Magian, church-law, 5 founded in the Early-Arabian
sacrament of baptism, 6 into a system, it provided the very form that the new-
Catholic, Faustian Christianity needed for the jural expression of its own being,
which reached back to the prime sacrament of an altar and a consecrated priest-
hood. With the Liber extra of 12.34 t ^ le ma i fl body of the Corpus Juris Canonici is
complete. What the Empire had failed to accomplish the creation, out of
the immense undeveloped profusion of tribal laws, of a general Western "Corpus
Juris Germanici" the Papacy achieved. There came into existence a com-
plete private law, with sanctions and processes, produced with German method
out of the ecclesiastical and secular law-material of the Gothic. This is the

1 Lcncl, I, p. 395.

8 The punning contrast of Lombard faex (excrement) and Roman lex is Huguccio's (1100).

3 W. Goctz, Arch, fur Kulturgeschicbte, 10, 2.8, et scq.

4 Sec the article "Canon Law" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr.

6 Sec Sohm's last work, Das altkatholiscbe Kirchtnrecbt und das Dekret Gratians (1918).
Sec Ch. VII below.

78 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

law called "Roman" which presently, after Bartolus, was infused into all
study of the texts of Justinian themselves. And it shows us, in the domain of
jurisprudence as elsewhere, that great dissidence, inherent in the Faustian,
which produced the gigantic conflict between the Papacy and the Empire.
The destruction between fas and jus, impossible in the Arabian world, was
inevitable in the Western. They are two expressions of a will-to-power over
the infinite, but the will behind "temporal" legislation is rooted in custom
and lays hands on the generations of the future, while that of "spiritual"
originates in mystical certainty and pronounces a timeless and eternal law. 1
This battle between equally matched opponents has never yet been ended, and
it is visible even to-day in our law of marriage, with its opposition of the
ecclesiastical and the civil wedding.

With the dawn of the Baroque, life, having by that time assumed urban
and money-economic forms, begins to demand a law like that of the Classical
city-states after Solon. The purpose of the prevailing law was now perfectly
clear. But it was a fateful legacy from the Gothic that the creation of "the
law inborn in us" was looked upon as the privilege of a learned class, and this
privilege no one succeeded in shaking.

Urban rationalism turned, as in the case of the Sophists and the Stoics, to
busy itself with the "law of nature," from its foundation by Oldendorp and
Bodinus to its destruction by Hegel. In England the great Coke successfully
defended Germanic self-developing practical law against the last attempts of
the Tudors to introduce Pandect law. But on the Continent the systems of the
learned evolved in Roman forms right down to the state codes of Germany and
the schemes of the Ancien Regime in France on which the Code Napoleon was
based. And therefore Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) is
the one purely Germanic Code, and it appeared when the Faustian Culture had
already reached the threshold of its Civilization.

VIII

With this I reach the objective and look around me. I see three law-his-
tories, connected merely by the elements of verbal and syntactical form, taken
over by one from another, voluntarily or perforce, but never revealing to the
new user the nature of the alien being which underlay them. Two of these
histories are complete. The third is that in which we ourselves are standing
standing, too, at a decisive point where we embark in our turn upon the big
constructive task that Rome and Islam, each for itself and in its season, have
accomplished before us.

What has "Roman" law been for us hitherto? What has it spoilt? What
can it be for us in the future?

All through our legal history runs, as basic motive, the conflict between

1 Sec Ch. X below.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 79

book and life. The Western book is not an oracle or magician's text with
Magian under-sense, but a piece of preserved history. It is compressed Past that
wants to become Future, through us who read it and in whom its content lives
anew. Faustian man does not aim, like Classical man, at bringing his life to a
self-contained perfection, but at carrying on a life that emerged long before
him and will draw to its end long after him. For Gothic man so far as he re-
flected about himself at all the question was not whether he should look for
linkages of his being and history, but in what direction to look for them.
He required a past in order to find meaning and depth in the present. On the
spiritual side the past which presented itself to him was ancient Israel; on the
mundane it was ancient Rome, whose relics he saw all about him. What was
revered was revered not because it was great, but because it was old and distant.
If these men had known Egypt, they would hardly have noticed Rome, and the
language of our Culture would have developed differently.

As it was a Culture of books and readers, Classical texts were "received"
in any and every field as Roman law was "received" in Germany, and their
further development assumed the form of a slow and unwilling self-emancipa-
tion. "Reception" of Aristotle, of Euclid, of the Corpus Juris, means in this
Culture (in the Magian East it was different) discovering a ready-made vessel
for our own thought a great deal too soon, with the result of making a histori-
cally built kind of man into a slave of concepts. The alien life-feeling, of course,
did not and could not enter into his thought, but it was a hindrance to his own
life-feeling's development of an unconstrained speech of its own.

Now, legal thought is forced to attach itself to something tangible
there must be something before it can abstract its concepts; it must have
something from which to abstract. And it was the misfortune of Western
jurisprudence that, instead of quarrying in strong, firm custom of social and
economic life, it abstracted prematurely and in a hurry from Latin writings.
The Western jurist became a philologist, and practical experience pf life was
replaced by scholarly experience in the purely logical separation and disposi-
tion of legal concepts on self-contained foundations.

Owing to this, we have been completely cut off from touch with the fact
that private law is meant to represent the social and economic existence of its period.
Neither the Code Napoleon nor the Prussian Landrecht, neither Grotius nor
Mommsen, was definitely conscious of this fact. Neither in the training of the
legal profession nor in its literature do we detect the slightest inkling of this
the genuine " source" of valid law.

And consequently we possess a private law that rests on the shadowy
foundations of the Late Classical economy. The intense embitterment which, in
these beginnings of our Civilization's economy, opposes the name of Capi-
talism to the name of Socialism comes very largely from the fact that scholarly
jurisprudence, and under its influence educated thought generally, have tied

8o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

up such all-important notions as person, thing, and property to the conditions
and the dispositions of Classical life. The book puts itself between the facts
and the perception of them. The learned meaning thereby the book-learned
weigh up everything to this day in scales that are essentially Classical. The
man who is merely active and not trained to judgment feels himself misunder-
stood. He sees the contradiction between the life of the times and the law's
outlook upon it, and calls for the heads of those who to gain their private
ends, as he thinks have promoted this opposition.

Again the question is: By whom and for whom is Western law made?
The Roman prxtor was a landowner, a military officer, a man experienced in
administrative and financial questions; and it was just this experience that
was held to qualify him for the inseparable functions of expounder and maker
of the law. The peregrin prastor developed his aliens' law as a law of com-
mercial intercourse adapted to the Late Classical megalopolis without plan,
without tendency, out of the cases that came before him and nothing else.

But the Faustian will-to-duration demands a book, something valid "for
evermore," l a system that is intended to provide in advance for every possible
case, and this book, a work of learning, necessarily called for a scholarly class
of jurists and judges the doctors of the faculties, the old German legal fam-
ilies, and the French "noblesse de robe." The English judges, who number
hardly over a hundred, 2 are drawn indeed from an upper class of advocates (the
"barristers"), but they actually rank above many members of the Government.

A scholar-class is alien to the world, and despises experience that does not
originate in thought. Inevitably conflict arises between the "state of knowl-
edge" as the scholar will accept it and the flowing custom of practical life.
That manuscript of the Pandect of Irnerius became, and for centuries remained,
the "world" in which learned jurists lived. Even in England, where there are
no law faculties (in the European sense), it was exclusively the legal profession
that controlled further growth, so that even here the development of legal
ideas diverged from the development of general life.

Thus what we have hitherto called juristic science is in fact either the
philology of law-language, or the scholarship of law-ideas. It is now the only
science that still continues to deduce the meaning of life from "eternally valid"
principles. "The German jurisprudence of to-day," says Sohm, 3 "represents
very largely indeed an inheritance from medieval Scholasticism. We have
not yet begun to consider in deep earnest the bearing of the basic values of the
actual life about us upon legal theory. We do not even yet know what these
values are."

1 The permanently valid clement in English law is the constant form of an incessant development
by the couits.

2 If the higher courts alone arc meant, the number is well below fifty for England *nd Wales,
Scots law is independent of English and has its own jurisprudence. Tr,

* Inst., p. 170.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 81

Here, then, is the task that German thought of the future has to perform.
From the practical life of the present it has to develop the deepest principles of
that life and elevate them into basic law-ideas. If our great arts lie behind us,
our great jurisprudence is yet to come.

For the work of the nineteenth century however creative that century
believed itself to be was merely preparatory. It freed us from the book of
Justinian, but not from the concepts. The ideologues of Roman law among scholars
no longer count, but scholarship of the old cast remains. It is another kind of
jurisprudence that is needed now to free us from the schematism of these con-
cepts. Philological expertness must give place to social and economic.

A glance at German civil and penal law will make the position clear. They
are systems ringed with a chaplet of minor laws it was impossible to em-
body the material of these in the main law. Conceptually, and therefore
syntactically, that which could not be understood in terms of the Classical
scheme separates itself from that which can be so understood.

How was it that in 1900 the theft of electric power after grotesque
discussions as to whether the matter in dispute was a corporeal thing * had
to be dealt with under an ad hoc statute? Why was it impossible to work the
substance of patent law into the ensemble of the law about things? Why was
copyright law unable conceptually to differentiate the intellectual creation,
its communicable form the manuscript, and the objective product in print?
Why, in contradiction with the law of things, had the artistic and the material
property in a picture to be distinguished by separating acquisition of the
original from acquisition of the right to reproduce it? Why is the misappro-
priation of a business idea or a scheme of organization unpunishable, and theft
of the piece of paper on which it is set forth punishable? Because even to-day
we are dominated by the Classical idea of the material thing. 2 We live other-
wise. Our instinctive experience is subject to functional concepts, such as work-
ing power, inventiveness, enterprise, such as intellectual and bodily, artistic and
organizing, energies and capacities and talents. In our physics (of which the
theory, advanced though it is, is but a copy of our present mode of life) the
old idea of a body has in principle ceased to exist as in this very instance of
electrical power. Why is our law conceptually helpless in the presence of the
great facts of modern economics? Because persons, too, are known to it only as
bodies?

If the Western jurisprudence took over ancient words, yet only the most su-
perficial elements of the ancient meanings still adhered to them. The consist-
ency of the text disclosed only the logical use of the words, not the life that
underlay them. No practice can reawaken the silent mctaphysic of old jural

1 Similar problems arc now (1917) arising in connexion with radio broadcasting. Tr.
1 Biirgerliches Geset^buch, 90.

s As evidenced in terms of French law like " Sociitl anonyme," "raison sociale," " ptrsonne juri~
clique." Tr.

8i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

ideas. No laws in the world make this last and deepest element explicit, be-
cause just because it is self-evident. In all of them the essential is tacitly
presupposed; in application it is not only the formula but also, and primarily,
the inexpressible element beneath it that the people inwardly understands and
can practise. Every law is, to the extent that it would be impossible to ex-
aggerate, customary law. Let the statute define the words; it is life that
explains them.

If, however, a scholars' law-language of alien origin and alien scheme tries
to bind the native and proper law, the ideas remain void and the life remains
dumb. Law becomes, not a tool, but a burden, and actuality marches on, not
with, but apart from legal history.

And thus it is that the law-material that our Civilization needs fits only
in externals, or even not at all, with the Classical scheme of the law-books,
and for the purposes of our proper jurisprudence and our educated thought
generally is still formless and therefore unavailable.

Are persons and things, in the sense of present-day legislation, law-concepts
at all? No! They merely serve to draw the ordinary distinction, the zoologi-
cal distinction, so to say, between man and the rest. But of old the whole
metaphysic of Classical being adhered to the notion of "persona." The dis-
tinction between man and deity, the essence of the Pol is, of the hero, of the
slave, the Cosmos of stuff and form, the life-ideal of Ataraxia, were the self-
evident premisses, and these premisses have for us completely perished. In
our thought the word "property" is tied up with the Classical static definition,
and consequently, in every application to the dynamism of our way of living
it falsifies. We leave such definitions to the world-shy abstract professors
of ethics, jurists, and philosophers and to the unintelligent debate of political
doctrinaires and this although the whole understanding of the economic his-
tory of this day rests upon the metaphysic of this one notion.

It must be emphasized then and with all rigour that Classical law
was a law of bodies, while ours is a law of functions. The Romans created a
juristic statics; our task is juristic dynamics. For us persons are not bodies,
but units of force and will; and things are not bodies, but aims, means, and
creations of these units. The Classical relation between bodies was positional,
but the relation between forces is called action. For a Roman the slave was a
thing which produced new things. A writer like Cicero could never have
conceived of "intellectual property," let alone property in a practical notion
or in the potentialities of talent; for us, on the contrary, the organizer or in-
ventor or promoter is a generative force which works upon other, executive, forces, by
giving direction, aim, and means to their action. 1 Both belong to economic life,
not as possessors of things, but as carriers of energies.

1 Note, in this connexion, the remarkable development in modern American industry of a pro-
fessional managerial class, distinct from the capitalist, the technician, and the "worker." Tr.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CULTURES 83

The future will be called upon to transpose our entire legal thought into
alignment with our higher physics and mathematics. Our whole social, eco-
nomic, and technical life is waiting to be understood, at long last, in this wise.
We shall need a century and more of keenest and deepest thought to arrive at
the goal. And the prerequisite is a wholly new kind of preparatory training
in the jurist. It demands:

i. An immediate, extended, and practical experience in the economic

life of the present.

L. An exact knowledge of the legal history of the West, with constant

comparison of German, English, and "Roman" development.

3. Knowledge of Classical jurisprudence, not as a model for principles

of present-day validity, but as a brilliant example of how a law can develop

strong and pure out of the practical life of its time.

Roman law has ceased to be our source for principles of eternal validity.
But the relation between Roman existence and Roman law-ideas gives it a
renewed value for us. We can learn from it how we have to build up our law
out of our experiences.

CHAPTER IV
CITIES AND PEOPLES

(A)
THE SOUL OF THE CITY

CHAPTER IV

CITIES AND PEOPLES

(A)
THE SOUL OF THE CITY

ABOUT the middle of the second millennium before Christ, two worlds lay
over against one another on the -^Egean Sea. The one, darkly groping, big with
hopes, drowsy with the intoxication of deeds and sufferings, ripening quietly
towards its future, was the Mycenasan. The other, gay and satisfied, snugly
ensconced in the treasures of an ancient Culture, elegant, light, with all its
great problems far behind it, was the Minoan of Crete.

We shall never really comprehend this phenomenon, which in these days is
becoming the centre of research-interest, unless we appreciate the abyss of
opposition that separates the two souls. The man of those days must have
felt it deeply, but hardly "cognised" it. I see it before me: the humility of
the inhabitant of Tiryns and Mycenas before the unattainable esprit of life in
Cnossus, the contempt of the well-bred of Cnossus for the petty chiefs and their
followers, and withal a secret feeling of superiority in the healthy barbarians,
like that of the German soldier in the presence of the elderly Roman dignitary.

How are we in a position to know this? There are several such moments in
which the men of two Cultures have looked into one another's eyes. We know
more than one "Inter-Culture" in which some of the most significant tendencies
of the human soul have disclosed themselves.

As it was (we may confidently say) between Cnossus and Mycenas, so it was
between the Byzantine court and the German chieftains who, like Otto II,
married into it undisguised wonder on the part of the knights and counts,
answered by the contemptuous astonishment of a refined, somewhat pale and
tired Civilization at that bearish morning vigour of the German lands which
Scheffel has described in Ekkehard. 1

In Charlemagne the mixture of a primitive human spirituality, on the
threshold of its awakening, with a superposed Late intellectuality, becomes
manifest. Certain characteristics of his rulership would lead us to name him
the Caliph of Frankistan, but on his other side he is but the chief of a Germanic
tribe; and it is the mingling of the two that makes him symbolic, in the same
way as the form of the Aachen palace-chapel no longer mosque, not
yet cathedral. The Germanic- Western pre-Culturc meanwhile is moving on,
but slowly and underground, for that sudden illumination which we most
ineptly call the Carolingian Renaissance is a ray from Baghdad. It must not be
1 Published 1857. English translation, 1871. Tr.
87

88 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

overlooked that the period of Charles the Great is an episode of the surface,
ending, as accidentals do end, without issue. After 900, after a new deep de-
pression, there begins something really new, something having the telling
force of a Destiny and the depth that promises duration. But in 800 it was the
sun of the Arabian Civilization passing on from the world-cities of the East
to the countryside of the West. Even so the sunshine of Hellenism had spread
to the distant Indus. 1

That which stands on the hills of Tiryns and Mycena; is Pfal% and Burg of
root-Germanic type. The palaces of Crete which are not kings' castles,
but huge cult-buildings for a crowd of priests and priestesses are equipped
with megalopolitan nay, Late-Roman luxury. At the foot of those hills
were crowded the huts of yeoman and vassals, but in Crete (Gournia, Hagia
Triada) the excavation of towns and villas has shown that the requirements
were those of high civilization, and the building-technique that of a long
experience, accustomed to catering for the most pampered taste in furniture
and wall-decoration, and familiar with lighting, water-circulation, staircases,
and suchlike problems. 2 In the one, the plan of the house is a strict life-
symbol; in the other, the expression of a refined utilitarianism. Compare
the Kamares vases and the frescoes of smooth stucco with everything that is
genuinely Mycenasan they are, through and through, the product of an
industrial art, clever and empty, and not of any grand and deep art of heavy,
clumsy, but forceful symbolism like that which in Mycenae was ripening to-
wards the geometric style. It is, in a word, not a style but a taste. 3 In My-
cenas was housed a primitive race which chose its sites according to soil-value
and facilities for defence, whereas the Minoan population settled in business
foci, as may be observed very clearly in the case of Philakopi on Melos which
was established for the export trade in obsidian. A Mycenasan palace is a
promise, a Minoan something that is ending. But it was just the same in the
West about 800 the Prankish and Visigothic farms and manor-houses
stretched from the Loire to the Ebro, while south of them lay the Moorish
castles, villas, and mosques of Cordova and Granada.

It is surely no accident that the peak of this Minoan luxury coincides with
the period of the great Egyptian revolution, and particularly the Hyksos time
(1780-1580 B.C.). 4 The Egyptian craftsmen may well have fled in those days
to the peaceful islands and even as far as the strongholds of the mainland, as in
a later instance the Byzantine scholars fled to Italy. For it is axiomatic that
the Minoan Culture is a part of the Egyptian, and we should be able to realize

1 Without Alexander, and even before him, for Alexander neither kindled nor spread that light;
he did not lead, but followed its path to the East.

2 See G. Glotz's recent work La Civilisation egiennc, 1913 (English translation, 1917). Tr.

* This is now recognized by art-research; cf. Salis, Die Kunst der Griecben (1919), pp. 3, ct scq.;
H. Th. Bosser, Alt-Kreta (1911), introduction.

4 D. Fimmcn, Die kretisch-mykcnischc Kultur (1911), p. zio.

THE SOUL OF THE CITY s 9

this more fully were it not that the part of Egypt's art-store which would have
been decisive in this connexion viz. : what was produced in the Western Delta

has perished from damp. We only know the Egyptian Culture in so far as it
flourished on the dry soil of the south, but it has long been admitted as certain
that the centre of gravity of its evolution lay elsewhere.

It is not possible to draw a strict frontier between the late Minoan and the
young Mycenasan art. Throughout the Egyptian-Cretan world we can observe
a highly modern fad for these alien and primitive things, and vice versa the
war-band kings of the mainland strongholds stole or bought Cretan oh jets
d'art wherever and however they could come by them, admiring and imitating

even as the style of the Migrations, once supposed to be, and prized as, proto-
German, borrows the whole of its form-language from the East. 1 They had
their palaces and tombs built and decorated by captive or invited craftsmen.
The "Treasure-house" (Tomb) of Atreus in Mycenas, therefore, is exactly
analogous to the tomb of Theoderich at Ravenna.

In this regard Byzantium itself is a marvel. Here layer after layer has to be
carefully separated. In 32.6 Constantine, rebuilding on the ruins of the great
city destroyed by Septimus Severus, created a Late Classical cosmopolis of the
first rank, into which presently streamed hoary Apollinism from the West and
youthful Magism from the East. And long afterwards again, in 1096, it is
a Late Magian cosmopolis, confronted in its last autumn days with spring in the
shape of Godfrey of Bouillon's crusaders, whom that clever royal lady Anna
Comnena 2 portrays with contempt. As the easternmost of the Classical West,
this city bewitched the Goths; then, a millennium later, as the northernmost
of the Arabian world, it enchanted the Russians. And the amazing Vasili
Blazheny in Moscow (1554), the herald of the Russian pre-Culture, stands
"between styles," just as, two thousand years before, Solomon's Temple had
stood between Babylon the Cosmopolis and early Christianity.

Primeval man is a ranging animal, a being whose waking-consciousness
restlessly feels its way through life, all microcosm, under no servitude of place
or home, keen and anxious in its senses, ever alert to drive off some element of
hostile Nature. A deep transformation sets in first with agriculture for that
is something artificial, with which hunter and shepherd have no touch. He
who digs and ploughs is seeking not to plunder, but to alter Nature. To plant
implies, not to take something, but to produce something. But with this, man
himself becomes -plant namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that he
tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a new earth-
boundness of being, a new feeling, pronounces itself. Hostile Nature becomes

1 Dchio, Gesch. d. dcutscb. Kunst (1919), pp. 16, et seq.

2 Dictcrich, By^ant. Charakterkopfi, pp. 136, ct seq.

90 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the friend; earth becomes Mother Earth. Between sowing and begetting,
harvest and death, the child and the grain, a profound affinity is set up. A new
devoutness addresses itself in chthonian cults to the fruitful earth that grows up
along with man. And as completed expression of this life-feeling, we find
everywhere the symbolic shape of the farmhouse, which in the disposition of the
rooms and in every line of external form tells us about the blood of its inhab-
itants. The peasant's dwelling is the great symbol of settledness. It is itself
plant, thrusts its roots deep into its "own" soil. 1 It is property in the most
sacred sense of the word. The kindly spirits of hearth and door, floor and cham-
ber Vesta, Janus, Lares and Penates are as firmly fixed in it as the man himself. ]

This is the condition precedent of every Culture, which itself in turn grows
up out of a mother-landscape and renews and intensifies the intimacy of man
and soil. What his cottage is to the peasant, that the town is to the Culture-
man. As each individual house has its kindly spirits, so each town has its
tutelary god or saint. The town, too, is a plantlike being, as far removed as a
peasantry is from nomadism and the purely microcosmic. Hence the develop-
ment of a high form-language is linked always to a landscape. Neither an art
nor a religion can alter the site of its growth; /only in the Civilization with its
giant cities do we come again to despise and disengage ourselves from these
roots. Man as civilized, as intellectual nomad, is again wholly microcosmic,
wholly homeless, as free intellectually as hunter and herdsman were free sen-
sually .J\ "Ubi benc, ibi patria" is valid before as well as after a Culture. In the
not-yet-spring of the Migrations it was a Germanic yearning virginal, yet
already maternal that searched the South for a home in which to nest its
future Culture. To-day, at the end of this Culture, the rootless intellect ranges
over all landscapes and all possibilities of thought. But between these limits
lies the time in which a man held a bit of soil to be something worth dying for.

It is a conclusive fact yet one hitherto never appreciated that all
great Cultures are town-Cultures. Higher man of the Second Age is a town-
tied animal. Here is the real criterion of "world-history" that differentiates
it with utter sharpness from man's history world-history is the history of civic
man. Peoples, states, politics, religion, all arts, and all sciences rest upon ont
prime phenomenon of human being, the town. As all thinkers of all Cultures
themselves live in the town (even though they may reside bodily in the coun-
try), they are perfectly unaware of what a bizarre thing a town is. To feel
this we have to put ourselves unreservedly in the place of the wonder-struck
primitive who for the first time sees this mass of stone and wood set in the
landscape, with its stone-enclosed streets and its stone-paved squares a
domicile, truly, of strange form and strangely teeming with men !

But the real miracle is the birth of the soul of a town. A mass-soul of a
wholly new kind whose last foundations will remain hidden from us for
1 Even admitting within itself the animals of its fields. Tr.

THE SOUL OF THE CITY 91

ever suddenly buds off from the general spirituality of its Culture. As soon
as it is awake, it forms for itself a visible body. Out of the rustic group of
farms and cottages, each of which has its own history, arises a totality. And
the whole lives, breathes, grows, and acquires a face and an inner form and
history. Thenceforward, in addition to the individual house, the temple,
the cathedral, and the palace, the town-figure itself becomes a unit objectively
expressing the form-language and style-history that accompanies the Culture
throughout its life-course.

It goes without saying that what distinguishes a town from a village is not
size, but the presence of a soul. Not only in primitive conditions, such as
those of central Africa, but in Late conditions too China, India, and in-
dustrialized Europe and America we find very large settlements that are
nevertheless not to be called cities. They are centres of landscape; they do not
inwardly form worlds in themselves. They have no soul. Every primitive
population lives wholly as peasant and son of the soil the being "City"
does not exist for it. That which in externals develops from the village is not
the city, but the market, a mere meeting-point of rural life-interests. Here
there can be no question of a separate existence. The inhabitant of a market
may be a craftsman or a tradesman, but he lives and thinks as a peasant. We
have to go back and sense accurately what it means when out of a primitive
Egyptian or Chinese or Germanic village a little spot in a wide land a
city comes into being. It is quite possibly not differentiated in any outward
feature, but spiritually it is a place from which the countryside is henceforth re-
garded, felt, and experienced as "environs," as something different and subordinate.
From now on there are two lives, that of the inside and that of the outside,
and the peasant understands this just as clearly as the townsman. The village
smith and the smith in the city, the village headman and the burgomaster, live
in two different worlds. The man of the land and the man of the city are dif-
ferent essences. First of all they feel the difference, then they are dominated by
it, and at last they cease to understand each other at all. To-day a Branden-
burg peasant is closer to a Sicilian peasant than he is to a Berliner. From the
moment of this specific attunement, the City comes into being, and it is this
attunement which underlies, as something that goes without saying, the entire
waking-consciousness of every Culture.

Every springtime of a Culture is ipso facto the springtime of a new city- type
and civism. The men of the pre-Culture are filled with a deep uneasiness in the
presence of these types, with which they cannot get into any inward relation.
On the Rhine and the Danube the Germans frequently, as at Strassburg, settled
down at the gates of Roman cities that remained uninhabited. 1 In Crete the
conquerors built, on the ruins of the burnt-out cities like Gournia and Cnossus
villages. The Orders of the Western pre-Culture, the Benedictines, and

1 Dehio, Gesch. d. dcutschcn Kunst (1919), pp. 13, ct seq.

p. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

particularly the Cluniacs and Premonstratcnsians, settled like the knights on
free land; it was the Franciscans and Dominicans who began to build in the
Early Gothic city. There the new soul had just awakened. But even there a
tender melancholy still adheres to the architecture, as to Franciscan art as a
whole an almost mystical fear of the individual in presence of the new and
bright and conscious, which as yet was only dully accepted by the generality.
Man hardly yet dared to cease to be peasant; the first to live with the ripe and
considered alertness of genuine megalopolitans are the Jesuits. It is a sign that
the countryside is still unconditionally supreme, and does not yet recognize
the city, when the ruler shifts his court every spring from palace to palace.
In the Egyptian Old Kingdom the thickly-populated centre of the administra-
tion was at the "White Wall" (Memphis), but the residences of the Pharaohs
changed incessantly as in Sumerian Babylon and the Carolingian Empire. 1
The Early Chinese rulers of the Chou dynasty had their court as a rule at Lo-
Yang (the present Ho-nan-fu) from about 1160, but it was not until 770
corresponding to our sixteenth century that the locality was promoted to
be the permanent royal residence. 2

Never has the feeling of earth-boundness, of the plantwise-cosmic, ex-
pressed itself so powerfully as it did in the architecture of the petty early towns,
which consisted of hardly more than a few streets about a market-place or a
castle or a place of worship. Here, if anywhere, it is manifest that every grand
style is itself plantlike. The Doric column, the Egyptian pyramid, the Gothic
cathedral, grow out of the ground; earnest, big with destiny, Being without
waking-consciousness. The Ionic column, the buildings of the Middle King-
dom and those of the Baroque, calmly aware and conscious of themselves, free
and sure, stand on the ground. There, separated from the power of the land
cut off from it, even, by the pavement underfoot Being becomes more and
more languid, sensation and reason more and more powerful. Man becomes
intellect, "free" like the nomads, whom he comes to resemble, but narrower
and colder than they. "Intellect," "Geist," "esprit," is the specific urban form
of the understanding waking-consciousness. All art, all religion and science,
become slowly intellectualized, alien to the land, incomprehensible to the
peasant of the soil. With the Civilization sets in the climacteric. The im-
memorially old roots of Being are dried up in the stone-masses of its cities.
And the free intellect fateful word ! appears like a flame, mounts splendid
into the air, and pitiably dies.

The new Soul of the City speaks a new language, which soon comes to be
tantamount to the language of the Culture itself. The open land with its

1 Eduard Meyer, Gcscb. d. Altertums, I, p. 188.

2 The English parallel is Winchester. Tr.

THE SOUL OF THE CITY 93

village-mankind is wounded; it no longer understands that language, it is
nonplussed and dumb. All genuine style-history is played out in the cities.
It is exclusively the city's destiny and the life-experience of urban men that
speaks to the eye in the logic of visible forms. The very earliest Gothic was
still a growth of the soil and laid hold of the farmhouse with its inhabitants
and its contents. But the Renaissance style flourished only in the Renaissance
city, the Baroque only in the Baroque city not to mention the wholly meg-
alopolitan Corinthian column or Rococo. There was perhaps some quiet
infiltration from these into the landscape; but the land itself was no longer
capable of the smallest creative effort only of dumb aversion. The peasant
and his dwelling remained in all essentials Gothic, and Gothic it is to this day.
The Hellenic countryside preserved the geometric style, the Egyptian village
the cast of the Old Kingdom.

It is, above all, the expression of the city's "visage" that has a history.
The play of this facial expression, indeed, is almost the spiritual history of the
Culture itself. First we have the little proto-cities of the Gothic and other
Early Cultures, which almost efface themselves in the landscape, which are
still genuine peasant-houses crowded under the shadow of a stronghold or a
sanctuary, and without inward change become town-houses merely in the sense
that they have neighbour-houses instead of fields and meadows around them.
The peoples of the Early Culture gradually became town-peoples, and accord-
ingly there are not only specifically Chinese, Indian, Apollinian, and Faustian
town-forms, but, moreover, Armenian and Syrian, Ionian and Etruscan, Ger-
man and French and English town-physiognomies. There is a city of Phidias,
a city of Rembrandt, a city of Luther. These designations, and the mere names
of Granada, Venice, and Niirnberg conjure up at once quite definite images,
for all that the Culture produces in religion, art, and knowledge has been
produced in such cities. While it was still the spirit of knights' castles and
rural monasteries that evoked the Crusades, the Reformation is urban and be-
longs to narrow streets and steep-gabled houses. The great Epic, which speaks
and sings of the blood, belongs to Pfal% and Burg, but the Drama, in which
awakened life tests itself, is city-poetry, and the great Novel, the survey of all
things human by the emancipated intellect, presupposes the world-city. Apart
from really genuine folk-song, the only lyrism is of the city. Apart from the
"eternal" peasant-art, there is only urban painting and architecture, with a
swift and soon-ended history.

And these stone visages that have incorporated in their light-world the
humanness of the citizen himself and, like him, are all eye and intellect how
distinct the language of form that they talk, how different from the rustic
drawl of the landscape ! The silhouette of the great city, its roofs and chim-
neys, the towers and domes on the horizon! What a language is imparted
to us through one look at Nvirnberg or Florence, Damascus or Moscow, Peking

94 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

or Benares. What do we know of the Classical cities, seeing that we do not
know the lines that they presented under the Southern noon, under clouds in
the morning, in the starry night? The courses of the streets, straight or crooked,
broad or narrow; the houses, low or tall, bright or dark, that in all Western
cities turn their facades, their faces, and in all Eastern cities turn their backs,
blank wall and railing, towards the street; the spirit of squares and corners,
impasses and prospects, fountains and monuments, churches or temples or
mosques, amphitheatres and railway stations, bazaars and town-halls! The
suburbs, too, of neat garden-villas or of jumbled blocks of flats, rubbish-heaps
and allotments; the fashionable quarter and the slum area, the Subura of
Classical Rome and the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Paris, ancient Baia: and
modern Nice, the little town-picture like Bruges and Rothenburg and the sea
of houses like Babylon, Tenochtitlan, Rome, and London! All this has his-
tory and is history. One major political event and the visage of the town
falls into different folds. Napoleon gave to Bourbon Paris, Bismarck gave to
worthy little Berlin, a new mien. But the Country stands by, uninfluenced,
suspicious and irritated.

In the earliest time the landscape-figure alone dominates man's eyes. It gives
form to his soul and vibrates in tune therewith. Feelings and woodland rus-
tlings beat together; the meadows and the copses adapt themselves to its shape,
to its course, even to its dress. [The village, with its quiet hillocky roofs, its
evening smoke, its wells, its hedges, and its beasts, lies completely fused and
embedded in the landscape. The country town confirms the country, is an in-
tensification of the picture of the country. It is the Late city that first defies
the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature.
It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-
pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor
desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic
megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets
about annihilating the country picture. The town that once upon a time humbly
accommodated itself to that picture now insists that it shall be the same as
itself. I Extra muros, chaussees and woods and pastures become a park, moun-
tains become tourists' view-points; and intra muros arises an imitation Nature,
fountains in lieu of springs, flower-beds, formal pools, and clipped hedges in
lieu of meadows and ponds and bushes. In a village the thatched roof is still
hill-like and the street is of the same nature as the baulk of earth between fields.
But here the picture is of deep, long gorges between high, stony houses filled
with coloured dust and strange uproar, and men dwell in these houses, the like
of which no nature-being has ever conceived.3 Costumes, even faces, are ad-
justed to a background of stone. By day there is a street traffic of strange col-
ours and tones, and by night a new light that outshines the moon. And the
yokel stands helpless on the pavement, understanding nothing and understood

THE SOUL OF THE CITY 95

by nobody, tolerated as a useful type in farce and provider of this world's
daily bread.

It follows, however and this is the most essential point of any that
we cannot comprehend political and economic history at all unless we realize
that the city, with its gradual detachment from and final bankrupting of the
country, is the determinative form to which the course and sense of higher
history generally conforms. World history is city history.

An obvious case in point is, of course, the Classical world, in which th
Euclidean feeling of existence connected the city-idea with its need of mini-
mizing extension and thus, with ever-increasing emphasis, identified the State
with the stone body of the individual Polis. But, quite apart from this instance,
we find in every Culture (and very soon) the type of the capital city. This, as its
name pointedly indicates, is that city whose spirit, with its methods, aims, and
decisions of policy and economics, dominates the land. The land with its
people is for this controlling spirit a tool and an object. The land does not
understand what is going on, and is not even asked. In all countries of all Late
Cultures, the great parties, the revolutions, the Cassarisms, the democracies,
the parliaments, are the form in which the spirit of the capital tells the country
what it is expected to desire and, if called upon, to die for. The Classical forum,
the Western press, are, essentially, intellectual engines of the ruling City.
Any country-dweller who really understands the meaning of politics in such
periods, and feels himself on their level, moves into the City, not perhaps in
the body, but certainly in the spirit. 1 The sentiment and public opinion of the
peasant's country-side so far as it can be said to exist is prescribed and
guided by the print and speech of the city. Egypt is Thebes, the orbis terrarum
is Rome, Islam is Baghdad, France is Paris. The history of every springtime
phase is played out in the many small centres of many separate districts. The
Egyptian nomes, the Greek peoples of Homer, the Gothic counties and
free cities, were the makers of history of old. But gradually Policy gathers
itself up into a very few capitals, and everything else retains but a shadow of
political existence. Even in the Classical world, the atomizing tendency
towards city-states did not hold out against the major movement. As early
as the Peloponnesian War it was only Athens and Sparta that were really
handling policy, the remaining cities of the ./Egean being merely elements
within the hegemony of the one or the other; of policies of their own there is no

1 The phenomenon is perhaps too well known in our days to need exemplification. But it is
worth while recalling that the usual form of disgrace for a minister or courtier of the seventeenth
or eighteenth century was to be commanded to "retire to his estates," and that a student expelled
from the universities is said to be "rusticated." Since this volume was written, a remarkable proof
of the reality of this spiritual indrawing by the Megalopolis has been given by the swift spread of
radio broadcasting over the West-European and American world. For the country-dweller, radio
reception means intimate touch with the news, the thought, and the entertainment of the great
city, and relieves the grievance of "isolation" that the older countryfolk would never have felt
as a grievance at all. Tr.

96 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

longer any question. Finally it is the Forum of the City of Rome alone that is
the scene of Classical history. Csesar might campaign in Gaul, his slayers in
Macedonia, Antony in Egypt, but, whatever happened in these fields, it was
from their relation to Rome that events acquired meaning.

All effectual history begins with the primary classes, nobility and priest-
hood, forming themselves and elevating themselves above the peasantry as
such. The opposition of greater and lesser nobility, between king and vassal,
between worldly and spiritual power, is the basic form of all primitive politics,
Homeric, Chinese, or Gothic, until with the coming of the City, the burgher, the
Tiers tat, history changes its style. But it is exclusively in these classes as
such, in their class-consciousness, that the whole meaning of history inheres.
The peasant is historyless. The village stands outside world-history, and all
evolution from the "Trojan" to the Mithridatic War, from the Saxon emperors
to the World War of 1914, passes by these little points on the landscape, occa-
sionally destroying them and wasting their blood, but never in the least touch-
ing their inwardness.

The peasant is the eternal man, independent of every Culture that ensconces
itself in the cities. He precedes it, he outlives it, a dumb creature propagating
himself from generation to generation, limited to soil-bound callings and
aptitudes, a mystical soul, a dry, shrewd understanding that sticks to practical
matters, the origin and the ever-flowing source of the blood that makes world-
history in the cities.

Whatever the Culture up there in the city conceives in the way of state-
forms, economic customs, articles of faith, implements, knowledge, art, he
receives mistrustfully and hesitatingly; though in the end he may accept these
things, never is he altered in kind thereby. Thus the West-European peasant
outwardly took in all the dogmas of the Councils from the great Lateran to
that of Trent, just as he took in the products of mechanical engineering and
those of the French Revolution but he remains what he was, what he already
was in Charlemagne's day. The present-day piety of the peasant is older than
Christianity; his gods are more ancient than those of any higher religion.
Remove from him the pressure of the great cities and he will revert to the state
of nature without feeling that he is losing anything. His real ethic, his real
metaphysic, which no scholar of the city has yet thought it worth while to
discover, lie outside all religious and spiritual history, have in fact no history
at all.

The city is intellect. The Megalopolis is " free" intellect. It is in resistance
to the "feudal" powers of blood and tradition that the burgherdom or bour-
geoisie, the intellectual class, begins to be conscious of its own separate exist-
ence. It upsets thrones and limits old rights in the name of reason and above all

THE SOUL OF THE CITY 97

in the name of " the People," which henceforward means exclusively the people
of the city. Democracy is the political form in which the townsman's outlook
upon the world is demanded of the peasantry also. The urban intellect reforms
the great religion of the springtime and sets up by the side of the old religion
of noble and priest, the new religion of the Tiers Etat, liberal science. The city
assumes the lead and control of economic history in replacing the primitive
values of the land, which are for ever inseparable from the life and thought of
the rustic, by the absolute idea of money as distinct from goods. The immemorial
countiy word for exchange of goods is "barter"; even when one of the things
exchanged is precious metal, the underlying idea of the process is not yet
monetary i.e., it does not involve the abstraction of value from things and its
fixation in metallic or fictitious quantities intended to measure things qua
" commodities. ' ' Caravan expeditions and Viking voyages in the springtime are
made between land-settlements and imply barter or booty, whereas in the Late
period they are made between cities and mean "money." This is the distinction
between the Normans before and the Hansa and Venetians after the Crusades, 1
and between the seafarers of Mycenaean times and those of the later colonization
period in Greece. The City means not only intellect, but also money. 2

Presently there arrived an epoch when the development of the city had
reached such a point of power that it had no longer to defend itself against
country and chivalry, but on the contrary had become a despotism against which
the land and its basic orders of society were fighting a hopeless defensive battle
in the spiritual domain against nationalism, in the political against
democracy, in the economic against money. At this period the number of cities
that really counted as historically dominant had already become very small.
And with this there arose the profound distinction which was above all a
spiritual distinction between the great city and the little city or town.
The latter, very significantly called the country- town, was a part of the no
longer co-efficient countryside. It was not that the difference between towns-
man and rustic had become lessened in such towns, but that this difference
had become negligible as compared with the new difference between them and
the great city. The sly-shrewdness of the country and the intelligence of the
megalopolis are two forms of waking-consciousness between which reciprocal
understanding is scarcely possible. Here again it is evident that what counts
is not the number of inhabitants, but the spirit. It is evident, moreover, that
in all great cities nooks remained in which relics of an almost rural mankind
lived in their byeways much as if they were on the land, and the people on the
two sides of the street were almost in the relation of two villages. In fact, a

1 In the case of the Venetians the money-outlook was already potent during the earlier Crusades.
But the fact that their financial exploitation of the great religious adventure was regarded as scan-
dalous indicates sufficiently that the rural world of the West was not yet face to face with the money-
idea. Tr.

2 See Ch. XIII below.

98 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

pyramid of mounting civism, of decreasing number and increasing field of
view, leads up from such quasi-rural elements, in ever-narrowing layers, to the
small number of genuine megalopolitans at the top, who are at home wherever
their spiritual postulates are satisfied.

With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no longer
merely serves for the understanding of economic intercourse, but subjects the
exchange of goods to its own evolution. It values things, no longer as between
each other, but with reference to itself. Its relation to the soil and to the man of
the soil has so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the lead-
ing cities the "money-markets" it is ignored. Money has now become
a power, and, moreover, a power that is wholly intellectual and merely figured
in the metal it uses, a power the reality of which resides in the waking-con-
sciousness of the upper stratum of an economically active population, a power
that makes those concerned with it just as dependent upon itself as the peasant
was dependent upon the soil. There is monetary thought, just as there is
mathematical or juristic.

But the earth is actual and natural, and money is abstract and artificial, a
mere "category" - like "virtue" in the imagination of the Age of Enlighten-
ment. And therefore every primary, pre-civic economy is dependent upon and
held in bondage by the cosmic powers, the soil, the climate, the type of man,
whereas money, as the pure form of economic intercourse within the waking-
consciousness, is no more limited in potential scope by actuality than are the
quantities of the mathematical and the logical world. Just as no view of facts
hinders us from constructing as many non-Euclidean geometries as we please, so
in the developed megalopolitan economics there is no longer any inherent
objection to increasing "money" or to thinking, so to say, in other money-
dimensions. This has nothing to do with the availability of gold or with any
values in actuality at all. There is no standard and no sort of goods in which
the value of the talent in the Persian Wars can be compared with its value in
the Egyptian booty of Pompey. Money has become, for man as an economic
animal, a form of the activity of waking-consciousness, having no longer any
roots in Being. This is the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning
Civilization, which is always an unconditional dictatorship of money, though
taking different forms in different Cultures. But this is the reason, too, for the
want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its power and its meaning,
so that at the last, as in Diocletian's time, it disappears from the thought of the
closing Civilization, and the primary values of the soil return anew to take its
place.

Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely
emancipated intellect, the world-city, the centre in which the course of a world-
history ends by winding itself up. A handful of gigantic places in each Civili-
zation disfranchises and disvalues the entire motherland of its own Culture

THE SOUL OF THE CITY 99

under the contemptuous name of "the provinces." The "provinces" arc now
everything whatsoever land, town, and city except these two or three
points. There are no longer noblesse and bourgeoisie, freemen and slaves, Hel-
lenes and Barbarians, believers and unbelievers, but only cosmopolitans and pro-
vincials. All other contrasts pale before this one, which dominates all events,
all habits of life, all views of the world.

The earliest of all world-cities were Babylon and the Thebes of the New
Empire the Minoan world of Crete, for all its splendour, belonged to the
Egyptian "provinces." In the Classical the first example is Alexandria, which
reduced old Greece at one stroke to the provincial level, and which even Rome,
even the resettled Carthage, even Byzantium, could not suppress. In India the
giant cities of Ujjaina, Kanauj, and above all Pataliputra were renowned even
in China and Java, and everyone knows the fairy-tale reputation of Baghdad and
Granada in the West. In the Mexican world, it seems, Uxmal (founded in 950)
was the first world-city of the Maya realms, which, however, with the rise
of the Toltec world-cities Tezcuco and Tenochtitlan sank to the level of the
provinces.

It should not be forgotten that the word "province" first appears as a
constitutional designation given by the Romans to Sicily; the subjugation of
Sicily, in fact, is the first example of a once pre-eminent Culture-landscape
sinking so far as to be purely and simply an object. Syracuse, the first real
great-city of the Classical world, had flourished when Rome was still an un-
important country town, but thenceforward, vis-a-vis Rome, it becomes a
provincial city. In just the same way Habsburg Madrid and Papal Rome,
leading cities in the Europe of the seventeenth century, were from the outset
of the eighteenth depressed to the provincial level by the world-cities of Paris
and London. And the rise of New York to the position of world-city during
the Civil War of 1861-5 may perhaps prove to have been the most pregnant
event of the nineteenth century.

The stone Colossus "Cosmopolis" stands at the end of the life's course of
every great Culture. The Culture-man whom the land has spiritually formed
is seized and possessed by his own creation, the City, and is made into its crea-
ture, its executive organ, and finally its victim. This stony mass is the absolute
city. Its image, as it appears with all its grandiose beauty in the light-world
of the human eye, contains the whole noble death-symbolism of the definitive
thing-become. The spirit-pervaded stone of Gothic buildings, after a millen-
nium of style-evolution, has become the soulless material of this daemonic
stone-desert.

These final cities are wholly intellect. Their houses are no longer, as those
of the Ionic and the Baroque were, derivatives of the old peasant's house,

ioo THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

whence the Culture took its spring into history. They are, generally speaking,
no longer houses in which Vesta and Janus, Lares and Penates, have any sort of
footing, but mere premises which have been fashioned, not by blood but by
requirements, not by feeling but by the spirit of commercial enterprise. So
long as the hearth has a pious meaning as the actual and genuine centre of a
family, the old relation to the land is not wholly extinct. But when that, too,
follows the rest into oblivion, and the mass of tenants and bed-occupiers in the
sea of houses leads a vagrant existence from shelter to shelter like the hunters
and pastors of the "pre-" time, then the intellectual nomad is completely
developed. This city is a world, is the world. Only as a whole, as a human
dwelling-place, has it meaning, the houses being merely the stones of which
it is assembledj

Now the old mature cities with their Gothic nucleus of cathedral, town-
halls, and high-gabled streets, with their old walls, towers, and gates, ringed
about by the Baroque growth of brighter and more elegant patricians' houses,
palaces, and hall-churches, begin to overflow in all directions in formless
masses, to eat into the decaying country-side with their multiplied barrack-
tenements and utility buildings, and to destroy the noble aspect of the old
time by clearances and rebuildings. Looking down from one of the old tow-
ers upon the sea of houses, we perceive in this petrification of a historic being
the exact epoch that marks the end of organic growth and the beginning of an
inorganic and therefore unrestrained process of massing without limit. And
now, too, appears that artificial, mathematical, utterly land-alien product of a
pure intellectual satisfaction in the appropriate, the city of the city-architect.
In all Civilizations alike, these cities aim at the chessboard form, which is the
symbol of soullessness. Regular rectangle-blocks astounded Herodotus in
Babylon and Cortez in Tenochtitlan. In the Classical world the series of
"abstract" cities begins with Thurii, which was "planned" by Hippodamus
of Miletus in 441. Priene, whose chessboard scheme entirely ignores the ups
and downs of the site, Rhodes, and Alexandria follow, and become in turn
models for innumerable provincial cities of the Imperial Age. The Islamic
architects laid out Baghdad from 761, and the giant city of Samarra a century
later, according to plan. 1 In the West-European and American world the
lay-out of Washington in 1791 is the first big example. 2 There can be no doubt

1 Samarra exhibits, like the Imperial Fora of Rome and the ruins of Luxor, truly American
proportions. The city stretches for 33 km. [2.0 miles] along the Tigris. The Balkuwara Palace,
which the Caliph Mutawakil built for one of his sons, forms a square of 1150 m. [say, three-quarters
of a mile] on each side. One of the giant mosques measures in plan 160 x 180 m. [858 x 594 ft.].
Schwarz, Dit Abbasidenresiden^ Samarra (1910); Hcrzfcld, Ausgrabungen von Samarra (1912-)- Pata-
liputra, in the days of Chandragupta and Asoka, measured intra mures 10 miles x i miles (equal to
Manhattan Island or London along the Thames from Greenwich to Richmond. Tr.

2 Karlsruhe, with its fan-scheme, and Mannheim, with its rectangles, arc earlier than Wash-
ington. But both arc small places. The one is a sort of extension of the prince's Rococo park and
centred on his point tie rue; the other, though its block-numbering, unique in Europe, seems to

THE SOUL OF THE CITY 101

that the world-cities of the Han period in China and the Maurya dynasty in
India possessed this same geometrical pattern. Even now the world-cities of the
Western Civilization are far from having reached the peak of their development.
I sec, long after A.D. zooo, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants,
spread over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings that will dwarf the
biggest of to-day's and notions of traffic and communication that we should
regard as fantastic to the point of madness. 1

Even in this final shape of his being, the Classical man's form-ideal remains
the corporeal point. Whereas the giant cities of our present confess our ir-
resistible tendency towards the infinite our suburbs and garden cities,
invading the wide country-side, our vast and comprehensive network of
roads, and within the thickly built areas a controlled fast traffic on, below,
and above straight, broad streets the genuine Classical world-city ever
strove, not to expand, but to thicken the streets narrow and cramped,
impossible for fast traffic (although this was fully developed on the great
Roman roads), entire unwillingness to live in suburbs or even to make suburbs
possible. 2 Even at that stage the city must needs be a body, thick and round,
oxD/ia in the strictest sense. The syncecism that in the early Classical had
gradually drawn the land-folk into the cities, and so created the type of the
Polis, repeated itself at the last in absurd form; everyone wanted to live in
the middle of the city, in its densest nucleus, for otherwise he could not feel
himself to be the urban man that he was. All these cities are only cites, inner
towns. The new syncecism formed, instead of suburban zones, the world of the
upper floors. In the year 74 Rome, in spite of its immense population, had the
ridiculously small perimeter of nineteen and a half kilometres [twelve miles]. 3
Consequently these city-bodies extended in general not in breadth, but more
and more upward. The block- tenements of Rome such as the famous Insula
Feliculas, rose, with a street breadth of only three to five metres [ten to seven-
teen feet] 4 to heights that have never been seen in Western Europe and are

relate it to the American city, was really planned as a self-contained military capital, rectangular
only within its oval enceinte, whereas the American rectangles are meant to be added to. The lay-
out of Petersburg by Peter the Great (which has been adhered to to this day and is still incompletely
filled in in detail) is a much more forcible example of the arbitrary planning of a megalopolis.
Though outside the "European" world, it is of it, for it was the visible symbol of Peter's will to
force Europe upon Russia. It is contemporary with Mannheim and Karlsruhe (early eighteenth
century), but its creator conceived of it as a city of the future. Tr.

1 In the case of Canada, not merely great regions, but the whole country has been picketed out in
equal rectangles for future development. Tr.

2 It has been left to the Western Civilization of present-day Rome to build the garden suburbs
that the Classical Civilization could have built. Tr.

3 Friedlandcr, Sittengeschichte Roms, I, p. 5. Compare this with Samarra, which had nothing
like this population. The "Late Classical city on Arabian soil was un-Classical in this respect
as in others. The garden suburb of Antioch was renowned throughout the East."

4 The city which the Egyptian "Julian the Apostate," Amenophis IV (Akhenaton) built himself
in Tcll-cl-Amarna had streets up to 45 m. [149 ft.] wide.

ioi THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

seen in only a few cities in America. Near the Capitol, the roofs already
reached to the level of the hill-saddle. 1 But always the splendid mass-cities
harbour lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and man-
sards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man in
Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London and
Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living
in one of these wretched upper-floor tenements of Rome.

But no wretchedness, no compulsion, not even a clear vision of the mad-
ness of this development, avails to neutralize the attractive force of these
daemonic creations. The wheel of Destiny rolls on to its end; the birth of the
City entails its death. Beginning and end, a peasant cottage and a tenement-
block are related to one another as soul and intellect, as blood and stone.
But "Time" is no abstract phrase, but a name for the actuality of Irreversi-
bility. Here there is only forward, never back. Long, long ago the country
bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant
city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring
fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost unin-
habited waste of country. Once the full sinful beauty of this last marvel of all
history has captured a victim, it never lets him go. Primitive folk can loose
themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never. Home-
sickness for the great city is keener than any other nostalgia. Home is for
him any one of these giant cities, but even the nearest village is alien territory.
He would sooner die upon the pavement than go "back" to the land. Even
disgust at this pretentiousness, weariness of the thousand-hued glitter, the
tadium vita that in the end overcomes many, does not set them free. They take
the City with them into the mountains or on the sea. They have lost the
country within themselves and will never regain it outside.

What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but
this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while
the tensions of his waking-consciousness become more and more dangerous.
It must be remembered that in a microcosm the animal, waking side super-
venes upon the vegetable side, that of being, and not vice versa. Beat and
tension, blood and intellect, Destiny and Causality are to one another as the
country-side in bloom is to the city of stone, as something existing per se to
something existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to ani-
mate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but
tension. The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilizations, is domi-
nated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension. Intelligence is only the
capacity for understanding at high tension, and in every Culture these heads
are the types of its final men one has only to compare them with the peasant
heads, when such happen to emerge in the swirl of the great city's strcct-

1 Pohlmann, Aus Altertum and Ge&enwart (1910), pp. zn, ct seq.

THE SOUL OF THE CITY 103

life. The advance, too, from peasant wisdom "slimness," mother wit,
instinct, based as in other animals upon the sensed beat of life through
the city-spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence the very word with its
sharp ring betraying the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation can
be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained
augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality. Intelligence
is the replacement of unconscious living by exercise in thought, masterly, but
bloodless and jejune. The intelligent visage is similar in all races what is
recessive in them is, precisely, race. The weaker the feeling for the necessity
and self-evidence of Being, the more the habit of "elucidation" grows, the
more the fear in the waking-consciousness comes to be stilled by causal methods.
Hence the assimilation of knowledge with demonstrability, and the substitu-
tion of scientific theory, the causal myth, for the religious. Hence, too, money-
in-the-abstract as the pure causality of economic life, in contrast to rustic
barter, which is pulsation and not a system of tensions.

Tension, when it has become intellectual, knows no form of recreation but
that which is specific to the world-city namely, detente, relaxation, distrac-
tion. Genuine play, joie de vivre, pleasure, inebriation, are products of the
cosmic beat and as such no longer comprehensible in their essence. But the
relief of hard, intensive brain-work by its opposite conscious and practised
fooling of intellectual tension by the bodily tension of sport, of bodily
tension by the sensual straining after "pleasure" and the spiritual straining
after the "excitements" of betting and competitions, of the pure logic of the
day's work by a consciously enjoyed mysticism all this is common to the
world-cities of all the Civilizations. Cinema, Expressionism, Theosophy,
boxing contests, nigger dances, poker, and racing one can find it all in
Rome. Indeed, the connoisseur might extend his researches to the Indian,
Chinese, and Arabian world-cities as well. To name but one example, if one
reads the Kama-sutram one understands how it was that Buddhism also ap-
pealed to men's tastes, and then the bullfighting scenes in the Palace of Cnossus
will be looked at with quite different eyes. A cult, no doubt, underlay them,
but there was a savour over it all, as over Rome's fashionable Isis-cult in the
neighbourhood of the Circus Maximus.

And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking-Being suffi-
ciently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a
phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps
forward to make an end of the drama the sterility of civilised man. This is
not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of Causality (as modern
science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood as an
essentially metaphysical turn towards death. The last man of the world-city
no longer wants to live he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type,
as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it

104 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a
deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be
extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-rela-
tion in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of
being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen,
not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelli-
gence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.
Let the reader try to merge himself in the soul of the peasant. He has sat on
his glebe from primeval times, 1 or has fastened his clutch in it, to adhere to it
with his blood. He is rooted in it as the descendant of his forbears and as
the forbear of future descendants. His house, bis property, means, here, not
the temporary connexion of person and thing for a brief span of years, but an
enduring and inward union of eternal land and eternal blood. It is only from this
mystical conviction of settlement that the great epochs of the cycle pro-
creation, birth, and death derive that metaphysical element of wonder
which condenses in the symbolism of custom and religion that all landbound
people possess. For the "last men" all this is past and gone. Intelligence and
sterility are allied in old families, old peoples, and old Cultures, not merely
because in each microcosm the overstrained and fettered animal-element is
eating up the plant element, but also because the waking-consciousness as-
sumes that being is normally regulated by causality. That which the man
of intelligence, most significantly and characteristically, labels as "natural
impulse" or "life-force," he not only knows, but also values, causally, giving
it the place amongst his other needs that his judgment assigns to it. When
the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard "having
children" as a question of pro's and cons, the great turning-point has come.
For Nature knows nothing of pro and con. Everywhere, wherever life is
actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an "it," a drive, that is utterly in-
dependent of waking-being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not even
observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples is a natural
phenomenon, which is not even thought about, still less judged as to its utility or
the reverse. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life,
life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation
of the number of births. In the Classical world the practice was deplored by
Polybius as the ruin of Greece, and yet even at his date it had long been es-
tablished in the great cities; in subsequent Roman times it became appallingly
general. At first explained by the economic misery of the times, very soon
it ceased to explain itself at all. And at that point, too, in Buddhist India
as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man's choice of the woman who
is to be, not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but

1 Some years ago a French peasant was brought to notice whose family had occupied its glebe
since the ninth century. Tr.

THE SOUL OF THE CITY 105

his own "companion for life," becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen
marriage appears, the "higher spiritual affinity" in which both parties arc
"free" free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood
to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say "that unless
Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children,
to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate
herself." l The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole
vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that
one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a
whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. In-
stead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achieve-
ment of "mutual understanding." It is all the same whether the case against
children is the American lady's who would not miss a season for anything,
or the Parisienne's who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen hero-
ine's who "belongs to herself" they all belong to themselves and they arc
all unfruitful. The same fact, in conjunction with the same arguments, is to be
found in the Alexandrian, in the Roman, and, as a matter of course, in every
other civilized society and conspicuously in that in which Buddha grew
up. And in Hellenism and in the nineteenth century, as in the times of Lao-
Tzu and the Charvaka doctrine, 2 there is an ethic for childless intelligences, and
a literature about the inner conflicts of Nora and Nana. The "quiverful,"
which was still an honourable enough spectacle in the days of Werther, be-
comes something rather provincial. The father of many children is for the
great city a subject for caricature; Ibsen did not fail to note it, and presented
it in his Loves Comedy.

At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries,
of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes.
It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms,
and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the
towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive
blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements.
This residue is the Fellah type.

If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing to do with
history, it is the familiar "decline" of the Classical, which accomplished
itself long before the irruption of Germanic migrants. 3 The Imperium enjoyed
the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed; it was well organized;
and it possessed in its emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers
such as the Cassarism of no other Civilization can show. And yet the popula-
tion dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children

1 Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsen.

8 An ancient Hindu materialism. Tr.

3 For what follows sec Eduard Meyer, Kl. Scbriften (1910), pp< 145, et seq.

io6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

laws of Augustus amongst them the Lex dt maritandis ordinibus, which dis-
mayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus's legions the
wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin
to fill the depleted country-side, the immense food-charities of Nerva and
Trajan for the children of poor parents nothing availed to check the process.
Italy, then North Africa and Gaul, and finally Spain, which under the early
Csesars had been one of the most densely populated parts of the Empire, be-
come empty and desolate. The famous saying of Pliny so often and so
significantly quoted to-day in connexion with national economics " Lati-
fundia ferdidere Italiam, jam, vero et provincias," 1 inverts the order of the process;
the large estates would never have got to this point if the peasantry had not
already been sucked into the towns and, if not openly, at any rate inwardly,
surrendered their soil. The terrible truth came out at last in the edict of Perti-
nax, A.D. 193, by which anyone in Italy or the provinces was permitted to
take possession of untended land, and if he brought it under cultivation, to
hold it as his legal property. The historical student has only to turn his
attention seriously to other Civilizations to find the same phenomenon every-
where. Depopulation can be distinctly traced in the background of the Egyp-
tian New Empire, especially from the XIX dynasty onwards. Street widths
like those to Amenophis IV at Tell-el-Amarna of fifty yards would have
been unthinkable with the denser population of the old days. The onset of
the "Sea-peoples," too, was only barely repulsed their chances of obtaining
possession of the realm were certainly not less promising than those of the
Germans of the fourth century vis-b-vis the Roman world. And finally the
incessant infiltration of Libyans into the Delta culminated when one of their
leaders seized the power, in 945 B.C. precisely as Odoacer seized it in A.D. 476.
But the same tendency can be felt in the history of political Buddhism after
the Cassar Asoka. 2 If the Maya population literally vanished within a very
short time after the Spanish conquest, and their great empty cities were
reabsorbed by the jungle, this does not prove merely the brutality of the con-
queror which in this regard would have been helpless before the self-renew-
ing power of a young and fruitful Culture-mankind but an extinction from
within that no doubt had long been in progress. And if we turn to our own
civilization, we find that the old families of the French noblesse were not, in
the great majority of cases, eradicated in the Revolution, but have died out
since 1815, and their sterility has spread to the bourgeoisie and, since 1870, to the
peasantry which that very Revolution almost re-created. In England, and still
more in the United States particularly in the east, the very states where the
stock is best and oldest the process of "race suicide" denounced by Roose-
velt set in long ago on the largest scale.

1 Hist. Nat., XVIII, 7. Tr.

* We know of measures to promote increase of population in China in the third century B.C.,
precisely the Augustan Age of Chinese evolution. Sec Rosthorn, Das so^iale Lebcn der Chintsen (1919),
p. 6.

THE SOUL OF THE CITY 107

Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the provincial
cities at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn at the end of the evolution,
stand empty, harbouring in their stone masses a small population of fellaheen
who shelter in them as the men of the Stone Age sheltered in caves and pile-
dwellings. 1 Samarra was abandoned by the tenth century; Fatal iputra, Asoka's
capital, was an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when
the Chinese traveller Hiouen-tsang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the
great Maya cities must have been in that condition even in Cortez's time.
In a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward 2 we read of old,
renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empty, crumbling
shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and the amphitheatre
is a sown field, 3 dotted with emergent statues and herms. Rome had in the
fifth century of our era the population of a village, but its Imperial palaces
were still habitable.

This, then, is the conclusion of the city's history; growing from primitive
barter-centre to Culture-city and at last to world-city, it sacrifices first the
blood and soul of its creators to the needs of its majestic evolution, and then
the last flower of that growth to the spirit of Civilization and so, doomed,
moves on to final self-destruction.

If the Early period is characterized by the birth of the City out of the
country, and the Late by the battle between city and country, the period of
Civilization is that of the victory of city over country, whereby it frees itself
from the grip of the ground, but to its own ultimate ruin. Rootless, dead
to the cosmic, irrevocably committed to stone and to intellectualism, it de-
velops a form-language that reproduces every trait of its essence not the
language of a becoming and growth, but that of a becomeness and completion,
capable of alteration certainly, but not of evolution. Not now Destiny, but
Causality, not now living Direction, but Extension, rules. It follows from
this that whereas every form-language of a Culture, together with the history
of its evolution, adheres to the original spot, civilized forms are at home
anywhere and capable, therefore, of unlimited extension as soon as they appear.
It is quite true that the Hanse Towns in their north-Russian staples built Goth-
ically, and the Spaniards in South America in the Baroque style, but that even
the smallest chapter of Gothic style-history should evolve outside the limits of

1 The amphitheatres of Nimcs and Aries were filled up by mean townlets that used the outer wall
as their fortifications. Tr.

2 Strabo, Pausanias, Dio Chrysostom, Avienus, etc. See E. Meyer, Kl. Schriften, pp. 164, et seq.

3 The Colosseum of Rome itself in due course fell into this decay and we read in the guide-books
that "its flora were once famous " 4x0 wild species lived in its ruins. If this could happen in
Rome, we need not be surprised at the quick, almost catastrophic, conquest of the Maya cities by
tropical vegetation. Tr.

io8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

West Europe was impossible, as impossible as that Attic or English drama,
or the art of fugue, or the Lutheran or the Orphic religion should be propa-
gated, or even inwardly assimilated, by men of alien Cultures. But the essence
of Alexandrinism and of our Romanticism is something which belongs to all ur-
ban men without distinction. Romanticism marks the beginning of that which
Goethe, with his wide vision, called world-literature the literature of the
leading world-city, against which a provincial literature, native to the soil
but negligible, struggles everywhere with difficulty to maintain itself. The
state of Venice, or that of Frederick the Great, or the English Parliament (as
an effective reality), cannot be reproduced, but "modern constitutions" can be
" introduced" into any African or Asiatic state as Classical Poleis could be set up
amongst Numidians and ancient Britons. In Egypt the writing that came into
common use was not the hieroglyphic, but the letter-script, which was with-
out doubt a technical discovery of the Civilization Age. 1 And so in general
it is not true Culture-languages like the Greek of Sophocles or the German
of Luther, but world-languages like the Greek Koine and Arabic and
Babylonian and English, the outcome of daily practical usage in a world-
city, which are capable of being acquired by anybody and everybody. Con-
sequently, in all Civilizations the "modern" cities assume a more and more
uniform type. Go where we may, there are Berlin, London, and New York
for us, just as the Roman traveller would find his columnar architecture,
his fora with their statuary, and his temples in Palmyra or Trier or Timgad
or the Hellenistic cities that extended out to the Indus and the Aral. But that
which was thus disseminated was no longer a style, but a taste, not genuine
custom but mannerism, not national costume but the fashion. This, of
course, makes it possible for remote peoples not only to accept the " permanent"
gains of a Civilization, but even to re-radiate them in an independent form.
Such regions of "moonlight" civilization are south China and especially
Japan (which were first Sinized at the close of the Han period, about
A.D. 2.10); Java as a relay of the Brahman Civilization; and Carthage, which
obtained its forms from Babylon.

All these are forms of a waking-consciousness now acute to excess, mitigated
or limited by no cosmic force, purely intellectual and extensive, but on that
very account capable of so powerful an output that their last flickering rays
reach out and superpose effects over almost the whole earth. Fragments of
the forms of Chinese Civilization are probably to be found in Scandinavian wood-
architecture, Babylonian measures probably in the South Seas, Classical coins
in South Africa, Egyptian and Indian influences probably in the land of the
Incas.

But while this process of extension was overpassing all frontiers, the

1 According to the researches of K. Sethc. Cf. Robert Eislcr, Die kenitischen Weibinschriften for
Hjksos^ett, etc. (1919).

THE SOUL OF THE CITY 109

development of inner form of the Civilization was fulfilling itself with im-
pressive consistency. Three stages are clearly to be distinguished the re-
lease from the Culture, the production of the thoroughbred Civilization-form,
and the final hardening. For us this development has now set in, and, as I
see it, it is Germany that is destined, as the last nation of the West, to crown
the mighty edifice. In this stage all questions of the life the Apollinian,
Magian, or Faustian life have been thought upon to the limit, and brought
to a final clear condition of knowledge and not-knowJedge. For or about
ideas men fight no more. The last idea that of the Civilization itself is
formulated in outline, and technics and economics are, as problems, enunciated
and prepared for handling. But this is only the beginning of a vast task;
the postulates have to be unfolded and these forms applied to the whole ex-
istence of the earth. Only when this has been accomplished and the Civ-
ilization has become definitely established not only in shape, but in mass,
does the hardening of the form set in. Style, in the Cultures, has been the
rhythm of the process of self-implementing. But the Civilized style (if we may
use the word at all) arises as the expression of the state of completeness. It attains
in Egypt and China especially to a splendid perfection, and imparts
this perfection to all the utterances of a life that is now inwardly unalter-
able, to its ceremonial and mien as to the superfine and studied forms of its
art-practice. Of history, in the sense of an urge towards a form-ideal, there
can now be no question, but there is an unfailing and easy superficial adap-
tiveness which again and again manages to coax fresh little art-problems
and solutions out of the now basically stable language. Of this kind is the
whole "history" of Chinese-Japanese painting (as we know it) and of Indian
architecture. And just as the real history of the Gothic style differs from this
pseudo-history, so the Knight of the Crusades differs from the Chinese Man-
darin the becoming state from the finished. The one is history; the other has
long ago overcome history. "Long ago," I say; for the history of these
Civilizations is merely apparent, like their great cities, which constantly
change in face, but never become other than what they are. In these cities
there is no Soul. They arc land in petrified form.

What is it that perishes here? And what that survives? It is a mere in-
cident that German peoples, under pressure from the Huns, take possession of
the Roman landscape and so prevent the Classical from prolonging itself in a
"Chinese" end-state. The movement of the "Sea-peoples" (similar to the
Germanic, even down to the details) which set in against the Egyptian Civili-
zation from 1400 B.C. succeeded only as regards the Cretan island-realm
their mighty expeditions against the Libyan and Phoenician coasts, with the
accompaniment of Viking fleets, failed, as those of the Huns failed against
China. And thus the Classical is our one example of a Civilization broken off
in the moment of full splendour. Yet the Germans only destroyed the upper

no THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

layer of the forms and replaced it by the life of their own pre-Culturc. The
" eternal ' ' layer was never reached. It remains, hidden and completely shrouded
by a new form-language, in the underground of the whole following history,
and to this day in southern France, southern Italy, and northern Spain tangible
relics of it endure. In these countries the popular Catholicism is tinged from
beneath with a Late Classical colouring, that sets it off quite distinctly from
the Church Catholicism of the West-European layer above it. South Italian
Church-festivals disclose Classical (and even pre-Classical) cults, and generally
in this field there are to be found deities (saints) in whose worship the Classical
constitution is visible behind the Catholic names.

Here, however, another element comes into the picture, an element with
a significance of its own. We stand before the problem of Race.

CHAPTER V
CITIES AND PEOPLES

CHAPTER V

CITIES AND PEOPLES
(B)

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES

THROUGHOUT the nineteenth century the scientific picture of history was
vitiated by a notion that was either derived from, or at any rate brought to a
point by, Romanticism the idea of the "People" in the moral-enthusiastic
sense of the word. If, here and there, in earlier time a new religion, a new
ornamentation, a new architecture, or a new script appeared, the question
that it raised presented itself to the investigator thus What was the name
of the people who produced the phenomenon? This enunciation of the problem
is peculiar to the Western spirit and the present-day cast of that spirit; but
it is so false at every point that the picture that it evokes of the course of
events must necessarily be erroneous. "The people" as the absolute basic form
in which men are historically effective, the original home, the original settle-
ment, the migrations of "the" peoples all this is a reflection of the vibrant
idea expressed in the "Nation" of 1789, of the "Volk" of 1813, both of which,
in last analysis, are derived from the self-assuredness of England and Puritanism.
But the very intensity of passion that the idea contains has protected it only
too well from criticism. Even acute investigators have unwittingly made it
cover a multitude of utterly dissimilar things, with the result that "peoples"
have developed into definite and supposedly well-understood unit-quantities
by which all history is made. For us, to-day, world-history means what it
cannot be asserted to mean self-evidently, or to mean for, e.g., the Greeks
and the Chinese the history of Peoples. Everything else, Culture, speech,
wit, religion, is created by the peoples. The State is the form of a people.

The purpose of this chapter is to demolish this romantic conception. What
has inhabited the earth since the Ice Age is man, not "peoples." In the first
instance, their Destiny is determined by the fact that the bodily succession of
parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms natural groups, which dis-
close a definite tendency to take root in a landscape. Even nomadic tribes
confine their movements within a limited field. Thereby the cosmic-plantlike
side of life, of Being, is invested with a character of duration. This I call race.
Tribes, septs, clans, families all these are designations for the fact of a blood
which circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or a wide landscape.

ii4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

But these human beings possess also the microcosmic-animal side of life,
in waking-consciousness and receptivity and reason. And the form in which
the waking-consciousness of one man gets into relation with that of another
I call language, which begins by being a mere unconscious living expression
that is received as a sensation, but gradually develops into a conscious technique
of communication that depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching
to signs.

In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every language 1 the
efficient form of one great waking-consciousness that connects many individual
beings. And we shall never reach the ultimate discoveries about either unless
they are treated together and constantly brought into comparison with one
another.

But, further, we shall never understand man's higher history if we ignore
the fact that man, as constituent of a race and as possessor of a language, as
derivative of a blood-unit and as member of an understanding-unit, has different
Destinies, that of his being and that of his waking-being. That is, the origin,
development, and duration of his race side and the origin, development, and
duration of his language side are completely independent of one another. Race is
something cosmic and psychic {Seelenhafi), periodic in some obscure way, and in its
inner nature partly conditioned by major astronomical relations.

Languages, on the other hand, are causal forms, and operate through the
polarity of their means. We speak of race-instincts and of the spirit of a lan-
guage. But they are two distinct worlds. To Race belong the deepest meanings
of the words "time" and "yearning"; to language those of the words "space"
and "fear." But all this has been hidden from us, hitherto, by the overlying
idea of "peoples."

There are, then, currents of being and linkages of waking-being. The former
have physiognomy, the latter are based on system. Race, as seen in the picture
of the world-around, is the aggregate of all bodily characters so far as these
exist for the sense-perceptions of conscious creatures. Here we have to re-
member that a body develops and fulfils from childhood to old age the specific
inner form that was assigned to it at the moment of its conception, while at
the same time that which the body is (considered apart from its form) is per-
petually being renewed. Consequently nothing of the body actually remains
in the man except the living meaning of his existence, and of this all that we
know is so much as presents itself in the world of waking-consciousness.
Man of the higher sort is limited, as to the impression of race that he can re-
ceive, almost wholly to what appears in the light-world of his eye, so that for
him race is essentially a sum of visible characters. But even for him there arc not

1 Henceforward, and indeed throughout this work, the word "language" is not to be regarded
as limited to spoken and written language. As the above definition indicates, it includes all
modes of intelligible conscious-expression "affective language" in the widest sense. Tr.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 115

inconsiderable relics of the power to observe non-optical characters such as
smell, the cries of animals, and, above all, the modalities of human speech. In
the other higher animals, on the contrary, the capacity to receive the impression
of race is decidedly not dominated by sight. Scent is stronger, and, besides, the
animals have modes of sensation that entirely elude human understanding. It is,
however, only men and animals that can receive the impression of race, and not the
plants, and yet these too have race, as every nurseryman knows. It is, to me, a
sight of deep pathos to see how the spring flowers, craving to fertilize and be
fertilized, cannot for all their bright splendour attract one another, or even see
one another, but must have recourse to animals, for whom alone these colours
and these scents exist.

"Language" I call the entire free activity of the waking microcosm in so far
as it brings something to expression for others. Plants have no waking-being,
no capacity of being moved, and therefore no language. The waking-conscious-
ness of animal existences, on the contrary, is through and through a speaking,
whether individual acts are intended to tell or not, and even if the conscious
or the unconscious purpose of the doing lies in a quite other direction. A
peacock is indubitably speaking when he spreads his tail, but a kitten playing
with a cotton-reel also speaks to us, unconsciously, through the quaint charm
of its movements. Everyone knows the difference there is in one's movements
according as one is conscious or unconscious of being observed; one suddenly
begins to speak, consciously, in all one's actions.

This, however, leads at once to the very significant distinction between
two genera of language the language which is only an expression for the
world, an inward necessity springing from the longing inherent in all life to
actualize itself before witnesses, to display its own presence to itself, and the
language that is meant to be understood by definite beings. There are, therefore,
expression-languages and communication-languages. The former assume only a
state of waking-being, the latter a connexion of waking-beings. To understand
means to respond to the stimulus of a signal with one's own feeling of its
significance. To understand one another, to hold "conversation," to speak to
a "thou," supposes, therefore, a sense of meanings in the other that corresponds
to that in oneself. Expression-language before witnesses merely proves the
presence of an "I," but communication-language postulates a "thou." The
"I" is that which speaks, and the "thou" that which is meant to understand
the speech of the "I." For primitives a tree, a stone, or a cloud can be a "thou."
Every deity is a "thou." In fairy-tales there is nothing that cannot hold
converse with men, and we need only look at our own selves in moments of
furious irritation or of poetic excitement to realize that anything can become
a "thou" for us even to-day. And it is by some "thou" that we first came to
the knowledge of an "I." "I," therefore, is a designation for the fact that a
bridge exists to some other being.

n6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

It is impossible, however, to delimit an exact frontier between religious
and artistic expression-languages and pure communication-languages. This is
true also (and indeed specially) of the higher Cultures with the separate develop-
ment of their form-domains. For, on the one hand, no one can speak without
putting into his mode of speech some significant trait of emphasis that has
nothing to do with the needs of communication as such; and, on the other
hand, we all know the drama in which the poet wants to "say" something
that he could have said equally well or better in an exhortation, and the paint-
ing whose contents are meant to instruct, warn, or improve the picture-
series in any Greek Orthodox church, which conforms to a strict canon and has
the avowed purpose of making the truths of religion clear to a beholder to whom
the book says nothing; or Hogarth's substitute for sermons; or, for that matter,
even prayer, the direct address to God, which also can be replaced by the
performance before one's eyes of cult-ritual that speaks to one intelligibly.
The theoretical controversy concerning the purpose of art rests upon the postu-
late that an artistic expression-language should in no wise be a communication-
language, and the phenomenon of priesthood is based upon the persuasion
that the priest alone knows the language in which man can communicate with
God.

All currents of Being bear a historical, and all linkages of Waking-Being a
religious, stamp. What we know to be inherent in every genuine religious or
artistic form-language, and particularly in the history of every script (for writ-
ing is verbal language for the eye), holds good without doubt for the origin of
human articulate speech in general indeed the prime words (of the structure
of which we now know nothing whatever) must also certainly have had a
cult-colouring. But there is a corresponding linkage on the other side between
Race and everything that we call life (as struggle for power), History (as
Destiny), or, to-day, politics. It is perhaps too fantastic to argue something
of political instinct in the search of a climbing plant for points of attachment
that shall enable it to encircle, overpower, and choke the tree in order finally to
rear itself high in the air above the tree-top or something of religious world-
feeling in the song of the mounting lark. But it is certain that from such
things as these the utterances of being and of waking-being, of pulse and ten-
sion, form an uninterrupted series up to the perfected political and religious
forms of every modern Civilization.

And here at last is the key to those two strange words which were discovered
by the ethnologists in two entirely different parts of the world in rather limited
applications, but have since been quietly moving up into the foreground of
research "totem" and "taboo." The more enigmatic and indefinable these
words became, the more it was felt that in them we were touching upon an
ultimate life-basis which was not that of merely primitive man. And now, as
the result of the above inquiry, we have clear meanings for both before us.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 117

Totem and Taboo describe the ultimate meanings of Being and Waking-Being,
Destiny and Causality, Race and Language, Time and Space, yearning and
fear, pulse and tension, politics and religion. The Totem side of life is plant-
like and inheres in all being, while the Taboo side is animal and presupposes
the free movement of a being in a world. Our Totem organs are those of the
blood-circulation and of reproduction, our Taboo organs those of the senses
and the nerves. All that is of Totem has physiognomy, all that is of Taboo
has system. In the Totemistic resides the common feeling of beings that
belong to the same stream of existence. It cannot be acquired and cannot be
got rid of; it is a fact, the fact of all facts. That which is of Taboo, on the
other hand, is the characteristic of linkages of waking-consciousness, it is
learnable and acquirable, and on that very account guarded as a secret by
cult-communities, philosophers' schools, and artists' guilds each of which
possesses a sort of cryptic language of its own. 1

But Being can be thought of without waking-consciousness, whereas the
reverse is not the case i.e., there are race-beings without language, but no
languages without race. All that is of race, therefore, possesses its proper
expression, independent of any kind of waking-consciousness and common to
plant and animal. This expression not to be confounded with the ex-
pression-language which consists in an active alteration of the expression is not
meant for witnesses, but is simply there; it is physiognomy. Not that it stops
at the plant; in every living language, too (and how significant the word
"living"!) we can detect, besides the Taboo side that is learnable, an entirely
untransferable quality of race that the old vessels of the language cannot pass
on to alien successors; it lies in melody, rhythm, stress; in colour, ring, and
tempo of the expression; in idiom, in accompanying gesture. On this account
it is necessary to distinguish between language and speaking, the first being in
itself a dead stock of signs, and the second the activity that operates with the
signs. 2 When we cease to be able to hear and see directly how a language is
spoken, thenceforward it is only its ossature and not its flesh that we can know.
This is so with Sumerian, Gothic, Sanskrit, and all other languages that we
have merely deciphered from texts and inscriptions, and we are right in calling
these languages dead, for the human communities that were formed by them
have vanished. We know the Egyptian tongue, but not the tongues of the
Egyptians. Of Augustan Latin we know approximately the sound-values of
the letters and the meaning of the words, but we do not know how the oration

1 Obviously, Totemistic facts, so far as they come under the observation of the waking-
consciousness, obtain a significance of the Taboo kind also; much in man's sexual life, for example,
is performed with a profound sense of fear, because his will-to-understand is baffled by it.

2 W. von Humboldt (Ubtr die Verschiedenhcit des menscblichcn Sprachbaues) was the first to empha-
size the fact that a language is not a thing, but an activity. "If we would be quite precise, we
can certainly say there is no such thing as 'language,' just as there is no such thing as ' intellect '; but
man docs speak, and does act intellectually."

n8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

of Cicero sounded from the rostra and still less how Hesiod and Sappho spoke
their verses, or what a conversation in the Athenian market-place was really
like. If in the Gothic age Latin came into actual speech again, it was as a
new language; this Gothic Latin did not take long to pass from the formation
of rhythms and sounds characteristic of itself (but which our imagination
to-day cannot recapture, any more than those of old Latin) to encroachments
upon the word-meanings and the syntax as well. But the anti-Gothic Latin
of the Humanists, too, which was meant to be Ciceronian, was anything but
a revival. The whole significance of the race-element in language can be
measured by comparing the German of Nietzsche and of Mommsen, the French
of Diderot and of Napoleon, and observing that in idiom Voltaire and Lessing
are much closer together than Lessing and Holderlin.

It is the same with the most telling of all the expression-languages, art.
The Taboo side namely, the stock of forms, the rules of convention, and
style in so far as it means an armoury of established expedients (like vocabulary
and syntax in verbal language) stands for the language itself, which can
be learned. And it is learned and transmitted in the tradition of the great
schools of painting, the cottage-building tradition, and generally in the
strict craft-discipline which every genuine art possesses as a matter of course
and which in all ages has been meant to give the sure command of the idiom
that at a particular time is quite definitely living idiom of that time. For
in this domain, too, there are living and dead languages. The form-language
of an art can only be called living, when the artist corps as a whole employs it
like a mother tongue, which one uses without even thinking about its structure.
In this sense Gothic in the sixteenth century and Rococo in 1800 were both
dead languages. Contrast the unqualified sureness with which architects
and musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries expressed themselves
with the hesitations of Beethoven, the painfully acquired, almost self-taught,
philological art of Schinkel and Schadow, 1 the manglings of the Pre-Raphaelites
and the Neo-Gothics, and the baffled experimentalism of present-day artists.

In an artistic form-language, as presented to us by its products, the voice of
the Totem side, the race, makes itself heard, and not less so in individual
artists than in whole generations of artists. The creators of the Doric temples
of South Italy and Sicily, and those of the brick Gothic of North Germany were
emphatically race-men, and so too the German musicians from Heinrich
Schiitz to Johann Sebastian Bach. To the Totem side belong the influences of
the cosmic cycles the importance of which in the structure of art-history
has hardly been suspected, let alone established and the creative times of
spring and love-stirrings which (apart altogether from the executive sureness in

1 Hans Fricdrich Schinkcl (1781-1841), architect of the Opera House, the Altes Museum, and the
Konigswache of Berlin. Gottfried Schadow (1764-1850), sculptor (statues of Frederick II, Zieten,
etc.; Quadriga of Brandcnburger Tor), a classicist malgri lui (not to be confused with two other
artists of the same name, quasi-contcmporarics). Tr.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 119

imparting form) determine the force of the forms and the depth of the concep-
tions. The formalists are explained by depth of world-fear or by defect of
"race," and the great formless ones by plethora of blood or defect of discipline.
We comprehend that there is a difference between the history of artists and that
of styles, and that the language of an art may be carried from country to country,
but mastery in speaking it, never.

A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes
root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we can, without
absurdity, work backwards from a race to its "home," but it is much more
important to realize that the race adheres permanently to this home with some
of its most essential characters of body and soul. If in that home the race
cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does
not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever-
changing landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant-
nature in them, and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by
the extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and
Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as
Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans. It
has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has made its mark upon them

- generation by generation they become more and more like the people they
eradicated. Gould and Baxter have shown that Whites of all races, Indians,
and Negroes have come to the same average in size of body and time of maturity

and that so rapidly that Irish immigrants, arriving young and developing
very slowly, come under this power of the landscape within the same generation.
Boas has shown that the American-born children of long-headed Sicilian and
short-headed German Jews at once conform to the same head-type. This is not a
special case, but a general phenomenon, and it should serve to make us very
cautious in dealing with those migrations of history about which we know
nothing more than some names of vagrant tribes and relics of languages (e.g.,
Danai, Etruscans, Pelasgi, Achasans, and Dorians). As to the race of these
"peoples" we can conclude nothing whatever. That which flowed into the
lands of southern Europe under the diverse names of Goths, Lombards, and
Vandals was without doubt a race in itself. But already by Renaissance times
it had completely grown itself into the root characters of the Provencal, Cas-
tilian, and Tuscan soil.

Not so with language. The home of a language means merely the accidental
place of its formation, and this has no relation to its inner form. Languages
migrate in that they spread by carriage from tribe to tribe. Above all, they
are capable of being, and are, exchanged indeed, in studying the early history
of races we need not, and should not, feel the slightest hesitation about postu-
lating such speech-changes. It is, I repeat, the form-content and not the
speaking of a language that is taken over, and it is taken over (as primitives

iio THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

are for ever taking over ornament-motives) in order to be used with perfect
sureness as elements of their own form-language. In early times the fact that a
people has shown itself the stronger, or the feeling that its language possesses
superior efficacy, is enough to induce others to give up their own language and
with genuinely religious awe to take its language to themselves. Follow
out the speech-changes of the Normans, whom we find in Normandy, England,
Sicily, and Constantinople with different languages in each place, and ever
ready to exchange one for another. Piety towards the mother tongue the
very term testifies to deep ethical forces, and accounts for the bitterness of
our ever-recurring language-battles is a trait of the Late Western soul, almost
unknowable for the men of other Cultures and entirely so for the primitive.
Unfortunately, our historians not only are sensible of this, but tacitly extend
it as a postulate over their entire field, which leads to a multitude of fallacious
conclusions as to the bearing of linguistic discoveries upon the fortunes of
"peoples" think of the reconstruction of the "Dorian migration," argued
from the distribution of later Greek dialects. It is impossible, therefore, to
draw conclusions as to the fortunes of the race side of peoples from mere place-
names, personal names, inscriptions, and dialects. Never do we know a priori,
whether a folkname stands for a language-body, or a race-part, or both, or
neither besides which, folk-names themselves, and even land-names, have,
as such, Destinies of their own.

Of all expressions of race, the purest is the House. From the moment when
man, becoming sedentary, ceases to be content with mere shelter and builds
himself a dwelling, this expression makes its appearance and marks off, within
the race "man" (which is the element of the biological world-picture 1 ) the
human races of world-history proper, which are streams of being of far greater
spiritual significance. The prime form of the house is everywhere a product of
feeling and of growth, never at all of knowledge. Like the shell of the nautilus,
the hive of the bee, the nest of the bird, it has an innate self-evidentness, and
every trait of original custom and form of being, of marriage, of family life, and
of tribal order is reflected in the place and in the room-organization of parterre,
hall, wigwam, atrium, court, chamber, and gynasceum. One need only compare
the lay-out of the old Saxon and that of the Roman house to feel that the soul
of the men and the soul of the house were in each case identical.

This domain art-history ought never to have laid its hands on. It was an
error to treat the building of the dwelling-house as a branch of the art of archi-
tecture. It is a form that arises in the obscure courses of being and not for the
eye that looks for forms in the light; no room-scheme of the boor's hovel was
ever thought out by an architect as the scheme of a cathedral was thought out.

1 Sec p. 19 above.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES n.i

This significant frontier line has escaped the observation of art-research
although Dehio l in one place remarks that the old German wooden house
has nothing to do with the later great architecture, which arose quite inde-
pendently and the result has been a perpetual perplexity in method, of which
the art-savant is sensible enough, but which he cannot understand. His science
gathers, indiscriminately in all the "pre-" and "primitive" periods, all sorts of
gear, arms, pottery, fabrics, funerary monuments, and houses, and considers
them from the point of view of form as well as that of decoration; and, pro-
ceeding thus, it is not until he comes to the organic history of painting, sculpture,
and architecture (i.e., the self-contained and differentiated arts) that he finds
himself on firm ground. But, unknowing, he has stepped over a frontier be-
tween two worlds, that of soul-expression and that of visual expression-language.
The house, and like it the completely unstudied basic (i.e., customary) forms
of pots, weapons, clothing, and gear, belong to the Totem side. They charac- ;
terize, not a taste, but a way of fighting, of dwelling, of working. Every
primitive seat is the offset of a racial mode of body-posing, every jar-handle an
extension of the supple arm. Domestic painting and dressmaking, the garment
as ornament, the decoration of weapons and implements, belong, on the con-
trary, to the Taboo side of life, and indeed for primitive man the patterns and
motives on these things possess even magical properties. 2 We all know the
Germanic sword-blades of the Migrations with their Oriental ornamentation,
and the Mycenaean strongholds with their Minoan artistry. It is the distinction
between blood and sense, race and speech, politics and religion,

There is, in fact, as yet no world-history of the House and its Races, and
to give us such a history should be one of the most urgent tasks of the researcher.
But we must work with means quite other than those of art-history. The
peasant dwelling is, as compared with the tempo of all ^-history, something
constant and "eternal" like the peasant himself. It stands outside the Culture
and therefore outside the higher history of man; it recognizes neither the
temporal nor the spacial limits of this history and it maintains itself, un-
altered ideally, throughout all the changes of architecture, which it witnesses,
but in which it does not participate. The round hut of ancient Italy is still
found in Imperial times. 3 The form of the Roman rectangular house, the
existence-mark of a second race, is found in Pompeii and even in the Imperial
palaces. Every sort of ornament and style was borrowed from the Orient, but
no Roman would ever think of imitating the Syrian house, 4 any more than the

1 Gesch. d. Dcutsch. Kunst (1919), pp. 14, ct scq.

2 This practice of inscription survives till deep into the Civilization. Even in 1914 the guns
of the German Army, true products of the advanced machine-shop though they were, carried a Latin
threat to the foe. From the magic rune of the blade it is a step to the motto on the shield, and
then to the motto alone as unity-charm of the regiment or the Order. Tr.

3 W. Altmann, Die ital. Rundbauten (1906).

4 A striking case in point is the Roman military camp. See Vol. I (English edition), p. 185,
foot-note. Tr.

ixz THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Hellenistic city-architect tampered with the megaron form of Mycena: and
Tiryns and the old Greek peasant-house described by Galen. The Saxon and
Franconian peasant-house kept its essential nucleus unimpaired right from the
country farm, through the burgher-house of the old Free Cities, up to the pa-
trician buildings of the eighteenth century, while Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque,
and Empire styles glided over it one after the other, clothing it from cellar to
garret with their essences, but never perverting the Soul of the House. And
the same is true of the furniture-forms, in which we have to distinguish care-
fully the psychological from the artistic treatment. In particular, the evolution
of the Northern seat-furniture is, right up to the club arm-chair, a piece of race-
history and not of what is called style-history. Every other character can
deceive us as to the fortunes of race the Etruscan names amongst the "Sea-
folk" defeated by Rameses III, the enigmatic inscription of Lemnos, the wall-
paintings in the tombs of Etruria, afford no sure evidences of the bodily
connexion of these men. Although towards the end of the Stone Age a telling
ornamentation arose and continued in the vast region east of the Carpathians,
it is perfectly possible that race superseded race there. If we possessed in
western Europe only pottery remains for the centuries between Trojan
and Chlodwig, we should not have the least inkling of the event that we know
as the "great Migrations." But the presence of an oval house in the ^gean
region l and of another and very striking example of it in Rhodesia, 2 and the
much-discussed concordance of the Saxon peasant-house with that of the Lib-
yan Kabyle disclose a piece of race-history. Ornaments spread when a people
incorporates them in its form-language, but a house-type is only transplanted
along with its race. The disappearance of an ornament means no more than a
change of language, but when a house-type vanishes it means that race is extinguished.
It follows that art-history, besides taking care to begin properly with the
Culture, must not neglect even in its course to separate the race side carefully
from the language proper. At the outset of a Culture two well-defined forms of
a higher order rise up over the peasant village, as expressions of being and
language of waking-being. They are the castle and the cathedral* In them the
distinction between Totem and Taboo, longing and fear, blood and intellect,
rises to a grand symbolism. The ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chinese, the
Classical, the South-Arabian, and the Western castle stands, as the home of
continuing generations, very near to the peasant cottage, and both, as copies
of the realities of living, breeding, and dying, lie outside all art-history. The
history of the German Burgen is a piece of race-history throughout. On them
both, early ornament does indeed venture to spread itself, beautifying here

* Bulle, Orchomenos, pp. 16, et scq.; Noack, Ovalhaus und Palast in Kreta, pp. 53, et scq. The
house-plans still traceable in Latin times in the /Egean and Asia Minor may perhaps allow us to
order our notions of human conditions in the pre-Classical period; but the linguistic remains, never.

2 Medieval "Rhodesia (London, 1906).

a. ch. x.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 113

the beams, there the door, and there again the staircase, but it can be so, or so,
at choice, or omitted altogether, for there is no inward bond between the
structure and the ornament. The cathedral, on the other hand, is not orna-
mented, but is itself ornament. Its history is coincident with that of the Gothic
style, and the same is true of the Doric temple and all other Early Culture
buildings. So complete is the congruence, in the Western and every other
Culture whose art we know at all, that it has never occurred to anyone to be
astonished at the fact that strict architecture (which is simply the highest
form of pure ornament) is entirely confined to religious building. All the
beauty of architecture that there is in Gelnhausen, Goslar, and the Wartburg
has been taken over from cathedral art; it is decoration and not essence. A
castle or a sword or a pitcher can do without this decoration altogether with-
out losing its meaning or even its form. 1 But in a Cathedral, or an Egyptian
pyramid-temple, such a distinction between essence and art is simply incon-
ceivable.

We distinguish, then, the building that has a style and the building in which
men have a style. Whereas in monastery and cathedral it is the stone that pos-
sesses form and communicates it to the men who are in its service, in farmhouse
and feudal stronghold it is the full strength of the countryman's and the knight's
life that forms the building forth from itself. Here the man and not the stone
comes first, and here, too, there is an ornamentation; it is an ornament which
is proper to man and consists in the strict nature and stable form of manners and
customs. We might call this living, as distinct from rigid, style. But, just as
the power of this living form lays hands on the priesthood also, creating in
Gothic and in Vedic times the type of the knightly priest, so the Romanesque-
Gothic sacred form-language seizes upon everything pertaining to this secular
life costume, arms, rooms, implements, and so forth and stylizes their
surface. But art-history must not let itself lose its bearings in this alien world
it is only the surface.

In the early cities it is the same; nothing new supervenes. Amongst the
race-made houses, which now form streets, there are scattered the handful of
cult-buildings that have style. And, as having it, they are the seats of art-
history and the sources whence its forms radiate out on to squares, fagades,
and house-rooms. Even though the castle develops into the urban palace and
patrician residence, and the falatium and the men's hall, into guild-house
and town-hall, one and all they receive and carry a style, they do not have it.
True, at the stage of real burgherdom the metaphysical creativeness of the
early religion has been lost. It develops the ornament further, but not the build-
ing as ornament, and from this point art-history splits up into the histories of
the separate arts. The picture, the statue, the house, become particular objects

1 Though magic or prestige may of course be involved in their ornamentation, these are super-
vening and not radical virtues. Tr.

124 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

to which the style is to be applied. Even the church itself is now such a house.
A Gothic cathedral is ornament, but a Baroque hall-church is a building clothed
with ornament. The process begun in the Ionic style and the sixteenth century is
completed in the Corinthian and Rococo, wherein the house and its ornament
are separated for good and all, so completely that even the master-works
amongst eighteenth-century churches and monasteries cannot mislead us
we know that all this art of theirs is secular, is adornment. With Empire
the style transforms itself into a "taste," and with the end of this mode archi-
tecture turns into a craft-art. And that is the end of the ornamental expression-
language, and of art-history with it. But the peasant-house, with its unaltered
race-form, lives on.

The practical importance of the house as race-expression begins to be ap-
preciated as and when one realizes the immense difficulty of approaching the
kernel of race. I do not refer to its inner essence, its soul as to that, feeling
speaks to us clearly enough and we all know a man of race, a "thoroughbred,"
when we see one. But what are the hall-marks for our sense, and above all
for our eye, by which we recognize and distinguish races? This is a matter
that belongs to the domain of Physiognomic just as surely as the classification
of tongues belongs to that of Systematic. But how immense and how varied
the material that would be required ! How much of it is irretrievably lost by
destruction, and how much more by corruption ! In the most favourable cases,
what we have of prehistoric men is their skeletons, and how much does a
skeleton not tell us ! Very nearly everything. Prehistoric research in its nai've
zeal is ready to deduce the incredible from a jaw-bone or an arm-bone. But
think of one of those mass-graves of the War in northern France, in which we
know that men of all races, white and coloured, peasants and townsmen, youths
and men lie together. If the future had no collateral evidence as to their na-
ture, it would certainly not be enlightened by anthropological research. In
other words, immense dramas of race can pass over a land without the investi-
gator of its grave-skeletons obtaining the least hint of the fact. It is the living
body that carries nine-tenths of the expression not the articulation of the
parts, but their articulate motions; not the bone of the face, but its mien.
And, for that matter, how much potentially interpretable race-expression is
actually observed even by the keenest-sensed contemporary? How much we
fail to see and to hear ! What is it for which unlike many species of beasts
we lack a sense-organ?

The science of the Darwinian age met this question with an easy assurance.
How superficial, how glib, how mechanistic the conception with which it
worked ! In the first place, this conception groups an aggregate of such grossly
palpable characters as are observable in the anatomy of the discoveries

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 115

that is, characters that even a corpse displays. As to observing the body qua
living thing, there is no question of it. Secondly, it investigates only those
signs which very little perspicacity is needed to detect, and investigates them
only in so far as they are measurable and countable. The microscope and not
the pulse-sense determines. When language is used as a differentia, it is to
classify races, not according to their way of speaking, but according to the gram-
matical structure of the speech, which is just anatomy and system of another
sort. No one as yet has perceived that the investigation of these speech-races
is one of the most important tasks that research can possibly set itself. In the
actuality of daily experience we all know perfectly well that the way of
speaking is one of the most distinctive traits in present-day man examples
are legion; each of us knows any number of them. In Alexandria the same
Greek was spoken in the most dissimilar race-modes, as we can see even to-day
from the script of the texts. In North America the native-born speak exactly
alike, whether in English, in German, or for that matter in Indian. What in
the speech of East-European Jews is a race-trait of the land, and present there-
fore^in Russian also, and what is a race-trait of the blood common to all Jews,
independent of their habitat and their hosts, in their speaking of any of the
European "mother "-tongues? What in detail are the relations of the sound-
formations, the accentuations, the placing of words?

But science has completely failed to note that race is not the same for rooted
plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the microcosmic side of life a
fresh group of characters appears, and that for the animal world it is decisive.
Nor again has it perceived that a completely different significance must be at-
tached to "races" when the word denotes subdivisions within the integral race
"Man." With its talk of adaptation and of inheritance it sets up a soulless
causal concatenation of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that here
the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are expressing them-
selves secrets that cannot be inspected and measured, but only livingly ex-
perienced and felt from eye to eye.

Nor are the scientists at one as to the relative rank of these superficial
characters amongst themselves. Blumenbach classified the races of man ac-
cording to skull-forms, Friedrich Muller (as a true German) by hair and lan-
guage-structure, Topinard (as a true Frenchman) by skin-colour and shape of
nose, and Huxley (as a true Englishman) by, so to say, sport characteristics.
This last is undoubtedly in itself a very suitable criterion, but any judge of
horses would tell him that breed-characteristics cannot be hit off by scientific
terminology. These " descriptions" of races are without exception as worthless
as the descriptions of "wanted" men on which policemen exercise their theoreti-
cal knowledge of men.

Obviously, the chaotic in the total expression of the human body is not in
the least realized. Quite apart from smell (which for the Chinese, for example,

1x6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

is a most characteristic mark of race) and sound (the sound of speech, song,
and, above all, laughter, which enables us accurately to sense deep differences
inaccessible to scientific method) the profusion of images before the eye is so
embarrassingly rich in details, either actually visible or sensible to the inner
vision, that the possibility of marshalling them under a few aspects is simply
unthinkable. And all these sides to the picture, all these traits composing it,
are independent of one another and have each their individual history. There
are cases in which the bony structure (and particularly the skull-form) com-
pletely alter without the expression of the fleshy parts i.e., the face be-
coming different. The brothers and sisters of the same family may all present
almost every differentia posited by Blumenbach, Miiller, and Huxley, and yet
the identity of their living race-expression may be patent to anyone who looks
at them. Still more frequent is similarity of bodily build accompanied by
thorough diversity of living expression I need only mention the immeasur-
able difference between genuine peasant-stock, like the Frisians or the Bretons,
and genuine city-stock. 1 But besides the energy of the blood which coins
the same living features ("family" traits) over and over again for centuries
and the power of the soil evidenced in its stamp of man there is that
mysterious cosmic force of the syntony of close human connexions. What is
called the " Versehen" of a pregnant woman 2 is only a particular and not very
important instance of the workings of a very deep and powerful formative
principle inherent in all that is of the race side. It is a matter of common
observation that elderly married people become strangely like one another,
although probably Science with its measuring instruments would "prove"
the exact opposite. It is impossible to exaggerate the formative power of this
living pulse, this strong inward feeling for the perfection of one's own type.
The feeling for race-beauty so opposite to the conscious taste of ripe urbans
for intellectual-individual traits of beauty is immensely strong in primitive
men, and for that very reason never emerges into their consciousness. But
such a feeling is race-forming. It undoubtedly moulded the warrior- and hero-
type of a nomad tribe more and more definitely on one bodily ideal, so that it
would have been quite unambiguous to speak of the race-figure of Romans or
Ostrogoths. The same is true of any ancient nobility filled with a strong
and deep sense of its own unity, it achieves the formation of a bodily ideal.
Comradeship breeds races. French noblesse and Prussian Landadel are genuine
race-denotations. But it is just this, too, that has bred the types of the Euro-

1 In this connexion it ought to be someone's business to undertake physiognomic studies upon
the massy, thoroughly peasantish, Roman busts; the portraits of Early Gothic; those of the Re-
naissance, already visibly urban; and, most of all, the polite English portraiture from the late-
eighteenth century onward. The great galleries of "ancestors" contain an endless wealth of
material.

2 The sudden fear of some animal or object seen, believed to result in her child's bearing the mark
of it. Cf. Jacob and the speckled cattle (Genesis xxx, 37). The attitude of biologists to this
question is not negative, but non-committal. Tr.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 12.7

pean Jew, with his immense race-energy and his thousand years of ghetto life;
and it always will forge a population into a race whenever it has stood for long
together spiritually firm and united in the presence of its Destiny. Where a
race-ideal exists, as it does, supremely, in the Early period of the Culture
the Vedic, the Homeric, the knightly times of the Hohenstaufen the yearn-
ing of a ruling class towards this ideal, its will to be just so and not otherwise,
operates (quite independently of the choosing of wives) towards actualizing
this ideal and eventually achieves it. Further, there is a statistical aspect of the
matter which has received far less attention than it should. For every human
being alive to-day there were a million ancestors even in A.D. 1300 and ten
million in A.D. 1000. This means that every German now living, without
exception, is a blood-relative of every European of the age of the Crusades
and that the relationship becomes a hundred and a thousand times more in-
tensely close as we narrow the limits of its field, so that within twenty genera-
tions or less the population of a land grows together into one single family;
and this, together with the choice and voice of the blood that courses through
the generations, ever driving congeners into one another's arms, dissolving and
breaking marriages, evading or forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to in-
numerable procreations that in utter unconsciousness fulfil the will of the race.

Primarily, this applies to the vegetal race-traits, the "physiognomy of
position," as apart from movement of the mobile i.e., everything which
does not differ in the living and in the dead animal-body and cannot but ex-
press itself even in stiffened members. There is undoubtedly something cog-
nate in the growth of an ilex or a Lombardy poplar and that of a man
"thickset," "slim," "drooping," and so forth. Similarly, the outline of
the back of a dromedary, or the striping of a tiger- or zebra-skin is a vegetal
race-mark. And so, too, are the motion-actions of nature upon and with a creature
a birch-tree or a delicately built child, which both sway in the wind, an
oak with its splintered crown, the steady circles or frightened flutterings of
birds in the storm, all belong to the plant side of race. But on which side of
the line do such characters stand when blood and soil contend for the inner form of the
" transplanted ' ' species, human or animal? And how much of the constitution of
the soul, the social code, the house, is of this kind?

It is quite another picture that presents itself when we attune ourselves to
receive the impressions of the purely animal. The difference between plant-
wise being and animalwise waking-being (to recall what has been said earlier)
is such that we are here concerned, not simply with waking-being itself and its
language, but with the combination of cosmic and microcosmic to form a freely
moving body, a microcosm vis-a-vis a macrocosm, whose independent life-
activity possesses an expression peculiar to itself, which makes use in part of
the organs of waking-consciousness and which as the corals show is
mostly lost again with the cessation of mobility.

ii8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

If the race-expression of the plant consists predominantly in the physi-
ognomy of position, the animal-expression resides in a physiognomy of movement

namely, in the form as having motion, in the motion itself, and in the set of
the limbs as figuring the motion. Of this race-expression not very much is
revealed in the sleeping animal, and far less still in the dead animal, whose parts
the scientist explores; we have practically nothing to learn now about the
skeleton of the vertebrate. Hence it is that in vertebrates the limbs arc more
expressive than the bones. Hence it is that the limb-masses are the true seat of
expressiveness in contrast to the ribs and skull-bones the jaw being an
exception in that its structure discloses the character of the animal's food,
whereas the plant's nutrition is a mere process of nature. Hence it is, again, that
the insect's skeleton, which clothes its body, is fuller of expression than the
bird's, which is clothed by its body. It is pre-eminently the organs of the outer
sheath that more and more forcefully gather the race-expression to themselves

the eye, not as a thing of form and colour, but as glance and expressive
visage; the mouth, which becomes through the usage of speech the expression
of understanding; and the head (not the skull), with its lineaments formed by
the flesh, which has become the very throne of the non-vegetable side of life.
Consider how, on the one hand, we breed orchids and roses and, on the other,
we breed horses and dogs and would like human beings to be bred, too.
But it is not, I repeat, the mathematical form of the visible parts, but ex-
clusively the expression of the movement, that displays this physiognomy.
When we seize at a glance the race-expression of a motionless man, it is because
our experienced eye sees the appropriate motion already potentially in the
limbs. The real race-appearance of a bison, a trout, a golden eagle, is not to be
reproduced by any reckoning of the creature's plane or solid dimensions; and
the deep attractiveness that they possess for the creative artist comes precisely
from the fact that the secret of race can reveal itself in the picture by way of the
soul and not by any mere imitation of the visible. One has to see and, seeing,
to feel how the immense energy of this life concentrates upon head and neck,
how it speaks in the bloodshot eye, in the short compact horn, in the "aqui-
line" beak and profile of the bird of prey to mention one or two only of the
innumerable points that cannot be communicated by words and are only ex-
pressible, by me for you, in the language of an art.

But with such hall-marks as those quoted, characterizing the noblest sorts
of animals, we come very near to the concept of race which enables us to per-
ceive within the type "mankind" differences of a higher sort than either the
vegetable or the animal differences that are spiritual rather, and to tpso
less accessible to scientific methods. The coarse characters of the skeletal
structure have ceased to possess independent importance. Already Retzius
(d. 1860) had put an end to the belief of Blumcnbach that race and skull-
formation are coincident, and J. Ranke summarizes his tenets in these

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 119

words: 1 " What in point of variety of skull-formation is displayed by mankind
in general is displayed also on the smaller scale by every tribe (Volksstamtn)
and even by many fair-sized communities a union of the different skull-forms
with the extremes led up to through finely graduated intermediate forms."
No one would deny that it is reasonable to seek for ideal basic forms, but the
researcher ought not to lose sight of the fact that these are ideals and that,
for all the objectivity of his measurements, it is his taste that really fixes his
limits and his classification. Much more important than any attempts to
discover an ordering principle is the fact that within the unit " humanity" all
these forms occur and have occurred from the earliest ice-times, that they
have never markedly varied, and that they are found indiscriminately even
within the same families. The one certain result of science is that observed
by Ranke, that when skull-forms are arranged serially with respect to transi-
tions, certain averages emerge which are characteristic not of "race," but of
the land.

In reality, the race-expression of a human head can associate itself with
any conceivable skull-form, the decisive element being not the bone, but the
flesh, the look, the play of feature. Since the days of Romanticism we have
spoken of an "Indogermanic" race. But is there such a thing as an Aryan or
a Semitic skull? Can we distinguish Celtic and Prankish skulls, or even Boer
and Kaffir? And if not, what may not the earth have witnessed in the way of
history unknown to us, for which not the slightest evidences, but only bones,
remain! How unimportant these are for that which we call race in higher
mankind can be shown by a drastic experiment. Take a set of men with every
conceivable race-difference, and, while mentally picturing "race," observe
them in an X-ray apparatus. The result is simply comic. As soon as light is
let through it, "race" vanishes suddenly and completely.

It cannot be too often repeated, moreover, that the little that is really
illustrative in skeletal structure is a growth of the landscape and never a func-
tion of the blood. Elliot Smith in Egypt and von Luschen in Crete have ex-
amined an immense material yielded by graves ranging from the Stone Age to
the present day. From the "Sea-peoples" of the middle of the second millen-
nium B.C. to the Arabs and the Turks one human stream after another has passed
over this region, but the average bone-structure has remained unaltered. It
would be true, in a measure, to say that "race" has travelled as flesh over the
fixed skeleton-form of the land. 2 The Alpine region to-day contains "peoples"

1 J. Ranke, Der Mensch (1911), II, p. 105.

2 This suggestive sentence should, of course, be read with its reservation. The cranial evi-
dences of Crete arc highly illustrative in this connexion; they would not indeed be trusted by a
modern historian without weighty collateral evidence, but here this evidence exists. Up to the
latter part of Middle Minoan, the "long" head predominated heavily, not only from the outset,
but increasingly as the Culture rose, until it included two-thirds of the whole, intermediates forming
a quarter and "short" heads a mere handful. But from about the time of the catastrophic fall of

i 3 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

of the most diverse origins Teuton, Latin, Slav and we need only glance
backward to discover Etruscans and Huns there also. Tribe follows tribe.
But the skeletal structure in the mankind of the region in general is ever the
same, and only on the edges, towards the plains, does it gradually disappear
in favour of other forms, which are themselves likewise fixed. As to race,
therefore, and the race-wanderings of primitive men, the famous finds of pre-
historic bones, Neanderthal to Aurignacian, prove nothing. Apart from some
conclusions from the jaw-bone as to the kinds of food eaten, they merely indi-
cate the basic land-form that is found there to this day.

Once more, it is the mysterious power of the soil, demonstrable at once in
every living being as soon as we discover a criterion independent of the heavy
hand of the Darwinian age. The Romans brought the vine from the South to
the Rhine, and there it has certainly not visibly i.e., botanically changed.
But in this instance "race" can be determined in other ways. There is a soil-
born difference not merely between Southern and Northern, between Rhine
and Moselle wines, but even between the products of every different site on
every different hill-side; and the same holds good for every other high-grade
vegetable "race," such as tea and tobacco. Aroma, a genuine growth of the
country-side, is one of the hall-marks (all the more significant because they
cannot be measured) of true race. But noble races of men are differentiated in
just the same intellectual way as noble wines. There is a like element, only
sensible to the finest perceptions, a faint aroma in every form, that underneath
all higher Culture connects the Etruscans and the Renaissance in Tuscany, 1 and
the Sumerians, the Persians of 500 B.C., and the Persians of Islam on the Tigris.

None of this is accessible to a science that measures and weighs. It exists
for the feelings with a plain certainty and at the first glance but not
for the savant's treatment. And the conclusion to which I come is that Race,
like Time and Destiny, is a decisive element in every question of life, something
which everyone knows clearly and definitely so long as he does not try to set
himself to comprehend it by way of rational i.e., soulless dissection
and ordering. Race, Time, and Destiny belong together. But the moment
scientific thought approaches them, the word "Time" acquires the significance

Late Minoan II, the long heads fall to a startlingly low figure, while intermediates account for
half, and short heads for more than a third. It marks the end of Minoan Civilization and the com-
ing of the Achzans. But just as the Minoan skull held its own throughout the Minoan Age, so
now, after its fall, the short head maintained itself, as stated in the text, through all subsequent
vicissitudes, from the "Sea-peoples" through Roman, Arab, and Turk, to this day. Thus the Cretan
landscape has had two skull-types successively; but the change from one to the other occurred in
connexion with an immense cataclysm, nothing less than the collapse of a Civilization. The
rough deduction that seems to emerge from this case is that a great Culture holds its skull, no
doubt in the course of its striving towards ideal physical type of its own (see p. 117), but that where
that major organism docs not exist, the skull endures as the land endures and the peasant endures.
This applies also to the Alpine region, which has received the deposit of migrations, but has never
been the centre of a high Culture. Tr.

1 Cf. D. Randall-Maclvcr, The Etruscans (1918), Ch. I. Tr.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 131

of a dimension, the word "Destiny" that of causal connexion, while Race,
for which even at that stage of scientific askesis we still retain a very sure feeling,
becomes an incomprehensible chaos of unconnected and heterogeneous char-
acters that (under headings of land, period, culture, stock) interpenetrate
without end and without law. Some adhere toughly and permanently to a
stock and are transmissible; others glide over a population like mere cloud-
shadows; and many are, as it were, dasmons of the land, which possess everyone
who inhabits it for as long as he stays in it. Some expel one another, some
seek one another. A strict classification of races the ambition of all ethnol-
ogy is impossible. The attempt is foredoomed from the start, as it contra-
dicts this very essence of the racial, and every systematic lay-out always has
been and will be, inevitably, a falsification and misapprehension of the nature of
its subject. Race, in contrast to speech, is unsystematic through and through.
In the last resort every individual man and every individual moment of his
existence have their own race. And therefore the only mode of approach to the
Totem side is, not classification, but physiognomic fact.

He who would penetrate into the essence of language should begin by
putting aside all the philologist's apparatus and observe how a hunter speaks
to his dog. The dog follows the outstretched finger. He listens, tense, to
the sound of the word, but shakes his head this kind of man-speech he does
not understand. Then he makes one or two sentences to indicate his idea;
he stands still and barks, which in his language is a sentence containing the
question: "Is that what Master means?" Then, still in dog language, he
expresses his pleasure at finding that he was right. In just the same way two
men who do not really possess a single word in common seek to understand
one another. When a country parson explains something to a peasant-woman,
he looks at her keenly, and, unconsciously, he puts into his look the essence
that she would certainly never be able to understand from a parsonic mode of
expression. The locutions of to-day, without exception, are capable of com-
prehension only in association with other modes of speech adequate by
themselves they are not, and never have been.

If the dog, now, wants something, he wags his tail; impatient of Master's
stupidity in not understanding this perfectly distinct and expressive speech,
he adds a vocal expression he barks and finally an expression of attitude
he mimes or makes signs. Here the man is the obtuse one who has not yet
learned to talk.

Finally something very remarkable happens. When the dog has exhausted
every other device to comprehend the various speeches of his master, he sud-
denly plants himself squarely, and his eye bores into the eye of the human.
Something deeply mysterious is happening here the immediate contact

i 3 z THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

of Ego and Tu. The look emancipates from the limitations of waking-con--
sciousness. Being understands itself without signs. Here the dog has become
a "judge" of men, looking his opposite straight in the eye and grasping,
behind the speech, the speaker.

Languages of these kinds we habitually use without being conscious of the
fact. The infant speaks long before it has learned its first word, and the
grown-up talks with it without even thinking of the ordinary meanings of the
words he or she is using that is, the sound-forms in this case subserve a lan-
guage that is quite other than that of words. Such languages also have their
groups and dialects; they, too, can be learned, mastered, and misunderstood,
and they are so indispensable to us that verbal language would mutiny if we
were to attempt to make it do all the work without assistance from tone- and
gesture-language. Even our script, which is verbal language for the eye, would
be almost incomprehensible but for the aid that it gets from gesture-language in
the form of punctuation.

It is the fundamental mistake of linguistic science that it confuses language
in general with human word-language and that not merely theoretically,
but habitually in the practical conduct of all its investigations. As a result,
it has remained immensely ignorant of the vast profusion of speech-modes
of different kinds that are in common use amongst beasts and men. The do-
main of speech, taken as a whole, is far wider, and verbal speech, with its inca-
pacity to stand alone (an incapacity not wholly shaken off, even now) has really
a much more modest part in it, than its students have observed. As to the
"origin of human speech," the very phrase implies a wrong enunciation
of the problem. Verbal speech for that is what is meant never had
origins at all in the sense here postulated. It is not primary, and it is not
unitary. The vast importance to which it has attained, since a certain stage in
man's history, must not deceive us as to its position in the history of free-
moving entity. An investigation into speech certainly ought not to begin
with man.

But the idea of a beginning for animal language, too, is erroneous. Speaking
is so closely bound up with the living being of the animal (in contradiction
to the mere being of the plant) that not even unicellular creatures devoid of all
sense-organs can be conceived of as speechless. To be a microcosm in the
macrocosm is one and the same thing as having a power to communicate oneself
to another. To speak of a beginning of speech in animal history is meaningless.
For that microcosmic existences are in plurality is a matter of simple self-evidence.
To speculate on other possibilities is mere waste of time. Granted that Dar-
winian fancies about an original generation and first pairs of ancestors belong
with the Victorian rearguard and should be left there, still the fact remains
that swarms also are awake and aware, inwardly and livingly sensible, of a
"we," and reaching out to one another for linkages of waking-consciousness.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 133

Waking-being is activity in the extended; and, further, is willed activity.
This is the distinction between the movements of a microcosm and the me-
chanical mobility of the plant, the animal, or the man in the plant-state
i.e., asleep. Consider the animal activity of nutrition, procreation, defence,
attack one side of it regularly consists in getting into touch with the macro-
cosm by means of the senses, whether it be the undifferentiated sensitivity of
the unicellular creature or the vision of a highly developed eye that is in ques-
tion. Here there is a definite will to receive impression; this we call orientation.
But, besides, there exists from the beginning a will to produce impression in the
other what we call expression and with that, at once, we have speaking
as an activity of the animal waking-consciousness. Since then nothing fundamentally
new has supervened. The world-languages of high Civilizations are nothing
but exceedingly refined expositions of potentialities that were all implicitly
contained in the fact of willed impressions of unicellular creatures upon one
another.

But the foundations of this fact lie in the primary feeling of fear. The wak-
ing-consciousness makes a cleft in the cosmic, projects a space between particu-
lars, and alienates them. To feel oneself alone is one's first impression in the
daily awakening, and hence the primitive impulse to crowd together in
the midst of this alien world, to assure oneself sensibly of the proximity of the
other, to seek a conscious connexion with him. The "thou" is deliverance
from the fear of the being-alone. The discovery of the Thou, the sense of another
self resolved organically and spiritually out of the world of the alien, is the
grand moment in the early history of the animal. Thereupon animals are.
One has only to look long and carefully into the tiny world of a water-droplet
under the microscope to be convinced that the discovery of the Thou, and with
it that of the I has been taking place here in its simplest imaginable form. These
tiny creatures know not only the Other, but also the Others; they possess not
merely waking-consciousness but also relations of waking-consciousness, and
therewith not only expression, but the elements of an expression- speech.

It is well to recall here the distinction between the two great speech-groups.
Expression-speech treats the Other as witness, and aims purely at effects upon
him, while communication-speech regards him as a collocutor and expects
him to answer. To understand means to receive impressions with one's own
feeling of their significance, and it is on this that the effect of the highest form
of human expression-speech, art, depends. 1 To come to an understanding,
to hold a conversation, postulates that the Other's feeling of significances is
the same as one's own. The elementary unit of an expression-speech before
witnesses is called the Motive. Command of the motive is the basis of all

1 Art is fully developed in the animals. So far as man can get at it by way of analogy, it consists
for them in rhythmic movement ('"dance") and sound-formation ("song"). But this is by no
-neans the limit of artistic impression on the animal itself.

i 3 4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

expression-technique. On the other hand, the impression produced for the
purpose of an understanding is called the Sign, and is the elementary unit of all
communication-technique including, therefore, at the highest level, human
speech.

Of the extensiveness of both these speech-worlds in the waking-conscious-
ness of man we to-day can scarcely form an idea. Expression-speech, which
appears in the earliest times with all the religious seriousness of the Taboo,
includes not only weighty and strict ornament which in the beginning
coincides completely with the idea of art and makes every stiff, inert thing into
a vehicle of the expression but also the solemn ceremonial whose web
of formulas spreads over the whole of public life, and even over that of the
family * and the language of costume, which is contained in clothing,
tattooing, and personal adornment, all of which have a uniform significance.
The investigators of the nineteenth century vainly attempted to trace the origin
of clothing to the feeling of shame or to utilitarian motives. It is in fact in-
telligible only as the means of an expression-speech, and as such it is developed
to a grandiose level in all the high Civilizations, including our own of to-day.
We need only think of the dominant part played by the "mode" in our whole
public life and doings, the regulation attire for important occasions, the nuances
of wear for this and that social function, the wedding-dress, mourning; of
the military uniform, the priest's robes, orders and decorations, mitre and
tonsure, periwig and queue, powder, rings, styles of hairdressing; of all the
significant displays and concealments of person, the costume of the mandarin
and the senator, the odalisque and the nun; of the court-state of Nero, Saladin
and Montezuma not to mention the details of peasant costumes, the lan-
guage of flowers, colours, and precious stones. As for the language of religion,
it is superfluous to mention it, for all this is religion.

The communication-languages, in which every kind of sense-impression
that it is possible to conceive more or less participates, have gradually evolved
(so far as the peoples of the higher Cultures are concerned) three outstanding
signs picture, sound, and gesture, which in the script-speech of the Western
Civilization have crystallized into a unit of letter, word, and punctuation mark.

In the course of this long evolution there comes about at the last the de-
tachment of speaking from speech. Of all processes in the history of language,
none has a wider bearing than this. Originally all motives and signs are un-
questionably the product of the moment and meant only for a single individual
act of the active waking-consciousness. Their actual and their felt and willed
significances are one and the same. But this is no longer so when a definite stock
of signs offers itself for the living act of giving the sign, for with that not only

1 Jesus says to the Seventy whom he is sending out on mission: "And salute no man on the
way" (Luke x, 4). The ceremonial of greeting on the high-road is so complicated that people in
a hurry have to omit it. A. Bcrtholet, Kulturgeschichte Israels (1919), p. 161.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 135

is the activity differentiated from its means, but the means are differentiated
from their significance. The unity of the two not only ceases to be a matter of
self-evidence, it ceases even to be a possibility. The feeling of significance is a
living feeling and, like everything else belonging with Time and Destiny,
it is uniquely occurring and non-recurring. No sign, however well known
and habitually used, is ever repeated with exactly the same connotation; and
hence it is that originally no sign ever recurred in the same form. The domain
of the rigid sign is unconditionally one of things-become of the pure extended;
it is not an organism, but a system, which possesses its own causal logic and brings
the irreconcilable opposition of space and time, intellect and mood, also into
the waking connexions of two beings.

This fixed stock of signs and motives, with its ostensibly fixed meanings,
must be acquired by learning and practice if one wishes to belong to the com-
munity of waking-consciousness with which it is associated. The necessary
concomitant of speech divorced from speaking is the notion of the school. This if fully
developed in the higher animals; and in every self-contained religion, every
art, every society, it is presupposed as the background of the believer, the
artist, the "well-brought-up" human being. And from this point each com-
munity has its sharply defined frontier; to be a member one must know its
language i.e., its articles of faith, its ethics, its rules. In counterpoint and
Catholicism alike, bliss is not to be compassed by mere feeling and goodwill.
Culture means a hitherto unimagined intensification of the depth and strictness
of the form-language in every department; for each individual belonging to it,
it consists as his personal Culture, religious, ethical, social, artistic in a
lifelong process of education and training for this life. And consequently in all
great arts, in the great Churches, mysteries and orders, there is reached such
a command of form as astonishes the human being himself, and ends by break-
ing itself under the stress of its own exigences whereupon, in every Culture
alike, there is set up (expressly or tacitly) the slogan of a "return to nature."
This maestria extends also to verbal language. Side by side with the social
polish of the period of the Tyrannis or of the troubadours, with the fugues of
Bach and the vase-paintings of Exekias, 1 we have the art of Attic oratory and
that of French conversation, both presupposing, like any other art, a strict
and carefully matured convention and a long and exacting training of the
individual.

Metaphysically the significance of this separating-off of a set language can
hardly be over-estimated. The daily practice of intercourse in settled forms,
and the command of the entire waking-consciousness through such forms
of which there is no longer a sensed process of formation ad hoc, but which are

1 Exekias represented in the British Museum by his "Achilles and Penthcsilca" (Ency. Brit.,
XI ed., article "Ceramics," Plate I) stands at the end of Black Figure as the master of the possi-
bilities of refinement in it on the verge of the style-change to Red Figure, yet apart from it. Se-
bastian Bach is his "contemporary." Tr.

136 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

just simply there, and require understanding in the strictest sense of the word
lead to an ever-sharper distinction between understanding and feeling within
the waking-consciousness. An incipient language is felt understandingly;
the practice of speaking requires one, first, to feel the known speech-medium
and, secondly, to understand the intention put into it on this occasion. Con-
sequently the kernel of all schooling lies in the acquisition of elements of
knowledge. Every Church proclaims unhesitatingly that not feeling but
knowledge leads into its ways of salvation; all true artistry rests on the
sure knowledge of forms that the individual has not to discover, but to learn.
"Understanding" is knowledge conceived of as a being. It is that which is
completely alien to blood, race, time; from the opposition of rigid speech to
coursing blood and developing history come the negative ideals of the absolute,
the eternal, the universally valid the ideals of Church and School.

But just this, in the last analysis, makes languages incomplete and leads to
the eternal contradiction between what is in fact spoken and what was willed
or meant by the speaking. We might indeed say that lies came into the world
with the separation of speech from speaking. The signs are fixed, but not so
their meaning from the outset we feel that this is so, then we know it,
and finally we turn our knowledge to account. It is an old, old, experience
that when one wills to say something, the words "fail" one (yersagen, mis-say);
that one does not "express oneself aright" and in fact says something other
than what was meant; that one may speak accurately and be understood
inaccurately. And so finally we get to the art which is widespread even
amongst animals (e.g., cats) of "using words to conceal thoughts." One
says not everything, one says something quite different, one speaks formally
about nothing, one talks briskly to cover the fact that one has said something.
Or one imitates the speech of another. The red-backed shrike (Lanius collurio)
imitates the strophes of small song-birds in order to lure them. This is a well-
known hunter's dodge, but here again established motives and signs are prec-
edent for it, just as much as they are a condition for the faking in antiques or
the forgery of a signature. And all these traits, met with in attitude and mien
as in handwriting and verbal utterance, reappear in the language of every
religion, every art, every society we need only refer to the ideas expressed
by the words "hypocrite," "orthodox," "heretic," the English "cant,"
the secondary senses of "diplomat," "Jesuit," "actor," the masks and wari-
nesses of polite society, and the painting of to-day, in which nothing is honest
more and which in every gallery offers the eye untruth in every imaginable
form.

In a language that one stammers, one cannot be a diplomat. But in the real
command of a language there is the danger that the relation between the
means and the meaning may be made into a new means. There arises an in-
tellectual art of playing with expression, practised by the Alexandrines and the

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 137

Romantics by Theocritus and Brentano in lyric poetry, by Reger in music,
by Kierkegaard in religion.

Finally, speech and truth exclude one another.*- And in fact this is just what
brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical "judge of men," who is
all race and knows how to take the being that is speaking. To look a man
keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker behind the stump speech or the philo-
sophical discourse, to know behind the prayer the heart, and behind the common
good-tone the more intimate levels of social importance and that instan-
taneously, immediately, and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes
everything cosmic that is what is lacking to the real Taboo-man, for whom
one language at any rate carries conviction. A priest who is also a diplomat
cannot be genuinely a priest. An ethical philosopher of the Kant stamp is
never a "judge of men."

The man who lies in his verbal utterances betrays himself, without observing
it, in his demeanour. One who uses demeanour to dissimulate with betrays
himself in his tone. It is precisely because rigid speech separates means and
intent that it never carries it off with the keen appraiser. The adept reads
between the lines and understands a man as soon as he sees his walk or his
handwriting. The deeper and more intimate a spiritual communion, the more
readily it dispenses with signs and linkages through waking-consciousness.
A real comradeship makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is
silent altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got
beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening in front of
their cottage and entertaining one another without a word's being passed,
each knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. Words would only
disturb the harmony. From such a state of reciprocal understanding some-
thing or other reaches back, far beyond the collective existence of the higher
animal-world, deep in the primeval history of free-moving life. Here deliver-
ance from the waking-consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.

Of all the signs that have come to be fixed, none has led to greater conse-
quences than that which in its present state we call "word." It belongs, no
doubt, to the purely human history of speech, but nevertheless the idea, or at
any rate the conventional idea, of an "origin" of verbal language is as mean-
ingless and barren as that of a zero-point for speech generally. A precise
beginning is inconceivable for the latter because it is compresent with and con-
tained in the essence of the microcosm, and for the former because it presup-

1 "All forms, even those that are most felt, contain an element of untruth" (Goethe). In sys-
tematic philosophy the intent of the thinker coincides neither with the written words nor with
the understanding of his readers, as it consists in his thinking meanings into words in the course
of using the words themselves (da es tin Denken in Wortbedeutungen ist, im Verlauf dtr Darstcllung mit
sicb sclbsi).

138 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

poses many fully developed kinds of communication-speech and constitutes
only one element though in the end the dominant element of a slow and
quiet evolution. It is a fundamental error in all theories (however diametrically
opposed to each other) like those of Wundt and of Jespersen 1 that they inves-
tigate speaking in words as if it were something new and self-contained, which
inevitably leads them into a radically false psychology. In reality verbal
language is a very late phenomenon, not a young shoot, but the last blossom
borne by one of the ramifications of the parent stem of all vocal speeches.

In actuality a pure word-speech does not exist. No one speaks without
employing, in addition to the set vocabulary, quite other modes of speech,
such as emphasis, rhythm, and facial play, which arc much more primary than
the language of the word, and with which, moreover, it has become completely
intertwined. It is highly necessary, therefore, to avoid regarding the ensemble
of present-day word-languages, with its extreme structural intricacy, as an
inner unity with a homogeneous history. Every word-language known to us
has very different sides, and each of these sides has its own Destiny within the
history of the whole. There is not one sense-perception that would be wholly
irrelevant to an adequate history of the use of words. Further, we must dis-
tinguish very strictly between vocal and verbal languages; the former is
familiar even to the simpler genera of animals, the latter is in certain char-
acters individual characters, it is true, but all the more significant for that
a radically different thing. For every animal voice-language, further, ex-
pression-motives (a roar of anger) and communication-signs (a cry of warning)
can be clearly distinguished, and doubtless the same may be said of the earliest
words. But was it, then, as an expression- or as a communication-language
that verbal language arose? Was it in quite primitive conditions, independent,
more or less, of any and every visual language such as picture and gesture?
To such questions we have no answer, since we have no inkling of what the
pre-forms of the "word," properly so called, were. Naive indeed is the phi-
lology which uses what we of to-day call "primitive" languages (in reality,
incomplete pictures of very late language-conditions) as premisses for con-
clusions as to the origin of words and the Word. The word is in them an
already established, highly developed, and self-evident means i.e., precisely
what anything "originally" is not.

There can be no doubt that the sign which made it possible for the future
word-language to detach itself from the general vocal speech of the animal world
was that which I call "name" a vocal image serving to denote a Something
in the world-around, which was felt as a being, and by the act of naming
became a numen. 2 It is unnecessary to speculate as to how the first names came

1 Jcspcrscn deduces language trom poesy, dance, and particularly courtship. Progress in Lan-
guage (1894), p. 357.

* See Vol. I, p. 80. Tr.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 139

to be no human speech accessible to us at this time of day gives us the least
point d'appui here. But, contrary to the view of modern research, I consider
that the decisive turn came not from a change of the throat-formation or from
a peculiarity of sound-formation or from any other physiological factor
if any such changes ever took place at all, it would be the race side that they
would affect not even an increased capacity for self-expression by existing
means, like, say, the transition from word to sentence (H. Paul l ), but a profound
spiritual change. With the Name comes a new world-outlook. And if speech
in general is the child of fear, of the unfathomable terror that wells up when
the waking-consciousness is presented with the facts, that impels all creatures
together in the longing to prove each other's reality and proximity then
the first word, the Name, is a mighty leap upward. The Name grazes the
meaning of consciousness and the source of fear alike. The world is not merely
existent, a secret is felt in it. Above and apart from the more ordinary objects
of expression- and communication-language, man names that which is enigmatic.
It is the beast that knows no enigmas. Man cannot think too solemnly,
reverently, of this first name-giving. It was not well always to speak the name,
it should be kept secret, a dangerous power dwelt in it. With the name the step
is taken from the everyday physical of the beast to the metaphysical of man. It was
the greatest turning-point in the history of the human soul. Our epistemology
is accustomed to set speech and thought side by side, and it is quite right, if we
take into consideration only the languages that are still accessible at the present
day. But I believe that we can go much deeper than this and say that with
the Name religion in the proper sense, definite religion in the midst of formless
quasi-religious awe, came into being. Religion in this sense means religious
thought. It is the new conception of the creative understanding emancipated
from sensation. We say, in a very significant idiom, that we "reflect on,"
"think over," something. With the understanding of things-named the for-
mation of a higher world, above all sensational existence, is begun "higher"
both according to obvious symbolism and in reference to the position of the
head which man guesses (often with painful distinctness) to be the home of
his thoughts. It gives to the primary feeling of fear both an object and a glimpse
of liberation. On this religious first thought all the philosophical, scholarly,
scientific thought of later times has been and remains dependent for its very
deepest foundations.

These first names we have to think of as quite separate and individual
elements in the stock of signs of a highly developed sound- and gesture-language,
the richness of which we can no longer imagine, since these other means have
come to be subordinate to the word-languages, and their further developments

1 Sentence-like complexes of sound arc known also to the dog. When the Australian dingo
reverted from domestication to the wild state, he reverted also from the house-dog's bark to the
wolf's howl a phenomenon that indicates a transition to very much simpler sound-signs, but
has nothing to do with "words."

140 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

have been in dependent connexion therewith. 1 One thing, however, was assured
when the name inaugurated the transformation and spiritualization of com-
munication-technique the pre-eminence of the eye over the other sense-
organs. Man's awakcness and awareness was in an illuminated space, his
depth-experience 2 was a radiation outward towards light-sources and light-
resistances, and he conceived of his ego as a middle point in the light.
"Visible" or "invisible" was the alternative which governed the state of
understanding in which the first names arose. Were the first numina, perhaps,
things of the light-world that were felt, heard, observed in their effects, but not
seen? No doubt the group of names, like everything else that marks a turning-
point in the course of world-happenings, must have developed both rapidly and
powerfully. The entire light-world, in which everything possesses the proper-
ties of position and duration in space, was in the midst of what tensions of
cause and effect, thing and property, object and subject ! very soon listed
with innumerable names, and so anchored in the memory, for what we now
call "memory" is the capacity of storing for the understanding, by means
of the name, the named. Over the realm of understood visuals (jSehdinge) super-
venes a more intellectual realm of namings, which shares with it the logical
property of being purely extensive, disposed in polarity, and ruled by the causal
principle. All word-types like cases and pronouns and prepositions (which
arise, of course, much later) have a causal or local meaning in respect of named
units; adjectives, and verbs also, have frequently come into existence in pairs
of opposites; often (as in the E'we languages of West Africa investigated by
Westermann) the same word is pronounced low or high to denote for example
great and small, far and near, passive and active. 3 Later these relics of gesture-
language pass completely into the word-form, 4 as we see clearly, for example,
in the Greek yua/cpos and /u/cp6j and the -sounds of Egyptian designations of

1 The gesture-languages of to-day (Delbriick, Grundfragtn d. Sprachforsch., pp. 49, et seq., with
reference to the work of Jorio on the gestures of the Neapolitans) without exception presuppose
word-language and are completely dependent upon its intellectual systematism. Examples: the
mimicry of the actor, and the language which the American Indians have formed for themselves
for the purpose of mutually understanding one another in spite of extreme differences and fluidity
in the verbal languages of the various tribes. Wundt (Volkerfsychologie, I, p. 112.) quotes the follow-
ing to show how complicated sentences can be handled in this language: "White soldiers, led by
an officer of high rank, but little intelligence, took the Mescalcro Indians prisoners."

2 See Vol. I, p. 171. Tr.

3 The case of voice-differentiations of the same word in Chinese is not analogous. It arose only
out of scholars' work in the later phases of the Chinese Civilization as understood in this work.
And it is a mechanical expedient and not a structural character i.e., it lacks the polarity mentioned
in the text. Voice-management distinguishes, not "great" from "small," but "pig" from "God,"
"bamboo" from "to dwell." English students will find a clear and understandable account of this
and other Chinese differential devices in Karlgrcn's little book: Sound and Symbol in Chinese (English
translation, 192.3)- Tr.

4 Possibly connected with this is the emphatic antithesis characterizing many of our proverbs and
everyday idioms e.g., "up hill and down dale" (" parmonts et vaux," " bergauf bergab"*), meaning
hardly more than "everywhere." Tr.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 141

suffering. It is the form of thinking in opposites which, starting from these
antithetical word-pairs, constitutes the foundation of all inorganic logic, and
turns every scientific discovery of truths into a movement of conceptual con-
traries, of which the most universal instance is that of an old view and a new
one being contrasted as "error" and "truth."

The second great turning-point was the use of grammar. Besides the name
there was now the sentence, besides the verbal designation the verbal relation,
and thereupon reflection which is a thinking in word-relations that fol-
lows from the perception of things for which word-labels exist became the
decisive characteristic of man's waking-consciousness. The question whether
the communication-languages already contained effective "sentences" before
the appearance of the genuine "name" is a difficult one. The sentence, in the
present acceptation of the word, has indeed developed within these languages
according to its own conditions and with its own phases, but nevertheless it
postulates the prior existence of the name. Sentences as conceptual relations
become possible only with the intellectual change that accompanied
their birth. And we must assume further that within the highly developed
wordless languages one character or trait after another, in the course of con-
tinuous practical use, was transformed into verbal form and as such fell into its
place in an increasingly solid structure, the prime form of our present-day
languages. Thus the inner build of all verbal languages rests upon foundations
of far older construction, and for its further development is not dependent upon
the stock of words and its destiny.

It is in fact just the reverse. For with syntax the original group of individual
names was transformed into a system of words, whose character was given, not
by their proper, but by their grammatical significance. The name made its
appearance as something novel and entirely self-contained. But word-species
arose as elements of the sentence, and thereafter the contents of waking-con-
sciousness streamed in overflowing profusion into this world of words, demand-
ing to be labelled and represented in it, until finally even "all" became, in one
shape or another, a word and available for the thought-process.

Thenceforward the sentence is the decisive element we speak in sentences
and not words. Attempts to define the two have been frequent, but never
successful. According to F. N. Finck, word-formation is an analytical and
sentence-formation a synthetical activity of the mind, the first preceding the
second. It is demonstrable that the same actuality received as impression is
variously understood, and words, therefore, are definable from very different
points of view. 1 But according to the usual definition, a sentence is the verbal
expression of a thought, a symbol (says H. Paul) for the connexion of several
ideas in the soul of the speaker. It seems to me quite impossible to settle the
nature of the sentence from its contents. The fact is simply that we call the
1 Die Haupttypen des Sprachbaus, 1910.

142- THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

relatively largest mechanical units employed "sentences" and the relatively
smallest "words." Over this range extends the validity of grammatical laws.
But as soon as we pass from theory to practice, we see that language as cur-
rently used is no longer such a mechanism; it obeys not laws, but pulse. Thus
a race-character is involved, a priori, in the way in which the matter to be
communicated is set in sentences. Sentences are not the same for Tacitus and
Napoleon as for Cicero and Nietzsche. The Englishman orders his material
syntactically in a different way from the German. Not the ideas and thoughts,
but the thinking, the kind of life, the blood, determine in the primitive, Clas-
sical, Chinese, and Western speech-communities the type of the sentence-unit,
and with it the mechanical relation of the word to the sentence. The boundary
between grammar and syntax should be placed at the point where the mechan-
ical of speech ceases and the organic of speaking begins usages, custom, the
physiognomy of the way that a man employs to express himself. The other
boundary lies where the mechanical structure of the word passes into the
organic factors of sound-formation and expression. Even the children of im-
migrants can often be recognized by the way in which the English " th" is
pronounced a race-trait of the land. Only that which lies between these
limits is the "language," properly so called, which has system, is a technical
instrument, and can be invented, improved, changed, and worn out; enuncia-
tion and expression, on the contrary, adhere to the race. We recognize a person
known to us, without seeing him, by his pronunciation, and not only that, but
we can recognize a member of an alien race even if he speaks perfectly correct
German. The great sound-modifications, like the Old High German in Caro-
lingian times and the Middle High German in the Late Gothic, have terri-
torial frontiers and affect only the speaking of the language, not the inner form
of sentence and word.

Words, I have just said, are the relatively smallest mechanical units in the
sentence. There is probably nothing that is so characteristic of the thinking
of a human species as the way in which these units are acquired by it. For the
Bantu Negro a thing that he sees belongs first of all to a very large number of
categories of comprehension. Correspondingly the word for it consists of a
kernel or root and a number of monosyllabic prefixes. When he speaks of a
woman in a field, his word is something like this: "living, one, big, old, fe-
male, outside, human"; this makes seven syllables, but it denotes a single,
clear-headed, and to us quite alien act of comprehension. 1 There are languages
in which the word is almost coextensive with the sentence.

The gradual replacement of bodily or sonic by grammatical gestures is

thus the decisive factor in the formation of sentences, but it has never been

completed. There arc no purely verbal languages. The activity of speaking, in

words, as it emerges more and more precise, consists in this, that through word-

1 Sec the article "Bantu Languages," by Sir H. H. Johnston, Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 143

sounds we awaken significance-feelings, which in turn through the sound of
the word-connexions evoke further relation-feelings. Our schooling in speech
trains us to understand in this abbreviated and indicative form not only light-
things and light-relations, but also thought-things and thought-relations.
Words are only named, not used definitively, and the hearer has to feel what
the speaker means. This and this alone amounts to speech, and hence mien
and tone play a much greater part than is generally admitted in the under-
standing of modern speech. Substantive signs may conceivably exist for many
of the animals even, but verb-signs never.

The last grand event in this history, which brings the formation of verbal
speech more or less to a close, is the coming of the verb. This assumes at the
outset a very high order of abstraction. For substantives are words whereby
things sense-defined in illuminated space 1 become evocable also in after-thought,
while verbs describe types of change, which are not seen, but are extracted from
the unendingly protean light-world, by noting the special characters of the
individual cases, and generating concepts from them. "Falling stone" is
originally a unit impression, but we first separate movement and thing moved
and then isolate falling as one kind of movement from innumerable other sorts
and shades thereof sinking, tottering, stumbling, slipping. We do not
"see" the distinction, we "know" it. The difference between fleeing and
running, or between flying and being wafted, altogether transcends the visual
impression they produce and is only apprehensible by a word-trained conscious-
ness. But now, with this verb-thinking, even life itself has become accessible
to reflection. Out of the living impress made on the waking-consciousness,
out of the ambiance of the becoming (which gesture-speech, being merely imi-
tative, leaves unquestioned and unprobed) that which is life itself namely,
singularity of occurrence is unconsciously eliminated, and the rest, as effect
of a cause (the wind wafts, lightning flashes, the peasant ploughs), is put, under
purely extensive descriptions, into suitable places in the sign-system. One has
to bury oneself completely in the solid definiteness of subject and predicate,
active and passive, present and perfect, to perceive how entirely the under-
standing here masters the senses and unsouls actuality. In substantives one
can still regard the mental thing (the idea) as a copy of the visual thing, but
in the verb something inorganic has been put in place of something organic. The fact
that we live namely, that we at this instant perceive something becomes
eventually a property of the something perceived. In terms of word-thought,
the perceived endures "is." Thus, finally, are formed the categories of
thought, graded according to what is and what is not natural to it; thus
Time appears as a dimension, Destiny as a cause, the living as chemical or
psychical mechanism. It is in this wise that the style of mathematical, judicial,
and dogmatic thought arises.

1 Even calling something "invisible" is a definition of it under the light-aspect.

144 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

And in this wise, too, arises that disunity which seems to us inseparable
from the essence of man, but is really only the expression of the dominance of
word-language in his waking-consciousness. This instrument of communica-
tion between Ego and Tu has, by reason of its perfection, fashioned out of the
animal understanding of sensation, a thinking-in-words which stands proxy
for sensation. Subtle thinking "splitting hairs," as it is called is con-
versing with oneself in word-significances. It is the activity that no kind of
language but the language of words can subserve, and it becomes, with the
perfection of the language, distinctive of the life-habit of whole classes of
human beings. The divorce of speech, rigid and devitalized, from speak-
ing, which makes it impossible to include the whole truth in a verbal ut-
terance, has particularly far-reaching consequences in the sign-system of words.
Abstract thinking consists in the use of a finite word-framework into which
it is sought to squeeze the whole infinite content of life. Concepts kill Being
and falsify Waking-Being. Long ago in the springtime of language-history,
while understanding had still to struggle in order to hold its own with sensa-
tion, this mechanization was without importance for life. But now, from
a being who occasionally thought, man has become a thinking being, and
it is the ideal of every thought-system to subject life, once and for all, to the
domination of intellect. This is achieved in theory by according validity only
to the known and branding the actual as a sham and a delusion. It is achieved
in practice by forcing the voices of the blood to be silent in the presence of
universal ethical principles. 1

Both, logic and ethics alike, are systems of absolute and eternal truths for
the intellect, and correspondingly untruths for history. However completely
the inner eye may triumph over the outer in the domain of thought, in the realm
of facts the belief in eternal truths is a petty and absurd stage-play that exists
only in the heads of individuals. A true system of thoughts emphatically can-
not exist, for no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are
always brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned a priori by
its own form and can never reach that which the words mean apart, again,
from the case of technics, in which the concepts are instruments and not aims
in themselves. And this ignorabimus is in conformity also with the intuition
of every true sage, that abstract principles of life are acceptable only as figures
of speech, trite maxims of daily use underneath which life flows, as it has always
flowed, onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that,
under all the great names, it has been thinkers who are personalities and
not systems which are mutable that have taken effect upon life.

1 Only technics are entirely true, for here the words are merely the key to actuality, and the
sentences are continually modified until they arc, not "truth," but actuality. A hypothesis claims,
not Tightness, but usefulness.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 145

So far, then, the inner history of word-languages shows three stages. In
the first there appears, within highly developed but wordless communication-
languages, the first names units in a new sort of understanding. The world
awakens as a secret, and religious thought begins. In the second stage, a com-
plete communication-speech is gradually transformed into grammatical values.
The gesture becomes the sentence, and the sentence transforms the names into
words. Further, the sentence becomes the great school of understanding vis-
a-vis sensation, and an increasingly subtle significance-feeling for abstract
relations within the mechanism of the sentence evokes an immense profusion
of inflexions, which attach themselves especially to the substantive and the
verb, the space-word and the time-word. This is the blossoming time of
grammar, the period of which we may probably (though under all reserves)
take as the two millennia preceding the birth of the Egyptian and Babylonian
Culture. The third stage is marked by a rapid decay of inflexions and a si-
multaneous replacement of grammar by syntax. The intellectualization of
man's waking-consciousness has now proceeded so far that he no longer needs
the sense-props of inflexion and, discarding the old luxuriance of word-forms,
communicates freely and surely by means of the faintest nuances of idiom
(particles, position of words, rhythm). By dint of speaking in words, the
understanding has attained supremacy over the waking-consciousness, and
to-day it is in process of liberating itself from the restrictions of sensible-verbal
machinery and working towards pure mechanics of the intellect. Minds and
not senses are making the contact.

In this third stage of linguistic history, which as such takes place in the
biological plane 1 and therefore belongs to man as a type, the history of the higher
Cultures now intervenes with an entirely new speech, the speech of the distance
writing an invention of such inward forcefulness that again there is a sud-
den decisive turn in the destinies of the word-languages.

The written language of Egypt is already by 3000 in a state of rapid gram-
matical decomposition; likewise the Sumerian literary languages called erne-sal
(women's language). The written language of China which vis-a-vis the
vernaculars of the Chinese world has long formed a language apart is, even
in the oldest known texts, so entirely inflexionless that only recent research has
established that it ever had inflexions at all. 2 The Indogermanic system
is known to us only in a state of complete break-down. Of the Case in Old
Vcdic (about 1500 B.C.) the Classical languages a thousand years later retained
only fragments. 3 From Alexander the Great's time the dual disappeared from

1 Sec pp. 2.9, ct scq.

2 The English reader may refer to Karlgren's Sound and Symbol in Chinese, already mentioned,
for details. Tr.

3 Sec the article "Indo-European Languages," Ency. Brit., XI ed. TV.

146 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the declension of ordinary Hellenistic Greek, and the passive vanished from the
conjugation entirely. The Western languages, although of the most miscel-
laneous provenance imaginable the Germanic from primitive and the Ro-
manic from highly civilized stock modify in the same direction, the Romanic
cases having become reduced to one, and the English, after the Reformation,
to zero. Ordinary German definitely shed the genitive at the beginning of the
nineteenth century and is now in process of abolishing the dative. Only after
trying to translate a piece of difficult and pregnant prose say of Tacitus or
Mommsen "back" 1 into some very ancient language rich in inflexions
does one realize how meantime the technique of signs has vaporized into a
technique of thoughts, which now only needs to employ the signs abbrevi-
ated, but replete with meaning merely as the counters in a game that only the
initiates of the particular speech-communion understand. This is why to a
west-European, the sacred Chinese texts must always be in the fullest sense a
sealed book; but the same holds good also for the primary words of every
other Culture-language the Greek XOTOS and bpxrj, the Sanskrit Atman and
Braman indications of the world-outlook of their respective Cultures that
no one not bred in the Culture can comprehend.

The external history of languages is as good as lost to us in just its most
important parts. Its springtime lies deep in the primitive era, in which (to
repeat what has been said earlier), we have to imagine "humanity" in the
form of scattered and quite small troops, lost in the wide spaces of the earth.
A spiritual change came when reciprocal contacts became habitual (and eventu-
ally natural) to them, but correspondingly there can be no doubt that this
contact was first sought for and then regulated, or fended off, by means of speech,
and that it was the impression of an earth filled with men that first brought the
waking-consciousness to the point of tense intelligent shrewdness, forcing verbal
language under pressure to the surface. So that, perhaps, the birth of grammar
is connected with the race hall-mark of the grand Number.

Since then, no other grammatical system has ever come into existence, but
only novel derivatives of what was already there. Of these authentic primitive
languages and their structure and sound we know nothing. As far as our back-
ward look takes us, we see only complete and developed linguistic systems,
used by everyone, learned by every child, as something perfectly natural. And
we find it more than difficult to imagine that once upon a time things may have
been different, that perhaps a shudder of fear accompanied the hearing of such
strange and enigmatic language an awe like that which in historic times
has been and still is excited by script. And yet we have to reckon with the
possibility that at one time, in a world of wordless communication, verbal
language constituted an aristocratic privilege, a jealously preserved class-secret.
We have a thousand examples the diplomats with their French, the scholars

1 Translation, it must be remembered, is normally from older into younger linguistic conditions.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 147

with their Latin, the priests with their Sanskrit to suggest that there may
have been such a tendency. It is part of the thoroughbred's pride to be able to
speak to one another in a way that outsiders cannot understand a language
for everybody is a vernacular. To be "on conversational terms with" someone
is a privilege or a pretension. So, too, the use of literary language in talking
with educated people, and contempt for dialect, mark the true bourgeois pride.
It is only we who live in a Civilization wherein it is just as normal for children
to learn to write as to learn to walk in all earlier Cultures it was a rare
accomplishment, to which few could aspire. And I am convinced that it was
just so once with verbal language.

The tempo of linguistic history is immensely rapid; here a mere century
signifies a great deal. I may refer again to the gesture-language of the North
Indians, 1 which became necessary because the rapidity of changes in the tribal
dialects made intertribal understanding impossible otherwise. Compare, too,
the Latin of the recently discovered Forum inscription 2 (about 500) with the
Latin of Plautus (about 2.00) and this again with the Latin of Cicero (about 50).
If we assume that the oldest Vedic texts have preserved the linguistic state of
iioo B.C., then even that of 2.000 may have differed from it far more completely
than any Indogermanic philologists working by a posteriori methods can even
surmise. 3 But allegro changes to lento in the moment when script, the language
of duration, intervenes and ties down and immobilizes the systems at entirely
different age-levels. This is what makes this evolution so opaque to research;
all that we possess is remains of written languages. Of the Egyptian and Baby-
lonian linguistic world we do possess originals from as far back as 3000, but the
oldest Indogermanic relics are copies, of which the linguistic state is much
younger than the contents.

Very various, under all these determinants, have been the destinies of the
different grammars and vocabularies. The first attaches to the intellect, the
second to things and places. Only grammatical systems are subject to natural
inward change. The use of words, on the contrary, psychologically pre-
supposes that, although the expression may change, inner mechanical structure
is maintained (and all the more firmly) as being the basis on which denomi-
nation essentially rests . The great linguistic families are purely grammatical families.
The words in them are more or less homeless and wander from one to another.
It is a fundamental error in philological (especially Indogermanic) research
that grammar and vocabulary are treated as a unit. All specialist vocabularies
the jargon of hunter, soldier, sportsman, seaman, savant are in reality
only stocks of words, and can be used within any and every grammatical system.
The semi-Classical vocabulary of chemistry, the French of diplomacy, and the

1 See p. 140 above. Tr.

2 See Ency. Brit., XI. ed., Vol. XVI, p. z 5 ib. Tr.

3 See the articles "Sanskrit" and "Indo-European Languages," Ency. Brit., XI ed Tr.

148 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

English of the racecourse have become naturalized in all modern languages
alike. We may talk of "alien" words, but the same could have been said at
some time or other of most of the "roots," so-called, in all the old languages.
All names adhere to the things that they denote, and share their history. In
Greek the names for metals are of alien provenance; words like raOpos, wrGiv,
olvos are Semitic. Indian numerals are found in the Hittitc texts of Boghaz
Kexii, 1 and the contexts in which they occur are technical expressions which
came into the country with horse-breeding. Latin administrative terms in-
vaded the Greek East, 2 German invaded Petrine Russia in multitudes, Arabic
words permeate the vocabulary of Western mathematics, chemistry, and as-
tronomy. The Normans, themselves Germanic, inundated English with French
words. Banking, in German-speaking regions, is full of Italian expressions, 3
and similarly and to a far greater extent masses of designations relating to
agriculture and cattle-breeding, to metals and weapons, and in general to all
transactions of handicraft, barter, and intertribal law, must have migrated
from one language to another, just as geographical nomenclature always passed
into the proper vocabulary of the dominant language, with the result that Greek
contains numerous Carian and German Celtic place-names. It is no exaggera-
tion to say that the more widely an Indogermanic word is distributed, the
younger it is, the more likely it is to be an "alien" word. It is precisely the
very oldest names that are hoarded as private possessions. Latin and Greek
have only quite young words in common. Or do "telephone," "gas," "au-
tomobile," belong to the word-stock of the "primitive" people? Suppose, for
the sake of argument that three-fourths of the Aryan "primitive" words came
from the Egyptian or the Babylonian vocabularies of the third millennium; we
should not find a trace of the fact in Sanskrit after a thousand years of unwritten
development, for even in German thousands of Latin loan-words have long
ago become completely unrecognizable. The ending "-ette" in "Henriette"
is Etruscan how many genuine Aryan and genuine Semitic endings, not-
withstanding their thoroughly alien origin, defy us to prove them intruders?
What is the explanation of the astounding similarity of many words in the
Australian and the Indogermanic languages?

The Indogermanic system is certainly the youngest, and therefore the most
intellectual. The languages derived from it rule the earth to-day, but did it
really exist at all in zooo as a specific grammatical edifice? As is well known, a
single initial form for Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic is nowadays assumed as
probable. The oldest Indian texts preserve the linguistic conditions of (prob-
ably) before ixoo, the oldest Greek those of (probably) 700. But Indian per-
sonal and divine names occur in Syria and Palestine, 4 simultaneously with the

1 P. Jensen, Sit%. Preuss. Akademie (1919), pp. 367, et scq.

2 L. Hahn, Rom and Romanismus im griech-rom. Osten (1906).

3 See the article "Book-keeping" in Ency. Brit., XI cd. Tr.

4 Ed. Meyer, Gescb. dcs Alt., I, 455, 465.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 149

horse, at a much later date, the bearers of these names being apparently first
soldiers of fortune and afterwards potentates. 1 May it be that about 1600 these
land- Vikings, these first Reiter men grown up inseparable from their horses,
the terrifying originals of the Centaur-legend established themselves
more or less everywhere in the Northern plains as adventurer-chiefs, bring-
ing with them the speech and divinities of the Indian feudal age? And the
same with the Aryan aristocratic ideals of breed and conduct. According
to what has been said above on race, this would explain the race-ideal of Aryan-
speaking regions without any necessity for "migrations" of a "primitive"
folk. After all, it was in this way that the knightly Crusaders founded their
states in the East and in exactly the same locality as the heroes with Mi-
tanni names had done so twenty-five hundred years before.

Or was this system of about 3000 merely an unimportant dialect of a lan-
guage that is lost? The Romanic language-family about A.D. 1600 dominated
all the seas. About 400 B.C. the "original" language on the Tiber possessed a
domain of little more than a thousand square miles. It is certain that the
geographical picture of the grammatical families at about 4000 was still very
variegated. The Semitic-Hamitic-Aryan group (if it ever did form a unit)
can hardly have been of much importance at that time. We stumble at every
turn upon the relics of old speech-families Etruscan, Basque, Sumerian,
Ligurian, the ancient tongues of Asia Minor, and others that in their day
must have belonged to very extensive systems. In the archives of Boghaz-
Keiii eight new languages have so far been identified, all of them in use about the
year 1000. With the then prevailing tempo of modification, Aryan may in
zooo have formed a unit with languages that we should never dream of asso-
ciating with it.

VII

Writing is an entirely new kind of language, and implies a complete change
in the relations of man's waking-consciousness, in that it liberates it from the
tyranny of the present. Picture-languages which portray objects are far older,
older probably than any words; but here the picture is no longer an immediate
denotation of some sight-object, but primarily the sign of a word i.e., some-
thing already abstract from sensation. It is the first and only example of a lan-
guage that demands, without itself providing, the necessary preparatory training.

Script, therefore, presupposes a fully developed grammar, since the activity
of writing and reading is infinitely more abstract than that of speaking and
hearing. Reading consists in scanning a script-image with a feeling of the sig-
nificances of corresponding word-sounds; what script contains is not signs for things^
but signs for other signs. The grammatical sense must be enlarged by instan-
taneous comprehension.

1 See below.

i 5 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

The word is a possession of man generally, whereas writing belongs ex-
clusively to Culture-men. In contrast to verbal language it is conditioned,
not merely partially, but entirely, by the political and religious Destinies of
world-history. All scripts come into being in the individual Cultures and are to
be reckoned amongst their profoundest symbols. But hitherto a comprehensive
history of script has never been produced, and a psychology of its forms and
their modifications has never even been attempted. Writing is the grand symbol
of the Far, meaning not only extension-distance, but also, and above all, dura-
tion and future and the will-to-eternity. Speaking and listening take place only
in proximity and the present, 1 but through script one speaks to men whom one
has never seen, who may not even have been born yet; the voice of a man is
heard centuries after he has passed away. It is one of the first distinguishing
marks of the historical endowment. But for that very reason nothing is more
characteristic of a Culture than its inward relation to writing. If we know as
little as we do about Indogermanic, it is because the two earliest Cultures
whose people made use of this system the Indian and the Classical were
so a-historic in disposition that they not only formed no script of their own,
but even fought off alien scripts until well into the Late period of their course.
Actually, the whole art of Classical prose is designed immediately for the ear.
One read it as if one were speaking, whereas we, by comparison, speak every-
thing as though we were reading it with the result that in the eternal seesaw
between script-image and word-sound we have never attained to a prose style
that is perfect in the Attic sense. In the Arabian Culture, on the other hand,
each religion developed its own script and kept it even through changes of
verbal language; the duration of the sacred books and teachings and the
script as symbol of duration belong together. The oldest evidences of alpha-
betical script are found in southern Arabia in the Minasan and Sabasan scripts
differentiated, without doubt, according to sect which probably go back to
the tenth century before Christ. 2 The Jews, Manda;ans, and Manichseans in
Babylonia spoke Eastern Aramaic, but all of them had scripts of their own.
From the Abbassid period onward Arabic ruled, but Christians and Jews wrote
it in their own characters. 3 Islam spread the Arabic script universally amongst
its adherents, irrespective of whether their spoken language was Semitic,
Mongolian, Aryan, or a Negro tongue. 4 The growth of the writing habit
brings with it, everywhere and inevitably, the distinction between the written
and the colloquial languages. The written language brings the symbolism

1 Radio broadcasting docs not controvert this. Its characteristic quality is not (as is often
supposed) dissemination to vast numbers irrespective of physical distance, but a special intimacy
of address to the listening individual. Tr.

2 Sec the article "Semitic Language," Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr.

3 Similarly the modern Jews of the Dispersion write Yiddish, which is a modified German,
in Hebrew characters. Tr.

4 Sec Lidzbarski, Sit?.. Berl. Akad. (1916), p izi8. There is plentiful material in M. Micse, Die

der Schriftgcschicbte (1919).

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 151

of duration to bear upon its own grammatical condition, which itself yields
only slowly and reluctantly to the progressive modifications of the colloquial
language the latter, therefore, always representing at any given moment a
younger condition. There is not one Hellenic nowr), but two, 1 and the im-
mense distance between the written and the living Latin of Imperial times is
sufficiently evidenced in the structure of the early Romance languages. 2 The
older a Civilization becomes, the more abrupt is the distinction, until we have
the gap that to-day separates written Chinese from Kuan-hua, the spoken
language of educated North Chinese a matter no longer of two dialects but
of two reciprocally alien languages.

Here, it should be observed, we have direct expression of the fact that
writing is above everything a matter of status, and more particularly an ancient
privilege of priesthood. The peasantry is without history and therefore without
ivriting. But, even apart from this, there is in Race an unmistakable antipathy
to script. It is, I think, a fact of the highest importance to graphology that
the more the writer has race (breed), the more cavalierly he treats the orna-
mental structure of the letters, and the more ready he is to replace this by per-
sonal line-pictures. Only the Taboo-man evidences a certain respect for the
proper forms of the letters and ever, if unconsciously, tries to reproduce them.
It is the distinction between the man of action, who makes history, and the
scholar, who merely puts it down on paper, "eternalizes" it. In all Cultures
the script is in the keeping of the priesthood, in which class we have to count
also the poet and the scholars. The nobility despises writing; it has people
to write for it. From the remotest times this activity has had something
intellectual-sacerdotal about it. Timeless truths came to be such, not at all
through speech, but only when there came to be script for them. It is the oppo-
sition of castle and cathedral over again: which shall endure, deed or truth? The
archivist's " sources" preserve facts, the holy scripture, truths. What chronicles
and documents mean in the first-named, exegesis and library mean in the second.
And thus there is something besides cult-architecture that is not decorated
with ornament, but is ornament 3 the book. The art-history of all Cultural
springtimes ought to begin with the script, and the cursive script even before
the monumental. Here we can observe the essence of the Gothic style, or of the
Magian, at its purest. No other ornament possesses the inwardness of a letter-
shape or a manuscript page; nowhere else is arabesque as perfect as it is in the
Koran texts on the walls of a mosque. And, then, the great art of initials, the
architecture of the marginal picture, the plastic of the covers ! In a Koran in
the Kufi script every page has the effect of a piece of tapestry. A Gothic book of
the Gospels is, as it were, a little cathedral. As for Classical art, it is very sig-

1 P. Kretschmer, in Gcrckc-Nordcn, Einl. i. d. Altertumstvissenschaft, I, p. 551.

2 See the articles "Romance Languages" and "Latin Language," Ency. Brit., XI cd. Tr.

3 a. P . 12.1.

i 5 i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

nificant that the one thing that it did not beautify with its touch was the
script and the book-roll an exception founded in its steady hatred of that
which endures, the contempt for a technique which insists on being more than
a technique. Neither in Hellas nor in India do we find an art of monumental
inscription as in Egypt. It does not seem to have occurred to anybody that a
sheet of handwriting of Plato was a relic, or that a fine edition of the dramas
of Sophocles ought to be treasured up in the Acropolis.

As the city lifted up its head over the countryside, as the burgher joined
the noble and the priest and the urban spirit aspired to supremacy, writing,
from being a herald of nobles' fame and of eternal truths, became a means of
commercial and scientific intercourse. The Indian and the Classical Cultures
rejected the pretension and met the working requirement by importation from
abroad; it was as a humble tool of everyday use that alphabetical script slowly
won their acceptance. With this event rank, as contemporaneous and like in
significance, the introduction into China of the phonetic script about 800,
and the discovery of book-printing in the West in the fifteenth century; the
symbol of duration and distance was reinforced in the highest degree by making
it accessible to the large number. Finally the Civilizations took the last step
and brought their scripts into utilitarian form. As we have seen, the discovery
of alphabetical script in the Egyptian Civilization, about 2.000, was a purely
technical innovation. In the same way Li Si, Chancellor to the Chinese Augus-
tus, introduced the Chinese standard script in ziy. And lastly, amongst our-
selves though as yet few of us have appreciated the real significance of the
fact a new kind of writing has appeared. That Egyptian alphabetic script
is in no wise a final and perfected thing is proved by the discovery of its fellow,
our stenography, which means no mere shortening of writing, but the overcoming
of the alphabetic script by a new and highly abstract mode of communication. It is not
impossible, indeed, that in the course of the next centuries script-forms of the
shorthand kind may displace letters completely.

VIII

May the attempt be made, thus early, to write a morphology of the Culture-
languages? Certainly, science has not as yet even discovered that there is such
a task. Culture-languages are languages of historical men. Their Destiny
accomplishes itself not in biological spaces of time, but in step with the organic
evolution of strictly limited lifetimes. Culture languages are historical languages,
which means, primarily, that there is no historical event and no political
institution that will not have been determined in part by the spirit of the
language employed in it and, conversely, that will not have its influence upon
the spiritual form of that language. The build of the Latin sentence is yet
another consequence of Rome's battles, which in giving her conquests com-
pelled the nation as a whole to think administratively; German prose bears

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 153

traces even to-day of the Thirty Years' War in its want of established norms,
and early Christian dogma would have acquired a different shape if the oldest
Scriptures, instead of being one and all written in Greek, and been set down in
Syriac form like those of the Mandasans. But secondarily it means that world-
history is dependent to a degree that students have hitherto scarcely imagined
upon the existence of script as the essentially historical means of communication.
The State (in the higher sense of the word) presupposes intercourse by writing;
the style of all politics is determined absolutely by the significance that the
politico-historical thought of the nation attaches in each instance to charters
and archives, to signatures, to the products of the publicist; the battle of
legislation is a fight for or against a written law; constitutions replace ma-
terial force by the composition of paragraphs and elevate a piece of writing to
the dignity of a weapon. Speech belongs with the present, and writing with
duration, but equally, oral understanding pairs with practical experience, and
writing with theoretical thought. The bulk of the inner political history of
all Late periods can be traced back to this opposition. The ever-varying facts
resist the "letter," while truths demand it that is the world-historical oppo-
sition of two parties that in one form or another is met with in the great crises
of all Cultures. The one lives in actuality, the other flourishes a text in its face;
all great revolutions presuppose a literature.

The group of Western Culture-languages appeared in the tenth century.
The available bodies of language namely, the Germanic and Romance dia-
lects (monkish Latin included) were developed into script-languages under
a single spiritual influence. It is impossible that there should not be a common
character in the development of German, English, Italian, French, and Spanish
from 900 to 1900, as also in the history of the Hellenic and Italic (Etruscan
included) between noo and the Empire. But what is it that, irrespective of the
area of extension of language-families or races, acquires specific unity from the
landscape-limit of the Culture alone? What modifications have Hellenistic
and Latin in common after 300 in pronunciation and idiom, metrically,
grammatically, and stylistically? What is present in German and Italian after
1000, but not in Italian and Rumanian? These and similar questions have
never yet been systematically investigated.

Every Culture at its awakening finds itself in the presence of peasant-lan-
guages, speeches of the cityless countryside, "everlasting," and almost uncon-
cerned with the great events of history, which have gone on through late
Culture and Civilization as unwritten dialects and slowly undergone imper-
ceptible changes. On the top of this now the language of the two primary
Estates raises itself as the first manifestation of a waking relation that has
Culture, that is Culture. Here, in the ring of nobility and priesthood, languages
become Culture-languages, and, more particularly, talk belongs with the castle,
and speech to the cathedral. And thus on the very threshold of evolution the

i 5 4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

plantlikc separates itself from the animal, the destiny of the living from the
destiny of the dead, that of the organic side from that of the mechanical side of
understanding. For the Totem side affirms and the Taboo side denies, blood and
Time. Everywhere we meet, and very early indeed, rigid cult-languages whose
sanctity is guaranteed by their inalterability, systems long dead, or alien to life
and artificially fettered, which have the strict vocabulary that the formulation
of eternal truths requires. Old Vedic stiffened as a religious language, and
with it Sanskrit as a savant-language. The Egyptian of the Old Kingdom was
perpetuated as priests' language, so that in the New Empire sacred formulas
were no more understandable than the Carmen Saliare and the hymn of the
Fratres Arvales in Augustan times. 1 In the Arabian pre-Cultural period Baby-
lonian, Hebrew, and Avestan simultaneously went out of use as workaday
languages probably in the second century before Christ indeed on that
very account Jews and Persians used them in their Scriptures as in opposition to
Aramaic and Pehlevi. The same significance attached to Gothic Latin for the
Church, Humanists' Latin for the learning of the Baroque, Church Slavonic
in Russia, and no doubt Sumerian in Babylonia.

In contrast with this, the nursery of talk is in the early castles and palaces
of assize. Here the living Culture-languages have been formed. Talk is the
custom of speech, its manners - "good form" in the intonation and idiom,
fine tact in choice of words and mode of expression. All these things are a
mark of race; they are learned not in the monastery cell or the scholar's study,
but in polite intercourse and from living examples. In noble society, and as a
hall-mark of nobility, the language of Homer, 2 as also the old French of the
Crusades and the Middle High German of the Hohenstaufen, were erected out
of the ordinary talk of the country-side. When we speak of the great epic
poets, the Skalds, the Troubadours, as creators of language, we must not
forget that they began by being trained for their task, in language as in other
things, by moving in noble circles. The great art by which the Culture finds its
tongue is the achievement of a race and not that of a craft.

The clerical language on the other hand starts from concepts and conclu-
sions. It labours to improve the dialectical capacities of the words and sen-
tence-forms to the maximum. There sets in, consequently, an ever-increasing
differentiation of scholastic and courtly, of the idiom of intellectual from that
of social intercourse. Beyond all divisions of language-families there is a
component common to the expression of Plotinus and Thomas Aquinas, of
Veda and Mishna. Here we have the starting-point of all the ripe scholar-
languages of the West which, German and English and French alike, bear

1 For this reason I am one of those who believe that, even quite late, Etruscan still played a very
important part in the colleges of the Roman priesthood.

2 Precisely for this reason it has to be recognized that the Homeric poems, which were first
fixed in the colonization period, can only give us an urban literary language and not the courtly
Jonvcrsation-languagc in which they were originally declaimed.

PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES 155

to this day the unmistakable signs of their origin in scholars' Latin and,
therefore, the starting point of all the apparatus of technical expression and
logical sentence-form. This opposition between the modes of understanding of
"Society" and of Science renews itself again and again till far into the Late
period. The centre of gravity in the history of French was decisively on the
side of race; i.e., of talk. At the Court of Versailles, in the salons of Paris,
the esprit precieux of the Arthurian romances evolves into the "conversation,"
the classical art of talk, whose dictature the whole West acknowledges. The
fact that Ionic-Attic, too, was fashioned entirely in the halls of the tyrants
and in symposia created great difficulties for Greek philosophy: for later on,
it was almost impossible to discuss the syllogism in the language of Alcibiades.
On the other hand, German prose, in the decisive phase of Baroque, had no
central point on which it could rise to excellence, and so even to-day it oscillates
in point of style between French and Latin courtly and scholarly ac-
cording as the author's intuition is to express himself well or accurately. Our
Classical writers, thanks to their linguistic origin in office or study and their
stay as tutors in the castles and the little courts, arrived indeed at personal
styles, and others are able to imitate these styles, but a specifically German
prose, standard for all, they were unable to create.

To these two class-languages the rise of the city added a third, the language
of the bourgeoisie, which is the true script-speech, reasoned and utilitarian,
prose in the strictest sense of the word. It swings gently between the ex-
pression-modes of elegant society and of learning, in the one direction thinking
for ever of new turns and words <; la mode, in the other keeping sturdy hold on
its existing stock of ideas. But in its inner essence it is of a mercantile nature.
It feels itself frankly as a class badge vis-b-vis the historyless-changeless phras-
ing of the "people" which Luther and others employed, to the great scandal
of their superficial contemporaries. With the final victory of the city the
urban speech absorbs into itself that of elegance and that of learning. There
arises in the upper strata of megalopolitan populations the uniform, keenly
intelligent, practical KOIJ^, the child and symbol of its Civilization, equally
averse from dialect and poetry something perfectly mechanical, precise,
cold, leaving as little as possible to gesture. These final homeless and rootless
languages can be learned by every trader and porter Hellenistic in Carthage
and on the Oxus, Chinese in Java, English in Shanghai and for their com-
prehension talk has no importance or meaning. And if we inquire what really
created these languages, we find not the spirit of a race or of a religion, but the
spirit of economics.

CHAPTER VI
CITIES AND PEOPLES

CHAPTER VI

CITIES AND PEOPLES

Now at last it is possible to approach if with extreme precaution the
conception "people," and to bring order into that chaos of people-forms that the
historical research of the present day has only succeeded in making worse
confounded than before. There is no word that has been used more freely and
more utterly uncritically, yet none that calls for a stricter critique, than this.
Very careful historians, even, after going to much trouble to clear! their the-
oretical basis (up to a point) slide back thereafter into treating peoples, race-
parts, and speech-communities as completely equivalent. If they find the name
of a people, it counts without more ado as the designation of a language as
well. If they discover an inscription of three words, they believe they have
established a racial connexion. If a few "roots" correspond, the curtain
rises at once on a primitive people with a primitive habitat in the background.
And the modern nationalist spirit has only enhanced this " thinking in terms
of peoples."

But is it the Hellenes, the Dorians, or the Spartans that are a people? If
the Romans were a people, what are we to say about the Latins? And what
kind of a unit within the population of Italy at c. 400 do we mean by the
name "Etruscan?" Has not their "nationality," like that of Basques and
Thracians, been made actually to depend upon the build of their language?
What ethnic idea underlies the words "American," "Swiss," "Jew," "Boer"?
Blood, speech, faith, State, landscape what in all these is determinative
in the formation of a people? In general, relationships of blood and language
are determined only by way of scholarship, and the ordinary individual is
perfectly unconscious of them. "Indogermanic" is purely and simply a
scientific, more particularly a philological, concept. The attempt of Alexander
the Great to fuse Greeks and Persians together was a complete failure, and we
have recently had experience of the real strength of Anglo-German community
of feeling. But "people" is a linkage of which one is conscious. In ordinary
usage, one designates as one's "people" and with feeling that com-
munity, out of the many to which one belongs, which inwardly stands nearest

159

i6o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

to one. 1 And then he extends the use of this concept, which is really quite
particular and derived from personal experience, to collectivities of the most
varied kinds. For Caesar the Arverni were a "civifas"; for us the Chinese
are a "nation." On this basis, it was the Athenians and not the Greeks who
constituted a nation, and in fact there were only a few individuals who, like
Isocrates, felt themselves primarily as Hellenes. On this basis, one of two
brothers may call himself a Swiss and the other, with equal right, a German.
These are not philosophical concepts, but historical facts. A people is an
aggregate of men which feels itself a unit. The Spartiates 2 felt themselves a
people in this sense; the "Dorians" of noo, too, probably, but those of 400
certainly not. The Crusaders became genuinely a people in taking the oath of
Clermont; the Mormons in their expulsion from Missouri, in 1839; 3 the
Mamertines 4 by their need of winning for themselves a stronghold of refuge. 6
Was the formative principle very different with the Jacobins and Hyksos? How
many peoples may have originated in a chief's following or a band of fugitives?
Such a group can change race, like the Osmanli, who appeared in Asia Minor
as Mongols; or language, like the Sicilian Normans; or name, like Achasans
and Danaoi. So long as the common feeling is there, the people as such is there.
We have to distinguish the destiny of a people from its name. The latter
is often the only thing about which information remains to us; but can we
fairly conclude from a name anything about the history, the descent, the
language, or even merely the identity of those who bore it? Here again the
historical researcher is to blame, in that, whatever his theory may have been,
he has in practice treated the relation between name and bearer as simply as he
would treat, say, the personal names of to-day. Have we any conception of
the number of unexplored possibilities in this field? To begin with, the very
act of name-giving is of enormous importance in early associations. For with
a name the human group consciously sets itself up with a sort of sacral dignity.
But, here, cult- and war-names may exist side by side; others the land or
the heritage may provide; the tribal name may be exchanged for that of an
eponymous hero, as with the Osmanli; 6 lastly, an unlimited number of alien
names can be applied along the frontiers of a group without more than a part of
the community ever hearing them at all. If only such names as these be handed

1 So much so that the workers of the great cities call themselves the People, thereby excluding
the bourgeoisie, with which no community feeling conjoins them. The bourgeoisie of 1789 did ex-
actly the same.

a The dominant nucleus within the Spartan ensemble. Tr.

8 Ed. Meyer, Ursprung und Gescbichte dcr Mormontn (1911), pp. 118, et seq. [An extended summary
of Mormon history will be found in the article "Mormons," Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr]

* Ex-mercenaries of Agathoclcs, tyrant of Syracuse, who seized and settled in Messina. The
questions arising out of this act precipitated the First Punic War. Tr.

6 A still more celebrated case is the "ambulatory Polis" formed by Xcnophon's Ten Thou-
sand. Tr.

6 And in numerous Classical instances. Tr.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 161

down, it becomes practically inevitable that conclusions about the bearers of
them will be wrong. The indubitably sacral names of Franks, Alemanni, and
Saxons have superseded a host of names of the period of the Varus battle but
if we did not happen to know this, we should long ago have been convinced that
an expulsion or annihilation of old tribes by new intruders had taken place
here. The names "Romans" and "Quirites," "Spartans" and "Lacedaemo-
nians," "Carthaginian" and "Punic" have endured side by side here again
there was a risk of supposing two peoples instead of one. In what relation the
names "Pelasgi," "Achasans," "Danai," stand to one another we shall never
learn, and had we nothing more than these names, the scholar would long ago
have assigned to each a separate people, complete with language and racial
affinities. Has it not been attempted to draw from the regional designation
" Doric" conclusions as to the course of the Dorian migration? How often may
a people have adopted a land-name and taken it along with them? This is the
case with the modern Prussians, but also with the modern Parsees, Jews, and
Turks, while the opposite is the case in Burgundy and Normandy. The name
"Hellenes" arose about 650, and, therefore, cannot be connected with any move-
ment of population. Lorraine (Lothringen) received the name of a perfectly un-
important prince, and that, in connexion with the decision of a heritage and
not a folk-migration. Paris called the Germans Allemands in 1814, Prussians
in 1870, Boches in 1914 in other circumstances three distinct peoples might
have been supposed to be covered by these names. The West-European is
called in the East a Frank, the Jew a Spaniole the fact is readily explained
by historical circumstances, but what would a philologist have produced from
the words alone?

It is not to be imagined at what results the scholars of A.D. 3000 might ar-
rive if they worked by present-day methods on names, linguistic remains,
and the notion of original homes and migration. For example, the Teutonic
Knights about 1300 drove out the heathen "Prussians," and in 1870 these
people suddenly appear on their wanderings at the gates of Paris ! The Romans,
pressed by the Goths, emigrate from the Tiber to the lower Danube ! Or a part
of them perhaps settled in Poland, where Latin was spoken? Charlemagne on
the Weser defeated the Saxons, who thereupon emigrated to the neighbourhood
of Dresden, their places being taken by the Hanoverians, whose original settle-
ment, according to the dynasty-name, was on the Thames! The historian
who writes down the history of names instead of that of peoples, forgets that
names, too, have their destinies. So also languages, which, with their mi-
grations, modifications, victories, and defeats, are inconclusive even as to the
existence of peoples associated with them. This is the basic error of Indo-
Germanic research in particular. If in historic times the names "Pfalz" and
"Calabria" have moved about, if Hebrew has been driven from Palestine to
Warsaw, and Persian from the Tigris to India, what conclusions can be drawn

161 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

from the history of the Etruscan name and the alleged "Tyrscnian" inscription
at Lemnos? * Or did the French and the Haytian Negroes, as shown by their
common language, once form a single primitive people? In the region between
Budapest and Constantinople to-day two Mongolian, one Semitic, two Classi-
cal, and three Slavonic languages are spoken, and these speech-communities
all feel themselves essentially as peoples. 2 If we were to build up a migration-
story here, the error of the method would be manifested in some singular results.
"Doric" is a dialect designation that we know, and that is all we know.
No doubt some few dialects of this group spread rapidly, but that is no proof
of the spread or even of the existence of a human stock belonging with it. 3

Thus we come to the pet idea of modern historical thought. If a historian
meets a people that has achieved something, he feels that he owes it to these
people to answer the question: Whence did it come? It is a matter of dignity
for a people to have come from somewhere and to have an original home.
The notion that it is at home in the place where we find it is almost an in-
sulting assumption. Wandering is a cherished saga-motive of primitive man-
kind, but its employment in serious research also has become a sheer mania.
Whether the Chinese invaded China or the Egyptians Egypt no one inquires, the
question being always when and whence they did so. It would be less of an effort
to originate the Semites in Scandinavia or the Aryans in Canaan than to abandon
the notion of an original home. ;

Now, the fact that all early populations were highly mobile is unquestion-
able. In it, for example, lies the secret of the Libyan problem. The Libyans or
their predecessors spoke Hamitic, but, as shown even by old Egyptian reliefs,
they were all blond and blue-eyed and, therefore, doubtless of North-European
provenance. 4 In Asia Minor at least three migration-strata since 1300 have
been determined, which are related probably to the attacks of the " Sea-peoples"
in Egypt, and something similar has been shown in the Mexican Culture.
But as to the nature of these movements we know nothing at all. In any case,
there can be no question of migrations such as modern historians like to picture

1 Sec Ency. Brit., XI cd., Vol. IX, p. 860. Tr.

1 In Macedonia, in the nineteenth century, Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks all founded schools for
the anti-Turkish population. If it happens that a village has been taught Serb, even the next gen-
eration consists of fanatical Serbs. The present strength of the "nations" is thus merely a conse-
quence of previous school-policy.

8 For Beloch's scepticism concerning the reputed Dorian migration sec his Griccbische Gtscbichtt,
I, z, Section VIII. [A brief account of the question, by J. L. Myres, is in Ency. Brit., XI cd., article
"Dorians." Tr]

4 C. Mehlis, Die Berberfrage (Arcbiv fur Antbropologic 39, pp. 149, et seq.) where relations bc
twecn North German and Mauretanian ceramics, and even resemblances of toponymy (rivers, moun-
tains) arc dealt with. The old pyramid buildings of West Africa are closely related, on the one hand,
to the Nordic dolmens (_Hunengraber~) of Holstein and, on the other, to the graves of the Old King-
dom (some illustrations in L. Frobcnius, Der kleinafrikanischc Grabbau, 1916).

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 163

movements of close-pressed peoples traversing the lands in great masses,
pushing and being pushed till finally they come to rest somewhere or other.
It is not the alterations in themselves, but the conceptions we have formed
about them, that have spoilt our outlook upon the nature of the peoples.
Peoples in the modern sense of the word do not wander, and that which of old
did wander needs to be very carefully examined before it is labelled, as the
label will not always stand for the same thing. The motive, too, that is ever-
lastingly assigned to these migrations is colourless and worthy of the century
that invented it material necessity. Hunger would normally lead to efforts
of quite a different sort, and it has certainly been only the last of the motives
that drove men of race out of their nests although it is understandable
that it would very frequently make itself felt when such bands suddenly en-
countered a military obstacle. It was doubtless, in this simple and strong
kind of man, the primary microcosmic urgency to move in free space which
sprang up out of the depths of his soul as love of adventure, daring, liking for
power and booty; as a blazing desire, to us almost incomprehensible, for deeds,
for joy of carnage, for the death of the hero. Often, too, no doubt, domestic
strife or fear of the revenge of the stronger, was the motive, but again a strong
and manly one. Motives like these are infectious the "man who stays
at home" is a coward. Was it common bodily hunger, again, that induced
the Crusades, or the expeditions of Cortez and Pizarro, or in our time the ven-
tures of "wild west" pioneers? Where, in history, we find the little handful
invading wide lands, it is ever the voices of the blood, the longing for high
destinies, that drive them.

Further, we have to consider the position in the country traversed by the
invaders. Its characteristics are always modified more or less, but the modi-
fications are due not merely to the influence of the immigrants, but more and
more to the nature of the settled population, which in the end becomes numeri-
cally overwhelming.

Obviously, in spaces almost empty of men it is easy for the weaker simply
to evade the onslaught, and as a rule he was able to do so. But in later and
denser conditions, the inroad spelt dispossession for the weaker, who must
either defend himself successfully or else win new lands for [old. Already
there is the out-thrust into space. No tribe lives without constant contacts
on all sides and a mistrustful readiness to stand to arms. The hard necessity
of war breeds men. Peoples grow by, and against, other peoples to inward
greatness. Weapons become weapons against men and not beasts. And finally
we have the only migration-form that counts in historic times warrior
bands sweep through thoroughly populated countries, whose inhabitants
remain, undisturbed and upstanding, as an essential part of the spoils of victory.
And then, the victors being in a minority, completely new situations arise.
Peoples of strong inward form spread themselves on top of much larger but

164 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

formless populations, and the further transformations of peoples, languages,
and races depend upon very complicated factors of detail. Since the decisive
investigations of Beloch 1 and Delbriick 2 we know that all migrant peoples
and the Persians of Cyrus, the Mamertines and the Crusaders, the Ostrogoths
and the "Sea-peoples" of the Egyptian inscriptions were all peoples in this
sense were, in comparison with the inhabitants of the regions they occu-
pied, very small in numbers, just a few thousand warriors, superior to the na-
tives only in respect of their determination to be a Destiny and not to submit to
one. It was not inhabitable, but inhabited, land of which they took possession,
and thus the relation between the two peoples became a question of status, the
migration turned into the campaign, and the process of settling down became
a political process. And here again, in presence of the fact that at a historic
distance of time the successes of a small war-band, with the consequent spread
of the victor's names and language, may all too easily be taken for a "mi-
gration of peoples," it is necessary to repeat our question, what, in fact, the
men, things, and factors are that can migrate.

Here are some of the answers the name of a district or that of a collec-
tivity (or of a hero, adopted by his followers), in that it spreads, becomes
extinct here and is taken by or given to a totally different population there:
in that it may pass from land to people and travel with the latter or vice versa
- the language of the conqueror or that of the conquered, or even a third
language, adopted for reciprocal understanding the war-band of a chief which
subdues whole countries and propagates itself through captive women, or some
accidental group of heterogeneous adventurers, or a tribe with its women and
children, like the Philistines of izoo, who quite in the Germanic fashion
trekked with their ox-wagons along the Phoenician coast to Egypt. 3 In such
conditions, we may again ask, can conclusions be drawn from the destinies of
names and languages as to those of peoples and races? There is only one possible
answer, a decided negative.

Amongst the "Sea-peoples" that repeatedly attacked Egypt in the thir-
teenth century appear the names of Danai and Achxans but in Homer both
are almost mythical designations the name of the Lukka which adhered
later to Lycia, though the inhabitants of that country called themselves
Tramilas and the names of the Etruscans, the Sards, the Siculi but this in
nowise proved that these "Tursha" spoke the later Etruscan, nor that there
was the slightest physical connexion with the like-named inhabitants of
Italy or anything else entitling us to speak of "one and the same people."
Assuming that the Lemnos inscription is Etruscan, and Etruscan an Indo-
germanic language, much could be deduced therefrom in the domain of linguis-

1 Die Bev dlkcrung der gricchiscb-romischcn Welt (1886).

2 Gescbichtc der Kriegskunst (from 1900).

8 Ramcscs III, who defeated them, portrayed their expedition in"the relief of Mcdinet Habet.
W. M. Miillcr, Asitn und Europa, p. 366.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 165

tic history, but in that of racial history nothing whatever. Rome was an
Etruscan city, but is not the fact completely without bearing upon the soul
of the Roman people? Are the Romans Indogermanic because they happen to
speak a Latin dialect? The ethnologists recognize a Mediterranean Race
and an Alpine Race, and north and south of these an astonishing physical
resemblance between North-Germans and Libyans; but the philologists know
that the Basques are in virtue of their speech a "pre-Indogermanic" Iberian
population. The two views are mutually exclusive. Were the builders of
Mycenas and Tiryns "Hellenes"? it would be as pertinent to ask were the
Ostrogoths Germans. I confess that I do not comprehend why such questions
are formulated at all.

For me, the "people" is a unit of the soul. The great events of history were
not really achieved by peoples; they themselves created the peoples. Every act
alters the soul of the doer. Even when the event is preceded by some grouping
around or under a famous name, the fact that there is a people and not merely
a band behind the prestige of that name is not a condition, but a result of the
event. It was the fortunes of their migrations that made the Ostrogoths and
the Osmanli what they afterwards were. The "Americans" did not immigrate
from Europe; the name of the Florentine geographer Amerigo Vespucci desig-
nates to-day not only a continent, but also a people in the true sense of the
word, whose specific character was born in the spiritual upheavals of 1775 and,
above all, 1861-5.

This is the one and only connotation of the word "people." Neither unity
of speech nor physical descent is decisive. That which distinguishes the
people from the population, raises it up out of the population, and will one
day let it find its level again in the population is always the inwardly lived
experience of the "we." The deeper this feeling is, the stronger is the vis viva
of the people. There are energetic and tame, ephemeral and indestructible, forms
of peoples. They can change speech, name, race, and land, but so long as
their soul lasts, they can gather to themselves and transform human material
of any and every provenance. The Roman name in Hannibal's day meant a
people, in Trajan's time nothing more than a population.

Of course, it is often quite justifiable to align peoples with races, but "race"
in this connexion must not be interpreted in the present-day Darwinian sense
of the word. It cannot be accepted, surely, that a people was ever held to-
gether by the mere unity of physical origin, or, if it were, could maintain that
unity even for ten generations. It cannot be too often reiterated that this
physiological provenance has no existence except for science never for folk-
consciousness and that no people was ever yet stirred to enthusiasm for
this ideal of blood-purity. In race there is nothing material, but something
cosmic and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence of the
march of historical Being. It is inco-ordination of this (wholly metaphysical)

166 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

beat that produces race-hatred, which is just as strong between Germans and
Frenchmen as it is between Germans and Jews, and it is resonance on this beat
that makes the true love so akin to hate between man and wife. He who
has not race knows nothing of this perilous love. If a part of the human multi-
tude that now speaks Indogermanic languages, cherishes a certain race-
ideal, what is evidenced thereby is not the existence of the prototype-people
so dear to the scholar, but the metaphysical force and power of the ideal. It
is highly significant that this ideal is expressed, never in the whole population,
but mainly in its warrior-element and pre-eminently in its genuine nobility -
that is, in men who live entirely in a world of facts, under the spell of historical
becoming, destiny-men who will and dare ard it was precisely in the early
times (another significant point) that a born alien of quality and dignity could
without particular difficulty gain admittance to the ruling class, and wives in
particular were chosen for their "breed" and not their descent. Correspond-
ingly, the impress of race-traits is weakest (as may be observed even to-day) in
the true priestly and scholarly natures, 1 even though these often do stand in
close blood-relationship to the others. A strong spirit trains up the body into a
product of art. The Romans formed, in the midst of the confused and even
heteroclite tribes of Italy, a race of the firmest and strictest inward unity that
was neither Etruscan nor Latin nor merely "Classical," but quite specifically
Roman. 2 Nowhere is the force that cements a people set before us more plainly
than in Roman busts of the late Republican period.

I will cite yet another example, than which none more clearly exhibits the
errors that these scholars' notions of people, language, and race inevitably
entail, and in which lies the ultimate, perhaps the determining reason why the
Arabian Culture has never yet been recognized as an organism. It is that of
the Persians. Persian is an Aryan language, hence "the Persians" are an
"Indogermanic people," and hence Persian history and religion are the affair
of "Iranian" philology.

To begin with, is Persian a language of equal rank with the Indian, derived
from a common ancestor, or is it merely an Indian dialect? Seven centuries of
linguistic development, scriptless and therefore very rapid, lie between the
Old Vedic of the Indian texts and the Behistun Inscription 3 of Darius. It is
almost as great a gap as that between the Latin of Tacitus and the French of
the Strassburg Oath of 841* Now the Tell-el-Amarna letters and the archives

1 Which, therefore, have discovered for themselves the nonsensical designation "aristocracy
of intellect" (GeisttsaJel').

2 Although or should we say "thus"? Rome accorded citizenship to freedmen, who in
general were of wholly alien blood, and sons of ex-slaves were admitted to the Senate even by Ap-
pius Claudius the Censor in 310. One of them, Flavius, had already been curule ardilc.

3 See articles "Persia (history: ancient)," "Behistun," "Cuneiform," in Ency. Brit., XI cd.,
or indeed almost any work upon Babylonian and Persian antiquities. Tir.

4 Sworn by Louis the German and Charles the Bald in both languages. The manuscript of
the oath, however, is later say, 950. Tr.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 167

of Boghaz Keiii tell us many "Aryan" names of persons and gods of the middle
of the second millennium B.C. that is, the Vedic Age of Chivalry. It is
Palestine and Syria that furnish these names. Nevertheless, Eduard Meyer
observes * that they are Indian and not Persian, and the same holds good for
the numerals that have now been discovered. 2 There is not a unit of Persians,
or of any other "people" in the sense of our historical writers. They were
Indian heroes, who rode westward and with their precious weapon the war-
horse and their own ardent energy made themselves felt as a power far and wide
in the ageing Babylonian Empire.

About 600 there appears in the middle of this world Persis, a little district
with a politically united population of peasant barbarians. Herodotus says
that of its tribes only three were of genuine Persian nationality. Had the
language of these knights of old lived on in the hills, and is "Persians" really
a land-name that passed to a people? The Medes, who were very similar, bear
only the name of a land where an upper warrior-stratum had learned through
great political successes to feel itself as a unit. In the Assyrian archives of
Sargon and his successors (about 700) are found, along with the non-Aryan
place-names, numerous "Aryan" names of persons, all leading figures, but
Tiglath-Pileser IV (745-717) calls the people black-haired. 3 It can only have
been later that the "Persian people" of Cyrus and Darius was formed, out of
men of varied provenance, but forged to a strong inner unity of lived experience.
But when, scarce two centuries later, the Macedonians put an end to their
lordship was it that the Persians in this form were no longer in existence' 1 .
(Was there still a Lombard people at all in Italy in A.D. 900?) It is certain that
the very wide diffusion of the empire-language of Persia, and the distribution
of the few thousands of adult males from Persia over the immense system of mil-
itary and administrative business, must long ago have led to the dissolution of
the Persian nation and set up in its place, as carriers of the Persian name
in upper-class conscious of itself as a -political unit, of whose members very
few could have claimed descent from the invaders from Persia. 4 There is,
indeed, not even a country that can be considered as the theatre of Persian
history. The events of the period from Darius to Alexander took place partly
in northern Mesopotamia (that is, in the midst of an Aramaic-speaking popula-
tion), partly lower. down in old Sinear, anywhere but in Persis, where the hand-
some buildings begun by Xerxes were never carried out. The Parthians of the
succeeding Achsemenid period were a Mongol tribe which had adopted a Persian
dialect and in the midst of this people sought to embody the Persian national
feeling in themselves.

"Die altcsten daticrtcn Zcugnissc dtr iranischcn Sprache" (Zeitsckr. f. vgl. Spracbf. 41, p. z6.)
2 Sec above, p. 145.
1 Ed. Meyer, op. cit., pp. i, et seq.

4 Compare the absorption of the Norman conquerors into EnglancTand the subsequent develop-
ment of an English aristocracy. Tr.

168 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Here the Persian religion emerges as a problem no less difficult than those
of race and language. 1 Scholarship has associated it with these as though the
association were self-evident, and has, therefore, treated it always with refer-
ence to India. But the religion of these land- Vikings was not related to, it was
identical with the Vedic, as shown by the divine pairs Mitra-Varuna and Indra-
Nasatya of the Boghaz Keiii texts. And within this religion which held up its
head in the middle of the Babylonian world Zarathustra now appeared, from
out of the lower ranks of the people, as reformer. It is known that he was not
a Persian. That which he created (as I hope to show) was a transfer of Vedic
religion into the forms of the Aramaean world-contemplation, in which already
there were the faint beginnings of the Magian religiousness. The davas, the
gods of the old Indian beliefs, grew to be the demons of the Semitic and the
jinn of the Arabian. Yahweh and Beelzebub are related to one another pre-
cisely as Ahuramazda and Ahriman in this peasant-religion, which was essen-
tially Aramaean and, therefore, founded in an ethical-dualistic world-feeling.
Eduard Meyer 2 has correctly established the difference between the Indian
and the Iranian view of the world, but, owing to his erroneous premisses, has
not recognized its origin. Zarathustra is a travelling-companion of the prophets of
Israel, who like him, and at the same time, transformed the old (Mosaic-
Canaanitish) beliefs of the people. It is significant that the whole eschatology
is a common possession of the Persian and Jewish religions, and that the Avesta
texts were originally written in Aramaic (in Parthian times) and only after-
wards translated into Pehlevi. 3

But already in Parthian times there occurred amongst both Persians and
Jews that profoundly intimate change which makes no longer tribal attach-
ment but orthodoxy the hall-mark of nationality. 4 A Jew who went over to
the Mazda faith became thereby a Persian; a Persian who became a Christian
belonged to the Nestorian "people." The very dense population of north-
ern Mesopotamia the motherland of the Arabian Culture is partly of
Jewish and partly of Persian nationality in this sense of the word, which is
not at all concerned with race and very little with language. Even before
the birth of Christ, "Infidel" designates the non-Persian as it designates the
non-Jew.

This nation is the "Persian people" of the Sassanid empire, and, connected
with the fact, we find that Pehlevi and Hebrew die out simultaneously, Ara-
maic becoming the mother tongue of both communities. If we speak in terms
of Aryans and Semites, the Persians in the time of the Tell-el-Amarna Corre-

1 For what follows, cf. Ch. VII IX.

J Gescbichte des Altertums, I, 590, ct scq.

8 Andreas and Wackernagcl, Nackrickten der Gottingiscken Gesellschaft der Wissenscbaften (1911),
p. i, ct seq. [On the subject generally,scc articles by K. Gcldncr, "Zend-Avesta" and "Zoroaster,"
and by Ed. Meyer, "Parthia," in Ency. Brit., XI cd. Tr.]

4 Sec, further, below.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 169

spondencc were Aryans, but no " people" : in that of Darius a people, but with-
out race: in Sassanid times a community of believers, but of Semitic origin.
There is no proto-Persian "people" branched off from the Aryan, nor a general
history of the Persians, and for the three special histories, which are held to-
gether only by certain linguistic relations, there is not even a common historical
theatre.

With this are laid, at last, the foundations for a morphology of peoples. Di-
rectly its essence is seen, we see also an inward order in the historical stream of
the peoples. They are neither linguistic nor political nor zoological, but
spiritual, units. And this leads at once to the further distinction between
peoples before, within, and after a Culture. It is a fact that has been profoundly
felt in all ages that Culture-peoples are more distinct in character than the rest.
Their predecessors I will call primitive peoples. These are the fugitive and
heterogeneous associations that form and dissolve without ascertainable rule,
till at last, in the presentiment of a still unborn Culture (as, for example, in the
pre-Homeric, the pre-Christian, and the Germanic periods), phase by phase,
becoming ever more definite in type, they assemble the human material of a
population into groups, though all the time little or no alteration has been oc-
curring in the stamp of man. Such a superposition of phases leads from the
Cimbri and Teutones through the Marcomanni and Goths to the Franks, Lom-
bards, and Saxons. Instances of primitive peoples are the Jews and Persians of
the Seleucid age, the "Sea-peoples," the Egyptian Nomes of Menes's time. 1
And that which follows a Culture we may call from its best-known example,
the Egyptians of post-Roman times fellah-peoples.

In the tenth century of our era the Faustian soul suddenly awoke and mani-
fested itself in innumerable shapes. Amongst these, side by side with the
architecture and the ornament, there appears a distinctly characterized form
of " people. ' ' Out of the people-shapes of the Carolingian Empire the Saxons,
Swabians, Franks, Visigoths, Lombards arise suddenly the German, the
French, the Spaniards, the Italians. Hitherto (consciously and deliberately or
not) historical research has uniformly regarded these Culture-peoples as some-
thing in being, as primaries, and have treated the Culture itself as secondary, as
their product. The creative units of history, accordingly, were simply the
Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, and so on. As the Greek Cul-
ture was the work of the Hellenes, they must have been in existence as such far
earlier; therefore they must have been immigrants. Any other idea of creator
and creation seemed inconceivable.

I regard it, therefore, as a discovery of decisive importance that the facts
here set forth lead to the reverse conclusion. It will be established in all rigour

1 Dynasty I. Tr.

i;o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

that the great Cultures are entities, primary or original, that arise out of the
deepest foundations of spirituality, and that the peoples under the spell of a
Culture are, alike in their inward form and in their whole manifestation, its
products and not its authors. These shapes in which humanity is seized and
moulded possess style and style-history no less than kinds of art and modes of
thought. The people of Athens is a symbol not less than the Doric temple,
the Englishman not less than modern physics. There are peoples of Apollinian,
Magian, Faustian cast. The Arabian Culture was not created by "the Arabs"
quite the contrary; for the Magian Culture begins in the time of Christ, and
the Arabian people represents its last great creation of that kind, a community
bonded by Islam as the Jewish and Persian communities before it had been
bonded by their religions. World-history is the history of the great Cultures,
and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these
Cultures fulfil their Destinies.

In each of these Cultures, Mexican and Chinese, Indian and Egyptian, there
is whether our science is aware of it or not a group of great peoples of identical
style, which arises at the beginning of the springtime, forming states and carry-
ing history, and throughout the course of its evolution bears its fundamental
form onward to the goal. They are in the highest degree unlike amongst
themselves it is scarcely possible to conceive of a sharper contrast than that
between Athenians and Spartans, Germans and Frenchmen, Tsin and Tsu
and all military history shows national hatred as the loftiest method of in-
ducting historic decisions. But the moment that a people alien to the Culture
makes an appearance in the field of history, there awakens everywhere an over-
powering feeling of spiritual relationship, and the notion of the barbarian
meaning the man who inwardly does not belong to the Culture is as clear-cut
in the peoples of the Egyptian settlements and the Chinese world of states as it
is in the Classical. The energy of the form is so high that it grasps and recasts
neighbouring peoples, witness the Carthaginians of Roman times with their
half-Classical style, and the Russians who have figured as a people of Western
style from Catherine the Great to the fall of Petrine Tsardom.

Peoples in the style of their Culture we will call Nations, the word itself
distinguishing them from the forms that precede and that follow them. It is
not merely a strong feeling of "we" that forges the inward unity of its most
significant of all major associations; underlying the nation there is an Idea. This
stream of a collective being possesses a very deep relation to Destiny, to Time,
and to History, a relation that is different in each instance and one, too, that
determines the relation of the human material to race, language, land, state,
and religion. As the styles of the Old Chinese and the Classical peoples differ,
so also the styles of their histories.

Life as experienced by primitive and by fellaheen peoples is just the zo-
ological up-and-down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 171

time, wherein occurrences arc many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of signifi-
cance. The only historical peoples, the peoples whose existence is world-history,
are the nations. Let us be perfectly clear as to what is meant by this. The
Ostrogoths suffered a great destiny, and therefore, inwardly, they have no
history. Their battles and settlements were not necessary and therefore were
episodic; their end was insignificant. In 1500 B.C. that which lived about
Mycenas and Tiryns was not as yet a nation, and that which lived in Minoan
Crete was no longer a nation. Tiberius was the last ruler who tried to lead a
Roman nation further on the road of history, who sought to retrieve it for his-
tory. By Marcus Aurelius there was only a Romanic population to be defended
a field for occurrences, but no longer for history. How many free pre-genera-
tions of Mede or Achaean or Hun folk there were, in what sort of social groups
their predecessors and their descendants lived, cannot be determined and de-
pends upon no rule. But of a nation the life-period is determinate, and so are
the pace and the rhythm in which its history moves to fulfilment. From the
beginning of the Chou period to the rulership of Shih-Hwang-ti, from the events
on which the Troy legend was founded to Augustus, and from Thinite times to
the XVIII Dynasty, the numbers of generations are more or less the same. The
"Late" period of the Culture, from Solon to Alexander, from Luther to Na-
poleon, embraces no more than about ten generations. Within such limits the
destiny of the genuine Culture-people, and with it that of world-history in
general, reach fulfilment. The Romans, the Arabs, the Prussians, are late-born
nations. How many generations of Fabii and Junii had already come and gone
as Romans by the time Cannas was fought?

Further, nations are the true city-building peoples. In the strongholds they
arose, with the cities they ripen to the full height of their world-consciousness,
and in the world-cities they dissolve. Every town-formation that has character
has also national character. The village, which is wholly a thing of race, does
not yet possess it; the megalopolis possesses it no longer. Of this essential,
which so characteristically colours the nation's public life that its slightest
manifestation identifies it, we cannot exaggerate we can scarcely imagine
the force, the self-sufficingness, and the loneliness. If between the souls of two
Cultures the screen is impenetrable, if no Western may ever hope completely to
understand the Indian or the Chinese, this is equally so, even more so, as be-
tween well-developed nations. Nations understand one another as little as
individuals do so. Each understands merely a self-created picture of the other,
and individuals with the insight to penetrate deeper are few and far between.
Vis-a-vis the Egyptians, all the Classical peoples necessarily felt themselves
as relatives in one whole, but as between themselves they never understood each
other. What sharper contrast is there than that between the Athenian and the
Spartan spirit? German, French, and English modes of philosophical thinking
are distinct, not merely in Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz, but already in the

i 7 i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

age of Scholasticism; * and even now, in modern physics and chemistry, the
scientific method, the choice and type of experiments and hypotheses, their in-
ter-relations, and their relative importance for the course and aim of the investi-
gation are markedly different in every nation. German and French piety,
English and Spanish social ethics, German and English habits of life, stand so
far apart that for the average man, and, therefore, for the public opinion of his
community, the real inwardness of every foreign nation remains a deep secret and
a source of continual and pregnant error. In the Roman Empire men began
generally to understand one another, but this was precisely because there had
ceased to be anything worth understanding in the Classical city. With the
advent of mutual comprehension this particular humanity ceased to live in
nations, and ipso facto ceased to be historic. 2

Owing to the very depth of these experiences, it is not possible for a whole
people to be uniformly and throughout a Culture-people, a nation. Amongst
primitives each individual man has the same feeling of group-obligations, but
the awakening of a nation into self-consciousness invariably takes place in
gradations that is, pre-eminently in the particular class that is strongest of
soul and holds the others spellbound by a power derived from what it has ex-
perienced. Every nation is represented in history by a minority. At the beginning of
the springtime it is the nobility, 3 which in that period of its first appearance
is the fine flowering of the people, the vessel in which the national character
unconscious, but felt all the more strongly in its cosmic pulse receives its
destined Style. The "we" is the knightly class, in the Egyptian feudal period
of zyoo not less than in the Indian and the Chinese of izoo. The Homeric
heroes are the Danai; the Norman barons are England. Centuries later, Saint-
Simon the embodiment, it is true, of an older France used to say that
"all France" was assembled in the King's ante-room, and there was a time in
which Rome and the Senate were actually identical. With the advent of the
town the burgher becomes the vessel of nationality, and (as we should expect
from the growth of intellectuality) of a national consciousness that it gets
from the nobility and carries through to its fulfilment. Always it is particular
circles, graduated in fine shades, that in the name of the people live, feel, act, and
know how to die, but these circles become larger and larger. In the eighteenth
century arose the Western concept of the Nation which sets up (and on occasion
energetically insists upon) the claim to be championed by everybody without
exception; but in reality, as we know, the emigres were just as convinced as the
Jacobins that they were the people, the representatives of the French nation.
A Culture-people which is coincident with "all" does not exist this is
possible only in primitive and fellaheen peoples, only in a mere joint being with-

1 Albcrtus Magnus; St. Thomas Aquinas; Grossctcstc, and Roger Bacon. Tr.

2 Cf. p. 105.
Cf. Ch. X.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 173

out depth or historical dignity. So long as a people is a nation and works out
the Destiny of a nation, there is in it a minority which in the name of all repre-
sents and fulfils its history.

The Classical nations, in accordance with the static-Euclidean soul of their
Culture, were corporeal units of the smallest imaginable size. It was not
Hellenes or lonians that were nations, but in each city the Demos, a union of
adult men, legally and by the same token nationally defined between the type of the
hero as upper limit and the slave as lower. 1 Synoecism, that mysterious process
of early periods in which the inhabitants of a countryside give up their villages
and assemble themselves as a town, marks the moment at which, having arrived
at self-consciousness, the Classical nation constitutes itself as such. We can still
trace the way in which this form of the nation steadily makes good from
Homeric times 2 to the epoch of the great colonizations. It responds exactly to
the Classical prime-symbol : each folk was a body, visible and survey able, a <rwjua,
the express negation of the idea of geographical space.

It is of no importance to Classical history whether or not the Etruscans in
Italy were identical physically or linguistically with the bearers of this name
amongst the "Sea-peoples," or what the relation was between the pre-Homeric
units of the Pelasgi or Danai and the later bearers of the Doric or the Hellenic
name. If, about uoo, there are Doric and Etruscan primitive peoples (as is
probable), nevertheless a Doric or an Etruscan nation never existed. In Tuscany as
in the Peloponnese there were only City-states, national points which in the
period of colonization could only multiply, never expand. The Etruscan wars of
Rome were always waged against one or more cities, 3 and the nations that the
Persians and the Carthaginians confronted were of this same type. To speak of
" the Greeks and the Romans" as the eighteenth century did (and as we still do)
is completely erroneous. A Greek "nation" in our sense is a misconception
the Greeks themselves never knew such an idea at all. The name of " Hellenes,"
which arose about 500, did not denote a people, but the aggregate of Classical
Culture-men, the sum of their nations, 4 in contradistinction to the "Barbarian"
world. And the Romans, a true urban people, could not conceive of their

1 See p. 60 above. The slave did not belong to the nation. On this account the enrolment
of non-citizens in the army of a city, which on occasions of dire crisis was inevitable, was always
felt as a profound blow to the national idea.

2 Even in the Iliad we can perceive the tendency to the nation-feeling in the small, and even
the smallest, aggregates.

3 And she had rarely to deal with anything more formidable than a loose partial confederacy.
Often Etruscan cities were in alliance with Rome against other Etruscan cities. Tr.

4 It is not to be overlooked that both Plato and Aristotle in their political writings were unable
to conceive of the ideal people otherwise than in the Polis form. But it was equally natural for the
eighteenth-century thinkers to regard "the Ancients" as nations after the fashion of Shaftcsbury
and Montesquieu it is we their successors who ought not to have stayed on that note.

i 7 4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Empire otherwise than in the form of innumerable nation-points, the civitates
into which, juridically as in other respects, they dissolved all the primitive
peoples of their Imperium. 1 When national feeling in this shape is extinguished,
there is an end to Classical history.

It will be the task one of the heaviest tasks of historians to trace,
generation by generation, the quiet fading-out of the Classical nations in the
eastern Mediterranean during the "Late Classical" age, and the ever stronger
inflow of a new nation-spirit, the Magian.

A nation of the Magian type is the community of co-believers, the group of
all who know the right way to salvation and are inwardly linked to one another
by the ijma 2 of this belief. Men belonged to a Classical nation by virtue of the
possession of citizenship, but to a Magian nation by virtue of a sacramental
act circumcision for the Jews, specific forms of baptism for the Mandseans
or the Christians. An unbeliever was for a Magian folk what an alien was for
a Classical no intercourse with him, no connubium and this national
separation went so far that in Palestine a Jewish-Aramaic and a Christian-
Aramaic dialect formed themselves side by side. 3 The Faustian nation, though
necessarily bound up with a particular religiousness, is not so with a particular
confession; the Classical nation is by type non-exclusive in its relations to
different cults; but the Magian nation comprises neither more nor less than is covered
by the idea of one or another of the Magian Churches. Inwardly the Classical nation
is linked with the city, and the Western with a landscape, but the Arabian
knows neither fatherland nor mother tongue. Outwardly its specific world-
outlook is only expressed by the distinctive script which each such nation de-
velops as soon as it is born. But for that very reason the inwardness and hidden
force the magic, in fact of a Magian nation-feeling impresses us Faustians,
who notice the absence of the home-idea, as something entirely enigmatic and
uncanny. This tacit, self-secure cohesion (that of the Jews, for example, in the
homes of the Western peoples) is what entered "Roman Law" (called by a
Classical label but worked out by Aramaans} as the concept of the "juridical per-
son," 4 which is nothing but the Magian notion of a community. Post-exilic
Judaism was a juridical person long before anyone had discovered the concept
itself.

The primitives who preceded this evolution were predominantly tribal
associations, among them the South-Arabian Minasans, 5 who appear about the
beginning of the first millennium, and whose name vanishes in the first century

1 Mommsen described the Roman Empire as a "universal Empire founded upon municipal au-
tonomy." And even Alexander's empire was originally conceived, and to a great extent actually
organized, in this spirit. See P. Jouguct, L Impirialisme macidonitn (1916), Ch. IV. Tr.

2 See p. 67.

3 F. N. Finck, Die Sprathstamme des Erdkreises (1915), pp. 19, et scq.

4 About the end of the second century of our era.
6 Sec foot-note, p. 197, ct seq. Tr.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 175

before Christ; the Aramaic-speaking Chaldeans, who, likewise about 1000 B.C.,
sprang up as clan-groups and from 659 to 539 ruled the Babylonian world; the
Israelites before the Exile; 1 and the Persians of Cyrus. 2 So strongly already the
populations felt this form that the priesthoods which developed here, there,
and everywhere after the time of Alexander received the names of foundered or
fictitious tribes. Amongst the Jews and the South-Arabian Sabasans they were
called Levites; amongst the Medes and Persians, Magi (after an extinct Indian
tribe); and amongst the adherents of the new Babylonian religion Chaldeans
(also after a disintegrated clan-grouping). 3 But here, as in all other Cultures,
the energy of the national consensus completely overrode the old tribal arrange-
ments of the primitives. Just as the Populus Romanus unquestionably contained
folk-elements of very varied provenance, and as the nation of the French took
in Salian Franks and Romanic and Old Celtic natives alike, so the Magian na-
tion also ceased to regard origin as a distinguishing mark. The process, of
course, was an exceedingly long one. The tribe still counts for much with the
Jews of the Maccabean period and even with the Arabs of the first Caliphs;
but for the inwardly ripened Culture-peoples of this world, such as the Jews
of the Talmudic period, it no longer possessed any meaning. He who belongs
to the Faith belongs to the Nation it would have been blasphemy even to
admit any other distinction. In early Christian times the Prince of Adiabene 4
went over to Judaism with his people in a body, and they were all ipso facto
incorporated in the Jewish nation. The same applies to the nobility of Armenia
and even the Caucasian tribes (which at that period must have Judaized on a
large scale) and, in the opposite direction, to the Beduins of Arabia, right down
to the extreme south, and beyond them again to African tribes as far afield as
Lake Chad. 5 Here evidently is a national common feeling proof even against
such race-distinctions as these. It is stated that even to-day Jews can amongst
themselves distinguish very different races at the first glance, and that in the
ghettos of eastern Europe the "tribes" (in the Old Testament sense) are clearly
recognized. But none of this constitutes a difference of nation. According to
von Erckert 6 the West-European Jew-type is universally distributed within the
non-Jewish Caucasian peoples, whereas according to Weissenberg 7 it does not
occur at all amongst the long-headed Jews of southern Arabia, where the

1 A loose group of Edomite tribes which, with Moabites, Amalekites, Ishmaelites, and others,
thus constituted a fairly uniform Hebrew-speaking population.

2 See p. 167.

1 Aristotle says that "philosophers are called Calani among the Indians, and Jews among
the Syrians." Exactly the same is stated by Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador at Pataliputra,
of Brahmins and Jews. Tr.

4 The district south of Lake Van, of which the capital was Arbela, the old home of the goddess
Ishtar.

5 As evidenced by the Falasha, the black Jews of Abyssinia.

6 Arch. f. Antbrop., Vol. XIX.

7 Zeitschr. f. Ethnol. (1919).

176 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Sabasan tomb-sculptures show a human type that might almost claim to be
Roman or Germanic and is the ancestor of these Jews who were converted by
missionary effort at least by the birth of Christ.

But this resolution of the tribal primitives into the Magian nations of Per-
sians, Jews, Mandasans, Christians, and the rest must have occurred quite
generally and on an immense scale. I have already drawn attention to the deci-
sive fact that long before the beginning of our era the Persians represented simply
a religious community, and it is certain that their numbers were indefinitely in-
creased by accessions to the Mazdaist faith. The Babylonian religion vanished
at that time which means that its adherents became in part Jews and in part
Persians but emerging from it there is a new religion, inwardly alien to both
Jewish and Persian, an astral religion, which bears the name of the Chaldecs
and whose adherents constituted a genuine Aramaic-speaking nation. From
this Aramaean population of Chaldean-Jewish-Persian nationality came, firstly
the Babylonian Talmud, the Gnosis, and the religion of Mani, and secondly,
in Islamic times, Sufism and the Shia.

Moreover, as seen from Edessa, the inhabitants of the Classical world, they
also, appear as nations in the Magian style. "The Greeks" in the Eastern idiom
means the aggregate of all who adhered to the Syncretic cults and were bound
together by the ijma of the Late Classical religiousness. The Hellenistic city-
nations are no longer in the picture, which shows only one community of be-
lievers, the "worshippers of the mysteries," who under the names of Helios,
Jupiter, Mithras, 0e6s ity'io-ros, worshipped a kind of Yahweh or Allah.
Throughout the East, Greekness is a definite religious notion, and for that mat-
ter one completely concordant with the facts as they then were. The feeling
of the Polis is almost extinct, and a Magian nation needs neither home nor
community of origin. Even the Hellenism of the Seleucid Empire, which made
converts in Turkestan and on the Indus, was related in inward form to Persian
and post-exilic Judaism. Later, the Aramaean Porphyry, the pupil of Plotinus,
attempted to organize this Greekness as a cult-Church on the model of the
Christian and the Persian, and the Emperor Julian raised it to the dignity of
being the State Church an act not merely religious, but also and above all
national. When a Jew sacrificed to Sol or to Apollo, he thereby became a Greek.
So, for example Ammonius Saccas (d. 141), the teacher of Plotinus and probably
also of Origen, went over "from the Christians to the Greeks"; so also Por-
phyry, born Malchus and (like the "Roman" jurist Ulpian) * a Phoenician of
Tyre. 2 In these cases we see jurists and State officials taking Latin, and phi-
losophers Greek, names and for the philological spirit of modern and religious
research, this is quite historical enough to justify these men's being regarded

1 Di&esta, 50, 15.

2 GcfFckcn, Der Ausgang des griech.-rom. Heiderttum (1910), p. 57 [English readers may refer to
the article "Ncoplatonism" and shorter articles under the personal names, in Ency. Brit., XI cd.
TV.]

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 177