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

as Roman and Greek in the Classical city-national sense! But how many of
the great Alexandrines may have been Greeks only in the Magian sense of the
term? In point of birth were not Plotinus and Diophantus 1 perhaps Jews or
Chaldeans?

Now, the Christians also felt themselves from the outset as a nation of the
Magian cast, and, moreover, the others, Greeks ("heathen") and Jews alike,
regarded them as such. Quite logically the latter considered their secession from
Judaism as high treason, and the former their missionary infiltration into the
Classical cities as an invasion and conquest, while the Christians, on their side,
designated people of other faiths as TO. Wvrj. 2 When the Monophy sites and
the Nestorians separated themselves from the Orthodox, new nations came into
being as well as new Churches. The Nestorians since 1450 have been governed
by the Mar Shimun, 3 who was at once prince and patriarch of his people and,
vis-a-vis the Sultan, occupied exactly the same position as, long before, the
Jewish Resh Galutha had occupied in the Persian Empire. 4 This nation-con-
sciousness, derived from particular and defined world-feeling and therefore self-
evident with an a -priori sureness, cannot be ignored if we are to understand the
later persecutions of the Christians. The Magian State is inseparably bound up
with the concept of orthodoxy. Caliphate, nation, and Church form an intimate
unit. It was as states that Adiabene went over to Judaism, Osrhoene about zoo
(so soon !) from Greekdom to Christendom, Armenia in the sixth century from
the Greek to the Monophysite Church. Each of these events expresses the fact
that the State was identical with the orthodox community as a juridical person. 5
If Christians lived in the Islamic State, Nestorians in the Persian, Jews in the
Byzantine, they did not and could not as unbelievers belong to it, and conse-
quently were thrown back upon their own jurisdictions. 6 If by reason of their
numbers or their missionary spirit they became a threat to the continuance

1 See Vol. I, pp. 63, 71. Tr.

2 Which we translate by "Gentiles," but which literally means "the nations" or "peo-
ples." Tr.

3 See the article "Nestorians," Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr.

4 See the articles "Jews" ( 43), "Exilarch," and "Gaon," Ency. Brit., XI. ed. In Europe, too,
far into the Dispersion, there are rabbis recognized by the State as governors of thek communities,
such as the famous Rabbi Low of Prague (1513-1609). Tr.

5 It may not be at all fanciful to connect the Reception of "Roman" law in Germany and the
rise of the doctrine of cujus regie, ejus religio which played so great a part in the religious wars and
treaties of our sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At any rate, "practical politics" so-called pro-
vides an inadequate motive by itself to account for the latter. Considering it in contrast to the
notion of Mortmain, and having regard to the intensity of religious belief in many of the princes
who applied it, the idea appears as something much more positive than a mere formula of com-
promise. Tr.

' Sec p. 70. The "capitulations" under which until recently Europeans were exempt from
the jurisdiction of Turkish courts are regarded nowadays as a right enforced by more civilized pow-
ers to protect their subjects from the laws of a less civilized state, and their abolition is a symbol
of the rise of the latter to the rank of a civilized power. But originally it was quite the reverse.
The first "capitulation" was sued for by France in an hour of danger when Turkish aid was essen-
tial to her. See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article "Capitulations." Tr.

i 7 8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

of the identity of state and creed-community, persecution became a national
duty. It was on this account that first the "orthodox" (or "Greek") and then
the Ncstorian Christians suffered in the Persian Empire. Diocletian also, who
as "Caliph" l (Dominus et Deus) had linked the Imperium with the pagan cult-
Churches and saw himself in all sincerity as Commander of these Faithful,
could not evade the duty of suppressing the second Church. Constantine
changed the " true" Church and in that act changed the nationality of the Byzantine
Empire. From that point on, the Greek name slowly passed over to the Chris-
tian nation, and specifically to that Christian nation which the Emperor as
Head of the Faithful recognized and allowed to sit in the Great Councils.
Hence the uncertain lines of the picture of Byzantine history in 190 the or-
ganization that of a Classical Imperium, but the substance already a Magian
national state; in 312. a change of nationality without change of name. Under
this name of "Greeks," first Paganism as a nation fought the Christians, and
then Christianity as a nation fought Islam. And in the latter fight, Islam itself
being a nation also (the Arabian), nationality stamped itself more and more
deeply upon events. Hence the present-day Greeks are a creation of the Magian
Culture, developed first by the Christian Church, then by the sacred language
of this Church, and finally by the name of this Church. Islam brought with it
from the home of Mohammed the Arab name as the badge of its nationality.
It is a mistake to equate these "Arabs" with the Beduin tribes of the desert.
What created the new nation, with its passionate and strongly characteristic
soul, was the consensus of the new faith. Its unity is no more derived from race
and home than that of the Christian, Jewish, or Persian, and therefore it did
not "migrate"; rather it owes its immense expansion to the incorporation
within itself of the greater part of the early Magian nations. With the end of
the first millennium of our era these nations one and all pass over into the form
of fellah-peoples, and it is as fellaheen that the Christian peoples of the
Balkans under Turkish rule, the Parsees in India, and the Jews in Western Europe
have lived ever since. 2

In the West, nations of Faustian style emerge, more and more distinctly, from
the time of Otto the Great (936-973), and in them the primitive peoples of the
Carolingian period are swiftly dissolved. 3 Already by A.D. 1000 the men who

1 See Vol. I., p. zii.

2 The author's meaning may perhaps be precised thus: so much of the old Magian nations as
was not Arabized became fellah peoples, cither outside the Magian sphere (as in Europe and India)
or within it, under the Turkish (Mongol) domination, but even the old Arab-element itself was
largely ripe for the change into the fellah condition when the Turks came. Tr.

* I am convinced that the nations of China which sprang up in members in the middle, Hwang-
Ho region at the beginning of the Chou dynasty, as also the regional peoples of the Egyptian Old
Kingdom (which had each its own capital and its own religion, and as late as Roman times fought
each other in definitely religious wars), were in their inward form more closely akin to the peoples
of the West than to those of the Classical and the Arabian worlds. However, research into such
fields has hitherto been conspicuous by its absence.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 179

"mattered most" were everywhere beginning to sense themselves as Germans,
Italians, Spaniards, Frenchmen; whereas hardly six generations earlier their
ancestors had been to the depths of their souls Franks, Lombards, and Visi-
goths.

The people-form of this Culture is founded, like its Gothic architecture
and its Infinitesimal Calculus upon a tendency to the Infinite, in the spatial as
well as the temporal sense. The nation-feeling comprises, to begin with, a
geographical horizon that, considering the period and its means of communica-
tion, can only be called vast, and is not paralleled in any other Culture. The
fatherland as extent, as a region whose boundaries the individual has scarcely,
if ever, seen and which nevertheless he will defend and die for, is something that
in its symbolic depth and force men of other Cultures can never comprehend.
The Magian nation does not as such possess an earthly home; the Classical
possesses it only as a point-focus. The actuality that, even in Gothic times,
united men from the banks of the Adige with men in the Order-castles of Lith-
uania in an association of feeling would have been inconceivable even in ancient
China and ancient Egypt, and stands in the sharpest opposition to the actuality
of Rome and Athens, where every member of the Demos had the rest constantly
in sight.

Still stronger is the sensitivity to distance in time. Before the fatherland-
idea (which is a consequence of the existence of the nation) emerged at all, this
passion evolved another idea to which the Faustian nations owe that existence
- the dynastic idea. Faustian peoples are historical peoples, communities that
feel themselves bound together not by place or consensus, but by history; and
the eminent symbol and vessel of the common Destiny is the ruling "house."
For Egyptian and for Chinese mankind the dynasty is a symbol of quite other
meaning. Here what it signifies, as a will and an activity, is Time. All that
we have been, all that we would be, is manifested in the being of the one gener-
ation; and our sense of this is much too profound to be upset by the worthless-
ness of a regent. What matters is not the person, but the idea, and it is for the
sake of the idea that thousands have so often marched to their deaths with
conviction in a genealogical quarrel. Classical history was for Classical eyes
only a chain of incidents leading from moment to moment; Magian history
was for its members the progressive actualization in and through mankind
of a world-plan laid down by God and accomplished between a creation and a
cataclysm; but Faustian history is in our eyes a single grand willing of conscious
logic, in the accomplishment of which nations are led and represented by their
rulers. It is a trait of race. Rational foundations it has not and cannot have
it has simply been felt so, and because it has been felt so, the companion-trust of
the Germanic migration-time developed on into the feudal troth of the Gothic,
the loyalty of the Baroque, and the merely seemingly undynastic patriotism of
the nineteenth century. We must not misjudge the depth and dignity of this

i8o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

feeling because there is an endless catalogue of perjured vassals and peoples ' and
an eternal comedy in the cringing of courtiers and the abjectness of the vulgar.
All great symbols are spiritual and can be comprehended only in their highest
forms. The private life of a pope bears no relation to the idea of the Papacy.
Henry the Lion's very defection 2 shows how fully in a time of nation-forming
a real ruler feels the destiny of " his" people incorporated in himself. He repre-
sents that destiny in the face of history, and at times it costs him his honour to
do so.

All nations of the West are of dynastic origins. In the Romanesque and even
in Early Gothic architecture the soul of the Carolingian primitives still quivers
through. There is no French or German Gothic, but Salian, Rhenish, and
Suabian, as there is Visigothic (northern Spain, southern France) and Lom-
bard and Saxon Romanesque. But over it all there spreads soon the minority,
composed of men of race, that feels membership in a nation as a great historical
vocation. From it proceed the Crusades, and in them there truly were French
and German chivalries. It is the hall-mark of Faustian peoples that they are
conscious of the direction of their history. But this direction attaches to the
sequence of the generations, and so the nature of the race-ideal is genealogical
through and through Darwinism, even, with its theories of descent and in-
heritance is a sort of caricature of Gothic heraldry and the world-as-history,
when every individual lives in the plane of it, contains not only the tree of the
individual family, ruling or other, but also the tree of the people as the basic
form of all its happenings. 3 It needs very exact observation to perceive that this
Faustian-genealogical principle, with its eminently historical notions of
" Ebenbitrtigkeit" (equivalence by virtue of birth) and of purity of blood, is just
as alien to the Egyptians and Chinese, for all their historical disposition, as it
is to the Roman nobility and the Byzantine Empire. On the other hand, neither
our peasantry nor the patriciate of the cities is conceivable without it. The
scientific conception of the people, which I have dissected above, is derived
essentially from the genealogical sense of the Gothic period. The notion that
the peoples have their trees has made the Italians proud to be the heirs of Rome,
and the Germans proud to recall their Teuton forefathers, and that is something
quite different from the Classical belief in timeless descent from heroes and gods.

1 That the dynasts themselves have contributed heavily to the catalogue of perjury and bad faith
only reinforces the argument. Tr.

2 His desertion of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in the Lombard war, 1176. The details of
the long struggle between Frederick and Henry will be found in any fairly full history of Europe
or in the respective articles devoted to them in the Ency. Brit., XI cd. While Frederick stood and
with real hopes as well as ideals for the inclusive Empire, Henry through all his vicissitudes stood
for Germany's eastern expansion, the colonization of the Slavonic north-cast, and the development
of the Baltic. Tr.

3 In mcdiarval hymns the cross is symbolically regarded as a tree bearing Christ as its last and
grandest fruit; it is identified, indeed, with the Tree of Knowledge. (Sec Yrjo Him, Thi Stcrd
Shrine.') Tr.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 181

And eventually, when after 1789 the notion of mother tongue came to be fitted
on to the dynastic principle, the once merely scientific fancy of a primitive
Indogermanic people transformed itself into a deeply felt genealogy of "the
Aryan race," and in the process the word "race" became almost a designation
for Destiny.

But the "races" of the West are not the creators of the great nations, but
their result. Not one of them had yet come into existence in Carolingian times.
It was the class-ideal of chivalry that worked creatively in different ways upon
Germany, England, France, and Spain and impressed upon an immense area that
which within the individual nations is felt and experienced as race. On this
rest (as I have said before) the nations so historical, so alien to the Classical
of equivalence by birth (peer-age, Ebenburtigkeii) and blood-purity. It was
because the blood of the ruling family incorporated the destiny, the being, of
the whole nation, that the state-system of the Baroque was of genealogical
structure and that most of the grand crises assumed the form of wars of dynastic
succession. Even the catastrophic ruin of Napoleon, which settled the world's
political organization for a century, took its shape from the fact than an ad-
venturer dared to drive out with his blood that of the old dynasties, and that
his attack upon a symbol made it historically a sacred duty to resist him. For
all these peoples were the consequence of dynastic destinies. That there is a
Portuguese people, and a Portuguese Brazil in the midst of Spanish America,
is the result of the marriage of Count Henry of Burgundy in 1095. That there
are Swiss and Hollanders is the result of a reaction against the House of Habs-
burg. That Lorraine is the name of a land and not of a people is an consequence
of the childlessness of Lothar II.

It was the Kaiser-idea that welded the disjunct primitives of Charlemagne's
time into the German nation. Germany and Empire are inseparable ideas.
The fall of the Hohenstaufens meant the replacement of one great dynasty by
a handful of small and tiny ones; and the German nation of Gothic style was
inwardly shattered even before the beginning of the Baroque that is, at the
very time when the nation-idea was being raised to higher levels of intellect in
leader-cities like Paris, Madrid, London, and Vienna. The Thirty Years' War,
so conventional history says, destroyed Germany in its flower. Not so; the
fact that it could occur at all in this wretched form simply confirmed and showed
up a long-completed decadence it was the final consequence of the fall of
the Hohenstaufens. There could hardly be a more convincing proof that
Faustian nations are dynastic units. But then again, the Salians and the Hohen-
staufens created also at least in idea an Italian nation out of Romans,
Lombards, and Normans. Only the Empire made it possible for them to stretch
a hand back to the age of Rome. Even though alien power evoked the hostility
of the townsmen, and split the two primary orders, the nobles to the Emperor,
the priests to the Pope; even though in these conflicts of Guelph and Ghibelline

181 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the nobility soon lost its importance and the Papacy rose through the anti-
dynastic cities to political supremacy; even though at the last there was but a
tangle of predatory states whose "Renaissance "-politics opposed the soaring
world-policy of the Gothic Empire, as Milan of old had defied the will of
Frederick Barbarossa yet the ideal of Una Italia, the ideal for which Dante
sacrificed the peace of his life, was a pure dynastic creation of the great Germany
emperors. The Renaissance, whose historical horizon was that of the urban
patriciate, led the nation as far out of the path of self-fulfilment as it is possible
to imagine. All through the Baroque and Rococo the land was depressed to the
state of being a mere pawn in the power-politics of alien houses. And not until
after 1800 did Romanticism arise and reawaken the Gothic feeling with an in-
tensity that made of it a political power.

The French people was forged out of Franks and Visigoths by its kings. It
learned to feel itself as a whole for the first time at Bou vines in 12.1 4.* Still
more significant is the creation of the House of Habsburg, which, out of a
population linked neither by speech nor folk-feeling nor tradition caused to
arise the Austrian nation, which proved its nationhood in defending Maria
Theresa and in resisting Napoleon its first tests, and its last. The political
history of the Baroque age is in essentials the history of the Houses of Bourbon
and Habsburg. The rise of the House of Wettin in place of that of Welf is the
reason why "Saxony" was on the Weser in 800, and is on the Elbe to-day.
Dynastic events, and finally the intervention of Napoleon, brought it about that
half of Bavaria has shared in the history of Austria and that the Bavarian State
consists for the most part of Franconia and Suabia.

The latest nation of the West is the Prussian, a creation of the Hohenzollerns
as the Roman was the last creation of the Classical Polis-feeling, and the Arabian
the last product of a religious consensus. At Fehbellin 2 the young nation gained
its recognition; at Rossbach 3 it won for Germany. It was Goethe who with
his infallible eye for historic turning-points described the then new ' 'Minna von
Barnhelm" as the first German poetry of specifically national content. It is one
more example, and a deeply significant one, to show how dynastically the
Western nations defined themselves, that Germany thus at one stroke re-dis-
covered her poetic language. The collapse of the Hohenstaufen rule had been
accompanied by that of Germany's Gothic literature also. What did emerge
here and there in the following centuries the golden age of all the Western
literatures was undeserving of the name. But with the victories of Frederick
the Great a new poesy began. "From Lessing to Hebbel" means the same as
"from Rossbach to Sedan." The attempts that were made to restore the lost
connexion by consciously leaning upon, first the French, and then Shakespeare,

1 And every English schoolboy knows the meaning of the "Early Plantagcncts." Tr.

1 Against the Swedes, 1675. Tr.

8 Against the French and their German dependent allies, 1757. Tr.

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 183

upon the Volkslied, and finally (in Romanticism) upon the poetry of the age
of chivalry, produced at least the unique phenomenon of an art-history which,
though it never really attained one aim, was constituted, for the greater part,
of flashes of genius.

The end of the eighteenth century witnessed the accomplishment of that
remarkable turn with which national consciousness sought to emancipate itself
from the dynastic principle. To all appearance this had happened in England
long before; In this connexion Magna Charta (12.15) w ^ occur to most readers,
but some will not have failed to observe that on the contrary, the very recog-
nition of the nation involved in the recognition of its representatives gave the
dynastic feeling a fresh-enforced depth and refinement to which the peoples
of the Continent remained almost utter strangers. If the modern Englishman
is (without appearing so) the most conservative human being in the world, and
if in consequence his political management solves its problems so much by word-
less harmony of national pulse instead of express discussion, and therefore has
been the most successful up to now, the underlying cause is the early emancipation
of the dynastic feeling from its expression in monarchical power.

The French Revolution, on the contrary, was in this regard only a victory
of Rationalism. It set free not so much the nation as the concept of the nation.
The dynastic has penetrated into the blood of the Western races, and on that
very account it is a vexation to their intellect. For a dynasty represents history,
it is the history-become-flesh of a land, and intellect is timeless and unhistorical.
The ideas of the Revolution were all "eternal" and "true." Universal human
rights, freedom, and equality are literature and abstraction and not facts. Call
all this republican if you will, in reality it was one more case of a minority
striving in the name of all to introduce the new ideal into the world of fact.
It became a power, but at the cost of the ideal, and all it did was to replace
the old felt adherence by the reasoned patriotism of the nineteenth century;
by a civilized nationalism, only possible in our Culture, which in France itself
and even to-day is unconsciously dynastic; and by the concept of the fatherland
as dynastic unit which emerged first in the Spanish and Prussian uprisings against
Napoleon and then in the German and Italian wars of dynastic unification. Out
of the opposition of race and speech, blood and intellect, a new and specifically
Western ideal arose to confront the genealogical ideal that of the mother
tongue. Enthusiasts there were in both countries who thought to replace the
unifying force of the Emperor- and King-idea by the linking of republic and
poetry something of the "return to nature" in this, but a return of history
to nature. In place of the wars of succession came language-struggles, in which
one nation sought to force its language and therewith its nationality upon the
fragments of another. But no one will fail to observe that even the rationalistic
conception of a nation as a linguistic unit can at best ignore, never abolish,
the dynastic feeling, any more than a Hellenistic Greek could inwardly over-

x84 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

come his Polis-consciousncss or a modern Jew the national ijma. The mother
tongue does not arise out of nothing, but is itself a product of dynastic history.
Without the Capetian line there would have been no French language, but a
Romance-Prankish in the north and a Provencal in the south. The Italian writ-
ten-language is to be credited to the German Emperors and above all to Frederick
II. The modern nations are primarily the populations of an old dynastic his-
tory. Yet in the nineteenth century the second concept of the nation as a unit
of written language has annihilated the Austrian, and probably created the
American. Thenceforward there have been in all countries two parties repre-
senting the nation in two opposed aspects, as dynastic-historical unit and as
intellectual unit the race party and the language party but these are re-
flections that evoke too soon problems of politics that must await a later chap-
ter.

At first, when the land was still without cities, it was the nobility that
represented, in the highest sense of the word, the nation. The peasantry,
"everlasting" and historyless, was a people before the dawn of the Culture, and
in very fundamental characters it continued to be the primitive people, surviving
when the form of the nation had passed away again. "The nation," like every
other grand symbol of the Culture, is intimately the cherished possession of a
few; those who have it are born to it as men are born to art or philosophy, and
the distinctions of creator, critic, and layman, or something like them, hold for
it also alike in a classical Polis, a Jewish consensus, and a Western people.
When a nation rises up ardent to fight for its freedom and honour, it is always
a minority that really fires the multitude. The people " awakens" it is more
than a figure of speech, for only thus and then does the waking-consciousness of
the whole become manifested. All these individuals whose "we"-feeling yes-
terday went content with a horizon of family and job and perhaps home-town
are suddenly to-day men of nothing less than the People. Their thought and
feeling, their Ego, and therewith the " it" in them have been transformed to the
very depths. It has become historic. And then even the unhistorical peasant
becomes a member of the nation, and a day dawns for him in which he ex-
periences history and not merely lets it pass him by.

But in the world-cities, besides a minority which has history and livingly
experiences, feels, and seeks to lead the nation, there arises another minority
of timeless a-historic, literary men, men not of destiny, but of reasons and
causes, men who are inwardly detached from the pulse of blood and being, wide-
awake thinking consciousnesses, that can no longer find any "reasonable"
connotation for the nation-idea. Cosmopolitanism is a mere waking-conscious
association of intelligentsias. In it there is hatred of Destiny, and above all of
history as the expression of Destiny. Everything national belongs to race

PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN 185

so much so that it is incapable of finding language for itself, clumsy in all that
demands thought, and shiftless to the point of fatalism. Cosmopolitanism is
literature and remains literature, very strong in reasons, very weak in defending
them otherwise than with more reasons, in defending them with the blood.

All the more, then, this minority of far superior intellect chooses the in-
tellectual weapon, and all the more is it able to do so as the world cities are pure
intellect, rootless, and by very hypothesis the common property of the civili-
zation. The born world-citizens, world-pacifists, and world-reconcilers
alike in the China of the "Contending States," in Buddhist India, in the Hellen-
istic age, and in the Western world to-day are the spiritual leaders of fellaheen.
" Panem et circenses" is only another formula for pacifism. In the history of all
Cultures there is an anti-national element, whether we have evidences of it or
not. Pure self-directed thinking was ever alien to life, and therefore alien to
history, unwarlike, raceless. Consider our Humanism and Classicism, the Soph-
ists of Athens, Buddha and Lao-tze not to mention the passionate con-
tempt of all nationalisms displayed by the great champions of the ecclesiastical
and the philosophical world-view. However the cases differ amongst them-
selves otherwise, they are alike in this, that the world-feeling of race; the po-
litical (and therefore national) instinct for fact ("my country, right or
wrong!"); the resolve to be the subject and not the object of evolution (for one
or the other it has to be) in a word, the will-to-power has to retreat and
make room for a tendency of which the standard-bearers are most often men
without original impulse, but all the more set upon their logic; men at home in
a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen who believe that they can re-
place the actual by the logical, the might of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny
by Reason. It begins with the everlastingly fearful who withdraw themselves
out of actuality into cells and study-chambers and spiritual communities, and
proclaim the nullity of the world's doings, and it ends in every Culture with the
apostles of world-peace. Every people has such (historically speaking) waste~
products. Even their heads constitute physiognomically a group by themselves.
In the "history of intellect" they stand high and many illustrious names are
numbered amongst them but regarded from the point of view of actual history,
they are inefficients.

The Destiny of a nation plunged in the events of its world depends upon how
far its race-quality is successful in making these events historically ineffective
against it. It could perhaps be demonstrated even now that in the Chinese
world of states the realm of Tsin won through (z5o B.C.) because it alone had
kept itself free from Taoist sentiments. Be this as it may, the Roman people
prevailed over the rest of the Classical world because it was able to insulate its
conduct of policy from the fellah-instincts of Hellenism.

A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result of
world-improving theories is consistently a formless and therefore historyless mass.

186 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

All world-improvers and world-citizens stand for fellaheen ideals, whether they
know it or not. Their success means the historical abdication of the nation in favour,
not of everlasting peace, but of another nation. World-peace is always a one-sided
resolve. The Pax Romana had for the later soldier-emperors and Germanic
band-kings only the one practical significance that it made a formless popula-
tion of a hundred millions a mere object for the will-to-power of small warrior-
groups. This peace cost the peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannas
seem vanishingly small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds
pass from one conqueror's hands to another's, and it is their own blood that pays
for the contest. That is their peace. When in 1401 the Mongols conquered
Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls of a hundred
thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended itself. From the
intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction of the nations puts a fella-
heen-world above history, civilized at last and for ever. But in the realm of
facts it reverts to a state of nature, in which it alternates between long sub-
missiveness and brief angers that for all the bloodshed world-peace never
diminishes that alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves;
now they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment of
others that is the difference. A resolute leader who collects ten thousand
adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single
Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for
the exploits of such conquering heroes.

"Lever doodt als Sklav (better dead than slave)" is an old Frisian peasant-
saying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late Civilization, and every
Late Civilization has had to experience how much that choice costs it.

(A)
HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES

CHAPTER VII

PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

(A)
HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES

IN a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks occur,
water filters in, and the crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course
only their hollow mould remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which ex-
plode the mountain; molten masses pour in, stiffen, and crystallize out in their
turn. But these are not free to do so in their own special forms. They must fill
up the spaces that they find available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals
whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind pre-i
sen ting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists call this
phenomenon Pseudomorphosis.

By the term "historical pseud omorphosis" I propose to designate those
cases in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a
young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only
to achieve pure and specific expression-forms, but even to develop fully its own
self-consciousness. All that wells up from the depths of the young soul is cast in
the old moulds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing
itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a
hate that grows to be monstrous.

This is the case of the Arabian Culture. Its pre-history lies entirely within
the ambit of the ancient Babylonian Civilization, 1 which for two thousand years
had been the prey of successive conquerors. Its "Merovingian period" is
marked by the dictatorship of a small 2 Persian clan, primitive as the Ostro-
goths, whose domination of two hundred years, scarcely challenged, was
founded on the infinite weariness of a fellah-world. But from 300 B.C. onwards
there begins and spreads a great awakening in the young Aramaic-speaking 3
peoples between Sinai and the Zagros range. As at the epoch of the Trojan
War and at that of the Saxon emperors, a new relation of man to God, a wholly
new world-feeling, penetrated all the current religions, whether these bore the
name of Ahuramazda, Baal, or Yahweh, impelling everywhere to a great effort
of creation. But precisely at this juncture there came the Macedonians

1 Sec pp. 166, ct scq., and 174, et seq.

2 Less than one per cent of the population.

* It is to be noted that the home of the Babylonian Culture, the ancient Sinear, plays no part of
any importance in the coming events. For the Arabian Culture only the region north of Babylon,
not that to south, comes into question.

189

190 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

so appositely that some inner connexion is not altogether impossible, for the
Persian power had rested on spiritual postulates, and it was precisely these that
had disappeared. To Babylon these Macedonians appeared as yet another
swarm of adventurers like the rest. They laid down a thin sheet of Classical
Civilization over the lands as far as Turkestan and India. The kingdoms of the
Diadochi might indeed have become, insensibly, states of pre-Arabian spirit
the Seleucid Empire, which actually coincided geographically with the region of
Aramaic speech, was in fact such a state by zoo B.C. But from the battle of
Pydna l onwards it was, in its western part, more and more embodied in the
Classical Imperium and so subjected to the powerful workings of a spirit which
had its centre of gravity in a distant region. And thus was prepared the Pseu-
domorphosis.

The Magian Culture, geographically and historically, is the midmost of
the group of higher Cultures the only one which, in point both of space
and of time, was in touch with practically all others. The structure of its
history as a whole in our world-picture depends, therefore, entirely on our recog-
nizing the true inner form which the outer moulds distorted. Unhappily, that is
just what we do not yet know, thanks to theological and philological prepos-
sessions, and even more to the modern tendency of over-specialization which
has unreasonably subdivided Western research into a number of separate branches
each distinguished from the others not merely by its materials and its methods,
but by its very way of thinking and so prevented the big problems from being
even seen. In this instance the consequences of specialization have been graver
perhaps than in any other. The historians proper stayed within the domain of
Classical philology and made the Classical language-frontier their eastern hori-
zon; hence they entirely failed to perceive the deep unity of development on
both sides of their frontier, which spiritually had no existence. The result is a
perspective of "Ancient," "Mediaeval," and "Modern" history, ordered and
defined by the use of the Greek and Latin languages. For the experts of the old
languages, with their " texts," Axum, Saba, and even the realm of the Sassanids
were unattackable, and the consequence is that in "history" these scarcely
exist at all. The literature-researcher (he also a philologist) confuses the spirit of
the language with the spirit of the work. Products of the Aramasan region, if
they happen to be written in Greek or even merely preserved in Greek, he em-
bodies in his "Late Greek literature" and proceeds to classify as a special period
of that literature. The cognate texts in other languages are outside his depart-
ment and have been brought into other groups of literature in the same artificial
way. And yet here was the strongest of all proofs that the history of a literature
never coincides with the history of a language. 2 Here, in reality, was a self-

1 The victory of L. .<milius Paullus over Perseus, 168 B.C. Tr.

2 This has an important bearing also in the histories of the Western literatures. The German
is written in part in Latin, and English in French.

contained ensemble of Magian national literature, single in spirit, but written
in several languages the Classical amongst others. For a nation of Magian
type has no mother tongue. There are Talmudic, Manichasan, Nestorian,
Jewish, or even Neopythagorean national literatures, but not Hellenistic or
Hebrew.

Theological research, in its turn, broke up its domain into subdivisions
according to the different West-European confessions, and so the "philological"
frontier between West and East came into force, and still is in force, for Christian
theology also. The Persian world fell to the student of Iranian philology, and
as the Avesta texts were disseminated, though not composed, in an Aryan
dialect, their immense problem l came to be regarded as a minor branch of the
Indologist's work and so disappeared absolutely from the field of vision of
Christian theology. And lastly the history of Talmudic Judaism, since He-
brew philology became bound up in one specialism with Old Testament research,
not only never obtained separate treatment, but has been completely forgotten
by all the major histories of religions with which I am acquainted, although
these find room for every Indian sect (since folk-lore, too, ranks as a specialism)
and every primitive Negro religion to boot. Such is the preparation of scholar-
ship for the greatest task that historical research has to face to-day.

The Roman world of the Imperial period had a good idea of its own state.
The later writers are full of complaints concerning the depopulation and
spiritual emptiness of Africa, Spain, Gaul, and, above all, the mother countries
Italy and Greece. But those provinces which belong to the Magian world are
consistently excepted in these mournful surveys. Syria in particular is densely
peopled and, like Parthian Mesopotamia, flourishes in blood and spirit.

The preponderance of the young East, palpable to all, had sooner or later
to find political expression also. Viewing the scene from this standpoint, we
see behind the epic and pageant of Marius and Sulla, Csesar and Pompey, Antony
and Octavian, this East striving ever more intensely to free itself from the
historically dying West, the fellah-world waking up. The transfer of the
capital to Byzantium was a great symbol. Diocletian had selected Nicodemia;
Csesar had had thoughts of Alexandria or Troy. A better choice than any would
have been Antioch. But the act came too late by three centuries, and these had
been the decisive period of the Magian Springtime.

The Pseudomorphosis began with Actium; there it should have been Antony
who won. It was not the struggle of Rome and Greece that came there to an
issue that struggle had been fought out at Cannse and Zama, where it was
the tragic fate of Hannibal to stand as champion not for his own land, but for
Hellenism. At Actium it was the unborn Arabian Culture that was opposed to

1 See Professor Geldner's article "Zend-Avesta," Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr.

i 9 i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

iron-grey Classical Civilization; the issue lay between Principatc and Caliphate.
Antony's victory would have freed the Magian soul; his defeat drew over its
lands the hard sheet of Roman Imperium. A comparable event in the history
of the West is the battle between Tours and Poitiers, A.D. 732.. Had the Arabs
won it and made "Frankistan" into a caliphate of the North-east, Arabic
speech, religion, and customs would have become familiar to the ruling classes,
giant cities like Granada and Kairawan would have arisen on the Loire and
the Rhine, the Gothic feeling would have been forced to find expression in the
long-stiffened forms of Mosque and Arabesque, and instead of the German
mysticism we should have had a sort of Sufism. That the equivalent of these
things actually happened to the Arabian world was due to the fact that the
Syro-Persian peoples produced no Charles Martel to battle along with Mithra-
dates or Brutus and Cassius or Antony (or for that matter without them) against
Rome.

A second pseudomorphosis is presented to our eyes to-day in Russia. The
Russian hero-tales of the Bylini culminated in the epic cycle of Prince Vladimir
of Kiev (c. A.D. loco), with his Round Table, and in the popular hero Ilya
Muromyets. 1 The whole immense difference between the Russian and the
Faustian soul is already revealed in the contrast of these with the "contempo-
rary" Arthur, Ermanarich, and Nibelungen sagas of the Migration-period in
the form of the Hildebrandslied and the Waltbarilitd? The Russian "Merovin-
gian ' ' period begins with the overthrow of the Tatar domination by Ivan III
(1480) and passes, by the last princes of the House of Rurik and the first of the
Romanovs, to Peter the Great (1689-172.5). It corresponds exactly to the
period between Clovis (481-511) and the battle of Testry (687), which
effectively gave the Carolingians their supremacy. I advise all readers to read
the Prankish history of Gregory of Tours (to 591) in parallel with the corre-
sponding parts of Karamzin's patriachal narrative, especially those dealing with
Ivan the Terrible, and with Boris Godunov and Vassili Shuiski. 3 There could
hardly be a closer parallel. This Muscovite period of the great Boyar families
and Patriarchs, in which a constant element is the resistance of an Old Russia
party to the friends of Western Culture, is followed, from the founding of
Petersburg in 1703, by the pseudomorphosis which forced the primitive Russian
soul into the alien mould, first of full Baroque, then of the Enlightenment, and
then of the nineteenth century. The fate-figure in Russian history is Peter the
Great, with whom we may compare the Charlemagne who deliberately and

1 See Wollncr, Untersuchungen uber die Volksepik des Grossrussen (1879). [A convenient edition
of the Kiev Stories is Mary Gill, Lej Ligendes slaves (Paris, i9iz). Tr.]

* The former is dated about 800, the latter about 930. Tr.

8 These two figures the one an authorized Mayor of the Palace before he was Tsar, the other
a crude usurper dominate the period of Russian history called the "Period of Troubles" i.e.,
that between the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584 and the election of Michael Romanov in
1613. Tr.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 193

with all his might strove to impose the very thing which Charles Martel had
just prevented, the rule of the Moorish-Byzantine spirit. The possibility was
there of treating the Russian world in the manner of a Carolingian or that of
Seleucid that is, of choosing between Old Russian and "Western" ways,
and the Romanovs chose the latter. The Seleucids liked to see Hellenes and
not Aramaeans about them. The primitive tsarism of Moscow is the only form
which is even to-day appropriate to the Russian world, but in Petersburg it was
distorted to the dynastic form of western Europe. The pull of the sacred South
of Byzantium and Jerusalem strong in every Orthodox soul, was twisted
by the worldly diplomacy which set its face to the West. The burning of
Moscow, that mighty symbolic act of a primitive people, that expression of
Maccaba^an hatred of the foreigner and heretic, was followed by the entry of Al-
exander I into Paris, the Holy Alliance, and the concert of the Great Powers
of the West. And thus a nationality whose destiny should have been to live
without a history for some generations still was forced into a false and artificial
history that the soul of Old Russia was simply incapable of understanding.
Late-period arts and sciences, enlightenment, social ethics, the materialism of
world-cities, were introduced, although in this pre-cultural time religion was
the only language in which man understood himself and the world. In the
townless land with its primitive peasantry, cities of alien type fixed themselves
like ulcers false, unnatural, unconvincing. "Petersburg," says Dostoyevski,
"is the most abstract and artificial city in the world." Born in it though
he was, he had the feeling that one day it might vanish with the morning mist.
Just so ghostly, so incredible, were the Hellenistic artifact-cities scattered in the
Aramaic peasant-lands. Jesus in his Galilee knew this. St. Peter must have felt
it when he set eyes on Imperial Rome.

After this everything that arose around it was felt by the true Russdom as
lies and poison. A truly apocalyptic hatred was directed on Europe, and
"Europe" was all that was not Russia, including Athens and Rome, just as
for the Magian world in its time Old Egypt and Babylon had been antique,
pagan, devilish. "The first condition of emancipation for the Russian soul,"
wrote Aksakov in 1863 to Dostoyevski, "is that it should hate Petersburg
with all its might and all its soul." Moscow is holy, Petersburg Satanic. A
widespread popular legend presents Peter the Great as Antichrist. Just so the
Aramaic Pseudomorphosis cries out in all the Apocalypses from Daniel and
Enoch in Maccabasan times to John, Baruch, and Ezra IV after the destruction
of Jerusalem, against Antiochus the Antichrist, against Rome the Whore of
Babylon, against the cities of the West with their refinement and their splen-
dour, against the whole Classical Culture. All its works are untrue and un-
clean; the polite society, the clever artistry, the classes, the alien state with its
civilized diplomacy, justice, and administration. The contrast between Rus-
sian and Western, Jew-Christian and Late-Classical nihilisms is extreme

194 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the one kind is hatred of the alien that is poisoning the unborn Culture in the
womb of the land, the other a surfeited disgust of one's own proper over-
growths. Depths of religious feeling, flashes of revelation, shuddering fear of
the great awakening, metaphysical dreaming and yearning, belong to the
beginning, as the pain of spiritual clarity belongs to the end of a history. In
these pseudomorphoses they are mingled. Says Dostoyevski: "Everyone in
street and market-place now speculates about the nature of Faith." So might
it have been said of Edessa or Jerusalem. Those young Russians of the days
before 1914 dirty, pale, exalted, moping in corners, ever absorbed in meta-
physics, seeing all things with an eye of faith even when the ostensible topic is
the franchise, chemistry, or women's education are the Jews and early
Christians of the Hellenistic cities, whom the Romans regarded with a mixture
of surly amusement and secret fear. In Tsarist Russia there was no bourgeoisie
and, in general, no true class-system, but merely, as in the Prankish dominions,
lord and peasant. There were no Russian towns. Moscow consisted of a
fortified residency (the Kreml) round which was spread a gigantic market.
The imitation city that grew up and ringed it in, like every other city on the
soil of Mother Russia, is there for the satisfaction and utilities of the Court,
the administration, the traders, but that which lives in it is, on the top, an
embodiment of fiction, an Intelligentsia bent on discovering problems and con-
flicts, and below, an uprooted peasantry, with all the metaphysical gloom, anx-
iety, and misery of their own Dostoyevski, perpetually homesick for the open
land and bitterly hating the stony grey world into which Antichrist has tempted
them. Moscow had no proper soul. The spirit of the upper classes was Western,
and the lower had brought in with them the soul of the countryside. Between
the two worlds there was no reciprocal comprehension, no communication,
no charity. To understand the two spokesmen and victims of the pseudomor-
phosis, it is enough that Dostoyevski is the peasant, and Tolstoi the man of
Western society. The one could never in his soul get away from the land; the
other, in spite of his desperate efforts, could never get near it.

Tolstoi is the former Russia, Dostoyevski the coming Russia. The inner Tolstoi
is tied to the West. He is the great spokesman of Petrinism even when he is
denying it. The West is never without a negative the guillotine, too, was
a true daughter of Versailles and rage as he might against Europe, Tolstoi
could never shake it off. Hating it, he hates himself and so becomes the father
of Bolshevism. The utter powerlessness of this spirit, and "its" 1917 revolu-
tion, stands confessed in his posthumously published A Light Shines in the Dark-
ness. This hatred Dostoyevski does not know. His passionate power of
living is comprehensive enough to embrace all things Western as well "I
have two fatherlands, Russia and Europe." He has passed beyond both Petrin-
ism and revolution, and from his future he looks back over them as from afar.
His soul is apocalyptic, yearning, desperate, but of this future certain. "I will

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 195

go to Europe," says Ivan Karamazov to his mother, Alyosha; "I know well
enough that I shall be going only to a churchyard, but I know too that that
churchyard is dear, very dear to me. Beloved dead lie buried there, every
stone over them tells of a life so ardently lived, so passionate a belief in its own
achievements, its own truth, its own battle, its own knowledge, that I know
even now I know I shall fall down and kiss these stones and weep over
them." Tolstoi, on the contrary, is essentially a great understanding, "en-
lightened" and "socially minded." All that he sees about him takes the
Late-period, megalopolitan, and Western form of a problem, whereas Dostoyevski
does not even know what a problem is. Tolstoi is an event within and of
Western Civilization. He stands midway between Peter and Bolshevism, and
neither he nor these managed to get within sight of Russian earth. The thing
they are fighting against reappears, recognizable, in the very form in which
they fight. Their kind of opposition is not apocalyptic but intellectual.
Tolstoi's hatred of property is an economist's, his hatred of society a social
reformer's, his hatred of the State a political theorist's. Hence his immense
effect upon the West he belongs, in one respect as in another, to the band of
Marx, Ibsen, and Zola.

Dostoyevski, on the contrary, belongs to no band, unless it be the band of
the Apostles of primitive Christianity. His "Daemons " were denounced by the
Russian Intelligentsia as reactionaries. But he himself was quite unconscious
of such conflicts "conservative" and "revolutionary" were terms of the
West that left him indifferent. Such a soul as his can look beyond everything
that we call social, for the things of this world seem to it so unimportant as
not to be worth improving. No genuine religion aims at improving the world
of facts, and Dostoyevski, like every primitive Russian, is fundamentally un-
aware of that world and lives in a second, metaphysical world beyond. What
has the agony of a soul to do with Communism? A religion that has got as
far as taking social problems in hand has ceased to be a religion. But the reality
in which Dostoyevski lives, even during this life, is a religious creation di-
rectly present to him. His Alyosha has defied all literary criticism, even
Russian. His life of Christ, had he written it as he always intended to
do would have been a genuine gospel like the Gospels of primitive Chris-
tianity, which stand completely outside Classical and Jewish literary forms.
Tolstoi, on the other hand, is a master of the Western novel Anna Karenina
distances every rival and even in his peasant's garb remains a man of polite
society.

Here we have beginning and end clashing together. Dostoyevski is a
saint, Tolstoi only a revolutionary. From Tolstoi, the true successor of Peter,
and from him only, proceeds Bolshevism, which is not the contrary, but the
final issue of Pctrinism, the last dishonouring of the metaphysical by the
social, and if so facto a new form of the Pseudomorphosis. If the building of

196 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Petersburg was the first act of Antichrist, the self-destruction of the society
formed of that Petersburg is the second, and so the peasant soul must feel it.
For the Bolshevists are not the nation, or even a part of it, but the lowest
stratum of this Petrine society, alien and western like the other strata, yet not
recognized by these and consequently filled with the hate of the downtrodden.
It is all megalopolitan and "Civilized" the social politics, the Intelligentsia,
the literature that first in the romantic and then in the economic jargon cham-
pions freedoms and reforms, before an audience that itself belongs to the soci-
ety. The real Russian is a disciple of Dostoyevski. Although he may not
have read Dostoyevski or anyone else, nay, perhaps because he cannot read, he is
himself Dostoyevski in substance; and if the Bolshevists, who see in Christ a
mere social revolutionist like themselves, were not intellectually so narrowed,
it would be in Dostoyevski that they would recognize their prime enemy.
What gave this revolution its momentum was not the intelligentsia's hatred.
It was the people itself, which, without hatred, urged only by the need of throw-
ing off a disease, destroyed the old Westernism in one effort of upheaval, and
will send the new after it in another. For what this townless people yearns
for is its own life-form, its own religion, its own history. Tolstoi's Christianity
was a misunderstanding. He spoke of Christ and he meant Marx. But to
Dostoyevski's Christianity the next thousand years will belong.

Outside the Pseudomorphosis, and the more vigorously in proportion as
the Classical influence is weaker over the country, there spring up all the forms
of a genuine feudal age. Scholasticism, mysticism, feudal fealty, minstrelsy,
the crusade spirit, all existed in the first centuries of the Arabian Culture and
will be found in it as soon as we know how to look for them. The legion
existed in name even after Septimius Severus, but in the East, legions look for
all the world like ducal retinues. Officials are nominated, but what nomination
amounts to in reality is the investiture of a count with his fief. While in the
West the Cassar-title fell into the hands of chieftains, the East transformed
itself into an early Caliphate amazingly like the feudal state of mature Gothic.
In the Sassanid Empire, 1 in Hauran, 2 in southern Arabia, there dawned a pure
feudal period. The exploits of a king of Saba, 3 Shamir Juharish, are immortalized
like those of a Roland or an Arthur, in the Arabic saga which tells of his ad-
vance through Persia as far as China. 4 The Kingdom of Ma'in 5 existed side by

1 Covering, before its later extensions, Persia and Iraq to the Euphrates. Tr.

1 The region south of Damascus and east of the Sea of Galilee. Tr.

9 Saba (Shcba) is, roughly, the modern Yemen, though the centre of gravity of the Sabsean
Kingdom may earlier have been in northern Arabia. Sec Dr. D. H. Miillcr's article "Sabaeans"
in Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr.

4 Schicle, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gcgenwart, I, 647.

1 The "Minsean" and the Sabsean kingdoms were the two outstanding hegemonies of early

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 197

side with the realm of Israel during the millennium before Christ, and its re-
mains (which suggest comparisons with Myccnx and Tiryns) extend deeply
into Africa. 1 But now the feudal age flowered throughout Arabia and even in
the mountains of Abyssinia. 2 In Axum there arose during early Christian times
mighty castles and kings' tombs with the largest monoliths in the world. 3
Behind the kings stands a feudal nobility of counts (kaif) and wardens (kabir),
vassals of often questionable loyalty whose great possessions more and more
narrowed the power of the king and his household. The endless Christian-
Jewish wars between south Arabia and the kingdom of Axum 4 have essentially
the character of chivalry-warfare, frequently degenerating into baronial feuds
based on the castles. In Saba ruled the Hamdanids who later became
Christian. Behind them stood the Christian realm of Axum, in alliance with
Rome, which about A.D. 300 stretched from the White Nile to the Somali
coast and the Persian Gulf, and in 5x5 overthrew the Jewish-Himaryites. 5
In 54z there was a diet of princes at Marib 6 to which both the Roman and the
Sassanid Empires sent ambassadors. Even to-day the country is full of in-
numerable relics of mighty castles, which in Islamic times were popularly
attributed to supernatural builders. The stronghold of Gomdan is a work of
twenty tiers. 7

In the Sassanid Empire ruled the Dikhans, or local lords, while the brilliant
court of these early-Eastern "Hohenstaufen" was in every respect a model for
that of the Byzantines who followed Diocletian. Even much later the Abbas-
sids in their new capital of Baghdad could think of nothing better than to
imitate, on a grand scale, the Sassanid ideal of court life. In northern Arabia,

Arabian history. Ma 1 in, in southern Arabia, should not be confused with the Ma' an which lies
north-east of the Gulf of Akaba. Tr.

1 Bent, The Sacred City of the Ethiopians (London 1893), pp. 134, et seq., deals with the remains
of Jeha, the inscriptions of which are dated by Glaser between the seventh and fifth centuries before
Christ. See D. H. Miiller, Burgen and Schlosser Siedarabicns.

2 Grimmc, Mohammed, pp. 2.6, et seq.

8 German Axum Expedition record (1913), Vol. II.

4 An ancient trade-route from Persia crossed the straits of Ormus and of Bab-el-Mandcb, trav-
ersing South Arabia and terminating in Abyssinia and the Nile region. It is historically more
important than the northern route over the Isthmus of Suez.

B So little is known as to these events by British (or any other) students that a brief record may
be useful. The original Himaryites or Homcrites, a people of the south-west angle of Arabia, had
displaced the Sabacans in control of South Arabia in the second century B.C. The Himaryite hegem-
ony was overthrown by invaders from Axum over the water about A.D. 300, and the Axumitc
rulers were, inter alia, kings of Hadramaut hence the mention in the text of the Persian Gulf.
But a Himaryite opposition continued, and, adopting Judaism as a counter-religion, it succeeded
for a time in throwing off the Abyssinian rule. Axum, however (aided, as a Christian state, by
Rome), reasserted her dominion in 515 and held it for fifty years, till an attack of Sassanid Persians
displaced them again. Thereafter southern Arabia fell into the swaying chaos in which the com-
ing of Mohammed found it. Tr.

8 The capital of Saba. Tr.

7 Grimmc, p. 43. Illustrations of these immense ruins of Gomdan, ibid., p. 81, and reconstruc-
tions in the German Axum report.

198 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

at the courts of the Ghassanids 1 and at those of the Lakhmids, 2 there sprang up
a genuine troubadour and Minne poetry; and knightly poets, in the days of the
Early Fathers, fought out their duels with "word, lance, and sword." One of
them was the Jew Samuel, lord of the castle of Al Alblaq, who stood a famous
siege by the King of Hira for the sake of five precious suits of armour. 3 In
relation to this lyric poetry, the Late-Arabic which flourished, especially in
Spain, from 800 stands as Uhland and Eichendorff stand to Walter von der
Vogelweidc.

For this young world of the first centuries of our era our antiquarians and
theologians have had no eyes. Busied as they are with the state of Late Re-
publican and Imperial Rome, the conditions of the Middle East seem to them
merely primitive and void of all significance. But the Parthian bands ''that
again and again rode at the legions of Rome were a chivalry exalted by Maz-
daism; in their armies there was the spirit of crusade. So, too, might it
have been with Christianity if it had not been wholly bound under the power
of the pseudomorphosis. The spirit was there Tertullian spoke of the
"militia Chrtsti," and the sacrament was the soldier's oath of fidelity. 4 But it
was only later that Christ became the hero for whom his vassals went out
against the heathen; for the time being, the hither side of the Roman frontier
knew not Christian lords and knights, but only Roman legates; not the castle,
but the castra; not tournaments, but executions. Yet in spite of all this it was
not, strictly speaking, a Parthian war, but a true crusade of Jewry that blazed
out in 115 when Trajan marched into the East, and it was as a reprisal for the
destruction of Jerusalem that the whole infidel ("Greek") population of
Cyprus traditionally X4o,ooo souls was massacred. 5 Nisibis, defended by
Jews, made an illustrious resistance. Warlike Adiabene (the upper Tigris
plain) was a Jewish state. In all the Parthian and Persian wars against Rome
the gentry and peasantry, the feudal levy, of Jewish Mesopotamia fought in the
front line.

Byzantium, even, was not able entirely to evade the influence of the Arabian
feudal age, and, under a crust of Late Classical administrative forms, the fief
system (especially in the interior of Asia Minor) came into existence. There
there were powerful families whose loyalty was doubtful and whose ambition
was to possess the Imperial throne. "Originally tied to the capital, which they

1 The country of Ghassan extends cast of the Jordan, parallel to and inland of Palestine and Syria,
approximately from Pctra to the middle Euphrates. Tr.

1 The Lakhmids were the ruling dynasty, from the third to the sixth century after Christ, of
the realm of Hira, which tan in a strip between the Euphrates and the present Ncjd coast on the one
hand and the desert of Arabia on the other. Tr.

* Brockclmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litcratur, p. 34.

4 The whole structure of Mithraism (so far as we know it) presents strong analogies with that
of a military order. Tr.

* As well as it is said 110,000 at Cyrcnc. At Alexandria, too, there were imtutts and counter-
emtMtes. Tr.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 199

were not allowed to leave without the Emperor's permission, this nobility
settled down later on its broad estates in the provinces. From the fourth cen-
tury onwards this provincial nobility was de facto an 'Estate of the realm,'
and in course of time it claimed a certain independence of Imperial control." l
The "Roman Army" in the East, meanwhile, was transformed in less than
two centuries from an army of modern type to one of the feudal order. The
Roman legion disappeared in the reorganization of the age of Severus, 2 about
A.D. 2:00. While in the West the army degenerated into hordes, in the East there
arose, in the fourth century a genuine, if belated, knighthood a fact that
Mommsen long ago pointed out, without, however, seeing the significance of
it. 3 The young noble received a thorough education in single combat, horse-
manship, use of bow and lance. About A.D. x6o the Emperor Gallienus
the friend of Plotinus and the builder of the Porta Nigra of Trier, one of the
most striking and most unfortunate figures of the period of the soldier-emper-
ors formed, from Germans and Moors, a new type of mounted force, the
personal military suite. 4 A significant light is thrown upon the changes by the
fact that the old city-gods give way, in the religion of the army, to the German
gods of personal heroism, under the labels of Mars and Hercules. 5 Diocletian's
palatmi are not a substitute for the prastorians abolished by Septimius Severus,
but a small, well-disciplined knight-army, while the comitatenses, the general
levy, are organized in "numeri" or companies. The tactics are those of every
Early period, with its pride of personal courage. The attack takes the Germanic
form of the so-called "boar's head" the deep mass technically called the
Gevierthaufe* Under Justinian we find, fully developed, a system corresponding
precisely to the Landsknecht system of Charles V, in which condottieri 7 of the
Frundsberg type 8 raise professional forces on a territorial basis. The expedition

1 Roth, Social- und Kulturgeschicbte ties By^antinischen Rticbes, p. 15.

2 Dclbriick Geschichte der Krieg.rkunst, II, p. zzi. [For British students C. W. C. Oman's Art of
War: Middle Ages will be more readily available, although Oman treats the subject more as a matter
of formal military organization than does Dclbriick. Neither writer deals with any special features
of the change as it worked itself out in the East, both being concerned almost entirely with its
Western aspects and phases. The origin of the late-Byzantine army system, as military historians
are aware, is an obscure and difficult subject. By what stages, after the decadence of the legion,
was the " Landsknecbt" army of Justinian reached? Like other elements of middle-East history in
the epoch of the Arabian Culture, it still awaits the full investigation that the West has already
had. Tr.

3 Gesammcltc Schriften, IV, 531.

4 Gefolgstreuen in German. The choice of an equivalent mediaeval term in English is difficult,
since any one that may be selected carries with it certain implications for students of feudal ori-
gins. Tr.

8 Domaszewski, Die Religion der romiscben Heeres, p. 49.

* The typical form, for instance, of the Swiss in their independence-battles, and of Western
infantry generally in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the transition from hand-arm to
fire-arm warfare. Tr.

7 Buccellarii; sec Delbruck, op. cit., II, 354.

8 Gcorg von Frundsbcrg (1473-1518). Short article in Ency. Brit., XI cd. Tr.

ioo THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

of Narscs is described by Procopius l just as one might describe the great re-
cruiting-operations of Wallenstcin.

But there appeared also in these early centuries a brilliant Scholasticism
and Mysticism of Magian type, domesticated in the renowned schools of the
Aramaean region the Persian schools of Ctesiphon, Resaina, Gundisapora,
the Jewish of Sura, Nehardea, Kinnesrin. 2 These are flourishing headquarters
of astronomy, philosophy, chemistry, medicine. But towards the west these
grand manifestations, too, become falsified by the Pseudomorphosis. The
characteristically Magian elements of this knowledge assume at Alexandria the
forms of Greek philosophy and at Beyrout those of Roman jurisprudence; they
are committed to writing in the Classical languages, squeezed into alien and
long-petrified literary forms, and perverted by the hoary logic of a Civilization of
quite other structure. It is in this, and not in the Islamic, time that Arabian
science began. Yet, as our philologists only unearthed what had been put in
Late Classical dress at Alexandria and Antioch, and had not an inkling either of
the immense wealth of the Arabian spring or of the real pivots of its researches
and ideas, there arose the preposterous notion that the Arabs were spiritual
epigoni of the Classical. In reality, practically everything that was produced on
the " other" side from Edessa's point of view of the philologist's frontier,
though seeming to the Western eye an offspring of a "Late Classical" spirit, is
nothing but a reflection of Early Arabian inwardness. And so we come to con-
sider what the Pseudomorphosis did for the Arabian religion.

The Classical religion lived in its vast number of separate cults, which in this
form were natural and self-evident to Apollinian man, essentially inaccessible
to any alien. As soon as cults of this kind arise, we have a Classical Culture,
and when their essence changes, in later Roman times, then the soul of this
Culture is at an end. Outside the Classical landscape they have never been
genuine and living. The divinity is always bound to and bounded by one locality,
in conformity with the static and Euclidean world-feeling. Correspondingly
the relation of man to the divinity takes the shape of a local cult, in which
the significances lie in the form of its ritual procedure and not in a dogma under-
lying them. Just as the population was scattered geographically in innumerable
points, so spiritually its religion was subdivided into these petty cults, each of
which was entirely independent of the rest. Only their number, and not their

1 Gothic War, IV, 16. [The same holds good for Belisarius's armies. Tr]

2 Nisibis and Edessa in the up-country between Euphrates and Tigris are represented to-day
by Nasibin (Nezib) and Urfa respectively; just to the west of them, east of the Euphrates above
Sura, were the three Jewish academics, in which Talmudic Judaism took shape after the Dispersion.
Kinnesrin lay just south of Aleppo. Ctesiphon is, of course, the classical city on the Tigris, still
dominant under the Sassanids, and Resaina lies in the up-country south-west of Nisibis. Gundi-
sapora is G under -Shapur (Jundaisapur), near the site of the old Elamitc capital Susa in Arabistan.
Tr.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 2.01

scope, was capable of increase. Within the Classical religion multiplication was
the only form of growth, and missionary effort of any sort was excluded, for
men could practise these cults without belonging to them. There were no com-
munities of fellow believers. Though the later thought of Athens reached
somewhat more general ideas of God and his service, it was philosophy and
not religion that it achieved; it appealed to only a few thinkers and had not
the slightest effect on the feeling of the nation that is, the Polis.

In the sharpest contrast to this stands the visible form of the Magian religion
uhe Church, the brotherhood of the faithful, which has no home and knows
no earthly frontier, which believes the words of Jesus, "when two or three
arc gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them." It is self-
evident that every such believer must believe that only one good and true God
can be, and that the gods of the others are evil and false. 1 The relation between
this God and man rests, not in expression or profession, but in the secret force,
the magic, of certain symbolic performances, which if they are to be effective
must be exactly known in form and significance and practised accordingly.
The knowledge of this significance belongs to the Church in fact, it is the
Church itself, qua community of the instructed. And, therefore, the centre of
gravity of every Magian religion lies not in a cult, but in a doctrine, in the
creed.

As long as the Classical remained spiritually strong, pseudomorphosis of all
the Churches of the East into the style of the West continued. This is a most
important aspect of Syncretism. The Persian religion enters in the shape of the
Mithras cult, the Chaldean-Syrian element as the cults of the star-gods and
BaalsQupiterDolichenus, Sabazius, Sol Invictus, Atargatis), the Jewish religion
in the form of a Yahweh-cult (for no other name can be applied to the Egyptian
communities of the Ptolemaic period 2 ), and primitive Early-Christianity too
as the Pauline Epistles and the Catacombs of Rome clearly show took
substance as a Jesus-cult. And however loudly each of these various religions
(which from about Hadrian's time drove the genuine old Classical deities com-
pletely into the background) might proclaim itself as the revelation of the
one true faith Isis styled herself deorum dearumque fades uniformis in reality
they carry, one and all, marks of the Classical separatism that is, they
multiply to infinity; every community stands for itself and is local; all the
temples, catacombs, Mithrasa, house chapels, are holy places to which (in

1 Not "non-existent." It would be a misconception of the Magian world-feeling to attach
a Faustian-dynamic meaning to the phrase "true God." In combating the worship of godlings, the
reality of godlings and daemons is presupposed. The Israelite prophets never dreamed of denying
the Baals, and similarly Isis and Mithras for the Early Christians, Jehovah for the Christian Mar-
cion, Jesus for the Manichseans, are devilish, but perfectly real, powers. Disbelieving in them would
have had no meaning for the Magian soul what was required was that one should not turn to them.
To use an expression now long current, it is "Henotheism" and not Monotheism.

1 Schiirer, Geschichte des judischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, III, 499; Wendland, Die
hellenistisch-romische Kultur, p. 191.

xoz THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

feeling, even though not in formal expression) the deity is considered to be
attached. 1 Nevertheless, there is Magian feeling even in this piety. Classical
cults arc practised, and one may practise as many of them as one pleases, but of
these newer, a man belongs to one and one alone. In the old, propaganda is un-
thinkable; in the new it goes without saying, and the purport of religious
exercises tends more and more to the doctrinal side.

From the second century onwards, with the fading of the Apollinian and the
flowering of the Magian soul, the relations are reversed. The consequences
of the Pseudomorphosis continue, but it is now cults of the West which tend to
become a new Church of the East that is, from the sum of separate cults there
evolves a community of those who believe in these gods and their rituals
and so there arises, by processes like those of the Early Persian and the Early
Judaic, a Magian Greek nationality. Out of the rigorously established forms
of detail-procedure in sacrifices and mysteries grows a sort of dogma concerning
the inner significance of these acts. The cults can now represent each other,
and men no longer practise or perform them in the old way, but become "ad-
herents" of them. And the little god of the place becomes without the
gravity of the change being noticed by anyone the great God really present
in the place.

Carefully as Syncretism has been examined in recent years, the clue to its
development the transformation of Eastern Churches into Western cults,
and then the reverse process of transformation of Western cults into Eastern
Churches has been missed. 2 Yet without this key it is quite impossible
to understand the religious history of Early Christianity. The battle that in
Rome was between Christ and Mithras as cult-deities took the form, east of
Antioch, of a contest between the Persian and the Christian Churches. But the
heaviest battle that Christianity had to fight, after it came itself under the in-
fluence of the Pseudomorphosis and began to develop spiritually with its face
to the West, was not that against the true Classical deities. With these it was
never face to face, for the public city-cults had long been inwardly dead and
possessed no hold whatever on men's souls. The formidable enemy was Pagan-
ism, or Hellenism, emerging as a powerful new Church and born of the selfsame
spirit as Christianity itself. In the end there were in the east of the Roman
Empire not one cult-Church, but two, and if one of these comprised exclusively
the followers of Christ, the other, too, was made up of communities which,
under a thousand different labels, consciously worshipped one and the same
divine principle.

1 Contrast with this the exactly opposite process in Jewry before the Pseudomorphosis had
begun to affect it, to wit, the battle against the local "high places" and the concentration of
sanctity in Jerusalem. Tir.

1 With the result that Syncretism is presented as a mere hotchpotch of every conceivable religion.
Nothing is further from the truth. The process of taking shape moved first from East to West and
then from West to East.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 103

Much has been written on the Classical toleration. The nature of a religion
may perhaps be most clearly seen in the limits of its tolerance, and there were
such limits in Classical religions as in others. It was, indeed, one essential
character of these religions that they were numerous, and another that they
were religions of pure performance; for them, therefore, the question of tolera-
tion, as the word is usually understood, did not arise. But respect for the
cult-formalities as such was postulated and required, and many a philosopher,
even many an unwitting stranger, who infringed this law by word or deed,
was made to realize the limits of Classical toleration. The reciprocal perse-
cutions of the Magian Churches are something different from this; there it was
the duty of the henotheist to his own faith that forbade him to recognize false
tenets. Classical cults would have tolerated the Jesus-cult as one of their own
number. But the cnlt-Ckurch was bound to attack the Jesus-Church. All the
great persecutions of Christians (corresponding therein exactly to the later
persecutions of Paganism) came, not from the "Roman" State, but from this
cult-Church, and they were only political inasmuch as the cult-Church was
both nation and fatherland. It will be observed that the mask of Caesar-
worship covered two religious usages. In the Classical cities of the West, Rome
above all, the special cult of the Divus arose as a last expression of that Euclidean
feeling which required that there should be legal and therefore sacral means
of communication between the body-unit man and the body-unit God. In
the East, on the other hand, the product was a creed of Caesar as Saviour, God-
man, Messiah of all Syncretists, which this Church brought to expression in a
supremely national form. The sacrifice for the Emperor was the most im-
portant sacrament of the Church exactly corresponding to the baptism of the
Christians and it is easy, therefore, to understand the symbolic significance
in the days of persecution of the command and the refusal to do these acts.
All these Churches had their sacraments: holy meals like the Haoma-drinking
of the Persians, 1 the Passover of the Jews, the Lord's Supper of the Christians,
similar rites for Attis and Mithras, and baptismal ceremonies amongst the
Mandaeans, the Christians, and the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Indeed,
the individual cults of the Pagan Church might be regarded almost as sects and
orders a view which would lead to a much better understanding of their
reciprocal propaganda.

All true Classical mysteries, such as those of Eleusis and those founded by
the Pythagoreans in the South-Italian cities about 500 B.C., had been place-
bound, 2 and had consisted in some symbolical act or process. Within the field
of the Pseudomorphosis these freed themselves from their localities; they could

1 The Haoma plant symbolized the Tree of Life (Gaokcrcna) like the Soma plant of Brahman-
ism. Tr.

2 Hence the expression "profaning " the mysteries, which meant, not revealing them, but
bringing them outside their fane. Tr.

io4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

be performed wherever initiates were gathered, and had now as their object the
Magian ecstasy and the ascetic change of life. The visitors to the holy place
had transformed themselves into practising Orders. The community of the
Neopythagoreans, formed about 50 B.C. and closely related to the Jewish
Essenes, is anything but a Classical "school of philosophy"; it is a pure mo-
nastic order, and it is not the only such order in the Syncretic movement that
anticipated the ideals of the Christian hermits and the Mohammedan dervishes.
These Pagan Churches had their anchorites, saints, prophets, miraculous
conversions, scriptures, and revelations. 1 In the significance of images there
came about a very remarkable transformation, which still awaits research.
The greatest of Plotinus's followers, lamblichus, finally, about A.D. 300,
evolved a mighty system of orthodox theology, ordered hierarchy, and rigid
ritual for the Pagan Church, and his disciple Julian devoted, and finally sacri-
ficed, his life to the attempt to establish this Church for all eternity. 2 He sought
even to create cloisters for meditating men and women and to introduce ec-
clesiastical penance. This great work was supported by a great enthusiasm
which rose to the height of martyrdom and endured 'long after the Emperor's
death. Inscriptions exist which can hardly be translated but by the formula:
"There is but one god and Julian is his Prophet." 3 Ten years more, and this
Church would have become a historic, permanent fact. In the end not only
its power, but also in important details its very form and content were in-
herited by Christianity. It is often stated that the Roman Church adapted
itself to the structure of the Roman State; this is not quite correct. The latter
structure was itself by hypothesis a Church. There was a period when the two
were in touch Constantine the Great acted simultaneously as convener of
the Council of Nicxa and as Pontifex Maximus, and his sons, zealous Christians
as they were, made him Divus and paid to him the prescribed rites. St. Augus-
tine dared to assert that the true religion had existed before the coming of
Christianity in the form of the Classical. 4

For the understanding of Judaism as a whole between Cyrus and Titus it is
necessary constantly to bear in mind three facts, of which scholarship is quite
aware, but which, owing to philological and theological parti pris, it refuses
to admit as factors in its discussions. First, the Jews are a "nation without a
land," a consensus, and in the midst, moreover, of a world of pure nations of
the same type. Secondly, Jerusalem is indeed a Mecca, a holy centre, but it is

1 J. Geffcken, Der Aus&ang des griecbiscb-romiscbcn Hcidtntums (1910), pp. 197, ct scq.

1 Geffcken, op. cit., pp. 131, et scq.

1 Geffcken, op. cit., p. 191, note 149.

4 ' ' Res ipsa, qua nunc religio Christiana nuncupafur, erat apud antiques nee defecit ab initio generis bumani,
quousque Christ us veniret in carnem. Unde vera religio, qua jam erat coepit appellari Christiana" (Retracta-
tiones, I, 13).

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 105

neither the home nor the spiritual focus of the people. Lastly, the Jews arc a
peculiar phenomenon in world-history only so long as we insist on treating
them as such.

It is true that the post-exilic Jews, in contradistinction to the pre-exilic
Israelites are as Hugo Winckler was the first to recognize a people of
quite new type. But they are not the only representatives of the type. The
Aramasan world began in those days to arrange itself in a great number of
such peoples, including Persians and Chaldeans, 1 all living in the same dis-
trict, yet in stringent aloofness from each other, and even then practising the
truly Arabian way of life that we call the ghetto.

The first heralds of the new soul were the prophetic religions, with their mag-
nificent inwardness, which began to arise about 700 B.C. and challenged the
primeval practices of the people and their rulers. They, too, are an essentially
Aramsean phenomenon. The more I ponder Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah on the
one hand, Zarathustra on the other, the more closely related they appear to me
to be. What seems to separate them is not their new beliefs, but the objects
of their attack. The first battled with that savage old-Israel religion, which
in fact is a whole bundle of religious elements 2 belief in holy stones and
trees, innumerable place-gods (Dan, Bethel, Hebron, Shechem, Beersheba,
Gilgal), a single Yahweh (or Elohim), whose name covers a multitude of most
heterogeneous numina, ancestor-worship and human sacrifices, dervish-dancing
and sacral prostitution intermixed with indistinct traditions of Moses and
Abraham and many customs and sagas of the Late Babylonian world, now after
long establishment in Canaan degenerated and hardened into peasant forms.
The second combated the old Vedic beliefs of heroes and Vikings, similarly
coarsened, no doubt, and certainly needing to be recalled to actuality, time and
again, by glorifications of the sacred cattle and of the care thereof. Zarathustra
lived about 600 B.C., often in want, persecuted and misunderstood, and met his
end as an old man in war against the unbelievers 3 a worthy contemporary
of the unfortunate Jeremiah, who for his prophesying was hated by his country-
men, imprisoned by his king, and after the catastrophe carried off by the fugi-
tives to Egypt and there put to death. And it is my belief that this great epoch
brought forth yet a third prophet-religion, the Chaldean.

This, with its penetrating astronomy and its ever-amazing inwardness, was,
I venture to guess, evolved at that time and by creative personalities of the Isaiah
stature from relics of the old Babylonian religion. 4 About 1000, the Chaldeans

1 The name Chaldean signifies, before the Persian epoch, a tribe; later, a religious society.
See p. 175 above.

2 A. Bcrtholct, Kulturgeschicbte Israels (1919), pp. 153, et seq. [Clear and useful English manuals
arc G. Moore, Literature of the Old Testament; R. H. Charles, Between the Old and the New Testaments.
See also the article "Hebrew Religion" in Ency. Brit., XI cd. TV.]

3 According to Williams Jackson's Zoroaster (1901).

4 Research has treated the Chaldean, like the Talmudic, as a stepchild. The investigator's
whole attention has been concentrated on the religion of the Babylonian Culture, and the Chaldean

io6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

were a group of Aramaic-speaking tribes like the Israelites, and lived in the south
of Sincar the mother tongue of Jesus is still sometimes called Chaldean. In
Seleucid times the name was applied to a widespread religious community, and
especially to its priests. The Chaldean religion was an astral religion, which
before Hammurabi the Babylonian was not. It is the deepest of all interpreta-
tions of the Magian universe, the World-Cavern l and Kismet working therein,
and consequently it remained the fundamental of Islamic and Jewish speculation
to their very latest phases. It was by it, and not by the Babylonian Culture,
that after the seventh century there was formed an astronomy worthy to be
called an exact science that is, a priestly technique of observation of marvel-
lous acuteness. 2 It replaced the Babylonian moon-week by the planet-week.
Ishtar, the most popular figure of the old religion, the goddess of life and fruit-
fulness, now became a planet, and Tammuz, the ever-dying and ever-revived
god of vegetation, a fixed star. Finally, the henotheistic feeling announced
itself; for Nebuchadnezzar the Great Marduk 3 was the one true god, the
god of mercy, and Nebo, the old god of Borsippa, was his son and envoy to
mankind. For a century (6x5-539) Chaldean kings were world-rulers, but they
were also the heralds of the new religion. When temples were being built,
they themselves carried bricks. The accession-prayer of Nebuchadnezzar, the
contemporary of Jeremiah, to Marduk is still extant, and in depth and purity
it is in nowise surpassed by the finest passages of Israelite prophecy. The Chal-
dean penitential psalms, closely related in rhythm and inner structure to those
of the Jews, know the sin of which man is unconscious and the suffering that
contrite avowal before the incensed god can avert. It is the same trust in the
mercy of the Deity that finds a truly Christian expression in the inscriptions of
the Bel temple of Palmyra. 4

The kernel of the prophetic teachings is already Magian. There is one god
be he called Yahwch, Ahuramazda or Marduk-Baal who is the principle
of good, and all other deities are either impotent or evil. To this doctrine there
attached itself the hope of a Messiah, very clear in Isaiah, but also bursting out
everywhere during the next centuries, under pressure of an inner necessity. It

has been regarded as its dying echo. Such a view inevitably excludes any real understanding of it.
The material is not even separated out, but is dispersed in all the books on Assyrian-Babylonian
religion. (H. Zimmern, Die Keilinschriften und das alte Testament II; Gunkel, Scbopfung und Chaos;
M. Jastrow, C. Bczold, etc.) On the other hand the subject is assumed by some (e.g., Boussct,
Hauftprobleme tier Gnosis, 1907) to have been exhausted.

i See Vol. I., p. 184. Tr.

1 The fact that Chaldean science was, in comparison with Babylonian empiricism, a new thing
has been clearly recognized by Bczold (Astronomic, Himmelsschau und Astratlehre bei den Babyloniern,
1911, pp. 17, et seq.). Its data were taken and developed by different Classical savants according
to their own way of reasoning that is, as a matter of applied mathematics, and to the exclusion
of all feeling for distance.

1 See Jastrow's articles "Babylonian and Assyrian Religion" and "Marduk" in Enty. Brit., XI
ed. Tr.

4 J. Hchn, Hymnen und Gtbete an Marduk (1905).

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 107

is the basic idea of Magian religion, for it contains implicitly the conception
of the world-historical struggle between Good and Evil, with the power of Evil
prevailing in the middle period, and the Good finally triumphant on the Day
of Judgment. This moralization of history is common to Persians, Chaldees,
and Jews. But with its coming, the idea of the localized people ipso facto
vanished and the genesis of Magian nations without earthly homes and bound-
aries was at hand. The idea of the Chosen People emerged. 1 But it is easy to
understand that men of strong blood, and in particular the great families, found
these too spiritual ideas repugnant to their natures and harked back to the stout
old tribal faiths. According to Cumont's researches the religion of the Persian
kings was polytheistic and did not possess the Haoma sacrament that is, it
was not wholly Zoroastrian. The same is true of most of the kings of Israel,
and in all probability also of the last Chaldean Nabu-Nabid (Nabonidus),
whose overthrow by Cyrus and his own subjects was in fact made possible by
his rejection of the Marduk faith. And it was in the Captivity that circum-
cision and the (Chaldean) Sabbath were first acquired, as rites, by the Jews.

The Babylonian exile, however, did set up an important difference between
the Jews and the Persians, in respect, not of the ultimate truths of conscious
piety, but of all the facts of actuality and consequently men's inward attitude to
these facts. It was the Yahweh believers who were permitted to go home and
the adherents of Ahuramazda who allowed them to do so. Of two small tribes
that two hundred years before had probably possessed equal numbers of fighting
men, the one had taken possession of a world while Darius crossed the
Danube in the north, his power extended in the south through eastern Arabia
to the island of Sokotra on the Somali coast 2 and the other had become an
entirely unimportant pawn of alien policy.

This is what made one religion so lordly, the other so humble. Let the
student read, in contrast to Jeremiah, the great Behistun inscription 3 of Darius
what a splendid pride of the King in his victorious god ! And how despairing
are the arguments with which the Israelite prophets sought to preserve intact

1 For Chaldeans and Persians there was no need to trouble here about proof they had by their
God conquered the world. But the Jews had only their literature to cling to, and this accordingly
turned to theoretical proof in the absence of positive. In the last analysis, this unique national treas-
ure owes its origin to the constant need of reacting against self-depreciation. [For example, the
repeated restatement of the date of the Messiah's advent in the successive works of the age of the
prophets. TV.]

2 Glascr, Die Abessinier in Arabien und in Afrika (1895), p. 114. Glaser is convinced that Abyssin-
ian, Pehlevi, and Persian cuneiform inscriptions of the highest importance await discovery there.

3 The inscription and sculptures of Behistun (on an almost inaccessible cliff in the Zagros range
on the Baghdad-Hamadan road) were reinvestigated by a British Museum expedition in 1904; sec
The Inscription of Darius the Great at Behistun (London, 1907). "Thus saith Darius the King. That
whac I have done I have done altogether by the grace of Ahuramazda. Ahuramazda and the other
gods that be, brought aid to me. For this reason did Ahuramazda and the other gods that be bring
aid to me because I was not hostile nor a liar nor a wrongdoer, neither I nor my family, but accord-
ing to Rectitude have I ruled" (A. V. Williams Jackson, Persia Past and Present). Tr.

io8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the image of their god. Here, in exile, with every Jewish eye turned by the
Persian victory to the Zoroastrian doctrine, the pure Judaic prophecy (Amos,
Hosca, Isaiah, Jeremiah) passes into Apocalypse (Deutero-Isaiah, 1 Ezekiel, Zecha-
riah). All the new visions of the Son of Man, of Satan, of archangels, of the
seven heavens, of the last judgment, are Persian presentations of the common world-
feeling. In Isaiah xli appears Cyrus himself, hailed as Messiah. Did the great
composer of Deutero-Isaiah draw his enlightenment from a Zoroastrian dis-
ciple? Is it possible that the Persians released the Jews out of a feeling of the
inward relationship of their two teachings? It is certain at any rate that both
shared one popular idea as to last things, and felt and expressed a common
hatred of the old Babylonian and Classical religions, of unbelievers generally,
which they did not feel towards one another.

We must not, however, forget to look at the "return from captivity" also
from the point of view of Babylon. The great mass, strong in race-force, was
in reality far removed from these ideas, or regarded them as mere visions and
dreams; and the solid peasantry, the artisans, and no doubt the nascent land-
aristocracy quietly remained in its holdings under a prince of their own, the Resh
Galutha, whose capital was Nehardea. 2 Those who returned "home" were
the small minority, the stubborn, the zealots. They numbered with their wives
and children forty thousand, a figure which cannot be one-tenth or even one-
twentieth of the total, and anyone who confuses these settlers and their destiny
with Jewry as a whole 3 must necessarily fail to read the inner meaning of all
following events. The little world of Judaism lived a spiritually separate life, and
the nation as a whole, while regarding this life with respect, certainly did not
share in it. In the East apocalyptic literature, the heiress of prophecy, blos-
somed richly. It was a genuine native poetry of the people, of which we still
have the masterpiece, the Book of Job a work in character Islamic and de-
cidedly un-Jewish 4 while a multitude of its other tales and sagas, such as
Judith, Tobit, Achikar, 5 are spread as motives over all the literatures of the
"Arabian" world. In Judea only the Law flourished; the Talmudic spirit
appears first in Ezekiel (chs. xl, et seq.) and after 450 is made flesh in the
scribes (Sopherim) headed by Ezra. From 300 B.C. to A.D. zoo the Tannaim
("Teachers") expounded the Torah and developed the Mishnah. Neither the
coming of Jesus nor the destruction of the Temple interrupted this abstract

1 Isaiah xl-lxvi. For the critical questions arising on Deutero-Isaiah sec Dr. T. K. Cheync's
article "Isaiah" in the Encyclopedia Biblica, the same scholar's summary in Ency. Brit., XI cd., ar-
ticle "Isaiah," or G. Moore's summary, Literature of the Old Testament, Ch. XVI. Tr.

* This "King of the Banishment" (Exilarch) was long a conspicuous and politically important
figure in the Persian Empire. He was only removed by Islam.

1 As Christian and Jewish theology both do the only difference between these is in their
respective interpretations of the later development of Israelite literature (recast in Judca as the
literature of Judaism), the one inflecting it towards Evangelism, the others towards Talmudism.

4 Later it occurred to some Pharisee mind to Judaizc it by interpolating chs. xxxii-xxxvii.

6 See the articles "Tobit," etc., in Jewish Encyclofadia and Ency. Biblica. Tr.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 109

scholarship. Jerusalem became for the rigid believer a Mecca, and his Koran
was a Code of laws to which was gradually added a whole primitive history com-
pounded of Chaldeo-Persian motives reset according to Pharisaic ideas. 1 But
in this atmosphere there was no room for a worldly art, poetry, or learning.
All that the Talmud contains of astronomical, medical, and juristic knowledge
is exclusively of Mesopotamian origin. 2 It is probable, too, that it was in
Mesopotamia, and before the end of the Captivity, that there began that Chal-
dean-Persian-Jewish formation of sects which developed into the formation of
great religions at the beginning of the Magian Culture, and reached its climax in
the teaching of Mani. " The Law and the Prophets ' ' these two nouns practically
define the difference between Judea and Mesopotamia. In the late Persian and in every
other Magian theology both tendencies are united; it is only in the case here
considered that they were separated in space. The decisions of Jerusalem were
recognized everywhere, but it is a question how widely they were obeyed.
Even as near as Galilee the Pharisees were the object of suspicion, while in
Babylonia no Rabbi could be consecrated. For the great Gamaliel, Paul's
teacher, it was a title to fame that his rulings were followed by the Jews "even
abroad. ' ' How independent was the life of the Jews in Egypt is shown by the re-
cently discovered documents of Elephantine and Assuan. 3 About 170, Onias asked
the King for permission to build a temple " according to the measurements of the
Temple in Jerusalem," on the ground that the numerous non-conforming temples
that existed were the cause of eternal bickerings amongst the communities.

One other subject must be considered. Jewry, like Persia, had since the
Exile increased enormously beyond the old small clan-limits; this was owing to
conversions and secessions the only form of conquest open to a landless nation
and, therefore, natural and obvious to the Magian religions. In the north it very
early drove, through the Jew State of Adiabene, to the Caucasus; in the south
(probably along the Persian Gulf) it penetrated to Saba; in the west it was dom-
inant in Alexandria, Cyrene, and Cyprus. The administration of Egypt and
the policy of the Parthian Empire were largely in Jewish hands.

But this movement came out of Mesopotamia alone, and the spirit in it was the
Apocalyptic and not the Talmudic. Jerusalem was occupied in creating yet
more legal barriers against the unbeliever. It was not enough even to abandon
the practice of making converts. A Pharisee permitted himself to summon the
universally beloved King Hyrcanus (135-106) to lay down the office of High
Priest because his mother had once been in the power of the infidels. 4 This is

1 If the assumption of a Chaldean prophecy corresponding to Isaiah and Zarathustra be correct,
it is to this young, inwardly cognate, and contemporary astral religion (and not to the Babylonian)
that Genesis owes its amazingly profound cosmogony, just as it owes to the Persian religion its
visions of the end of the world.

1 S. Funk, Die Entstebung dcs Talmuds (1919), p. 106.

* E. Sachau, Aramaische Pafyros und Ostraka am Elephantine (1911).

4 Joscphus, Antiq. t 13, 10.

no THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the same narrowness which in the primitive Christian brotherhood of Judca
took the form of opposing the preaching of the Gospel to the heathen. In the
East it would simply never have occurred to anyone to draw such barriers,
which were contrary to the whole idea of the Magian nation. But in that
very fact was based the spiritual superiority of the wide East. The Syncdrion in
Jerusalem might possess unchallenged religious authority, but politically, and
therefore historically, the power of the Resh Galutha was a very different mat-
ter. Christian and Jewish research alike have failed to perceive these things.
So far as I am aware, no one has noticed the important fact that the persecution
of Antiochus Epiphanes was directed not against "Jewry" but against Judea.
And this brings us to another fact, of still greater importance.

The destruction of Jerusalem hits only a very small part of the nation, one
moreover that was spiritually and politically by far the least important. It is
not true that the Jewish people has lived " in the Dispersion" since that day, for
it had lived for centuries (and so too had the Persian and others) in a form which
was independent of country. On the other hand, we realize equally little the
impression made by this war upon the real Jewry which Judea thought of and
treated as an adjunct. The victory of the heathen and the ruin of the Sanctuary
was felt in the inmost soul, 1 and in the crusade of 115 2 a bitter revenge was
taken for it; but the ideal outraged and vindicated was the ideal of Jewry and
not that of Judaism. Zionism then, as in Cyrus's day and in ours, was a reality
only for a quite small and spiritually narrow minority. If the calamity had been
really felt in the sense of a " loss of home" (as we figure it to ourselves with the
Western mind), a hundred opportunities after Marcus Aurelius's time could have
been seized to win the city back. But that would have contradicted the Magian
sense of the nation, whose ideal organic form was the synagogue, the pure con-
sensus like the early Catholic " visible Church" and like Islam and it was
precisely the annihilation of Judea and the clan spirit of Judea that for the
first time completely actualized this ideal.

For Vespasian's War, directed against Judca, was a liberation of Jewry.
In the first place, it ended both the claim of the people of this petty district to be
the genuine nation, and the pretensions of their bald spirituality to equivalence
with the soul-life of the whole. The research, the scholasticism, and the
mysticism of the Oriental academies entered into possession of their rights;
so, for instance, the judge Kama the contemporary, more or less, of Ulpian
and Papinian formulated at the academy of Nehardea the first code of civil
law. 3 In the second place, it rescued this religion from the dangers of that
pseudomorphosis to which Christianity in that same period was succumbing.
Since 100 B.C. there had existed a half-Hellenistic Jewish literature. The

1 Much as, say, the destruction of the Vatican would be felt by the Catholic Church.
1 See p. 198. Tr.

a. P . 69.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES m

"Preacher" (Ecclesiastcs, Koheleth) contains Pyrrhonic ideas. 1 The Wisdom
of Solomon, 2. Maccabees, Theodotion, the Aristeas Letter, etc., follow; there
are things like the Menander collection of Maxims, as to which it is impossible
to say whether they ought to be regarded as Jewish or as Greek. There were,
about 1 60, high priests who were so Hellenistic in spirit that they combated the
Jewish religion, and later there were rulers like Hyrcanus and Herod who did the
same by political methods. This danger came to an end instantly and for good
in A.D.yo.

In the time of Jesus there were in Jerusalem three tendencies which can be
described as generally Aramaean, represented respectively by the Pharisees, the
Sadducees, and the Essenes. Although the connotations of these names varied,
and although both in Christian and in Jewish research most diverse views are
held about them, it may at any rate be said that the first of these tendencies
is found in greatest purity in Judaism, the second in Chaldeanism, the third in
Hellenism. 2 Essene is the rise of the cult (almost the Order) of Mithras in the
east of Asia Minor. The Sadducees, although in Jerusalem they appear as a
small and distinguished group Josephus compares them with the Epicureans
are thoroughly Aramasan in their apocalyptic and eschatological views, in
virtue of a certain element which makes them, so to say, the Dostoyevskis of
this Early period. They stand to the Pharisees in the relation of mysticism to
scholasticism, of John to Paul, of Bundahish to Vendidad 3 in the Persian world.
The Apocalyptic is popular, and many of its traits are spiritually common prop-
erty throughout the Aramasan world; the Talmudic and Avestan Pharisaism
is exclusive and tries to rule out every other religion with uncompromising
rigour.

The Essenes appear in Jerusalem as a monastic order like the Neopythago-
reans. They possessed secret texts. 4 In the broad sense they are representative
of the Pseudomorphosis, and in consequence they disappear from Jewry com-
pletely after A.D. 70, while precisely in this period Christian literature was be-
coming purely Greek not in the least of the causes of this being that the
Hellenized Western Jews left Judaism to retreat into its East, and gradually
adopted Christianity.

But also Apocalyptic, which is an expression-form of townless and town-
fearing mankind, soon came to an end within the Synagogue, after a last won-
derful reaction to the stimulus of the great catastrophe. 6 When it had become
evident that the teaching of Jesus would lead not to a reform of Judaism,

1 Pyrrho himself had studied under Magian priests. See, for Pyrrhonism, Ency. Brit., XI cd.,
articles "Scepticism," "Megarian School," "Pyrrho." Tr.

* Schicle (Die Religion in Geschicbte und Gegenwart, III, 811) reverses the two latter names; this,
however, docs not affect the phenomenon in any way.

8 The Cosmogony and the Law, in the Zoroastrian Scriptures. Tr.

4 Boussct, Rel. d. Jud., p. 531.

1 Baruch, Ezra IV (z Esdras), the original text of John's Revelation.

in THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

but to a new religion, and when, about A.D. 100, the daily imprecation-formula
against the Jew-Christians was introduced, Apocalyptic for the short remainder
of its existence resided in the young Church.

The incomparable thing which lifted the infant Christianity out above all
religions of this rich Springtime is the figure of Jesus. In all the great creations
of those years there is nothing which can be set beside it. Tame and empty all
the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis, and Osiris must have seemed
to any man reading or listening to the still recent story of Jesus's sufferings
the last journey to Jerusalem, the last anxious supper, the hours of despair in
Gethsemane, and the death on the cross.

Here was no matter of philosophy. Jesus's utterances, which stayed in the
memory of many of the devoted, even in old age, are those of a child in the
midst of an alien, aged, and sick world. They are not sociological observations,
problems, debatings. Like a quiet island of bliss was the life of these fishermen
and craftsmen by the Lake of Gennesareth in the midst of the age of the great
Tiberius, far from all world-history and innocent of all the doings of actuality,
while round them glittered the Hellenistic towns with their theatres and temples,
their refined Western society, their noisy mob-diversions, their Roman cohorts,
their Greek philosophy. When the friends and disciples of the sufferer had
grown grey and his brother was president of their group in Jerusalem, they put
together, from the sayings and narratives generally current in their small com-
munities, a biography so arresting in its inward appeal that it evolved a presen-
tation-form of its own, of which neither the Classical nor the Arabian Culture
has any example the Gospel. Christianity is the one religion in the history
of the world in which the fate of a man of the immediate present has become the
emblem and the central point of the whole creation.

A strange excitement, like that which the Germanic world experienced
about A.D. 1000, ran in those days through the whole Aramzean land. The
Magian soul was awakened. That element which lay in the prophetic religions
like a presentiment, and expressed itself in Alexander's time in metaphysical
outlines, came now to the state of fulfilment. And this fulfilment awakened,
in indescribable strength, the primitive feeling of Fear. The birth of the Ego,
and of the world-anxiety with which it is identical, is one of the final secrets
of humanity and of mobile life generally. In front of the Microcosm there
stands up a Macrocosm wide and overpowering, an abyss of alien, dazzling
existence and activity that frightens the small lonely ego back into itself.
Even in the blackest hours of life no adult experiences fear like the fear which
sometimes overpowers a child in the crisis of awakening. Over the dawn of
the new Culture likewise lay this deathly anxiety. In this early morning of
Magian world-feeling, timorous and hesitant and ignorant of itself, young

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES ii 3

eyes saw the end of the world at hand it is the first thought in which every
Culture to this day has come to knowledge of itself. All but the shallower
souls trembled before revelations, miracles, glimpses into the very fundament of
things. Men now lived and thought only in apocalyptic images. Actuality
became appearance. Strange and terrifying visions were told mysteriously by
one to another, read out from fantastic veiled texts, and seized at once with an
immediate inward certainty. These writings travelled from community to
community, village to village, and it is quite impossible to assign them to any
one particular religion. 1 Their colouring is Persian, Chaldean, Jewish, but they
have absorbed all that was circulating in men's minds. Whereas the canonical
books are national, the apocalyptic literature is international in the literal
sense of the word. It is there, and no one seems to have composed it. Its
content is fluid to-day it reads thus and to-morrow otherwise. But this
does not mean that it is a "poetry" it is not. 2 These creations resemble the
terrible figures of the Romanesque cathedral-porches in France, which also are
not " art," but fear turned into stone. Everyone knows those angels and devils,
the ascent to heaven and descent to hell of divine Essence, the Second Adam,
the Envoy of God, the Redeemer of the last days, the Son of Man, the eternal
city, and the last judgment. 3 In the alien cities and the high positions of strict
Judaic and Persian priesthoods the different doctrines might be tangibly
defined and argued about, but below in the mass of the people there was prac-
tically no specific religion, but a general Magian religiousness which filled all
souls and attached itself to glimpses and visions of every conceivable origin.
The Last Day was at hand. Men expected it and knew that on that day "He"
of whom all these revelations spoke would appear. Prophets arose. More and
more new communities and groups gathered, believing themselves to have
found either a better understanding of the traditional religion, or the true
religion itself. In this time of amazing, ever-increasing tension, and in the
very years around Jesus's birth-year, there arose, besides endless communities
and sects, another redemption-religion, the Mandasan, as to which we know

1 For instance, the Book of Naasenes (P. Wendland, Htlhnistisch-rdmischt Kultur, pp. 177, etseq.);
the "Mithras Liturgy" (ed. A. Dieterich); the Hermetic Pcemandcr (ed. Reitzcnstein), the Psalins
of Solomon, the Gospels of Thomas and Peter, the Pistis-Sophia, etc. [Information as to these will
be found in the articles "Ophites," "Mithras," "Hermes Trismegistus," "Apocalyptic Literature,"
"Apocryphal Literature," "Gnosticism," in the Emy. Brit., XI cd. Tr.]

2 Any more than Dostoycvski's "Dream of a Ridiculous Person " is so.

3 Our definitive ideas of this early Magian vision-world we owe to the manuscripts of Turfan,
which have reached Berlin since 1903. It was these which at last freed our knowledge and, above all,
our criteria from the deformations due to the preponderance of Western-Hellenistic material a
preponderance that had been augmented by Egyptian papyrus finds and radically transformed all
our existing views. Now at last the pure, almost unknown, East is seen operative in all the apoca-
lypses, hymns, liturgies, and books of edification of the Persians, Manda^ans, Manichseans, and
countless other sects; and primitive Christianity for the first time really takes its place in the move-
ment to which it owes its spiritual origins (see H. Liiders, Sit-^ungen der Berliner Akademic, 1914,
and R. Reitzenstein, Das iranische Erlosungsmysterium (1911).

ii4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

nothing of founder or origins. In spite of its hatred of the Judaism of Jerusalem
and its definite preference for the Persian idea of redemption, the Mandasan
religion seems to have stood very close to the popular beliefs of Syrian Jewry.
One after another, pieces of its wonderful documents arc becoming available,
and they consistently show us a "Him," a Son of Man, a Redeemer who is
sent down into the depths, who himself must be redeemed and is the goal of
man's expectations. In the Book of John, the Father high upraised in the House
of Fulfilment, bathed in light, says to his only begotten Son: "My Son, be to
me an ambassador; go into the world of darkness, where no ray of light is."
And the Son calls up to him: "Father, in what have I sinned that thou hast
sent me into the darkness?" And finally: "Without sin did I ascend and there
was no sin and defect in me." 1

All the characters of the great prophetic religions and of the whole store of
profound glimpses and visions later collected into apocalypses are seen here as
foundations. Of Classical thought and feeling not a breath reached this Magian
underworld. No doubt the beginnings of the new religion are lost irrevocably.
But one historical figure of Manda:anism stands forth with startling distinctness,
as tragic in his purpose and his downfall as Jesus himself John the Baptist. 2
He, almost emancipated from Judaism, and filled with the as mighty a hatred of
the Jerusalem spirit as that of primitive Russia for Petersburg, preached the
end of the world and the coming of the Barnasha, the Son of Man, who is no
longer the longed-for national Messiah of the Jews, but the bringer of the world-
conflagration. 3 To him came Jesus and was his disciple. 4 He was thirty years
old when the awakening came over him. Thenceforth the apocalyptic, and in
particular the Mandzan, thought-world filled his whole being. The other
world of historical actuality lying round him was to him as something sham,
alien, void of significance. That "He" would now come and make an end

1 Lidzbarski, Das Johannesbuch der Mandaer, Ch. LXVI. Also W. Bousset, Hauptprobleme der
Gnosis (1907) and Rcitzcnstcin, Das Mandaische Buch der Herrn der Gr'dsse (1919), an apocalypse ap-
proximately contemporary with the oldest Gospels. On the Messiah texts, the Descent-into-Hcll
texts, and the Songs of the Dead see Lidzbarski, Mandaische Liturgien (192.0); also the Book of the
Dead (especially the second and third books of the left Genza) in Reitzcnstein's Das iraniscke Erlo-
sun&smysterittm (especially pp. 43, et seq.). [The Mandzan religion survives to-day in the region
of the Shatt-cl-Arab and the Karun valley or Khuzistan. Tr.]

2 Sec Rcitzenstein, pp. 114, et scq., and references there quoted.

* In the New Testament, of which the final redaction lies entirely in the sphere of Western-
Classical thought, the Mandzan religion and the sects belonging thereto are no longer understood,
and indeed everything Oriental seems to have dropped out. Acts xviii-xix, however, discloses a
perceptible hostility between the then widespread John-communities and the Primitive Christians
(see Dibclius Die Urchristliche Uberlieferungen von Johannes dem Taufer). The Mandzans later rejected
Christianity as flatly as they had rejected Judaism. Jesus was for them a false Messiah. In their
Apocalypse of the Lord of Greatness the apparition of Enosh was also announced.

4 According to Rcitzenstein (Das Buch von Herrn der Grosse*) Jesus was condemned at Jerusalem as
a John-disciple. According to Lidzbarski (Mand. Lit., 1910, XVI and Zimmern (Zticbr. d. D. Mor&.
Gtsellschaft, 1910, p. 419), the expression "Jesus the Nazarcne" or "Nasorcne," which was later
by the Christian communities referred to Nazareth (Matthew ii, 13, with a doubtful citation),
really indicates the membership in a Mandzan Order.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 115

of this unreal reality was his magnificent certainty, and like his master John,
he stepped forth as its herald. Even now we can see, in the oldest Gospels that
were embodied into the New Testament, gleams of this period in which he was,
in his consciousness, nothing but a prophet. 1

But there was a moment in his life when an inkling, and then high certainty,
came over him "Thou art thyself It!" It was a secret that he at first hardly
admitted to himself, and only later imparted to his nearest friends and com-
panions, who thereafter shared with him, in all stillness, the blessed mission,
till finally they dared to reveal the truths before all the world by the momentous
journey to Jerusalem. If there is anything at all that clouds the complete purity
and honour of his thought, it is that doubt as to whether he has deceived him-
self which from time to time seizes him, and of which, later, his disciples told
quite frankly. He comes to his home. The village crowds to him, recognizes
the former carpenter who left his work, is angered. The family mother
and all the brothers and sisters are ashamed of him and would have arrested
him. And with all these familiar eyes upon him he was confused and felt the
magic power depart from him (Mark vi). In Gethsemane doubts of his mis-
sion 2 mingled themselves in the terrible fear of coming things, and even on the
cross men heard the anguished cry that God had forsaken him.

Even in these last hours he lived entirely in the form of his own apocalyptic
world, which alone was ever real to him. What to the Roman sentries stand-
ing below him was reality was for him an object of helpless wonder, an illusion
that might at any moment without warning vanish into nothingness. He
possessed the pure and unadulterated soul of the townless land. The life of the
cities and their spirit were to him utterly alien. Did he really see the semi-
Classical Jerusalem, into which he rode as the Son of Man, and understand
its historical nature? This is what thrills us in the last days and the collision
of facts with truths, of two worlds that will never understand one another, and
his entire incomprehension of what was happening about him.

So he went, proclaiming his message without reservation, through his
country. But this country was Palestine. He was born in the Classical Empire
and lived under the eyes of the Judaism of Jerusalem, and when his soul, fresh
from the awful revelation of its mission, looked about, it was confronted by the
actuality of the Roman State and that of Pharisaism. His repugnance for the
stiff and selfish ideal of the latter, which he shared with all Mandseanism and
doubtless with the peasant Jewry of the wide East, is the hall-mark of all his
discourses from first to last. It angered him that this wilderness of cold-hearted
formula: was reputed to be the only way to salvation. Still, thus far it was only

1 E.g., Mark vi; and then the great change, Mark viii, T.J, et scq. There is no religion which
has given us more honestly the talc of its birth.

2 Similarly in Mark i, 38, et scq., when he arose in the night and sought a. lonely place in order
to fortify himself by prayer.

xi6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

another kind of piety that his conviction was asserting against Rabbinical logic.
Thus far it is only the Law versus the Prophets.

But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, then the world of facts and the world of
truths were face to face in immediate and implacable hostility. It is a scene appallingly
distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism, such as the world's history had
never before and has never since looked at. The discord that lies at the root of
all mobile life from its beginning, in virtue of its very being, of its having both
existence and awareness, took here the highest form that can possibly be con-
ceived of human tragedy. In the famous question of the Roman Procurator:
"What is truth?" - the one word that is race-pure in the whole Greek Testa-
ment lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of the deed, the
prestige of the State and war and blood, the all-powerfulness of success and the
pride of eminent fitness. Not indeed the mouth, but the silent feeling of Jesus
answers this question by that other which is decisive in all things of religion
What is actualityl For Pilate actuality was all; for him nothing. Were it
anything, indeed, pure religiousness could never stand up against history and
the powers of history, or sit in judgment on active life; or if it does, it ceases to
be religion and is subjected itself to the spirit of history.

My kingdom is not of this world. This is the final word which admits of no
gloss and on which each must check the course wherein birth and nature have
set him. A being that makes use of a waking-consciousness, or a waking-
consciousness which subjects being to itself; pulsation or tension, blood or
intellect, history or nature, politics or religion here it is one or the other,
there is no honest way of compromise. A statesman can be deeply religious, a
pious man can die for his country but they must, both, know on which
side they are really standing. The born politician despises the inward thought-
processes of the ideologue and ethical philosopher in a world of fact and
rightly. For the believer, all ambition and succession of the historical world
are sinful and without lasting value he, too, is right. A ruler who wishes
to improve religion in the direction of political, practical purposes is a fool.
A sociologist-preacher who tries to bring truth, righteousness, peace, and
forgiveness into the world of actuality is a fool also. No faith yet has altered
the world, and no fact can ever rebut a faith. There is no bridge between direc-
tional Time and timeless Eternity, between the course of history and the existence
of a divine world-order, in the structure of which the word "providence"
or "dispensation" denotes the form of causality. This is the final meaning of the
moment in which Jesus and Pilate confronted one another. In the one world, the
historical, the Roman caused the Galilean to be crucified that was his Des-
tiny. In the other world, Rome was cast for perdition and the Cross became
the pledge of Redemption that was the "will of God." 1

1 The method of the present work is historical. It therefore recognizes the anti-historical as
well as the historical as a fact. The religious method, on the contrary, necessarily looks upon it-
self as the true and the opposite as false. This difference is quite insuperable.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 117

Religion is metaphysic and nothing else "Credo quia absurdum" and this
metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is
mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic that is,
the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a
world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other
world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of
religion is to be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century
Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a
blasphemy. His occasional utterances of a social kind, so far as they are
authentic and not merely attributed sayings, tend merely to edification. They
contain nothing whatever of new doctrine, and they include proverbs of the
sort then in general currency. His teaching was the proclamation, nothing but
the proclamation, of those Last Things with whose images he was constantly
filled, the dawn of the New Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the last judg-
ment, a new heaven and a new earth. 1 Any other conception of religion was
never in Jesus, nor in any truly deep-feeling period of history. Religion is, first and
last, metaphysic, other-worldliness (Jenseifigkeii), awareness in a world of which
the evidence of the senses merely lights the foreground. It is life in and with
the supersensible. And where the capacity for this awareness, or even the
capacity for believing in its existence, is wanting, real religion is at an end.
"My kingdom is not of this world," and only he who can look into the depths
that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them.
It is the Late, city periods that, no longer capable of seeing into depths, have
turned the remnants of religiousness upon the external world and replaced
religion by humanities, and metaphysic by moralization and social ethics.

In Jesus we have the direct opposite. "Give unto Cassar the things that are
Cassar's" means: "Fit yourselves to the powers of the fact-world, be patient,
suffer, and ask it not whether they are 'just.'' What alone matters is the
salvation of the soul. "Consider the lilies" means: "Give no heed to riches
and poverty, for both fetter the soul to cares of this world." "Man cannot
serve both God and Mammon" by Mammon is meant the whole of actuality.
It is shallow, and it is cowardly, to argue away the grand significance of this
demand. Between working for the increase of one's own riches, and working
for the social ease of everyone, he would have felt no difference whatever.
When wealth affrighted him, when the primitive community in Jerusalem

1 Hence Mark xiii, taken from an older document, is perhaps the purest example of his usual daily
discourse. Paul (i Thess. iv, 15-17) quotes another, which is missing in the Gospels. With these,
we have the priceless but, by commentators dominated by the Gospel tone, misunderstood
contributions of Papias, who about 100 was still in a position to collect much oral tradition. The
little that we have of his work suffices amply to show us the apocalyptic character of Jesus's daily
discourses. It is Mark xiii and not the Sermon on the Mount that reproduces the real note of them.
But as his teaching became modified into a teaching of Him, this material likewise was transformed
and the record of his utterances became the narrative of his manifestation. In this one respect the
picture given by the Gospels is inevitably false.

n8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

which was a strict Order and not a socialist club rejected ownership, it was
the most direct opposite of "social" sentiment that moved them. Their con-
viction was, not that the visible state of things was all, but that it was nothing:
that it rested not on appreciation of comfort in this world, but on unreserved
contempt of it. Something, it is true, must always exist to be set against and to
nullify worldly fortune, and so we come back to the contrast of Tolstoi and

Dostoycvski. Tolstoi, the townsman and Westerner, saw in Jesus only a social
reformer, and in his metaphysical impotence like the whole civilized West,
which can only think about distributing, never renouncing elevated primitive

- Christianity to the rank of a social revolution. Dostoyevski, who was poor,
but in certain hours almost a saint, never thought about social ameliorations
of what profit would it have been to a man's soul to abolish property?

VII

Amongst Jesus's friends and disciples, stunned as they were by the appalling
outcome of the journey to Jerusalem, there spread after a few days the news of
his resurrection and reappearance. The impression of this news on such souls
and in such a time can never be more than partially echoed in the sensibilities
of a Late mankind. It meant the actual fulfilment of all the Apocalyptic of that
Magian Springtime the end of the present xon marked by the ascension of the
redeemed Redeemer, the second Adam, the Saoshyant, Enosh, Barnasha, or
whatever other name man attached to "Him," into the light-realm of the
Father. And therewith the foretold future, the new world-a:on, "the King-
dom of Heaven," became immediately present. They felt themselves at the
decisive point in the history of redemption.

This certainty completely transformed the world-outlook of the little
circles. "His" teachings, as they had flowed from his mild and noble nature
his inner feeling of the relation between God and man and of the high mean-
ing of the times, and were exhaustively comprised in and defined by the word
"love" fell into the background, and their place was taken by the teaching
of Hint. As the Arisen he became for his disciples a new figure, in and of the
Apocalyptic, and (what was more) its most important and final figure. But
therewith their image of the future took form as an image of memory. Now,
this was something of quite decisive importance, unheard-of in the world of
Magian thought the transference of an actuality, lived and experienced, on
to the plane of the high story itself. The Jews (amongst them the young Paul)
and the Mandzans (amongst them the disciples of John the Baptist) fought
against it with passion and made of Jesus a "False Messiah" such as had been
spoken of in the earliest Persian texts. 1 For them "He" was still to come from
afar; for the little community "He" had already been had they not seen
him and lived with him? We have to enter into this conception unreservedly
1 Jesus himself was aware of this (Matt, xxiv, 5, n).

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES zi 9

if we arc to appreciate the enormous superiority it had in those times. Instead
of an uncertain glimpse into the distance, 1 a compelling present; instead of
fearful waiting for a liberating certainty, instead of a saga, a lived and shared
human destiny truly they were "glad tidings" that were proclaimed.

But to whom? Even in the first days the question arose which decided the
whole Destiny of the new revelation. Jesus and his friends were Jews by birth,
but they did not belong to the land of Judea. Here in Jerusalem men looked
for the Messiah of their old sacred books, a Messiah who was to appear for
the "Jewish people," in the old tribal sense, and only for them. But all the
rest of the Aramasan world waited upon the Saviour of the world, the Redeemer
and Son of Man, the figure of all apocalyptic literature, whether written out in
Jewish, Persian, Chaldean, or Mandaran terms. 2 In the one view the death and
resurrection of Jesus were merely local events; in the other they betokened a
world-change. For, while everywhere else the Jews were a Magian nation
without home or unity of birth, Jerusalem held firmly to the tribal idea. The
conflict was not one between "preaching to the Jews" and "preaching to the
Gentiles" it went far deeper. The word "mission" had essentially here a
twofold meaning. In the Judaic view there was essentially no need for re-
cruiting quite the reverse, as it was a contradiction to the Messiah-idea.
The words "tribe" and "mission" are reciprocally exclusive. The members
of the Chosen People, and in particular the priesthood, had merely to convince
themselves that their longing was now fulfilled. But to the Magian nation,
based on consensus or community of feeling, what the Resurrection conveyed was
a full and definitive truth, and consensus in the matter of this truth gave the
principle of the true nation, which must necessarily expand till it had taken in all
older and conceptually incomplete principles. "A Shepherd and his sheep"
was the formula of the new world-nation. The nation of the Redeemer was
identical with mankind. When, therefore, we survey the early history of
this Culture, we see that the controversy in the Apostles' Council 3 had been
already decided, five hundred years before, by facts. Post-exilic Jewry (with
the sole exception of self-contained Judea) had, like the Persians, Chaldeans,
and others, recruited widely amongst the heathen, from Turkestan to inner
Africa, regardless of home and origin. As to this there is now no controversy.
It never at any time entered the heads of this community to be anything but

1 Made more uncertain perhaps by the failure of previous prophecies that had been so confidently
dated e.g., Jeremiah xxv, n; xxiv, 5-6; reinterpreted in Daniel vii, ix; i Enoch Ixxxiii-xc; and
again to be reinterpreted in 2. Baruch xxxvi-xl and 4 Ezra x-xii. Tr.

2 The designation "Messiah (Christ)" was old-Jewish, those of "Lord" (/cupi6j, divus) and
"Saviour" (trwrr/p, Asklepios) were cast-Aramsean in origin. In the course of the pseudomorphosis
"Christ" became the name of Jesus, and "Saviour" the title; but already "Lord" and "Saviour"
were titles current in the Hellenistic Emperor- worship; and in this was implicit the whole destiny
of westward-looking Christianity (compare here Rcitzcnstcin, Das iranische Erlosungsmysterium, p.
131, note).

3 Acts xv ; Gal. ii.

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

what it really was. It was itself already the result of a national existence in dis-
persion. In utter contrast to the old-Jewish texts which were a carefully
preserved treasure, and of which the right interpretation, the Halakha, was
reserved by the Rabbis to themselves the apocalyptic literature was written
so that it could reach all the souls to be wakened, and interpreted so that it
might strike home in everyone.

It is easy to see which of these conceptions was that of Jesus's oldest friends,
for they established themselves as a community of the Last Days in Jerusalem
and frequented the Temple. For these simple folk amongst them his broth-
ers, who erstwhile had openly rejected him, and his mother, who now believed
in her executed Son 1 the power of the Judaic tradition was even stronger
than the spirit of Apocalypse. In their object of convincing the Jews they failed
(although at first even Pharisees came over to them) and so they remained as
one of the numerous sects within Judaism, and their product, the "Confession
of Peter," may fairly be characterized as an express assertion that they them-
selves were the true Jewry and the Synedrion the false. 2

The final destiny of this circle 3 was to fall into oblivion when, as very
soon happened, the whole world of Magian thought and feeling responded to
the new apocalyptic teaching. Amongst the later disciples of Jesus were many
who were definitely and purely Magian, and wholly free from the Pharisaic
spirit. Long before Paul, they had tacitly settled the mission question. Not
to preach, for them, was not to live at all, and presently they had assembled,
everywhere from the Tigris to the Tiber, small circles in which the figure of
Jesus, in every conceivable presentation, merged with the mass of prior visions. 4
Out of this, a new discord arose, as between mission to the heathen and mission
to the Jews, and this was far more important than the conflict between Judea
and the world on issues already decided. Jesus had lived in Galilee. Was his
teaching to look west or east? Was it to be a Jesus-cult or an Order of the
Saviour? Was it to seek intimacy with the Persian or with the Syncretic
Church, both of which were in process of formation?

This was the question decided by Paul the first great personality in the
new movement, and the first who had the sense not only of truths, but of facts.

1 Acts i, 14; cf. Mark vi.

2 As against Luke, Matthew is the representative of this conception. His is the only Gospel
in which the word " Ecclesia" is used, and it denotes the true Jews, in contradistinction to the masses
that refuse to listen to Jesus. This is not the missionary idea, any more than Isaiah was a mission-
ary. Community, in this connexion, means an Order within Judaism. The prescriptions of Matt,
xviii, 15-2.0 arc wholly incompatible with any general dissemination.

3 It fell apart later into sects, amongst which were the Ebionites and the Elkazitcs (the latter
having a strange sacred book, the Elxai; sec Bousset, Hattptprobltme tier Gnosis, p. 154). [See the ar-
ticles "Ebionites" and "Sabians" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tir.]

4 Such sects were attacked in the Acts of the Apostles and in all Paul's Epistles, and indeed
there was hardly a Late Classical or Aramaran religion or philosophy which did not give rise to
some sort of Jesus-sect. The danger was indeed real of the Passion story becoming, not the nucleus
of a new religion, but an integrating element of all existing ones.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES zii

As a young rabbi from the West, and a pupil of one of the most famous of the
Tannaim, he had persecuted the Christians qua Jewish sectaries. Then, after
an awakening of the sort that often happened in those days, he turned to the
numerous small cult-communities of the West and forged out of them a Church
of his own modelling: so that thenceforward, the Pagan and the Christian cult-
Churches evolved in parallel, and with constant reciprocal action, up to lam-
blichus and Athanasius (about A.D. 330). In the presence of this great ideal,
Paul had for the Jesus-communities of Jerusalem a scarcely veiled contempt.
There is nothing in the New Testament more express and exact than the be-
ginning of the Epistle to the Galatians; his activity is a self-assumed task;
he has taught how it pleased him and he has built how it pleased him. Finally,
after fourteen years, he goes to Jerusalem in order, by force of his superior
mentality, his success, and his effective independence of the old comrades of
Jesus, to compel them there to agree that his, Paul's, creation contained the
true doctrine. Peter and his people, alien to actualities, failed to seize and
appreciate the far-reaching significance of the discussion. And from that
moment the primitive community was superfluous.

Paul was a rabbi in intellect and an apocalyptic in feeling. He recognized
Judaism, but as a preliminary development. And thus there came to be two
Magian religions with the same Scriptures (namely, the Old Testament), but a
double Halakha, the one setting towards the Talmud developed by the
Tannaim at Jerusalem from 300 B.C. onwards and the other, founded by
Paul and completed by the Fathers, in the direction of the Gospel. But, further,
Paul drew together the whole fullness of Apocalypse and salvation-yearning
then circulating in these fields 1 into a salvation-certainty, the certainty im-
mediately revealed to him and to him alone near Damascus. "Jesus is the Re-
deemer and Paul is his Prophet" this is the whole content of his message.
The analogy with Mohammed could scarcely be closer. They differed neither
in the nature of the awakening, nor in prophetic self-assuredness, nor in the
consequent assertion of sole authority and unconditional truth for their re-
spective expositions.

With Paul, urban man and his "intelligence" come on the scene. The
others, though they might know Jerusalem or Antioch, never grasped the
essence of these cities. They lived soil-bound, rural, wholly soul and feeling.
But now there appeared a spirit that had grown up in the great cities of Classical
cast, that could only live in cities, that neither understood nor respected the
peasant's countryside. An understanding was possible with Philo, but with

1 Of this he was fully aware. Many of his deepest intuitions arc unimaginable without Persian
and Mandican influences (e.g., Romans vii, ^^-2.4; i Corinthians xv, 2.6; Ephesians v, 6, ct seq.,
with a quotation of Persian origin. See Rcitzcnstein, Das iran. Erlos.-Myst., pp. 6, 133, ct scq.).
But this does not prove familiarity with Persian-Mandxan literature. The stories were spread in
these days as sagas and folk-tales were amongst us. One heard about them in childhood as things
of daily hearsay, but without being in the least aware of how deeply one was under their spell.

in THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Peter never. Paul was the first by whom the Resurrection-experience was
seen as a problem; the ecstatic awe of the young countryman changed in his brain
into a conflict of spiritual principles. For what a contrast ! the struggle of
Gethsemane, and the hour of Damascus: Child and Man, soul-anguish and
intellectual decision, self-devotion to death and resolve to change sides ! Paul
had begun by seeing in the new Jewish sect a danger to the Pharisaism of
Jerusalem; now, suddenly, he comprehended that the Nazarenes "were right"
a phrase that is inconceivable on the lips of Jesus and took up their cause
against Judaism, thereby setting up as an intellectual quantity that which had
previously consisted in the knowledge of an experience. An intellectual
quantity but in making his cause into this he unwittingly drove it close to
the other intellectual powers, the cities of the West. In the ambiance of pure
Apocalyptic there is no "intellect." For the old comrades it was simply not
possible to understand him in the least and mournfully and doubtfully
they must have looked at him while he was addressing them. Their living
image of Jesus (whom Paul had never seen) paled in this bright, hard light of
concepts and propositions. Thenceforward the holy memory faded into a
Scholastic system. But Paul had a perfectly exact feqling for the true home of
his ideas. His missionary journeys were all directed westward, and the East he
ignored. He never left the domain of the Classical city. Why did he go to Rome,
to Corinth, and not to Edessa or Ctesiphon? And why was it that he worked
only in the cities, and never from village to village?

That things developed thus was due to Paul alone. In the face of his practical
energy the feelings of all the rest counted for nothing, and so the young Church
took the urban and Western tendency decisively, so decisively that later it could
describe the remaining heathen as "pagani," country-folk. Thus arose an
immense danger that only youth and vernal force enabled the growing Church
to repel; the fellah-world of the Classical cities grasped at it with both hands,
and the marks of that grasp are visible to-day. But how remote already
from the essence of Jesus, whose entire life had been bound to country and the
country-folk ! The Pseudomorphosis in which he was born he had simply not
noticed; his soul contained not the smallest trace of its influence and now,
a generation after him, probably within the lifetime of his mother, that which
had grown up out of his death had already become a centre of formative pur-
pose for that Pseudomorphosis. The Classical City was soon the only theatre
of ritual and dogmatic evolution. Eastward the community extended only fur-
tively and unobtrusively. 1 About A.D. 100 there was already Christians beyond
the Tigris, but as far as the development of the Church was concerned they and
their beliefs might almost have been non-existent.

1 The early missionary effort in the East has scarcely been investigated and is still very difficult
to establish in detail. Sachau, Chronik von Arbtla (1915) and "Die Ausbreitung der Cbristentums in
Asien" in Abb. Pr. Akad. 4. Wiss. (1919); Harnack, Mission und Ausbreitung des Cbristentums, II, 117,
et scq.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES xx 3

It was a second creation, then, that came out of Paul's immediate entourage,
and it was this creation that, essentially, defined the form of the new Church.
The personality and the story of Jesus cried aloud to be put into poetic form,
and yet it is due to one man alone, Mark, that Gospels came into existence at
all. 1 What Paul and Mark had before them was a firm tradition in the com-
munity, the "Gospel," a continued and propagated hearsay, supported by
formless and insignificant notes in Aramaic and Greek, but in no way set out.
In any case, of course, serious documents would have come into existence some
time or another, but their natural form as products of the spirit of those who
had lived with Jesus (and of the spirit of the East generally) would have been a
canonical collection of his sayings, amplified, conclusively defined, and provided
with an exegesis by the Councils and pivoting upon the Second Advent. But
any tentatives in this direction were completely broken off by the Gospel of
Mark, which was written down about A.D. 65, at the same time as the last
Pauline Epistles, and, like them, in Greek. The writer had no suspicion, per-
haps, of the significance of his little work, but it made him one of the supremely
important personalities not only of Christianity, but of the Arabian Culture
generally. All older attempts vanished, leaving writings in Gospel-form as the
sole sources concerning Jesus. (So much so that " Evangelium," from signifying
the content of glad tidings, came to mean the form itself.) The work was the
outcome of the wishes of Pauline, literate, circles that had never heard any one
of Jesus's companions discourse about him. It is an apocalyptic lift-picture from a
distance; lived experience is replaced by narrative, and narrative so plain and
straightforward that the apocalyptic tendency passes quite unperceived. 2
And yet Apocalyptic is its condition precedent. It is not the words of Jesus, but
the doctrine of Jesus in the Pauline form, that constitutes the substance of
Mark. The first Christian book emanates from the Pauline creation. But very
soon the latter itself becomes unthinkable without the book and its successors.

For presently there arose something which Paul, the born schoolman,
had never intended, but which nevertheless had been made inevitable by the
tendency of his work the cult-church of Christian nationality. While the
Syncretic creed-community, in proportion as it attained to consciousness of
itself, drew the innumerable old city-cults and the new Magian together and
by means of a supreme cult endowed the structure with henotheistic form, the
Jesus-cult of the oldest Western communities was so long dissected and enriched
that it also came to consist of just such another mass of cults. 3 Around the

1 The researchers who argue with such over-learnedness about a proto-Mark, Source Q, the
"Twelve "-source, and so on, overlook the essential novelty of Mark, which is the first "Book" of
Christendom, plan-uniform and entire. Work of this sort is never the natural product of an evolution,
but the merit of an individual man, and it marks, here if anywhere, a historical turning-point.

2 Mark is generally the Gospel; after him the partisan writings (Matthew, Luke) begin; the
tone of narrative passes into that of legend and ends, beyond the Hebrew and John gospels, in Jesus-
romances like the gospels of Peter and James.

3 If the word "catholic" be used in its oldest sense (Ignatius ad Smyrn., 8) namely, to signify

iM THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

birth of Jesus, of which the Disciples knew nothing, grew up a story of his
childhood. In the Mark Gospel it has not yet come into existence. Already
in the old Persian apocalyptic, indeed, the Saoshyant as Saviour of the Last
Day was said to be born of a virgin. But the new western myth was of quite
other significance and had incalculable consequences. For within the Pseudo-
morphosis-region there arose presently beside Jesus a figure to which he was
Son, which transcended his figure that of the Mother of God. She, like her
Son, was a simple human destiny of such arresting and attractive force that she
towered above all the hundred and one Virgins and Mothers of Syncretism
Isis, Tanit, Cybele, Demeter and all the mysteries of birth and pain, and
finally drew them into herself. For Irenasus she is the Eve of a new mankind.
Origen champions her continued virginity. By giving birth to Redeemer-God
it is she really who has redeemed the world. Mary the "Theotokos" (she
who bare God) was the great stumbling-block for the Christians outside the
Classical frontier, and it was the doctrinal developments of this idea that led
Monophysites and Nestorians to break away and re-establish the pure Jesus-
religion. 1 But the Faustian Culture, again, when it awoke and needed a symbol
whereby to express its primary feeling for Infinity in time and to manifest its
sense of the succession of generations, set up the "Mater Dolorosa" and not the
suffering Redeemer as the pivot of the German-Catholic Christianity of the Gothic
age; and for whole centuries of bright fruitful inwardness this woman-figure
was the very synthesis of Faustian world-feeling and the object of all art,
poetry, and piety. Even to-day in the ritual and the prayers of the Roman
Catholic Church, and above all in the thoughts of its people, Jesus takes second
place after the Madonna. 2

Along with the Mary-cult there arose the innumerable cults of the saints,
which certainly exceeded in number those of the antique place-gods; when the
Pagan Church finally expired, the Christian had been able to absorb the whole
store of local cults in the form of the veneration of saints.

Paul and Mark were decisive in yet another matter of inestimably wide
import. It was a result of Paul's mission that, contrary to all the initial proba-
bilities, Greek became the language of the Church and following the lead
of the first Gospel of a sacred Greek literature. Let the reader consider what
this meant, in one way and another. The Jesus Church was artificially separated
from its spiritual origins and attached to an alien and scholarly element. Touch
with the folk-spirit of the Aramsean motherland was lost. Thenceforward
both the cult-Churches possessed the same language, the same conceptual

the sum of the cult-communities, both the Churches were Catholic. In the East the word had no
meaning. The Ncstorian Church was no more a sum than was the Persian: it was a Magian unit.

1 A brief survey of the Mary doctrine is given in article "Mary,"rx. Brit., XI ed. The sym-
bolism involved in the details of the story of Mary, as told in writing and in art, is very fully gone
into in Yrjo Him, The Sacred Shrine. Tr.

2 Ed. Meyer, Ursprung und Anfange des Cbristcntums (1911), pp. 77, et seq.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 115

traditions, the same book-literature from the same schools. The far less so-
phisticated Aramaic literatures of the East the truly Magian, written and
thought in the language of Jesus and his companions were cut off from co-
operating in the life of the Church. They could not be read, they dropped out
of sight, and finally they were forgotten altogether. After all, notwithstanding
that the Persian Scriptures were set down in Avestan and the Jewish in Hebrew,
the language of their authors and exegetes; the language of the whole Apoc-
alyptic from which the teachings of Jesus, and secondarily the teachings
about Jesus, sprang; the language, lastly, of the scholars of all the Mesopo-
tamian universities was Aramaic. All this vanished from the field of view,
to be replaced by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom were taken up, worked
upon in common, and misunderstood in common by the Schoolmen of the two
cult-Churches.

A final step in this direction was attempted by a man who was the equal
of Paul in organizing talent and greatly his superior in intellectual creativeness,
but who was inferior to him in the feeling for possibilities and actualities, and
consequently failed to achieve his grandly conceived schemes Marcion. 1
He saw in Paul's creation and its consequences only the basis on which to
found the true religion of salvation. He was sensible of the absurdity of two
religions that were unreservedly at war with one another possessing the same
Holy Writ namely, the Jewish canon. To us to-day it seems almost incon-
ceivable that this should have been, but in fact it was so, for a century but
we have to remember what a sacred text meant in every kind of Magian re-
ligiousness. In these texts Marcion saw the real "conspiracy against the
truth" and the most urgent danger for the doctrines intended by Jesus and,
in his view, not yet actualized. Paul the prophet had declared the Old Testa-
ment as fulfilled and concluded Marcion the founder pronounced it defeated
and cancelled. He strove to cut out every thing Jewish, down to the last detail.
From end to end he was fighting nothing but Judaism. Like every true founder,
like every religiously creative period, like Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel,
like the Homeric Greeks, and like the Germans converted to Christianity,
he transformed the old gods into defeated powers. 2 Jehovah as the Creator-God,
the Demiurge, is the "Just" and therefore the Evil: Jesus as the incarnation of the
Saviour-God in this evil creation is the "alien" that is, the good Principle. 3
The foundation of Magian, and in particular Persian, feeling is perfectly un-
mistakable here. Marcion came from Sinope, the old capital of that Mithra-

1 C. 85-155. See the recent work of Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium voni frcmden Gott (1911).
[Harnack's article "Marcion" in Ency. Brit., XI cd., is dated 1910. Tir.]

2 Harnack, op. cit., pp. 136, ct seq.; N. Bonwetsch, Grundr. d. Dogmtngcsch. (1919), p. 45, et
seq.

3 This is one of the profoundest ideas in all religious history, and one that must for ever remain
inaccessible to the pious average man. Marcion's identification of the "Just" with the Evil enables
him in this sense to oppose the Law of the Old Testament to the Evangel of the New.

12.6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

datic Empire whose religion is indicated in the very name of its kings. Here
of old, too, the Mithras cult had originated.

But to the new doctrine properly belonged new Scriptures. The "Law and
Prophets" which had hitherto been canonical for the whole of Christendom
was the Bible of the Jewish God, and in fact it had just been given final shape as
such by the Synedrion at Jabna. Thus, it was a Devil's book that the Christian
had in his hands, and Marcion, therefore, now set up against it the Bible of the
Redeemer-God likewise an assemblage and ordering of writings that had
hitherto been current in the community * as simple edification-books without
canonical claims. In place of the Torah he puts the one and true Gospel,
which he builds up uniformly out of various separate, and, in his view, cor-
rupted and falsified, Gospels. In place of the Israelite prophets he sets up the
Epistles of the one prophet of Jesus , who was Paul.

Thus Marcion became the real creator of the New Testament. But for that
reason it is impossible to ignore the mysterious personage, closely related to
him, who not long before had written the Gospel "according to John." The
intention of this writer was neither to amplify nor to supersede the Gospels
proper; what he did and, unlike Mark, consciously did was to create
something quite new, the first sacred book of Christianity, the Koran of the new
religion. 2 The book proves that this religion was already conceived of as some-
thing complete and enduring. The idea of the immediately impending end of
the world, with which Jesus was filled through and through and which even
Paul and Mark in a measure shared, lies far behind "John" and Marcion.
Apocalyptic is at an end, and Mysticism is beginning. Their content is not
the teaching of Jesus, nor even the Pauline teaching about Jesus, but the enigma
of the universe, the World-Cavern. There is here no question of a Gospel;
not the figure of the Redeemer, but the principle of the Logos, is the meaning
and the means of happening. The childhood story is rejected again; a god is
not "born," he is "there," and wanders in human form over the earth. And
this god is a Trinity God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. This sacred
book of earliest Christianity contains, for the first time, the Magian problem
of "Substance," which dominated the following centuries of the exclusion of
everything else and finally led to the religion's splitting up into three churches.
And what is significant in more respects than one the solution of that
problem to which "John" stands closest is that which the Nestorian East
stood for as the true one. It is, in virtue of the Logos idea (Greek though

1 About A.D. 150. Sec Harnack, op. cit., pp. 31, ct scq.

* For the notions of Koran and Logos, sec below. Again as in the case of Mark, the really
important question is, not what the material before him was, but how this entirely novel idea
for such a book, which anticipated and indeed made possible Marcion's plan for a Christian Bible,
could arise. The book presupposes a great spiritual movement (in eastern Asia Minor?) that knew
scarcely anything of Jewish Christianity and was yet remote from the Pauline, westerly thought-
world. But of the region and type of this movement we know nothing whatever.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES

the word happens to be) the "easternmost" of the Gospels, and presents Jesus,
emphatically not as the bringer of the final and total revelation, but as the
second envoy, who is to be followed by a third (the Comforter, Paraclete, of
John xiv, 16, 2.6; xv, z6). This is the astounding doctrine that Jesus him-
self proclaims, and the decisive note of this enigmatic book. Here is unveiled,
quite suddenly, the faith of the Magian East. If the Logos does not go, the
Paraclete J cannot come (John xvi, 7), but between them lies the last yon,
the rule of Ahriman (xiv, 30). The Church of the Pseudomorphosis, ruled by
Pauline intellect, fought long against the John Gospel and gave it recognition
only when the offensive, darkly hinted doctrine had been covered over by a
Pauline interpretation. The real state of affairs is disclosed in the Montanist
movement (Asia Minor, 160) which harked back to oral tradition and pro-
claimed in Montanus the manifested Paraclete and the end of the world. Its
popularity was immense. Tertullian went over to it at Carthage in 2.07. About
245 Mani, 2 who was intimately in touch with the currents of Eastern Chris-
tianity, 3 cast out the Pauline, human Jesus as a demon and confessed the Johan-
nine Logos as the true Jesus, but announced himself as the Paraclete of the
fourth Gospel. In Carthage, Augustine became a Manichasan, and it is a
highly suggestive fact that both movements finally fused with Marcionism.

To return to Marcion himself, it was he who carried through the idea of
"John" and created a Christian Bible. And then, verging on old age, when the
communities of the extreme west recoiled from him in horror, 4 he set out to
build the masterly structure of his own Redeemer-Church. 5 From 156 to 190 this
was a power, and it was only in the following century that the older Church
succeeded in degrading the Marcionites to the rank of heretics. Even so, in the
broad East and as far out as Turkestan, it was still important at a much later
date, and it ended, in a way deeply significant of its essential feeling, by fusing
with the Manichseans. 6

Nevertheless, though in the fullness of his conscious superiority he had
underestimated the vis inertia of existing conditions, his grand effort was not
in vain. He was, like Paul before him and Athanasius after him, the deliverer
of Christianity at a moment when it threatened to break up, and the grandeur
of his idea is in no wise diminished by the fact that union came about in oppo-
sition to, instead of through, him. The early Catholic Church that is, the
Church of the Pseudomorphosis arose in its greatness only about 190, and then

1 Vohu Mano, the Spirit of Truth, in the shape of the Saoshyant.

2 Sec the article by Harnack and Conybeare "Manichseism," Ency. Brit., XI cd. Tr.

8 Bardesanes, too, and the system of the "Acts of Thomas" are very near to him and to "John."
[See the articles "Bardaisan," "Thomas," and "Gnosticism," Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr]

* Harnack, p. 2.4. The break with the established Church occurred at Rome, in 144.

B Harnack, pp. 181, ct seq.

6 It had, like each of the other Magian religions, a script of its own, and this script steadily
came to resemble the Manichzan more and more closely.

2.z8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

it was in self-defence against the Church of Marcion and with the aid of an
organization taken from that Church. Further, it replaced Marcion's Bible by
another of similar structure Gospels and apostolic Epistles which it
then proceeded to combine with the Law and the Prophets in one unit. And
finally, this act of linking the two Testaments having in itself settled the
Church's attitude towards Judaism, it proceeded to combat Marcion's third
creation, his Redeemer-doctrine, by making a start with a theology of its own
on the basis of his enunciation of the problem.

This development, however, took place on Classical soil, and, therefore,
even the Church that arose in opposition to Marcion and his anti-Judaism
was looked upon by Talmudic Jewry (whose centre of gravity lay entirely in
Mesopotamia and its universities) as a mere piece of Hellenistic paganism.
The destruction of Jerusalem was a conclusive event that in the world of fact
no spiritual power could nullify. Such is the intimacy of inward relationship
between waking-consciousness, religion, and speech that the complete sever-
ance after 70 of the Greek Pseudomorphosis and the Aramaic (that is, the truly
Arabian) region was bound to result in the formation of two distinct domains
of Magian religious development. On the Western margin of the young
Culture the Pagan cult-Church, the Jesus-Church (removed thither by Paul),
and the Greek-speaking Judaism of the Philo stamp were in point of language
and literature so interlocked that the last-named fell into Christianity even in
the first century, and Christianity and Hellenism combined to form a common
early philosophy. In the Aramaic-speaking world from the Orontes to the
Tigris, on the other hand, Judaism and Persism interacted constantly and inti-
mately, each creating in this period its own strict theology and scholastic in the
Talmud and the Avesta; and from the fourth century both these theologies exer-
cised the most potent influence upon the Aramaic-speaking Christendom that resisted the
Pseudomorphosis, so that finally it broke away in the form of the Nestorian Church.

Here in the East the difference, inherent in every human waking-conscious-
ness, between sense-understanding and word-understanding and, therefore
between eye and letter led up to purely Arabian methods of mysticism and
scholasticism. The apocalyptic certainty, "Gnosis" in the first-century sense,
that Jesus intended to confer, 1 the divining contemplation and emotion, is that
of the Israelite prophets, the Gathas, Sufism, and we have it recognizable still
in Spinoza, in the Polish Messiah Baal Shem 2 and in Mirza Ali Mohammed,
the enthusiast-founder of Bahaism, who was executed in Teheran in 1850.
The other way, "Paradosis," is the characteristically Talmudic method of
word-exegesis, of which Paul was a master; 3 it pervades all later Avcstan
works, the Nestorian dialectic, 4 the entire theology of Islam alike.

1 Matthew xi, 15, ct scq., on which sec Eduard Meyer, Urspr. u. Anf. d. Christ., pp. 186, et seq.;
here it is the old and Eastern (i.e., the genuine) form of gnosis that is described.

2 See further, below, p. 3x1.

* As a drastic instance, Galatians iv, 14-2.6.
4 Loofs, Ntstoriana (1905), pp. 176, ct scq.

HISTORIC PSEUDOMORPHOSES 2.19

On the other side, the Pseudomorphosis is single and whole both in its
Magian believing acceptance (Pistis) and its metaphysical introversion
(Gnosis). 1 The Magian belief in its Westerly shape was formulated for the
Christians by Irenasus and, above all, by Tertullian, whose famous aphorism
"Credo quia absurdum" is the very summation of this certainty in belief. The
Pagan counterpart is Plotinus in his Enneads and even more so Porphyry in his
treatise On the Return of the Soul to God* But for the great schoolmen of the
Pagan Church too, there were Father (Nus), Son, and the middle Being, just
as already for Philo the Logos had been first-born Son and second God. Doc-
trines concerning ecstasy, angels and demons, and the dual substance of soul
were freely current amongst them, and we see in Plotinus and Origen, both
pupils of the same master, that the scholasticism of the Pseudomorphosis
consisted in the development of Magian concepts and thoughts, by system-
atic transvaluation of the texts of Plato and Aristotle.

The characteristic central idea of the whole thought of the Pseudomor-phosis is the
Logos, 3 in use and development its faithful image. There is no possibility here
of any "Greek," in the sense of Classical, influence; there was not a man alive
in those days whose spiritual disposition could have accommodated the smallest
trace of the Logos of Heraclitus and the Stoa. But, equally, the theologies
that lived side by side in Alexandria were never able to develop in full purity
the Logos-notion as they meant it, whereas both in Persian and Chaldean
imaginings as Spirit or Word of God and in Jewish doctrine as Ruach
and Memra it played a decisive part. What the Logos-teaching in the West
did was to develop a Classical formula, by way of Philo and the John Gospel
(the enduring effect of which on the West was its mark upon the schoolmen)
not only into an element of Christian mysticism, but, eventually, into a dogma. 4
This was inevitable. This dogma which both the Western Churches held,
corresponded, on the side of knowledge, to that which, on the side of faith, was
represented both by the syncretic cults and the cults of Mary and the Saints. And
against the whole thing, dogma and cult, the feeling of the East revolted from
the 4th century on.

For the eye the history of these thoughts and feelings is repeated in the
history of Magian architecture. 5 The basic form of the Pseudomorfhosis is the
Basilica, which was known to the Jews of the West and to the Hellenistic sects
of the Chaldeans even before the time of Christ. As the Logos of the John
Gospel is a Magian fundamental in Classical shape, so the Basilica is a Magian

1 The best exposition of the mass of thought common to both Churches is Windelband's Ge-
schichte dtr Philosophic (1900), pp. 177, et seq.; for the dogmatic history of the Christian Chruch see
Harnack, Dogmcngeschichtc (1914), while unconsciously Geffckcn (JDtr Ausgang des gricchisch-
romischen Htidentums, 192.0) gives the corresponding "dogmatic history of the Pagan Church."

2 Geffcken, op. cit., p. 69 [article "Ncoplatonism" in Ency. Brit., XI cd. Tr.].

3 Sec the following chapter.

4 Harnack, Dogmengcscbichte, p. 165.

5 See Vol. I, p. 109.

z 3 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

room whose inner walls correspond to the outer surfaces of the old Classical
temple, the cult-building introverted. The architectural form of the pure
East is the cupola building, the Mosque, which without doubt existed long before
the oldest Christian Churches in the temples of the Persians and Chaldeans,
the synagogues of Mesopotamia, and probably the temples of Saba as well.
The attempts to reconcile East and West in the Church Councils of the Byzan-
tine period were finally symbolized in the mixed form of the domed basilica.
For this item of the history of ecclesiastical architecture is really another ex-
pression of the great change that set in with Athanasius and Constantine, the
last great champions of Christianity. The one created the firm western dogma
and also Monasticism, into whose hands dogma gradually passed from those
of the ageing schools. The other founded the State of Christian nationality,
to which likewise the name of "Greek" passed in the end. And of this transi-
tion the domed basilica is the symbol.

CHAPTER VIII
PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

(B)
THE MAGIAN SOUL

CHAPTER VIII

PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

(B)
THE MAGIAN SOUL

THE world, as spread out for the Magian waking-consciousness, possesses a
kind of extension that may be called cavern-like, 1 though it is difficult for
Western man to pick upon any word in his vocabulary that can convey anything
more than a hint of the meaning of Magian "space." For "space" has essen-
tially unlike meanings for the perceptions of the two Cultures. The world-
as-cavern is just as different from the world-as-extent of the passionate,
far-thrusting Faustian as it is from the Classical world-as-sum-of-bodily-things.
The Copernican system, in which the earth, as it were, loses itself, must neces-
sarily seem crazy and frivolous to Arabian thought. The Church of the West
was perfectly right when it resisted an idea so incompatible with the world-
feeling of Jesus, and the Chaldean cavern-astronomy, which was wholly natural
and convincing for Persians, Jews, peoples of the Pseudomorphosis, and Islam,
became accessible to the few genuine Greeks who knew of it at all only after a
process of transvaluing its basic notions of space.

The tension between Macrocosm and Microcosm (which is identical with
the waking-consciousness) leads, in the world-picture of every Culture, to fur-
ther oppositions of symbolic importance. All a man's sensations or under-
standing, faith or knowledge, receive their shape from a primary opposition
which makes them not only activities of the individual, but also expressions of
the totality. In the Classical the opposition that universally dominates the
waking-consciousness is the opposition of matter and form; in the West it is
that of force and mass. In the former the tension loses itself in the small and
particular, and in the latter it discharges itself in the character of work. In the
World-Cavern, on the other hand, it persists in traversing and swaying to and
fro in unsure strugglings, and so becomes that "Semitic" primary-dualism
which, ever the same under its thousand forms, fills the Magian world. The
light shines through the cavern and battles against the darkness (John i, 5).
Both are Magian substances. Up and down, heaven and earth become powers
that have entity and contend with one another. But these polarities in the
most primary sensations mingle with those of the refined and critical under-

1 The expression is Leo Frobenius's (Paideuma, 1910, p. gz). [Sec Vol. I, p. 184. Tr.Jl

2-33

X34 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

standing, like good and evil, God and Satan. Death, for the author of the
John Gospel as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a Something, a
death-force, that contends with a life-force for the possession of man.

But still more important than all this is the opposition of Spirit and Soul
(Hebrew Ruach and nephesh, Persian ahu and urvan, Mandasan monuhmed and
gyan, Greek pneuma and psyche) which first comes out in the basic feeling of the
prophetic religions, then pervades the whole of Apocalyptic, and finally forms
and guides the world-contemplations of the awakened Culture Philo, Paul
and Plotinus, Gnostics and Manda^ans, Augustine and the Avesta, Islam and
the Kabbalah. Ruach means originally "wind" and nephesh "breath." * The
nephesh is always in one way or another related to the bodily and earthly, to
the below, the evil, the darkness. Its effort is the "upward." The ruach
belongs to the divine, to the above, to the light. Its effects in man when it
descends are the heroism of a Samson, the holy wrath of an Elijah, the enlight-
enment of the judge (the Solomon passing judgment, 2 ) and all kinds of divina-
tion and ecstasy. It is poured out. 3 From Isaiah xi, x, the Messiah becomes
the incarnation of the ruach. Philo and the Islamic theology divide mankind
into born Psychics and born Pneumatics (the "elect," a concept thoroughly
proper to the world-cavern and Kismet). All the sons of Jacob are pneumatics.
For Paul (i Cor. xv) the meaning of the Resurrection lies in the opposition of a
psychic and a pneumatic body, which alike for him and Philo and the author
of the Baruch apocalypse coincides with the opposition of heaven and earth,
light and darkness. 4 For Paul, the Saviour is the heavenly Pneuma. 5 In the
John Gospel he fuses as Logos with the Light; in Neoplatonism he appears
as Nus or, in the Classical terminology, the All-One opposed to Physis. 6 Paul
and Philo, with their "Classical" (that is, western) conceptual criteria, equated
soul and body with good and bad respectively, Augustine, as a Manichsean 7
with Persian-Eastern bases of distinction, lumps soul and body together as
the naturally bad, in contrast to God as the sole Good, and finds in this oppo-
sition the source of his doctrine of Grace, which developed also, in the same
form (though quite independently of him) in Islam.

But souls are at bottom discrete entities, whereas the Pneuma is one and

1 The soul-stones on Jewish, Sabzan, and Islamic tombs are also called nephesb. They arc un-
mistakable symbols of the "upward." With them belong the huge storcyed stela: of Axum which
belong to the first to third centuries of our era i.e., the great period of the early Magian religions.
The giant stele, long overthrown, is the largest monolith known to art-history, larger than any
Egyptian obelisk (German Axum Expedition report, Vol. II, pp. 2.8, ct scq.).

2 On this rests the whole theory and practice of Magian law (sec p. 72. above).
* Isaiah xxxii, 15; 4 Ezra xiv, 39; Acts ii.

4 Rcitzcnstein Das iran. Erlosungsmystcrium, pp. 108, ct seq.

6 Bousset, Kyrios Cbristos, p. 141.

8 Windclband, Gescb. d. Phil. (1900), pp. 189, ct seq.; Windelband-Bonhoffer, Gescb. d. antiken
Phil. (1912.), PR- 32-8, et seq.; Gcffckcn, Der Ausgan&des griecb.-rom. Heidentums (192x1), pp. 51, ct seq.

7 Jodl, Geschicbte der Etbik, I, p. 58.

THE MAGIAN SOUL z 35

ever the same. The man possesses a soul, but he only participates in the spirit
of the Light and the Good; the divine descends into him, thus binding all the
individuals of the Below together with the one in the Above. This primary
feeling, which dominates the beliefs and opinions of all Magian men, is some-
thing perfectly singular, and not only characterizes their world-view, but
marks off the essence and kernel of their religiousness in all its forms from that
of every other kind of man. This Culture, as has been shown, was characteris-
tically the Culture of the middle. It could have borrowed forms and ideas
from most of the others, and the fact that it did not do so, that in the face of all
pressure and temptation it remained so profoundly mistress of its own inward
form, attests an unbridgeable gulf of difference. Of all the wealth of Babylonian
and Egyptian religion it admitted hardly more than a few names; the Classical
and the Indian Cultures, or rather the Civilizations heir to them Hellenism
and Buddhism distorted its expression to the point of pseudomorphosis, but
its essence they never touched. All religions of the Magian Culture, from the
creations of Isaiah and Zarathustra to Islam, constitute a complete inward
unit of world-feeling; and, just as in the Avestan beliefs there is not to be found
one trait of Brahmanism nor in early Christianity one breath of Classical feeling,
but merely names and figures and outward forms, so also not a trace of this
Jesus-religion could be absorbed by the Germanic-Catholic Christianity of the
West, even though the stock of tenets and observances was taken over in its
entirety.

Whereas the Faustian man is an "I" that in the last resort draws its own
conclusions about the Infinite; whereas the Apollinian man, as one soma among
many, represents only himself; the Magian man, with his spiritual kind of
being, is only a part of a pneumatic "We" that, descending from above, is one
and the same in all believers. As body and soul he belongs to himself alone,
but something else, something alien and higher, dwells in him, making him
with all his glimpses and convictions just a member of a consensus which, as
the emanation of God, excludes error, but excludes also all possibility of the
self-asserting Ego. Truth is for him something other than for us. All our
epistemological methods, resting upon the individual judgment, are for him
madness and infatuation, and its scientific results a work of the Evil One,
who has confused and deceived the spirit as to its true dispositions and purposes.
Herein lies the ultimate, for us unapproachable, secret of Magian thought in its
cavern-world the impossibility of a thinking, believing, and knowing Ego
is the presupposition inherent in all the fundamentals of all these religions.
While Classical man stood before his gods as one body before another; whereas
the Faustian willing "I" in its wide world feels itself confronted by deity, also
Faustian, also willing, effective everywhere; the Magian deity is the indefinite,
enigmatic Power on high that pours out its Wrath or its Grace, descends itself
into the dark or raises the soul into the light as it sees fit. The idea of individual

z 3 6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

wills is simply meaningless, for "will" and "thought" in man arc not prime,
but already effects of the deity upon him. Out of this unshakable root-feeling,
which is merely re-expressed, never essentially altered, by any conversions,
illumination or subtilizing in the world there emerges of necessity the idea
of the Divine Mediator, of one who transforms this state from a torment into
a bliss. All Magian religions are by this idea bound together, and separated
from those of all other Cultures.

The Logos-idea in its broadest sense, an abstraction of the Magian light-
sensation of the Cavern, is the exact correlative of this sensation in Magian
thought. It meant that from the unattainable Godhead its Spirit, its "Word,"
is released as carrier of the light and bringer of the good, and enters into rela-
tion with human being to uplift, pervade, and redeem it. This distinctness of
three substances, which does not contradict their oneness in religious thought,
was known already to the prophetic religions. Ahuramazda's light-gleaming
soul is the Word (Yasht 13, 31), and in one of the earliest Gathas his Holy
Spirit (s-^enta mainyu) converses with the Evil Spirit (angra mainyu, Yasna 45, i).
The same idea penetrates the whole of the old Jewish literature. The thought
which the Chaldeans built up on the separation of God and His Word and the
opposition of Marduk and Nabu, which breaks forth with power in the whole
Aramaean Apocalyptic remained permanently active and creative; by Philo
and John, Marcion and Mani, it entered into the Talmudic teachings and thence
into the Kabbalistic books Yesirah and Sohar, into the Church Councils and the
works of the Fathers, into the later Avesta, and finally into Islam, in which a
Mohammed gradually became the Logos and, as the mystically respent, living
Mohammed of the popular religion, fused into the figure of Christ. 1 This
conception is for Magian man so self-evident that it was able to break through
even the strictly monotheistic structure of the original Islam and to appear with
Allah as the Word of God (kalimatf), the Holy Spirit (rufi), and the "light of
Mohammed."

For, for the popular religion, the first light that comes forth from the
world-creation is that of Mohammed, in the shape of a peacock 2 "formed of
white pearls" and walled about by veilings. But the peacock is the Envoy
of God and the prime soul 3 as early as the Mandseans, and it is the emblem of
immortality on Early Christian sarcophagi. The light-diffusing pearl that
illumines the dark house of the body is the Spirit entered into man, and thought
of as substance, for the Mandasans as in the Acts of Thomas. 3 The Jezidi 4

1 M. Morten, Die religiose Gtdankenwelt der Volkes im beutigen Islam (1917), pp. 381, et scq. By the
Shiitcs the Logos-idea was transferred to Ali.

1 Wolff, Muhammidanische Eschatologie, 3, 2., ct seq.

1 Mandzan Book of John, Ch. LXXV.

* Uscner, Vortr. u. Aufs., p. 117.

4 The "devil-worshippers" in Armenia; M. Hortcn in Derneue Orient (March 1918). The name
arose from the fact that they did not recognize Satan as a being, and accordingly derived the Evil,

THE MAGIAN SOUL

reverence the Logos as peacock and light; next to the Druses they have pre-
served most purely the old Persian conception of the substantial Trinity.

Thus again and again we find the Logos-idea getting back to the light-
sensation from which the Magian understanding derived it. The world of Magian
mankind is filled with a fairy-tale feeling. 1 Devils and evil spirits threaten man;
angels and fairies protect him. There are amulets and talismans, mysterious
lands, cities, buildings, and beings, secret letters, Solomon's Seal, the Philoso-
phers' Stone. And over all this is poured the quivering cavern-light that the
spectral darkness ever threatens to swallow up. If this profusion of figures
astonishes the reader, let him remember that Jesus lived in it, and Jesus's teach-
ings are only to be understood from it. Apocalyptic is only a vision of fable
intensified to an extreme of tragic power. Already in the Book of Enoch we
have the crystal palace of God, the mountains of precious stone, and the im-
prisonment of the apostate stars. Fantastic, too, are the whole overpowering
idea-world of the Mandasans, that of the Gnostics and the Manichasans, the
system of Origen, and the figures of the Persian "Bundahish"; and when the
time of the great visions was over, these ideas passed into a legend-poesy and
into the innumerable religious romances of which we have Christian specimens
in the gospels concerning Jesus's childhood, the Acts of Thomas and the anti-
Pauline Pseudo-Clementines. One such story is that of Abraham's having
minted the thirty pieces of silver of Judas. Another is the tale of the " treasure-
cave" in which, deep under the hill of Golgotha, are stored the golden treasure
of paradise and the bones of Adam. 2 Dante's poetic material was after all poetic,
but this was sheer actuality, the only world in which these people lived con-
tinuously. Such sensations are unapproachably remote from men who live in
and with a dynamical world-picture. If we would obtain some inkling of how
alien to us all the inner life of Jesus is a painful realization for the Christian
of the West, who would be glad indeed if he could make that inner life the
point of contact for his own inward piety if we would discover why now-
adays only a pious Moslem has the capacity livingly to experience it, we should
sink ourselves in this wonder-element of a world-image that was Jesus's world-
image. And then, and only then, shall we perceive how little Faustian Chris-
tianity has taken over from the wealth of the Church of the Pseudomorphosis
of its world-feeling nothing, of its inward form little, and of its concepts
and figures much.

by a very complicated set of ideas, from the Logos itself. Under old Persian influences the Jews
also busied themselves with the same problem observe the difference between r Samuel xxiv, i,
and i Chron. xxi, i.

1 M. Horten, op. cit., p. xxi. This book is the best introduction to the actually existing popu-
lar religion of Islam, which deviates considerably from the official doctrines.

2 Baumstark, Die cbristl. Literaturen des Orients, I, p. 64.

138 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

The When, for the Magian Soul, issues from the Where. Here too, is no
Apollinian clinging to pointlike Present, nor Faustian thrust and drive towards
an infinitely distant goal. Here Being has a different pulse, and consequently
Waking-being has another sense of time, which is the counter-concept to
Magian space. The prime thing that the humanity of this Culture, from
poor slaves and porters to the prophets and the caliphs themselves, feels as the
Kismet above him is not a limitless flight of the ages that never lets a lost mo-
ment recur, but a Beginning and an End of "This Day," which is irrevocably
ordained and in which the human existence takes the place assigned to it from
creation itself. Not only world-space, but world-time also is cavern-like.
Hence comes the thoroughly Magian certainty that everything has "<*" time,
from the origins of the Saviour, whose hour stood written in ancient texts, to
the smallest detail of the everyday, in which Faustian hurry would be meaning-
less and unimaginable. Here, too, is the basis of the Early Magian (and in
particular the Chaldean) astrology, which likewise presupposes that all things
are written down in the stars and that the scientifically calculable course of
the planets authorized conclusions as to the course of earthly things. 1 The
Classical oracle answered the only question that could perturb Apollinian man
the form, the " How?" of coming things. But the question of the Cavern is
"When?" The whole of Apocalyptic, the spiritual life of Jesus, the agony of
Gethsemane, and the grand movement that arose out of his death are unintelligi-
ble if we have not grasped this primary question of Magian being and the
presuppositions lying behind it. It is an infallible sign of the extinction of the
Classical Soul that astrology in its westward advance drove the oracle step by
step before it. Nowhere is the stage of transition more clearly visible than in
Tacitus, whose entire history is dominated by the confusion and dislocation
of his world-picture. First of all, as a true Roman, he brings in the power of
the old city-deities; then, as an intelligent cosmopolitan, he regards this
very belief in their intervention as a superstition; and finally, as a Stoic (by
that time the spiritual outlook of the Stoa had become Magian), he speaks of
the power of the seven planets that rule the fortunes of men. And thus it comes
about that in the following centuries Time itself as vessel of fate namely, the
Vault of Time, limited each way and therefore capable of being grasped as an
entity by the inner eye is by Persian mysticism set above the light of God
as Zrvan, and rules the world-conflict of Good and Evil. Zrvanism was the
State religion of Persia in 438-457.

1 Cf. p. 105. The Babylonian view of the heavens had not definitely distinguished between
astronomical and atmospheric elements; e.g., the covering of the moon by clouds was regarded as
a kind of eclipse. For this soothsaying the momentary figure of the heavens served only the same
purpose as the inspection of the victim's liver. But the Chaldeans' intention was to forecast the
actual course of the stars; here, therefore, astrology presupposed a genuine astronomy.

THE MAGIAN SOUL 139

Fundamentally, too, it is this belief that all stands written in the stars, that
makes the Arabian Culture characteristically that of "eras" that is, of time-
reckonings that begin at some event felt as a peculiarly significant act of Provi-
dence. The first and most important is the generic Aramaean era, which begins
about 300 B.C. with the growth of apocalyptic tension and is the "Seleucid era."
It was followed by many others, amongst them the Sabaran (about 115 B.C.),
the starting-point of which is not exactly known to us; that of Diocletian; the
Jewish era, beginning with the Creation, which was introduced by the Syned-
rion in 346; 1 the Persian, from the accession of the last Sassanid Jezdegerd in
63x5 and the Hijra, by which at last the Seleucid was displaced in Syria and
Mesopotamia. Outside this land-field there is mere imitation for practical ends,
like Varro's " ab urbe condita"; that of the Marcionites, beginning with Mar-
cion's breach with the Church in 144; and that of the Christians, introduced
shortly after 500 and beginning with the birth of Jesus.

World-history is the picture of the living world into which man sees himself
woven by birth, ancestry, and progeny, and which he strives to comprehend
from out of his world-feeling. The historical picture of Classical man concen-
trates itself upon the pure Present. Its content is no true Becoming, but a fore-
ground Being with a conclusive background of timeless myth, rationalized as
"the Golden Age." This Being, however, was a variegated swarming of ups
and downs, good and ill fortune, a blind "thereabouts," an eternal alteration,
yet ever in its changes the same, without direction, goal, or "Time." The
cavern-feeling, on the contrary, requires a surveyable history consisting in a
beginning and an end to the world that is also the beginning and the end of man
acts of God of mighty magic and between these turns, spellbound to the
limits of the Cavern and the ordained period, the battle of light and darkness, of
the angels and Jazatas with Ahriman, Satan, and Eblis, in which Man, his
Soul, and his Spirit are involved. The present Cavern God can destroy and re-
place by a new creation. The Persian-Chaldean apocalyptic offers to the gaze
a whole series of such aeons, and Jesus, along with his time, stood in expectation
of the end of the existing one. 2 The consequence of this is a historic outlook
like that which is natural to Islam even to-day the view over a given time.
"The world-view of the people falls naturally into three major parts world-
beginning, world-development, and world-catastrophe. For the Moslem who
feels so deeply ethically, the chief essentials in world-development are the sal-
vation-story and the ethical way of life, knit into one as the "life" of man.

1 B. Cohn, "Die Anfangsepocke der jiid. Kalenders" (Sit?.. Pr. Akad., 1914). The date of the first
day of Creation was on this occasion fixed by calculation from a total eclipse of the sun of course
with the aid of Chaldean astronomy. [See, in general, the articles "Chronology," "Calendar,"
in Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr.]

2 The Persian notion of total time is 11,000 years. The Parsees of to-day consider A.D. 1910 as
the n, 55oth.

M o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

This debouches into the world-catastrophe, which contains the sanction of the
moral history of humanity." l

But, further, for the Magian human-existence, the issue of the feeling of this
sort of Time and the view of this sort of space is a quite peculiar type of piety,
which likewise we may put under the sign of the Cavern a will-less resigna-
tion, to which the spiritual "I" is unknown, and which feels the spiritual
"We" that has entered into the quickened body as simply a reflection of the
divine Light. The Arab word for this is Islam (= submission) but this Islam
was equally Jesus 's normal mode of feeling and that of every other personality
of religious genius that appeared in this Culture. Classical piety is something
perfectly different, 2 while, as for that of our own Culture, if we could mentally
abstract from the piety of St. Theresa and Luther and Pascal their Ego that
Ego which wills to maintain itself against, to submit to, or even to be extin-
guished by the Divine Infinite there would be nothing left. The Faustian
prime-sacrament of Contrition presupposes the strong and free will that can
overcome itself. But it is precisely the impossibility of an Ego as a free power in
the face of the divine that constitutes "Islam. ' ' Every attempt to meet the opera-
tions of God with a personal purpose or even a personal opinion is "masiga,"
that is, not an evil willing, but an evidence that the powers of darkness and evil
have taken possession of a man and expelled the divine from him. The Magian
waking-consciousness is merely the theatre of a battle between these two powers
and not, so to say, a power in itself. Moreover, in this kind of world-happening
there is no place for individual causes and effects, let alone any universally
effective dynamic concatenation thereof, and consequently there is no necessary
connexion between sin and punishment, no claim to reward, no old-Israelitish
"righteousness." Things of this order the true piety of this Culture regards as
far beneath it. The laws of nature are not something settled for ever that God
can alter only by the method of miracle they are (so to put it) the ordinary
state of an autocratic divine will, not possessing in themselves anything of the
logical necessity that they have for Faustian souls. In the entire world-cavern
there is but one Cause, which lies immediately behind all visible workings, and
this is the Godhead, which, as itself, acts without causes. Even to speculate
upon causes in connexion with God is sinful.

From this basic feeling proceeds the Magian idea of Grace. This underlies
all sacraments of this Culture (especially the Magian proto-sacrament of Bap-
tism) and forms a contrast of the deepest intensity with the Faustian idea of
Contrition. Contrition presupposes the will of an Ego, but Grace knows of no
such thing. It was Augustine's high achievement to develop this essentially
Islamic thought with an inexorable logic, and with a penetration so thorough

1 M. Horten, Die religiose Gedankenwelt des Volkes im heutigen Islam, p. xxvi.

2 It shows a great gap in our research that although we possess a whole library of works on
Classical religion and particularly its gods and cults, we have not one about Classical religiousness
and its history.

THE MAGIAN SOUL Z4i

that since Pelagius the Faustian Soul has tried by any and every route to circum-
vent this certainty which for it constitutes an imminent danger of self-
destruction and in using Augustinian propositions to express its own proper
consciousness of God has ever misunderstood and transvalued them. Actually,
Augustine was the last great thinker of Early Arabian Scholasticism, anything
but a Western intellect. 1 Not only was he at times a Manichsean, but he re-
mained so even as a Christian in some important characteristics, and his closest
relations are to be found amongst the Persian theologians of the later Avesta,
with their doctrines of the Store of Grace of the Holy and of absolute guilt. For
him grace is the substantial inflowing of something divine into the human
Pneuma, itself also substantial. 2 The Godhead radiates it; man receives it, but
does not acquire it. From Augustine, as from Spinoza so many centuries later, 3
the notion of force is absent, and for both the problem of freedom refers not to
the Ego and its Will, but to the part of the universal Pneuma that is infused into
a man and its relation to the rest of him. Magian waking-being is the theatre of
a conflict between the two world-substances of light and darkness. The Early
Faustian thinkers such as Duns Scotus and William of Occam, on the contrary,
see a contest inherent in dynamic waking-consciousness itself, a contest of the
two forces of the Ego namely, will and reason, 4 and so imperceptibly the
question posed by Augustine changes into another, which he himself would have
been incapable of understanding are willing and thinking free forces, or are
they not? Answer this question as we may, one thing at any rate is certain, that
the individual ego has to wage this war and not to suffer it. The Faustian Grace
refers to the success of the Will and not to the species of a substance. Says the

1 "He is in truth the conclusion and completion of the Christian Classical, its last and greatest
thinker, its intellectual practitioner and tribune. This is the starting-point from which he must be
understood. What later ages have made of him is another affair. His own real mind, the syn-
thesizer of Classical Culture, ecclesiastical and episcopal authority, and intimate mysticism, could
not possibly have been handed on by those who, environed by different conditions, have to deal
with different tasks" (E. Troeltsch, Augustin, die christliche Antike und das Mittelalter, 1915, p. 7).
His power, like Tertullian's, rested also on the fact that his writings were not translated into Latin,
but thought in this language, the sacred language of the Western Church; it was precisely this that
excluded both from the field of Aramaean thought. Cf. p. 1x4 above.

" Inspiratio bonx voluntatis" (jDe corr. et grat., 3). His "good will" and "ill will" are, quite
dualistically, a pair of opposite substances. For Pelagius, on the contrary, will is an activity without
moral quality as such; only that which is willed has the property of being good or evil, and the
Grace of God consists in the " possibilitas utriusque partis," the freedom to will this or that. Gregory
I transmuted Augustinian doctrines into Faustian when he taught that God rejected individuals
because he foreknew their evil will.

3 All the elements of the Magian metaphysic are to be found in Spinoza, hard as he tried to
replace the Arabian-Jewish conceptual world of his Spanish masters (and above all Moses Maimon-
ides) by the Western of early Baroque. The individual human mind is for him not an ego, but only
a mode of the one divine attribute, the " cogitatio" which is just the Pneuma. He protests against
notions like "God's Will." His God is pure substance and in lieu of the dynamic causality of the
Faustian universe he discovers simply the logic of the divine cogitatio. All this is already in Por-
phyry, in the Talmud, in Islam; and to Faustian thinkers like Leibniz and Goethe it is as alien as
anything can possibly be. {Allgem. Gesch. d. Philos. in KulturdcrGegcnwart, I, v, p. 484, Windelband.)

4 Here, therefore, "good" is an evaluation and not a substance.

M 2 - THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Westminster Confession of the Presbyterians (1646): "The rest of Mankind,
God was pleased, according to the unsearchable Counsel of his own Will,
whereby he extendeth, or withholdeth Mercy, as he pleascth, for the Glory
of his Sovereign Power over his Creatures, to pass by; and to ordain them to
Dishonour and Wrath, for their Sin, to the Praise of his glorious Justice."
The other conception, that the idea of Grace excludes every individual will and
every cause but the One, that it is sinful even to question why man suffers, finds
an expression in one of the most powerful poems known to world-history, a
poem that came into being in the midst of the Arabian pre-Culture and is in
inward grandeur unparalleled by any product of that Culture itself the Book
of Job. 1 It is not Job, but his friends who look for a sin as the cause of his
troubles. They like the bulk of mankind in this and every other Culture,
present-day readers and critics of the work, therefore, included lack the
metaphysical depth to get near the ultimate meaning of suffering within the
world-cavern. Only the Hero himself fights through the fulfilment, to pure
Islam, and he becomes thereby the only possible figure of tragedy that Magian
feeling can set up by the side of our Faust. 2

The waking-consciousness of every Culture allows of two ways of inwardness,
that in which contemplative feeling spreads into understanding, and that in
which the reverse takes place. The Magian contemplation is called by Spinoza
"intellectual love of God," and by his Sufist contemporaries in Asia "extinction
in God" (mahii); it may be intensified to the Magian ecstasy that was vouch-
safed to Plotinus several times, and to his pupil Porphyry once in old age. The
other side, the rabbinical dialectic, appears in Spinoza as geometrical method
and in the Arabian-Jewish "Late" philosophy in general as Kalaam. Both,
however, rest upon the fact that there in Magian there is no individual-ego, but
a single Pneuma present simultaneously in each and all of the elect, which is
likewise Truth. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that the resultant root-
idea of the ijma is much more than a concept or notion, that it can be a lived
experience of even overwhelming force, and that all community of the Magian
kind rests upon it and, as doing so, is removed from community in any other
Culture. "The mystic Community of Islam extends from the here into the
beyond; it reaches beyond the grave, in that it comprises the dead Moslems
of earlier generations, nay, even the righteous of the times before Islam. The
Moslem feels himself bound up in one unity with them all. They help him, and
he, too, can in turn increase their beatitude by the application of his own

1 The period at which it was written corresponds to our Carolingian. Whether the latter really
brought forth any poetry of like rank we do not know, but that it may possibly have done so is
shown by creations like the Voluspa, Muspilli, the Hcliand, and the universe conceived by John
Scotus Erigena.

* See, for example, Bcrtholct Kulturgcsch. Israels, p. 141.

THE MAGIAN SOUL 2.43

merit." 1 The same, precisely, was what the Christians and the Syncretists
of the Pseudomorphosis meant when they used the words Polis and Civitas
these words, which had formerly implied a sum of bodies, now denoted a con-
sensus of fellow believers. Augustine's famous Civitas Dei was neither a Clas-
sical Polis nor a Western Church, but a unity of believers, blessed, and angels,
exactly as were the communes of Mithras, of Islam, of Manichseism, and of
Persia. As the community was based upon consensus, it was in spiritual things
infallible. "My people," said Mohammed, "can never agree in an error," and
the same is premised in Augustine's State of God. With him there was not and
could not be any question of an infallible Papal ego or of any other sort of
authority to settle dogmatic truths; that would completely destroy the Magian
concept of the Consensus. And the same applied in this Culture generally
not only to dogma, but also to law 2 and to the State. The Islamic community,
like that of Porphyry and that of Augustine, embraces the whole of the world-
cavern, the here and the beyond, the orthodox and the good angels and spirits,
and within this community the State only formed a smaller unit of the visible side,
a unit, therefore, of which the operations were governed by the major whole.
In the Magian world, consequently, the separation of politics and religion is
theoretically impossible and nonsensical, whereas in the Faustian Culture the
battle of Church and State is inherent in the very conceptions logical, neces-
sary, unending. In the Magian, civil and ecclesiastical law are simply identical.
Side by side with the Emperor of Constantinople stood the Patriarch, by the
Shah was the Zarathustratema, by the Exilarch the Gaon, by the Caliph the
Sheikh-ul-Islam, at once superiors and subjects. There is not in this the slightest
affinity to the Gothic relation of Emperor and Pope; equally, all such ideas were
alien to the Classical world. In the constitution of Diocletian this Magian
embedding of the State in the community of the faithful was for the first time
actualized, and by Constantine it was carried into full effect. It has been
shown already that State, Church, and Nation formed a spiritual unit namely,
that part of the orthodox consensus which manifested itself in the living man.
And hence for the Emperor, as ruler of the Faithful that is, of that portion of
the Magian community which God had entrusted to him it was a self-evident
duty to conduct the Councils so as to bring about the consensus of the elect.

But besides the consensus there is another sort of revelation of Truth
namely, the "Word of God," in a perfectly definite and purely Magian sense of
the phrase, which is equally remote from Classical and from Western thought,
and has, in consequence, been the source of innumerable misunderstandings.
The sacred book in which it has become visibly evident, in which it has been
captured by the spell of a sacred script, is part of the stock of every Magian
1 Hortcn, op. cit., p. xii. 2 See p. 67 above.

244 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

religion. 1 In this conception three Magian notions are interwoven each of
which, even by itself, presents extreme difficulties for us, while their simultane-
ous separateness and oneness is simply inaccessible to our religious thought,
often though that thought has managed to persuade itself to the contrary.
These ideas are: God, the Spirit of God, the Word of God. That which is
written in the prologue of the John Gospel " In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" had long before come
to perfectly natural expression as something self-evident in the Persian ideas of
Spenta Mainyu, 2 and Vohu Mano, 3 and in corresponding Jewish and Chaldean
conceptions. And it was the kernel for which the conflicts of the fourth and
fifth centuries concerning the substance of Christ were fought. But, for Magian
thought, truth is itself a substance, 4 and lie (or error) second substance again
the same dualism that opposes light and darkness, life and death, good and evil.
As substance, truth is identical now with God, now with the Spirit of God,
now with the Word. Only in the light of this can we comprehend sayings like
"I am the truth and the life" and "My word is the truth," sayings to be under-
stood, as they were meant, with reference to substance. Only so, too, can we
realize with what eyes the religious man of this Culture looked upon his sacred
book: in it the invisible truth has entered into a visible kind of existence, or,
in the words of John i, 14: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."
According to the Yasna the Avesta was sent down from heaven, and according
to the Talmud Moses received the Torah volume by volume from God. A
Magian revelation is a mystical process in which the eternal and unformed word
of God or the Godhead as Word enters into a man in order to assume
through him the manifest, sensible form of sounds and especially of letters.
"Koran" means "reading." Mohammed in a vision saw in the heaven treasured
rolls of scripture that he (although he had never learned how to read) was able
to decipher " in the name of the Lord." 5 This is a form of revelation that in the
Magian Culture is the rule and in other Cultures is not even the exception, 6 but

1 It is almost unnecessary to say that in all religions of the Germanic West the Bible stands in
a quite other relationship to the faith namely, in that of a source in the strictly historical sense,
irrespective of whether it is taken as inspired and immune from textual criticism or not. The rela-
tion of Chinese thought to the canonical books is similar.

2 The Holy Spirit, different from Ahuramazda and yet one with him, opposed to the Evil (Angra
Mainyu).

* Identified by Mani with the Johannine Logos. Compare also Yasht 13, 31. Ahuramazda's
shining soul is the Word.

4 Aletheia (Truth) is generally employed in this way in the John Gospel, and drug (= lie) is used
for Ahriman in Persian cosmology. Ahriman is often shown as though a servant of the drug.

8 Sura 96; cf. 80, ii and 85, n, where in connexion with another vision it is said: "This is
a noble Koran on a treasured tablet." The best commentary on all this is Eduard Meyer's (G-
sckichte der Mcrmanen, pp. 70, et scq.).

8 Classical man receives, in states of extreme bodily excitation, the power of unconsciously
predicting future events. But these visions arc completely unlitcrary. The Classical Sibylline
books (which have no connexion with the later Christian works bearing that name) arc meant to
be nothing more than a collection of oracles.

THE MAGIAN SOUL 145

it was only from the time of Cyrus that it began to take shape. The old Israel-
itish prophets, and no doubt Zarathustra also, see and hear in ecstasy things that
afterwards they spread abroad. The Deuteronomic code (6zi) was given out as
having been "found in the Temple," which meant that it was to be taken as
the wisdom of the Father. The first (and a very deliberate) example of a
"Koran" is the book of Ezekiel, which the author received in a thought-out
vision from God and "swallowed" (iii, 1-3). Here, expressed in the crudest
imaginable form, is the basis on which later the idea and shape of all apocalyptic
writing was founded. But by degrees this substantial form of reception came to
be one of the requisites for any book to be canonical. It was in post-Exilic times
that the idea arose of the Tables of the Law received by Moses on Sinai; later
such an origin came to be assumed for the whole Torah, and about the Macca-
bzean period for the bulk of the Old Testament. From the Council of Jabna
(about 90 B.C.) the whole word was regarded as inspired and delivered in the
most literal sense. But the same evolution took place in the Persian religion up
to the sanctification of the Avesta in the third century, and the same idea of a
literal delivery appears in the second vision of Hermas, in the Apocalypses, and
in the Chaldean and Gnostic and Mandasan writings; lastly, it underlies, as a
tacit natural basis, all the ideas that the Neo-Pythagoreans and the Neo-Pla-
tonists formed of the writings of their old masters. "Canon" is the technical
expression for the totality of writings that are accepted by a religion as de-
livered. It was as canons in this sense that the Hermetic collection and the
corpus of Chaldean oracles came into being from 2.00 the latter a sacred book
of the Neoplatonists which alone was admitted by Proclus, the "Father" of
this Church, to stand with Plato's Timneus.

Originally, the young Jesus-religion, like Jesus himself, recognized the
Jewish canon. The first Gospels set up no sort of claim to be the Word made
visible. The John Gospel is the first Christian writing of which the evident -purpose is
that of a Koran, and its unknown author is the originator of the idea that there
could be and must be a Christian Koran. The grave and difficult decision
whether the new religion should break with that which Jesus had believed in
clothed itself of deep necessity in the question whether the Jewish scriptures
might still be regarded as incarnations of the one truth. The answer of the John
Gospel was tacitly, and that of Marcion openly, no, but that of the Fathers was,
quite illogically, yes.

It followed from this metaphysical conception of the essence of a sacred book
that the expressions "God speaks" and "the Scripture says" were, in a manner
wholly alien to our thought, completely identical. To us it is suggestive of the
Arabian Nights that God himself should be spellbound in these words and
letters and could be unsealed and compelled to reveal the truth by the adepts
of this magic. Exegesis no less than inspiration and delivery is a process of
mystical under-meaning (Mark i, zz). Hence the reverence in diametrical

246 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

opposition to the Classical feeling with which these precious manuscripts
were cared for, their ornamentation by every means known to the young
Magian art, and the appearance again and again of new scripts which, in the
eyes of their users, alone possessed the power of capturing the truth sent down.
But such a Koran is by its very nature unconditionally right, and therefore
unalterable and incapable of improvement. 1 There arose, in consequence, the
habit of secret interpretations meant to bring the text into harmony with the
convictions of the time. A masterpiece of this kind is Justinian's Digests, but
the same applies not only to every book of the Bible, but also (we need not
doubt) to the Gathas of the Avesta and even to the then current manuscripts
of Plato, Aristotle, and other authorities of the Pagan theology. More im-
portant still is the assumption, traceable in every Magian religion, of a secret
revelation, or a secret meaning of the Scriptures, preserved not by being written
down, but in the memory of adepts and propagated orally. According to Jewish
notions, Moses received at Sinai not only the written, but also a secret oral Torah*
which it was forbidden to commit to writing. "God foresaw," says the Tal-
mud, " that one day a time would come when the Heathen would possess them-
selves of the Torah and would say to Israel: 'We, too, are sons of God.' Then
will the Lord say: 'Only he who knows my secrets is my son.' And what
are the secrets of God? The oral teachings." 3 The Talmud, then, in the form
in which it is generally accessible, contains only a part of the religious material,
and it is the same with Christian texts of the early period. It has often been
observed 4 that Mark speaks of the Visitation and of the Resurrection only in
hints, and that John only touches upon the doctrine of the Paraclete and omits
the institution of the Lord's Supper entirely. The initiates understood what was
meant, and the unbeliever ought not to know it. Later there was a whole
"secret discipline" which bound Christians to observe silence in the presence
of unbelievers concerning the baptismal confession and other matters. With
the Chaldeans, Neopythagoreans, Cynics, Gnostics, and especially the sects
from Jewish to Islamic, this tendency went to such lengths that the greater part
of their secret doctrines is unknown to us. Concerning the Word thus preserved
only in the minds there was a consensus of silence, the more so as each believer was
certain that the other " knew." We ourselves, as it is upon the most important
things that we are most emphatic and forthright, run the risk of ministerpreting
Magian doctrines through taking the part that was expressed for the whole that
existed, and the profane literal meaning of words for their real significance.
Gothic Christianity had no secrets and hence it doubly mistrusted the Talmud,
which it rightly regarded as being only the foreground of Jewish doctrine.

1 Sec p. 73.

1 IV Ezra xiv; S. Funk, Die Entstehung des Talmuds, p. 17; Hirsch's commentary on Exodus
xxi, x.

3 Funk, op. cit., p. 86.

4 For example, Ed. Meyer, Urspr. u. Anf. d. Christ., p. 95.

THE MAGIAN SOUL 247

Pure Magian, too, is the Kabbalah, which out of numbers, letter-forms,
points, and strokes, unfolds secret significances, and therefore cannot but be as
old as the Word itself that was sent down as Substance. The secret dogma of
the creation of the world out of the two-and-twenty letters of the Hebrew
alphabet, and that of the throne-chariot of Ezekiel's Vision, are already trace-
able in Maccabasan times. Closely related to this is the allegorical exegesis of
the sacred texts. All the tractates of the Mishnah, all the Fathers, all the Alex-
andrian philosophers are full of it; in Alexandria the whole Classical mythology
and even Plato were treated in this way and brought into analogy (Moses =
Musasus) with the Jewish prophets.

The only strictly scientific method that an unalterable Koran leaves open for
progressive opinion is that of commentary. As by hypothesis the "word" of
an authority cannot be improved upon, the only resource is reinterpretation.
No one in Alexandria would ever have asserted that Plato was in "error";
instead, he was glossed upon. It was done in the strictly constructed forms of
the Halakha, and the fixation of this exegesis in writing takes the commentary
shape that dominates all religious, philosophical, and savant literatures of this
Culture. Following the procedure of the Gnostics, the Fathers compiled
written commentaries upon the Bible, and similarly the Pehlevi commentary
of the Zend appeared by the side of the Avesta, and the Midrash by the side of
the Jewish canon. But the "Roman" jurists of about A.D. zoo and the "Late
Classical ' ' philosophers that is, the Schoolmen of the growing cult-Church
went just the same way; the Apocalypse of this Church, commented over
and over again after Posidonius, was the Timaus of Plato. The Mishnah is one
vast commentary upon the Torah. And when the oldest exegetes had become
themselves authorities and their writings Korans, commentaries were written
upon commentaries, as by Simplicius, the last Platonist, in the West, by the
Amoraim, who added the Gemara to the Mishnah in the East, and by the
jurists who compiled the Imperial Constitutions into the Digests at Byzantium.

This method, which fictitiously refers back every saying to an immediate
inspired delivery, was brought to its keenest edge in the Talmudic and the
Islamic theologies. A new Halakha or a Hadith is only valid when it can be
referred through an unbroken chain of guarantors back to Moses or Moham-
med. 1 The solemn formula for this in Jerusalem was " Let it come over me ! So
have I heard it from my teacher. " 2 In the Zend the citation of the chain of
warranty is the rule, and Irenasus justifies his theology by the fact that a chain
goes back from him through Polycarp to the primitive Community. Into the
Early Christian literature this Halakha-form entered so self-evidently that no

1 In the West, Plato, Aristotle, and above all Pythagoras were regarded as prophets in this
sense. What could be referred back to them, was valid. For this reason the succession of the heads
of the schools became more and more important, and often more work was done in establishing
or inventing them than was done upon the history of the doctrine itself.

1 Fromer, Der Talmud, p. 190.

Z48 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

one remarked it for what it was. Apart altogether from the constant references
to the Law and the Prophets, it appears in the superscription of the four Gospels
{"according to" Mark), each of which had thus to present its warrant if authority
was to be claimed for the words of the Lord that it presented. 1 This established
the chain back to the Truth that was incarnate in Jesus, and it is impossible to
exaggerate the intense reality of this in the world-idea of an Augustine or a
Jerome. This is the basis of the practice, which spread even more widely from
the time of Alexander onwards, of providing religious and philosophical writ-
ings with names, 2 like Enoch, Solomon, Ezra, Hermes, Pythagoras guarantors
and vessels of divine wisdom, in whom, therefore, the Word had been made
Flesh of old. We still possess a number of Apocalypses bearing the name of
Baruch, who was then compared with Zarathustra, and we can scarcely form
an idea of what in the way of literature circulated under the names of Aristotle
and Pythagoras. The "Theology of Aristotle" was one of the most influential
works of Neoplatonism. And, lastly, this the metaphysical presupposition
for the style and the deeper meaning of citation, which was employed by Fathers,
Rabbis, "Greek" philosophers, and "Roman" jurists, and eventuated on the
one hand in the Law of Valentinian III, 3 and on the other in the elimination
from the Jewish and Christian canons of apocryphal writings a fundamental
notion, which differentiated the literary stock according to difference of substance.

With such researches to build upon, it will become possible in the future
to write a history of the Magian group of religions. It forms an inseparable
unit of spirit and evolution, and let no one imagine that any individual one of
them can be really comprehended without reference to the rest. Their birth,
unfolding, and inward confirmation occupy the period 0-500. It corresponds
exactly to the rise of the Western religion from the Cluniac movement to the
Reformation. A mutual give-and-take, a confusingly rich blossoming, ripen-
ing, transformation overlayings, migrations, adaptations, rejections
fill these centuries, without any sort of dependence of one system upon the others
being demonstrable. But only the forms and the structures change; in the
depths it is one and the same spirituality, and in all the languages of this world
of religions it is always itself that it brings to expression.

1 We to-day confuse authorship and authority. Arabian thought knew not the idea of " intellectual
property." Such would have been absurd and sinful, for it is the one divine Pncuma that selects
the individual as vessel and mouthpiece. Only to that extent is he the "author," and it does not
matter even whether he or another actually writes down the material. "The Gospel according to
Mark" means that Mark vouches for the truth of this evangel.

2 On the pscudonyma and anonyma of Biblical apocryphal literature the English reader will
find much of interest in three small books (already referred to) of the "Home University" series:
Moore, Literature of the Old Testament; Charles, Between the Old and the New Testaments; and Bacon,
Tie Making of the New Testament. Tr.

1 Sec p. 73. Tr.

THE MAGIAN SOUL

In the wide realm of old-Babylonian fellahdom young peoples lived. There
everything was making ready. The first premonitions of the future awoke
about 700 B.C. in the prophetic religions of the Persians, Jews, and Chaldeans.
An image of creation of the same kind that later was to be the preface of the
Torah showed itself in clear outlines, and with that an orientation, a direction,
a goal of desire, was set. Something was descried in the far future, indefinitely
and darkly still, but with a profound certainty that it would come. From that
time on men lived with the vision of this, with the feeling of a mission.

The second wave swelled up steeply in the Apocalyptic currents after 300.
Here it was the Magian waking-consciousness that arose and built itself a
metaphysic of Last Things, based already upon the prime-symbol of the coming
Culture, the Cavern. Ideas of an awful End of the World, of the Last Judgment,
of Resurrection, Paradise, and Hell, and with them the grand thought of a
process of salvation in which earth's destiny and man's were one, burst forth
everywhere we cannot say what land or people it was that created them
mantled in wondrous scenes and figures and names. The Messiah-figure presents
itself, complete at one stroke. Satan's temptation of the Saviour * is told as a
tale. But simultaneously there welled up a deep and ever-increasing fear be-
fore this certainty of an implacable and imminent limit of all happening,
before the moment in which there would be only Past. Magian Time, the
"hour," directedness under the Cavern, imparted a new pulse to life and a new
import to the word "Destiny." Man's attitude before the Deity suddenly
became completely different. In the dedicatory inscription of the great basilica
of Palmyra (which was long thought to be Christian) Baal was called the
good, the compassionate, the mild; and this feeling penetrated, with the
worship of Rahman, right to southern Arabia. It fills the psalms of the Chal-
deans and the teachings about the God-sent Zarathustra that took the place of
his teachings. And it stirred the Jewry of Maccabean time most of the psalms
were written then and all the other communities, long forgotten now, that
lay between the Classical and the Indian worlds.

The third upheaval came in the time of Cassar and brought to birth the
great religions of Salvation. And with this the Culture rose to bright day,
and what followed continuously throughout one or two centuries was an
intensity of religious experience, both unsurpassable and at long last unbear-
able. Such a tension bordering upon the breaking point the Gothic, the
Vedic, and every other Culture-soul has known, once and once only, in its
young morning.

Now arose in the Persian, the Mandasan, the Jewish, the Christian, circles

of belief, and in that of the Western Pseudomorphosis as well just as in the

Indian, the Classical, and the Western ages of Chivalry the Grand Myth.

In this Arabian Culture religious and national heroism are no more distinctly

1 Vcndidad 19, i; here it is Zarathustra who is tempted.

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

separable than nation, church, and state, or sacred and secular law. The
prophet merges with the fighter, and the story of a great Sufferer rises to the
rank of a national epic. The powers of light and darkness, fabulous beings,
angels and devils, Satan and the good spirits wrestle together; all nature is a
battle-ground from the beginning of the world to its annihilation. Down
below in the world of mankind are enacted the adventures and sufferings of the
heralds, the heroes, and the martyrs of religion. Every nation, in the sense of
the word attaching to this Culture, possessed its heroic saga. In the East the
life of the Persian prophet inspired an epic poetry of grand outlines. At his
birth the Zarathustra-laughter pealed through the heavens, and all nature
echoed it. In the West the suffering of Jesus, ever broadening and developing,
became the veritable epic of the Christian nation, and by its side there grew up a
chain of legends of his childhood which in the end fructified a whole genre
of poetry. The figure of the Mother of God and the deeds of the Apostles be-
came, like the stories of the Western Crusade-heroes, the centre of extended
romances (Acts of Thomas, Pseudo-Clementines) which in the second century
sprang up everywhere from the Nile to the Tigris. In the Jewish Haggada and in
the Targums is brought together a rich measure of legends about Saul, David, the
Patriarchs, and the great Tannaim, like Schuda and Akiba, 1 and the insatia-
ble fancy of the age seized also upon what it could reach of the Late-Classical cult-
legends and founder-stories (lives of Pythagoras, Hermes, Apollonius of Tyana).
With the end of the second century the sounds of this exaltation die away.
The flowering of epic poetry is past, and the mystical penetration and dogmatic
analysis of the religious material begin. The doctrines of the new Churches
are brought into theological systems. Heroism yields to Scholastism, poetry
to thought, the seer and seeker to the priest. The early Scholasticism which
ends about zoo (as the Western about 12.00) comprises the whole Gnosis
in the very broadest sense, the great Contemplation the author of the John
Gospel, Valentinus, Bardesanes, and Marcion, the Apologists and the early
Fathers, up to Irenasus and Tertullian, the last Tannaim up to Rabbi Jehuda,
the completer of the Mishna, the Neopythagoreans and Hermetics of Alexandria.
All this corresponds with, in the West, the School of Chartres, Anselm, Joachim
of Floris, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugo de St. Victor. Full Scholasticism begins
with Ncoplatonism, with Clement and Origen, the first Amoraim, and the
creators of the newer Avesta under Ardeshir (rz6-2-4i) and Sapor I, the Maz-
daist high-priest Tanvasar above all. Simultaneously a higher religiousness
begins to separate from the peasant's piety of the countryside, which still
lingered in the apocalyptic disposition, and thenceforth maintained itself almost
unaltered under various names right into the fellahdom of the Turkish age,
while in the urban and more intellectual upper world the Persian, Jewish, and
Christian community was absorbed by that of Islam.

1 M. J. ben Gorion, Die Sagen dtr Judtn (1913).

THE MAGIAN SOUL 2.51

Slowly and steadily now the great Churches moved to fulfilment. It had
been decided the most important religious result of the second century
that the outcome of the teaching of Jesus was not to be a transformation of
Judaism, but a new Church, which took its way westward while Judaism,
without loss of inward strength, turned itself to the East. To the third century
belong the great mental structures of theology. A modus vivendi with historical
actuality had been reached, the end of the world had receded into the distance,
and a new dogmatic grew up to explain the new world-picture. The arrival of
mature Scholasticism presupposes faith in the duration of the doctrines that it
sets itself to establish.

Viewing the results of their efforts, we find that the Aramaean motherland
developed its forms in three directions. In the East, out of the Zoroastrian
religion of Achasmenid times and the remains of its sacred literature, there
formed itself the Mazdaist Church, with a strict hierarchy and laborious ritual,
with sacraments, mass, and confession (pafei). As mentioned above, Tanvasar
made a beginning with the collection and ordering of the new Avesta; under
Sapor I (as contemporaneously in the Talmud) the profane texts of medicine,
law, and astronomy were added; and the rounding-off was the work of the
Church magnate Mahraspand under Sapor II (309-379). The immediate accre-
tion of a commentary in Pehlevi was only what was to be expected in the Magian
Culture. The new Avesta, like the Jewish and the Christian Bibles, was a
canon of separate writings, and we learn that amongst the Nasks (originally
twenty-one) now lost there was a gospel of Zarathustra, the conversion-
story of Vishtaspa, a Genesis, a law-book, and a genealogical book with trees
from the Creation to the Persian kings, while the Vendidad, which Geldner
calls the Leviticus of the Persians, was most significantly preserved
complete.

A new religious founder appeared in 2.42., in the reign of Sapor I. This was
Mani, who, rejecting " redeemerless " Judaism and Hellenism, knit together the
whole mass of Magian religions in one of the most powerful theological cre-
ations of all times for which in 2.76 the Mazdaist priesthood crucified him.
Equipped by his father (who quite late in life abandoned his family to enter a
Mandasan order) with all the knowledge of the period, he unified the basic
ideas of the Chaldeans and Persians with those of Johannine, Eastern, Chris-
tianity a task which had been attempted before in the Christian-Persian
Gnosis of Bardesanes, but without any idea of founding a new church. 1 He

1 It is reasonable to suppose that he must through oral tradition have had a very accurate
knowledge of the fundamental doctrines of the John Gospel. Even Bardesanes (d. 2.54), and the
"Acts of St. Thomas" that originated in his circle, are very far removed indeed from Pauline doc-
trines, an alienation that in Mani rose to downright hostility and to the historical Jesus's being
described as an evil demon. We obtain here a glimpse into the essence of the almost subterranean
Christianity of the East, which was ignored by the Greek-writing churches of the Pseudomor-
phosis and for that reason has hitherto escaped the attention of Church history. But Marcion and
Montanus also came from eastern Asia Minor; here originated the Naasene book, basically Per-

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

conceived of the mystical figures of the Johanninc Logos (for him identical
with the Persian Vohu Mano), the Zarathustra of the Avesta legends, and the
Buddha of the late texts as divine Emanations, and himself he proclaimed to be
the Paraclete of the John Gospel and the Saoshyant of the Persians. As we now
know, thanks to the Turfan discoveries which included parts of Mani's works
(till then completely lost), the Church-language of the Mazdaists, Manichaeans,
and Nestorians was independently of the current languages Pehlcvi.

In the West the two cult-Churches developed (in Greek *) a theology that
was not only cognate with this, but to a great extent identical with it. In the
time of Mani began the theological fusion of the Aramaean-Chaldean sun-
religion and the Aramaean-Persian Mithras cult into one system, whose first
great "Father" was lamblichus (c. 300) the contemporary of Athanasius,
but also of Diocletian, the Emperor who in 2.95 made Mithras the God of a
henotheistic State-religion. Spiritually, at any rate, its priests were in nowise
distinguishable from those of Christianity. Proclus (he, too, a true "Father")
received in dreams elucidations of a difficult text-passage; to him the Ttmceus
and the Chaldean oracles were canonical, and he would gladly have seen all
other writings of the philosophers destroyed. His hymns, tokens of the lacera-
tions of a true eremite, implore Helios and other helpers to protect him against
evil spirits. Hierocles wrote a moral breviary for the believers of the Neo-
pythagorean community, which it needs a keen eye to distinguish from Chris-
tian work. Bishop Synesius was a prince-prelate of Neoplatonism before
becoming one of Christianity and the change did not involve an act of
conversion; he kept his theology and only altered its names. It was possible
for the Neoplatonist Asclepiades to write a great work on the likeness of all
theologies. We possess Pagan gospels and hagiologies as well as Christian.
Apollonius wrote the life of Pythagoras, Marinus that of Proclus, Damascius
that of Isidore; and there is not the slightest difference between these works,
which begin and end with prayers, and the Christian Acts of the Martyrs.
Porphyry describes faith, love, hope, and truth as the four divine elements.

Between these Churches of the East and the West we see, looking south
from Edessa, the Talmudic Church (the "Synagogue") with Aramaic as its
written language. Against these great and firm foundations Jewish-Christians
(such as Ebionites and Elkazites), Mandaeans, and likewise Chaldeans (unless
we regard Manichansm as a reconstruction of that religion) were unable to
hold their own. Breaking down into numberless sects, they either faded out

sian, but overlaid first with Judaism and then with Christianity; and further east, probably in the
Matthew monastery of Mosul, Aphrahat wrote, about 340, those strange epistles whose Chris-
tianity the Western development from Irenzus to Athanasius left wholly unaffected. The history
of Nestorian Christianity, in fact, was already beginning in the second century.

1 For the later writings of (for example) Tcrtullian and Augustine remained wholly without
effect save in so far as they were translated. In Rome itself even, Greek was the true language of
the Church.

THE MAGIAN SOUL 153

in the shadow of the great Churches or were absorbed in their structure as the
last Marcionites and Montanists were absorbed into Manichxism. By about
300, outside the Pagan, Christian, Persian, Jewish, and Manichasan Churches
no important Magian religions remained in being.

Along with this ripe Scholasticism, there set in also, from 100, the effort to
identify the visible community, as its organization became ever stricter, with the
organism of the State. This followed of necessity from the world-feeling of
Magian man, and in turn it led to the transformation of the rulers into caliphs

lords of a creed-society far more than of domains to the idea of orthodoxy
as the premiss of real citizenship; to the duty of persecuting false religions
(the "Holy War" of Islam is as old as the Culture itself, and the first centuries
were full of it); and to a special regime within the State of unbelievers
just tolerated and under laws and governance of their own * (for the law God
had given was not for heretics) and, with it, the ghetto manner of living.

First, Osrhoene, in the centre of the Aramasan landscape, adopted Christianity
as the State religion about ^oo. Then Mazdaism assumed the same position in
the Sassanid Empire (zi6) while under Aurelian (d. x/5) and above all Dio-
cletian (2.95) Syncretism as a compound of the Divus, Sol, and Mithras cults
became the state religion of the Roman Imperium. Constantine in 3iz, King
Trdat of Armenia about 3x1, and King Mirian of Georgia a few years later,
went over to Christianity. In the far South, Saba must already have become
Christian in the third century, Axum in the fourth; on the other hand, simul-
taneously with these, the Himaryite State became Jewish, and there was one
more effort, that of Julian, to bring back the Pagan Church to supremacy.

In opposition to this likewise in all the religions of this Culture we
find the spread of Monasticism, with its radical aversion from State, history,
and actuality in general. For after all the conflict of being and waking-being

that is, of politics and religion, of history and nature could not be com-
pletely mastered by the form of the Magian Church and its identification with
State and nation. Race breaks forth into life in these mind-creations and over-
powers the divine, precisely because the latter has absorbed the worldly into
itself. But here there was no conflict of Church and State as in the Gothic age,
and consequently the split in the nation was between the worldly-pious and the
ascetics. A Magian religion relates exclusively to the divine spark, the Pneuma,
in the man, that which he shares with the invisible community of the faithful
and blessed spirits. The rest of the man belongs to Evil and Darkness. But in
the man it is the divine that must rule, overcoming, suppressing, destroying
the other. In this Culture the askcte is not only the veritable priest the
secular priest, as to-day in Russia, is never really respected, and mostly he is

1 See p. 177. Tr.

z 5 4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

allowed to marry but, what is more, he is the true man of piety. Outside
monasticism it was simply not possible to fulfil the demands of religion, and
consequently communities of repentance, monasteries, and convents assume
quite early a position that, for metaphysical reasons, they could never have had
in India or China let alone in the West, where the Orders were working and
fighting that is, dynamic units. 1 Consequently, we must not regard the
people of the Magian world as divided into the "world" and the "cloister"
as two definitely separate modes of life, with equal possibilities of fulfilling all
the demands of religion. Every pious person was a monk in some sort. 2 Be-
tween world and cloister there was no opposition, but only a difference of degree.
Magian churches and orders are homogeneous communities which are only
to be distinguished from one another by extent. The community of Peter was
an Order, that of Paul a Church, while the Mithras religion is at once almost
too wide for the one designation and too narrow for the other.

Every Magian Church is itself an Order and it was only in respect of human
weakness that there were stages and grades of askesis, and these not ordered,
but only permitted, as among the Marcionites and the Manicha^ans (electi,
auditores). And, in truth, a Magian nation is nothing but the sum, the order of
all the orders, which, constituted in smaller and smaller, stricter and stricter
groups, come out finally in the eremites, dervishes, and stylites, in whom
nothing more is of the world, whose waking-consciousness now belongs only
to the Pneuma. Setting aside the prophetic religions out of which, and
between which, the excitation of Apocalypse generated numerous order-like
communities the two cult-Churches of the West produced unnumbered
monks, friars, and orders, distinguishable from one another in the end only by
the name of the Deity upon whom they called. All observed fasting, prayer,
celibacy, poverty. It is very doubtful which of the two Churches in 300 was
the more ascetic in its tendency. The Neoplatonist monk Sarapion went
into the desert in order to devote himself entirely to studying the hymns of
Orpheus. Damascius, guided by a dream, withdrew into a noisome cave in
order to pray continuously to Cybele. 3 The schools of philosophy were nothing
but ascetic orders; the Neopythagoreans stood close to the Jewish Essenes;
the Mithras cult, a true order, admitted only men to its communion and its
fraternities; the Emperor Julian had the intention of endowing pagan monas-
teries. The Mandasan religion seems to have been a group of order-communities
of varying rigour; amongst them was that of John the Baptist. Christian
monasticism did not begin with Pachomius (310); he was merely the builder of

1 The Faustian monk represses his evil will, the Magian the evil substance in himself. Only
the latter is dualistic.

2 The purity- and food-laws of the Talmud and the Avesta cut far deeper into everyday life
than, for example, the Benedictine rule.

3 Asmus, "Damaskios" {Philos. Bibl., 115 (1911). Christian anchoritism is later than pagan:
Rcitzenstein, " Des Athanasius Werk ubtrdas Leben dts Antontus" (.f/>. HeiJ. Ak. (1914), VIII, n).

THE MAGIAN SOUL 155

the first cloister. The movement began with the original community in
Jerusalem itself. The Gospel of Matthew and almost all ' ' Acts of the Apostles ' '
testify to rigorously ascetic sentiment. 1 The Persian and Nestorian Churches
developed the monastic idea further, and finally Islam assimilated it to the full.
To this day Oriental piety is dominated by the Moslem Orders and Brotherhoods.
And Jewry followed the same line of evolution, from the Karasi 2 (Qaraites)
of the eighth century to the Polish Hasidim of the eighteenth. 3

Christianity, which even in the second century was hardly more than an
extended Order, and whose public influence was out of all proportion to the
number of its adherents, grew suddenly vast about the year 2.50. This is the
epochal moment in which the last city-cults of the Classical effaced themselves
before, not Christianity, but the new-born Pagan Church. The records of the Fratres
Arvales in Rome break off in 141, and the last cult-inscriptions at Olympia are
of 2.65. At the same time, the cumulation of the most diverse priestly char-
acters in one man became customary, 4 implying that these usages were felt no
longer as specific, but as usages of one single religion. And this religion set out
to convert, spreading itself far and wide over the lands of the Hellenistic-Roman
stock. The Christian religion, on the other hand, was alone in spreading
(c. 300) over the great Arabian field. And for that very reason it was inevitable
that inner contradiction should now be set up in it. Due, not now to the spirit-
ual dispositions of particular men, but to the spirit of the particular landscapes,
these contradictions led to the break-up of Christianity into several religions
and for ever.

The controversy concerning the nature of Christ was the issue on which this
conflict came up for decision. The matter in dispute was just those problems of
substance which in the same form and with the same tendency fill the thoughts
of all other Magian theologies. Neoplatonic Scholasticism, Porphyry, lambli-
chus, and above all Proclus treated it in a Western formulation, by modes of
thought closely akin to Philo's and even to Paul's. The relation between the
Primary One, Nus, Logos, the Father, and the Mediator was considered with
reference to the substantial. Was the process thereof one of emanation, of
partition, or of pervasion? Was one contained in the other, are they identical,
or mutually exclusive? Was the Triad at the same time a Monad? In the East a
different constitution of the problem is evidenced already in the premisses of the
John Gospel and the Bardesanian Gnosis: the relation of Ahuramazda to the
Holy Spirit (Spenta Mainyu) and the nature of Vohu Mano gave plenty of

1 Even to the point indicated in Matt, xix, 12., which Origen followed to the letter.

2 Sec Ency. Brit., XI ed., article "Qaraites." The outlook of these Protestants so resembled that
of the Western Protestants that their name was used as a term of contempt for the latter by the Catho-
lics, and not greatly resented. It is significant also that this movement in Jewry almost coincided
in date with the vaster Reformation of Islam. Tr.

3 The followers of Baal Shem above mentioned (p. 118) not to be confused with the Hasidim
or Assideans of the second century. Tr.

4 Wissowa, Religion und Kulturs der Corner, p. 493; Geffckcn pp. 4, 144.

z 5 6 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

occupation to the Avcstan "fathers"; and it was just at the time of the decisive
Councils of Ephcsus and Chalcedon that we find the temporary triumph of
Zrvanism (438-457), with its primacy of the divine world-course (Zrvan as
historic Time) over the divine substances marking a peak of dogmatic battle.
Later, Islam took up the whole subject over again and sought to solve it in
relation to the nature (Wcsenhcii) of Mohammed and the Koran. The problem
had been there, ever since a Magian mankind had come into being very
much as the specifically Western will-problem, our counterpart to the substance-
problem, was posed in the beginnings of Faustian thought. There is no need
to look for these problems; they are there as soon as the Culture thinks, they
are the fundamental form of its thought, and come to the front, uncalled-for
and sometimes not even perceived, in all its studies.

But the three Christian solutions predetermined by the three landscapes of
East, West, and South were all present from the first, implicit already in the
main tendencies of Gnosticism, which we may indicate by the names of Bar-
desanes, Basilides, and Valentinus. Their meeting-point was Edessa, where
the streets rang with the battle-cries of the Nestorians against the victors of
Ephesus and, anon, with the els 0eos shout of the Monophysites, demanding
that Bishop Ibas should be thrown to the wild beasts of the circus.

The great question was formulated by Athanasius, whose intellectual origins
lay in the Pseudomorphosis and who had many affinities with his Pagan con-
temporary lamblichus. Against Arius, who saw in Christ a demigod, merely
like in substance to the Father, he maintained that Father and Son were of the
same substance (fleorTjs) which in Christ had assumed a human aupa.. "The
Word became Flesh" this formula of the West depends upon visible facts of
the cult-Churches, and the understanding of the Word upon constant contempla-
tion of the picturable. Here in the iconodule West, where in these very times
lamblichus wrote his book concerning God-statues in which the divine was
substantially present and worked miracles, 1 the abstraction of the Triunity
was always effectively accompanied by the sensuous-human relation of Mother
and Son, and it is the latter which it is impossible to eliminate from the thought-
processes of Athanasius.

With the recognition of the homoousia of Father and Son the real problem
was for the first time posed namely, the attitude of the Magian dualism to
the historical phenomenon of the Son himself. In the world-cavern there was
divine and human substance, in man a part in divine Pneuma and the individual
soul somehow related to the "flesh." But what of Christ?

It was a decisive factor one of the results of Actium that the contest
was fought out in the Greek tongue and in the territory of the Pseudomorphosis
that is, under the full influence of the "Caliph" of the Western Church.

1 This is the metaphysical basis also of the Christian image-worship, which presently set in
and of the appearance of wonder-working pictures of Mary and the Saints.

THE MAGIAN SOUL 157

Constantino had even been the convener and president of the Council of Niczea,
where the doctrine of Athanasius carried the day. In the East, with its Aramaic
speech and thought, these doings were (as we know from the letters of Aphrahat)
hardly followed at all; there men saw no cause to quarrel about what, so far
as they were concerned, had long ago been settled. The breach between East
and West, a consequence of the Council of Ephesus (43 1) separated two Chris-
tian nations, that of the "Persian Church" and that of the Greek Church, but
this was no more than the manifestation of a difference, inherent from the
first, between modes of thought proper to the two different landscapes. Nestorius
and the whole East saw in Christ the Second Adam, the Divine Envoy of the
last xon. Mary had borne a man-child in whose human and created substance
(jihysis} the godly, uncreated element dwelt. The West, on the contrary, saw in
Mary the Mother of a God: the divine and the human substance formed in his
body (fersona, in the Classical idiom ^ a unity, named by Cyril tVoxrts. 2 When
the Council of Ephesus had recognized the mother of God, her who gave birth
to God, the city of Diana's old renown burst into a truly Classical orgy of
celebration. 3

But long ere this the Syrian Apollinaris 4 had heralded the "Southern" idea
of the matter that in the living Christ there was not merely a substance, but
a single substance. The divine had transmuted itself into, not mingled itself
with, a human substance (no Kpaais, as Gregory Nazianzen maintained in
opposition; significantly enough, the best way of expressing the Monophysite
idea is through concepts of Spinoza the one substance in another mode). The
Monophysites called the Christ of the Council of Chalcedon (451, where the
West once more prevailed) "the idol with the two faces." They not only fell
away from the Church, they broke out in fierce risings in Palestine and Egypt;
and when in Justinian's time the troops of Persia that is, of Mazdaism
penetrated to the Nile, they were hailed by the Monophysites as liberators.

The fundamental meaning of this desperate conflict which raged for a

1 See p. 60.

2 The Nestorians protested against Mary Tbeotokos (she who bore God), opposing to her the
concept of Christ the Tkcofhorus (he who carried God in him). The deep difference between an
image-loving and an image-hating religiousness is here clearly manifested.

3 Note the "Western" outlook on the substance-questions in the contemporary writings of
Proclus his double Zeus, his triad of varfip, Swa/us, vofitris or voqrbv, and so forth (Zeller,
Philosophic der Griechen, V, pp. 857, et seq.)- Proclus's beautiful "Hymn to Athene" is a veritable
Avc Maria:

"But when an evil lapse of my being puts me into bondage

(And, ah, I know indeed how I am tossed about by many unholy deeds that in my

blindness I have done),

Be thou gracious to me, thou gentle one, thou blessing of mankind,
And let me not lie upon the earth as prey to fearful punishments,
For I am, and I remain, thy chattel."

(Hymn VII, Eudocix Aug. rcl. A. Ludwich, 1897.])

4 Sec Ency. Brit., XI cd., article "Apollinaris, the Younger." Tr.

2.58 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

century not over scholarly concepts, but over the soul of a landscape that
sought to be set free in its people was the reversal of the work of Paul. If we can
transport ourselves into the inmost soul of the two new-born nations, making
no reservations and ignoring all minor points of dogmatics, then we see how the
direction of Christianity towards the Greek West and its intellectual affinity
with the Pagan Church culminated in the position that the Ruler of the West
was the Head of Christianity in general. In the mind of Constantine it was
self-evident that the Pauline foundation within the Pseudomorphosis was
synonymous with Christianity. The Jewish Christians of Petrine tendency
were to him a heretical sect, and the Eastern Christians of "Johannine" type
he never even noticed. When the spirit of the Pseudomorphosis had, in the
three determining councils of Nicsea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, put its seal upon
dogma, once and for all, the real Arabian world rose up with the force of
nature and set up a barrier against it. With the end of the Arabian Springtime,
Christianity fell apart for good into three religions, which can be symbolized
by the names of Paul, Peter, and John, and of which none can henceforth claim
to be regarded by the historically and doctrinally unprejudiced eye as the true
and proper Christianity. These three religions are at the same time three
nations, living in the old race-areas of Greeks, Jews, and Persians, and the
tongues that they used were the Church-languages borrowed from them
namely, Greek, Aramaic, and Pehlevi.

VII

The Eastern Church, since the Council of Nicsea, had organized itself with
an episcopal constitution, at the head of which stood the Katholikos of Ctesi-
phon, and with councils, liturgy, and law of its own. In 486 the Nestorian
doctrine was accepted as binding, and the tie with Constantinople was thus
broken. From that point on, Mazdaists, Manichasans, and Nestorians have a
common destiny, of which the seed was sown in the Gnosis of Bardesanes. In
the Monophysite Churches of the South, the spirit of the primitive Community
emerged again and spread itself further; with its uncompromising monotheism
and its hatred of images its closest affinity was with Talmudic Judaism, and its
old battle-cry of els Bern had already marked it to be, with that Judaism, the
starting-point of Islam ("Allah il Allah"). The Western Church continued to
be bound up with the fate of the Roman Empire that is, the cult-Church
became the State. Gradually it absorbed into itself the adherents of the Pagan
Church, and thenceforth its importance lay not so much in itself for Islam
almost annihilated it but in the accident that it was from it that the young
peoples of the Western Culture received the Christian system as the basis for a
new creation, 1 receiving it, moreover, in the Latin guise of the extreme West
which for the Greek Church itself was unmeaning, since Rome was now a
1 And Russia, too, though hitherto Russia has kept it as a buried treasure.

THE MAGIAN SOUL 159

Greek city, and the Latin language was far more truly at home in Africa and
Gaul.

The essential and elemental concept of the Magian nation, a being that con-
sists in extension, had been from the beginning active in extending itself. All
these Churches were, deliberately, forcefully, and successfully, missionary
Churches. But it was not until men had at last ceased to think of the end of
the world as imminent, and dogma appropriate to prolonged existence in this
World's Cavern had been built up, and the Magian religions had taken up their
standpoint towards the problem of substance, that the extending of the Culture
took up that swift, passionate tempo that distinguished it from all others and
found in Islam its most impressive, its last, but by no means its only example.
Of these mighty facts Western theologians and historians give an entirely false
picture. All that their gaze, riveted upon the Mediterranean lands, observes is
the Western direction that fits in with their " Ancient-Medixval-Modern"
schema, and even within these limits, accepting the ostensible unity of Chris-
tianity, they regard it as passing at a certain period from a Greek into a Latin
form, whereby the Greek residue is lost sight of altogether.

But even before Christianity and this is a fact of which the immense
significance has never been observed, which has not even been correctly in-
terpreted as mission effort the Pagan Church had won for the Syncretic
Cult the greater part of the population of North Africa, Spain, Gaul, Britain,
and the Rhine and Danube frontiers. Of the Druidism that Cassar had found
in Gaul, little remained extant by the time of Constantine. The assimilation of
indigenous local gods under the names of the great Magian divinities of the
Cult-Church (and especially Mithras-Sol-Jupiter) from the second century on,
was essentially a process of conquest, and the same is true of the later emperor-
worship. 1 The missionary efforts of Christianity here would have been less
successful than they were if the other cult-Church its near relative had
not preceded it. But the latter 's propaganda was by no means limited to bar-
barian fields; even in the fifth century the missionary Asclepiodotus converted
Aphrodisias, a Carian city, from Christianity to Paganism.

The Jews, as has been shown already, directed missionary effort on a large
scale towards the East and the South. Through southern Arabia they drove into
the heart of Africa, possibly even before the birth of Christ, while on the side
of the East their presence in China is demonstrable, even in the second century.
To the north the realm of the Khazars 2 and its capital, Astrakhan, later went
over to Judaism. From this area came the Mongols of Jewish religion who
advanced into the heart of Germany and were defeated, along with the
Hungarians, in the battle of the Lechfeld in 955. Jewish scholars of the Span-

1 The Christian missionary efforts of the West very generally followed the same method, main-
taining the local places of prayer, and merely substituting crucifixes or relics for the idols. Gregory
the Great even sanctioned the sacrifice of animals in Britain. Tr.

2 See Ency. Brit., XI cd., art. "Khazars." Tr.

i6o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

ish-Moorish universities petitioned the Byzantine Emperor (in A.D. 1000) for
safe-conduct for an embassy that was to ask the Khazars whether they were
the Lost Tribes of Israel.

From the Tigris, Mazdaists and Manichasans penetrated the empires on
either hand, Roman and Chinese, to their utmost frontiers. Persian, as the
Mithras cult, invaded Britain; Manichjeism had by 400 become a danger
to Greek Christianity, and there were Manichsean sects in southern France as
late as the Crusades 1 ; but the two religions drove eastwards as well, along
the Great Wall of China (where the great polyglot inscription of Kara Bal-
gassun testifies to the introduction of the Manichsean faith in the Oigur realm)
and even to Shantung. Persian fire-temples arose in the interior of China, and
from 700 Persian expressions are found in Chinese astrological writings.

The three Christian Churches everywhere followed up the blazed trails.
When the Western Church converted the Prankish King Chlodwig in 496, the
missionaries of the Eastern Church had already reached Ceylon and the western-
most Chinese garrisons of the Great Wall, and those of the Southern were in the
Empire of Axum. At the same time as, after Boniface (718), Germany became
converted, the Nestorian missionaries were within an ace of winning China
itself. They had entered Shantung in 638. The Emperor Kao-tsung (651-84)
permitted churches to be built in all provinces of the Empire, in 750 Christianity
was preached in the Imperial palace itself, and in 781, according to the Aramaic
and Chinese inscriptions upon a memorial column in Singafu which has been
preserved, "all China was covered with the palaces of Concord." But it is in
the highest degree significant that the Confucians, who cannot be called inexpert
in religious matters, regarded the Nestorians, Mazdaists, and Manichasans as ad-
herents of a single "Persian" religion, 2 just as the population of the Western
Roman provinces were unable to discriminate between Mithras and Christ.

Islam, therefore, is to be regarded as the Puritanism of the whole group of
Early Magian religions, emerging as a religion only formally new, and in the
domain of the Southern Church and Talmudic Judaism. It is this deeper sig-
nificance, and not merely the force of its warlike onslaught, that gives the key
to its fabulous successes. Although on political grounds it practised an as-
tounding toleration John Damascenus, the last great dogmatist of the Greek
Church, was, under the name of Al Manzor, treasurer to the Caliph Judaism,
Mazdaism, and the Southern and Eastern churches of Christianity were swiftly
and almost completely dissolved in it. The Katholikos of Seleucia, Jesujabh III,
complains that tens of thousands of Christians went over to it as soon as it came
on the scene, and in North Africa the home of Augustine the entire
population fell away to Islam at once. Mohammed died in 632.. In 641 the
whole domain of the Monophysitcs and the Nestorians (and, therefore, of the

1 The Albigensian movement of the twelfth century. Tr.

2 Hermann, Chines. Gtschichtt (1911), p. 77.

THE MAGIAN SOUL 161

Talmud and the Avesta) were in the possession of Islam. In 717 it stood before
Constantinople, and the Greek Church was in peril of extinction. Already in
618 a relative of the prophet had brought presents to the Chinese Emperor Tai-
dsung and obtained leave to institute a mission. From 700 there were mosques
in Shantung, and in 710 Damascus sent instructions to the Arabs long estab-
lished in southern France to conquer the realm of the Franks. Two centuries
later, when in the West a new religious world was arising out of the remains of
the old Western Church, Islam was in the Sudan and in Java.

For all this, Islam is significant only as a piece of outward religious history.
The inner history of the Magian religion ends with Justinian's time, as truly
as that of the Faustian ends with Charles V and the Council of Trent.
Any book on religious history shows "the" Christian religion as having had
two ages of grand thought-movements 0-500 in the East and 1000-1500 in the West. 1
But these are two springtimes of two Cultures, and in them are comprised also the
non-Christian forms which belong to each religious development. The closing
of the University of Athens by Justinian in 519 was not, as is always stated, the
end of Classical philosophy there had been no Classical philosophy for
centuries. What he did, forty years before the birth of Mohammed, was to
end the theology of the Pagan Church by closing this school and as the
historians forget to add to end the Christian theology also by closing those of
Antioch and Alexandria. Dogma was complete, finished just as it was in the
West with the Council of Trent (1564) and the Confession of Augsburg (1540),
for with the city and intellectualism religious creative force comes to an end.
So also in Jewry and in Persia, the Talmud was concluded about 500, and when
Chosroes Nushirvan in 5x9 bloodily suppressed the Reformation of Mazdak
which was not unlike our Anabaptism in its rejection of marriage and worldly
property, and had been supported by King Kobad I as counteracting the power
of Church and nobility Avestan dogma similarly passed into fixity.

1 A third, "contemporary," movement should follow in the Russian world in the first half of
the coming millennium.

CHAPTER IX
PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

CHAPTER IX

PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL
I 1

RELIGION may be described as the Waking-Being of a living creature in the
moments when it overcomes, masters, denies, and even destroys Being. Race-
life and the pulse of its drive dwindle as the eyes gaze into an extended, tense,
and light-filled world, and Time yields to Space. The plantlike desire for ful-
filment goes out, and from primary depths there wells up the animal fear of
the fulfilment, of the ceasing of direction, of death. Not hate and love, but
fear and love are the basic feelings of religion. Hate and fear differ as Time and
Space, blood and eye, pulse and tension, heroism and saintliness. And love in
the race-sense differs from love in the religious sense in the same way.

All religion is turned to light. The extended itself becomes religious as a
world of the eye comprehended from the ego as centre of light. Hearing and
touch are adjusted to what is seen and the Invisible, whose workings are sensed,
becomes the sum of the daemonic. All that we designate by the words " deity,"
"revelation," "salvation," "dispensation," is in one way and another an
element of illumined actuality. Death, for man, is something that he sees, and
knows by seeing, and in relation to death birth is the other secret. They are the
two visible limits of the sensible cosmic that is incarnate in a live body in
lighted space.

There are two sorts of deeper fear one is fear (known even to the animals)
in presence of microcosmic freedom in space, before space itself and its powers,
before death; the other is fear for the cosmic current of being, for life, for
directional time. The first awakens a dark feeling that freedom in the extended
is just a new and deeper sort of dependence than that which rules the vegetable
world, and it leads the individual being, sensible of its weakness, to seek the
propinquity and alliance of others. Anxiety produces speech, and our sort of
speech is religion every religion. Out of the fear of Space arise the numina of
the world-as-nature and the cults of gods; out of the fear for time arise the numina
of life, of sex and breed, of the State, centring on ancestor-worship. That is the
difference between Taboo and Totem 1 for the totemistic, too, always appears
in religious form, out of holy awe of that which passeth all understanding and
is for ever alien.

1 Cf. pp. 3, ct scq. and foot-note p. 3. l See p. 116.

z6 5

z66 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

The higher religion requires tense alertness against the powers of blood and
being that ever lurk in the depths ready to recapture their primeval rights over
the younger side of life. "Watch and pray, that ye fall not into temptation."
Nevertheless, "liberation" is a fundamental word in every religion and an
eternal wish of every waking-being. In this general, almost prcreligious, sense,
it means the desire for freedom from the anxieties and anguishes of waking-
consciousness; for relaxation of the tensions of fear-born thought and search;
for the obliteration and removal of the consciousness of the Ego's loneli-
ness in the universe, the rigid conditionedness of nature, the prospect of the
immovable boundary of all Being in eld and death.

Sleep, too, liberates "Death and his brother Sleep." And holy wine,
intoxication, breaks the rigour of the spirit's tension, and dancing, the Dio-
nysus art, and every other form of stupefaction and ecstasy. These are modes
of slipping out of awareness by the aid of being, the cosmic, the "it," the
escape out of space into time. But higher than all these stands the genuinely
religious overcoming of fear by means of the understanding itself. The tension
between microcosm and macrocosm becomes something that we can love,
something in which we can wholly immerse ourselves. 1 We call this faith,
and it is the beginning of all man's intellectual life.

Understanding is causal only, whether deductive or inductive, whether
derived from sensation or not. It is wholly impossible to distinguish being-
understood from being-caused both express the same thing. When something
is "actual" for us, we see it and think it in causal (ursachlicfr) form, just as we
feel and know ourselves and our activities as things originating, causes (Ur-
sache*). The assignment of causes is, however, different from case to case, not
only in the religious, but also generally in the inorganic logic of man. A fact
is thought of at one moment as having such-and-such, at another moment as
having something else, as its cause. Every kind of thinking has for every one
of its domains of application a proper "system." In everyday life a causal
connexion in thought is never exactly repeated. Even in modern physics
working hypotheses that is, causal systems which partially exclude one
another are in use side by side; for instance, the ideas of electrodynamics and
those of thermodynamics. The significance of the thought is not thereby
nullified, for during a continuous spell of waking-consciousness we "under-
stand" always in the form of single acts of which each has its own causal
inception. The viewing of the entire world-as-nature in relation to the individ-
ual consciousness as a single causally-ordered concatenation is something
perfectly unrealizable by our thought, inasmuch as our thinking proceeds
always by unit acts. It remains a belief. It is indeed Faith itself, for it is the
basis of religious understanding of the world, which, wherever something is
observed, postulates numina as a necessity of thought ephemeral numina for

1 "He who loves God with inmost soul, transforms [himself into God" (Bernard of Clairvaux).

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 167

incidental events which are not again thought of, and enduring numina as
place-definite indwellers (of springs, trees, stones, hills, stars, and so forth)
or as universals (like the gods of Heaven, of War, of Wisdom) which can be
present anywhere. These numina are limited only in virtue of the individual-
ness of each separate act of thought. That which to-day is a property of the
god is to-morrow itself the god. Others are now a plurality, now a unity,
now a vague Ent. There arc invisibles (shapes) and incomprehensibles
(principles), which, to those to whom it is vouchsafed, may become phenomenal
or comprehensible. Fate 1 in the Classical (a/zap^*"?) an d * n t he Indian (rfa)
is something which stands as origin-thing (Ur-Sache) above the picturable
divinities; Magian Destiny, on the contrary, is the operation of the one and
formless supreme God. Religious thought ever lets itself graduate values
and rank within the causal succession, and leads up to supreme beings or prin-
ciples, as very first and "governing" causes; "dispensation" is the word
used for the most comprehensive of all systems based upon valuation. Science,
on the contrary, is a mode of understanding which fundamentally abhors
distinctions of rank amongst causes; what it finds is not dispensation, but
law.

The understanding of causes sets free. Belief in the linkages discovered
compels the world-fear to retreat. God is man's refuge from the Destiny which
he can feel and livingly experience, but not think on, or figure, or name, and
which sinks into abeyance for so long only for so long as the "critical"
(literally, the separating) fear-born understanding can establish causes behind
causes comprehensibly; that is, in order visible to the outer or inner eye. It is
the desperate dilemma of the higher grade of man that his powerful will to
understand is in constant contradiction with his being. It has ceased to serve
his life, but is unable to rule it, and consequently in all important con-
junctures there remains an insoluble element. "One has merely to declare
oneself free, and one feels the moment to be conditioned. But if one has
the courage to declare oneself conditioned, then one has the feeling of being
free" (Goethe).

We name a causal linkage within the world-as-nature, as to which we are
convinced that no further reflection can alter it Truth. Truths are es-
tablished, and they are timeless "absolute" means detached from Destiny
and history, but detached also from the facts of our own living and dying
and they are an inward liberation, consolation, and salvation, in that they
disvalue and overcome the incalculable happenings of the world of facts. Or,
as it mirrors itself in the mind, men may go, but truth remains.

In the world-around something is established that is, fixed, spellbound.

1 For religious thought Destiny is always a causal quantity. Epistemology knows it, there-
fore, only as an indistinct word for causality. Only so long as we do not think upon it do we really
know it.

j.68 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Understanding man has the secret in the hands, whether this be, as of old, sonic
potent charm or, as nowadays, a mathematical formula. A feeling of triumph,
even to-day, accompanies every experimental step in the realm of Nature
which determines something about the purposes and powers of the goJ of
heaven or the storm-spirits of the ground-dasmons; or about the numina of
natural science (atom-nuclei, the velocity of light, gravitation); or even about
the abstract numina that thought conceives in contemplating its own image
(concept, category, reason) and, in determining, fixes it in the prison of an
unalterable system of causal relations. Experience in this inorganic, killing,
preserving sense, which is something quite different from life-experience and
knowledge of men, takes place in two modes theory and technique, 1 or, in
religious language, myth and cult according as the believer's intention is to
open up or to confine the secrets of the world-around. Both demand a high
development of human understanding. Both may be born of either fear or love.
There is a mythology of fear, like the Mosaic and the primitive generally, and a
mythology of love, like that of early Christianity and Gothic mysticism.
Similarly there is a technique of defensive, and another technique of postulant,
magic, and this, no doubt the most fundamental, distinction between sacrifice
and prayer 2 distinguishes also primitive and mature mankind. Religiousness
is a trait of soul, but religion is a talent. "Theory" demands the gift of vision
that few possess to the extent of luminous insight and many possess not at all.
It is world-view, "Weltanschauung' in the most primary sense, whether what
one sees in that world is the hand and the loom of powers, or (in a colder urban
spirit, not fearing or loving, but inquisitive) the theatre of law-conform
forces. The secrets of Taboo and Totem are beheld in god-faiths and soul-faiths,
and calculated in theoretical physics and biology. "Technique" presupposes
the intellectual gift of binding and conjuring. The theorist is the critical seer,
the technician is the priest, the discoverer is the prophet.

The means, however, in which the whole force of intellect concentrates
itself is the form of the actual, which is abstracted from vision by speech, and of
which not every waking-consciousness can discern the quintessence the
conceptual circumscription, the communicable law, name, number. Hence
every conjuration of the deity is based on the knowledge of its real name and
the use of rites and sacraments, known and available only to the initiated, of
which the form must be exact and the words correct. This applies not merely
to primitive magic, but just as much to our physical (and particularly our
medical) technique. It is for this reason that mathematics have a character of
sanctity and are regularly the product of a religious milieu (Pythagoras,
Descartes, Pascal); that there is a mysticism of sacred numbers (3, 7, 12.) in

1 See p. 15.

2 The distinction between the two is one of inner form. A sacrifice made by Socrates is at bot-
tom a prayer; and generally the Classical sacrifice is to be looked upon as a prayer in bodily form.
The ejaculated prayer of the criminal, on the contrary, is a sacrifice to which fear drives him.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 169

every religion, 1 and that Ornament (of which cult-architecture is the highest
form) is essentially number felt as shape. It is rigid, compelling forms, ex-
pression-motives and communication-signs 2 that the microcosm employs in the
world of waking-consciousness to get into touch with the macrocosm. In
sacerdotal technique they are called precepts, and in scientific, laws but
both are really name and number, and primitive man would discover no differ-
ence between the magic wherewith the priests of his villages command the
daemons and that wherewith the civilized technician commands his machines.

The first, and perhaps the only, outcome of man's will-to-understanding is
faith. " I believe" is the great word against metaphysical fear, and at the same
time it is an avowal of love. Even though one's researches or accumulation of
knowledge may culminate in sudden illumination or conclusive calculation,
yet all one's own sense and comprehension would be meaningless unless there
were set up along with it an inward certainty of a "something" which as
other and alien is and is, moreover, exactly under the ascertained shape
in the concatenation of cause and effect. The highest intellectual possession,
therefore, known to man as a being of speech-deduced thought, is the
firm and hard-won belief in this something, withdrawn from the courses of
time and destiny, which he has separated out by contemplation and labelled
by name and number. But what that something is remains in the last analysis
obscure. Was it the something of secret logic of the universe that was touched,
or only a silhouette? And all the struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious
investigation directs itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair.
He needs in his intellectual boring of belief a final something attainable by
thought, an end of dissection that leaves no remainder of mystery. The corners
and pockets of his world of contemplation must all be illuminated nothing
less will give him his release.

Here belief passes over into the knowledge evoked by mistrust, or, more
accurately, becomes belief in that knowledge. For the latter form of the under-
standing is radically dependent upon the former; it is posterior, more artificial,
more questionable. Further, religious theory that is, the contemplation
of the believer leads to priestly practice, but scientific theory, on the con-
trary, liberates itself by contemplation from the technical knowledge of every day
life. 3 The firm belief that is bred by illuminations, revelations, sudden deep
glimpses, can dispense with critical work. But critical knowledge presupposes
the belief that its methods will lead to just that which is desired that is,
not to fresh imaginings, but to the "actual." History, however, teaches that
doubt as to belief leads to knowledge, and doubt as to knowledge (after a
period of critical optimism) back again to belief. As theoretical knowledge

1 And herein philosophy differs not in the least from soil-sprung folk-belief. Think of Kant's
category-table with its 3 X 4 units, of Hegel's method, of lamblichus's triads.

2 See p. 133.
Cf. p. 14.

170 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

frees itself from confiding acceptance, it is marching to self-destruction, after
which what remains is simply and solely technical experience.

Belief, in its primitive, unclear condition, acknowledges superior sources
of wisdom by which things that man's own subtlety could never unravel arc
more or less manifest such as prophetic words, dreams, oracles, sacred
scriptures, the voice of the deity. The critical spirit, on the contrary, wants,
and believes itself able, to look into everything for itself. It not only mistrusts
alien truths, but even denies their possibility. Truth, for it, is only knowledge
that it has proved for itself. But if pure criticism creates its means out of itself
solely, it did not long go unperceived that this position assumed the reality of
the result. De omnibus dubitandum is a proposition that is incapable of being
actualized. It is apt to be forgotten that critical activity must rest upon a
method, and the possibility of obtaining this method in turn by the way of
criticism is only apparent. For, in reality, it follows from the momentary dis-
position of the thought. 1 That is, the results of criticism themselves are de-
termined by the basic method, but this in turn is determined by the stream of
being which carries and perfuses the waking-consciousness. The belief in a
knowledge that needs no postulates is merely a mark of the immense naivete of
rationalist periods. A theory of natural science is nothing but a historically
older dogma in another shape. And the only profit from it is that which
life obtains, in the shape of a successful technique, to which theory has provided
the key. It has already been said that the value of a working hypothesis resides
not in its "correctness" but in its usableness. But discoveries of another sort,
findings of insight, "Truths" in the optimistic sense, cannot be the outcome
of purely scientific understanding, since this always presupposes an existing
view upon which its critical, dissecting activity can operate; the natural
science of the Baroque is one continuous dissection of the religious world-pic-
ture of the Gothic.

The aim of faith and science, fear and curiosity, is not to experience life,
but to know the world-as-nature. Of world-as-history they are the express
negation. But the secret of waking-consciousness is a twofold one; two fear-
born, causally ordered pictures arise for the inner eye the "outer world"
and as its counter-image the "inner world." In both are true problems, and
the waking-consciousness is not only a look-out, but is very busy within its
own domains as well. The Numen out there is called God; in here Soul. By
the critical understanding the deities of the believer's vision are transmuted
in thought into mechanical magnitudes referable to its world, but their essence
and kernel remain the same Classical matter and form, Magian light and
darkness, Faustian force and mass and its mode is ever the same dissection

1 And even so the thought has a different disposition according as it is primitive or cultured;
Chinese, Indian, Classical, Magian, or Western; and even German, English, or French. In the last
resort, there arc not even two individuals with exactly the same method.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 2.71

of the primitive soul-belief, and its end is ever the same, a predetermined result.
The physics of the within is called systematic psychology and it discovers in
man, if it is Classical science, thing-like soul-parts (foOs, 6vfj,6s, e7ri0u//ia); if
Magian, soul-substance (ruach, nephesh); if Faustian, soul-forces (thinking, feel-
ing, willing). These are the shapes that religious meditation, in fear and in
love, then follows up in the causal relations of guilt, sin, pardon, conscience,
reward, and punishment.

Being is a mystery that, as soon as faith and science turn their attention to
it, illudes them into fateful error. Instead of the cosmic itself being reached
(which is completely outside the possibilities of the active waking-conscious-
ness) the sensible mobility of body in the field of the eye, and the conceptual
image of a mechanical-causal chain abstracted therefrom, are subjected to
analysis. But real life is led, not cognised. Only the Timeless is true. Truths lie
beyond history and life, and vice versa life is something beyond all causes,
effects, and truths. Criticism in both cases, critique of waking-consciousness
and critique of being, are contrary to happening and alien to life. But in the
first case the application of a critique is entirely justified by the critical intention
and the inner logic of the object that is referred to; in the second case it is not.
It follows that the distinction between faith and knowledge, or fear and curi-
osity, or revelation and criticism, is not, after all, the ultimate distinction.
Knowledge is only a late form of belief. But belief and life, love springing from
the secret fear of the world, and love springing from the secret hate of the sexes,
knowledge of inorganic and sense of organic logic, Causes and Destinies
this is the deepest opposition of all. And here we distinguish men, not ac-
cording to what their modes of thinking are religious or critical nor
according to the objects of their thought, but according to whether they are
thinkers (no matter about what) or doers.

In the realm of doing the waking-consciousness takes charge only when it
becomes technique. Religious knowledge, too, is power man is not only
ascertaining causations, but handling them. He who knows the secret rela-
tionship between microcosm and macrocosm commands it also, whether the
knowledge has come to him by revelation or by eavesdropping. Thus the
magician and conjuror is truly the Taboo-man. He compels the deity through
sacrifice and prayer; he practises the true rites and sacraments because they are
causes of inevitable results, and whosoever knows them, him they must serve.
He reads in the stars and in the sacred books; in his power lies, timeless and
immune from all accident, the causal relation of sin and propitiation, repentance
and absolutions, sacrifice and grace. His chain of sacred origins and results
makes him himself a vessel of mysterious power and, therefore, a cause of new
effects, in which one must have faith before one may have them imparted.

From this starting-point we can understand (what the European-American
world of to-day has wellnigh forgotten) the ultimate meaning of religious

THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

ethics, Moral. It is, wherever true and strong, a relation that has the full import
of ritual act and practice; it is (to use Loyola's phrase) " exercitium spiritualty"
performed before the deity, 1 who is to be softened and conjured thereby. " What
shall I do to be saved?" This "what?" is the key to the understanding of all
real moral. In its deeps there is ever a "wherefore" and a "why," even in the
case of those few sublimate philosophers who have imagined a moral that is
"for its own sake" confessing in the very phrase that deep down they feel a
"wherefore," even though but a sympathetic few of their own kind can appre-
ciate it. There is only causal moral that is, ethical technique on the back-
ground of a convinced metaphysic.

Moral is a conscious and planned causality of the conduct, apart from all
particulars of actual life and character, something eternal and universally
valid, not only without time, but hostile to time and for that very reason
"true." Even if mankind did not exist, moral would be true and valid this
is no mere conceit, but an expression of the ethical inorganic logic of the
world conceived as system that has actually been used. Never would the
philosopher concede that it could have a historical evolution and fulfilment.
Space denies Time; true moral is absolute, eternally complete and the same.
In the depths of it there is ever a negation of life, a refraining and renunciation
carried to the point of askesis and death itself. Negation is expressed in its very
phrases religious moral contains prohibitions, not precepts. Taboo, even
where it ostensibly affirms, is a list of disclaimers. To liberate oneself from the
world of fact, to evade the possibilities of Destiny, always to look upon the
race in oneself as the lurking enemy nothing but hard system, doctrine, and
exercise will give that. No action must be causal or impulsive that is, left
to the blood everything must be considered according to motives and results
and "carried out" according to orders. Extreme tension of awareness is re-
quired lest we fall into sin. First of all things, continence in what pertains to
the blood, love, marriage. Love and hate in mankind are cosmic and evil;
the love of the sexes is the very polar opposite of timeless love and fear of God,
and therefore it is the prime sin, for which Adam was cast forth from paradise
and burdened man with the heritage of guilt. Conception and death define the
life of the body in space, and the fact that it is the body that is in question makes
the former sin and the latter punishment. 2oyxa crij^a (the Classical body a
grave!) was the confession of the Orphic religion. /Eschylus and Pindar com-
prehended Being as a reproach, and the saints of all Cultures feel it as an impiety
that has to be killed off by askesis or (what is nearly related thereto) orgiastic
squandering. Action, the field of history, the deed, heroism, delight in battle
and victory and spoil, are evil. For in them the pulse of cosmic being knocks
on the door too loudly and disturbingly for contemplativeness and thought.

1 Anatolc France's story Le Jongleur de Notre Dame is something deeper than a beautiful
fancy. Tr.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL x 73

The whole world meaning the world-as-history is infamous. It fights
instead of renouncing; it does not possess the idea of sacrifice. It prevails over
truth by means of facts. As it follows impulse, it baffles thought about cause
and effect. And therefore the highest sacrifice that intellectual man can offer is
to make a personal present of it to the powers of nature. Every moral action is a
piece of this sacrifice, and an ethical life-course is an unbroken chain of such
sacrifices. Above all, the offering of sympathy, corn-passion, in which the
inwardly strong gives up his superiority to the powerless. The compassionate
man kills something within himself. But we must not confuse this sympathy
in the grand religious sense with the vague sentimentality of the everyday man,
who cannot command himself, still less with the race-feeling of chivalry that is
not a moral of reasons and rules at all, but an upstanding and self-evident cus-
tom bred of the unconscious pulsations of a keyed-up life. That which in civilized
times is called social ethics has nothing to do with religion, and its presence
only goes to show the weakness and emptiness of the religiousness of the day,
which has lost that force of metaphysical sureness that is the condition
precedent of strong, convinced, and self-denying moral. Think for instance of
the difference between Pascal and Mill. Social ethic is nothing but practical
politics. It is a very Late product of the same historical world whose Springtime
(in all Cultures alike) has witnessed the flowering of an ethic of high courage
and knightliness in a strong stock that does not wince under the life of history
and fate; an ethic of natural and acquired reactions that polite society to-day
would call "the instincts of a gentleman"; an ethic of which vulgarity and
not sin is the antithesis. Once again it is the Castle versus the Cathedral.
The castle character does not ask about precepts and reasons. In fact, it does
not ask questions at all. Its code lies in the blood which is pulse and its
fear is not of punishment or requital, but of contempt and especially self-con-
tempt. It is not selfless; on the contrary, it springs from the very fullness of a
strong self. But Compassion likewise demands inward greatness of soul, and
so it is those selfsame Springtimes that produce the most saintly servants of
pity, the Francis of Assisi, the Bernard of Clairvaux, in whom renunciation was
a pervading fragrance, to whom self-offering was bliss, whose caritas was ethe-
real, bloodless, timeless, historyless, in whom fear of the universe had dissolved
itself into pure, flawless love, a summit of causal moral of which Late periods
are simply no longer capable.

To constrain one's blood, one must have blood. Consequently it is only in
knightly warrior-times that we find a monasticism of the great style, and the
highest symbol for the complete victory of Space over Time is the warrior
become ascetic not the born dreamer and weakling, who belongs by nature
to the cloister, nor again the scholar, who works at a moral system in the
study. Putting cant aside, that which is called moral to-day a proper affec-
tion for one's nearest, or the exercise of worthy inclinations, or the practice of

z 7 4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

caritas with an arriere-pensee of acquiring political power by that means is
not honour-moral, or even a low grade of it, according to Springtime stand-
ards. To repeat: there is grand moral only with reference to death, and its
sources are a fear, pervading the whole waking-consciousness, of metaphysical
causes and consequences, a love that overcomes life, a consciousness that one
is under the inexorable magic of a causal system of sacred laws and purposes,
which are honoured as truths and which one must either wholly belong to or
wholly renounce. Constant tension, self-watching, self-testing, accompany
the exercise of this moral, which is an art, and in the presence of which the
world-as-history sinks to nothingness. Let a man be either a hero or a saint.
In between lies, not wisdom, but banality.

If there were truths independent of the currents of being, there could be no
history of truths. If there were one single eternally right religion, religious
history would be an inconceivable idea. But, however highly developed the
microcosmic side of an individual's life may be, it is nevertheless something
stretched like a membrane over the developing life, perfused by the pulsing
blood, ever betraying the hidden drive of cosmic directedness. Race dominates
and forms all apprehension. It is the destiny of each moment of awareness to
be a cast of Time's net over Space.

Not that "eternal truths" do not exist. Every man possesses them
plenty of them to the extent that he exists and exercises the understanding
faculty in a world of thoughts, in the connected ensemble of which they are, in
and for the instant of thought, unalterable fixtures ironbound as cause-
effect combinations in hoops of premisses and conclusions. Nothing in this
disposition can become displaced, he believes. But in reality it is just one surge
of life that is lifting his waking self and its world together. Its unity remains
integral, but as a unit, a whole, a fact, it has a history. Absolute and relative
are to one another as transverse and longitudinal sections of a succession of
generations, the latter ignoring Space, and the former Time. The systematic
thinker stays in the causal order of a moment; only the physiognomist who
reviews the sequence of positions realizes the constant alteration of that which
"is" true.

. Alles Vergangliche ist nur tin Gleichnis holds good for the eternal truths also,
as soon as we follow their course in the stream of history, and watch them move
on as elements in the world-picture of the generations that live and die. For
each man, during the short space of his existence, the one religion is eternal and
true which Destiny, through the time and place of his birth, has ordained for
him. With it he feels, out of it he forms, the views and convictions of his days.
To its words and forms he holds fast, although what he means by them is
constantly changing. In the world-as-nature there arc eternal truths; in the
world-as-history there is an eternally changing truencss.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL z 75

A morphology of religious history, therefore, is a task that the Faustian spirit
alone could ever formulate, and one that it is only now, at this present stage of
its development, fit to deal with. The problem is enunciated, and we must dare
the effort of getting completely away from our own convictions and seeing before
us everything indifferently as equally alien. And how hard it is! He who un-
dertakes the task must possess the strength not merely to imagine himself in an
illusory detachment from the truths of his world-understanding illusory
even to one for whom truths are just a set of concepts and methods but
actually to penetrate his own system physiognomically to its very last cells.
And even then is it possible, in a single language, which structurally and
spiritually carries the whole metaphysical content of its own Culture, to capture
transmissible ideas of the truths of other-tongued men?

There is, to begin with, over the thousands of years of the first age, 1 the
colourless throng of primitive populations, which stand fearfully agape in the
presence of the chaotic environment, whose enigmas continually weigh upon
them, for no man amongst them is able logically to master it. Lucky in com-
parison with them is the animal, who is awake and yet not thinking. An
animal knows fear only from case to case, whereas early man trembles before the
whole world. Everything inside and outside him is dark and unresolved. The
everyday and the daemonic are tangled together without clue and without rule.
The day is filled with a frightened and painful religiousness, in which it is rare
to find even the suggestion of a religion of confidence for from this elemen-
tary form of the world-fear no way leads to the understanding love. Every
stone on which a man stumbles, every tool that he takes in his hand, every insect
buzzing past him, food, house, weather, all can be daemonic; but the man be-
lieves in the powers that lurk in them only so long as he is frightened or so long
as he uses them there are quite enough of them even so. But one can love
something only if one believes in its continued existence. Love presupposes the
thought of a world-order that has acquired stability. Western research has
been at great pains, not only to set in order individual observations gathered
from all parts of the world, but to arrange them according to assumed gradations
that "lead up" from animism (or other beginnings, as you please) to the be-
liefs that it holds itself. Unfortunately, it is one particular religion that has
provided the values of the scheme, and Chinese or Greeks would have built
it quite differently. In reality no such gradation, leading a general human
evolution up to one goal, exists. Primitive man's chaotic world-around, born
of his discontinuous understanding of separate moments and yet full of impres-
sive meaning, is always something grown-up, self-complete, and closed off,
often with chasms and terrors of deep metaphysical premonition. Always
it contains a system, and it matters little whether this is partially abstracted
from the contemplation of the light-world or remains wholly within it. Such

1 Sec p. 33.

2L76 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

a world-picture docs not "progress"; nor is it a fixed sum of particulars from
which this one and that one ought to be (though usually they are) picked out
for comparison irrespective of time, land, and people. In reality they form a
world of organic religions, which, all over the world, possessed (and, where they
linger, still possess) proper and very significant modes of originating, growing,
expanding, and fading out, and a well-established specific character in point of
structure, style, tempo, and duration. The religions of the high Cultures are
not developed from these, but different. They lie clearer and more intellectual
in the light, they know what understanding love means, they have problems
and ideas, theories and techniques, of strict intellect, but the religious symbol-
ism of everyday light they know no more. The primitive religiousness pene-
trates everything; the later and individualized religions are self-contained
form-worlds of their own.

All the more enigmatic, therefore, are the "pre-" periods of the grand
Cultures, still primitive through and through, and yet more and more distinctly
anticipating and pointing in a definite direction. It is just these periods, of
some centuries' duration, that ought to have been accurately examined and com-
pared amongst themselves and for themselves. In what shape does the coming
phenomenon prepare itself? In the case of the Magian religions the threshold
period, as we have seen, produced the type of the Prophetic religion, which
led up to the Apocalyptic. How comes it that this particular form is more
deeply grounded in the essence of this particular Culture? Or why is it that the
Mycenasan prelude of the Classical is filled from one end to the other with
imaginings of beast-formed deities? 1 They are not the gods of the warriors
up in the megaron of the Mycenaean castle, where soul- and ancestor-worship
was practised with a high and noble piety evidenced still in the monuments,
but the gods of down below, the powers believed in in the peasant's hut. The
great menlike gods of the Apollinian religion, which must have arisen about
1 100 out of a mighty religious upheaval, bear traces of their dark past on all
sides. Hardly one of these figures is without some cognomen, attribute, or
telltale transformation-myth indicative of its origin. To Homer Hera is in-
variably the cow-eyed; Zeus appears as a bull, and the Poseidon of the Thelpusan

1 Was it that highly civilized Crete, the outpost of Egyptian modes of thought, afforded a
pattern (see p. 87)? But, after all, the numerous local and tribal gods of the primitive Thinite time
(before 3000), which represented the numina of particular beast-genera, were essentially different
in meaning. The more powerful the Egyptian deity of this preliminary period is, the more par-
ticular individual spirits (ka) and individual souls (bat) he possesses, and these hide and lurk in
the various animals Bastct in the cat, Scchmet in the lion, Hathor in the cow, Mut in the vul-
ture (hence the human-formed ka that figures behind the beast-head in the figures of the gods)
making of this earliest world-picture a very abortion of monstrous fear, filling it with powers which
rage against man even after his death and which only the greatest sacrifices avail to placate. The
union of the North and the South lands was represented by the common veneration of the Horus-
falcon, whose first ka resided in the Pharaoh of the time. Cf. Eduard Meyer, Gtsch. J. Alt., I, 182.,
et seq. [Sec also Morct and Davy : Des clans aux empires and Moret : Le Nil tt la civilisation eg
(available in English translations). Tr.]

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 177

legend as a horse. Apollo comes to be the name for countless primitive numina;
now he was wolf (Lycasus) like the Roman Mars, now dolphin (Delphinius),
and now serpent (the Pythian Apollo of Delphi). A serpent, too, is the form
of Zeus Meilichios on Attic grave-reliefs and of Asclepios, and of the Furies even
in ^Eschylus; * and the sacred snake kept on the Acropolis was interpreted as
Erichthonios. In Arcadia the horse-headed figure of Demeter in the temple of
Phigalia was still to be seen by Pausanias; the Arcadian Artemis-Callisto
appears as a she-bear, but in Athens too the priestesses of Artemis Brauronia
were called " arktoi" (bears). 2 Dionysus now a bull, now a stag and Pan
retained a certain beast-element to the end. Psyche (like the Egyptian corporal-
soul, bat) is the soul-bird. And upon all this supervened the innumerable semi-
animal figures like sirens and centaurs that completely fill up the Early Classical
nature-picture. 3

But what are the features, now, of the primitive religion of Merovingian
times that foreshadow the mighty uprising of the Gothic that was at hand?
That both are ostensibly the same religion, Christianity, proves nothing when
we consider the entire difference in their deeps. For (we must be quite clear in
our own mind on this) the primitive character of a religion does not lie in its
stock of doctrines and usages, but in the specific spirituality of the mankind
that adopts them and feels, speaks, and thinks with them. The student has to
familiarize himself with the fact that primitive Christianity (more exactly, the
early Christianity of the Western Church) has twice subsequently become the
expression-vehicle of a primitive piety, and therefore itself a primitive religion
namely, in the Celtic-Germanic West between 500 and 900, and in Russia up
to this day. Now, how did the world mirror itself to these "converted"
minds? Leaving out of account some few clerics of, say, Byzantine education,
what did one actually think and imagine about these ceremonies and dogmas.
Bishop Gregory of Tours, who, we must remember, represents the highest
intellectual outlook of his generation, once lauded the powder rubbed from a
saint's tombstone in these words: "O divine purgative, superior to all doctors'
recipes, which cleanses the belly like scammony and washes away all stains
from our conscience!" For him the death of Jesus was a crime which filled him
with indignation, but no more; the Resurrection, on the contrary, which
hovered before him vaguely, he felt deep down as an athletic four de force that
stamped the Messiah as the grand wizard and so legitimated him as the true
Saviour. Of any mystic meaning in the story of the Passion he has not an
inkling. 4

1 Eumcnides, 116.

2 Moreover, in the full maturity of Athens, every little girl of the upper classes was consecrated
as a bear to this Artemis. Tr.

3 For further information the reader may consult the articles "Demeter," etc., in the Ency.
Brit., XI ed.; and, for a suggestive introduction in the fewest possible words, Dr. Jane Harrison's
pamphlet, Myths of Greece and Rome. Tr.

4 Bernoulli, Die Heiligen der Merowinger (1900) a good account of this primitive religion.

z?8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

In Russia the conclusions of the "Synod of a Hundred Chapters," of 1551,
evidence a wholly primitive order of belief. Shaving of the beard and wrong
handling of the cross both figure here as deadly sins they were affronts to
the daemons. The "Synod of Antichrist," of 1667, led to the vast secession of
the Raskol movement, because thenceforward the sign of the cross was to be
made with three fingers instead of two, and the name "Jesus" was to be pro-
nounced "Yissus" instead of "Issus" -whereby, for the strict believer, the
power of this magic over the dxmons would be lost. 1 But this effect of fear is,
after all, not the only one nor even the most potent. Why is it that the Merovin-
gian period shows not the slightest trace of that glowing inwardness and
longing to sink into the metaphysical that suffuses the Magian seed-time of
Apocalyptic and the closely analogous period of the Holy Synod (1711-1917) in
Russia? What was it that from Peter the Great's time on led all those martyr-
sects of the Raskolniki to celibacy, poverty, pilgrimage, self-mutilation, and
asceticism in its most fearful forms, and in the seventeenth century had driven
thousands, in religious frenzy, to throw themselves en masse into the flames?
The doctrines of the Chlysti, with their "Russian Christs" (of whom seven
are counted so far); the Dukhobors with their Book of Life, which they use as
their Bible and hold to contain psalms of Jesus orally transmitted; the Skoptsi
with their ghastly mutilation-precepts manifestations, one and all, of some-
thing without which Tolstoi, Nihilism, and the political revolutions are in-
comprehensible 2 how is it that in comparison the Prankish period seems so
dull and shallow? Is it that only Aramaeans and Russians possess religious
genius and, if so, what have we to expect of the Russia that is to come, now
that (just in the decisive centuries) the obstacle of scholarly orthodoxy has
been destroyed?

Primitive religions have something homeless about them, like the clouds
and the wind. The mass-souls of the proto-peoples have accidentally and
fugitively condensed into one being, and accidental, therefore, is and remains
the "where" which is an "anywhere" of the linkages of waking-con-
sciousness arising from the fear and defensiveness that spread over them.
Whether they stay or move on, whether they alter or not, is immaterial so far
as concerns their inward significance.

From life of this order the high Cultures are separated by a deep soil-bound-
ness. Here there is a mother-landscape behind all expression-forms, and just
as the State, as temple and pyramid and cathedral, must fulfil their history there
where their idea originated, so too the great religion of every Springtime is

1 For an account of Russian sectarian movements sec A. P. Stanley, Hist, of tht Eastern Church;
for a summary, Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p. 886. Tr.

2 Kattenbusch, Lehrb. d. vgl. Konfessionsk., I (1891)1 PP- 1 34. ct sc q-J N- P. Milyukov, Skitf..
russ. Kulturg. (1901) II, pp. 104, ct scq.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL z 79

bound by all the roots of its being to the land over which its world-image has
risen. Sacral practices and dogmas may be carried far and wide, but their
inner evolution stays spellbound in the place of their birth. It is simply an
impossibility that the slightest trace of evolution of Classical city-cults should
be found in Gaul, or a dogmatic advance of Faustian Christianity in America.
Whatever disconnects itself from the land becomes rigid and hard.

It begins, in every case, like a great cry. The dull confusedness of terror and
defence suddenly passes into a pure awakening of inwardness that blossoms up,
wholly plantwise, from mother earth, and sees and comprehends the depth of
the light-world with one outlook. Wherever introspectiveness exists as a living
sense, this change is felt and welcomed as an inward rebirth. In this moment
never earlier, and never (at least with the same deep intensity) later it
traverses the chosen spirits of the time like a grand light, which dissolves all
fear in blissful love and lets the invisible appear, all suddenly, in a metaphysical
radiance.

Every Culture actualizes here its prime symbol. Each has its own sort
of love we may call it heavenly or metaphysical as we choose with
which it contemplates, comprehends, and takes into itself its godhead, and
which remains to every other Culture inaccessible or unmeaning. Whether the
world be something set under a domed light-cavern, as it was for Jesus and his
companions, or just a vanishingly small bit of a star-filled infinity, as Giordano
Bruno felt it; whether the Orphics take their bodily god into themselves, or
the spirit of Plotinus, soaring in ecstasy, fuses in henosis with the spirit of God,
or St. Bernard in his "mystic union" becomes one with the operation of infinite
deity the deep urge of the soul is governed always by the prime symbol of the
particular Culture and of no other.

In the Vth Dynasty of Egypt (1680-1540), which followed that of the great
pyramid-builders, the cult of the Horus-falcon, whose ka dwelt in the reigning
monarch, faded. The old local cults and even the profound Thot religion
of Hermopolis fell into the background. The sun-religion of Re appears.
Out from his palace westward every king erects a Re-sanctuary by his tomb-
temple, the latter a symbol of a life directional from birth to sarcophagus-
chamber, the former a symbol of grand and eternal nature. Time and Space,
being and waking-being, Destiny and sacred Causality are set face to face in
this mighty twin-creation as in no other architecture in the world. To both a
covered way leads up; that to the Re is accompanied by reliefs figuring the
power of the sun-god over the plant and animal worlds and the changings of
seasons. No god-image, no temple, but only an altar of alabaster adorns the
mighty terrace on which at day-break, high above the land, the Pharaoh ad-
vances out of the darkness to greet the great god who is rising up in the East. 1

1 Borchardt, TUcheiligtum des Newoserre, I (1905). The Pharaoh is no longer an incarnation of
godhead, and not yet, as the theology of the Middle Kingdom was to make him, the son of Re;
notwithstanding all earthly greatness, he is small, a servant, as he stands before the god.

z8o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

This youthful inwardness proceeds always out of a townless country-side,
out of villages, hovels, sanctuaries, solitary cloisters, and hermitages. Here is
formed the community of high awareness, of the spiritual elect, which in-
wardly is separated by a whole world from the great being-currents of the
heroic and the knightly. The two prime estates, priesthood and nobility -
contemplation in the cathedral and deeds before the castles, askesis and Minne,
ecstasy and high-bred custom begin their special histories from this point.
Though the Caliph was also worldly ruler of the faithful, though the Pharaoh
sacrificed in both holy places, though the German King built his family vault
under the cathedral, nothing gets rid of the abyssal opposition of Time and Space
that is reflected in the contrast of these two social orders. Religious history and
political history, the histories of truths and facts, stand opposed and irrecon-
cilable. Their opposition begins in cathedral and castle, it propagates itself in
the ever-growing towns as the opposition of wisdom and business, and in the
last stages of historical capacity it closes as a wrestle of intellect and power.

But both these movements take place on the heights of humanity. Peasant-
dom remains historyless under it all, comprehending politics as little as it
understands dogmatics. Out of the strong young religion of saintly groups,
scholasticism and mysticism develop in the early towns; reformation, philoso-
phy, and worldly learning in the increasing tumult of streets and squares;
enlightenment and irreligion in the stone masses of the late megalopolis. The
beliefs of the peasant outside remain "eternal" and always the same. The
Egyptian hind understood nothing of this Re. He heard the name, but while a
grand chapter of religious history was passing over his head in the cities, he
went on worshipping the old Thinite beast-gods, until with the XXVIth
Dynasty and its fellah-religion they regained supremacy. The Italian peasant
prayed in Augustus's time just as he had done long before Homer and as he does
to-day. Names and dogmas of big religions, blossoming and dying in turn,
have penetrated to him from the towns and have altered the sounds of his words
but the meaning remains ever the same. The French peasant lives still in the
Merovingian Age. Freya or Mary, Druids or Dominicans, Rome or Geneva
nothing touches the innermost kernel of his beliefs.

But even in the towns one stratum hangs back, historically, relatively to
another. Over the primitive religion of the country-side there is another
popular religion, that of the small people in the underground of the towns and
in the provinces. The higher a Culture rises Middle Kingdom, Brahman
period, Pre-Socratics, Pre-Confucians, Baroque the narrower becomes the
circle of those who possess the final truths of their time as reality and not as
mere name and sound. How many of those who lived with Socrates, Augustine,
and Pascal understood them? In religion as otherwise the human pyramid rises
with increasing sharpness, till at the end of the Culture it is complete there-
after, bit by bit, to crumble.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL z8i

About 3000 in Egypt and Babylon two great religions began their life-
courses. In Egypt the "reformation" period at the end of the Old Kingdom
saw solar monotheism firmly founded as the religion of priests and educated
persons. All other gods and goddesses whom the peasantry and the humble
people continued to worship in their fomer meaning are now only in-
carnations or servants of the one Re. Even the particular religion of Hermop-
olis, with its cosmology, was adapted to the grand system, and a theological
negotiation brought even the Ptah of Memphis into harmony with dogma
as an abstract prime-principle of creation. 1 Exactly as in the times of Justinian
and Charles V, the city-spirit asserted mastery over the soul of the land; the
formative power of the Springtime had come to an end; the dogma was es-
sentially complete, and its subsequent treatment by rational processes took
down more of the structure than it improved. Philosophy began. In respect
of dogma, the Middle Kingdom was as unimportant as the Baroque.

From 1500 three new religious histories begin first the Vedic in the
Punjab, then the Early Chinese in the Hwang-ho, and lastly the Classical on
the north of the ALgezn Sea. Distinctly as the Classical man's world-picture
and his prime symbol of the unit body is presented to us, it is difficult even to
guess the details of the great Early Classical religion. For this lacuna we have
to thank the Homeric poems, which hinder rather than help us in compre-
hending it. The new notion of godhead that was the special ideal of this Culture
is the human-formed body in the light, the hero as mediator between man and
god so much, at any rate, the Iliad evidences. This body might be light-
transfigured by Apollo or disjected to the winds by Dionysus, but in every case
it was the basic form of Being. The aw^o. as ideal of the extended, the cosmos
as sum of these unit bodies, "Being" and "the one" as the extended-in-itself
and "Logos" 2 as the order thereof in the light all this came up before the
eyes of priest-men, grandly visible and having the full force of a new religion.

But the Homeric poetry is purely aristocratic. Of the two worlds that of
the noble and that of the priest, that of Taboo and that of Totem, that of
heroism and that of sanctity only the one is here living. It not only does
not understand, but actually despises, the other. As in the Edda, so in Homer,
it is the greatest glory of an immortal to know the way and code of nobility.
The thinkers of the Classical Baroque, from Xenophanes to Plato, regarded
these scenes of god-life as impudent and trivial, and they were right; they felt
exactly as the theology and philosophy of the later West felt about the
Germanic hero-sagas and even about Gottfried of Strassburg, Wolfram, and
Walther. If the Homeric epics did not vanish as the hero-songs collected by
Charlemagne vanished, it was only because there was no fully formed Classical

1 Erman, "Em Denkmal mem-phitsickt Tkcologic," Ber. Btrl. Ak. (1911), pp. 916, et seq.

2 Not, of course, to be connected in any profound sense with that which emerged under the name
in the Magian Culture. Tr.

2.8z THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

priesthood, with the result that the Classical cities, when they arose, were
intellectually dominated by a knightly and not a religious literature. The
original doctrines of this religion, which out of opposition to Homer linked
themselves with the (probably) still older name of Orpheus, were never written
down.

All the same, they existed. Who knows what and how much is hidden be-
hind the figures of Calchas and Tiresias? A mighty upheaval there must have
been at the beginning of this Culture, as at that of others an upheaval extend-
ing from the /Egean Sea as far as Etruria but the Iliad shows as few signs of it
as the lays of the Nibelungs and of Roland show of the inwardness and mysticism
of Joachim of Floris, St. Francis, and the Crusades, or of the inner fire of that
Dies Ira of Thomas of Celano, which would probably have excited mirth at a
thirteenth-century court of love. Great personalities there must have been to
give a mystical-metaphysical form to the new world-outlook, but we know
nothing of them and it is only the gay, bright, easy side of it that passed into
the song of knightly halls. Was the "Trojan War " a feud, or was it also a
Crusade? What is the meaning of Helen? Even the Fall of Jerusalem has been
looked at from a worldly point of view as well as from a spiritual.

In the nobles' poetry of Homer, Dionysus and Demeter, as priests' gods, are
unhonoured. 1 But even in Hesiod, the herdsman of Ascra, the enthusiast-
searcher inspired by his folk-beliefs, the ideas of the great early time are not to
be found pure, any more than in Jakob Bohme the cobbler. 2 That is the second
difficulty. The great early religions, too, were the possession of a class, and neither
accessible to nor understandable by the generality; the mysticism of earliest
Gothic, too, was confined to small elect circles, sealed by Latin and the diffi-
culty of its concepts and figures, and neither nobility nor peasantry had any
distinct idea of its existence. And excavation, therefore, important as it is in
respect of the Classical country-faiths, can tell us as little about the Early
Classical religion as a village church can tell us about Abelard or Bonaven-
tura.

But /Eschylus and Pindar, at any rate, were under the spell of a great priestly
tradition, and before them there were the Pythagoreans, who made the Demeter-
cult their centre (thereby indicating where the kernel of that mythology is to
be sought), and earlier still were the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic
reformation of the seventh century; and, finally, there are the fragments of
Pherecydes and Epimenides, who were not the first but the last dogmatists of a
theology in reality ancient. The idea that impiety was a heritable sin, visited
upon the children and the children's children, was known to Hesiod and Solon,
as well as the doctrine (Apollinian also) of "Hybris." 3 Plato, however, as an

1 And because they were the gods of the eternal peasant, they outlived the Olympians.

2 Even though Hesiod is two centuries nearer to the source of his Culture than the German
mystic is to that of our own. See the article "Boehmc," Ency. Brit., XI cd. Tr.

9 Insolent prosperity tempting Nemesis. Tr.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 183

Orphic opponent of the Homeric conception of life, sets forth very ancient
doctrines of hell and the judgment of the dead in his Phado. We know the
tremendous formula of Orphism, the Nay of the mysteries that answered the
Yea of the agon, which arose, certainly by noo at latest, as a protest of Waking-
Consciousness against Being o-cDjua tr^a, that splendid Classical body a grave !
Here man is no longer feeling himself as a thing of breeding, strength, and
movement; he knows himself and is terrified by what he knows. Here begins
the Classical askesis, which by strictest rites and expiations, even by voluntary
suicide, seeks deliverance from this Euclidean body-being. It is an entirely
erroneous interpretation of the Pre-Socratics to suppose that it was from the
view-point of enlightenment that they spoke against Homer. It was as ascetics
that they did so. These "contemporaries" of Descartes and Leibniz were
brought up in the strict traditions of the old great Orphism, which were as
faithfully preserved in the almost claustral meditation-schools old and famous
holy places as Gothic Scholasticism was treasured in the wholly intellectual
universities of the Baroque. From the self-immolation of Empedocles the line
runs straight forward to the suicide of the Roman Stoic, and straight back to
"Orpheus."

Out of these last surviving traces, however, an outline of the Early Classical
religion emerges bright and distinct. Just as all Gothic inwardness directed
itself upon Mary, Queen of Heaven and Virgin and Mother, so in that moment
of the Classical World there arose a garland of myths, images, and figures
around Demeter, the bearing mother, around Gaia and Persephone, and also
Dionysus the begetter, chthonian * and phallic cults, festivals and mysteries of
birth and death. All this, too, was characteristically Classical, conceived under
the aspect of present corporeality. The Apollinian religion venerated body,
the Orphic rejected it, that of Demeter celebrated the moments of. fertilization
and birth, in which body acquired being. There was a mysticism that reverently
honoured the secret of life, in doctrine, symbol, and mime, but side by side with
it there was orgiasm too, for the squandering of the body is as deeply and
closely akin to asceticism as sacred prostitution is to celibacy both, all, are
negations of time. It is the reverse of the Apollinian "halt!" that checks on
the threshold of Hybris; detachment is not kept, but flung away. He who has
experienced these things in his soul has "from being a mortal become a god."
In those days there must have been great saints and seers who towered as far
above the figures of Heraclitus and Empedocles as the latter above the itinerant
teachers of Cynicism and Stoicism things of this order do not happen name-
lessly and impersonally. As the songs of Achilles and Odysseus were dying
down everywhere, a grand, strict doctrine arose at the famous old cult-places,
a mysticism and scholasticism with developed educational methods and a secret

1 The work of J. J. Bachofcn in this field has recently been assembled in concentrated form under
the title Mythus von Occident und Orient (1916). Tr.

z8 4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

oral tradition, as in India. But all that is buried, and the relics of the later
times barely suffice to prove that it once existed.

By putting the knightly poetry and folk-cults quite aside, then, we can
even now determine something more of this (the) Classical religion. But in doing
so there is a third pitfall to be avoided the opposing of Greek religion to
Roman religion. For in reality there was no such opposition.

Rome is only one of innumerable city-states that arose during the great
epoch of colonization. It was built by Etruscans. From the religious point
of view it was re-created under the Etruscan dynasty of the sixth century, and
it is possible indeed that the Capitoline group of deities, Jupiter, Juno, Mi-
nerva which at that time replaced the ancient trinity, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus,
of the ' ' Numa' ' religion was in some way connected with the family cult of the
Tarquins, in which case Minerva, as goddess of the city, is unmistakably a copy
of Athene Polias. 1 The cults of this single city are properly comparable only with
those of individual Greek-speaking cities of the same degree of maturity, say
Sparta or Thebes, which were in nowise more colourful. The little that in these
latter discloses itself as generally Hellenic will also prove to be generally
Italian. And as for the claim that the "Roman" religion is distinguished from
that of the Greek city-states by the absence of myth what is the basis of our
knowledge on the point? We should know nothing at all of the great god-sagas
of the Springtime if we had only the festival-calendar and the public cults of
the Greek city-states to go upon, just as we should learn nothing of Jesus's
piety from the proceedings of the Council of Ephesus or of that of St. Francis
from a church constitution of the Reformation. Menelaus and Helen were
for the Laconian state-cult tree-deities and nothing more. The Classical myth
derives from a period when the Poleis with their festivals and sacral constitu-
tions were not yet in existence, when there was not only no Rome, but no
Athens. With the religious duties and notions of the cities which were
eminently rational it has no connexion at all. Indeed, myth and cult are
even less in touch with one another in the Classical Culture than in others.
The myth, moreover, is in no way a creation of the Hellenic culture-field as a
whole it is not "Greek" but originated (like the stories of Jesus's child-
hood and the Grail legend) in this and that group, quite local, under pressure
of deep inward stirrings. For instance, the idea of Olympus arose in Thessaly
and thence, as a common property of all educated persons, spread out to Cyprus
and to Etruria, thus, of course, involving Rome. Etruscan painting presupposes
it as a thing of common knowledge, and therefore the Tarquins and their

1 Wissowa, 'Religion undKultus der Homer, p. 41. What has been said above (p. 191) concerning
the Talmudic religion applies also to the Etruscan religion by which all Italy i.e., no less than
half of the Classical field was so deeply influenced. It lies outside the province of both the con-
ventional "Classical" philologies and in consequence has been practically ignored, as compared
with the Achzan and Doric religions. In reality (as its tombs, temples, and myths prove), it forms
with them a single unit of spirit and evolution.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 185

court must have been familiar with it. We may attach any implications we
please to "belief" (whatever that may mean) in this myth; the point is that
they will be as valid for Romans of the period of the Kings as for the inhabitants
of Tegea or Corcyra.

That the pictures of Greek and Roman mythology that modern research has
developed are quite different from this is the result not of the facts, but of the
methods. In the case of Rome (Mommsen) the festal calendar and the State
cults, in that of Greece the poetic literature, were taken as the starting-points.
Apply the "Latin" method which has led up to Wissowa's picture to the Greek
cities, and the result is a wholly similar picture, as, for example, in Nilsson's
Griechische Festen.

When this is taken into consideration, the Classical religion is seen to be a
whole possessing an inner unity. The grand god-legends of the eleventh cen-
tury, which have the dew of Spring upon them, and in their tragic holiness
remind us of Gethsemane, Balder's death, and Francis, are the purest essence of
" theoria," contemplation, a world-picture before the inner eye, and born of the
common inward awakening of a group of chosen souls from the world of
chivalry. 1 But the much later city-religions are wholly technique, formal wor-
ship, and as such represent only one side (and a different side) of piety. They
are as far from the great myth as they are from the folk-belief. They are con-
cerned neither with metaphysic nor with ethic, but only with the fulfilment of
sacral acts. And, finally, the choice of cults by the several cities very often
originated, not, like the myth, from a single world-view, but from the accidental
ancestor- and family-cults of great houses, which (precisely as in the Gothic)
made their sacred figures the tutelary deities of the city and at the same time
reserved to themselves the rights of celebrating and worshipping them. In
Rome, for example, the Lupercalia in honour of the field-god Faunus were a
privilege of the Quinctii and Fabii.

The Chinese religion, of which the great "Gothic" period lies between
1300 and 1 100 and covers the rise of the Chou dynasty, must be treated with
extreme care. In presence of the superficial profundity and pedantic enthusiasm
of Chinese thinkers of the Confucius and Lao-tse type who were all born
in the ancien regime period of their state-world it seems very hazardous to
try to determine anything at all as to high mysticism and grand legends in the
beginning. Nevertheless, such a mysticism and such legends must once have
existed. But it is not from these over-rationalized philosophies of the great
cities that we shall learn anything about them as little as Homer can give
us in the Classical parallel, though for another reason. What should we know

1 It is immaterial whether or not Dionysus was "borrowed" from Thrace, Apollo from Asia
Minor, Aphrodite from Phoenicia. It is the fact that out of the thousands of alien motives these
particular few were chosen and combined in so splendid a unity that implies the fundamental newness
of the creation just as does the Mary-cult of the Gothic, although in that case the whole form-
material was taken over from the East.

2.86 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

about Gothic piety if all its works had undergone the censorship of Puritans
and Retioralists like Locke, Rousseau, and Wolff! And yet we treat the Con-
fucian close of Chinese inwardness as its beginning if, indeed, we do not
go farther and describe the syncretism of Han times as " the" religion of China. 1
We know nowadays that, contrary to the usual assumption, there was
a powerful old-Chinese priesthood. 2 We know that in the text of the Shu-
King, relics of the ancient hero-sagas and god-myths were worked over
rationalistically, and were thus able to survive, and similarly the Hou-li,
Ngi-li, and Shi-King 3 would still reveal a good deal more if only they were
attacked with the conviction that there was in them something far deeper
than Confucius and his like were capable of comprehending. We hear of
chthonian and phallic cults in early Chou times; of orgiastic rites in which
the service of the gods was accompanied by ecstatic mass-dances; of mimic
representations and dialogues between god and priestess, out of which probably
(as in Greece) the Chinese drama evolved. 4 And we obtain an inkling finally
of why the luxuriant growth of early Chinese god-figures and myths was neces-
sarily swallowed up in an emperor-mythology. For not only all saga-emperors,
but also most of the figures of the Hia and Shang dynasties before 1400 are
all dates and chronicles notwithstanding nothing but nature transformed
into history. The origins of such a process lie deep in the possibilities of every
young Culture. 5 Ancestor-worship ever seeks to gain power over the nature-
dasmons. All Homeric heroes, and Minos and Theseus and Romulus, are gods
become kings. In the Heliandf Christ is about to become so. Mary is the
crowned Queen of Heaven. It is the supreme (and perfectly unconscious)
mode which enables men of breeding to venerate something that is, for
them, what is great must have breeding, race, must be mighty and lordly, the
ancestor of whole families. A strong priesthood is able to make short work of
this mythology of Time, but it won through partially in the Classical and
completely in China exactly in proportion to the disappearance of the
priestly element. The old gods are now emperors, princes, ministers, and
retainers; natural events have become acts of rulers, and onsets of peoples
social enterprises. Nothing could have suited the Confucians better. Here
was a myth which could absorb social-ethical tendencies to an indefinite ex-

1 As in DC Groot's Universismus (1918), where, in fact, the systems of Taoists, Confucians, and
Buddhists arc handled without a qualm as the religions of China. This amounts to the same as
saying that the Classical religion dates from Caracalla.

2 Conrady, in Wassiljew, Die Erschliessung Chinas (1909), p. 2.31; B. Schindler, Das Priestertum
im alten China, I (1919).

* The Shu-King or Canon of History is a collection of ancient annals, the Shi-King a canonical
anthology of rhymed tales made by Confucius. Tr.

Conrady, China, p. 5 16.

& Of which an outstanding example is the Edda. Tr.

8 See article " Hcliand " in Ency. Brit., XI edit., and works there referred to. A handy edition
of the text is included in the " Rcclam " scries. Tr.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL z8 7

tent, and all that was necessary was to expunge the traces of the original nature-
myth.

To the Chinese waking-consciousness heaven and earth were halves of the
macrocosm, without opposition, each a mirror-image of the other. In this
picture there was neither Magian dualism nor Faustian unity of active force.
Becoming appears in the unconstrained reciprocal working of two principles,
the yang and the yin, which were conceived rather as periodic than as polar.
Accordingly, there are two souls in man, the kwei which corresponded with the
yin, the earthly, the dark, the cold, and disintegrated with the body; and
the sen, which is higher, light, and permanent. 1 But, further, there are in-
numerable multitudes of souls of both kinds outside man. Troops of spirits
fill the air and the water and the earth all is peopled and moved by kweis and
sens. The life of nature and that of man are in reality made out of the play of
such units. Wisdom, will, force, and virtue depend on their relationship.
Asceticism and orgiasm; the knightly custom of hiao, which requires the noble
to revenge an impiety towards an ancestor even after centuries, and commands
him never to survive defeat; 2 and the reasoning moral of the yen, which,
according to the judgment of rationalism, followed from knowledge all
proceed from conceptions of the forces and possibilities of the kwei and the sen.

All this is concentrated in the basic word " tao." The conflict between the
yang and the yin in man is the tao of his life; the warp and woof of the spirit-
swarms outside him are the tao of Nature. The world possesses tao inasmuch as
it possesses beat, rhythm, and periodicity. It possesses li, tension, inasmuch as
man knows it and abstracts from it fixed relationships for future use. Time,
Destiny, Direction, Race, History all this, contemplated with the great
world-embracing vision of the early Chou times, lies in this one word. The
path of the Pharaoh through the dark alley to his shrine is related to it, and so
is the Faustian passion of the third dimension, but tao is nevertheless far re-
moved from any idea of the technical conquest of Nature. The Chinese park
avoids energetic perspective. It lays horizon behind horizon and, instead of
pointing to a goal, tempts to wander. The Chinese "cathedral" of the early
time, the Pi-Yung, with its paths that lead through gates and thickets, stairs
and bridges and courts, has never the inexorable march of Egypt or the drive
into depth of the Gothic.

When Alexander appeared on the Indus, the piety of these three Cultures
Chinese, Indian, Classical had long been moulded into the historyless forms
of a broad Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. But it was not long before the
group of Magian religions arose in the region intermediate between the Classical
and the Indian field, and it must have been at about the same time that the

1 This idea differs essentially from that of the Egyptian duality of the spiritual ka and the
soul-bird bat, and still more so from the Magian duality of soul-substances.

2 O. Franke, Studitn fur d. Gtscb. der Konfu^tanischen Dogmas (192.0), p. zoi.

i88 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

religious history of the Maya and Inca, now hopelessly lost to us, began.
A thousand years later, when here also all was inwardly fulfilled and done with,
there appeared on the unpromising soil of France, sudden and swiftly mount-
ing, Germanic-Catholic Christianity. It was in this case as in every other;
whether the whole stock of names and practices came from the East, or whether
thousands of particular details were derived from primeval Germanic and Celtic
feelings, the Gothic religion is something so new and unheard-of, something
of which the final depths are so completely incomprehensible by anyone outside
its faith, that to contrive linkages for them on the historical surface is mean-
ingless jugglery.

The mythic world that thereupon formed itself around this young soul, an
integer of force, will, and direction seen under the symbol of Infinity, a stupen-
dous action-into-distance, chasms of terror and of bliss suddenly opening up
it was all, for the elect of this early religiousness, something so entirely natural
that they could not even detach themselves sufficiently to "know" it as a unit.
They lived in it. To us, on the contrary, who are separated from these ancestors
by thirty generations, this world seems so alien and overpowering that we al-
ways seek to grasp it in detail, and so misunderstand its wholeness and undivid-
edness.

The father-godhead men felt as Force itself, eternal, grand, and ever-present
activity, sacred causality, which could scarcely assume any form comprehensible
by human eyes. But the whole longing of the young breed, the whole desire
of this strongly coursing blood, to bow itself in humility before the meaning of
the blood found its expression in the figure of the Virgin and Mother Mary, whose
crowning in the heavens was one of the earliest motives of the Gothic art.
She is a light-figure, in white, blue, and gold, surrounded by the heavenly hosts.
She leans over the new-born Child; she fells the sword in her heart; she stands
at the foot of the cross; she holds the corpse of the dead Son. From the turn
of the tenth century on, Petrus Damiani and Bernard of Clairvaux developed
her cult; there arose the Ave Maria and the angelic greeting and later, among the
Dominicans, the crown of roses. Countless legends gathered round her figure. 1
She is the guardian of the Church's store of Grace, the Great Intercessor.
Among the Franciscans arose the festival of the Visitation, amongst the English
Benedictines (even before noo) that of the Immaculate Conception, which
elevated her completely above mortal humanity into the world of light.

But this world of purity, light, and utter beauty of soul would have been
unimaginable without the counter-idea, inseparable from it, an idea that
constitutes one of the maxima of Gothic, one of its unfathomable creations
one that the present day forgets, and deliberately forgets. While she there sits
enthroned, smiling in her beauty and tenderness, there lies in the background
another world that throughout nature and throughout mankind weaves and
1 Reference may again be made to Yrjo Him, The Sacred Shrine. Tr.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 189

breeds ill, pierces, destroys, seduces namely, the realm of the Devil. It
penetrates the whole of Creation, it lies ambushed everywhere. All around is an
army of goblins, night-spirits, witches, werewolves, all in human shape.
No man knows whether or not his neighbour has signed himself away to the
Evil One. No one can say of an unfolding child that it is not already a devil's
temptress. An appalling fear, such as is perhaps only paralleled in the early
spring of Egypt, weighs upon man. Every moment he may stumble into the
abyss. There were black magic, and devils' masses and witches' sabbaths,
night feasts on mountain-tops, magic draughts and charm-formulae. The
Prince of Hell, with his relatives mother and grandmother, for as his very
existence denies and scorns the sacrament of marriage, he may not have wife or
child his fallen angels and his uncanny henchmen, is one of the most
tremendous creations in all religious history. The Germanic Loki is hardly
more than a preliminary hint of him. Their grotesque figures, with horns,
claws, and horses' hoofs, were already fully formed in the mystery plays of
the eleventh century; everywhere the artist's fancy abounded in them, and,
right up to Diirer and Griinewald, Gothic painting is unthinkable without
them. The Devil is sly, malignant, malicious, but yet in the end the powers
of light dupe him. He and his brood, bad-tempered, coarse, fiendishly inventive,
are of a monstrous imaginativeness, incarnations of hellish laughter opposed
to the illumined smile of the Queen of Heaven, but incarnations, too, of Faustian
world-humour 1 opposed to the panic of the sinner's contrition.

It is not possible to exaggerate either the grandeur of this forceful, insistent
picture or the depth of sincerity with which it was believed in. The Mary-
myths and the Devil-myth formed themselves side by side, neither possible
without the other. Disbelief in either of them was deadly sin. There was a
Mary-cult of prayer, and a Devil-cult of spells and exorcisms. Man walked
continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit. Life in this world is a
ceaseless and desperate contest with the Devil, into which every individual
plunges as a member of the Church Militant, to do battle for himself and to
win his knight's spurs. The Church Triumphant of angels and saints in their
glory looks down from on high, and heavenly Grace is the warrior's shield in
the battle. Mary is the protectress to whose bosom he can fly to be comforted,
and the high lady who awards the prizes of valour. Both worlds have their
legends, their art, their scholasticism, and their mysticism for the Devil,
too, can work miracles. Characteristic of this alone among the religious
Springtimes is the symbolism of colour to the Madonna belong white and blue,
to the Devil black, sulphur-yellow, and red. The saints and angels float in the
arther, but the devils leap and crouch and the witches rustic through the night.
It is the two together, light and night, which fill Gothic art with its indescrib-

1 Consider, for example, the fantastic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Breughel's similar
humour, too, is unthinkable without the tradition of a rank-and-file of evil creatures. TV.

190 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

able inwardness that, and not any "artistic" fancifulness. Every man
knew the world to be peopled with angel and devil troops. The light-encircled
angels of Fra Angelico and the early Rhenish masters, and the grimacing things
on the portals of the great cathedrals, really filled the air. Men saw them, felt
their presence everywhere. To-day we simply no longer know what a myth is;
for it is no mere aesthetically pleasing mode of representing something to oneself,
but a piece of the most lively actuality that mines every corner of the waking-
consciousness and shakes the innermost structure of being. These creatures were
about one all the time. They were glimpsed without being seen. They were
believed in with a faith that felt the very thought of proof as a desecration.
What we call myth nowadays, our litterateur's and connoisseur's taste for
Gothic colour, is nothing but Alexandrinism. In the old days men did not
"enjoy" it behind it stood Death. 1

For the Devil gained possession of human souls and seduced them into
heresy, lechery, and black arts. It was war that was waged against him on
earth, 2 and waged with fire and sword upon those who had given themselves
up to him. It is easy enough for us to-day to think ourselves out of such notions,
but if we eliminate this appalling reality from Gothic, all that remains is mere
romanticism. It was not only the love-glowing hymns to Mary, but the cries
of countless pyres as well that rose up to heaven. Hard by the Cathedral were
the gallows and the wheel. Every man lived in those days in the consciousness
of an immense danger, and it was hell, not the hangman, that he feared. Un-
numbered thousands of witches genuinely imagined themselves to be so; they
denounced themselves, prayed for absolution, and in pure love of truth confessed
their night rides and bargains with the Evil One. Inquisitors, in tears and com-
passion for the fallen wretches, doomed them to the rack in order to save their
souls. That is the Gothic myth, out of which came the cathedral, the crusader,
the deep and spiritual painting, the mysticism. In its shadow flowered that
profound Gothic blissfulness of which to-day we cannot even form an idea.

In Carolingian times, all this was still strange and far. Charlemagne in the
first Saxon Capitulary (787) put a ban on the ancient Germanic belief in were-
wolves and night-gangers (striga), and as late as 112.0 it was condemned as an
error in the decree of Burkard of Worms. But twenty years later it was only in
a dilute form that the anathema reappeared in the Decretum Gratiani. Csesarius
of Heisterbach, already, was familiar with the whole devil-legend and in the
Legenda Aurea it is just as actual and as effective as the Mary-legends. In 12.33,
when the Cathedrals of Mainz and Speyer were being vaulted, appeared the bull
Vox in Rama, by which the belief in Devil and witch was made canonical.

1 So also in the Classical, the Homeric figures were for educated people of Hellenistic times
nothing but literature, representation, artistic motive. Even for Plato's period they were little
more than this. But in noo B.C., Dcmcter and Dionysus were a fearful actuality before which men
collapsed.

1 The stern object of Roger Bacon's science; see p. 501, foot-note. Tr.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL z 9 i

St. Francis's " Hymn to the Sun" had not long been written, and the Franciscans
were kneeling in intimate prayer before Mary and spreading her cult afar, when
the Dominicans armed themselves for battle with the Devil by setting up the
Inquisition. Heavenly love found its focus in the Mary-image, and eo ipso
earthly love became akin to the Devil. Woman is Sin so the great ascetics
felt, as their fellows of the Classical, of China, and of India had felt. The
Devil rules only through woman. The witch is the propagator of deadly sin.
It was Thomas Aquinas who evolved the repulsive theory of Incubus and
Succuba. Inward mystics like Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, Duns Scotus,
developed a full metaphysic of the devilish.

The Renaissance had ever the strong faith of the Gothic at the back of its
world-outlook. When Vasari eulogized Cimabue and Giotto for returning to
Nature as their teacher, it was this Gothic nature that he had in mind, a nature
influenced in every nook by the encircling troops of angels and devils that stood
there, ever threatening, in the light. "Imitation" of Nature meant imitation
of its soul, not of its surface. Let us be rid at last of the fable of a renewal of
Classical "Antiquity." Renaissance, Rinascita, meant then the Gothic uplift
from A.D. 1000 onward, 1 the new Faustian world-feeling, the new personal ex-
perience of the Ego in the Infinite. For some individual spirits, no doubt, it
meant a sentimental enthusiasm for the Classical (or what was thought to be
the Classical), but that was a manifestation of taste, nothing more. 2 The
Classical myth was entertainment-material, an allegorical play, through the
thin veil of which men saw, no less definitely than before, the old Gothic
actuality. When Savonarola stood up, the antique trappings vanishedTrom the
surface of Florentine life in an instant. It was all for the church that the Floren-
tines laboured, and with conviction. Raphael was the most deeply intimate
of all Madonna-painters. A firm belief in the realm of Satan, and in deliverance
from it through the saints, lay at the root of all this art and literature; and
every one of them, painters, architects, and humanists however often the
names of Cicero and Virgil, Venus and Apollo were on their lips looked
upon the burning of witches as something entirely natural and wore amulets
against the devil. The writings of Marsilius Ficinus are full of learned dis-
quisitions on devils and witches. Francesco della Mirandola wrote (in elegant
Latin) his dialogue " The Witch" in order to warn the fine intellects of his circle
against a danger. 3 When Leonardo da Vinci, at the summit of the Renaissance,

. l This is the real conclusion that emerges from Burdach's Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus
(1918).

2 In this connexion, it is important to observe that the education-movement of Humanism took
into its field modern Italian, Hebrew, etc., as well as the Classical knowledge. A Dante professor-
ship was founded in Florence in 1373. As for the Classical itself, side by side with all the enthusiasm
we find a significant note in Boccaccio, who thanks Jesus Christ for a victory over unbelief that has
delivered up the enemy's camp to the victor's enjoyment. Burkhardt, Renaissance, Vol. I, p. 2.62.
(Reclam edition). Tr.

3 Bczold, Hist. Zeitschr., 45, p. 2x58.

Z9Z THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

was working upon his "Anna Selbdritt," 1 the "Witches' Hammer" was
being written in Rome (1487) in the finest Humanistic Latin. It was these that
constitute the real myth of the Renaissance, and without them we shall never
understand the glorious and truly Gothic force of this anti-Gothic movement. 2
Men who did not feel the Devil very near at hand could not have created the
Divina Commedia or the frescoes of Orvieto 3 or the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel.

It was the tremendous background of this myth that awakened in the
Faustian soul a feeling of what it was. An Ego lost in Infinity, an Ego that was
all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity of greater forces; 4 that was
all will, but a will full of fear for its freedom. Never has the problem of Free-
will been meditated upon more deeply or more painfully. Other Cultures have
simply not known it. But precisely because here Magian resignation was totally
impossible because that which thought was not an "it" or particle of an all-
soul, but an individual, fighting Ego, seeking to maintain itself every limi-
tation upon freedom was felt as a chain that had to be dragged along through
life, and life in turn was felt as a living death. And if so why? For what?

The result of this in-looking was that immense sense of guilt which runs
throughout these centuries like one long, desperate lament. The cathedrals rose
evermore supplicatingly to heaven, the Gothic vaulting became a joining of
hands in prayer, and little comfort of light shone through the high windows
into the night of the long naves. The choking parallel-sequences of the church
chants, the Latin hymns, tell of bruised knees and flagellations in the nocturnal
cell. For Magian man the world-cavern had been close and the heaven impend-
ing, but for Gothic man heaven was infinitely far. No hand seemed to reach
down from these spaces, and all about the lone Ego the mocking Devil's world
lay in leaguer. And, therefore, the great longing of Mysticism was to lose
created form (as Heinrich Seuse said), to be rid of self and all things (Meister
Eckart), to abandon selfness (Tbeologie deutsck). 5 And out of these longings there
grew up an unending dogged subtilizing on notions which were ever more
and more finely dissected to get at the "why," and finally a universal cry for
Grace not the Magian Grace coming down as substance, but the Faustian
Grace that unbinds the Will.

To be able to will freely is, at the very bottom, the one gift that the Faustian
soul asks of heaven. The seven sacraments of the Gothic, felt as one by Peter
Lombard, elevated into dogma by the Lateran Council of 12.15, and grounded

1 Italian, "Anna Mcttcrza." The reference is to the St. Anne of the Louvre and the Royal
Academy Diploma Gallery, London. Tr.
9 Cf. Vol. I, p. 131. Tr.

3 Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli. Tr.

4 The sense of such a relativity led to a mathematic (the calculus) which is literally based on
the ignoring of second- and third-order magnitudes. Tr.

6 Sec article "Mysticism" in Ency. Brit., XI cd. Tr.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL z 93

in mystical foundations by Thomas Aquinas, mean this and only this. They
accompany the unit soul from birth to death and protect it against the diabolical
powers that seek to nest themselves in its will. For to sell oneself to the Devil
means to deliver up one's will to him. The Church Militant on earth is the
visible community of those who are enabled, by enjoyment of the sacraments,
to will. This certainty of free being is held to be guaranteed in the altar-sacra-
ment, which accordingly suffers a complete change of meaning. The miracle of
the holy tranformation which takes place daily under the hands of the priest
the consecrated Host in the high altar of the cathedral, wherein the be-
liever sensed the presence of him who of old sacrificed himself to secure for
his own the freedom to will called forth a sigh of relief of such depth and
sincerity as we moderns can hardly imagine. It was in thanksgiving, there-
fore, that the chief feast of the Catholic Church, Corpus Christi, was founded in
1164. !

But more important still and by far was the essentially Faustian prime-
sacrament of Contrition. This ranks with the Mary-myth and the Devil-myth
as the third great creation of the Gothic. And, indeed, it is from this third
that the other two derive depth and meaning; it discloses the last secrets of
this Culture's soul, and so sets it apart from all other Cultures. The effect of the
Magian baptism was to incorporate a man in the great consensus the one great
" it" of the divine spirit took up its abode in him as in the others, and thereafter
resignation to all that should happen became his duty. But in the Faustian
contrition the idea of -personality was implicit. It is not true that the Renaissance
discovered personality 2 ; what it did was to bring personality up to a brilliant
surface, whereby it suddenly became visible to everyone. Its birth is in Gothic;
it is the most intimate and peculiar property of Gothic; it is one and the same
with Gothic soul. For this contrition is something that each one accomplishes
for himself alone. He alone can search his own conscience. He alone stands
rueful in the presence of the Infinite. He alone can and must in confession un-
derstand and put into words his own past. And even the absolution that frees
his Ego for new responsible action is personal to himself. Baptism is wholly
impersonal one receives it because one is a man, not because one is this man
but the idea of contrition presupposes that the value of every act depends
uniquely upon the man who does it. This is what differentiates the Western
drama from the Classical, the Chinese, and the Indian. This is what directs
our legislation more and more with reference to the doer rather than to the deed,

1 After its confirmation in 1311, the character of this festival as one of popular joy became still
more marked by its association with the nascent drama (see Ency. Brit., XI ed., articles "Corpus
Christi," "Drama"; and Y. Him, op. cit., pp. 144-5. Tr.

2 Or even rediscovered it. For Classical man as a spirit-filled body is one amongst many quite
independent units, while Faustian man is a centre in the universe, which with its soul embraces the
whole. But personality (individuality) means, not something separate (einzelnes), but something
single

Z94 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

and bases our primary ethical conceptions on individual doing and not typical
behaviour. Faustian responsiblity instead of Magian resignedness, the in-
dividual instead of the consensus; relief from, instead of submissiveness under,
burdens that is the difference between the most active and the most passive
of all sacraments, and at the back of it again lies the difference between the
world-cavern and infinity-dynamics. Baptism is something done upon one,
Contrition something done by oneself within oneself. And, moreover, this
conscientious searching of one's own past is both the earliest evidence of, and
the finest training for, the historical sense of Faustian mankind. There is no other
Culture in which the personal life of the living man, the conscientious tracing
of each feature, has been so important, for this alone has required the accounts
to be rendered in words. If historical research and biography are characteristic
of the spirit of the West from its beginnings; if both in the last resort are
self-examination and confession; if our lives are led with an assuredness and
conscious reference to the historic background that nowhere else has been
even imagined as possible or tolerable; if, lastly, we habitually look at
history in terms of millennia, not rhapsodically or decoratively as in the
Classical World and in China, but directionally and with the almost sacra-
mental formula "Tout comprendre, cest tout pardonner" ever in our minds we
have this sacrament of the Gothic Church, this continual unburdening of
the Ego by historical test and justification to thank for it. Every confession
is an autobiography. This peculiar liberation of the will is to us so neces-
sary that the refusal of absolution drives to despair, even to destruction.
Only he who senses the bliss of such an inward acquittal can comprehend the
old name of the sacramentum resurgentium, the sacrament of those who are risen
again. 1

When in this heaviest of decisions the soul is left to its own resources,
something unresolved remains hanging over it like a perpetual cloud. It may
be said, therefore, that perhaps no institution in any religion has brought so
much happiness into the world as this. The whole inwardness and heavenly
love of the Gothic rests upon the certainty of full absolution through the power
invested in the priest. In the insecurity that ensued from the decline of this
sacrament, both Gothic joy of life and the Mary-world of the light faded out.
Only the Devil's world, with its grim all-presentness, remained. And then,
in place of the blissfulness irrecoverably lost, came the Protestant, and especially

1 Hence it is that this sacrament has conferred a position of such immense power upon the West-
ern priest. He receives the personal confession, and speaks personally, in the name of the Infinite,
the absolution, without which life would be unbearable.

The notion of confession as a duty, which was finally established in 12.15, ^ st arose in England,
whence came also the first confession-books (Pcnitcntials). In England, too, originated, the idea
of the Immaculate Conception, and even the idea of the Papacy at a time when Rome itself thought
of it as a question of power and precedence. It is evidence of the independence of Faustian Chris-
tianity from Magian that its decisive ideas grew up in those remote parts of its field which lay
beyond the Prankish Empire.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 2.95

Puritan, heroism, which could fight on, even hopeless, in a lost position.
"Auricular confession," said Goethe once, "ought never to have been taken
from mankind." Over the lands in which it had died out, a heavy earnestness
spread itself. Ethic and costume, art and thought, took on the night-colour
of the only myth that remained outstanding. Nothing is less sunlit than the
doctrines of Kant. "Every man his own priest" is a conviction to which men
could win through, but only as to that part of priesthood that involves duties,
not as to that which possesses -powers. No man confesses himself with the inward
certainty of absolution. And as the need of the soul to be relieved of its past
and to be redirected remained urgent as ever, all the higher forms of com-
munication were transmuted, and in Protestant countries music and painting,
letter-writing and memoirs, from being modes of description became modes of
self-denunciation, penance, and unbounded confession. Even in Catholic regions
too in Paris above all art as psychology set in as doubt in the sacrament
of Contrition and Absolution grew. Outlook on the world was lost in ceaseless
mine-warfare within the self. In lieu of the Infinite, contemporaries and de-
scendants were called in to be priests and judges. Personal art, in the sense that
distinguishes Goethe from Dante, and Rembrandt from Michelangelo, was a
substitute for the sacrament of confession. It was, also, the sign that this
Culture was already in the condition of a Late period. 1

In all Cultures, Reformation has the same meaning the bringing back of
the religion to the purity of its original idea as this manifested itself in the great

1 The immeasurable difference between the Faustian and the Russian souls is disclosed in certain
word-sounds. The Russian word for heaven is " nyebo," which contains in its a negative element.
Western man looks up, the Russian looks horizontally into the broad plain. The death-impulse,
too, of the respective souls is distinguishable, in that for the West it is the passion of drive all-ways
into infinite space, whereas for Russians it is an expressing and expanding of self (Sickentaussern),
till "it" in the man becomes identical with the boundless plain itself. It is thus that a Russian
understands the words "man" and "brother." He sees even mankind as a plane. The idea of a
Russian's being an astronomer! He does not see the stars at all, he sees only the horizon. Instead
of the vault he sees the down-hang of the heavens something that somewhere combines with
the plain to form the horizon. For him the Copernican system, be it never so mathematical, is
spiritually contemptible.

While our German " Schicksal" rings like a trumpet call, " Sud'ba" is a genuflection. There is
no room for the upstanding "I" beneath this almost flat-roofed heaven. That "All are responsible for
all" the "it" for the "it" in this boundlessly extended plain is the metaphysical fundament
of all Dostoyevski's creation. That is why Ivan Karamasov must name himself murderer although
another had done the murder. The criminal is the "unfortunate," the "wretch" it is the utter
negation of Faustian personal responsibility. Russian mysticism has nothing of that upstriving
inwardness of Gothic, of Rembrandt, of Beethoven, which can swell up to a heaven-storming jubi-
lation its god is not the azure depth up above. Mystical Russian love is love of the plain, the
love of brothers under equal pressure all along the earth, ever along and along; the love of the
poor tortured beasts that wander on it, the love of plants never of birds and clouds and stars.
The Russian " volya," our "will," means principally non-compulsion, freedom not for something
but from something, and particularly freedom from compulsion to personal doing. Free-will is

196 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

centuries of the beginning. In no Culture is this movement missing, whether
we know about it, as in the case of Egypt, or not, as in that of China. It means,
further, that the city and with it the city-spirit are gradually freeing them-
selves from the soul of the country-side, setting up in opposition to the latter's
all-power and reconsidering the feelings and thoughts of the primitive pre-urban
time with reference to its present self. It was Destiny and not intellectual
necessities of thought that led, in the Magian and Faustian worlds, to the
budding-off of new religions at this point. We know to-day that, under
Charles V, Luther was within an ace of becoming the reformer of the whole
undivided Church.

For Luther, like all reformers in all Cultures, was not the first, but the last
of a grand succession which led from the great ascetics of the open land to the
city-priest. Reformation is Gothic, the accomplishment and the testament
thereof. Luther's chorale "Bin feste Burg" does not belong to the spiritual
lyrism of the Baroque. There rumbles in it still the splendid Latin of the Dies
ira. It is the Church Militant's last mighty Satan-song. 1 Luther, like every
reformer that had arisen since the year 1000, fought the Church not because it
demanded too much, but because it demanded too little. The great stream
flows on from Cluny: through Arnold of Brescia, who preached return to
Apostolic simplicity and was burned in 1155; through Joachim of Floris, who
was the first to use the world "reformare;" the spirituals of the Franciscan
Order; Jacopone da Todi, revolutionary and singer of the Stabat Mater, the
knight whom the death of a young wife turned into an ascetic and who tried
to overthrow Boniface VIII for governing the Church too slackly; through
Wyclif and Hus and Savonarola; to Luther, Karlstadt, Zwingli, Calvin, and
Loyola. The intention of these men, one and all, was not to overcome the
Christianity of the Gothic, but to bring it to inward fulfilment. So also with
Marcion, Athanasius, the Monophysites, and the Nestorians, who sought in
the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon to purify the faith and lead it back to
its origins. 2 But so also the Orphics of the Classical seventh century were the
last and not the first of a series that must have begun even before 1000 B.C. So
with the establishment of the Re religion in Egypt at the close of the Old
Kingdom, the Egyptian Gothic. It is an ending, not a new beginning, that these

seen as a condition in which no one else can command "it," and in which, therefore, one may give
way to one's own disposition. "Geist," "esprit," "spirit," go thus: *; the Russian " ducb" goes
thus: \_>. What sort of a Christianity will come forth one day from this world-feeling?
1 "Und wenn die Welt voll Teujtl war

Und wollten uns verscklingen
So furchten wir uns nimmermthr

Es soil uns doch gelingen."

* And, as the secession of a reformed Church necessarily transforms the parent Church, there
was a Magian counter-reformation also. In the Decretum Gelasii (c. 500, Rome) even Clement of Alex-
andria, Tcrtullian, and Lactantius, and in the Syno<} of Byzantium (543) Origen, were declared
heretical.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 197

signify. Just so, again, a reform-fulfilment happened in the Vedic religion
about the tenth century and was followed by the setting-in of late Brahmanism.
And in the ninth century a corresponding epochal point must have occurred in
the religious history of China.

However widely the Reformations of the various Cultures may differ amongst
themselves, the purpose is the same for all to bring the faith, which had
strayed all too far into the world-as-history and time-secularism ' Ztitticbkt&'\
back into the realm of Nature, clean waking-consciousness, and pure cause-
controlled and cause-pervaded Space; out of the world of economics ("wealth")
into that of science ("poverty"), out of patrician and cavalier society (which
was also that of Renaissance and Humanism) into that of spirituals and ascetics;
and lastly (as significant as it is impossible) out of the political ambitions of
vestmented human thoroughbreds into the realm of holy Causality that is
not of this world.

In those times the West and the situation was the same in the other
Cultures divided the Corpus Christianorum of the population into the three
classes of status policticus, ecclesiasticus, and aconomicus (that is, urban), but as the
outlook was that of the city and no longer that of the castle and the village,
officials and judges belonged to the first-named class, men of learning to the
second and the peasant was forgotten. This is the key to the opposition of
the Renaissance and Reformation, which was an opposition of class and not a
difference in world-feeling like that of Renaissance and Gothic. Castle-taste and
cloister-soul moved into town, and remained there, as before, in opposition
as in Florence the Medici to Savonarola, and as in old Greece the noble families
of the cities with their Homer now finally written down to the last
Orphics these, too, writers. The Renaissance artists and Humanists are the
legitimate successors of the Troubadours and Minnesingers, and just as there is a
line from Arnold of Brescia to Luther, so there is a line from Bertrand de Born
and Peire Cardinal, through Petrarch, to Ariosto. The castle has become the
town-house, the knight the patrician. The whole movement adhered to palaces,
as courts; it limits itself to those fields of expression that affect and interest
polite society; it is bright and gay, like Homer, because it is courtly an at-
mosphere where problems were bad taste, where Dante and Michelangelo cannot
but have felt themselves out of place and it spread over the Alps to the courts
of the North, not as a new world-outlook, but as a new taste. The "Northern"
Renaissance of the mercantile and capital cities consisted simply in the fact that
the ban ton of the Italian patriciate replaced that of the French chivalry.

But the last reformers, too, the Luthers and Savonarolas, were urban monks,
and this differentiates them profoundly from the Joachims and the Bernards.
Their intellectual and urban askesis is the stepping-stone from the hermitages
of quiet valleys to the scholar's study of the Baroque. The mystic experience
of Luther which gave birth to his doctrine of justification is the experience,

198 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

not of a St. Bernard in the presence of woods and hills and clouds and stars, but
of a man who looks through narrow windows on the streets and house walls
and gables. Broad God-perfused nature is remote, outside the city wall; and
the free intellect, detached from the soil, is inside it. Within the urban, stone-
walled waking-consciousness sense and reason part company and become
enemies, and the city-mysticism of the last reformers is thus a mysticism of
pure reason through and through, and not one of the eye an illumination of
concepts, in presence of which the brightly coloured figures of the old myth
fade into paleness.

Necessarily, therefore, it was, in its real depths, a thing of the few. Nothing
was left of that sensible content that formerly had offered even to the poorest
something to grip. The mighty act of Luther was a purely intellectual decision.
Not for nothing has he been regarded as the last great Schoolman of the line
of Occam. 1 He completely liberated the Faustian personality the inter-
mediate person of the priest, which had formerly stood between it and the
Infinite, was removed. And now it was wholly alone, self-oriented, its own
priest . andjLts own_ judge. But the common people could only feel, not
understand, the element oFliberation in it all. They welcomed, enthusiastically,
indeed, the tearing-up of visible duties, but they did not come to realize that
these had been replaced by intellectual duties that were still stricter. Francis of
Assisi had given much and taken little, but the urban Reformation took much
and, as far as the majority of people were concerned, gave little.

The holy Causality of the Contrition-sacrament Luther replaced by the
mystic experience of inward absolution "by faith alone." He came very near
to Bernard of Clairvaux in this concept of contrition as lifelong, as a continu-
ous intellectual askesis in contrast to the askesis of outward and visible works.
Both of them understood absolution as a divine miracle: in so far as the man
changes himself, it is God changing him. But what no purely intellectual
mysticism can replace is the "Tu" outside, in free nature. The one and the
other preached: "Thou must believe that God has forgiven thee," but for
Bernard belief was through the powers of the priest elevated to knowledge,
whereas for Luther it sank to doubt and desperate insistence. This little "I,"
detached from the cosmos, nailed up in an individual being and (in the most
terrific sense of the word) alone, needed the proximity of a powerful "Thou,"
and the weaker the intellect, the more urgent the need. Herein lies the ultimate
meaning of the Western priest, who from 12.15 was elevated above the rest of
mankind by the sacrament of ordination and its character indclebilis: he was a
hand with which even the poorest wretch could grasp God. This visible link
with the Infinite, Protestantism destroyed. Strong souls could and did win it
back for themselves, but for the weaker it was gradually lost. Bernard, al-
though for him the inward miracle was successful of itself, would not deprive

1 Bochmcr, Luther im Licbte dtr neueren Forscbung (1918), pp. 54, ct scq.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 199

others of the gentler way, for the very illumination of his soul showed him the
Mary-world of living nature, all-pervading, ever near, and ever helpful.
Luther, who knew himself only and not men, set postulated heroism in place
of actual weakness. For him life was desperate battle against the Devil, and
that battle he called upon everyone to fight. And everyone who fought it
fought alone.

The Reformation abolished the whole bright and consoling side of the
Gothic myth the cult of Mary, the veneration of the saints, the relics, the
pilgrimages, the mass. But the myth of devildom and witchcraft remained,
for it was the embodiment and cause of the inner torture, and now that torture
at last rose to its supreme horror. 1 Baptism was, for Luther at least, an exor-
cism, the veritable sacrament of devil-banning. There grew up a large, purely
Protestant literature about the Devil. 2 Out of the Gothic wealth of colour,
there remained black; of its arts, music, in particular organ-music. But
in the place of the mythic light-world, whose helpful nearness the faith of
the common people could not, after all, forgo, there rose again out of long-
buried depths an element of ancient German myth. It came so stealthily that
even to-day its true significance is not yet realized. The expressions "folk-
tale" and "popular custom" are inadequate: it is a true Myth that inheres in
the firm belief in dwarfs, bogies, nixies, house-sprites, and sweeping clouds of
the disembodied, and a true Cult that is seen in the rites, offerings, and conjur-
ings that are still practised with a pious awe. In Germany, at any rate, the
Saga took the place, unperceived, of the Mary-myth: Mary was now called
Frau Holde, and where once the saints had stood, appeared the faithful Eckart.
In the English people what arose was something that has long been designated
" Bible-fetishism.

What Luther lacked and it is an eternal fatality for Germany was the
eye for facts and the power of practical organization. He did not bring his
doctrines to a clear system, nor did he lead the great movement and choose its
aim. The one and the other were the work of his great successor Calvin.
While the Lutheran movement advanced leaderless in central Europe, he viewed
his rule in Geneva as the starting-point of a systematic subjection of the world
under a Protestantism unfalteringly thought out to its logical conclusion.
Therefore he, and he alone, became a world-power; therefore it was the
decisive struggle between the spirit of Calvin and the spirit of Loyola that
dominated, from the Spanish Armada on, the world-politics of the Baroque

1 Sec, for instance, H. T. Buckle, Hist. Civilisation in England, Vol. Ill, ch. iv, for the Scottish
outlook, which at times attributed all this horror, not even to an anti-God, but to God himself.
"Consider, who is the contriver of these torments. There have been some very exquisite torments
contrived by the wit of men . . . but all these fall as far short of the torments ye arc to endure as the
wisdom of man falls short of that of God. . . . Infinite wisdom has contrived that evil " (The Great
Concern of Salvation, by T. Halyburton, lyrz). Tr.

2 M. Osborn, Die Teufelsltteratur des 16. Jahrh. (1893).

300 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

and the struggle for sea-supremacy. While in mid-Europe Reformation and
Counter-Reformation struggled for some small imperial city or a few poor
Swiss cantons, Canada, the mouth of the Ganges, the Cape, the Mississippi,
were the scenes of great decisions fought to an issue by France and Spain, Eng-
land and Holland. And in these decisions the two grand organizers of the Late
religion of the West were ever present, ever opposed.

Intellectual creativeness of the Late period begins, not with, but after, the
Reformation. Its most typical creation is free science. Even for Luther learning
was still essentially the "handmaid of theology," and Calvin had the free-
thinking doctor Servet burnt. The thought of the Springtimes Faustian
like Egyptian, Vedic, and Orphic had felt its vocation to be the justification
of faith by criticism. If criticism did not succeed, the critical method must be
wrong. Knowledge was faith justified, not faith controverted.

Now, however, the critical powers of the city intellect have become so great
that it is no longer content to affirm, but must test. The stock of believed
probables, and especially that part of it which was received by the understand-
ing and not the heart, was the first obvious target for dissecting activities.
This distinguishes the Springtime Scholasticism from the actuality-philosophy
of the Baroque as it distinguishes Neoplatonist from Islamic, Vedic from
Brahmanic, Orphic from Pre-Socratic, thought. The (shall we say) profane
Causality of human life, the world-around, the process and meaning of cog-
nition, become a problem. The Egyptian philosophy of the Middle Kingdom
measured up the value of life in this sense; and akin to it, in all probability,
was the late pre-Confucian philosophy of China from 800 to 500 B.C. Only the
book ascribed to Kwan-tse (d. 645) remains to give us some dim idea of this
philosophy, but the indications, slight though they be, are that epistemologi-
cal and biological problems occupied the centre of the one genuine philosophy
of China, now utterly lost.

Within Baroque philosophy, Western natural-science stands by itself. No
other Culture possesses anything like it, and assuredly it must have been from
its beginnings, not a "handmaid of theology," but the servant of the technical
Will-to-Power, oriented to that end both mathematically and experimentally
from its very foundations a practical mechanics. And as it is firstly technique and
only secondly theory, it must be as old as Faustian man himself. Accordingly,
we find technical works of an astounding energy of combination even by looo. 1
As early as the thirteenth century Robert Grosseteste 2 was treating space as a
function of light. Petrus Peregrinus in 1189 wrote the best experimentally

1 Clocks being an outstanding example. See Vol. I., p. 15, foot-note. Tr.

2 The famous Bishop of Lincoln (1175-1153), scholar and philosopher, scientist and statesman
the British Orcsmc. Tr.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 301

based treatise on magnetism that appeared before Gilbert (1600). And Roger
Bacon, the disciple of both, developed a natural-scientific theory of knowledge
to serve as basis for his technical investigations. 1 But boldness in the discovery
of dynamic interlinkages went further still. The Copernican system was hinted
at in a manuscript of 1311 and a few decades later was mathematically developed
by the Paris Occamists, Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Oresme. 2 Let us not de-
ceive ourselves as to the fundamental motive-power of these explorations. Pure
contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment for ever, but
not so the Faustian symbol of the machine, which urged us to mechanical con-
structions even in the twelfth century and made " Perpetuum mobile" the
Prometheus-idea of the Western intellect. For us the first thing is ever the
working hypothesis the very kind of thought-product that is meaningless to
other Cultures. It is an astounding fact (to which, however, we must accustom
ourselves) that the idea of immediately exploiting in practice any knowledge of
natural relations that may be acquired is alien to every sort of mankind except
the Faustian (and those who, like Japanese, Jews, and Russians, have to-day
come under the intellectual spell of its Civilization). The very notion of the
working hypothesis implicitly contains a dynamic lay-out of the universe.
Theoria, contemplative vision of actuality, was for those subtly inquiring
monks only secondary, and, being itself the outcome of the technical passion,
it presently led them, quite imperceptibly, to the typically Faustian conception
of God as the Grand Master of the machine, who could accomplish everything
that they themselves in their impotence only dared to wish. Insensibly the
world of God became, century by century, more and more like the Perpetuum
mobile. And, imperceptibly also, as the scanning of nature became sharper and
sharper in the school of experiment and technique, and the Gothic myth be-
came more and more shadowy, the concepts of monkish working hypotheses
developed, from Galileo onwards, into the critically illuminated numina of
modern science, the collisions and the fields, gravitation, the velocity of light,
and the "electricity" which in our electrodynamic world-picture has absorbed
into itself the other forms of energy and thereby attained to a sort of physical
monotheism. They are the concepts that are set up behind the formulas, to
endow them with a mythic visibility for the inner eye. The numbers themselves
are technical elements, levers and screws, overhearings of the world's secrets.
The Classical Nature-thought and that of others also required no numbers,
for it strove for no powers. The pure mathematic of Pythagoras and Plato had
no relation whatever to the nature-views of Democritus and Aristotle.

1 A clear summary of Grossctcstc's, Pierre de Maricourt's, and Roger Bacon's work and out-
look will be found in Ch. ix of E. Gilson's short manual, La Philosophic du Moyen Age (Paris, 192.5).
Ency. Brit., XI ed., may also be consulted for Roger Bacon, but the article "Grosseteste" deals al-
most entirely with the bishop's political and ecclesiastical career. Tr.

1 M. Baumgartner, Gesch. der Philos. des Mittelalters (1915), pp. 41^, 571, 6zo, et seq. [Brief
account in Ch. xi (3) of Gilson's manual above cited. Tr.]

301 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Just as the Classical mind felt Prometheus's defiance of the gods as " hybris,"
so our Baroque felt the machine as diabolical. 1 The spirit of Hell had betrayed
to man the secret of mastering the world-mechanism and even of himself
enacting the part of God. And hence it is that all purely priestly natures, that
live wholly in the world of the spirit and expect nothing of "this world"
and notably the idealist philosophers, the Classicists, the Humanists, and even
Nietzsche have for technique nothing but silent hostility.

Every Late philosophy contains this critical protest against the uncritical
intuitiveness of the Spring. But this criticism of the intellect that is sure of its
own superiority affects also faith itself and evokes the one great creation in the
field of religion that is the peculiarity of the Late period every Late period

namely, Puritanism.

Puritanism manifests itself in the army of Cromwell and his Independents,
iron, Bible-firm, psalm-singing as they rode into battle; in the ranks of the
Pythagoreans, who in the bitter earnest of their gospel of duty wrecked gay
Sybaris and branded it for ever as the city without morals; in the armies of the
early Caliphs, which subdued not only states, but souls. Milton's Paradise Lost,
many surahs of the Koran, the little that we know of Pythagorean teachings
all come to the same thing. They are enthusiasms of a sober spirit, cold in-
tensities, dry mysticism, pedantic ecstasy. And yet, even so, a wild piety
flickers up once more in them. All the transcendent inwardness that the City
can produce after attaining to unconditional mastery over the soul of the Land
is here concentrated, with a sort of terror lest it should prove unreal and evanes-
cent, and is correspondingly impatient, pitiless, and unforgiving. Puritanism

not in the West only, but in all Cultures lacks the smile that had illumined
the religion of the Spring every Spring the moments of profound joy in
life, the humour of life. Nothing of the quiet blissfulness that in the Magian
Springtime flashes up so often in the stories of Jesus's childhood, or in Gregory
Nazianzen, is to be found in the Koran, nothing in the palpable blitheness of
St. Francis's songs in Milton. Deadly earnest broods over the Jansenist mind
of Port Royal, over the meetings of the black-clothed Roundheads, by whom
Shakespeare's "Merry England" Sybaris over again was annihilated in a
few years. Now for the first time the battle against the Devil, whose bodily
nearness they all felt, was fought with a dark and bitter fury. In the seventeenth
century more than a million witches were burnt alike in the Protestant
North, the Catholic South, and even the communities in America and India.
Joyless and sour are the duty-doctrines of Islam (/*&/>)> w i tn i s nar d intellectu-
ality, and the Westminster Catechisms of 1643, and the Jansenist ethics (Jansen's
Augustinus, 1640) as well for in the realm of Loyola, too, there was of in-
ward necessity a Puritan movement. Religion is livingly experienced meta-
physic, but the company of the " godly," as the Independents called themselves,

i Sec Ch. XIV below. Tr.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 303

and the Pythagoreans, and the disciples of Mohammed, all alike experienced it,
not with the senses, but primarily as a concept. Parshva, who about 600 B.C.
founded the sect of the "Unfettered" l on the Ganges, taught, like the other
Puritans of his time, that salvation came, not from sacrifices and rights, but
only from knowledge of the identity of Atman and Brahman. In all Puritan
poetry the place of the old Gothic visions is taken by an unbridled, yet withal
jejune, spirit of allegory. In the waking-consciousness of these ascetics the
concept is the only real power. Pascal's wrestlings were about concepts and
not, like Meister Eckart's., about shapes. Witches were burnt because they were
proved, and not because they were seen in the air o' nights; the Protestant
jurists employed the witches' hammer of the Dominicans because it was built
on concepts. The Madonnas of the early Gothic had appeared to their sup-
pliants, but those of Bernini no man ever saw. They exist because they are
proved and there came to be a positive enthusiasm for existence of this sort.
Milton, Cromwell's great secretary of state, clothed concepts with shapes, and
Bunyan brings a whole mythology of concepts into ethical-allegorical activity.
From that it is but a step to Kant, in whose conceptual ethics the Devil assumes
his final shape as the Radically Evil.

We have to emancipate ourselves from the surfaces of history and,
especially, to thrust aside the artificial fences in which the methodology of
Western sciences has paddocked it before we can see that Pythagoras,
Mohammed, and Cromwell embody one and the same movement in three Cul-
tures.

Pythagoras was not a philosopher. According to all statements of the Pre-
Socratics, he was a saint, prophet and founder of a fanatically religious society
that forced its truths upon the people around it by every political and military
means. The destruction of Sybaris by Croton an event which, we may be
sure, has survived in historical memory only because it was the climax of a wild
religious war was an explosion of the same hate that saw in Charles I and
his gay Cavaliers not merely doctrinal error, but also worldly disposition as
something that must be destroyed root and branch. A myth purified and
conceptually fortified, combined with rigorous ethical precepts, imbued the
Pythagoreans with the conviction that they would attain salvation before all
other men. The gold tablets found in Thurii and Petelia, which were put into
the hand of the dead initiate, carried the assurance of the god: "Happy and
blessed one, thou shalt be no more a mortal, but a god." It is the same cer-
tainty that the Koran gave to all believers who fought in the holy war against
the infidel "The monasticism of Islam is the religious war," says a hadith
of the Prophet the same which filled Cromwell's Ironsides when they scat-
tered the King's " Philistines" and "Amalekites" at Marston Moor and Naseby.

Islam was no more a religion of the desert in particular than Zwingli's
1 Nigantha. Sec Ency. Brit., XI ed., article "Jains." Tr.

304 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

faith was a religion of the high mountains in particular. It is incident, and no
more, that the Puritan movement for which the Magian world was ripe pro-
ceeded from a man of Mecca and not from a Monophysite or a Jew. For in the
northern Arabian desert there were the Christian states of the Ghassanids and
Lakhmids, and in the Sabsean South there were religious wars waged between
Christians and Jews that involved the world of states from Assuan to the
Sassanid Empire. The Congress of Princes at Marib * was attended by hardly a
single pagan, and shortly after this date South Arabia came under Persian
that is, Mazdaist government. Mecca was a little island of ancient Arabian
paganism in the midst of a world of Jews and Christians, a mere relic that had
long been mined by the ideas of the great Magian religions. The little of this
paganism that filtered into the Koran was later explained away by the Com-
mentary of the Sunna and its Syro-Mesopotamian intellect. At most Islam was
a new religion only to the same extent as Lutheranism was one. 2 Actually,
it was the prolongation of the great early religions. Equally, its expansion
was not (as is even now imagined) a "migration of peoples" proceeding from
the Arabian Peninsula, but an onslaught of enthusiastic believers, which like
an avalanche bore along with it Christians, Jews, and Mazdaists and set them
at once in its front rank as fanatical Moslems. It was Berbers from the homeland
of St. Augustine who conquered Spain, and Persians from Irak who drove on to
the Oxus. The enemy of yesterday became the front-rank comrade of to-
morrow. Most of the "Arabs" who in 717 attacked Constantinople for the
first time, had been born Christians. About 650 Byzantine literature 3 quite
suddenly vanished, and the deeper meaning of the fact has so far never been
noticed it was just that the Arabian literature took up the tale. The soul of
the Magian Culture found at last its true expression in Islam, and therewith
became truly the "Arabian," free thenceforth from all bondage to the Pseudo-
morphosis. The Iconoclastic movement, led by Islam, but long prepared by
Monophysites and Jews, advanced to and even beyond Byzantium, where the
Syrian Leo III (717-41) raised this Puritan movement of Islamic-Christian
sects the Paulicians about 650 and the Bogomils later 4 to predominance.
The great figures of Mohammed's entourage, such as Abu Bekr and Omar,
are the near relatives of the Pyms and Hampdens of the English Revolution,
and we should see this relationship to be nearer still if we knew more than we
do about the Hanifs, the Arabian Puritans before and about the Prophet. All
of them had won out of Predestination the guarantee that they were God's

1 541. Sec p. 197.

2 "Mahommcdanism must be regarded as an eccentric heretical form of Eastern Christianity.
This in fact was the ancient mode of regarding Mahommet. He was considered, not in the light
of the founder of a new religion, but rather as one of the chief hcresiarchs of the Church. Among
them he is placed by Dante in the "Inferno." Dean Stanley, Eastern Church (1861), Lecture VIII.
Tr.

3 Krumbacher, Byzant. Litcraturgtsch., p. n.

4 See Ency, Brit., XI ed., under these names. Tr.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 305

elect. The grand Old Testament exaltation of Parliament and the camps of
Independency which left behind it, in many an English family, even to the
nineteenth century, 1 the belief that the English are the descendants of the ten
Lost Tribes of Israel, a nation of saints predestined to govern the world
dominated also the emigration to America which began with the Pilgrim
Fathers of 1610. It formed that which may be called the American religion of
to-day, and bred and fostered the trait which gives the Englishman even now
his particular political insouciance, an assurance that is essentially religious
and has its roots in predestination. The Pythagoreans themselves, too (an
unheard-of thing in the religious history of the Classical world) assumed
political power for the furtherance of religious ends and sought to advance their
puritanism from Polis to Polis. Everywhere else unit cults reigned in unit
states, each of which left the other unconcernedly to its own religious duties;
here and here only do we find a community of saints, and their practical energy
as far surpassed that of the old Orphics as fighting Independency surpassed the
spirit of the Reformation wars.

But in Puritanism there is hidden already the seed of Rationalism, and after
a few enthusiastic generations have passed, this bursts forth everywhere and
makes itself supreme. This is the step from Cromwell to Hume. Not cities in
general, not even the great cities, but a few particular cities now become the
theatre of intellectual history Socratic Athens, Abbassid Baghdad, eighteenth-
century London and Paris. 2 "Enlightenment" is the cliche of that time. The
sun bursts forth but what is it that clears off the heavens of the critical
consciousness to make way for that sun?

Rationalism signifies the belief in the data of critical understanding (that
is, of the "reason") alone. In the Springtime men could say "Credo quia ab-
surdum," because they were certain that the comprehensible and the incom-
prehensible were both necessary constituents of the world the nature which
Giotto painted, in which the Mystics immersed themselves, and into which
reason can penetrate, but only so far as the deity permits it to penetrate. But
now a secret jealousy breeds the notion of the Irrational that which, as
incomprehensible, is therefore valueless. It may be scorned openly as super-
stition, or privily as metaphysic. Only critically-established understanding
possesses value. And secrets are merely evidences of ignorance. The new
secretless religion is in its highest potentialities called wisdom (<ro</>ta), its priests
.philosophers, and its adherents "educated" people. According to Aristotle,
the old religion is indispensable only to the uneducated, 3 and his view is Con-
fucius's and Gotama Buddha's, Lcssing's and Voltaire's. Men go away from
Culture "back to nature," but this nature is not something livingly ex-

1 Not to say the twentieth. TV.

2 To which may be added Edinburgh. Tir.

1 jjpds rrjv iri/3d> TUV TjoXXwj', Metaphysics XI, 8, p. 1074 (Bekker) 13. Tr.

306 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

pericnccd, but something proved, something born of, and accessible only to, the
intellect a Nature that has no existence at all for a peasantry, a Nature by
which one is not in the least overawed but merely put into a condition of sensi-
bility. Natural religion, rational religion, Deism all this is not lived meta-
physics, but a comprehended mechanics, called by Confucius the "Laws of
Heaven" and by Hellenism rvxr). Formerly philosophy was the handmaid of
transcendent religiousness, but now comes sensibility, and philosophy must
therefore become scientific as epistemology and critique of nature and critique of
values. No doubt there was a feeling that this philosophy was, even so, nothing
but a diluted dogmatism, for the idea that pure knowledge was possible itself
involved a belief. Systems were woven out of phenomenally guaranteed be-
ginnings, but in the long run the result was merely to say "Force" instead of
"God," and "Conservation of Energy" instead of "Eternity." Under all
Classical rationalism is to be found Olympus, under all Western the dogma of
the sacraments. And so our Western philosophy swings to and fro between
religion and technical science, and is defined thus, or thus, according as the
author of the definition is a man with some relic of priesthood still in him, or is
a pure expert and technician of thought.

"Wcltansschauung" is the characteristic expression for an enlightened
waking-consciousness that, under the guidance of the critical understanding,
looks about it in a godless light-world and, when sense-perceptions are found
not to square with sound human reason, treats sense as a "lying jade." That
which was once myth the actualest of the actual is now subjected to
the methods of what is called Euhemerism. The learned Euhemerus, about
300 B.C., "explained" the Classical divinities to the public that they had
formerly served so well, and the process occurs under one form or another in
every "age of enlightenment." We have our Euhemeristic interpretations of
Hell as a guilty conscience, the Devil as evil desire, and God as the beauty of
nature, and it is the same tendency that declares itself when Attic tomb-in-
scriptions of about 400 invoke, not the city-goddess Athene, but a goddess
"Demos" a near relation, by the way, of the Jacobins' Goddess of Reason
and where the dai/jioviov for Socrates, vovs for other philosophers, take the
place of Zeus. Confucius says "heaven" instead of "Shang-ti," which means
that he believes only in laws of nature. The "collection" and "ordering" of
the canonical writings of China by the Confucians was a colossal act of Euhemer-
ism, in which actually almost all the old religious works were literally de-
stroyed and the residue subjected to rationalist falsification. Had it been
possible, the enlightcners of our eighteenth century would no doubt have
served the Gothic heritage in the same way. 1 Confucius belongs to the Chinese

1 Caliphs like Al Maimun (813-33) an d thc ^t Ommayads would have entirely approved of
similar measures in Islam. In those times there was a club in Baghdad in which Christians, Jews,
Moslems, and Atheists debated, and appeals to the authority of Bible or Koran were "out of order."

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 307

"eighteenth century" through and through. Lao-tse (who despised him)
stands at a midpoint in the Taoist movement, which manifested traits of
Protestantism, Puritanism, and Pietism in turn, and both finally propagated a
practical world-tone based upon a wholly mechanistic world-view. The
word " tao" underwent in the Late period of China just the same continuous
alteration of its fundamental content, and in the same mechanistic direction,
as the word "Logos" in the history of Classical thought from Heraclitus to
Posidonius, and as the word "Force" between Galileo's day and ours. That
which once had been grandly moulded myth and cult is called, in this "religion
of educated people," Nature and Virtue but this Nature is a reasonable
mechanism, and this Virtue is knowledge. 1 Confucius and Buddha, Socrates
and Rousseau are at one in this. Confucius contains little of prayer or of medi-
tation upon the life after death, and nothing at all of revelation. To busy
oneself overmuch with sacrifices and rites stamps one as uneducated and un-
reasoning. Gotama Buddha and his contemporary Mahavira, the founder of
Jainism 2 both of whom came from the political world of the lower Ganges,
east of the old Brahmanic Culture-field recognized, as everyone knows,
neither the idea of God nor myth and cult. Of the real teaching of Buddha
little can now be ascertained for it all appears in the colours of the later
fellah-religion baptized by his name but one of the unquestionably authentic
ideas concerning "conditioned arising" 3 is the derivation of suffering from ig-
norance ignorance, namely, of the "Four Noble Truths." This is true ra-
tionalism. Nirvana, for them, is a purely intellectual release and corresponds
exactly with the "Autarkeia" and "Eudaimonia" of the Stoics. It is that
condition of the understanding and waking-consciousness for which Being no
longer is.

The great ideal of the educated of such periods is the Sage. The sage goes
back to Nature to Ferney or Ermenonville, to Attic gardens or Indian groves
which is the most intellectual way of being a megalopolitan. The sage is the
man of the Golden Mean. His askesis consists in a judicious depreciation of
the world in favour of meditation. The wisdom of the enlightenment never
interferes with comfort. Moral with the great Myth to back it is always a
sacrifice, a cult, even to extremes of asceticism, even to death; but Virtue with
Wisdom at its back is a sort of secret enjoyment, a superfine intellectual egoism.
And so the ethical teacher who is outside real religion becomes the Philistine.
Buddha, Confucius, Rousseau, are arch-Philistines, for all the nobility of their

1 Whereas "virtu" in Dante always carries a connotation of vital force, as also docs the older
English use of the word; e.g., in Chaucer's "of which vertuc cngendred is the flour," (Canterbury
Tales, Prol. 4) and in the Bible (Mark v, 30). In Mcdixval Latin " virtutes" is used for miracles.
Tr.

2 Sec Ency. Brit., XI cd., article "Jains." Tr.

* E.g., "Given eye and visible object, visual consciousness arises; the conjunction of the three
is contact; whereby conditioned, arises feeling; whereby conditioned, arises perception. . . ."
Majjima Nikhaya, I, in (quoted by Mrs. Rhys Davids, Buddhism). Tr.

308 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

ordered ideas, and the pedantry of the Socratic life-wisdom is insurmount-
able.

Along with this (shall we call it) scholasticism of sane reason, there must
of inner necessity be a rationalistic mysticism of the educated. The Western
Enlightenment is of English origin and Puritan parentage. The rationalism
of the Continent comes wholly from Locke. In opposition to it there arose in
Germany the Pietists (Herrnhut, 1700, Spener and Francke, and in Wiirttemberg
Oetinger) and in England the Methodists (Wesley "awakened" by Herrnhut,
1738). It was Luther and Calvin over again the English at once organ-
ized themselves for a world-movement and the Germans lost themselves in
mid-European conventicles. The Pietists of Islam are to be found in Sufism,
which is not of "Persian" but of common Aramaean origin and in the eighth
century spread all over the Arabian world. Pietists or Methodists, too, are
the Indian lay preachers, who shortly before Buddha's time were teaching
release from the cycle of life (jansara) through immersion in the identity of
Atman and Brahman. But Pietists or Methodists, too, are Lao-tse and his
disciples and notwithstanding their rationalism the Cynic mendicants
and itinerant preachers and the Stoic tutors, domestic chaplains, and confessors
of early Hellenism. 1 And Pietism may ascend even to the peak of rationalist
vision, of which Swedenborg is the great example, which created for Stoics
and Sufists whole worlds of fancy, and by which Buddhism was prepared for its
reconstruction as Mahayana. The expansion of Buddhism and that of Taoism
in their original significations are closely analogous to the Methodist expansion
in America, and it is no accident that they both reached their full maturity in
those regions (lower Ganges and south of the Yang-tse-kiang) which had
cradled the respective Cultures.

Two centuries after Puritanism the mechanistic conception of the world
stands at its zenith. It is the effective religion of the time. Even those who
still thought themselves to be religious in the old sense, to be "believers in
God," were only mistaking the world in which their waking-consciousness
was mirroring itself. Religious truths were always in their understanding
mechanistic truths, and in general it was only the habit of traditional words
that imparted a colour-wash of myth to a Nature that was in reality regarded
scientifically. Culture is ever synonymous with religious creativeness. Every
great Culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban
country-side, is carried through in the cities of art and intellect, and closes with
a finale of materialism in the world-cities. But even the last chords arc strictly
in the key of the whole. There are Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian, Western
materialisms, and each is nothing but the original stock of myth-shapes, cleared

1 Gcrckc-Nordcn, Einltit. in die Altertumswisi., II, no.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 309

of the elements of experience and contemplative vision and viewed mechan-
istically.

Confucianism as reasoned out by Yang-Chu concluded in this sense. The
system of Lakayata was the prolongation of the contempt for a de-souled world
which had been the common characteristic of Gotama Buddha, Mahavira, and
the contemporary Pietists, and which they in turn had derived from Sankhya
atheism. Socrates is alike the heir of the Sophists and the ancestor of the Cynic
itinerants and of Pyrrhonian skcpsis. All are manifestations of the superiority
of the megalopolitan intellect that has done with the irrational for good and all
and despises any waking-consciousness that still knows or acknowledges
mysteries. Gothic men shrank at every step before the fathomless, more awe-
inspiring still as presented in dogmatic truths. But to-day even the Catholic
has arrived at the point of feeling these dogmas as a successful systematic ex-
position of the riddle of the universe. The miracle is regarded as a physical
occurrence of a higher order, and an English bishop professes his belief in the
possibility of electric power and the power of prayer both originating in one
homogeneous nature-system. 1 The belief is belief in force and matter, even if
the words used be "God" and "world," "Providence" and "man."

Unique and self-contained, again, is the Faustian materialism, in the nar-
rower sense of the word. In it the technical outlook upon the world reached ful-
filment. The whole world a dynamic system, exact, mathematically disposed,
capable down to its first causes of being experimentally probed and numerically
fixed so that man can dominate it this is what distinguishes our particular
"return to Nature" from all others. That "Knowledge is Virtue" Confucius
also believed, and Buddha, and Socrates, but "Knowledge is Power" is a phrase
that possesses meaning only within the European-American Civilization.
"Return to nature" here means the elimination of all forces that stand between
the practical intelligence and nature everywhere else materialism has con-
tented itself with establishing (by way of contemplation or logic, as the case
may be) supposedly simple units whose causal play accounts for everything
without any residue of secrets, the supernatural being put down to want of
knowledge. But the grand intellectual myth of Energy and Mass is at the same
time a vast working hypothesis. It draws the picture of nature in such a way that
men can use it. The Destiny element is mechanized as evolution, development,
progress, and put into the centre of the system; the Will is an albumen-process;
and all these doctrines of Monism, Darwinism, Positivism, and what not are
elevated into the fitness-moral which is the beacon of American business men,
British politicians, and German progress-Philistines alike and turns out, in
the last analysis, to be nothing but an intellectualist caricature of the old justi-
fication by faith.

1 Compare the renewed controversy as to Transubstantiation in the English Church, 19x6-8,
in which a bishop actually proposed that physical tests could be applied to the altar-miracle. Tr.

310 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

Materialism would not be complete without the need of now and again
easing the intellectual tension, by giving way to moods of myth, by performing
rites of some sort, or by enjoying with an inward light-heartedness the charms
of the irrational, the unnatural, the repulsive, and even, if need be, the merely
silly. This tendency, which is visible enough, even to us, in the times of Meng-
tse (371-189) and in those of the first Buddhist brotherhoods, is present also
(and with the same significance) in Hellenism, of which indeed it is a leading
characteristic. About 311 poetical scholars of the Callimachus type in Alex-
andria invented the Serapis-cult and provided it with an elaborate legend. The
Isis-cult in Republican Rome was something very different both from the
emperor-worship that succeeded it and from the deeply earnest Isis-religion of
Egypt; it was a religious pastime of high society, which at times provoked
public ridicule and at times led to public scandal and the closing of the cult-
centres. 1 The Chaldean astrology was in those days a. fashion, 2 very far removed
from the genuine Classical belief in oracles and from the Magian faith in the
might of the hour. It was "relaxation," a "let's pretend." And, over and
above this, there were the numberless charlatans and fake prophets who toured
the towns and sought with their pretentious rites to persuade the half-educated
into a renewed interest in religion. Correspondingly, we have in the European-
American world of to-day the occultist and theosophist fraud, the American
Christian Science, the untrue Buddhism of drawing-rooms, the religious arts-
and-crafts business (brisker in Germany than even in England) that caters for
groups and cults of Gothic or Late Classical or Taoist sentiment. Everywhere
it is just a toying with myths that no one really believes, a tasting of cults that
it is hoped might fill the inner void. The real belief is always the belief in
atoms and numbers, but it requires this highbrow hocus-pocus to make it
bearable in the long run. Materialism is shallow and honest, mock-re-
ligion shallow and dishonest. But the fact that the latter is possible at all
foreshadows a new and genuine spirit of seeking that declares itself, first quietly,
but soon emphatically and openly, in the civilized waking-consciousness.

This next phase I call the Second Religiousness. It appears in all Civilizations
as soon as they have fully formed themselves as such and are beginning to pass,
slowly and imperceptibly, into the non-historical state in which time-periods
cease to mean anything. (So far as the Western Civilization is concerned, there-
fore, we are still many generations short of that point.) The Second Reli-
giousness is the necessary counterpart of Cassarism, which is the final political
constitution of Late Civilizations; it becomes visible, therefore, in the Augustan
Age of the Classical and about the time of Shi-hwang-ti's time in China. In
both phenomena the creative young strength of the Early Culture is lacking.
But both have their greatness nevertheless. That of the Second Religiousness

1 Which was ordered no less than four times in the decade 58-49.

2 Horace's fine lady, Lcuconoc. Tr.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 311

consists in a deep piety that fills the waking-consciousness the piety that
impressed Herodotus in the (Late) Egyptians and impresses West-Europeans in
China, India, and Islam and that of Csesarism consists in its unchained might
of colossal facts. But neither in the creations of this piety nor in the form of
the Roman Imperium is there anything primary and spontaneous. Nothing is
built up, no idea unfolds itself it is only as if a mist cleared off the land and
revealed the old forms, uncertainly at first, but presently with increasing
distinctness. The material of the Second Religiousness is simply that of the
first, genuine, young religiousness only otherwise experienced and expressed.
It starts with Rationalism's fading out in helplessness, then the forms of the
Springtime become visible, and finally the whole world of the primitive re-
ligion, which had receded before the grand forms of the early faith, returns to
the foreground, powerful, in the guise of the popular syncretism that is to be
found in every Culture at this phase.

Every "Age of Enlightenment" proceeds from an unlimited optimism of
the reason always associated with the type of the mcgalopolitan to an
equally unqualified scepticism. The sovereign waking-consciousness, cut off
by walls and artificialities from living nature and the land about it and under it,
cognises nothing outside itself. It applies criticism to its imaginary world,
which it has cleared of everyday sense-experience, and continues to do so till it
has found the last and subtlest result, the form of the form itself: namely,
nothing. With this the possibilities of physics as a critical mode of world-
understanding are exhausted, and the hunger for metaphysics presents itself
afresh. But it is not the religious pastimes of educated and literature-soaked
cliques, still less is it the intellect, that gives rise to the Second Religiousness.
Its source is the naive belief that arises, unremarked but spontaneous, among
the masses that there is some sort of mystic constitution of actuality (as to
which formal proofs are presently regarded as barren and tiresome word-
jugglery), and an equally na'ive heart-need reverently responding to the myth
with a cult. The forms of neither can be foreseen, still less chosen they
appear of themselves, and as far as we are ourselves concerned, we are as yet far
distant from them. 1 But already the opinions of Comte and Spencer, the
Materialism and the Monism and the Darwinism, which stirred the best
minds of the nineteenth century to such passion, have become the world-view
proper to country cousins.

The Classical philosophy had exhausted its ground by about 2.50 B.C. From
that time on, "knowledge" was no longer a continually tested and augmented
stock, but a belief therein, due basically to force of habit, but still able to
convince, thanks to an old and well-tried methodology. In the time of Socrates

1 It is perhaps possible for us to make some guess already as to these forms, which (it is self-
evident) must lead back to certain elements of Gothic Christianity. But be this as it may, what is
quite certain is that they "will not be the product of any literary taste for Late-Indian or Late-Chinese
speculation, but something of the type, for example, of Adventism and suchlike sects.

3 n THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

there had been Rationalism as the religion of educated men, with, above it,
the scholar-philosophy and, below it, the "superstition" of the masses. Now,
philosophy developed towards an intellectual, and the popular syncretism
towards a tangible, religiousness. The tendency was the same in both, and
myth-belief and piety spread, not downwards, but upwards. Philosophy had
much to receive and little to give. The Stoa had begun in the materialism
of the Sophists and Cynics, and had explained the whole mythology on al-
legorical lines, but the prayer to Zeus at table one of the most beautiful
relics of the Classical Second Religiousness l dates from as early as Cleanthes
(d. 2.32.)- I fl Sulla's time there was an upper-class Stoicism that was religious
through and through, and a popular syncretism which combined Phrygian,
Syrian, and Egyptian cults with numberless Classical mysteries that had be-
come almost forgotten corresponding exactly to the development of Buddha's
enlightened wisdom into Hinayana for the learned and Mahayana for the
masses, and to the relation between learned Confucianism and Taoism as the
vessel of Chinese syncretism which it soon became.

Contemporary with the "Positivist" Meng-tse (371-189) there suddenly
began a powerful movement towards alchemy, astrology, and occultism. It
has long been a favourite topic of dispute whether this was something new or a
recrudescence of old Chinese myth-feeling but a glance at Hellenism supplies
the answer. This syncretism appears "simultaneously" in the Classical, in
India and China, and in popular Islam. It starts always on rationalist doctrines
the Stoa, Lao-tse, Buddha and carries these through with peasant and
springtime and exotic motives of every conceivable sort. From about 100 B.C.
the Classical Syncretism which must not be confused with that of the later
Magian Pseudomorphosis 2 raked in motives from Orphism, from Egypt,
from Syria; from 67 B.C. the Chinese brought in Indian Buddhism in the popular
Mahayana form, and the potency of the holy writings as charms, and the
Buddha-figures as fetishes, was thought to be all the greater for their alien
origin. The original doctrine of Lao-tse disappeared very quickly. At the
beginning of Han times (c. A.D. 100) the troops of the Sen had ceased to be
"moral representations" and become kindly beings. The wind-, cloud-, thun-
der-, and rain-gods came back. Crowds of cults which purported to drive out
the evil spirits by the aid of the gods acquired a footing. It was in that time
that there arose doubtless out of some basic principle of pre-Confucian philos-
ophy the myth of Pan-ku, the prime principle from which the series of
mythical emperors descended. As we know, the Logos-idea followed a similar
line of development. 3

1 Arnim, Stoic, vct.fragm., 537.

8 See p. loz.

3 The Lu-shi Chun-tsiu of Lii-pu-Wei (d. 137 B.C., Chinese Augustan Age) is the first monu-
ment of this syncretism, of which the final deposit was the ritual work Li-ki of the Han period (B.
Schindler, Das Pricstcrtum im alien China, I, 93).

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 313

The theory and practice of the conduct of life that Buddha taught were
the outcome of world-weariness and intellectual disgusts, and were wholly
unrelated to religious questions. And yet at the very beginning of the Indian
"Imperial" period (2.50 B.C.) he himself had already become a seated god-figure;
and the Nirvana-theories, comprehensible only to the learned, were giving
place more and more to solid and tangible doctrines of heaven, hell, and salva-
tion, which were probably borrowed, as in other syncretisms, from an alien
source namely, Persian Apocalyptic. Already in Asoka's time there were
eighteen Buddhist sects. The salvation-doctrine of Mahay ana found its first
great herald in the poet-scholar Asvagosha (c. 50 B.C.) and its fulfilment proper in
Nagarjuna (c. A.D. 150). But side by side with such teaching, the whole mass
of proto-Indian mythology came back into circulation. The Vishnu- and
Shiva-religions were already in 300 B.C. in definite shape, and, moreover, in
syncretic form, so that the Krishna and the Rama legends were now transferred
to Vishnu. We have the same spectacle in the Egyptian New Empire, where
Amen of Thebes formed the centre of a vast syncretism, and again in the Arabian
world of the Abbassids, where the folk-religion, with its images of Purgatory,
Hell, Last Judgment, the heavenly Kaaba, Logos-Mohammed, fairies, saints,
and spooks drove pristine Islam entirely into the background. 1

There are still in such times a few high intellects like Nero's tutor Seneca

j and his antitype Psellus 2 the philosopher, royal tutor and politician of By-
zantium's Cassarism-phase; like Marcus Aurelius the Stoic and Asoka the
Buddhist, who were themselves the Csesars; 3 like the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV
(Akhenaton), whose deeply significant experiment was treated as heresy and
brought to naught by the powerful Amen-priesthood a risk that Asoka, too,

[had, no doubt, to face from the Brahmins.

But Csesarism itself, in the Chinese as in the Roman Empire, gave birth to

Ian emperor-cult, and thereby concentrated Syncretism. It is an absurd notion
that the veneration of the Chinese for the living emperor is a relic of ancient
religion. During the whole course of the Chinese Culture there were no em-
perors at all. The rulers of the States were called Wang (that is, kings), and
scarcely a century before the final victory of the Chinese Augustus Meng-tse
wrote in the vein of our nineteenth century "The people is the most im-
portant element in the country; next come the useful gods of the soil and the
crops, and least in importance comes the ruler." The mythology of the pristine

I emperors was without doubt put together by Confucius and his contemporaries,

1 M. Horten, Die religiose Gedankenwelt des Volkes im beutigen Islam (1917).

2 1018-78; cf. Dietcrich, By^ant. Charakterkopfe (1909), p. 63. [Or Ency. Brit., XI ed., article
" Psellus." TV.]

3 It was only in old age and after long and heavy warring that both these Csesars gave themselves
up to a mild and weary piety, and both of them held aloof from the more definite religions. From
the point of view of dogma, Asoka was no Buddhist; what he did was to understand the currents
and take them under his protection (Hillcbrandt, Altindien, p. 143). [Asoka's life is dealt with in
several of the works of Rhys Davids; for example, Ch. xv of his Buddhist India. Tr.]

3 i4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

its constitutional and social-ethical form was dictated by their rationalist aims,
and from this myth the first Chinese Csesar borrowed both title and cult-idea.
The elevation of men to divinity is the full-cycle return to the springtime in
which gods were converted into heroes exactly like these very emperors and
the figures of Homer and it is a distinguishing trait of almost all religions
of this second degree. Confucius himself was deified in A.D. 57, with an official
cult, and Buddha had been so long before. Al Ghazali (c. 1050), who helped
to bring about the "Second Religiousness" of the Islamic world, is now, in the
popular belief, a divine being and is beloved as a saint and helper. In the philos-
ophy-schools of the Classical there was a cult of Plato, and of Epicurus, and
Alexander's claim to descent from Heracles and Cassar's to descent from Venus
lead directly to the cult of the Divus, in which immemorial Orphic imaginings
and family religions crop up afresh, just as the cult of Hwang-ti contains traits
of the most ancient mythology of China.

But with the coming of the emperor-cults there begins at once, in each of the
two, an attempt to bring the Second Religiousness into fixed organizations,
which, however named sects, orders, Churches are always stiff re-construc-
tions of what had been living forms of the Springtime, and bear the same re-
lation to these as "caste" bears to "status."

There are signs of the tendency even in the Augustan reforms, with their
artificial revival of long-dead city-cults, such as the rites of the Fratres Arvales,
but it is only with the Hellenistic mystery-religions, or even with Mithraism, 1
that community or Church organization proper begins, and its development is
broken off in the ensuing downfall of the Classical. The corresponding feature
in Egypt is the theocratic state set up by the priest-kings of Thebes in the
eleventh century. The Chinese analogue is the Tao churches of the Han
period and especially that founded by Chang-lu, which gave rise to the fearful
insurrection of the Yellow Turbans (recalling the religious provincial rebellions
of the Roman Empire), which devastated whole regions and brought about the
fall of the Han dynasty. 2 And the very counterpart of these ascetic Churches
of Taoism, with their rigidity and wild mythology, is to be found in the late
Byzantine monk-states such as Studion and the autonomous group of monas-
teries on Athos, founded in noo, which are as suggestive of Buddhism as any-
thing could well be.

In the end Second Religiousness issues in the fellah-religions. Here the oppo-
sition between cosmopolitan and provincial piety has vanished again, as com-
pletely as that between primitive and higher Culture. What this means the
conception of the fellah people, discussed in an earlier chapter, 3 tells us. Re-
ligion becomes entirely historyless; where formerly decades constituted an

1 In so far as it is permissible to reckon Mithraism as Classical at all for it is really a religion
of the Magian Spring.

2 De Groot, Universismus (1918), p. 134.
8 P. 169.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 315

cpoch s now whole centuries pass unimportantly, and the ups and downs of
superficial changes only serve to show the unalterable finality of the inner state.
It matters nothing that " Chufucianism" appeared in China (1100) as a variant
of the Confucian state-doctrine, when it appeared, and whether or not it suc-
ceded. Equally, it signifies nothing that Indian Buddhism, long become a
polytheistic religion of the people, went down before Neo-Brahmanism (whose
great divine, Sankhara, lived about 800), nor is it of importance to know the
date at which the latter passed over into the Hinduism of Brahma, Vishnu,
and Shiva. There always are and always will be a handful of superlatively
intellectual, thoughtful, and perfectly self-sufficing people, like the Brahmins
in India, the Mandarins in China, and the Egyptian priests who amazed Herodo-
tus. But the fellah-religion itself is once more primitive through and through
the animal-cults of the Egyptian XXVIth dynasty; the composite of Bud-
dhism, Confucianism, and Taoism that constitutes the state religion of China;
the Islam of the present-day East. The religion of the Aztecs was very likely
another case in point, for, as Cortez found it, it seems remote indeed from the
intensely intellectualized religion of the Mayas.

VII

The religion of Jewry, too, is a fellah-religion since the time of Jehuda ben
Halevi who (like his Islamic teacher, Al Ghazali) regarded scientific philos-
ophy with an unqualified scepticism, and in the Ku^ari (1140) refused to it any
role save that of handmaid of the orthodox theology. This corresponds exactly
to the transition from Middle Stoicism to the later form of the Imperial period,
and to the extinction of Chinese speculation under the Western Han Dynasty.
Still more significant is the figure of Moses Maimonides, 1 who in 1175 collected
the entire dogmatic material of Judaism, as something fixed and complete, in a
great work of the type of the Chinese Li-ki, entirely regardless of whether the
particular items still retained any meaning or not. 2 Neither in this period nor
in any other is Judaism unique in religious history, though from the view-point
that the Western Culture has taken up on its own ground, it may seem so.
Nor is it peculiar to Jewry that, unperceived by those who bear it, its name is
for ever changing in meaning, for the same has happened, step by step, in the
Persian story.

In their "Merovingian" period approximately the last five centuries
before the birth of Christ both Jewry and Persia evolve from tribal groups
into nations of Magian cast, without land, without unity of origin, and (even
so soon) with the characteristic ghetto mode of life that endures unchanged to-
day for the Jews of Brooklyn and the Parsees of Bombay alike.

1 Sec the article "Maimonides" in Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr.

2 Fromer, Der Talmud, p. 117. The "red cow" and the ritual of anointing a Jewish king were
treated in this work with the same seriousness as the most important provisions of private law.
[See J. and J. Tharaud, Petite Histoire des Jttifs, Ch. I, (1917). Tr.]

316 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

In the Springtime (first five centuries of the Christian era) this landless
Consensus spread geographically from Spain to Shantung. This was the
Jewish Age of Chivalry and its "Gothic" blossoming-time of religious creative-
force. The later Apocalyptic, the Mishnah, and also primitive Christianity
(which was not cast off till after Trajan's and Hadrian's time) are creations of
this nation. It is well known that in those days the Jews were peasants,
artisans, and dwellers in little towns, and "big business" was in the hands of
Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans that is, members of the Classical world.

About 500 l begins the Jewish Baroque, which Western observers are ac-
customed to regard, very one-sidedly, as part of the picture of Spain's age of
glory. The Jewish Consensus, like the Persian, Islamic, and Byzantine, now
advances to an urban and intellectual awareness, and thenceforward it is master
of the forms of city-economics and city-science. Tarragona, Toledo, and
Granada are predominantly Jewish cities. Jews constitute an essential element
in Moorish high society. Their finished forms, their esprit, their knightliness,
amazed the Gothic nobility of the Crusades, which tried to imitate them; but
the diplomacy also, and the war-management and the administration of the
Moorish cities would all have been unthinkable without the Jewish aristocracy,
which was every whit as thoroughbred as the Islamic. As once in Arabia there
had been a Jewish Minnesang, so now here there was a high literature of en-
lightened science. It was under the guidance of the Rabbi Isaac Hassan, and by
the hand of Jewish and Islamic as well as Christian savants, that Alfonso X's
new work on the planets was prepared (c. 1150); 2 in other words, it was an
achievement of Magian and not of Faustian world-thought. 3 But Spain and
Morocco after all contained but a very small fraction of the Jewish Consensus,
and even this Consensus itself had not merely a worldly but also (and predomi-
nantly) a spiritual significance. In it, too, there occurred a Puritan movement,
which rejected the Talmud and tried to get back to the pure Torah. The com-
munity of the Qaraites, preceded by many a forerunner, arose about 760 in
northern Syria, the selfsame area which gave birth a century earlier to the
Paulician iconoclasts and a century later to the Sufism of Islam three Magian
tendencies whose inner relationship is unmistakable. The Qaraites, like the
Puritans of all other Cultures, were combated by both orthodoxy and enlight-
enment. Rabbinical counterblasts appeared from Cordova and Fez to southern
Arabia and Persia. But in that period appeared also an outcome of "Jewish
Sufism," and suggestive in places of Swedenborg the chef-d' auvre of rational
mysticism, the Yesirah, germane in its Kabbalistic root-ideas to Byzantine
image-symbolism and the contemporary magic of Greek "second-degree
Christianity," and equally so to the folk-religion of Islam.

1 Sec, for the following paragraphs, the articles "Jews," "Hebrew Religion," "Hebrew Lit-
erature," "Kabbalah," "Qaraites," etc., in Ency. Brit., XI ed. Tr.

2 Strunz, Gesch. dtr Naturwiss. im Mittelalttr, p. 89.

3 Only with Nicolaus Cusanus was this state of things reversed.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 317

But an entirely new situation was created when, from about the year 1000,
the Western portion of the Consensus found itself suddenly in the field of the
young Western Culture. The Jews, like the Parsees, the Byzantines, and the
Moslems, had become by then civilized and cosmopolitan, whereas the German-
Roman world lived in the townless land, and the settlements that had just come
(or were coming) into existence around monasteries and market-places were still
many generations short of possessing souls of their own. While the Jews were
already almost fellaheen, the Western peoples were still almost primitives.
The Jew could not comprehend the Gothic inwardness, the castle, the Cathedral;
nor the Christian the Jew's superior, almost cynical, intelligence and his finished
expertness in " money-thinking. ' ' There was mutual hate and contempt, due not
to race-distinction, but to difference of phase. Into all the hamlets and country
towns the Jewish Consensus built its essentially megalopolitan proletarian
ghettos. The Judengasse is a thousand years in advance of the Gothic town.
Just so, in Jesus's days, the Roman towns stood in the midst of the villages on
the Lake of Genesareth.

But these young nations were, besides, bound up with the soil and the idea
of a fatherland, and the landless "Consensus," which was cemented, not by
deliberate organization, but by a wholly unconscious, wholly metaphysical
impulse an expression of the Magian world-feeling in its simplest and directest
form appeared to them as something uncanny and incomprehensible. It was
in this period that the legend of the Wandering Jew arose. It meant a good deal
for a Scottish monk to visit a Lombard monastery, and nostalgia soon took
him home again, but when a rabbi of Mainz in 1000 the seat of the most
important Talmudic seminary of the West or of Salerno betook himself
to Cairo or Merv or Basra, he was at home in every ghetto. In this tacit cohesion
lay the very idea of the Magian nation 1 although the contemporary West
was unaware of the fact, it was for the Jews, as for the Greeks of the period
and the Parsees and Islam, State and Church and people all in one. This State
had its own jurisprudence and (what Christians never perceived) its own
public life, 2 and despised the surrounding world of the host-peoples as a sort
of outland; and it was a veritable treason-trial that expelled Spinoza and
Uriel Acosta an event of which these host-peoples could not possibly grasp
the under meaning. And in 1799 the leading thinker among the Eastern Hasi-
dim, Senior Salman, was handed over by the rabbinical opposition to the
Petersburg Government as though to a foreign state.

Jewry of the West-European group had entirely lost the relation to the open
land which had still existed in the Moorish period of Spain. There were no
more peasants. The smallest ghetto was a fragment, however miserable, of

1 P. 174-

1 The reader is recommended to study, in the light of all this, recent literature of the type of
Hajim Bloch's Golem and the works of the brothers Tharaud. TV.

3 i8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

megalopolis, and its inhabitants (like those of hardened India and China) split
into castes the Rabbi is the Brahmin or Mandarin of the ghetto and a
coolie-mass characterized by civilized, cold, superior intelligence and an un-
deviating eye to business. But this phenomenon, again, is not unique if our
historical sense takes in the wider horizon, for all Magian nations have been in
this condition since the Crusade period. The Parsee in India possesses exactly
the same business-power as the Jews in the European- American world and the
Armenians and Greeks in southern Europe. The same phenomenon occurs in
every other Civilization, when it pushes into a younger milieu witness the
Chinese in California (where they are the targets of a true Anti-Semitism of
western America), in Java, and in Singapore; that of the Indian trader in
East Africa; and that of the Romans in the Early Arabian World. In the last
instance, indeed, the conditions were the exact reverse of those of to-day, for
the "Jews "of those days were the Romans, and the Aramasan felt for them an
apocalyptic hatred that is very closely akin to our West-European Anti-Semi-
tism. The outbreak of 88, in which, at a sign from Mithridates, a hundred
thousand Roman business-people were murdered by the exasperated population
of Asia Minor, was a veritable pogrom.

Over and above these oppositions there was that of race, which passed
from contempt into hate in proportion as the Western Culture itself caught up
with the Civilization and the "difference of age," expressed in the way of
life and the increasing primacy of intelligence, became smaller. But all this
has nothing to do with the silly catchwords "Aryan" and "Semite" that have
been borrowed from philology. The "Aryan" Persians and Armenians are in
our eyes entirely indistinguishable from the Jews, and even in South Europe
and the Balkans there is almost no bodily difference between the Christian and
Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish nation is, like every other nation of the
Arabian Culture, the result of an immense mission, and up to well within the
Crusades it was changed and changed again by accessions and secessions en
masse. 1 One part of Eastern Jewry conforms in bodily respects to the Christian
inhabitants of the Caucasus, another to the South-Russian Tatars, and a large
portion of Western Jewry to the North African Moors. What has mattered in
the West more than any other distinction is the difference between the race-ideal of
the Gothic springtime, 2 which has bred its human type, and that of the Sephardic
Jew, which first formed itself in the ghettos of the West and was likewise the
product of a particular spiritual breeding and training under exceedingly hard
external conditions to which, doubtless, we must add the effectual spell of
the land and people about him, and his metaphysical defensive reaction to that
spell, especially after the loss of the Arabic language had made this part of the
nation a self-contained world. This feeling of being "different" is the more
potent on both sides, the more breed the individual possesses. It is want of race,
1 Sec pp. 159, et scq.; 174, et scq. 2 P. n?-

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 319

and nothing else, that makes intellectuals philosophers, doctrinaires.
Utopists incapable of understanding the depth of this metaphysical hatred,
which is the beat-difference of two currents of being manifested as an unbearable
dissonance, a hatred that may become tragic for both, the same hatred as has
dominated the Indian Culture in setting the Indian of race against the Sudra.
During the Gothic age this difference is deep and religious, and the object of
hatred is the Consensus as religion; only with the beginning of the Western
Civilization does it become materialist, and begin to attack Jewry on its in-
tellectual and business sides, on which the West suddenly finds itself confronted
by an even challenger.

But the deepest element of separation and bitterness has been one of which
the full tragedy has been least understood. While Western man, from the days
of the Saxon emperors to the present, has (in the most significant sense of the
words) lived his history, and lived it with a consciousness of it that no other
Culture can parallel, the Jewish Consensus ceased to have a history at all. 1
Its problems were solved, its inner form was complete, conclusive, and un-
alterable. For it, as for Islam, the Greek Church, and the Parsees, centuries
ceased to mean anything, and consequently no one belonging inwardly to the
Consensus can even begin to comprehend the passion with which Faustians
livingly experience the short crowded epochs in which their history and destiny
take decisive turns the beginning of the Crusades, the Reformation, the
French Revolution, the German Wars of Liberation, and each and every turn-
ing-point in the existence of the several peoples. All this, for the Jew, lies
thirty generations back. Outside him history on the grand style flowed on and
past. Epochs succeeded to epochs, every century witnessed fundamental human
changes, but in the ghetto and in the souls of its denizens all stood still. And
even when he regarded himself as a member of the people amongst whom he
sojourned and took part in their good and evil fortune as happened in so
many countries in 1914 he lived these experiences, not really as something his
own, but as a partisan, a supporter; he judged them as an interested spectator,
and hence it is just the deepest meanings of the struggle that must ever remain
hidden from him. A Jewish cavalry-general fought in the Thirty Years' War
(he lies buried in the old Jewish cemetery at Prague 2 ) but what did the ideas
of Luther or Loyola mean to him? What did the Byzantines near relatives
of the Jews comprehend of the Crusades ? Such things are among the tragic
necessities of the higher history that consists in the life-courses of individual
Cultures, and often have they repeated themselves. The Romans, then an
ageing people, cannot possibly have understood what was at issue for the Jews
in the trial of Jesus or the rising of Barcochebas. 3 The European- American

1 P. 48.

2 Prague contains a veritable corpus of commentary upon these pages. Tr.

3 A.D. 131. See Ency. Brit,, XI ed., Vol. XV, p. 401, and Vol. Ill, p. 395. Tr.

3 xo THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

world has displayed a complete incomprehension of the fellah-revolutions
of Turkey (1908) and China (1911); the inner life and thought of these peoples,
and consequently, even their notions of state and sovereignty (the Caliph in
the one, the Son of Heaven in the other) being of an utterly different cast and,
therefore, a sealed book, the course of events could neither be weighed up,
nor even reckoned upon in advance. The member of an alien Culture can be a
spectator, and therefore also a descriptive historian of the past, but he can never
be a statesman, a man who feels the future working in him. If he does not
possess the material power to enable him to act in the cadre of his own Culture,
ignoring or manipulating those of the alien (which, of course, may occur,
as with the Romans in the young East or Disraeli in England), he stands helpless
in the midst of events. The Roman and the Greek always mentally projected
the life-conditions of his Polis into the alien event; the modern European
always regards alien Destinies in terms of constitution, parliament, and democ-
racy, although the application of such ideas to other Cultures is ridiculous
and meaningless; and the Jew of the Consensus follows the history of the
present (which is nothing but that of the Faustian Civilization spread over
continents and oceans) with the fundamental feelings of Magian mankind,
even when he himself is firmly convinced of the Western character of
his thought.

As every Magian Consensus is non-territorial and geographically unlim-
ited, it involuntarily sees in all conflicts concerning the Faustian ideas of
fatherland, mother tongue, ruling house, monarchy, constitution, a return
from forms that are thoroughly alien (therefore burdensome and meaningless)
to him towards forms matching with his own nature. Hence the word "in-
ternational," whether it be coupled with socialism, pacificism, or capitalism,
can excite him to enthusiasm, but what he hears in that word is the essence of
his landless and boundless Consensus. While for the European- American de-
mocracy constitutional struggles and revolutions mean an evolution towards
the Civilized ideal, for him they mean (as he almost never consciously realizes)
the breaking-down of all that is of other build than himself. Even when the
force of the Consensus in him is broken and the life of his host-people exercises
an outward attraction upon him to the point of an induced patriotism, yet the
party that he supports is always that of which the aims are most nearly com-
parable with the Magian essence. Hence in Germany he is a democrat and in
England (like the Parsee in India) an imperialist. It is exactly the same mis-
understanding as when West Europeans regard Young Turks and Chinese re-
formers as kindred spirits that is, as "constitutionalists." If there is
inward relationship, a man affirms even where he destroys; if inward alienness,
his effect is negative even where his desire is to be constructive. What the
Western Culture has destroyed, by reform-efforts of its own type where it has
had power, hardly bears thinking of; and Jewry has been equally destructive

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 311

where it has intervened. The sense of the inevitablencss of this reciprocal
misunderstanding leads to the appalling hatred that settles deep in the blood
and, fastening upon visible marks like race, mode of life, profession, speech,
leads both sides to waste, ruin, and bloody excesses wherever these conditions
occur. 1

This applies also, and above all, to the religiousness of the Faustian world,
which feels itself to be threatened, hated, and undermined by an alien meta-
physic in its midst. From the reforms of Hugh of Cluny and St. Bernard and
the Lateran Council of 1x15 to Luther, Calvin, and Puritanism and thence to
the Age of Enlightenment, what a tide flowed through our waking-conscious-
ness, when for the Jewish religion history had long ceased altogether! Within
the West-European Consensus we see Joseph Qaro in his Schulehan Arukh (1565)
restating the Maimonides material in another form, and this could equally
well have been done in 1400 or 1800, or for that matter not at all. In the fixity
of modern Islam of Byzantine Christianity since the Crusades (and, equally,
of the life of Late China and of Late Egypt) all is formal and rolled even, not
only the food-prohibitions, the prayer-runes, the phylacteries, but also the
Talmudic casuistry, which is fundamentally the same as that applied for cen-
turies to the Vendidad in Bombay and the Koran in Cairo. The mysticism,
too, of Jewry (which is pure Sufism) has remained, like that of Islam, unaltered
since the Crusades; and in the last centuries it has produced three more saints
in the sense of Oriental Sufism though to recognize them as such we have
to see through a colour-wash of Western thought-forms. Spinoza, with his
thinking in substances instead of forces and his thoroughly Magian dualism,
is entirely comparable with the last stragglers of Islamic philosophy such as
Murtada and Shirazi. He makes use of the notions of his Western Baroque
armoury, living himself into mode of imagination of that milieu so thoroughly
as to deceive even himself, but below the surface movements of his soul he
remains the unchanged descendant of Maimonides and Avicenna and Talmudic
"more geometrico " methodology. In Baal Shem, the founder of the Hasidim
sect (born in Volhynia about 1698), a true Messiah arose. His wanderings
through the world of the Polish ghettos teaching and performing miracles
are comparable only with the story of primitive Christianity; 2 here was a
movement that had its sources in ancient currents of Magian, Kabbalistic
mysticism, that gripped a large part of Eastern Jewry and was undoubtedly a
potent fact in the religious history of the Arabian Culture; and yet, running
its course as it did in the midst of an alien mankind, it passed practically un-
noticed by it. The peaceful battle that Baal Shem waged for God-immanent

1 Instances besides that of Mithradatcs and the Cyprus massacre (p. 198) quoted above
arc the Sepoy Mutiny in India, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and the Bolshevist fury of Jews,
Letts, and other alien peoples against Tsarist Russia.

2 P. Lcvcrtoff, Die religiose Denkweise derChassidim (1918), pp. 118, et scq.; M. Bubcr, Die Le&ende
4es Baalschtm (1907). [Brief account in J. and J. Tharaud, Petite histoire des Juifs, Ch. vii. Tr.]

32-z THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

against the Talmudic pharisees of his time, his Christlike figure, the wealth
of legends that were rapidly woven about his person and the persons of his
disciples all this is of the pure Magian spirit, and at bottom as alien to us of
the West as primitive Christianity itself. The thought-processes of Hasidist
writings are to non-Jews practically unintelligible, and so also is the ritual.
In the excitement of the service some fall into convulsions and others begin to
dance like the dervishes of Islam. 1 The original teaching of Baal Shem was
developed by one of the disciples in Zaddikism, and this too, which was a
belief in successive divine embassies of saints (Zaddiks), whose mere proximity
brought salvation, has obvious kinship with Islamic Mahdism and still more
with the Shiite doctrine of the imams in whom the "Light of the Prophet "
takes up its abode. Another disciple, Solomon Maimon of whom a re-
markable autobiography exists stepped from Baal Shem to Kant (whose
abstract kind of thought has always possessed an immense attraction for Tal-
mudic intellects). The third is Otto Weininger, whose moral dualism is a
purely Magian conception and whose death in a spiritual struggle of essentially
Magian experience is one of the noblest spectacles ever presented by a Late
religiousness. 2 Something of the sort Russians may be able to experience, but
neither the Classical nor the Faustian soul is capable of it.

In the "Enlightenment " of the eighteenth century the Western Culture in
turn becomes megalopolitan and intellectual, and so, suddenly, accessible to
the intelligentsia of the Consensus. And the latter, thus dumped into the middle
of an epoch corresponding, for them, to the remote past of a long-expired
Sephardic life-current, were inevitably stirred by echo-feelings, but these echoes
were of the critical and negative side only, and the tragically unnatural outcome
was that a cohesion already historically complete and incapable of organic
progress was swept into the big movement of the host-peoples, which it shook,
loosened, displaced, and vitiated to its depths. For, for the Faustian spirit,
the Enlightenment was a step forward along its own road a step over debris,
no doubt, but still affirmative at bottom whereas for Jewry it was destruc-
tion and nothing else, the demolition of an alien structure that it did not un-
derstand. And this is why we so often see the spectacle paralleled by the
case of the Parsees in India, of the Chinese and Japanese in a Christian milieu,
and by modern Americans in China of enlightenment, pushed to the point
of cynicism and unqualified atheism, opposing an alien religion, while the
fellah-practices of its own folk go on wholly unaffected. There are Socialists
who superficially and yet quite sincerely combat every sort of religion,
and yet in their own case follow the food-prohibitions and routine prayers
and phylacteries with an anxious exactitude. More frequent actually is inward
lapse from the Consensus qua creed the spectacle that is presented to us by

1 Lcvertoff, op. cit., p. 136.

2 O. Wciningcr, Taschcnbuch (1919), above all pp. 19, ct seq.

PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL 32.3

the Indian student who, after an English university-training in Locke and Mill,
acquires the same cynical contempt for Indian and Western faiths alike and must
himself be crushed under the ruins of both. Since the Napoleonic era the old-
civilized Consensus has mingled unwelcome with the new-civilized Western
"society" of the cities and has taken their economic and scientific methods
into use with the cool superiority of age. A few generations later, the Japanese,
also a very old intellect, did the same, and probably with still greater success.
Yet another example is afforded by the Carthaginians, a rear-guard of the Baby-
lonian Civilization, who, already highly developed when the Classical Culture
was still in the Etrusco-Doric infancy, ended by surrendering to Late Hellenism l
petrified in an end-state in all that concerned religion and art, but far superior
to the Greeks and Romans as men of business, and hated accordingly.

To-day this Magian nation, with its ghetto and its religion, itself is in
danger of disappearing not because the metaphysics of the two Cultures
come closer to one another (for that is impossible), but because the intellectual-
ized upper stratum of each side is ceasing to be metaphysical at all. It has
lost every kind of inward cohesion, and what remains is simply a cohesion for
practical questions. The lead that this nation has enjoyed from its long habitua-
tion to thinking in business terms becomes ever less and less (vis-b-vis the Ameri-
can, it has already almost gone), and with the loss of it will go the last potent
means of keeping up a Consensus that has fallen regionally into parts. In the
moment when the civilized methods of the European-American world-cities
shall have arrived at full maturity, the destiny of Jewry at least of the Jewry
in our midst (that of Russia is another problem) will be accomplished.

Islam has soil under it. It has practically absorbed the Persian, Jewish,
Nestorian, and Monophysite Consensus into itself. 2 The relic of the Byzantine
nation, the modern Greeks, also occupy their own land. The relic of the Par-
sees in India dwells in the midst of the stiffened forms of a yet older and more
fellahized Civilization and is thereby secured in its footing. But the West-
European-American part of the Jewish Consensus, which has drawn to itself
and bound to its destiny most of the other parts of Jewry, has now fallen into
the machinery of a young Civilization. Detached from any land-footing since,
centuries ago, it saved its life by shutting itself off in the ghetto, it is fragmented
and faced with dissolution. But that is a Destiny, not in the Faustian Culture,
but of the Magian.

1 Their ship-building was in Roman times more Classical than Phoenician, their state was or-
ganized as a Polis, and their educated people, like Hannibal, were familiar with Greek.

2 See p. z6o, ct scq.

CHAPTER X
THE STATE

(A)

THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES NOBILITY
AND PRIESTHOOD

CHAPTER X

THE STATE

(A)
THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD

I 1

A FATHOMLESS secret of the cosmic Sowings that we call Life is their separation
into two sexes. Already in the earth-bound existence-streams of the plant
world they are trying to part from one another, as the symbol of the flower
tells us into a something that is this existence and a something that keeps it
going. Animals are free, little worlds in a big world the cosmic closed
off as microcosms and set up against the macrocosm. And, more and more
decisively as the animal kingdom unfolds its history, the dual direction of dual
being, of the masculine and the feminine, manifests itself.

The feminine stands closer to the Cosmic. It is rooted deeper in the earth
and it is immediately involved in the grand cyclic rhythms of Nature. The
masculine is freer, more animal, more mobile as to sensation and understand-
ing as well as otherwise more awake and more tense.

The male livingly experiences Destiny, and he comprehends Causality, the
causal logic of the Become. The female, on the contrary, is herself Destiny and
Time and the organic logic of the Becoming, and for that very reason the prin-
ciple of Causality is for ever alien to her. Whenever Man has tried to give
Destiny any tangible form, he has felt it as of feminine form, and he has called
it Moirai, Parcas, Norns. The supreme deity is never itself Destiny, but always
either its representative or its master just as man represents or controls
woman. Primevally, too, woman is the seeress, and not because she knows the
future, but because she is the future. The priest merely interprets the oracle;
the woman is the oracle itself, and it is Time that speaks through her.

The man makes History, the woman is History. Here, strangely clear yet
enigmatic still, we have a dual significance of all living happenings on the
one hand we sense cosmic flow as such, and on the other hand the chain and
train of successive individuals brings us back to the microcosms themselves as
the recipients, containers, and preservers of the flowing. It is this "second"
history that is characteristically masculine political, social, more conscious,
freer, and more agitated than the other. It reaches back deep into the animal
world, and receives highest symbolic and world-historical expression in the
Hfe-courses of the great Cultures. Feminine, on the contrary, is the primary,

1 Cf. p. 3 and foot-note.
32-7

3 i8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the eternal, the maternal, the plantlike (for the plant ever has something
female in it), the cultureless history of the generation-sequence, which never alters,
but uniformly and stilly passes through the being of all animal and human
species, through all the short-lived individual Cultures. In retrospect, it is
synonymous with Life itself. This history, too, is not without its battles and
its tragedies. Woman in childbed wins through to her victory. The Aztecs
the Romans of the Mexican Culture honoured the woman in labour as a
battling warrior, and if she died, she was interred with the same formulas as
the fallen hero. Policy for Woman is eternally the conquest of the Man,
through whom she can become mother of children, through whom she can
become History and Destiny and Future. The target of her profound shyness,
her tactical finesse, is ever the father of her son. The man, on the contrary,
whose centre of gravity lies essentially in the other kind of History, wants
that son as his son, as inheritor and carrier of his blood and historical tradition.

Here, in man and in woman, the two kinds of History are fighting for power.
Woman is strong and wholly what she is, and she experiences the Man and the
Sons only in relation to herself and her ordained role. In the masculine being,
on the contrary, there is a certain contradiction; he is this man, and he is
something else besides, which woman neither understands nor admits, which
she feels as robbery and violence upon that which to her is holiest. This
secret and fundamental war of the sexes has gone on ever since there were
sexes, and will continue silent, bitter, unforgiving, pitiless while they
continue. In it, too, there are policies, battles, alliances, treaties, treasons.
Race-feeling of love and hate, which originate in depths of world-yearning and
primary instincts of directedness, prevail between the sexes and with a still
more uncanny potency than in the other History that takes place between man
and man. There are love-lyrics and war-lyrics, love-dances and weapon-dances,
there are two kinds of tragedy Othello and Macbeth. But nothing in the
political world even begins to compare with the abysses of a Clytasmnestra's or
a Kriemhild's vengeance.

And so woman despises that other History man's politics which
she never comprehends, and of which all that she sees is that it takes her sons
from her. What for her is a triumphant battle that annihilates the victories
of a thousand childbeds? Man's history sacrifices woman's history to itself,
and no doubt there is a female heroism too, that proudly brings the sons to the
sacrifice (Catherine Sforza on the walls of Imola), but nevertheless there was
and is and ever will be a secret politic of the woman of the female of the
animal world even that seeks to draw away her male from his kind of his-
tory and to weave him body and soul into her own plantlike history of generic
succession that is, into herself. And yet all that is accomplished in the man-
history is accomplished under the battle-cries of hearth and home, wives and
children, race and the like, and its very object is the covering and upholding of

NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD 3x9

this history of birth and death. The conflict of man and man is ever on account
of the blood, of woman. Woman, as Time, is that for which there is history at all.

The woman with race in her feels this even when she does not know it.
She is Destiny, she plays Destiny. The play begins with the fight of men for
the possession of her Helen, and the tragedy of Carmen, and Catherine II,
and the story of Napoleon and Desir6e Clary, who in the end took Bernadotte
over to the side of his enemies and it is not a human play only, for this fight
begins down in the animal world and fills the history of whole species. And it
culminates in her swaying, as mother or wife or mistress, the Destiny of em-
pires Hallgerd in the Njal saga, the Prankish queen Brunhilde, Marozia
who gave the Holy See to men of her choice. The man climbs up in his history
until he has the future of a country in his hands and then woman comes
and forces him to his knees. Peoples and states may go down in ruin over it,
but she in her history has conquered. This, in the last analysis, is always the
aim of political ambition in a woman of race. 1

Thus history has two meanings, neither to be blasphemed. It is cosmic or
politic, it is being or it preserves being. There are two sorts of Destiny, two
sorts of war, two sorts of tragedy public and private. Nothing can eliminate
this duality from the world. It is radical, founded in the essence of the animal
that is both microcosm and participant in the cosmic. It appears at all sig-
nificant conjunctures in the form of a conflict of duties, which exists only for
the man, not for the woman, and in the course of a higher Culture it is never
overcome, but only deepened. There are public life and private life, public
law and private law, communal cults and domestic cults. As Estate, 2 Being
is "in form" for the one history; as race, breed, it is in flow as itself the other
history. This is the old German distinction between the "sword side" and the
"spindle side" of blood-relationships. The double significance of directional
Time finds its highest expression in the ideas of the State and the Family.

The ordering of the family is in living material what the form of the house
is in dead. 3 A change in the structure and import of family life, and the plan

1 And not until women cease to have race enough to have or to want children, not until they
cease to be history, does it become possible for them to make or to copy the history of men. Con-
versely, it is deeply significant that we are in the habit of calling thinkers, doctrinaires, and humanity-
enthusiasts of anti-political tendency "old women." They wish to imitate the other history, the
history of woman, although they cannot.

2 No exact equivalent exists in common English for the German word "Stand." "Aristocracy"
is too narrow, as under most aspects the clergy and under some even the Tiers have to be reckoned in.
"Class" fails because, for logical completeness, it has to be stretched so as to bring in the qualita-
tively unclassed as a distinct category. (A whole social history is contained in the use of these and
similar words at different periods.) The word "Estate" itself is used nowadays for the "masses"
("Fourth Estate" = "Proletariat"), but this very use, by Socialists, is an assertion that the masses,
as workers, possess a qualitative peculiarity and condition of their own, and the word thus continues
to connote ideas of differentiation, specific constitution, and oriented outlook. It may, therefore,
be employed here without fear of misunderstanding or reproach of pedantry. Tr.

3 Cf. pp. 110., et scq.

33 o THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

of the house changes also. To the Classical mode of housing corresponds the
agnate family of Classical style. This is ever more sharply defined in Hellenic
city-law than in the later Roman. 1 It refers entirely to the Estate as present
in a Euclidean here-and-now, just as the Polis is conceived as an aggregate of
bodies availably present. Blood-relationship, therefore, is neither necessary
nor sufficient for it; it ceases at the limit of f atria potestas, of the "house."
The mother as such is not agnatically related to the offspring of her own body;
only in so far as, like them, she is subject to the patria potestas of her living
husband is she the agnatic sister of her children. 2 To the "Consensus," on the
other hand, corresponds the Magian cognate family (Hebrew, " Misbpasha"')
which is representatively extended by both the paternal and the maternal
blood-relationships, and possesses a "spirit," a little consensus, of its own,
but no special head. 3 It is significant of the extinction of the Classical soul and
the unfolding of the Magian that the "Roman" law of Imperial times gradually
passes from agnatio to cognatio. Justinian's u8th and iiyth novels reforming
the law of inheritance affirm the victory of the Magian family-idea. 4

On the other side, we see masses of individual beings streaming past, grow-
ing and passing, but making history. The purer, deeper, stronger, more taken-
for-granted the common beat of these sequent generations is, the more blood,
the more race they have. Out of the infinite they rise, every one with its soul, 5
bands that feel themselves in the common wave-beat of their being, as a whole
not mind-communities like orders, craft-guilds, or schools of learning, which
are linked by common truths, but blood-confederates in the melee of fighting
life.

There are streams of being which are "in form" in the same sense in which
the term is used in sports. A field of steeplechasers is "in form" when the legs
swing surely over the fences, and the hoofs beat firmly and rhythmically on the
flat. When wrestlers, fencers, ball-players are "in form," the riskiest acts
and moves come off easily and naturally. An art-period is in form when its
tradition is second nature, as counterpoint was to Bach. An army is in form
when it is like the army of Napoleon at Austerlitz and the army of Moltke at
Sedan. Practically everything that has been achieved in world-history, in
war and in that continuation of war by intellectual means 6 that we call politics;

1 Mittcis, Rcichsreckt und Volksrecht (1891), p. 63.

2 Sohm, Institutional (1911), p. 614. [Ency. Brit., XI cd., Vol. XXIII, pp. 540-1. Tr.]

1 This principle formed the basis of the dynastic-idea of the Arabian world (Ommayads, Com-
neni, Sassanids), which is so hard for us to grasp. When a usurper had seized a throne, he hastened
to marry one or another of the female members of the blood-community and so prolonged the dy-
nasty; of law-made succession rights there was no question, nor under this idea could there be. (Sec
also J. Wcllhauscn, Ein Gemeinwescn ohne Obrigkeit, (1900).

4 Sec Ency. Brit., XI cd., Vol. XXIII, p. 574. Tr.

6 See p. 18.

6 An inversion of Clausewitz's famous expression that war is a continuation of policy by other
means. (On War, I, i, 14). Tr.

NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD 331

in all successful diplomacy, tactics, strategy; in the competition of states or
social classes or parties; has been the product of living unities that found
themselves "in form."

The word for race- or breed-education is "training" (Zucht, Zuchtung), as
against the shaping (Bildung) which creates communities of waking-con-
ciousness on a basis of uniform teachings or beliefs. Books, for example, are
shaping agents, while the constant felt pulse and harmony of milieu into which
one feels oneself, lives oneself like a novice or a page of early Gothic times
are training influences. The "good form" and ceremonies of a given society
are sense-presentations of the beat of a given species of Being, and to master
them one must have the beat of them. Hence women, as more instinctive and
nearer to cosmic rhythms, adapt themselves more readily than men to the forms
of a new milieu. Women from the bottom strata move in elegant society with
entire certainty after a few years and sink again as quickly. But men alter
slowly, because they are more awake and aware. The proletarian man never
becomes wholly an aristocrat, the aristocrat never wholly a proletarian
only in the sons does the beat of the new milieu make its appearance.

The profounder the form, the stricter and more repellent it is. To the
outsider, therefore, it appears to be a slavery; the member, on the contrary,
has a perfect and easy command of it. The Prince de Ligne was, no less than
Mozart, master of the form and not its slave; and the same holds good of
every born aristocrat, statesman, and captain.

In all high Cultures, therefore, there is a peasantry, which is breed, stock, in
the broad sense (and thus to a certain extent nature herself), and a society which
is assertively and emphatically "in form." It is a set of classes or Estates, and
no doubt artificial and transitory. But the history of these classes and estates
is world-history at highest potential. It is only in relation to it that the peasant
is seen as historyless. The whole broad and grand history of these six millen-
nia has accomplished itself in the life-courses of the high Cultures, because
these Cultures themselves placed their creative foci in Estates possessing breed
and training, and so in the course of fulfilment became trained and bred. A
Culture is Soul that has arrived at self-expression in sensible forms, but these
forms are living and evolving. 1 Their matrix is in the intensified Being of
individuals or groups that is, in that which I have just called Being "in
form." And when, and not until, this Being is sufficiently formed to that
high Tightness, it becomes representative of a representable Culture. 2

This Culture is not only a grand thing, but wholly unlike any other thing
in the organic world. It is the one point at which man lifts himself above
the powers of Nature and becomes himself a Creator. Even as to race, breed,

1 Not excluding art, although we arc not conscious of them save through deduction from art-
bistory.

2 Original: "Sit licgen im gesteigcrtcn Dascin van Ein^elnen und Kreisen, then in dem, was soelcn
' Dascin in Form' genannt warden ist, und durch dicse Hohe des Geformtscins erst die Kultur refrasentirt."

33* THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

he is Nature's creature he is bred. But, as Estate, he breeds himself just as
he breeds the noble kinds of animal-plant with which he surrounds himself
and that process, too, is in the deepest and most final sense "Culture." Culture
and class l are interchangeable expressions; they arise together and they vanish
together. The breeding of select types of wines or fruit or flowers, the breeding
of blood horses, is Culture, and the culture, in exactly the same sense, of the
human elite arises as the expression of a Being that has brought itself into high
"form."

For that very reason, there is found in every Culture a sharp sense of whether
this or that man belongs thereto or not. The Classical notion of the Bar-
barian, the Arabian of the Unbeliever (Amhaarez, Giaour), the Indian of the
Sudra however differently the lines of cleavage were arrived at are alike
in that the words do not primarily express contempt or hatred, but establish
that there are differences in pulse of Being which set an impassable barrier
against all contacts on the deeper levels. This perfectly clear and unambiguous
idea has been obscured by the Indian concept of a "fourth caste," which caste,
as we know now, has never existed at all. 2 The Code of Manu, with its cele-
brated regulations for the treatment of the Sudra, is the outcome of the fully
developed state of fellahdom in his India, and irrespective of practical
actualities under either existing or even obtainable legislation described the
misty idea of Brahmanism by the negative mode of dealing with its opposite,
very much as the Late Classical philosophy used the notion of the working
Banausos. The one has led us into misunderstanding caste as a specifically
Indian phenomenon, the other to a basically false idea of the attitude of Classical
man towards work.

In all such cases what really confronts us is the residue which does not count
for the inward life of the Culture and its symbolism, and is in principle left
out of every really significant classification, somewhat as the "outcast" is
ignored in the far East. The Gothic expression "corpus christianum" indicates
explicitly in its very terms that the Jewish Consensus does not belong to it.
In the Arabian Culture the other-believer is merely tolerated within the re-
spective domains of the Jewish, the Persian, the Christian, and, above all, the
Islamic, nations, and contemptuously left to his own administration and his
own jurisdiction. In the Classical World it was not only barbarians that were
"outcasts" so also in a measure were slaves, and especially the relics of the
autochthonous population like the Penestse in Thessaly and the Helots of Sparta,
whom their masters treated in a way that reminds us of the conduct of the
Normans in Anglo-Saxon England and the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic
East. The Code of Manu preserves, as designations of Sudra classes, the names

1 So in the German, but sec foot-note p. 319. "Stand" would have expressed the sense bet-
ter. Tr.

2 R. Pick, Die so^iale Gliedtrung im nordostlichcn Indien %u Buddkas Zeit (1897), p. 101; K. Hille-
brandt, Alt-lnditn (1899), p. 81. [Also the article "Brahmanism," Ency. Brit., XI cd. Tr.]

NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD 333

of ancient peoples of the " Colonial" region of the Lower Ganges. (As Magadha
is amongst them, Buddha himself may have been a Sudra, like the "Czesar"
Asoka, whose grandfather Chandragupta was of the most humble origin.)
Others are names of callings, and this again reminds us that also in the West
and elsewhere certain callings were outcast the beggars, for example (who
in Homer are a class), smiths, singers, and the professional poor, who have
been bred literally en masse by the caritas of the Church and the benevolence of
laymen in the Early Gothic.

But, in sum, "caste" is a word that has been at least as much abused as it
has been used. There were no castes in the Old and Middle Kingdoms of
Egypt, nor in India before Buddha, nor in China before Han times. It is only
in very Late conditions that they appear, and then we find them in all Cultures.
From the XXIst Dynasty onwards (c. noo B.C.) Egypt was in the hands, now
of the Theban priest-caste, now of the Libyan warrior-caste; and thereafter
the hardening process went on steadily till the time of Herodotus whose
view of the conditions of his day as characteristically Egyptian is just as inac-
curate as our view of those prevailing in India. The distinction between Estate
and Caste is that between earliest Culture and latest Civilisation. In the rise of the
prime Estates noble and priest the Culture is unfolding itself, while the
castes are the expression of its definitive fellah-state. The Estate is the most
living of all, Culture launched on the path of fulfilment, "the form that living
must itself unfold." x The caste is absolute finished-ness, the phase in which
development has been succeeded by immutable fixation.

But the great Estates are something quite different from occupation-groups
like those of artisans, officials, artists, which are professionally held together
by technical tradition and the spirit of their work. They are, in fact, emblems
in flesh and blood, whose entire being, as phenomenon, as attitude, and as mode
of thought, possesses symbolic meaning. Within every Culture, moreover
while peasantry is a piece of pure nature and growth and, therefore, a completely
impersonal manifestation nobility and priesthood are the results of high
breeding and forming and therefore express a thoroughly personal Culture, which,
by the height of its form, rejects not merely barbarians, but presently also all
who are not of their status, as a residue regarded by the nobility as the
"people" and by clergy as the "laity." And this style of personality is the ma-
terial that, when the fellah-age arrives, petrifies into the type of a caste, which
thereafter endures unaltered for centuries. As in the living Culture race and
estate are in antithesis as the impersonal and the personal, in fellah-times
the mass and the caste, the coolie and the Brahmin, are in antithesis as the formless
and the formal. The living form has become formula, still possessing style, but
possessing it as stylistic rigidity. This petrified style of the caste is of an ex-
treme subtlety, dignity, and intellectuality, and feels itself infinitely superior

1 See Vol. I, p. 157. Tr.

334 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

to the developing mankind of a Culture we can hardly form an idea of
the lofty height from which the Mandarin or the Brahmin looks down upon
European thoughts and actions, or how fundamentally the Egyptian priest
must have despised a visiting Pythagoras or Plato. It moves impassive through
time with the Byzantine dignity of a soul that has left all its problems and
enigmas far behind it.

In the Carolingian pre-Culture men distinguished Knechte, Freie, and Edle.
This is a primitive differentiation based merely on the facts of external life.
But in Early Gothic times it runs:

God hath shapen lives three,

Boor and knight and priest they'be. 1

Here we have status-differences of a high Culture that has just awakened.
And the stole and the sword stand together in face of the plough in strongest
assertiveness as estates vis-b-vis the rest, the Non-Estate, that which, like them-
selves, is fact, but, unlike themselves, fact without deeper significance. The
separation, inward and felt, is so destined, so potent, that no understanding
can ignore it. Hatred wells up out of the villages, contempt flashes back from
the castles. Neither possession nor power nor calling produced this abyss
between the "lives." Logical justification for it there is none. It is meta-
physical nature.

Later, with the cities, but younger than they, burgherdom, bourgeoisie, arises
as the "Third Estate." The burgher, too, now looks with contempt upon the
countryside, which lies about him dull, unaltered, and patient, and in contrast
to which he feels himself more awake and freer and therefore further advanced
on the road of the Culture. He despises also the primary estates, " squire and
parson," as something lying intellectually below him and historically behind
him. Yet, as compared with these two, the burgher is, as the boor was, a
residue, a non-estate. In the minds of the "privileged" the peasant hardly now
counts at all the burgher counts, but as an opposite and a background. He
is the foil against which the others become conscious of their own significance
and of the fact that this significance is something lying outside all practical
considerations. When we find that in all Cultures the same occurs in exactly
the same form, and that, however different the symbolism of one Culture from
that of another, their history fulfils itself everywhere in and by opposition of
these groups impulsive peasant wars in the Springtime, intellectually-based
civil wars in the later period then it is evident that the meaning of the facts
must be looked for in the deepest foundations of Life itself.

1 Got ht driu leben geschaffen

Gebure, ritter, fhaffen.
[Note the collective ge- attached to the first-named. TV.]

NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD 335

It is an idea that lies at the base of these two prime Estates, and only these.
It gives them the potent feeling of a rank derived from a divine investiture and
therefore beyond all criticism a standing which imposes self-respect and self-
consciousness, but the sternest self-discipline as well (and death itself if need
be), as a duty and imbues both with the historical superiority, the soul-magic,
that does not draw upon power but actually generates it. Those who
inwardly, and not merely nominally belong to these Estates are actually
something other than the residue; their lives, in contrast to those of burgher
and peasant, are sustained in every part by a symbolic dignity. These lives do
not exist in order to be merely lived, but to have meaning. It is the two sides of
all freely moving life that come to expression in these Estates; the one is wholly
being, the other wholly waking-consciousness.

Every nobility is a living symbol of Time, every priesthood of Space. Destiny
and sacred Causality, History and Nature, the When and the Where, race
and language, sex-life and feeling-life all these attain in them to the highest
possible expression. The noble lives in a world of facts, the priest in one of
truths; the one has shrewdness, the other knowledge; the one is a doer, the
other a thinker. Aristocratic world-feeling is essentially pulse-sense; priestly
world-feeling proceeds entirely by tensions. Between the time of Charlemagne
and that of Conrad II something formed itself in the time-stream that cannot
be elucidated, but has to be felt if we are to understand the dawn of the new
Culture. There had long been noblemen and ecclesiastics, but then first and
not for long there were nobility and clergy, in the grand sense of the words
and the full force of their symbolic significance. 1 So mighty is this onset of a
symbolism that at first all other distinctions, such as those of country, people,
and language, fall into the background. In all the lands from Ireland to Calabria
the Gothic hierarchy was a single great community; the Early Classical
chivalry before Troy, or the Early Gothic before Jerusalem, seems to us as of
one great family. The old Egyptian nomes and the feudal states of the first
Chou times appear, in comparison with such Estates as these (and because of
the comparison) just as colourless as Burgundy and Lorraine in the Hohenstaufen
period. There is a cosmopolitan condition both at the beginning and at the
end of every Culture, but in the first case it exists because the symbolic might
of aristocratic-hierarchic forms still towers above those of nationality, and
in the second because the formless mass sinks below them.

The two Estates in principle exclude one another. The prime opposition of

1 The case with which Bolshevism extinguished the four so-called estates or classes of Pctrine
Russia nobles, merchants, small townspeople, and peasants shows that these were mere imi-
tations and administrative conveniences, and destitute of all symbolism for symbolism no power
on earth can choke. They correspond to the outward differences of rankf and possessions that existed
in the Visigothic and Prankish Kingdoms, and as glimpses afforded by the earliest parts of the
Iliad show in Mycenaran times. It is reserved for the future to develop a true nobility and clergy
in Russia.

336 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

cosmic and microcosmic, which pervades all being that moves freely in space,
underlies this dual existence also. Each is possible and necessary only through
the other. The Homeric world maintained a conspiracy of hostile silence
towards the Orphic, and in turn (as we see from the Pre-Socratics) the former
became an object of anger and contempt for the latter. In Gothic times the
reforming spirits set themselves with a sacred enthusiasm across the path of
the Renaissance-natures. State and Church have never really come to equilib-
rium, and in the conflict of Empire and Papacy their opposition rose to an
intensity only possible for Faustian man.

Of the two, moreover, it is the nobility that is the true Estate, the sum of
blood and race, being-stream in the fullest imaginable form. And therefore
nobility is a higher peasantry. Even in 1x50 the West had a widespread proverb:
"One who ploughs in the forenoon jousts in the afternoon," and it was quite
usual for a knight to marry the daughter of a peasant. In contrast to the
cathedral, the castle was a development, by way of the country noble's house
of Prankish times, from the peasant-dwelling. In the Icelandic sagas peasants'
crofts are besieged and stormed like castles. Nobility and peasantry are plant-
like and instinctive, deep-rooted in the ancestral land, propagating themselves
in the family tree, breeding and bred. In comparison with them the priesthood
is essentially the counter-estate, the estate of negation, of non-race, of detach-
ment from earth of free, timeless, and history less waking-consciousness.
In every peasant village, in every peasant family from the Stone Age to the peaks
of the Culture, world-history plays itself out in little. Substitute for peoples
families, and for lands farms still the ultimate meaning of their strivings is
the same the maintenance of the blood, the succession of the generations,
the cosmic, woman, power. Macbeth and King Lear might perfectly well have
been thought out as village tragedies and the fact is a proof of their tragic
truth. In all Cultures nobility and peasantry appear in forms of family descent,
and language itself connects them with the sexes, through which life propa-
gates itself, has history, and is history. And as woman is history, the inward
rank of peasant and noble families is determined by how much of race their
women have in them, how far they are Destiny. And, therefore, there is deep
meaning in the fact that the purer and more race-pervaded world-history is, the
more the stream of its public life passes into and adapts itself to the private lives
of individual great families. This, of course, is the basis of the dynastic prin-
ciple, and not only that, but the basis of the idea of world-historical personality.
The existence of entire states comes to depend on a few private destinies, vastly
magnified. The history of Athens in the fifth century is in the main that of the
Alcmzonidas, the history of Rome is that of a few families of the type of the
Fabii or the Claudii. The history of states in the Baroque is, broadly speaking,
that of the operations of Habsburg and Bourbon family-politics, and its crises
take form as marriages and wars of succession. The history of Napoleon's

NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD 337

second marriage comprises also the burning of Moscow and the battle of Leipzig.
The history of the Papacy is, right into the eighteenth century, that of a few
noble families which competed for the tiara in order to found princely family-
fortunes. This is true equally of Byzantine dignitaries and English premiers
(witness the Cecils) and even, in numerous instances, of great revolution-
leaders.

Of all this the priesthood (and philosophy so far as it is priesthood) is the
direct negative. The Estate of pure waking-consciousness and eternal truths
combats time and race and sex in every sense. Man as peasant or noble turns
towards, man as priest turns away from, woman. Aristocracy runs the danger
of dissipating and losing the broad being-stream of public life in the petty
channels of its minor ancestors and relatives. The true priest, on the other
hand, refuses in principle to recognize private life, sex, family, the "house."
For the man of race death begins to be real and appalling only when it is death
without heirs Icelandic sagas no less than Chinese ancestor-worship teach
us this. He does not entirely die who lives on in sons and nephews. But for
the true priest media vita in morte sumus; what he shall bequeath is intellectual,
and rejected woman bears no part in it. The phenomenal forms of this second
Estate that occur again and again are celibacy, cloister, battlings with sex-
impulse fought to the extreme of self-emasculation, and a contempt for mother-
hood which expresses itself in orgiasm and hallowed prostitution, and not less
in the intellectual devaluation of sexual life down to the level of Kant's vile
definition of marriage. 1 Throughout the Classical world it was the rule that in
the sacred precinct, the Temenos, no one must be born or die. The timeless
must not come into contact with time. It is possible for the priest to have an
intellectual recognition of the great moments of generation and birth, and to
honour them sacramentally, but experience them he may not.

For while nobility is something, priesthood signifies something, and this
alone would be enough to tell us that it is the opposite of all that is Destiny
and Race and Estate. The castle, with its chambers and towers, walls and
moats, tells of a strong-flowing life, but the cathedral, with its vaulting and
pillars and choir, is, through and through, Meaning that is to say, Orna-
ment and every venerable priesthood has developed itself up to that marvel-
lous gravity and beauty of bearing in which every item, from facial expression
and voice-inflection to costume and walk, is ornament, from which private
life and even inward life have been eliminated as unessential whereas that
which a ripe aristocracy (such as that of eighteenth-century France) displays
and parades is a finished living. It was Gothic thought that developed out of
the priest-concept the character indelebilis, which makes the idea indestructible
and wholly independent of the worthiness of its bearer's life in the world-as-

1 As a treaty of reciproca! 7 possession by the two parties which is made effective by the recipro-
cal use of their sex-properties.

33 8 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

history but every priesthood, and consequently also all philosophy (in the
sense of the schools), contain it implicitly. If a priest has race, he leads an
outward existence like peasant, knight, or prince. The Pope and cardinals
of the Gothic period were feudal princes, leaders of armies, fond of the chase,
connoisseurs and adepts in family politics. Among the Brahmins of the pre-
Buddha "Baroque" were great landowners, well-groomed abbes, courtiers,
spendthrifts, gourmets. 1 But it was the early period that had learned to dis-
tinguish the idea from the person a notion diametrically opposed to the
essence of nobility and not until the Age of Enlightenment did the priest
come to be judged, as priest, by his private life, and then not because that age
had acquired sharper eyes, but because it had lost the idea.

The noble is the man as history, the priest is the man as nature. History of the
high kind is always the expression and effect of the being of a noble society;
and the criterion for the relative importance of its different events is always
the pulse of this stream of being. That is why the battle of Cannx matters
much and the battles of Late Roman emperors matter not at all. The coming of
a Springtime consistently coincides with the birth of a primary nobility, in
whose sentiments the prince is merely "primus inter pares" and an object of
mistrust. For not only does a strong race not need the big individual, but
his existence is a reflection upon its worth; hence vassal-wars are pre-eminently
the form in which the history of Early periods fulfils itself, and thenceforth the
nobility has the fate of the Culture in hand. With a creative force that is all
the more impressive because it is silent, Being is brought into form and "con-
dition." The pulse in the blood is heightened and confirmed, and for good.
For what this creative rise to living form is to the Spring every Spring
the might of tradition is for the Late every Late period namely, the old
firm discipline, the life-beat, so sure that it outlives the extinction of all the
old families and continually draws under its spell new men and new being-
streams out of the deep. Beyond a shadow of doubt, all the history of Late
periods, in respect of form and beat and tempo, is inherent (and irrevocably so)
in the very earliest generations. Its successes are neither more nor less than the
strength of the tradition in the blood. In politics, as in all other great and
mature arts, success presupposes a being in high condition, a great stock of
pristine experiences unconsciously and unquestioningly stored up as instincts
and impulses. There is no other sort of political maestria but this. The big
individual is only something better than an incident, only master of the future,
in that he is effective (or is made effective), is Destiny (or has Destiny), in and
through this form. This is what distinguishes necessary from superfluous art
and therefore, also, historically necessary from unnecessary politics. It matters
little if many of the big men come up out of the "people" (that is, the aggre-
gate of the traditionless) into the governing stratum, or even if they arc the
1 Oldcnbcrg, Die Lehre dtr Upanisbadtn (j.^i^) t p. 5.

NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD 339

only ones left to occupy it the great tide of tradition takes charge of them,
all unwitting, forms their intellectual and practical conduct, and rules their
methods. And this tradition is nothing but the pulse of ancient and long-
extinguished lines.

But Civilization, the real "return to Nature," is the extinction of nobility
not as physical stock (which would not matter), but as living tradition
and the supplanting of destiny-pulse by causal intelligence. With this, no-
bility becomes no more than a prefix. And, for that very reason, Civilized
history is superficial history, directed disjointedly to obvious aims, and so
become formless in the cosmic, dependent on the accident of great individuals,
destitute of inward sureness, line, and meaning. With Cassarism history re-
lapses back into the historyless, the old beat of primitive life, with endless and
meaningless battles for material power, such as those of the Roman soldier-
emperors of the third century and the corresponding "Sixteen States" of China
(z65~4io), which differ only in unessentials from the events of beast-life in a
jungle.

It follows from this that true history is not "cultural" in the sense of anti-
political, as the philosophers and doctrinaires of all commencing Civilizations
assert. On the contrary, it is breed history, war history, diplomatic history,
the history of being-streams in the form of man and woman, family, people,
estate, state, reciprocally defensive and offensive in the wave-beat of grand
facts. Politics in the highest sense is life, and life is -politics. Every man is willy-
nilly a member of this battle-drama, as subject or as object there is no
third alternative. The kingdom of the spirit is not of this world. True, but it
presupposes it, as waking-being presupposes being. It is only possible as a
consistent saying of "no" to the actuality that nevertheless exists and, indeed,
must exist before it can be renounced. Race can dispense with language, but
the very speaking of a language is an expression of antecedent race, 1 as are
religions and arts and styles of thought and everything else that happens in the
history of the spirit and that there is such a history is shown by the power
that blood possesses over feeling and reason. For all these are active waking-
consciousness "in form," expressive, in their evolution and symbolism and pas-
sion, of the blood (again the blood) that courses through these forms in the
waking-being of generation after generation. A hero does not need to know any-
thing at all of this second world he is life through and through but a saint
can only by the severest asceticism beat down the life that is in him and gain
solitary communion with his spirit and his strength for this again comes from
life itself. The hero despises death and the saint life, but in the contrast between
the heroism of great ascetics and martyrs and the piety of most (which is of

1 P. 114.

340 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

the kind described in Revelation iii, 16 *) we discover that greatness, even in
religion, presupposes Race, that life must be strong indeed to be worthy of
such wrestlers. The rest is mere philosophy.

For this very reason nobility in the world-historical sense is much more than
comfortable Late periods consider it; it is not a sum of titles and privileges and
ceremonies, but an inward possession, hard to acquire, hard to retain worth,
indeed, for those who understand, the sacrifice of a whole life. An old family
betokens not simply a set of ancestors (we all have ancestors), but ancestors
who lived through whole generations on the heights of history; who not
merely had Destiny, but were Destiny; in whose blood the form of happening
was bred up to its perfection by the experience of centuries. As history in the
grand sense begins with the Culture, it was mere panache for a Colonna to
trace back his ancestry into Late Roman times. But it was not meaningless
for the grandee of Late Byzantium to derive himself from Constantine, nor is it
so for an American of to-day to trace his ancestry to a Mayflower immigrant of
i6zo. In actual fact Classical nobility begins with the Trojan period and not
the Mycenxan, and the Western with the Gothic and not the Franks and Goths

in England with the Normans and not the Saxons. Only from these real
starting-points is there History, and, therefore, only from then can there be an
original aristocracy, as distinct from nobles and heroes. That which in the first
chapter of this volume 2 1 called cosmic beat or pulse receives in this aristocracy
its fulfilment. For all that in riper times we call diplomatic and social "tact"

which includes strategic and business flair, the collector's eye for precious
things, and the subtle insight of the judge of men and generally all that
which one has and does not learn; which arouses the impotent envy of the rest
who cannot participate; which as "form" directs the course of events; is noth-
ing but a particular case of the same cosmic and dreamlike sureness that is visibly
expressed in the circlings of a flock of birds or the controlled movements of a
thoroughbred horse.

The priest circumscribes the world-as-nature and deepens his picture of it by
thinking into it. The noble lives in the world-as-history and deepens it by
altering its picture. Both evolve towards the great tradition, but the evolution
of the one comes of shaping and that of the other from training. This is a
fundamental difference between the two Estates, and consequently only one of
them is truly an Estate, and the other only appears to be such because of the com-
pleteness of the contrast. The field of effect of breed and training is the blood,
and they pass on, therefore, from the fathers to the sons. Shaping (Bildung),
on the other hand, presupposes talents, and consequently a true and strong
priesthood is always a sum of individual gifts a community of waking-

1 "So, then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thce out of my
mouth."

2 P. 4, et scq.

NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD 341

consciousness having no relation to origin in the race sense; and thus, in this
respect as in others, it is a negation of Time and History. Intellectual affinity
and blood-affinity ponder and probe into the depths of these contrasted
expressions! Heritable priesthood is a contradiction in terms. It existed in-
deed, in a sense, in Vedic India, but the basis of that existence was the fact
that there was a second nobility, which reserved the privilege of priesthood to
the gifted members of its own circle. 1 And elsewhere celibacy made an end even
of this much infringement of principle. The "priest in the man" whether
the man be noble or not stands for a focus of sacred Causality in the world.
The priestly power is itself of a causal nature, brought about by higher causes
and itself in turn an efficient cause. The priest is the middleman in the timeless
extended that is stretched taut between the waking-consciousness and the
ultimate secret; and, therefore, the importance of the clergy in each Culture is
determined by its prime-symbol. The Classical soul denies Space and therefore
needs no middleman for dealings with it, and so the Classical priesthood dis-
appears in its very beginnings. Faustian man stands face to face with the In-
finite, nothing a priori shields him from the crushing force of this aspect, and
so the Gothic priesthood elevated itself to the heights of the Papal idea.

As two world-outlooks, two modes of blood-flow in the veins and of thought
in the daily being and doing, are interwoven, there arise in the end (in every
Culture) two sorts of moral, of which each looks down upon the other
namely, noble custom, and priestly askesis, reciprocally censured as worldly
and as servile. It has been shown already 2 how the one proceeds from the
castle and the other from the cloister and the minster, the one from full being
in the flood of History and the other, aloof therefrom, out of pure waking-
consciousness in the ambiance of a God-pervaded nature. The force with which
these primary impressions act upon men is something that later periods will be
unable even to imagine. The secular and the spiritual class-feeling are starting
on their upward career, and cutting out for themselves an ethical class-ideal
which is accessible only to the right people, and even to them only by way of
long and strict schooling. The great being-stream feels itself as a unit as against
the residue of dull, pulseless, and aimless blood. The great mind-community
knows itself as a unit as against the residue of uninitiated. These units are the
band of heroes and the community of saints.

It will always remain the great merit of Nietzsche that he was the first to
recognize the dual nature of all moral. 3 His designations of "master-" and
"slave-" moral were inexact, and his presentation of "Christianity" placed it
much too definitely on the one side of the dividing line, but at the basis of all his
opinions this lies strong and clear, that good and bad are aristocratic, and good and

1 The case of Egypt is of course similar. Tr.

2 Pp. zyi, et seq.

3 Jenseits von Gut und Base, z6o.

34 i THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

evil priestly, distinctions. Good and bad, which arc Totcmistic distinctions
among primitive groups of men and tribes, describe, not dispositions, but men,
and describe them comprehensively in respect of their living-being. The good
are the powerful, the rich, the fortunate. Good means strong, brave, thorough-
bred, in the idiom of every Springtime. Bad, cheap, wretched, common, in the
original sense, are the powerless, propertyless, unfortunate, cowardly, negli-
gible the "sons of nobody" as ancient Egypt said. 1 Good and evil, Taboo
concepts, assign value to a man according to his perceptions and reason
that is, his waking disposition and his conscious actions. To offend against
love-ethic in the race sense is ungentle, to sin against the Church's love-com-
mand is wicked. The noble habit is the perfectly unconscious result of a long
and continuous training. It is learned in intercourse and not from books. It is
a felt rhythm, and not a notion. But the other moral is enunciated, ordered
on the basis of cause and consequence, and therefore learnable and expressive
of a conviction.

The one is historical through and through, and recognizes rank-distinctions
and privileges as actual and axiomatic. Honour is always class-honour
there is no such thing as an "honour of humanity." The duel is not an obli-
gation of unfree persons. Every man, be he Bedouin or Samurai or Corsican,
peasant or workman, judge or bandit, has his own binding notions of honour,
loyalty, courage, revenge, that do not apply to other kinds of life. Every life
has custom-ethic it is unthinkable without it. Children have it already in
their play; they know at once, of themselves, what is fitting. No one has laid
down these rules, but they exist. They arise, quite unconsciously, out of the
"we" that has formed itself out of the uniform pulse of the group. Here, too,
each being is "in form." Every crowd that, under one or another stimulus,
has collected in the street has for the moment its own ethic, and anyone who
does not absorb it and stand for it as self-evident to say "follow it" would
presume more rationality in the action than there is is a poor, mean creature,
an outsider. Uneducated people and children possess an astonishingly fine
reactivity to this. Children, however, are also required to learn the Catechism,
and in it they hear about the good and evil that are laid down and are any
thing rather than self-evident. Custom-ethic is not that which is true, but that
which is there; it is a thing of birth and growth, feeling and organic logic.
Moral, in contrast to this, is never actuality (for, if it were, all the world would
be saintly), but an eternal demand hanging over the consciousness and, ex
hyfothesi, over that of all men alike, irrespective of all differences of actual life
and history. And, therefore, all moral is negative and all custom-ethic affirma-
tive. In the latter "devoid of honour" is the worst, in the former "devoid of
sin" is the highest, that can be said of anyone.

The basic concept of all living custom-ethic is honour. Everything else
1 In contrast, the Spanish word "Hidalgo" means "son of somebody." Tr.

NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD 343

loyalty, modesty, bravery, chivalry, self-control, resolution is comprised
in it. And honour is a matter of the blood and not of the reason. One does not
reflect on a point of honour that is already dishonour. To lose honour
means to be annulled so far as Life and Time and History are concerned. The
honour of one's class, one's family, of man and woman, of one's people and one's
country, the honour of peasant and soldier and even bandit honour means
that the life in a person is something that has worth, historical dignity, del-
icacy, nobility. It belongs to directional Time, as sin belongs to timeless Space.
To have honour in one's body means about the same as to have race. The
opposite sort are the Thersites-natures, the mud-souled, the riff-raff, the "kick-
me-but-let-me-live's." To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail
before an enemy all these are signs of a life become worthless and super-
fluous. But this is not at all the same thing as priestly moral, for that moral does
not cleave to life at any cost of degradation, but rather rejects and abstains
from life as such, and therefore incidentally from honour. As has been said
already, every moral action is, at the very bottom, a piece of askesis and a killing
of being. And eo ipso it stands outside the field of life and the world of history.

Here it is necessary to anticipate somewhat, and to consider whence it is
that world-history (especially in the Late periods of the grand Cultures and
the beginnings of the Civilizations) derives its rich variety of colour and the
profound symbolism of its events. The primary Estates, nobility and clergy,
are the purest expressions of the two sides of life, but they are not the only
ones. In very early times often, indeed, foreshadowed in the Primitive
Age itself yet other being-streams and waking-linkages break forth, in
which the symbolism of Time and Space comes to living'expression, and which,
when (and not until) combined with these two, make up the whole fullness
of what we call social organisation or society.

While Priesthood is microcosmic and animal-like, Nobility is cosmic and
plantlike (hence its profound connexion with the land). It is itself a plant,
strongly rooted in the soil, established on the soil in this, as in so many
other respects, a supreme peasantry. It is from this kind of cosmic boundness
that the idea of property arises, which to the microcosm as such, freely moving
in space, is wholly alien. Property is a primary feeling and not a concept; it
belongs to Time and History and Destiny, and not to Space and Causality.
It cannot be logically based, but it is there. 1 "Having" begins with the plant,
and propagates itself in the history of higher mankinds just to the precise
extent that history contains plant-character and race. Hence property in the
most genuine sense is always ground-property, and the impulse to convert

1 Conversely, it can successfully be controverted and often has been so in the Chinese and
Classical, Indian and Western philosophies but it does not get abolished.

344 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

other acquisitions into ground and soil is an evidence of sound stock. The
plant possesses the ground in which it roots. It is its property, 1 which it defends
to the utmost, with the desperate force of its whole being, against alien seeds,
against overshadowing neighbour plants, against all nature. So, too, a bird
defends the nest in which it is hatching. The bitterness fights over property
occur not in the Late periods of great Cultures, between rich and poor, and
about movable goods but here in the beginnings of the plant-world. When,
in a wood, one feels all about one the silent, merciless battle for the soil that
goes on day and night, one is appalled by the depth of an impulse that is almost
identical with life itself. Here is a yearlong, tenacious, embittered wrestle,
a hopeless resistance of the weak against the strong, that goes on to the point
that the victor too is broken such as is only paralleled in the most primitive
of mankind when an old peasant-family is expelled from the clod, from the nest,
or a family of noble stock is uprooted or, more truly, cut off from its roots, by
money. 2 The far more conspicuous conflicts in the later cities have quite
another meaning, for here in communism of all kinds it is not the ex-
perience of possessing, but the idea of property purely as material means that is
fought for. The negation of property is never race-impulse, but the doctrinaire
protest of the purely intellectual, urban, uprooted, anti-vegetal waking-con-
sciousness of saints, philosophers, and idealists. The same reason actuates
the monk of the hermitage and the scientific Socialist be his name Moh-ti,
Zeno, or Marx to reject the plantlike; the same feeling impels men of race
to defend it. Here, as ever, fact and truth are opposed. "Property is theft"
is the ultra-materialistic form of the old thought: "What shall it profit a man
if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" When the priest gives
up property, he is giving up something dangerous and alien; when a noble
does so, he is giving up himself.

This brings us to a duality of the property-idea feeling Having as power and
Having as spoil. Both, in primitive men of race, lie immediately together.
Every Bedouin or Viking intends both. The sea-hero is always a sea-robber
also; every war is concerned with possessions and, above all, possessions in
land. But a step, and the knight becomes the robber-knight, the adventurer
becomes conqueror and king, like Rurik the Norman in Russia and many an
Achasan and Etruscan pirate in Homeric times. In all heroic poetry we find,

1 The possession of movable things (food, equipment, arms) comes later, and is of much lower
symbolic weight. It occurs widely in the animal world.. The bird's nest, on the contrary, is a
property of plantlike kind.

2 Property in this most significant sense the having grown up with something refers there-
fore less to the particular person than to the family tree to which he belongs. In every quarrel within
a peasant or even within a princely family, this is the deep and violent element. The master for the
time being holds possession only in the name of the family line. Hence, too, the terror of death with-
out heirs. Property also is a Time-symbol, and consequently it is closely related to marriage, which is
a firm plantlike intergrowth and mutual possession of two human beings, so real as to be even
reflected in an increasing facial similarity.

NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD 345

side by side with the strong and natural satisfaction of winning battles and
power and women, and the unbridled outbursts of joy and grief, anger, and
love, the immense delight of "having." When Odysseus lands at home, the
first thing he does is to count the treasures in his boat, and when, in the Ice-
landic Saga, the peasants Hjalmar and Olvarod perceive each that the other
has no goods in his ship, they abandon their duel at once he who fights from
pride and for honour is a fool for his pains. In the Indian hero-epic, eagerness
for battle means eagerness for cattle, and the "colonizing" Greeks of the tenth
century were primarily corsairs like the Normans. On the high seas an alien
ship is a priori good prize. But out of the feuds of South-Arabian and Persian
Knights of A.D. 2.00, and the "private wars" of the Provencal barons of A. D. izoo
which were hardly more than cattle-raids there developed at the end of the
feudal period the war proper, the great war with acquisition of land and people
as its object. All this, in the end, brings the aristocratic Culture to the " top
of its form," while, correspondingly, priests and philosophers despise it.

As the Culture rises to its height, these two primary urges trend widely
apart, and hostility develops between them. The history of this hostility is almost
the same thing as world-history. From the feeling of power come conquest and -politics and
law; from that of spoil, trade and economy and money. Law is the property of the
powerful. Their law is the law of all. Money is the strongest weapon of the
acquiring: with it he subdues the world. Economics likes and intends a
state that is weak and subservient to it. Politics demands that economic life
shall adapt itself to and within the State Adam Smith and Friedrich List,
Capitalism and Socialism. All Cultures exhibit at the outset a war- and a
trade-nobility, then a land- and a money-nobility, and finally a military and
an economic war-management and a ceaseless struggle of money against law.

Equally, on the other hand, priesthood and learning separate out. Both are
directed towards, not the factual, but the true; both belong to the Taboo side
of life and to Space. Fear before death is the source, not merely of all religion,
but of all philosophy and natural science as well. Now, however, there de-
velops a profane Causality in contrast to the sacred. "Profane" is the new
counter-concept to "religious," which so far had tolerated learning only as a
handmaiden. The whole of Late criticism, its spirit, its method, its aims, are
profane and the Late theology, even, is no exception to the rule. But in-
variably, nevertheless, the learning of all Cultures moves in the forms of the
preceding priesthood thus showing that it is merely a product of the con-
tradiction itself, and how dependent it is and remains, in every particular, upon
the primary image. Classical science, therefore, lives in cult-communities
of the Orphic style, such as the school of Miletus, the Pythagorean society,
the medical schools of Croton and Cos, the Attic schools of the Academy, the
Peripatos, and the Stoa, every one of whose leaders belongs to the type of the
sacrificial priest and seer, and even the Roman legal schools of the Sabiniani

346 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

and Proculiani. The sacred book, the Canon is, scientifically as in other re-
spects, Arabian the scientific canon of Ptolemy (Almagest), the medical of
Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and the philosophical corpus designated "Aristotle," but
so largely spurious so also the (mostly unwritten) laws and methods of quo-
tation: * the Commentary as the form of thought-development; the universities
as cloisters (Medrashim) which provided teachers and students with cell, food,
and clothing; and tendencies in scholarship taking form as brotherhoods. The
learned world of the West possesses unmistakably the form of the Catholic
Church, and more particularly so in Protestant regions. The connecting link
between the learned orders of the Gothic period and the order-like schools
of the nineteenth century the schools of Hegel, of Kant, of historical juris-
prudence, and not a few of the English university colleges is formed by the
Maurists and Bollandists 2 of France, who from 1650 on mastered and largely
created the ancillary "science" of history. In all the specialist sciences (medi-
cine and lecture-room philosophy included) there are fully developed hierarchies
leading up to school-popes, grades, and dignities (the doctor's degree as an
ordination), sacraments and councils. The uninitiate is rigorously treated as
the "layman," and the idea of a generalized priesthood residing in the believers
themselves, which is manifested in "popular" science for example, Darwin-
ism is passionately combated. The language of learning was originally
Latin, but to-day all sorts of special languages have formed themselves which
(in the domain of radioactivity, for example, or that of the law of contract)
are unintelligible save to those who have received the higher initiation. There
are founders of sects, such as many of Kant's and Hegel's disciples were;
there are missionaries to the unbelievers, like the Monists. There are heretics,
like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, there is the weapon of the ban, and there is
the Index in the form of the Conspiracy of Silence. There are ethical truths
(for example, in Law the division of the objects into persons and things) and
dogmas (like that of energy and mass, or the theory of inheritance), a ritual in
the citation of orthodox writings, and even a scientific sort of beatification. 3

More, the savant-type of the West (which in the nineteenth century reached
its zenith, corresponding to the nadir of true priesthood) has brought to high
perfection the study as the cell of a profane monachism that has its unconscious
vows of Poverty, in the shape of honourable disdain for fat living and
wealth, and unfeigned contempt for the commercial professional and for all
exploitation of scientific results for gain; of Chastity, which has evolved a
veritable celibacy of science, with Kant as exemplar and culmination; and of
Obedience, even to the point of sacrificing oneself to the standpoint of the

1 Sec p. 148.

2 See these headings in Ency. Brit., XI. ed. Tr.

9 After death the teachers of error arc excluded from the eternal bliss of the text-book and cast
into the purgatorial fires of foot-notes, whence, purged by the intercession of the believer, they
ascend into the paradise of the paragraphs.

NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD 347

School. Further, and lastly, there is a sort of estrangement from the world
which is the profane echo of the Gothic flight from it, and leads to an almost
complete disregard of the life in public and the forms of good society little
"breeding," much too much "shaping." Nobility, even in its later rami-
fications the judge, the squire, the officer still retains the old root-strong
natural satisfaction in carrying on the stock, in possessions and honour, but the
scientist counts these things as little beside the possession of a pure scientific
conscience and the carrying on of a method or a view unimpaired by the com-
mercialism of the world. The fact that the savant to-day has ceased to be
remote from the world, and puts his science at the service of (not seldom, indeed,
most shrewdly applies it to) technics and money-making, is a sign that the pure
type is entering upon its decline and that the great age of intellectual optimism
that is livingly expressed in him belongs already to the past. i

In sum, we see that the Estates have a natural build which in its evolution
and action forms the basic structure of every Culture's life-course. No specific
decision made it; revolutions only alter it when they are forms of the evolution
and not results of some private will. It never, in its full cosmic significance,
enters the consciousness of men as doers and thinkers, because it lies too deep
in human being to be other than a self-evident datum. It is merely from the
surface that men take the catchwords and causes over which they fight on that
side of history which theory regards as horizontally layered, but which in
actuality is an aggregate of inseparable interpenetrations. First, nobility and
priesthood arise out of the open landscape, and figure the pure symbolism
of Being and Waking-Being, Time and Space. Then out of the one under the
aspect of booty, and out of the other under the aspect of research, there de-
velop doubled types of lower symbolic force, which in the urban Late periods
rise to prepotency in the shapes of economy and science. In these two being-
streams the ideas of Destiny and Causality are thought out to their limit,
unrelentingly and anti-traditionally. Forces emerge which are separated
by a deadly enmity from the old class-ideals of heroism and saintliness these
forces are money and intellect, and they are related to those ideals as the city to
the