CHAPTER X

THE STATE

(A)

THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES--NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD

I[569]

A fathomless secret of the cosmic flowings 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 understanding 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 principle 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, Parcæ,

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 life-courses of the great Cultures. Feminine, on the contrary,

is the primary, 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

formulæ 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

rôle. 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 Clytæmnestra’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 history 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 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 Désirée 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 empires--Hallgerd in the

Njal saga, the Frankish 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.[570]

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 significant

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,[571] 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.[572] A change in the structure and import of family

life, and the plan 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.[573] 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 _patria 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.[574] To the “Consensus,” on the other hand,

corresponds the Magian cognate family (Hebrew, “_Mishpasha_”) 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.[575] 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 118th and 127th novels reforming the law of inheritance

affirm the victory of the Magian family-idea.[576]

On the other side, we see masses of individual beings streaming past,

growing 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,[577] 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 mêlée 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[578] that

we call politics; 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_,

_Züchtung_), as against the shaping (_Bildung_) which creates

communities of waking-consciousness 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 millennia 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.[579] 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 rightness, it becomes representative of a representable

Culture.[580]

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, 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[581]

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 élite 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 Barbarian, 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.[582] The Code of Manu,

with its celebrated 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 respective

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 Penestæ 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 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 “Cæsar” 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._ 1100 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 inaccurate as our view of

those prevailing in India. _The distinction between Estate and Caste is

that between earliest Culture and latest Civilization._ 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.”[583] 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 material 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 extreme subtlety, dignity, and intellectuality,

and feels itself infinitely superior 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.

II

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.[584]

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-à-vis_ the rest,

the Non-Estate, that which, like themselves, 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

metaphysical 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.

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.[585] 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 Chóu 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 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

equilibrium, 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 1250 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 Frankish times,

from the peasant-dwelling. In the Icelandic sagas peasants’ crofts are

besieged and stormed like castles. Nobility and peasantry are plantlike

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 detachment from earth--of free, timeless,

and historyless 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 propagates 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 principle, 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 Alcmæonidæ, 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 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 motherhood

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.[586] 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, Ornament--and every

venerable priesthood has developed itself up to that marvellous

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-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 abbés, courtiers, spendthrifts,

gourmets.[587] But it was the early period that had learned to

distinguish 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 Cannæ 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 “condition.” 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 aggregate of the traditionless) into the governing stratum, or

even if they are the 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, nobility 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 Cæsarism history relapses 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

(265-420), which differ only in unessentials from the events of

beast-life in a jungle.

III

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,[588]

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 passion, 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 anything

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 the kind described in

Revelation iii, 16[589]) 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 1620. In actual fact Classical

nobility begins with the Trojan period and not the Mycenæan, 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[590] 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

nothing 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 completeness 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-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 indeed, 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.[591] 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 disappears in its very beginnings. Faustian man stands face

to face with the Infinite, 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[592] 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.[593] 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

evil priestly, distinctions_. Good and bad, which are Totemistic

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, thoroughbred, in the idiom of

every Springtime. Bad, cheap, wretched, common, in the original sense,

are the powerless, propertyless, unfortunate, cowardly, negligible--the

“sons of nobody” as ancient Egypt said.[594] 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-command 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 obligation 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 hypothesi_, 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 affirmative.

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--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, delicacy,

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 superfluous. 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.

IV

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 organization_ 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.[595] “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 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,[596] 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.[597] The far more conspicuous conflicts

in the later cities have quite another meaning, for here--in communism

of all kinds--it is not the experience 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-consciousness

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 Achæan and Etruscan

pirate in Homeric times. In all heroic poetry we find, 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 Icelandic Saga, the peasants Hjalmar and Ölvarod 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. 200, and the “private wars” of the Provençal barons of A.D.

1200--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 develops 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 invariably, nevertheless, the learning of all Cultures moves

in the forms of the preceding priesthood--thus showing that it is

merely a product of the contradiction 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 and Proculiani. The sacred book, the Canon

is, scientifically as in other respects, 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

quotation:[598] 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 jurisprudence,

and not a few of the English university colleges--is formed by the

Maurists and Bollandists[599] of France, who from 1650 on mastered

and largely created the ancillary “science” of history. In all the

specialist sciences (medicine 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, Darwinism--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.[600]

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 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 ramifications--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 commercialism 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.

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

develop 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

country. Henceforward property is called riches, and world-outlook

knowledge--a desanctified Destiny and a profane Causality. But science

is in contradiction with Nobility too, for this does not prove or

investigate, but _is_. “_De omnibus dubitandum_” is the attitude of a

burgher and not of an aristocrat, while at the same time it contradicts

the basic feeling of priesthood, for which the proper rôle of critique

is that of a handmaid. Economy, too, finds an enemy here, in the shape

of the ascetic moral which rejects money-getting, just as the genuine

land-based nobility despises it. Even the old merchant-nobility has in

many cases perished (e.g., Hanse Towns, Venice, Genoa), because with

its traditions it could not and would not fall in with the business

outlook of the big city. And, with all this, economy and science are

themselves at enmity; once more, in the conflicts of money-getting and

knowledge, _between counting-house and study_, business liberalism and

doctrinaire liberalism, we meet the old great oppositions of action and

contemplation, castle and cathedral. In one form or in another this

order of things emerges in the structure of every Culture--hence the

possibility of a comparative morphology in the social as in the other

aspects of history.

Wholly outside the category of the true Estates are the calling-classes

of the craftsmen, officials, artists, and labourers, whose organization

in guilds (e.g., of smiths in China, of scribes in Egypt, and of

singers in the Classical world) dates from pristine antiquity, and

who because of their professional segregation (which sometimes goes

as far as to cut off their _connubium_ with others) actually develop

into genuine tribes, as, for instance, the Falasha[601] of Abyssinia

and some of the Sudra classes named in Manu’s code. Their separation

is due merely to their technical accomplishments and therefore not

to their being vessels of the symbolism of Time and Space. Their

tradition, likewise, is limited to their techniques and does not refer

to a customary-ethic or a moral _of their own_, such as is always

found in economy and science as such. As derived from a nobility,

judges and officers are classes, whereas officials are a profession;

as derived from priesthood, scholars are a class, while artists are

a profession. Sense of honour, conscience, adhere in one case to the

status, in the other to the achievement. There is something, slight

though it may be, of symbolism in every category on the one side,

and none in any category on the other. And consequently something of

strangeness, irregularity, often disgrace, clings to them--consider,

for example, executioners, actors, and strolling singers, or the

Classical estimation of the artist. Their classes or guilds separate

from general society, or seek the protection of other orders of society

(or individual patrons and Mæcenases), but fit themselves in with that

society they cannot, and their inability to do so finds expression in

the guild-wars of the old cities and in uncouthness of every sort in

the instincts and manners of artists.

V

A history of estates or classes, ignoring in principle that of

profession-classes, is therefore a presentation of the metaphysical

element in higher mankind, so far as this rises to grand symbolism in

species of onflowing life, species in and along which the history of

the Cultures moves to fulfilment.

At the very beginning, the sharply defined type of the peasant is

something new. In Carolingian times, and under the Tsarist system of

the “Mir” in Russia,[602] there were freemen and hinds cultivating

the soil, _but no peasantry_. Only when there emerges the feeling

of being different from the two symbolic “lives”--Freidank’s

_Bescheidenheit_[603] comes into our minds--does this life become

an Estate, the _nourishing_ estate in the fullest sense of the

word, the root of the great plant Culture, which has driven its

fibres deep into Mother Earth and darkly, industriously, draws all

juices into itself and sends them to the upper parts, where trunks

and branches tower up in the light of history. It serves the great

lives not merely by the nourishment that it wins out of the soil

for them, but also with that other harvest of mother earth--its own

blood; for blood flowed up for centuries from the villages into

the high places, received there the high forms, and maintained the

high lives. The relation is called (from the noble’s point of view)

_vassalage_, and we find it arising--whatever the superficial causes

may be in each case--in the West between 1000 and 1400 and in the

other Cultures at the “contemporary” periods. The Helotry of Sparta

belongs with it, and equally so the old Roman _clientela_, from

which after 471 the _rural_ Plebs--that is, a free yeomanry--grew

up.[604] Astonishing indeed is the force of this striving towards

symbolic form in the Pseudomorphosis of the Late Roman East, where

the caste system of the principate founded by Augustus (with its

division into senatorial and equestrian officialdom) evolved backwards

until, about 300, it had returned, wherever the Magian world-feeling

prevailed, to a condition parallel to that of the Gothic in 1300--the

condition, in fact, of the Sassanid Empire of its own time.[605] Out

of the officialdom of a highly Civilized administration came a minor

nobility of decurions, village knights, and town politicians, who were

responsible to the sovereign in body and goods for all outgoings--a

feudalism formed backwards--and gradually made their positions

heritable, just as happened under the Egyptian Vth dynasty and the

first Chóu centuries[606] and the Europe of the Crusades. Military

status, of officers and soldiers alike, became hereditary in the same

way,[607] and service as a feudal obligation, and all the rest of

what Diocletian presently reduced to formal law. The individual was

firmly bound to the status (_corpori adnexus_), and the principle

was extended as compulsory guild-membership to all trades, as in the

Gothic or in old Egypt. But, above all, there necessarily arose from

the ruins of the Late Classical slave-economy of “Latifundia”[608] the

colonate of hereditary small farmers, while the great estates became

administrative districts and the lord was made responsible for its

taxes and its recruit-quota.[609] Between 250 and 300 the “colonus”

became legally bound to the soil (_adscriptus glebæ_). And with that

the differentiation of feudal lord and vassal _as class and class_[610]

was reached.

Every new Culture has potentially its nobility and its priesthood.

The apparent exceptions to this are due merely to the absence to

tangible tradition. We know to-day that a real priesthood existed in

ancient China[611] and we may assume as self-evident that there was

a priest-estate in the beginnings of Orphism in the eleventh century

B.C.--the more confidently as we have plain indications of it in the

epic figures of Calchas and Tiresias. Similarly the development of the

feudal constitution in Egypt presupposes a primitive nobility as early

as the IIIrd Dynasty.[612] But the form in which, and the force with

which, these Estates first realized themselves and then took charge

of the course of history--shaped it, carried it, and even represented

it in their own destinies--depend upon the Prime-symbol on which each

individual Culture, with its entire form-language, is based.

The nobility, wholly plantlike, proceeds everywhere from the land,

which is its primary property and with which it is fast bound. It

possesses everywhere the basic form of the family, the gens (in which,

therefore, the “other” gender of history, the feminine, is expressed

also), and it manifests itself through the will-to-duration--duration,

namely, of the blood--as the great symbol of Time and History. It

will appear that the early officialdom of the vassal state, based

on personal trustworthiness, everywhere--in China and Egypt, in

the Classical and the Western World--[613] goes through the same

development, first creating quasi-feudal court offices and dignities,

then seeking hereditary connexion with the soil, and so finally

becoming the origin of noble family-lines.

The Faustian will-to-infinity comes to expression in the _genealogical

principle_, which--strange as it may seem--is peculiar to this Culture.

And in this Culture, moreover, it intimately permeates and moulds all

the historical forms, and supremely those of the states themselves.

The historical sense that insists upon getting to know the destinies

of its own blood backwards through the centuries and seeing _archival_

proofs of dates and provenances up to the first ancestors; the

careful ordering of the genealogical tree, which is potent enough to

make present possession and inheritance dependent upon the fortunes

of a single marriage contracted perhaps five hundred years ago; the

conceptions of _pure blood_, birth-equivalence, _mésalliance_--all this

is will-to-direction in time, will towards Time’s remote distances.

There is no second example of it, save perhaps in the Egyptian

nobility, and there the comparable forms that were attained were far

weaker.

Nobility of the Classical style, on the contrary, relates to the

present estate of the agnatic family, and from it straight to a

_mythical_ origin, which does not imply the historical sense in

the least, but only a craving, sublimely regardless of historic

probability, for splendid backgrounds to the here and now of the

living. Only thus can we explain the otherwise baffling naïveté with

which an individual saw behind his grandfather Theseus and Heracles in

one plane, and fashioned himself a family tree (or several, perhaps,

as Alexander did), and the light-heartedness with which respectable

Roman families would forge the names of reputed ancestors into the

old consular lists. At the funeral of a Roman noble the wax masks of

great forefathers were introduced into the cortège, but it was only

for the number and sound of the famous names and not in the least on

account of any genealogical connexion with the present. This trait

appears throughout the Classical nobility, which like the Gothic

formed, structurally and spiritually, one inward unit from Etruria to

Asia Minor. On it rested the power that, even at the beginning of the

Late period, was still in the possession of order-like family-groupings

throughout the cities (phylæ, phratriæ, tribus, and what not) which

maintained a purely present membership and unity by means of sacral

forms--for example, the three Doric and the four Ionic phylæ, and

the three Etruscan tribes that appear in the earlier Roman history

as Tities, Ramnes, and Luceres. In the Vedas the “father-” and the

“mother-”souls had claims to soul-rites only in respect of three nearer

and three further generations,[614] after which the past claimed them;

and nowhere do we find the Classical cult of souls reaching any further

back than the Indian. It is the very reverse of the ancestor-worship

of the Chinese and the Egyptians, which was by hypothesis without end,

and therefore maintained the family in a definite ordering even beyond

bodily death. In China there still lives to-day a duke, Kong, who is

the descendant of Confucius and equally the descendant of Lao-tse, of

Chang-lu, and others. It is not a question of a many-branched tree, but

of carrying the line, the _tao_ of being, straight on--if necessary,

frankly by adoption (the adopted member, pledged to the ancestor-cult,

is thereby spiritually incorporated in the family) or other expedients.

An unbridled joy of life streams through the flourishing centuries of

this estate, _the_ Estate _par excellence_, which is direction and

destiny and race through and through. Love, because woman _is_ history,

and war because fighting _makes_ history, are the acknowledged foci

of its thoughts and feelings. The Northern skald-poetry and the

Southern _Minnesang_ correspond to the old love-songs of the Chinese

age of chivalry in the Shi-King,[615] which were sung in the Pi-Yung,

the places of noble training (_hiao_). And the ceremonial public

archery-displays, like the Early Classical agon, and the Gothic and the

Persian-Byzantine[616] tourney, were manifestations of the life on its

Homeric side.

In opposition to this side stands the _Orphic_--the expression

of the space-experience of a Culture through the style of its

priesthood. It was in accord with the Euclidean character of Classical

extension--which needed no intermediaries for intercourse with near

and corporeal gods--that in this case priesthood, from beginnings as

an estate, rapidly degenerated into city-officialdom. Similarly, it

was expressive of the Chinese _tao_ that the place of the original

hereditary priesthood came to be taken by professional classes of

praying men, scribes, and oracle-priests, who could accompany the

religious performances of the authorities and heads of families

with the prescribed rites. It was in conformity, again, with the

Indian world-feeling that lost itself in measureless infinity that

the priest-class there became a second nobility, which with immense

power, intruding upon every sort of life, planted itself between the

people and its wilderness of gods. It is an expression, lastly, of the

“cavern” feeling that the priest of true Magian cast is the monk and

the hermit, and becomes more and more so, while the secular clergy

steadily loses in symbolic significance.

In contrast to all these there is the Faustian priesthood, which, still

without any profound import or dignity in 900, rose up thereafter to

that sublime rôle of intermediary which placed it in principle between

humanity (_all_ humanity) and a macrocosm strained to all imaginable

expanse by the Faustian passion of the third dimension. Excluded from

history by celibacy and from time by its _character indelebilis_, it

culminated in the Papacy, which represented the highest symbol of God’s

dynamic Space that it was possible to conceive; even the Protestant

idea of a generalized priesthood has not destroyed it, but merely

decentralized it from one point and one person into the heart of each

individual believer.

The contradiction between being and waking-being that exists in every

microcosm necessarily drives the two Estates against one another.

Time seeks to absorb and subordinate Space, Space Time. Spiritual

and worldly power are magnitudes so different in structure and

tendency that any reconciliation, or even understanding, between them

seems impossible. But this conflict has not in all Cultures come to

world-historical expression. In China it promoted the _tao_ idea

that primacy should reside securely in an aristocracy. In India the

conception of Space as infinite-indefinite required a primacy of the

priesthood. In the Arabian Culture the Magian world-feeling involved

in principle the inclusion of the worldly visible society of believers

as a constituent in the grand consensus, and therefore the unity of

spiritual and temporal polity, law, and sovereignty. Not that there

was not friction between the two estates; far from it; in the Sassanid

Empire there were bloody feuds between the country aristocracy of the

Dikhans and the party of the Magi--even in some instances murders

of sovereigns--and in Byzantium the whole fifth century is full

of the struggles between the Imperial power and the clergy, which

from an ever-present background to the Monophysite and Nestorian

controversies.[617] But the basic interconnexion of the two orders was

not in dispute.

In the Classical world, which abhorred the infinite in every sense,

Time was reduced to the present and Extension to tangible unit-bodies;

as the result, the grand symbolic estates became so voided of meaning

that, as compared with the city-state, which expressed the Classical

prime-symbol in the strongest imaginable form, they did not count as

independent forces at all. In the history of Egyptian mankind, on the

other hand, which is the history of striving with equal force towards

distances of time and of space, the struggle of the two estates and

their symbolisms is constantly recognizable right into the period of

complete fellahdom. For the transition from the IVth to the Vth Dynasty

is accompanied also by a visible triumph of the priestly over the

knightly world-feeling; the Pharaoh, from being the body and vessel of

the supreme deity, becomes its servant, and the Re sanctuary overpowers

the tomb-temple of the ruler both in architectural and in suggestive

force. The New Empire witnessed, immediately after its great Cæsars,

the political autocracy of the Amen priesthood, Thebes, and then again

the revolution of the “heretic” king Amenophis IV (Akhenaton)--in

which one feels unmistakably a political as well as a religious

side--and so on until after interminable conflicts between warrior- and

priestly-castes, the Egyptian world ended in foreign domination.

In the Faustian Culture this battle between two high symbols of equal

force has been waged in somewhat the same spirit, but with far greater

passion still than in the Egyptian--so that, from the early Gothic

onward, only armistice, never peace, has seemed possible between State

and Church. But in this conflict the handicap against waking-being

tells--it would shake off its dependence upon being, but it cannot.

The mind needs the blood, but the blood does not need the mind. War

belongs to the world of time and history--_intellectual battle is only

a fight with reasons, only disputation_--and, therefore a _militant_

Church must step from the world of truths into the world of facts--from

the world of Jesus into that of Pilate. And so it becomes an element

in race-history and subject to the formative powers of the _political_

side of life. From early Feudalism to modern Democracy it fights with

sword and cannon, poison and dagger, bribery and treason, all the

weapons of party conflict in use at the time. It sacrifices articles

of belief to worldly advantages, and allies itself with heretics and

unbelievers against orthodox powers. The Papacy _as an idea_ has a

history of its own, but this bears no relation to the position of the

popes in the sixth and seventh centuries as Byzantine viceroys of

Syrian and Greek provenance; or to their later evolution into powerful

landowners, with crowds of subject peasants; or to the Patrimonium

Petri of the early Gothic--a sort of duchy in the possession of great

families of the Campagna (Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Frangipani),

which alternately set up the popes, until finally the general Western

feudalism prevailed here also, and the Holy See came to be an object of

investiture within the families of the Roman baronage, so that each new

pope, like a German or a French king, had to confirm the rights of his

vassals. In 1032 the Counts of Tusculum nominated a twelve-year-old boy

as pope. In those days eight hundred castle-towers stood up in the city

area of Rome amongst and upon the Classical ruins. In 1045 three popes

entrenched themselves in the Vatican, the Lateran, and Santa Maria

Maggiore respectively, and were defended by their noble supporters.

Now supervened the city with its own soul, first emancipating itself

from the soul of the countryside, then setting up as an equal to it,

and finally seeking to suppress and extinguish it. But this evolution

accomplished itself in _kinds of life_, and it also, therefore, is part

of the history of the estates. The _city-life_ as such emerges--through

the inhabitants of these small settlements acquiring a common soul,

and becoming conscious that the life within is something different

from the life outside--and at once the spell of _personal freedom_

begins to operate and to attract within the walls life-streams of

more and more new kinds. There sets in a sort of passion for becoming

urban and for propagating urban life. It is this, and not material

considerations, that produced the fever of the colonization period in

the Classical world, which is still recognizable to us in its last

offshoots, and which it is not quite exact to speak of as colonization

at all. For it was a creative enthusiasm in the man of the city that

from the tenth century B.C. (and “contemporaneously” in other Cultures)

drew generation after generation under the spell of a new life, with

which there emerges for the first time in human history the idea of

_freedom_. This idea is not of political (still less of abstract)

origin, but is something bringing to expression the fact that within

the city walls plantlike attachment to a soil has ceased, and that the

threads that run through the whole life of the countryside have been

snapped. And consequently the freedom-idea ever contains a negative;

it looses, redeems, defends, always frees a man _from_ something.

Of _this_ freedom the city is the expression; the city-spirit is

understanding become free, and everything in the way of intellectual,

social, and national movements that bursts forth in Late periods under

the name of Freedom leads back to an origin _in this one prime fact of

detachment from the land_.

But the city is older than the “citizen.” It attracts first the

calling-classes, which as such are outside the symbolic estates, and,

when urban, take form as guilds. Then it draws in the primary estates

themselves; the minor nobility moves its castles, the Franciscans their

cloisters, within the contour. As yet, not much is inwardly altered.

Not only Papal Rome, but all Italian cities of this time are filled

with the fortified towers of the families, who issued thence to fight

out their feuds in the streets. In a well-known fourteenth-century

picture of Siena these towers stand up like factory chimneys round the

market-place.[618] As for the Florentine palace of the Renaissance,

if, in respect of the bright life within, it is the successor of

Provençal courts, it is equally, with its “rusticated” façade, an

offshoot of the Gothic castles that the French and German knights were

still building on their hills. It was, in fact, only slowly that the

new life separated out. Between 1250 and 1450, throughout the West,

the immigrant families concentrated, _vis-à-vis_ the guilds, into the

patriciate, and in so doing detached themselves, spiritually as in

other respects, from the country nobility. It was exactly the same in

early China, Egypt, and the Byzantine Empire, and it is only in the

light of this that we become able to understand the older Classical

city-leagues (such as the Etruscan and, it may be, even the Latin) and

the sacral connexions of colonial daughter-cities with their mother

city. It was not the Polis as such, so far, that was the backbone

of events, but the patriciate of phylæ and phratriæ within it. _The

original Polis is identical with the nobility_, as Rome was up to 471,

and Sparta and the Etruscan cities throughout. Synœcism grew out of it,

and the city-state was formed by it. But here, as in other Cultures,

the difference between country- and city-nobility was at first quite

unimportant as compared with the strong and deep distinction between

the nobility (in general) and the residue.

The burgher proper emerges when the fundamental distinction between

town and country has brought the “families and the guilds,” in spite

of their otherwise implacable hostility to one another, to a sense

of unity _vis-à-vis_ the old nobility, the feudal system generally,

and the feudal position of the Church. The notion of the “Third

Estate” (to use the catchword of 1789) is essentially only a unit of

_contradiction_, incapable of definition by positive content, and

having neither customary-ethic of its own--for the higher bourgeois

society took after the nobility, and the urban piety after the older

priesthood--nor symbolism of its own--for the idea that life was not

for the service of practical aims, but for the consistent expression

of a symbolism of Time and Space, and could claim true dignity only

to the extent that it was the worthy vessel of these, was necessarily

repugnant to the urban reason as such. This reason, which dominates the

entire political literature of the Late period, asserts a new grouping

of estates as from the rise of cities--at first only in theory, but

finally, when rationalism becomes omnipotent, in practice, even the

bloody practice of revolutions. Nobility and clergy, so far as they are

still extant, appear rather markedly as _privileged_ classes, the tacit

significance of the emphasis being that their claim to prescriptive

rights on the ground of historical status is (from the point of view

of timeless rational or “natural” law) obsolete nonsense. They now

have their centre in the _capital city_ (this also a Late-period idea)

and now, and now only, develop aristocratic forms to that imposing

combination of hauteur and elegance that we see, for example, in the

portraits of Reynolds and Lawrence. In opposition to them stand the

intellectual powers of the now supreme city, _economy and science_,

which in conjunction with the mass of artisans, functionaries, and

labourers feel themselves as a party, diverse in its constituents, but

invariably solid at the call to battle for freedom--that is, for urban

independence of the great old-time symbols and the rights that flowed

from them. As components of the Third Estate, which counts by heads

and not by rank, they are all, in all Late periods of all Cultures,

“liberal” in one way or another--namely, free from the inward powers

of non-urban life. Economy is freed to make money, science freed to

criticize. And so in all the great decisions we perceive the intellect

with its books and its meetings having the word (“Democracy”), and

money obtaining the advantages (“Plutocracy”)--and it is never ideas,

but always capital, that wins. But this again is just the opposition of

truths and facts, in the form in which it develops from the city-life.

Moreover, by way of protest against the ancient symbols of the

soil-bound life, the city opposes to the aristocracy of birth the

notion of an aristocracy of money and an aristocracy of intellect--the

one not very explicit as a claim, but all the more effective as a fact;

the other a truth, but nothing more than that and, as a spectacle for

the eye, not very convincing. In every Late period there grows on to

the ancient nobility--that in which some big bit of history (say,

Crusades, or Norman conquest) has become stored as form and beat, but

which often has inwardly decayed at the great courts--a genuine second

crop. Thus in the fourth century B.C. the entry of great plebeian

families as _conscripti_ into the Roman Senate of _patres_ produced

within the senatorial order an aristocracy of “_nobiles_”--a nobility

holding lands, but entitled by office. In just the same way a nobility

of nepotism arose in Papal Rome; in 1650 there were scarcely fifty

families of more than three centuries’ status. In the Southern States

of the American Union there grew up, from Baroque times onward, that

planter-aristocracy which was annihilated by the money-powers of the

North in the Civil War of 1861-5. The old merchant-nobility of the type

of the Fugger, Welser, and Medici and the great Venetian and Genoese

houses--to this type, too, must be assigned practically the whole of

the patriciate of the Hellenic colonial cities of 800--had always

something of aristocracy in them,[619] race, tradition, high standards,

and the nature-impulse to re-establish connexion with the soil by

acquiring lands (although the old family house in town was no bad

substitute). But the new money-aristocracy of deals and speculations

rapidly acquired a taste for polite forms and at last forced its way

into the birth-nobility--in Rome, as Equites, from the first Punic War,

in France under Louis XIV[620]--which it disintegrated and corrupted,

while the intellectual aristocracy of the Enlightenment, for its part,

overwhelmed it with scorn. The Confucians took the old Chinese idea

of _Shi_ from the ethic of nobility and put it into the virtue of

intellect, and made the Pi-Yung, from a centre of knightly battle-play,

into an “intellectual wrestling-school,” a gymnasium--quite in the

spirit of our eighteenth century.

With the close of the Late period of every Culture the history of its

estates also comes to a more or less violent end. The mere desire

to live in rootless freedom prevails over the great imperative

Culture-symbols, which a mankind now wholly dominated by the city no

longer comprehends or tolerates. Finance sheds every trace of feeling

for earth-bound immovable values, and scientific criticism every

residue of piety. Another such victory also, in a measure, is the

liberation of the peasant, which consists in relieving him from the

pressure of servage, but hands him over to the power of money, which

now proceeds to turn the land into movable property--which happened

in our case in the eighteenth century; in Byzantium about 740 under

the Nomos Georgikos of the legislator Leo III[621] (after which the

colonate slowly disappeared); in Rome along with the founding of the

Plebeian order in 471. In Sparta the simultaneous attempt of Pausanias

to emancipate the Helots failed.

_This Plebs is the Third Estate in the form in which it is

constitutionally recognised as a unit_; its representatives are the

Tribunes, not officials, but trusted persons armed with a guaranteed

immunity. The reform of 471,[622] which _inter alia_ replaced the

old three Etruscan tribes by four urban tribes or wards (a highly

suggestive fact in itself), has been variously regarded as a pure

emancipation of peasantry[623] or as an organization of the trading

class.[624] But the Plebs, as Third Estate, as residue, is only

susceptible of negative definition--as meaning everyone who does

not belong to the land-nobility or is not the incumbent of a great

priestly office. The picture is as variegated as that of the French

“_Tiers État_” of 1789. Only the protest holds it together. In it are

traders, craftsmen, day-labourers, clerks. The gens of the Claudii

contained patrician _and_ plebeian families--that is, great landlords

and prosperous yeomen (for example, the Claudii Marcelli). The Plebs

in the Classical city-state is what a combination of peasant and

burgher is in a Baroque state of the West, when it protests in an

assembled states-general against the autocracy of a prince. Outside

politics--that is, socially--the plebs, as a unit distinguished from

nobility and priesthood, has no existence, but falls apart at once into

special callings that are perfectly distinct in interests. It is a

_Party_, and what it stands for as such is freedom in the urban sense

of the word. The fact emerges still more distinctly from the success

which the Roman land-nobility won immediately afterwards, in adding

sixteen country tribes, designated by family names and unchallengeably

controlled by themselves, to the four urban tribes that stood for

bourgeoisie proper--namely, money and mind. Not until the great social

conflict during the Samnite wars (contemporary with Alexander, and

corresponding exactly to the French Revolution), which ended with the

Lex Hortensia of 287, was the status-idea legally abolished and the

history of the symbolic Estates closed. _The Plebs became the Populus

Romanus_ in the same way as in 1789 the “_Tiers État_” constituted

itself the Nation. From this point on, in every Culture, it is

something fundamentally different that happens under the label of

social conflict.

The nobility of every Springtime had been _the_ Estate in the most

primary sense, history become flesh, race at highest potential. The

priesthood was its _counter-estate_, saying no wherever nobility said

yes and thus displaying the other side of life in a grand symbol.

The Third Estate, without proper inward unity, was the non-estate--the

protest, in estate-form, against the existence of estates; not against

this or that estate, but against the symbolic view of life in general.

It rejects all differences not justified by reason or practically

useful. And yet it does mean something itself, and means it very

distinctly--_the city-life as estate_ in contradistinction to that of

the country, _freedom as a condition_ in contrast to attachment. But,

looked at from within its own field, it is by no means the unclassified

residue that it appears in the eyes of the primary estates. The

bourgeoisie has definite limits; it belongs to the Culture; it

embraces, in the best sense, all who adhere to it, and under the name

of people, _populus, demos_, rallies nobility and priesthood, money and

mind, craftsman and wage-earner, as constituents of itself.

This is the idea that Civilization finds prevailing when it comes

on the scene, and this is what it destroys by its notion of the

Fourth Estate, _the Mass_, which rejects the Culture and its matured

forms, lock, stock, and barrel. It is the absolute of formlessness,

persecuting with its hate every sort of form, every distinction of

rank, the orderliness of property, the orderliness of knowledge. It

is the new nomadism of the Cosmopolis,[625] for which slaves and

barbarians in the Classical world, Sudras in the Indian, and in

general anything and everything that is merely human, provide an

undifferentiated floating something that falls apart the moment it is

born, that recognizes no past and possesses no future. Thus the Fourth

Estate becomes the expression of the passing of a history over into the

historyless. The mass is the end, the radical nullity.