But these human beings possess also the microcosmic-animal side of life, in waking-consciousness and receptivity and reason. And the form in which the waking-consciousness of one man gets into relation with that of another I call language, which begins by being a mere unconscious living expression that is received as a sensation, but gradually develops into a conscious technique of communication that depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching to signs.
In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every language[1] the efficient form of one great waking-consciousness that connects many individual beings. And we shall never reach the ultimate discoveries about either unless they are treated together and constantly brought into comparison with one another.
But, further, we shall never understand man's higher history i£ we ignore the fact that man, as constituent of a race and as possessor of a language, as derivative of a blood-unit and as member of an understanding-unit, has different Destinies, that of his being and that of his waking-being. That is, the origin, development, and duration of his race side and the origin, development, and duration of his language side are completely independent of one another. Race is something cosmic and psychic (Seelenhaft), periodic in some obscure way, and in its inner nature partly conditioned by major astronomical relations.
Languages, on the other hand, are causal forms, and operate through the polarity of their means. We speak of race-instincts and of the spirit of a language. But they are two distinct worlds. To Race belong the deepest meanings of the words "time" and "yearning"; to language those of the words "space" and "fear." But all this has been hidden from us, hitherto, by the overlying idea of "peoples."
There are, then, currents of being and linkages of waking-being. The former have physiognomy, the latter are based on system. Race, as seen in the picture of the world-around, is the aggregate of all bodily characters so far as these exist for the sense-perceptions of conscious creatures. Here we have to remember that a body develops and fulfils from childhood to old age the specific inner form that was assigned to it at the moment of its conception, while at the same time that which the body is (considered apart from its form) is perpetually being renewed. Consequently nothing of the body actually remains in the man except the living meaning of his existence, and of this all that we know is so much as presents itself in the world of waking-consciousness. Man of the higher sort is limited, as to the impression of race that he can receive, almost wholly to what appears in the light-world of his eye, so that for him race is essentially a sum of visible characters. But even for him there are not
- ↑ Henceforward, and indeed throughout this work, the word "language" is not to be regarded as limited to spoken and written language. As the above definition indicates, it includes all modes of intelligible conscious-expression — "affective language" in the widest sense. — Tr.
