Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/143

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PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES
127

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

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

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