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[1] 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.[2] 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
