other acquisitions into ground and soil is an evidence of sound stock. The plant possesses the ground in which it roots. It is its property,[1] which it defends to the utmost, with the desperate force of its whole being, against alien seeds, against overshadowing neighbour plants, against all nature. So, too, a bird defends the nest in which it is hatching. The bitterness fights over property occur — not in the Late periods of great Cultures, between rich and poor, and about movable goods — but here in the beginnings of the plant-world. When, in a wood, one feels all about one the silent, merciless battle for the soil that goes on day and night, one is appalled by the depth of an impulse that is almost identical with life itself. Here is a yearlong, tenacious, embittered wrestle, a hopeless resistance of the weak against the strong, that goes on to the point that the victor too is broken — such as is only paralleled in the most primitive of mankind when an old peasant-family is expelled from the clod, from the nest, or a family of noble stock is uprooted or, more truly, cut off from its roots, by money.[2] The far more conspicuous conflicts in the later cities have quite another meaning, for here — in communism of all kinds — it is not the 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,
- ↑ The possession of movable things (food, equipment, arms) comes later, and is of much lower symbolic weight. It occurs widely in the animal world. The bird's nest, on the contrary, is a property of plantlike kind.
- ↑ Property in this most significant sense — the having grown up with something — refers therefore less to the particular person than to the family tree to which he belongs. In every quarrel within a peasant or even within a princely family, this is the deep and violent element. The master for the time being holds possession only in the name of the family line. Hence, too, the terror of death without heirs. Property also is a Time-symbol, and consequently it is closely related to marriage, which is a firm plantlike intergrowth and mutual possession of two human beings, so real as to be even reflected in an increasing facial similarity.
