Note 250 — Chapter III · THE TWO ELEMENTS IN POETRY

Bastian, in his book Der Völkergedanke im Aufbau einer Wissenschaft vom Menschen, Berlin, 1881, pp. 8 f., notes that in a modern work of art one looks for traits of the genius that brought it forth, while in the beginnings of society, of institutions, one looks “for the unconscious stirrings, in the organism, of the average man who has realized himself in them.” And in an address (same book, p. 172) on the aims of ethnology, he declares that for this science man is not the individual anthropos, but the social being, the zoon politikon of Aristotle, which demands the social state as condition of his existence. “Das Primäre ist also der Völkergedanke.”