Volume 2 — CHAPTER V CITIES AND PEOPLES (B) PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES

I

Throughout the nineteenth century the scientific picture of history was vitiated by a notion that was either derived from, or at any rate brought to a point by, Romanticism—the idea of the “People” in the moral-enthusiastic sense of the word. If, here and there, in earlier time a new religion, a new ornamentation, a new architecture, or a new script appeared, the question that it raised presented itself to the investigator thus—What was the name of the people who produced the phenomenon? This enunciation of the problem is peculiar to the Western spirit and the present-day cast of that spirit; but it is so false at every point that the picture that it evokes of the course of events must necessarily be erroneous. “The people” as the absolute basic form in which men are historically effective, the original home, the original settlement, the migrations of “the” peoples—all this is a reflection of the vibrant idea expressed in the “Nation” of 1789, of the “Volk” of 1813, both of which, in last analysis, are derived from the self-assuredness of England and Puritanism. But the very intensity of passion that the idea contains has protected it only too well from criticism. Even acute investigators have unwittingly made it cover a multitude of utterly dissimilar things, with the result that “peoples” have developed into definite and supposedly well-understood unit-quantities by which all history is made. For us, to-day, world-history means—what it cannot be asserted to mean self-evidently, or to mean for, e.g., the Greeks and the Chinese—the history of Peoples. Everything else, Culture, speech, wit, religion, is created by the peoples. The State is the form of a people.

The purpose of this chapter is to demolish this romantic conception. What has inhabited the earth since the Ice Age is man, not “peoples.” In the first instance, their Destiny is determined by the fact that the bodily succession of parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms natural groups, which disclose a definite tendency to take root in a landscape. Even nomadic tribes confine their movements within a limited field. Thereby the cosmic-plantlike side of life, of Being, is invested with a character of duration. This I call race. Tribes, septs, clans, families—all these are designations for the fact of a blood which circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or a wide landscape.

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[161] 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 if 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 inconsiderable relics of the power to observe non-optical characters such as smell, the cries of animals, and, above all, the modalities of human speech. In the other higher animals, on the contrary, the capacity to receive the impression of race is decidedly not dominated by sight. Scent is stronger, and, besides, the animals have modes of sensation that entirely elude human understanding. It is, however, only men and animals that can receive the impression of race, and not the plants, and yet these too have race, as every nurseryman knows. It is, to me, a sight of deep pathos to see how the spring flowers, craving to fertilize and be fertilized, cannot for all their bright splendour attract one another, or even see one another, but must have recourse to animals, for whom alone these colours and these scents exist.

“Language” I call the entire free activity of the waking microcosm in so far as it brings something to expression for others. Plants have no waking-being, no capacity of being moved, and therefore no language. The waking-consciousness of animal existences, on the contrary, is through and through a speaking, whether individual acts are intended to tell or not, and even if the conscious or the unconscious purpose of the doing lies in a quite other direction. A peacock is indubitably speaking when he spreads his tail, but a kitten playing with a cotton-reel also speaks to us, unconsciously, through the quaint charm of its movements. Everyone knows the difference there is in one’s movements according as one is conscious or unconscious of being observed; one suddenly begins to speak, consciously, in all one’s actions.

This, however, leads at once to the very significant distinction between two genera of language—the language which is only an expression for the world, an inward necessity springing from the longing inherent in all life to actualize itself before witnesses, to display its own presence to itself, and the language that is meant to be understood by definite beings. There are, therefore, expression-languages and communication-languages. The former assume only a state of waking-being, the latter a connexion of waking-beings. To understand means to respond to the stimulus of a signal with one’s own feeling of its significance. To understand one another, to hold “conversation,” to speak to a “thou,” supposes, therefore, a sense of meanings in the other that corresponds to that in oneself. Expression-language before witnesses merely proves the presence of an “I,” but communication-language postulates a “thou.” The “I” is that which speaks, and the “thou” that which is meant to understand the speech of the “I.” For primitives a tree, a stone, or a cloud can be a “thou.” Every deity is a “thou.” In fairy-tales there is nothing that cannot hold converse with men, and we need only look at our own selves in moments of furious irritation or of poetic excitement to realize that anything can become a “thou” for us even to-day. And it is by some “thou” that we first came to the knowledge of an “I.” “I,” therefore, is a designation for the fact that a bridge exists to some other being.

It is impossible, however, to delimit an exact frontier between religious and artistic expression-languages and pure communication-languages. This is true also (and indeed specially) of the higher Cultures with the separate development of their form-domains. For, on the one hand, no one can speak without putting into his mode of speech some significant trait of emphasis that has nothing to do with the needs of communication as such; and, on the other hand, we all know the drama in which the poet wants to “say” something that he could have said equally well or better in an exhortation, and the painting whose contents are meant to instruct, warn, or improve—the picture-series in any Greek Orthodox church, which conforms to a strict canon and has the avowed purpose of making the truths of religion clear to a beholder to whom the book says nothing; or Hogarth’s substitute for sermons; or, for that matter, even prayer, the direct address to God, which also can be replaced by the performance before one’s eyes of cult-ritual that speaks to one intelligibly. The theoretical controversy concerning the purpose of art rests upon the postulate that an artistic expression-language should in no wise be a communication-language, and the phenomenon of priesthood is based upon the persuasion that the priest alone knows the language in which man can communicate with God.

All currents of Being bear a historical, and all linkages of Waking-Being a religious, stamp. What we know to be inherent in every genuine religious or artistic form-language, and particularly in the history of every script (for writing is verbal language for the eye), holds good without doubt for the origin of human articulate speech in general—indeed the prime words (of the structure of which we now know nothing whatever) must also certainly have had a cult-colouring. But there is a corresponding linkage on the other side between Race and everything that we call life (as struggle for power), History (as Destiny), or, to-day, politics. It is perhaps too fantastic to argue something of political instinct in the search of a climbing plant for points of attachment that shall enable it to encircle, overpower, and choke the tree in order finally to rear itself high in the air above the tree-top—or something of religious world-feeling in the song of the mounting lark. But it is certain that from such things as these the utterances of being and of waking-being, of pulse and tension, form an uninterrupted series up to the perfected political and religious forms of every modern Civilization.

And here at last is the key to those two strange words which were discovered by the ethnologists in two entirely different parts of the world in rather limited applications, but have since been quietly moving up into the foreground of research—“totem” and “taboo.” The more enigmatic and indefinable these words became, the more it was felt that in them we were touching upon an ultimate life-basis which was not that of merely primitive man. And now, as the result of the above inquiry, we have clear meanings for both before us. Totem and Taboo describe the ultimate meanings of Being and Waking-Being, Destiny and Causality, Race and Language, Time and Space, yearning and fear, pulse and tension, politics and religion. The Totem side of life is plantlike and inheres in all being, while the Taboo side is animal and presupposes the free movement of a being in a world. Our Totem organs are those of the blood-circulation and of reproduction, our Taboo organs those of the senses and the nerves. All that is of Totem has physiognomy, all that is of Taboo has system. In the Totemistic resides the common feeling of beings that belong to the same stream of existence. It cannot be acquired and cannot be got rid of; it is a fact, the fact of all facts. That which is of Taboo, on the other hand, is the characteristic of linkages of waking-consciousness, it is learnable and acquirable, and on that very account guarded as a secret by cult-communities, philosophers’ schools, and artists’ guilds—each of which possesses a sort of cryptic language of its own.⁠[162]

But Being can be thought of without waking-consciousness, whereas the reverse is not the case—i.e., there are race-beings without language, but no languages without race. All that is of race, therefore, possesses its proper expression, independent of any kind of waking-consciousness and common to plant and animal. This expression—not to be confounded with the expression-language which consists in an active alteration of the expression—is not meant for witnesses, but is simply there; it is physiognomy. Not that it stops at the plant; in every living language, too (and how significant the word “living”!) we can detect, besides the Taboo side that is learnable, an entirely untransferable quality of race that the old vessels of the language cannot pass on to alien successors; it lies in melody, rhythm, stress; in colour, ring, and tempo of the expression; in idiom, in accompanying gesture. On this account it is necessary to distinguish between language and speaking, the first being in itself a dead stock of signs, and the second the activity that operates with the signs.⁠[163] When we cease to be able to hear and see directly how a language is spoken, thenceforward it is only its ossature and not its flesh that we can know. This is so with Sumerian, Gothic, Sanskrit, and all other languages that we have merely deciphered from texts and inscriptions, and we are right in calling these languages dead, for the human communities that were formed by them have vanished. We know the Egyptian tongue, but not the tongues of the Egyptians. Of Augustan Latin we know approximately the sound-values of the letters and the meaning of the words, but we do not know how the oration of Cicero sounded from the rostra and still less how Hesiod and Sappho spoke their verses, or what a conversation in the Athenian market-place was really like. If in the Gothic age Latin came into actual speech again, it was as a new language; this Gothic Latin did not take long to pass from the formation of rhythms and sounds characteristic of itself (but which our imagination to-day cannot recapture, any more than those of old Latin) to encroachments upon the word-meanings and the syntax as well. But the anti-Gothic Latin of the Humanists, too, which was meant to be Ciceronian, was anything but a revival. The whole significance of the race-element in language can be measured by comparing the German of Nietzsche and of Mommsen, the French of Diderot and of Napoleon, and observing that in idiom Voltaire and Lessing are much closer together than Lessing and Hölderlin.

It is the same with the most telling of all the expression-languages, art. The Taboo side—namely, the stock of forms, the rules of convention, and style in so far as it means an armoury of established expedients (like vocabulary and syntax in verbal language)—stands for the language itself, which can be learned. And it is learned and transmitted in the tradition of the great schools of painting, the cottage-building tradition, and generally in the strict craft-discipline which every genuine art possesses as a matter of course and which in all ages has been meant to give the sure command of the idiom that at a particular time is quite definitely living idiom of that time. For in this domain, too, there are living and dead languages. The form-language of an art can only be called living, when the artist corps as a whole employs it like a mother tongue, which one uses without even thinking about its structure. In this sense Gothic in the sixteenth century and Rococo in 1800 were both dead languages. Contrast the unqualified sureness with which architects and musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries expressed themselves with the hesitations of Beethoven, the painfully acquired, almost self-taught, philological art of Schinkel and Schadow,⁠[164] the manglings of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Neo-Gothics, and the baffled experimentalism of present-day artists.

In an artistic form-language, as presented to us by its products, the voice of the Totem side, the race, makes itself heard, and not less so in individual artists than in whole generations of artists. The creators of the Doric temples of South Italy and Sicily, and those of the brick Gothic of North Germany were emphatically race-men, and so too the German musicians from Heinrich Schütz to Johann Sebastian Bach. To the Totem side belong the influences of the cosmic cycles—the importance of which in the structure of art-history has hardly been suspected, let alone established—and the creative times of spring and love-stirrings which (apart altogether from the executive sureness in imparting form) determine the force of the forms and the depth of the conceptions. The formalists are explained by depth of world-fear or by defect of “race,” and the great formless ones by plethora of blood or defect of discipline. We comprehend that there is a difference between the history of artists and that of styles, and that the language of an art may be carried from country to country, but mastery in speaking it, never.

A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes root, there it dies also. There is certainly a sense in which we can, without absurdity, work backwards from a race to its “home,” but it is much more important to realize that the race adheres permanently to this home with some of its most essential characters of body and soul. If in that home the race cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in ever-changing landscapes; but the landscape exercises a secret force upon the plant-nature in them, and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by the extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated thither as Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are there as Americans. It has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has made its mark upon them—generation by generation they become more and more like the people they eradicated. Gould and Baxter have shown that Whites of all races, Indians, and Negroes have come to the same average in size of body and time of maturity—and that so rapidly that Irish immigrants, arriving young and developing very slowly, come under this power of the landscape within the same generation. Boas has shown that the American-born children of long-headed Sicilian and short-headed German Jews at once conform to the same head-type. This is not a special case, but a general phenomenon, and it should serve to make us very cautious in dealing with those migrations of history about which we know nothing more than some names of vagrant tribes and relics of languages (e.g., Danai, Etruscans, Pelasgi, Achæans, and Dorians). As to the race of these “peoples” we can conclude nothing whatever. That which flowed into the lands of southern Europe under the diverse names of Goths, Lombards, and Vandals was without doubt a race in itself. But already by Renaissance times it had completely grown itself into the root characters of the Provençal, Castilian, and Tuscan soil.

Not so with language. The home of a language means merely the accidental place of its formation, and this has no relation to its inner form. Languages migrate in that they spread by carriage from tribe to tribe. Above all, they are capable of being, and are, exchanged—indeed, in studying the early history of races we need not, and should not, feel the slightest hesitation about postulating such speech-changes. It is, I repeat, the form-content and not the speaking of a language that is taken over, and it is taken over (as primitives are for ever taking over ornament-motives) in order to be used with perfect sureness as elements of their own form-language. In early times the fact that a people has shown itself the stronger, or the feeling that its language possesses superior efficacy, is enough to induce others to give up their own language and—with genuinely religious awe—to take its language to themselves. Follow out the speech-changes of the Normans, whom we find in Normandy, England, Sicily, and Constantinople with different languages in each place, and ever ready to exchange one for another. Piety towards the mother tongue—the very term testifies to deep ethical forces, and accounts for the bitterness of our ever-recurring language-battles—is a trait of the Late Western soul, almost unknowable for the men of other Cultures and entirely so for the primitive. Unfortunately, our historians not only are sensible of this, but tacitly extend it as a postulate over their entire field, which leads to a multitude of fallacious conclusions as to the bearing of linguistic discoveries upon the fortunes of “peoples”—think of the reconstruction of the “Dorian migration,” argued from the distribution of later Greek dialects. It is impossible, therefore, to draw conclusions as to the fortunes of the race side of peoples from mere place-names, personal names, inscriptions, and dialects. Never do we know a priori, whether a folkname stands for a language-body, or a race-part, or both, or neither—besides which, folk-names themselves, and even land-names, have, as such, Destinies of their own.

II

Of all expressions of race, the purest is the House. From the moment when man, becoming sedentary, ceases to be content with mere shelter and builds himself a dwelling, this expression makes its appearance and marks off, within the race “man” (which is the element of the biological world-picture⁠[165]) the human races of world-history proper, which are streams of being of far greater spiritual significance. The prime form of the house is everywhere a product of feeling and of growth, never at all of knowledge. Like the shell of the nautilus, the hive of the bee, the nest of the bird, it has an innate self-evidentness, and every trait of original custom and form of being, of marriage, of family life, and of tribal order is reflected in the place and in the room-organization of parterre, hall, wigwam, atrium, court, chamber, and gynæceum. One need only compare the lay-out of the old Saxon and that of the Roman house to feel that the soul of the men and the soul of the house were in each case identical.

This domain art-history ought never to have laid its hands on. It was an error to treat the building of the dwelling-house as a branch of the art of architecture. It is a form that arises in the obscure courses of being and not for the eye that looks for forms in the light; no room-scheme of the boor’s hovel was ever thought out by an architect as the scheme of a cathedral was thought out. This significant frontier line has escaped the observation of art-research—although Dehio⁠[166] in one place remarks that the old German wooden house has nothing to do with the later great architecture, which arose quite independently—and the result has been a perpetual perplexity in method, of which the art-savant is sensible enough, but which he cannot understand. His science gathers, indiscriminately in all the “pre-” and “primitive” periods, all sorts of gear, arms, pottery, fabrics, funerary monuments, and houses, and considers them from the point of view of form as well as that of decoration; and, proceeding thus, it is not until he comes to the organic history of painting, sculpture, and architecture (i.e., the self-contained and differentiated arts) that he finds himself on firm ground. But, unknowing, he has stepped over a frontier between two worlds, that of soul-expression and that of visual expression-language. The house, and like it the completely unstudied basic (i.e., customary) forms of pots, weapons, clothing, and gear, belong to the Totem side. They characterize, not a taste, but a way of fighting, of dwelling, of working. Every primitive seat is the offset of a racial mode of body-posing, every jar-handle an extension of the supple arm. Domestic painting and dressmaking, the garment as ornament, the decoration of weapons and implements, belong, on the contrary, to the Taboo side of life, and indeed for primitive man the patterns and motives on these things possess even magical properties.⁠[167] We all know the Germanic sword-blades of the Migrations with their Oriental ornamentation, and the Mycenæan strongholds with their Minoan artistry. It is the distinction between blood and sense, race and speech, politics and religion.

There is, in fact, as yet no world-history of the House and its Races, and to give us such a history should be one of the most urgent tasks of the researcher. But we must work with means quite other than those of art-history. The peasant dwelling is, as compared with the tempo of all art-history, something constant and “eternal” like the peasant himself. It stands outside the Culture and therefore outside the higher history of man; it recognizes neither the temporal nor the spacial limits of this history and it maintains itself, unaltered ideally, throughout all the changes of architecture, which it witnesses, but in which it does not participate. The round hut of ancient Italy is still found in Imperial times.⁠[168] The form of the Roman rectangular house, the existence-mark of a second race, is found in Pompeii and even in the Imperial palaces. Every sort of ornament and style was borrowed from the Orient, but no Roman would ever think of imitating the Syrian house,⁠[169] any more than the Hellenistic city-architect tampered with the megaron form of Mycenæ and Tiryns and the old Greek peasant-house described by Galen. The Saxon and Franconian peasant-house kept its essential nucleus unimpaired right from the country farm, through the burgher-house of the old Free Cities, up to the patrician buildings of the eighteenth century, while Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Empire styles glided over it one after the other, clothing it from cellar to garret with their essences, but never perverting the Soul of the House. And the same is true of the furniture-forms, in which we have to distinguish carefully the psychological from the artistic treatment. In particular, the evolution of the Northern seat-furniture is, right up to the club arm-chair, a piece of race-history and not of what is called style-history. Every other character can deceive us as to the fortunes of race—the Etruscan names amongst the “Sea-folk” defeated by Rameses III, the enigmatic inscription of Lemnos, the wall-paintings in the tombs of Etruria, afford no sure evidences of the bodily connexion of these men. Although towards the end of the Stone Age a telling ornamentation arose and continued in the vast region east of the Carpathians, it is perfectly possible that race superseded race there. If we possessed in western Europe only pottery remains for the centuries between Trojan and Chlodwig, we should not have the least inkling of the event that we know as the “great Migrations.” But the presence of an oval house in the Ægean region⁠[170] and of another and very striking example of it in Rhodesia,⁠[171] and the much-discussed concordance of the Saxon peasant-house with that of the Libyan Kabyle disclose a piece of race-history. Ornaments spread when a people incorporates them in its form-language, but a house-type is only transplanted along with its race. The disappearance of an ornament means no more than a change of language, but when a house-type vanishes it means that race is extinguished.

It follows that art-history, besides taking care to begin properly with the Culture, must not neglect even in its course to separate the race side carefully from the language proper. At the outset of a Culture two well-defined forms of a higher order rise up over the peasant village, as expressions of being and language of waking-being. They are the castle and the cathedral.⁠[172] In them the distinction between Totem and Taboo, longing and fear, blood and intellect, rises to a grand symbolism. The ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chinese, the Classical, the South-Arabian, and the Western castle stands, as the home of continuing generations, very near to the peasant cottage, and both, as copies of the realities of living, breeding, and dying, lie outside all art-history. The history of the German Burgen is a piece of race-history throughout. On them both, early ornament does indeed venture to spread itself, beautifying here the beams, there the door, and there again the staircase, but it can be so, or so, at choice, or omitted altogether, for there is no inward bond between the structure and the ornament. The cathedral, on the other hand, is not ornamented, but is itself ornament. Its history is coincident with that of the Gothic style, and the same is true of the Doric temple and all other Early Culture buildings. So complete is the congruence, in the Western and every other Culture whose art we know at all, that it has never occurred to anyone to be astonished at the fact that strict architecture (which is simply the highest form of pure ornament) is entirely confined to religious building. All the beauty of architecture that there is in Gelnhausen, Goslar, and the Wartburg has been taken over from cathedral art; it is decoration and not essence. A castle or a sword or a pitcher can do without this decoration altogether without losing its meaning or even its form.⁠[173] But in a Cathedral, or an Egyptian pyramid-temple, such a distinction between essence and art is simply inconceivable.

We distinguish, then, the building that has a style and the building in which men have a style. Whereas in monastery and cathedral it is the stone that possesses form and communicates it to the men who are in its service, in farmhouse and feudal stronghold it is the full strength of the countryman’s and the knight’s life that forms the building forth from itself. Here the man and not the stone comes first, and here, too, there is an ornamentation; it is an ornament which is proper to man and consists in the strict nature and stable form of manners and customs. We might call this living, as distinct from rigid, style. But, just as the power of this living form lays hands on the priesthood also, creating in Gothic and in Vedic times the type of the knightly priest, so the Romanesque-Gothic sacred form-language seizes upon everything pertaining to this secular life—costume, arms, rooms, implements, and so forth—and stylizes their surface. But art-history must not let itself lose its bearings in this alien world—it is only the surface.

In the early cities it is the same; nothing new supervenes. Amongst the race-made houses, which now form streets, there are scattered the handful of cult-buildings that have style. And, as having it, they are the seats of art-history and the sources whence its forms radiate out on to squares, façades, and house-rooms. Even though the castle develops into the urban palace and patrician residence, and the palatium and the men’s hall, into guild-house and town-hall, one and all they receive and carry a style, they do not have it. True, at the stage of real burgherdom the metaphysical creativeness of the early religion has been lost. It develops the ornament further, but not the building as ornament, and from this point art-history splits up into the histories of the separate arts. The picture, the statue, the house, become particular objects to which the style is to be applied. Even the church itself is now such a house. A Gothic cathedral is ornament, but a Baroque hall-church is a building clothed with ornament. The process begun in the Ionic style and the sixteenth century is completed in the Corinthian and Rococo, wherein the house and its ornament are separated for good and all, so completely that even the master-works amongst eighteenth-century churches and monasteries cannot mislead us—we know that all this art of theirs is secular, is adornment. With Empire the style transforms itself into a “taste,” and with the end of this mode architecture turns into a craft-art. And that is the end of the ornamental expression-language, and of art-history with it. But the peasant-house, with its unaltered race-form, lives on.

III

The practical importance of the house as race-expression begins to be appreciated as and when one realizes the immense difficulty of approaching the kernel of race. I do not refer to its inner essence, its soul—as to that, feeling speaks to us clearly enough and we all know a man of race, a “thoroughbred,” when we see one. But what are the hall-marks for our sense, and above all for our eye, by which we recognize and distinguish races? This is a matter that belongs to the domain of Physiognomic just as surely as the classification of tongues belongs to that of Systematic. But how immense and how varied the material that would be required! How much of it is irretrievably lost by destruction, and how much more by corruption! In the most favourable cases, what we have of prehistoric men is their skeletons, and how much does a skeleton not tell us! Very nearly everything. Prehistoric research in its naïve zeal is ready to deduce the incredible from a jaw-bone or an arm-bone. But think of one of those mass-graves of the War in northern France, in which we know that men of all races, white and coloured, peasants and townsmen, youths and men lie together. If the future had no collateral evidence as to their nature, it would certainly not be enlightened by anthropological research. In other words, immense dramas of race can pass over a land without the investigator of its grave-skeletons obtaining the least hint of the fact. It is the living body that carries nine-tenths of the expression—not the articulation of the parts, but their articulate motions; not the bone of the face, but its mien. And, for that matter, how much potentially interpretable race-expression is actually observed even by the keenest-sensed contemporary? How much we fail to see and to hear! What is it for which—unlike many species of beasts—we lack a sense-organ?

The science of the Darwinian age met this question with an easy assurance. How superficial, how glib, how mechanistic the conception with which it worked! In the first place, this conception groups an aggregate of such grossly palpable characters as are observable in the anatomy of the discoveries—that is, characters that even a corpse displays. As to observing the body qua living thing, there is no question of it. Secondly, it investigates only those signs which very little perspicacity is needed to detect, and investigates them only in so far as they are measurable and countable. The microscope and not the pulse-sense determines. When language is used as a differentia, it is to classify races, not according to their way of speaking, but according to the grammatical structure of the speech, which is just anatomy and system of another sort. No one as yet has perceived that the investigation of these speech-races is one of the most important tasks that research can possibly set itself. In the actuality of daily experience we all know perfectly well that the way of speaking is one of the most distinctive traits in present-day man—examples are legion; each of us knows any number of them. In Alexandria the same Greek was spoken in the most dissimilar race-modes, as we can see even to-day from the script of the texts. In North America the native-born speak exactly alike, whether in English, in German, or for that matter in Indian. What in the speech of East-European Jews is a race-trait of the land, and present therefore in Russian also, and what is a race-trait of the blood common to all Jews, independent of their habitat and their hosts, in their speaking of any of the European “mother”-tongues? What in detail are the relations of the sound-formations, the accentuations, the placing of words?

But science has completely failed to note that race is not the same for rooted plants as it is for mobile animals, that with the microcosmic side of life a fresh group of characters appears, and that for the animal world it is decisive. Nor again has it perceived that a completely different significance must be attached to “races” when the word denotes subdivisions within the integral race “Man.” With its talk of adaptation and of inheritance it sets up a soulless causal concatenation of superficial characters, and blots out the fact that here the blood and there the power of the land over the blood are expressing themselves—secrets that cannot be inspected and measured, but only livingly experienced and felt from eye to eye.

Nor are the scientists at one as to the relative rank of these superficial characters amongst themselves. Blumenbach classified the races of man according to skull-forms, Friedrich Müller (as a true German) by hair and language-structure, Topinard (as a true Frenchman) by skin-colour and shape of nose, and Huxley (as a true Englishman) by, so to say, sport characteristics. This last is undoubtedly in itself a very suitable criterion, but any judge of horses would tell him that breed-characteristics cannot be hit off by scientific terminology. These “descriptions” of races are without exception as worthless as the descriptions of “wanted” men on which policemen exercise their theoretical knowledge of men.

Obviously, the chaotic in the total expression of the human body is not in the least realized. Quite apart from smell (which for the Chinese, for example, is a most characteristic mark of race) and sound (the sound of speech, song, and, above all, laughter, which enables us accurately to sense deep differences inaccessible to scientific method) the profusion of images before the eye is so embarrassingly rich in details, either actually visible or sensible to the inner vision, that the possibility of marshalling them under a few aspects is simply unthinkable. And all these sides to the picture, all these traits composing it, are independent of one another and have each their individual history. There are cases in which the bony structure (and particularly the skull-form) completely alter without the expression of the fleshy parts—i.e., the face—becoming different. The brothers and sisters of the same family may all present almost every differentia posited by Blumenbach, Müller, and Huxley, and yet the identity of their living race-expression may be patent to anyone who looks at them. Still more frequent is similarity of bodily build accompanied by thorough diversity of living expression—I need only mention the immeasurable difference between genuine peasant-stock, like the Frisians or the Bretons, and genuine city-stock.⁠[174] But besides the energy of the blood—which coins the same living features (“family” traits) over and over again for centuries—and the power of the soil—evidenced in its stamp of man—there is that mysterious cosmic force of the syntony of close human connexions. What is called the “Versehen” of a pregnant woman⁠[175] is only a particular and not very important instance of the workings of a very deep and powerful formative principle inherent in all that is of the race side. It is a matter of common observation that elderly married people become strangely like one another, although probably Science with its measuring instruments would “prove” the exact opposite. It is impossible to exaggerate the formative power of this living pulse, this strong inward feeling for the perfection of one’s own type. The feeling for race-beauty—so opposite to the conscious taste of ripe urbans for intellectual-individual traits of beauty—is immensely strong in primitive men, and for that very reason never emerges into their consciousness. But such a feeling is race-forming. It undoubtedly moulded the warrior- and hero-type of a nomad tribe more and more definitely on one bodily ideal, so that it would have been quite unambiguous to speak of the race-figure of Romans or Ostrogoths. The same is true of any ancient nobility—filled with a strong and deep sense of its own unity, it achieves the formation of a bodily ideal. Comradeship breeds races. French noblesse and Prussian Landadel are genuine race-denotations. But it is just this, too, that has bred the types of the European 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.

If the race-expression of the plant consists predominantly in the physiognomy of position, the animal-expression resides in a physiognomy of movement—namely, in the form as having motion, in the motion itself, and in the set of the limbs as figuring the motion. Of this race-expression not very much is revealed in the sleeping animal, and far less still in the dead animal, whose parts the scientist explores; we have practically nothing to learn now about the skeleton of the vertebrate. Hence it is that in vertebrates the limbs are more expressive than the bones. Hence it is that the limb-masses are the true seat of expressiveness in contrast to the ribs and skull-bones—the jaw being an exception in that its structure discloses the character of the animal’s food, whereas the plant’s nutrition is a mere process of nature. Hence it is, again, that the insect’s skeleton, which clothes its body, is fuller of expression than the bird’s, which is clothed by its body. It is pre-eminently the organs of the outer sheath that more and more forcefully gather the race-expression to themselves—the eye, not as a thing of form and colour, but as glance and expressive visage; the mouth, which becomes through the usage of speech the expression of understanding; and the head (not the skull), with its lineaments formed by the flesh, which has become the very throne of the non-vegetable side of life. Consider how, on the one hand, we breed orchids and roses and, on the other, we breed horses and dogs—and would like human beings to be bred, too. But it is not, I repeat, the mathematical form of the visible parts, but exclusively the expression of the movement, that displays this physiognomy. When we seize at a glance the race-expression of a motionless man, it is because our experienced eye sees the appropriate motion already potentially in the limbs. The real race-appearance of a bison, a trout, a golden eagle, is not to be reproduced by any reckoning of the creature’s plane or solid dimensions; and the deep attractiveness that they possess for the creative artist comes precisely from the fact that the secret of race can reveal itself in the picture by way of the soul and not by any mere imitation of the visible. One has to see and, seeing, to feel how the immense energy of this life concentrates upon head and neck, how it speaks in the bloodshot eye, in the short compact horn, in the “aquiline” beak and profile of the bird of prey—to mention one or two only of the innumerable points that cannot be communicated by words and are only expressible, by me for you, in the language of an art.

But with such hall-marks as those quoted, characterizing the noblest sorts of animals, we come very near to the concept of race which enables us to perceive within the type “mankind” differences of a higher sort than either the vegetable or the animal—differences that are spiritual rather, and eo ipso less accessible to scientific methods. The coarse characters of the skeletal structure have ceased to possess independent importance. Already Retzius (d. 1860) had put an end to the belief of Blumenbach that race and skull-formation are coincident, and J. Ranke summarizes his tenets in these words:⁠[176] “What in point of variety of skull-formation is displayed by mankind in general is displayed also on the smaller scale by every tribe (Volksstamm) and even by many fair-sized communities—a union of the different skull-forms with the extremes led up to through finely graduated intermediate forms.” No one would deny that it is reasonable to seek for ideal basic forms, but the researcher ought not to lose sight of the fact that these are ideals and that, for all the objectivity of his measurements, it is his taste that really fixes his limits and his classification. Much more important than any attempts to discover an ordering principle is the fact that within the unit “humanity” all these forms occur and have occurred from the earliest ice-times, that they have never markedly varied, and that they are found indiscriminately even within the same families. The one certain result of science is that observed by Ranke, that when skull-forms are arranged serially with respect to transitions, certain averages emerge which are characteristic not of “race,” but of the land.

In reality, the race-expression of a human head can associate itself with any conceivable skull-form, the decisive element being not the bone, but the flesh, the look, the play of feature. Since the days of Romanticism we have spoken of an “Indogermanic” race. But is there such a thing as an Aryan or a Semitic skull? Can we distinguish Celtic and Frankish skulls, or even Boer and Kaffir? And if not, what may not the earth have witnessed in the way of history unknown to us, for which not the slightest evidences, but only bones, remain! How unimportant these are for that which we call race in higher mankind can be shown by a drastic experiment. Take a set of men with every conceivable race-difference, and, while mentally picturing “race,” observe them in an X-ray apparatus. The result is simply comic. As soon as light is let through it, “race” vanishes suddenly and completely.

It cannot be too often repeated, moreover, that the little that is really illustrative in skeletal structure is a growth of the landscape and never a function of the blood. Elliot Smith in Egypt and von Luschen in Crete have examined an immense material yielded by graves ranging from the Stone Age to the present day. From the “Sea-peoples” of the middle of the second millennium B.C. to the Arabs and the Turks one human stream after another has passed over this region, but the average bone-structure has remained unaltered. It would be true, in a measure, to say that “race” has travelled as flesh over the fixed skeleton-form of the land.⁠[177] The Alpine region to-day contains “peoples” of the most diverse origins—Teuton, Latin, Slav—and we need only glance backward to discover Etruscans and Huns there also. Tribe follows tribe. But the skeletal structure in the mankind of the region in general is ever the same, and only on the edges, towards the plains, does it gradually disappear in favour of other forms, which are themselves likewise fixed. As to race, therefore, and the race-wanderings of primitive men, the famous finds of prehistoric bones, Neanderthal to Aurignacian, prove nothing. Apart from some conclusions from the jaw-bone as to the kinds of food eaten, they merely indicate the basic land-form that is found there to this day.

Once more, it is the mysterious power of the soil, demonstrable at once in every living being as soon as we discover a criterion independent of the heavy hand of the Darwinian age. The Romans brought the vine from the South to the Rhine, and there it has certainly not visibly—i.e., botanically—changed. But in this instance “race” can be determined in other ways. There is a soil-born difference not merely between Southern and Northern, between Rhine and Moselle wines, but even between the products of every different site on every different hill-side; and the same holds good for every other high-grade vegetable “race,” such as tea and tobacco. Aroma, a genuine growth of the country-side, is one of the hall-marks (all the more significant because they cannot be measured) of true race. But noble races of men are differentiated in just the same intellectual way as noble wines. There is a like element, only sensible to the finest perceptions, a faint aroma in every form, that underneath all higher Culture connects the Etruscans and the Renaissance in Tuscany,⁠[178] and the Sumerians, the Persians of 500 B.C., and the Persians of Islam on the Tigris.

None of this is accessible to a science that measures and weighs. It exists for the feelings—with a plain certainty and at the first glance—but not for the savant’s treatment. And the conclusion to which I come is that Race, like Time and Destiny, is a decisive element in every question of life, something which everyone knows clearly and definitely so long as he does not try to set himself to comprehend it by way of rational—i.e., soulless—dissection and ordering. Race, Time, and Destiny belong together. But the moment scientific thought approaches them, the word “Time” acquires the significance of a dimension, the word “Destiny” that of causal connexion, while Race, for which even at that stage of scientific askesis we still retain a very sure feeling, becomes an incomprehensible chaos of unconnected and heterogeneous characters that (under headings of land, period, culture, stock) interpenetrate without end and without law. Some adhere toughly and permanently to a stock and are transmissible; others glide over a population like mere cloud-shadows; and many are, as it were, dæmons of the land, which possess everyone who inhabits it for as long as he stays in it. Some expel one another, some seek one another. A strict classification of races—the ambition of all ethnology—is impossible. The attempt is foredoomed from the start, as it contradicts this very essence of the racial, and every systematic lay-out always has been and will be, inevitably, a falsification and misapprehension of the nature of its subject. Race, in contrast to speech, is unsystematic through and through. In the last resort every individual man and every individual moment of his existence have their own race. And therefore the only mode of approach to the Totem side is, not classification, but physiognomic fact.

IV

He who would penetrate into the essence of language should begin by putting aside all the philologist’s apparatus and observe how a hunter speaks to his dog. The dog follows the outstretched finger. He listens, tense, to the sound of the word, but shakes his head—this kind of man-speech he does not understand. Then he makes one or two sentences to indicate his idea; he stands still and barks, which in his language is a sentence containing the question: “Is that what Master means?” Then, still in dog language, he expresses his pleasure at finding that he was right. In just the same way two men who do not really possess a single word in common seek to understand one another. When a country parson explains something to a peasant-woman, he looks at her keenly, and, unconsciously, he puts into his look the essence that she would certainly never be able to understand from a parsonic mode of expression. The locutions of to-day, without exception, are capable of comprehension only in association with other modes of speech—adequate by themselves they are not, and never have been.

If the dog, now, wants something, he wags his tail; impatient of Master’s stupidity in not understanding this perfectly distinct and expressive speech, he adds a vocal expression—he barks—and finally an expression of attitude—he mimes or makes signs. Here the man is the obtuse one who has not yet learned to talk.

Finally something very remarkable happens. When the dog has exhausted every other device to comprehend the various speeches of his master, he suddenly plants himself squarely, and his eye bores into the eye of the human. Something deeply mysterious is happening here—the immediate contact of Ego and Tu. The look emancipates from the limitations of waking-consciousness. Being understands itself without signs. Here the dog has become a “judge” of men, looking his opposite straight in the eye and grasping, behind the speech, the speaker.

Languages of these kinds we habitually use without being conscious of the fact. The infant speaks long before it has learned its first word, and the grown-up talks with it without even thinking of the ordinary meanings of the words he or she is using—that is, the sound-forms in this case subserve a language that is quite other than that of words. Such languages also have their groups and dialects; they, too, can be learned, mastered, and misunderstood, and they are so indispensable to us that verbal language would mutiny if we were to attempt to make it do all the work without assistance from tone- and gesture-language. Even our script, which is verbal language for the eye, would be almost incomprehensible but for the aid that it gets from gesture-language in the form of punctuation.

It is the fundamental mistake of linguistic science that it confuses language in general with human word-language—and that not merely theoretically, but habitually in the practical conduct of all its investigations. As a result, it has remained immensely ignorant of the vast profusion of speech-modes of different kinds that are in common use amongst beasts and men. The domain of speech, taken as a whole, is far wider, and verbal speech, with its incapacity to stand alone (an incapacity not wholly shaken off, even now) has really a much more modest part in it, than its students have observed. As to the “origin of human speech,” the very phrase implies a wrong enunciation of the problem. Verbal speech—for that is what is meant—never had origins at all in the sense here postulated. It is not primary, and it is not unitary. The vast importance to which it has attained, since a certain stage in man’s history, must not deceive us as to its position in the history of free-moving entity. An investigation into speech certainly ought not to begin with man.

But the idea of a beginning for animal language, too, is erroneous. Speaking is so closely bound up with the living being of the animal (in contradiction to the mere being of the plant) that not even unicellular creatures devoid of all sense-organs can be conceived of as speechless. To be a microcosm in the macrocosm is one and the same thing as having a power to communicate oneself to another. To speak of a beginning of speech in animal history is meaningless. For that microcosmic existences are in plurality is a matter of simple self-evidence. To speculate on other possibilities is mere waste of time. Granted that Darwinian fancies about an original generation and first pairs of ancestors belong with the Victorian rearguard and should be left there, still the fact remains that swarms also are awake and aware, inwardly and livingly sensible, of a “we,” and reaching out to one another for linkages of waking-consciousness.

Waking-being is activity in the extended; and, further, is willed activity. This is the distinction between the movements of a microcosm and the mechanical mobility of the plant, the animal, or the man in the plant-state—i.e., asleep. Consider the animal activity of nutrition, procreation, defence, attack—one side of it regularly consists in getting into touch with the macrocosm by means of the senses, whether it be the undifferentiated sensitivity of the unicellular creature or the vision of a highly developed eye that is in question. Here there is a definite will to receive impression; this we call orientation. But, besides, there exists from the beginning a will to produce impression in the other—what we call expression—and with that, at once, we have speaking as an activity of the animal waking-consciousness. Since then nothing fundamentally new has supervened. The world-languages of high Civilizations are nothing but exceedingly refined expositions of potentialities that were all implicitly contained in the fact of willed impressions of unicellular creatures upon one another.

But the foundations of this fact lie in the primary feeling of fear. The waking-consciousness makes a cleft in the cosmic, projects a space between particulars, and alienates them. To feel oneself alone is one’s first impression in the daily awakening, and hence the primitive impulse to crowd together in the midst of this alien world, to assure oneself sensibly of the proximity of the other, to seek a conscious connexion with him. The “thou” is deliverance from the fear of the being-alone. The discovery of the Thou, the sense of another self resolved organically and spiritually out of the world of the alien, is the grand moment in the early history of the animal. Thereupon animals are. One has only to look long and carefully into the tiny world of a water-droplet under the microscope to be convinced that the discovery of the Thou, and with it that of the I has been taking place here in its simplest imaginable form. These tiny creatures know not only the Other, but also the Others; they possess not merely waking-consciousness but also relations of waking-consciousness, and therewith not only expression, but the elements of an expression-speech.

It is well to recall here the distinction between the two great speech-groups. Expression-speech treats the Other as witness, and aims purely at effects upon him, while communication-speech regards him as a collocutor and expects him to answer. To understand means to receive impressions with one’s own feeling of their significance, and it is on this that the effect of the highest form of human expression-speech, art, depends.⁠[179] To come to an understanding, to hold a conversation, postulates that the Other’s feeling of significances is the same as one’s own. The elementary unit of an expression-speech before witnesses is called the Motive. Command of the motive is the basis of all expression-technique. On the other hand, the impression produced for the purpose of an understanding is called the Sign, and is the elementary unit of all communication-technique—including, therefore, at the highest level, human speech.

Of the extensiveness of both these speech-worlds in the waking-consciousness of man we to-day can scarcely form an idea. Expression-speech, which appears in the earliest times with all the religious seriousness of the Taboo, includes not only weighty and strict ornament—which in the beginning coincides completely with the idea of art and makes every stiff, inert thing into a vehicle of the expression—but also the solemn ceremonial—whose web of formulæ spreads over the whole of public life, and even over that of the family⁠[180]—and the language of costume, which is contained in clothing, tattooing, and personal adornment, all of which have a uniform significance. The investigators of the nineteenth century vainly attempted to trace the origin of clothing to the feeling of shame or to utilitarian motives. It is in fact intelligible only as the means of an expression-speech, and as such it is developed to a grandiose level in all the high Civilizations, including our own of to-day. We need only think of the dominant part played by the “mode” in our whole public life and doings, the regulation attire for important occasions, the nuances of wear for this and that social function, the wedding-dress, mourning; of the military uniform, the priest’s robes, orders and decorations, mitre and tonsure, periwig and queue, powder, rings, styles of hairdressing; of all the significant displays and concealments of person, the costume of the mandarin and the senator, the odalisque and the nun; of the court-state of Nero, Saladin and Montezuma—not to mention the details of peasant costumes, the language of flowers, colours, and precious stones. As for the language of religion, it is superfluous to mention it, for all this is religion.

The communication-languages, in which every kind of sense-impression that it is possible to conceive more or less participates, have gradually evolved (so far as the peoples of the higher Cultures are concerned) three outstanding signs—picture, sound, and gesture, which in the script-speech of the Western Civilization have crystallized into a unit of letter, word, and punctuation mark.

In the course of this long evolution there comes about at the last the detachment of speaking from speech. Of all processes in the history of language, none has a wider bearing than this. Originally all motives and signs are unquestionably the product of the moment and meant only for a single individual act of the active waking-consciousness. Their actual and their felt and willed significances are one and the same. But this is no longer so when a definite stock of signs offers itself for the living act of giving the sign, for with that not only is the activity differentiated from its means, but the means are differentiated from their significance. The unity of the two not only ceases to be a matter of self-evidence, it ceases even to be a possibility. The feeling of significance is a living feeling and, like everything else belonging with Time and Destiny, it is uniquely occurring and non-recurring. No sign, however well known and habitually used, is ever repeated with exactly the same connotation; and hence it is that originally no sign ever recurred in the same form. The domain of the rigid sign is unconditionally one of things-become of the pure extended; it is not an organism, but a system, which possesses its own causal logic and brings the irreconcilable opposition of space and time, intellect and mood, also into the waking connexions of two beings.

This fixed stock of signs and motives, with its ostensibly fixed meanings, must be acquired by learning and practice if one wishes to belong to the community of waking-consciousness with which it is associated. The necessary concomitant of speech divorced from speaking is the notion of the school. This is fully developed in the higher animals; and in every self-contained religion, every art, every society, it is presupposed as the background of the believer, the artist, the “well-brought-up” human being. And from this point each community has its sharply defined frontier; to be a member one must know its language—i.e., its articles of faith, its ethics, its rules. In counterpoint and Catholicism alike, bliss is not to be compassed by mere feeling and goodwill. Culture means a hitherto unimagined intensification of the depth and strictness of the form-language in every department; for each individual belonging to it, it consists—as his personal Culture, religious, ethical, social, artistic—in a lifelong process of education and training for this life. And consequently in all great arts, in the great Churches, mysteries and orders, there is reached such a command of form as astonishes the human being himself, and ends by breaking itself under the stress of its own exigences—whereupon, in every Culture alike, there is set up (expressly or tacitly) the slogan of a “return to nature.” This maestria extends also to verbal language. Side by side with the social polish of the period of the Tyrannis or of the troubadours, with the fugues of Bach and the vase-paintings of Exekias,⁠[181] we have the art of Attic oratory and that of French conversation, both presupposing, like any other art, a strict and carefully matured convention and a long and exacting training of the individual.

Metaphysically the significance of this separating-off of a set language can hardly be over-estimated. The daily practice of intercourse in settled forms, and the command of the entire waking-consciousness through such forms—of which there is no longer a sensed process of formation ad hoc, but which are just simply there, and require understanding in the strictest sense of the word—lead to an ever-sharper distinction between understanding and feeling within the waking-consciousness. An incipient language is felt understandingly; the practice of speaking requires one, first, to feel the known speech-medium and, secondly, to understand the intention put into it on this occasion. Consequently the kernel of all schooling lies in the acquisition of elements of knowledge. Every Church proclaims unhesitatingly that not feeling but knowledge leads into its ways of salvation; all true artistry rests on the sure knowledge of forms that the individual has not to discover, but to learn. “Understanding” is knowledge conceived of as a being. It is that which is completely alien to blood, race, time; from the opposition of rigid speech to coursing blood and developing history come the negative ideals of the absolute, the eternal, the universally valid—the ideals of Church and School.

But just this, in the last analysis, makes languages incomplete and leads to the eternal contradiction between what is in fact spoken and what was willed or meant by the speaking. We might indeed say that lies came into the world with the separation of speech from speaking. The signs are fixed, but not so their meaning—from the outset we feel that this is so, then we know it, and finally we turn our knowledge to account. It is an old, old, experience that when one wills to say something, the words “fail” one (versagen, mis-say); that one does not “express oneself aright” and in fact says something other than what was meant; that one may speak accurately and be understood inaccurately. And so finally we get to the art—which is widespread even amongst animals (e.g., cats)—of “using words to conceal thoughts.” One says not everything, one says something quite different, one speaks formally about nothing, one talks briskly to cover the fact that one has said something. Or one imitates the speech of another. The red-backed shrike (Lanius collurio) imitates the strophes of small song-birds in order to lure them. This is a well-known hunter’s dodge, but here again established motives and signs are precedent for it, just as much as they are a condition for the faking in antiques or the forgery of a signature. And all these traits, met with in attitude and mien as in handwriting and verbal utterance, reappear in the language of every religion, every art, every society—we need only refer to the ideas expressed by the words “hypocrite,” “orthodox,” “heretic,” the English “cant,” the secondary senses of “diplomat,” “Jesuit,” “actor,” the masks and warinesses of polite society, and the painting of to-day, in which nothing is honest more and which in every gallery offers the eye untruth in every imaginable form.

In a language that one stammers, one cannot be a diplomat. But in the real command of a language there is the danger that the relation between the means and the meaning may be made into a new means. There arises an intellectual art of playing with expression, practised by the Alexandrines and the Romantics—by Theocritus and Brentano in lyric poetry, by Reger in music, by Kierkegaard in religion.

Finally, speech and truth exclude one another.⁠[182] And in fact this is just what brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical “judge of men,” who is all race and knows how to take the being that is speaking. To look a man keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker behind the stump speech or the philosophical discourse, to know behind the prayer the heart, and behind the common good-tone the more intimate levels of social importance—and that instantaneously, immediately, and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes everything cosmic—that is what is lacking to the real Taboo-man, for whom one language at any rate carries conviction. A priest who is also a diplomat cannot be genuinely a priest. An ethical philosopher of the Kant stamp is never a “judge of men.”

The man who lies in his verbal utterances betrays himself, without observing it, in his demeanour. One who uses demeanour to dissimulate with betrays himself in his tone. It is precisely because rigid speech separates means and intent that it never carries it off with the keen appraiser. The adept reads between the lines and understands a man as soon as he sees his walk or his handwriting. The deeper and more intimate a spiritual communion, the more readily it dispenses with signs and linkages through waking-consciousness. A real comradeship makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a word’s being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony. From such a state of reciprocal understanding something or other reaches back, far beyond the collective existence of the higher animal-world, deep in the primeval history of free-moving life. Here deliverance from the waking-consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.

V

Of all the signs that have come to be fixed, none has led to greater consequences than that which in its present state we call “word.” It belongs, no doubt, to the purely human history of speech, but nevertheless the idea, or at any rate the conventional idea, of an “origin” of verbal language is as meaningless and barren as that of a zero-point for speech generally. A precise beginning is inconceivable for the latter because it is compresent with and contained in the essence of the microcosm, and for the former because it presupposes many fully developed kinds of communication-speech and constitutes only one element—though in the end the dominant element—of a slow and quiet evolution. It is a fundamental error in all theories (however diametrically opposed to each other) like those of Wundt and of Jespersen⁠[183] that they investigate speaking in words as if it were something new and self-contained, which inevitably leads them into a radically false psychology. In reality verbal language is a very late phenomenon, not a young shoot, but the last blossom borne by one of the ramifications of the parent stem of all vocal speeches.

In actuality a pure word-speech does not exist. No one speaks without employing, in addition to the set vocabulary, quite other modes of speech, such as emphasis, rhythm, and facial play, which are much more primary than the language of the word, and with which, moreover, it has become completely intertwined. It is highly necessary, therefore, to avoid regarding the ensemble of present-day word-languages, with its extreme structural intricacy, as an inner unity with a homogeneous history. Every word-language known to us has very different sides, and each of these sides has its own Destiny within the history of the whole. There is not one sense-perception that would be wholly irrelevant to an adequate history of the use of words. Further, we must distinguish very strictly between vocal and verbal languages; the former is familiar even to the simpler genera of animals, the latter is in certain characters—individual characters, it is true, but all the more significant for that—a radically different thing. For every animal voice-language, further, expression-motives (a roar of anger) and communication-signs (a cry of warning) can be clearly distinguished, and doubtless the same may be said of the earliest words. But was it, then, as an expression- or as a communication-language that verbal language arose? Was it in quite primitive conditions, independent, more or less, of any and every visual language such as picture and gesture? To such questions we have no answer, since we have no inkling of what the pre-forms of the “word,” properly so called, were. Naïve indeed is the philology which uses what we of to-day call “primitive” languages (in reality, incomplete pictures of very late language-conditions) as premisses for conclusions as to the origin of words and the Word. The word is in them an already established, highly developed, and self-evident means—i.e., precisely what anything “originally” is not.

There can be no doubt that the sign which made it possible for the future word-language to detach itself from the general vocal speech of the animal world was that which I call “name”—a vocal image serving to denote a Something in the world-around, which was felt as a being, and by the act of naming became a numen.⁠[184] It is unnecessary to speculate as to how the first names came to be—no human speech accessible to us at this time of day gives us the least point d’appui here. But, contrary to the view of modern research, I consider that the decisive turn came not from a change of the throat-formation or from a peculiarity of sound-formation or from any other physiological factor—if any such changes ever took place at all, it would be the race side that they would affect—not even an increased capacity for self-expression by existing means, like, say, the transition from word to sentence (H. Paul⁠[185]), but a profound spiritual change. With the Name comes a new world-outlook. And if speech in general is the child of fear, of the unfathomable terror that wells up when the waking-consciousness is presented with the facts, that impels all creatures together in the longing to prove each other’s reality and proximity—then the first word, the Name, is a mighty leap upward. The Name grazes the meaning of consciousness and the source of fear alike. The world is not merely existent, a secret is felt in it. Above and apart from the more ordinary objects of expression- and communication-language, man names that which is enigmatic. It is the beast that knows no enigmas. Man cannot think too solemnly, reverently, of this first name-giving. It was not well always to speak the name, it should be kept secret, a dangerous power dwelt in it. With the name the step is taken from the everyday physical of the beast to the metaphysical of man. It was the greatest turning-point in the history of the human soul. Our epistemology is accustomed to set speech and thought side by side, and it is quite right, if we take into consideration only the languages that are still accessible at the present day. But I believe that we can go much deeper than this and say that with the Name religion in the proper sense, definite religion in the midst of formless quasi-religious awe, came into being. Religion in this sense means religious thought. It is the new conception of the creative understanding emancipated from sensation. We say, in a very significant idiom, that we “reflect on,” “think over,” something. With the understanding of things-named the formation of a higher world, above all sensational existence, is begun—“higher” both according to obvious symbolism and in reference to the position of the head which man guesses (often with painful distinctness) to be the home of his thoughts. It gives to the primary feeling of fear both an object and a glimpse of liberation. On this religious first thought all the philosophical, scholarly, scientific thought of later times has been and remains dependent for its very deepest foundations.

These first names we have to think of as quite separate and individual elements in the stock of signs of a highly developed sound- and gesture-language, the richness of which we can no longer imagine, since these other means have come to be subordinate to the word-languages, and their further developments have been in dependent connexion therewith.⁠[186] One thing, however, was assured when the name inaugurated the transformation and spiritualization of communication-technique—the pre-eminence of the eye over the other sense-organs. Man’s awakeness and awareness was in an illuminated space, his depth-experience⁠[187] was a radiation outward towards light-sources and light-resistances, and he conceived of his ego as a middle point in the light. “Visible” or “invisible” was the alternative which governed the state of understanding in which the first names arose. Were the first numina, perhaps, things of the light-world that were felt, heard, observed in their effects, but not seen? No doubt the group of names, like everything else that marks a turning-point in the course of world-happenings, must have developed both rapidly and powerfully. The entire light-world, in which everything possesses the properties of position and duration in space, was—in the midst of what tensions of cause and effect, thing and property, object and subject!—very soon listed with innumerable names, and so anchored in the memory, for what we now call “memory” is the capacity of storing for the understanding, by means of the name, the named. Over the realm of understood visuals (Sehdinge) supervenes a more intellectual realm of namings, which shares with it the logical property of being purely extensive, disposed in polarity, and ruled by the causal principle. All word-types like cases and pronouns and prepositions (which arise, of course, much later) have a causal or local meaning in respect of named units; adjectives, and verbs also, have frequently come into existence in pairs of opposites; often (as in the E’we languages of West Africa investigated by Westermann) the same word is pronounced low or high to denote for example great and small, far and near, passive and active.⁠[188] Later these relics of gesture-language pass completely into the word-form,⁠[189] as we see clearly, for example, in the Greek μακρός and μικρός and the u-sounds of Egyptian designations of suffering. It is the form of thinking in opposites which, starting from these antithetical word-pairs, constitutes the foundation of all inorganic logic, and turns every scientific discovery of truths into a movement of conceptual contraries, of which the most universal instance is that of an old view and a new one being contrasted as “error” and “truth.”

The second great turning-point was the use of grammar. Besides the name there was now the sentence, besides the verbal designation the verbal relation, and thereupon reflection—which is a thinking in word-relations that follows from the perception of things for which word-labels exist—became the decisive characteristic of man’s waking-consciousness. The question whether the communication-languages already contained effective “sentences” before the appearance of the genuine “name” is a difficult one. The sentence, in the present acceptation of the word, has indeed developed within these languages according to its own conditions and with its own phases, but nevertheless it postulates the prior existence of the name. Sentences as conceptual relations become possible only with the intellectual change that accompanied their birth. And we must assume further that within the highly developed wordless languages one character or trait after another, in the course of continuous practical use, was transformed into verbal form and as such fell into its place in an increasingly solid structure, the prime form of our present-day languages. Thus the inner build of all verbal languages rests upon foundations of far older construction, and for its further development is not dependent upon the stock of words and its destiny.

It is in fact just the reverse. For with syntax the original group of individual names was transformed into a system of words, whose character was given, not by their proper, but by their grammatical significance. The name made its appearance as something novel and entirely self-contained. But word-species arose as elements of the sentence, and thereafter the contents of waking-consciousness streamed in overflowing profusion into this world of words, demanding to be labelled and represented in it, until finally even “all” became, in one shape or another, a word and available for the thought-process.

Thenceforward the sentence is the decisive element—we speak in sentences and not words. Attempts to define the two have been frequent, but never successful. According to F. N. Finck, word-formation is an analytical and sentence-formation a synthetical activity of the mind, the first preceding the second. It is demonstrable that the same actuality received as impression is variously understood, and words, therefore, are definable from very different points of view.⁠[190] But according to the usual definition, a sentence is the verbal expression of a thought, a symbol (says H. Paul) for the connexion of several ideas in the soul of the speaker. It seems to me quite impossible to settle the nature of the sentence from its contents. The fact is simply that we call the relatively largest mechanical units employed “sentences” and the relatively smallest “words.” Over this range extends the validity of grammatical laws. But as soon as we pass from theory to practice, we see that language as currently used is no longer such a mechanism; it obeys not laws, but pulse. Thus a race-character is involved, a priori, in the way in which the matter to be communicated is set in sentences. Sentences are not the same for Tacitus and Napoleon as for Cicero and Nietzsche. The Englishman orders his material syntactically in a different way from the German. Not the ideas and thoughts, but the thinking, the kind of life, the blood, determine in the primitive, Classical, Chinese, and Western speech-communities the type of the sentence-unit, and with it the mechanical relation of the word to the sentence. The boundary between grammar and syntax should be placed at the point where the mechanical of speech ceases and the organic of speaking begins—usages, custom, the physiognomy of the way that a man employs to express himself. The other boundary lies where the mechanical structure of the word passes into the organic factors of sound-formation and expression. Even the children of immigrants can often be recognized by the way in which the English “th” is pronounced—a race-trait of the land. Only that which lies between these limits is the “language,” properly so called, which has system, is a technical instrument, and can be invented, improved, changed, and worn out; enunciation and expression, on the contrary, adhere to the race. We recognize a person known to us, without seeing him, by his pronunciation, and not only that, but we can recognize a member of an alien race even if he speaks perfectly correct German. The great sound-modifications, like the Old High German in Carolingian times and the Middle High German in the Late Gothic, have territorial frontiers and affect only the speaking of the language, not the inner form of sentence and word.

Words, I have just said, are the relatively smallest mechanical units in the sentence. There is probably nothing that is so characteristic of the thinking of a human species as the way in which these units are acquired by it. For the Bantu Negro a thing that he sees belongs first of all to a very large number of categories of comprehension. Correspondingly the word for it consists of a kernel or root and a number of monosyllabic prefixes. When he speaks of a woman in a field, his word is something like this: “living, one, big, old, female, outside, human”; this makes seven syllables, but it denotes a single, clear-headed, and to us quite alien act of comprehension.⁠[191] There are languages in which the word is almost coextensive with the sentence.

The gradual replacement of bodily or sonic by grammatical gestures is thus the decisive factor in the formation of sentences, but it has never been completed. There are no purely verbal languages. The activity of speaking, in words, as it emerges more and more precise, consists in this, that through word-sounds we awaken significance-feelings, which in turn through the sound of the word-connexions evoke further relation-feelings. Our schooling in speech trains us to understand in this abbreviated and indicative form not only light-things and light-relations, but also thought-things and thought-relations. Words are only named, not used definitively, and the hearer has to feel what the speaker means. This and this alone amounts to speech, and hence mien and tone play a much greater part than is generally admitted in the understanding of modern speech. Substantive signs may conceivably exist for many of the animals even, but verb-signs never.

The last grand event in this history, which brings the formation of verbal speech more or less to a close, is the coming of the verb. This assumes at the outset a very high order of abstraction. For substantives are words whereby things sense-defined in illuminated space⁠[192] become evocable also in after-thought, while verbs describe types of change, which are not seen, but are extracted from the unendingly protean light-world, by noting the special characters of the individual cases, and generating concepts from them. “Falling stone” is originally a unit impression, but we first separate movement and thing moved and then isolate falling as one kind of movement from innumerable other sorts and shades thereof—sinking, tottering, stumbling, slipping. We do not “see” the distinction, we “know” it. The difference between fleeing and running, or between flying and being wafted, altogether transcends the visual impression they produce and is only apprehensible by a word-trained consciousness. But now, with this verb-thinking, even life itself has become accessible to reflection. Out of the living impress made on the waking-consciousness, out of the ambiance of the becoming (which gesture-speech, being merely imitative, leaves unquestioned and unprobed) that which is life itself—namely, singularity of occurrence—is unconsciously eliminated, and the rest, as effect of a cause (the wind wafts, lightning flashes, the peasant ploughs), is put, under purely extensive descriptions, into suitable places in the sign-system. One has to bury oneself completely in the solid definiteness of subject and predicate, active and passive, present and perfect, to perceive how entirely the understanding here masters the senses and unsouls actuality. In substantives one can still regard the mental thing (the idea) as a copy of the visual thing, but in the verb something inorganic has been put in place of something organic. The fact that we live—namely, that we at this instant perceive something—becomes eventually a property of the something perceived. In terms of word-thought, the perceived endures—“is.” Thus, finally, are formed the categories of thought, graded according to what is and what is not natural to it; thus Time appears as a dimension, Destiny as a cause, the living as chemical or psychical mechanism. It is in this wise that the style of mathematical, judicial, and dogmatic thought arises.

And in this wise, too, arises that disunity which seems to us inseparable from the essence of man, but is really only the expression of the dominance of word-language in his waking-consciousness. This instrument of communication between Ego and Tu has, by reason of its perfection, fashioned out of the animal understanding of sensation, a thinking-in-words which stands proxy for sensation. Subtle thinking—“splitting hairs,” as it is called—is conversing with oneself in word-significances. It is the activity that no kind of language but the language of words can subserve, and it becomes, with the perfection of the language, distinctive of the life-habit of whole classes of human beings. The divorce of speech, rigid and devitalized, from speaking, which makes it impossible to include the whole truth in a verbal utterance, has particularly far-reaching consequences in the sign-system of words. Abstract thinking consists in the use of a finite word-framework into which it is sought to squeeze the whole infinite content of life. Concepts kill Being and falsify Waking-Being. Long ago in the springtime of language-history, while understanding had still to struggle in order to hold its own with sensation, this mechanization was without importance for life. But now, from a being who occasionally thought, man has become a thinking being, and it is the ideal of every thought-system to subject life, once and for all, to the domination of intellect. This is achieved in theory by according validity only to the known and branding the actual as a sham and a delusion. It is achieved in practice by forcing the voices of the blood to be silent in the presence of universal ethical principles.⁠[193]

Both, logic and ethics alike, are systems of absolute and eternal truths for the intellect, and correspondingly untruths for history. However completely the inner eye may triumph over the outer in the domain of thought, in the realm of facts the belief in eternal truths is a petty and absurd stage-play that exists only in the heads of individuals. A true system of thoughts emphatically cannot exist, for no sign can replace actuality. Profound and honest thinkers are always brought to the conclusion that all cognition is conditioned a priori by its own form and can never reach that which the words mean—apart, again, from the case of technics, in which the concepts are instruments and not aims in themselves. And this ignorabimus is in conformity also with the intuition of every true sage, that abstract principles of life are acceptable only as figures of speech, trite maxims of daily use underneath which life flows, as it has always flowed, onward. Race, in the end, is stronger than languages, and thus it is that, under all the great names, it has been thinkers—who are personalities—and not systems—which are mutable—that have taken effect upon life.

VI

So far, then, the inner history of word-languages shows three stages. In the first there appears, within highly developed but wordless communication-languages, the first names—units in a new sort of understanding. The world awakens as a secret, and religious thought begins. In the second stage, a complete communication-speech is gradually transformed into grammatical values. The gesture becomes the sentence, and the sentence transforms the names into words. Further, the sentence becomes the great school of understanding vis-à-vis sensation, and an increasingly subtle significance-feeling for abstract relations within the mechanism of the sentence evokes an immense profusion of inflexions, which attach themselves especially to the substantive and the verb, the space-word and the time-word. This is the blossoming time of grammar, the period of which we may probably (though under all reserves) take as the two millennia preceding the birth of the Egyptian and Babylonian Culture. The third stage is marked by a rapid decay of inflexions and a simultaneous replacement of grammar by syntax. The intellectualization of man’s waking-consciousness has now proceeded so far that he no longer needs the sense-props of inflexion and, discarding the old luxuriance of word-forms, communicates freely and surely by means of the faintest nuances of idiom (particles, position of words, rhythm). By dint of speaking in words, the understanding has attained supremacy over the waking-consciousness, and to-day it is in process of liberating itself from the restrictions of sensible-verbal machinery and working towards pure mechanics of the intellect. Minds and not senses are making the contact.

In this third stage of linguistic history, which as such takes place in the biological plane⁠[194] and therefore belongs to man as a type, the history of the higher Cultures now intervenes with an entirely new speech, the speech of the distance—writing—an invention of such inward forcefulness that again there is a sudden decisive turn in the destinies of the word-languages.

The written language of Egypt is already by 3000 in a state of rapid grammatical decomposition; likewise the Sumerian literary languages called eme-sal (women’s language). The written language of China—which vis-à-vis the vernaculars of the Chinese world has long formed a language apart—is, even in the oldest known texts, so entirely inflexionless that only recent research has established that it ever had inflexions at all.⁠[195] The Indogermanic system is known to us only in a state of complete break-down. Of the Case in Old Vedic (about 1500 B.C.) the Classical languages a thousand years later retained only fragments.⁠[196] From Alexander the Great’s time the dual disappeared from the declension of ordinary Hellenistic Greek, and the passive vanished from the conjugation entirely. The Western languages, although of the most miscellaneous provenance imaginable—the Germanic from primitive and the Romanic from highly civilized stock—modify in the same direction, the Romanic cases having become reduced to one, and the English, after the Reformation, to zero. Ordinary German definitely shed the genitive at the beginning of the nineteenth century and is now in process of abolishing the dative. Only after trying to translate a piece of difficult and pregnant prose—say of Tacitus or Mommsen—“back”⁠[197] into some very ancient language rich in inflexions does one realize how meantime the technique of signs has vaporized into a technique of thoughts, which now only needs to employ the signs—abbreviated, but replete with meaning—merely as the counters in a game that only the initiates of the particular speech-communion understand. This is why to a west-European, the sacred Chinese texts must always be in the fullest sense a sealed book; but the same holds good also for the primary words of every other Culture-language—the Greek λογός and ἀρχή, the Sanskrit Atman and Braman—indications of the world-outlook of their respective Cultures that no one not bred in the Culture can comprehend.

The external history of languages is as good as lost to us in just its most important parts. Its springtime lies deep in the primitive era, in which (to repeat what has been said earlier), we have to imagine “humanity” in the form of scattered and quite small troops, lost in the wide spaces of the earth. A spiritual change came when reciprocal contacts became habitual (and eventually natural) to them, but correspondingly there can be no doubt that this contact was first sought for and then regulated, or fended off, by means of speech, and that it was the impression of an earth filled with men that first brought the waking-consciousness to the point of tense intelligent shrewdness, forcing verbal language under pressure to the surface. So that, perhaps, the birth of grammar is connected with the race hall-mark of the grand Number.