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THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY -- VOLUMES 1 & 2 |
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FOURTH CHAPTER: THE CHAOS
THE remarks which I made in the introduction to the second division will suffice as a general preface to this chapter on the chaos of peoples in the dying Roman Empire; they explain to what time and what countries I refer in speaking of the "chaos of peoples." Here, as elsewhere, I presuppose historical knowledge, at least in general outline, and as I should not like to write a single line in this whole book which did not originate from the need of comprehending and of judging the nineteenth century better, I think I should use the subject before us especially to discuss and answer the important question: Is nation, is race a mere word? Is it the case, as the ethnographer Ratzel asserts, that the fusion of all mankind should be kept before us as our "aim and duty, hope and wish"? Or do we not rather deduce from the example of Hellas and Rome, on the one hand, and of the pseudo- Roman empire on the other, as well as from many other examples in history, that man can only attain his zenith within those limits in which sharply defined, individualistic national types are produced? Is the present condition of things in Europe with its many fully formed idioms, each with its own peculiar poetry and literature, each the expression of a definite, characteristic national soul -- is this state of things really a retrograde step in comparison with the time, when Latin and Greek, as a kind of twin Volapuk, formed a bond of union between all those Roman subjects who had no fatherland to call their own? Is community of blood nothing? Can community of memory and of faith be replaced by abstract ideals? Above all, is the question one to be settled by each as he pleases, is there no clearly distinguishable natural law, according to which we must fit our judgment? Do not the biological sciences teach us that in the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms pre-eminently noble races -- that is, races endowed with exceptional strength and vitality -- are produced only under definite conditions, which restrict the begetting of new individuals? Is it not possible, in view of all these human and non-human phenomena, to find a clear answer to the question, What is race? And shall we not be able, from the consciousness of what race is, to say at once what the absence of definite races must mean for history? When we look at those direct heirs of the great legacy, these questions force themselves upon us. Let us in the first place discuss races quite generally; then, and then only, shall we be able to discuss with advantage the conditions prevailing in this special case, their importance in the course of his tory, and consequently in the nineteenth century. There is perhaps no question about which such absolute ignorance prevails among highly cultured, indeed learned, men, as tile question of the essence and the significance of the idea of "race." What are pure races? Whence do they come? Have they any historical importance? Is the idea to be taken in a broad or a narrow sense? Do we know anything on the subject or not? What is the relation of the ideas of race and of nation to one another? I confess that all I have ever read or heard on this subject has been disconnected and contradictory: some specialists among the natural investigators form an exception, but even they very rarely apply their clear and detailed knowledge to the human race. Not a year passes without our being assured at international congresses, by authoritative national economists, ministers, bishops, natural scientists, that there is no difference and no inequality between nations. Teutons, who emphasise the importance of race-relationship, Jews, who do not feel at ease among us and long to get back to their Asiatic home, are by none so slightingly and scornfully spoken of as by men of science. Professor Virchow, for instance, says [1] that the stirrings of consciousness of race among' us are only to be explained by the "loss of sound common sense": moreover, that it is " all a riddle to us, and no one knows what it really means in this age of equal rights." Nevertheless, this learned man closes his address with the expression of a desire for "beautiful self-dependent personalities." As if all history were not there to show us how personality and race are most closely connected. how the nature of the personality is determined by the nature of its race. and the power of the personality dependent upon certain conditions of its blood! And as if the scientific rearing of animals and plants did not afford us an extremely rich and reliable material, whereby we may become acquainted not only with the conditions but with the importance of "race"! Are the so-called (and rightly so-called) "noble" animal races, the draught-horses of Limousin, the American trotter, the Irish hunter, the absolutely reliable sporting dogs, produced by chance and promiscuity? Do we get them by giving the animals equality of rights, by throwing the same food to them and whipping them with the same whip? No, they are produced by artificial selection and strict maintenance of the purity of the race. Horses and especially dogs give us every chance of observing that the intellectual gifts go hand in hand with the physical; this is specially true of the moral qualities: a mongrel is frequently very clever, but never reliable; morally he is always a weed. Continual promiscuity between two ye-eminent animal races leads without exception to the destruction of the pre-eminent characteristics of both. [2] Why should the human race form an exception? A father of the Church might imagine that it does, but is it becoming in a renowned natural investigator to throw the weight of his great influence into the scale of mediaeval ignorance and superstition? Truly one could wish that these scientific authorities of ours, who are so utterly lacking in philosophy, had followed a course of logic under Thomas Aquinas; it could only be beneficial to them. In spite of the broad common foundation, the human races are, in reality, as different from one another in character, qualities. and above all, in the degree of their individual capacities, as greyhound, bulldog, poodle and Newfoundland dog. Inequality is a state towards which nature inclines in all spheres; nothing extraordinary is produced without "specialisation"; in the case of men, as of animals, it is this specialisation that produces noble races; history and ethnology reveal this secret to the dullest eye. Has not every genuine race its own glorious, incomparable physiognomy? How could Hellenic art have arisen without Hellenes? How quickly has the jealous hostility between the different cities of the small country of Greece given each part its sharply defined individuality within its own family type! How quickly this was blurred again, when Macedonians and Romans with their levelling hand swept over the land! And how everything which had given an everlasting significant to the word "Hellenic" gradually disappeared when from North, East and West new bands of unrelated peoples kept flocking to the country and mingled with genuine Hellenes! The equality, before which Professor Virchow bows the knee, was now there, all walls were razed to the ground, all boundaries became meaningless; the philosophy, too, with which Virchow in the same lecture breaks so keen a lance, was destroyed, and its place taken by the very soundest "common sense"; but the beautiful Hellenic personality, but for which all of us would to-day be merely more or less civilised barbarians, had disappeared, disappeared for ever. "Crossing obliterates characters." If the men who should be the most competent to pronounce an opinion on the essence and significance of Race show such an incredible lack of judgment -- if in dealing with a subject where wide experience is necessary for sure perception, they bring to bear upon it nothing but hollow political phrases -- how can we wonder that the unlearned should talk nonsense even when their instinct points out the true path? For the subject has in these days aroused interest in widely various strata of society, and where the learned refuse to teach, the unlearned must shift for themselves. When in the fifties Count Gobineau published his brilliant work on the inequality of the races of mankind, it passed unnoticed: no one seemed to know what it all meant. Like poor Virchow men stood puzzled before a riddle. Now that the Century has come to an end things have changed: the more passionate, more impulsive element in the nations pays great and direct attention to this question. But in what a maze of contradiction, errors and delusions public opinion moves! Notice how Gobineau bases his account -- so astonishingly rich in intuitive ideas which have later been verified and in historical knowledge -- upon the dogmatic supposition that the world was peopled by Shem, Ham and Japhet. Such a gaping void in capacity of judgment in the author suffices, in spite of all his documentary support, to relegate his work to the hybrid class of scientific phantasmagorias. With this is connected Gobineau's further fantastic idea, that the originally" pure" noble races crossed with each other in the course of history, and with every crossing became irrevocably less pure and less noble. From this we must of necessity derive a hopelessly pessimistic view of the future of the human race. But this supposition rests upon total ignorance of the physiological importance of what we have to understand by "race." A noble race does not fall from Heaven, it becomes noble gradually, just like fruit-trees, and this gradual process can begin anew at any moment, as soon as accident of geography and history or a fixed plan (as in the case of the Jews) creates the conditions. We meet similar absurdities at every step. We have, for example, a powerful Anti-Semitic movement: are we to consider the Jews as identical with the rest of the Semites? Have not the Jews by their very development made themselves a peculiar, pure race profoundly different from the others? Is it certain that an important crossing did not precede the birth of this people? And what is an Aryan? We hear so many and so definite pronouncements on this head. We contrast the Aryan with the "Semite," by whom we ordinarily understand "the Jew" and nothing more, and that is at least a thoroughly concrete conception based upon experience. But what kind of man is the Aryan? What concrete conception does he correspond to? Only he who knows nothing of ethnography can give a definite answer to this question. As soon as we do not limit this expression to the Indo-Eranians who are doubtless interrelated, we get into the sphere of uncertain hypotheses. [3] The peoples whom we have learned to classify together as "Aryans" differ physically very much from each other; they reveal the most different structure of skull, also different colour of skin, eyes and hair; and even granted that there was once a common ancestral Indo-European race, what evidence can we offer against the daily increasing sum of facts which make it probable that other absolutely unrelated types have also been from time immemorial richly represented in our so-called Aryan nations of to-day, so that we can never apply the term "Aryan" to a whole people, but, at most, to single individuals? Relationship of language is no conclusive proof of community of blood: the theory of the immigration of the so-called Indo-Europeans from Asia, which rests upon very slight grounds, encounters the grave difficulty that investigators are finding more and more reason to believe that the population which we are accustomed to can Indo-European was settled in Europe from time immemorial; [4] for the opposite hypothesis of a colonisation of India from Europe there are not the slightest grounds ... in short, this question is what miners call "swimming land"; he who knows the danger sets foot on it as little as possible. The more we study the specialists, the less certain we become. It was originally the philologists who established the collective idea "Aryans." Then came the anatomical anthropologists; the inadmissibility of conclusions drawn from mere philology was demonstrated, and now skull-measuring began; craniometry became a profession, and it did provide a mass of extremely interesting material; lately, however, the same fate is overtaking this. so-called "somatic anthropology" that formerly overtook philology; ethnographers have begun to travel and to make scientifically systematic observations from living man; and in this way have been able to prove that the measuring of bones by no means deserves the importance that was wont to be attached to it; one of the greatest of Virchow's pupils has become convinced that the idea of solving problems of ethnology by the measurement of skulls is fruitless. [5] All these advances have been made in the second half of the nineteenth century; who knows what will be taught about "Aryans" [6] in the year 1950? At present, at any rate, the layman can say nothing on the subject. If he turns up one of the well-known authorities, he will be told that the Aryans "are an invention of the study and not a primeval people," [7] if he seeks information from another, he receives the answer that the common characteristics of the Indo-Europeans, from the Atlantic Ocean to India, suffice to put the actual blood-relationship beyond all doubt. [8] I hope I have clearly illustrated in these two paragraphs the great confusion which is prevalent among us to-day in regard to the idea "race." This confusion is not necessary, that is, with practical, active men who belong to life as we do. And it is unnecessary for this reason, that we, in order to interpret the lessons of history and to comprehend our present age in connection therewith, do not in any way need to seek for hidden origins and causes. In the former division I have already quoted the words of Goethe, "Animated inquiry into cause does great harm." What is clear to every eye suffices, if not for science, at least for life. Science must, of course, ever wander on its thorny but fascinating path; it is like a mountain climber, who every moment imagines that he will reach the highest peak, but soon discovers behind it a higher one still. But life is only indirectly interested in these changing hypotheses. One of the most fatal errors of our time is that which impels us to give too great weight in our judgments to the so-called "results" of science. Knowledge can certainly have an illuminating effect; but it is not always so, and especially for this reason. that knowledge always stands upon tottering feet. For how can intelligent men doubt but that much which we think we know to-day will be laughed at as crass ignorance, one hundred, two hundred, five hundred years hence? Many facts may, indeed, be looked upon to-day as finally established; but new knowledge places these same facts in quite a new light, unites them to figures never thought of before, or changes their perspective; to regulate our judgments by the contemporary state of science may be compared to an artist's viewing the world through a transparent, ever-changing kaleidoscope, instead of with the naked eye. Pure science (in contrast to industrial science) is a noble plaything; its great intellectual and moral worth rests in no small degree upon the fact that it is not "useful"; in this respect it is quite analogous to art, it signifies the application of thought to the outward world; and since nature is inexhaustibly rich, she thereby ever brings new material to the mind, enriches its inventory of conceptions and gives the imagination a new dream-world to replace the gradually fading old one. [9] Life, on the other hand, purely as such, is something different from systematic knowledge, something much more stable, more firmly founded, more comprehensive; it is in fact the essence of all reality, whereas even the most precise science represents the thinned, generalised, no longer direct reality. Here I understand by "life" what is otherwise also called "nature," as when, for instance, modern medicine teaches us that nature encourages by means of fever the change of matter and defends man against the illness which has seized him. Nature is in fact what we call "automatic," its roots go very much deeper than knowledge will ever be able to follow. And so it is my conviction that we -- who as thinking, well-informed, boldly dreaming and investigating beings are certainly just such integral parts of nature as all other beings and things, and as our own bodies -- may entrust ourselves to this nature -- to this "life" -- with great confidence. Though science leaves us in the lurch at many points, though she, fickle as a modern parliamentarian, laughs to-day at what she yesterday taught as everlasting truth, let this not lead us astray; what we require for life, we shall certainly learn. On the whole science is a splendid but somewhat dangerous friend; she is a great juggler and easily leads the mind astray into wild sentimentality; science and art are like the steeds attached to Plato's car of the soul; "sound common sense" (whose loss Professor Virchow lamented) proves its worth not least of all in pulling the reins tight and not permitting these noble animals to bolt with its natural, sound judgment. The very fact that we are living beings gives us an infinitely rich and unfailing capacity of hitting upon the right thing, even without learning, wherever it is necessary. Whoever simply and with open mind questions nature -- the "mother" as the old myths called her -- can be sure of being answered, as a mother answers her son, not always in blameless logic, but correctly in the main, intelligibly and with a sure instinct for the best interests of the son. So is it, too, in regard to the question of the significance of race: one of the most vital, perhaps the most vital, questions that can confront man. Nothing is so convincing as the consciousness of the possession of Race. The man who belongs to a distinct, pure race, never loses the sense of it. The guardian angel of his lineage is ever at his side, supporting him where he loses his foothold, warning him like the Socratic Daemon where he is in danger of going astray, compelling obedience, and forcing him to undertakings which, deeming them impossible, he would never have dared to attempt. Weak and erring like all that is human, a man of this stamp recognises himself, as others recognise him, by the sureness of his character, and by the fact that his actions are marked by a certain simple and peculiar greatness, which finds its explanation in his distinctly typical and super-personal qualities. Race lifts a man above himself: it endows him with extraordinary -- I might almost say supernatural -- powers. so entirely does it distinguish him from the individual who springs from the chaotic jumble of peoples drawn from all parts of the world: and should this man of pure origin be perchance gifted above his fellows, then the fact of Race strengthens and elevates him on every hand, and he becomes a genius towering over the rest of mankind, not because he has been thrown upon the earth like a flaming meteor by a freak of nature, but because he soars heavenward like some strong and stately tree, nourished by thousands and thousands of roots -- no solitary individual, but the living sum of untold souls striving for the same goal. He who has eyes to see at once detects Race in animals. It shows itself in the whole habit of the beast, and proclaims itself in a hundred peculiarities which defy analysis: nay more, it proves itself by achievements, for its possession invariably leads to something excessive and out of the common -- even to that which is exaggerated and not free from bias. Goethe's dictum, "only that which is extravagant (uberschwanglich) makes greatness," is well known. [10] That is the very quality which a thoroughbred race reared from superior materials bestows upon its individual descendants -- something "extravagant" -- and, indeed, what we learn from every racehorse, every thoroughbred fox-terrier, every Cochin China fowl, is the very lesson which the history of mankind so eloquently teaches us! Is not the Greek in the fulness of his glory an unparalleled example of this "extravagance"? And do we not see this "extravagance" first make its appearance when immigration from the North has ceased, and the various strong breeds of men, isolated on the peninsula once for all, begin to fuse into a new race, brighter and more brilliant, where, as m Athens, the racial blood flows from many sources -- simpler and more resisting where, as in Lacedaemon, even this mixture of blood had been barred out. Is the race not as it were extinguished, as soon as fate wrests the land from its proud exclusiveness and incorporates it in a greater whole? [11] Does not Rome teach us the same lesson? Has not in this case also a special mixture of blood produced an absolutely new race, [12] similar in qualities and capacities to no later one, endowed with exuberant power? And does not victory in this case effect what disaster did in that, but only much more quickly? Like a cataract the stream of strange blood overflooded the almost depopulated Rome and at once the Romans 'ceased to be. Would one small tribe from among all the Semites have become a world-embracing power had it not made "purity of race" its inflexible fundamental law? In days when so much nonsense is talked concerning this question, let Disraeli teach us that the whole significance of Judaism lies in its purity of race. that this alone gives it power and duration, and just as it has outlived the people of antiquity, so, thanks to its knowledge of this law of nature, will It outlive the constantly mingling races of to-day. [13] What is the use of detailed scientific investigations as to whether there are distinguishable races? whether race has a worth? how this is possible? and so on. We turn the tables and say: it is evident that there are such races: it is a fact of direct experience that the quality of the race is of vital importance; your province is only to find out the how and the wherefore, not to deny the facts themselves in order to indulge your ignorance. One of the greatest ethnologists of the present day, Adolf Bastian, testifies that, "what we see in history is not a transformation, a passing of one race into another, but entirely new and perfect creations, which the ever-youthful productivity of nature sends forth from the invisible realm of Hades." [14] Whoever travels the short distance between Calais and Dover, feels almost as if he had reached a different planet, so great is the difference between the English and French, despite their many points of relationship. The observer can also see from this instance the value of purer "inbreeding." England is practically cut off by its insular position: the last (not very extensive) invasion took place 800 years ago; since then only a few thousands from the Netherlands, and later a few thousand Huguenots have crossed over (all of the same origin), and thus has been reared that race which at the present moment is unquestionably the strongest in Europe. [15] Direct experience, however, offers us a series of quite different observations on race, all of which may gradually contribute to the extension of our knowledge as well as to its definiteness. In contrast to the new, growing, Anglo-Saxon race, look, for instance, at the Sephardim, the so-called "Spanish Jews"; here we find how a genuine race can by purity keep itself noble for centuries and tens of centuries, but at the same time how very necessary it is to distinguish between the nobly reared portions of a nation and the rest. In England, Holland and Italy there are still genuine Sephardim but very few, since they can scarcely any longer avoid crossing with the Ashkenazim (the so-called "German Jews"). Thus, for example, the Montefiores of the present generation have all without exception married German Jewesses. But every one who has travelled in the East of Europe. where the genuine Sephardim still as far as possible avoid all intercourse with German Jews, for whom they have an almost comical repugnance, will agree with me when I say that it is only when one sees these men and has intercourse with them that one begins to comprehend the significance of Judaism in the history of the word. This is nobility in the fullest sense of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful figures, noble heads, dignity in speech and bearing. The type is Semitic in the same sense as that of certain noble Syrians and Arabs. That out of the midst of such people Prophets and Psalmists could arise -- that I understood at the first glance, which I honestly confess that I had never succeeded in doing when I gazed, however carefully, on the many hundred young Jews -- "Bochers " -- of the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. When we study the Sacred Books of the Jews we see further that the conversion of this monopolytheistic people to the ever sublime (though according to our Ideas mechanical and materialistic) conception of a true cosmic monotheism was not the work of the community, but of a mere fraction of the people; indeed this minority had to wage a continuous warfare against the majority, and was compelled to enforce the acceptance of its more exalted view of life by means of the highest Power to which man is heir, the might of personality. As for the rest of the people, unless the Prophets were guilty of gross exaggeration, they convey the impression of a singularly vulgar crowd, devoid of every higher aim, the rich hard and unbelieving, the poor fickle and ever possessed by the longing to throw themselves into the arms of the wretchedest and filthiest idolatry. The course of Jewish history has provided for a peculiar artificial selection of the morally higher section: by banishments, by continual withdrawals to the Diaspora -- a result of the poverty and oppressed condition of the land -- only the most faithful (of the better classes) remained behind, and these abhorred every marriage contract -- even with Jews! -- in which both parties could not show an absolutely pure descent from one of the tribes of Israel and prove their strict orthodoxy beyond all doubt. [16] There remained then no great choice; for the nearest neighbours, the Samaritans, were heterodox, and in the remoter parts of the land, except in the case of the Levites who kept apart, the population was to a large extent much mixed. In this way race was here produced. And when at last the final dispersion of the Jews came, all or almost all of these sole genuine Jews were taken to Spain. The shrewd Romans in fact knew well how to draw distinctions, and so they removed these dangerous fanatics, these proud men, whose very glance made the masses obey, from their Eastern home to the farthest West, [17] while, on the other hand, they did not disturb the Jewish people outside of the narrower Judea more than the Jews of the Diaspora. [18] -- Here, again, we have a most interesting object-lesson on the origin and worth of "race"! For of all the men whom we are wont to characterise as Jews, relatively few are descended from these great genuine Hebrews, they are rather the descendants of the Jews of the Diaspora, Jews who did not take part in the last great struggles; who, indeed, to some extent did not even live through the Maccabean age; these and the poor country people who were left behind in Palestine, and who later in Christian ages were banished or fled, are the ancestors of "our Jews" of to-day. Now whoever wishes to see with his own eyes what noble race is, and what it is not, should send for the poorest of the Sephardim from Salonici or Sarajevo (great wealth is very rare among them, for they are men of stainless honour) and put him side by side with any Ashkenazim financier; then will he perceive the difference between the nobility which race bestows and that conferred by a monarch. [19] It would be easy to multiply examples. But I think that we now have all the material that is necessary for a systematic analysis of our knowledge regarding race, from which we may then derive the cardinal principles of a conscious and appropriate judgment. We are not reasoning from hypothetical conditions in the remote past to possible results, but arguing from sure facts back to their direct causes. The inequality of gifts even in what are manifestly related races is evident; it is, moreover, equally evident to everyone who observes more closely that here and there, for a shorter or a longer time, one tribe does not only distinguish itself from the others, but is easily pre-eminent among them because there is something beyond the common in its gifts and capabilities. That this is due to racial breeding I have tried to illustrate graphically by the preceding examples. The results deducible from these examples (and they can be multiplied to any extent) enable us to affirm that the origin of such noble races is dependent upon five natural laws. (1) The first and fundamental condition is undoubtedly the presence of excellent material. Where there is nothing, the king has no rights. But if I am asked, Whence comes this material? I must answer, I know not, I am as ignorant in this matter as if I were the greatest of all scholars and I refer the questioner to the words of the great world-seer of the nineteenth century, Goethe, "What no longer originates, we cannot conceive as originating. What has originated we do not comprehend." As far back as our glance can reach, we see human beings, we see that they differ essentially in their gifts and that some show more vigorous powers of growth than others. Only one thing can be asserted without leaving the basis of historical observation: a high state of excellence is only attained gradually and under particular circumstances, it is only forced activity that can bring it about; under other circumstances it may completely degenerate. The struggle which means destruction for the fundamentally weak race steels the strong; the same struggle, moreover, by eliminating the weaker elements, tends still further to strengthen the strong. Around the childhood of great races, as we observe, even in the case of the metaphysical Indians, the storm of war always rages. (2) But the presence of excellent human material is not enough to give birth to the "extravagant"; such races as the Greeks, the Romans, the Franks, the Swabians, the Italians and Spaniards in the period of their splendour, the Moors, the English, such abnormal phenomena as the Aryan Indians and the Jews only spring from continued inbreeding. They arise and they pass away before our eyes. Inbreeding means the producing of descendants exclusively in the circle of the related tribesmen, with the avoidance of all foreign mixture of blood. Of this I have already given striking examples. (3) But inbreeding pur et simple does not suffice: along with it there must be selection, or, as the specialists say, "artificial selection." We understand this law best when we study the principles of artificial breeding in the animal and vegetable worlds; I should recommend every one to do so, for there are few things which so enrich our conceptions of the plastic possibilities of life. [20] When one has come to understand what miracles are performed by selection, how a racehorse or a Dachshund or a choice chrysanthemum is gradually produced by the careful elimination of everything that is of indifferent quality, one will recognise that the same phenomenon is found in the human race, although of course it can never be seen with the same clearness and definiteness as in the other spheres. I have already advanced the example of the Jews; the exposure of weak infants is another point and was in any case one of the most beneficial laws of the Greeks, Romans and Teutonic peoples; hard times, which only the strong man and the hardy woman can survive, have a similar effect. [21] (4) There is another fundamental law hitherto little heeded, which seems to me quite clear from history, just as it is a fact of experience in the breeding of animals: the origin of extraordinary races is, without exception, preceded by a mixture of blood. As that acute thinker, Emerson, says: "we are piqued with pure descent, but nature loves inoculation." Of the Aryan Indians of course we can say nothing as regards this, their previous history being hidden in the misty distance of time; on the other hand, with regard to the Jews, Hellenes and Romans the facts are perfectly clear, and they are no less so in regard to all the nations of Europe which have distinguished themselves by their national achievements and by the production of a great number of individuals of "extravagant" endowments. With regard to the Jews I refer the reader to the following chapter, as regards the Hellenes, Romans and English I have often pointed to this fact; [22] nevertheless, I would urge the reader not to grudge the labour of carefully reading in Curtius and Mommsen those chapters at the beginning which, on account of the many names and the confusion of detail, are usually rather glanced through than studied. There has never been so thorough and successful a mixture as in Greece: with the old common stock as basis there have gradually sprung up in the valleys, separated by mountains or seas, characteristically different tribes, composed here of huntsmen, there of peaceful farmers, in other parts of seafarers, &c.; among these differentiated elements we find a mixing and crossing, so fine that a human brain selecting artificially could not have reasoned the matter out more perfectly. In the first place we have migrations from East to West, later from West to East over the AEgean Sea; in the meantime, however, the tribes of the extreme North (in the first place the Dorians) advanced to the extreme South, forcing many of the noblest who would not submit to bondage from the South to that North from which they themselves had just come, or over the sea to the islands and the Hellenic coast of Asia. But everyone of these shiftings meant mixture of blood. Thus, for example, the Dorians did not all move to the Peloponnese, portions of them remained at every stopping-place in their slow wanderings and there fused with the former population. Indeed, these same original Dorians, whose special unity is such an apparent characteristic, knew in the old times that they were composed of three different stems, one of which moreover was called "Pamphyle," that is, "the stem of people of various descent." The most exuberant talent showed itself where the crossing had been happiest -- in New Ionia and in Attica. In New Ionia "Greeks came to Greeks, Ionians returned to their old home, but they came so transformed that from the new union of what was originally related, a thoroughly national development, much improved, rich, and in its results absolutely new, began in the old Ionian land." But most instructive is the history of the development of the Attic and particularly of the Athenian people. In Attica (just as in Arcadia, but nowhere else) the original Pelasgic population remained; it "was never driven out by the power of the stranger." But the coastland that belonged to the Archipelago invited immigration; and this came from every side; and while the alien Phoenicians only founded commercial stations on the neighbouring islands, the related Greeks pressed on into the interior from this side and that side of the sea, and gradually mingled with the former inhabitants. Now came the time of the already mentioned Dorian migrations and the great and lasting changes; Attica alone was spared; and thither fled many from all directions, from Boeotia, Achaea, Messenia, Argos and Egina, &c.; but these new immigrants did not represent whole populations; in the great majority of cases they were chosen men, men of illustrious, often of royal birth. By their influx the one small land became exceptionally rich in genuine, pure nobility. Then and then only, that is, after a varied crossing, arose that Athens to which humanity owes a greater debt than could ever be reckoned up. [23] -- The least reflection will show that the same law holds good in the case of Germans, French, Italians and Spaniards. The individual Teutonic tribes, for example, are like purely brutal forces of nature, till they begin to mingle with one another; consider how Burgundy, which is rich in great men, owes its peculiar population to a thorough crossing of the Teutonic and the Romance elements, and develops its characteristic individuality by long-continued political isolation; [24] the Franks grow to their full strength and give the world a new type of humanity where they mingle with the Teutonic tribes who preceded them and with Gallo- Romans, or where they, as in Franconia, form the exact point of union of the most diverse German and Slavonic elements; Swabia, the home of Mozart and Schiller, is inhabited by a half-Celtic race; Saxony, which has given Germany so many of its greatest men, contains a population quickened almost throughout by a mixture of Slavonic blood; and has not Europe seen within the last three centuries how a nation of recent origin -- Prussia -- in which the mixture of blood was still more thorough, has raised itself by its pre-eminent power to become the leader of the whole German Empire? -- It cannot of course be my task to give a detailed proof of what is here simply pointed out; but as I am advocating especially the great importance of purely-bred races, I desire particularly to emphasise the necessity, or at least the advantage, of mixture of blood and that not merely to meet the objection of one-sidedness and bias a priori, but because it is my conviction that the advocates of this theory have injured it very much by disregarding the important law of crossing. They get then to the mystical conception of a race pure in itself, which is an airy abstraction that retards instead of furthering. Neither history nor experimental biology has anything to say for such a view. The race of English thoroughbreds has been produced by the crossing of Arabian stallions with ordinary, but of course specially chosen, English mares, followed by inbreeding, yet in such a way that later crossing between varieties not far removed, or even with Arabians, is advisable from time to time; one of the noblest creatures that nature possesses, the so-called "genuine" Newfoundland dog, originated from the crossing of the Eskimo dog and a French hound; in consequence of the isolated position of Newfoundland, it became by constant inbreeding fixed and "pure," it was then brought to Europe by fanciers and raised to the highest perfection by artificial selection. -- Many of my readers may be amused at my constant references to the breeding of animals. But it is certain that the laws of life are great simple laws, embracing and moulding everything that lives; we have no reason to look upon the human race as an exception; and as we are unfortunately not in a position to make experiments in this matter with human beings, we must seek counsel from the experiments made with plants and animals -- But I cannot close my discussion of the fourth law without emphasising another side of this law of crossing; continued inbreeding within a narrow circle, what one might call "close breeding," leads in time to degeneration and particularly to sterility. Countless experiences in animal breeding prove that. Sometimes in such a case a single crossing, applied, for example, only to single members of a pack of hounds, will suffice to strengthen the weakened race and restore its productivity. In the case of men the at traction of Passion provides sufficiently for this quickening, so that it is only in the highest circles of the nobility and in some royal houses [25] that we observe increasing mental and physical degeneration in consequence of "close breeding." [26] The slightest increase of remoteness in the degree of relationship of those marrying (even within the strict limits of the same type) suffices to give all the great advantages of inbreeding and to prevent its disadvantages. Surely it is manifest that here we have the revelation of a mysterious Law of Life, a Law of Life so urgent that in the vegetable kingdom -- where fructification within one and the same blossom seems at the first glance the natural and unavoidable thing -- there are in most cases the most complicated arrangements to hinder this and at the same time to see that the pollen, when not borne by the wind, is carried by insects from the one individual flower to the other. [27] When we perceive what is so evidently a fundamental law of nature, we are led to suppose that it is not by mere chance that pre-eminent races have sprung from an original fusing of different stems, such as we have observed in history; the historical facts rather provide still further proof for the view that mixture of blood supplies particularly favourable physiological conditions for the origin of noble races. [28] (5) A fifth law must also be mentioned, although it is restrictive and explanatory rather than contributive of any new element to the question of race. Only quite definite, limited mixtures of blood contribute towards the ennoblement of a race, or, it may be, the origin of a new one. Here again the clearest and least ambiguous examples are furnished by animal breeding. The mixture of blood must be strictly limited as regards time, and it must, in addition, be appropriate; not all and any crossings, but only definite ones can form the basis of ennoblement. By time-limitation I mean that the influx of new blood must take place as quickly as possible and then cease; continual crossing ruins the strongest race. To take an extreme example, the most famous pack of greyhounds in England was crossed once only with bulldogs, whereby it gained in courage and endurance, but further experiments prove that when such a crossing is continued, the characters of both races disappear and quite characterless mongrels remain behind. [29] Crossing obliterates characters. The limitation to definitely appropriate crossings means that only certain crossings, not all, ennoble. There are crossings which, far from having an ennobling influence, ruin both races, and moreover, it frequently happens that the definite, valuable characters of two different types cannot fuse at all; in the latter case some of the descendants take after the one parent, others after the other, but naturally with mingled characteristics, or again, genuine real mongrels may appear, creatures whose bodies give the impression of being screwed together from parts that do not fit, and whose intellectual qualities correspond exactly to the physical. [30] Here too it should be remarked that the union of mongrel with mongrel brings about with startling rapidity the total destruction of all and every pre-eminent quality of race. It is therefore an entirely mistaken idea that mixture of blood between different stems invariably ennobles the race, and adds new qualities to the old. It does so only with the strictest limitations and under rare and definite conditions; as a rule mixture of blood leads to degeneration. One thing is perfectly clear: that the crossing of two very different types contributes to the formation of a noble race only when it takes place very seldom and is followed by strict inbreeding (as in the case of the English thoroughbred and the Newfoundland dog); in all other cases crossing is a success only when it takes place between those closely related, i.e., between those that belong to the same fundamental type. -- Here too no one who knows the detailed results of animal breeding can doubt that the history of mankind before us and around us obeys the same law. Naturally, it does not appear with the same clearness in the one case as in the other; we are not in a position to shut in a number of human beings and make experiments with them for several generations; moreover, while the horse excels in swiftness, the dog in remarkable and plastic flexibility of body, man excels in mind, here all his vigour is concentrated, here too, therefore, is concentrated all his variability, and it is just these differences in character and intelligence that are not visible to the eye. [31] But history has carried out experiments on a large scale, and everyone whose eye is not blinded by details, but has learned to survey great complexes, everyone who studies the soul-life of nations, will discover any amount of proofs of the law here mentioned. While, for example, the "extravagantly" gifted Attics and the uniquely shrewd and strong Roman race are produced by the fusion of several stems, they are nevertheless nearly related and noble, pure stems, and these elements are then, by the formation of States, isolated for centuries, so that they have time to amalgamate into a new solid unity; when, on the other hand, these States are thrown open to every stranger, the race is ruined, in Athens slowly, because owing to the political situation there was not much to get there, and the mixing in consequence only took place gradually and then for the most part with Indo-European peoples, [32] in Rome with frightful rapidity, after Marius and Sulla had, by murdering the flower of the genuine Roman youth, dammed the source of noble blood and at the same time, by the freeing of slaves, brought into the nation perfect floods of African and Asiatic blood, thus transforming Rome into the cloaca gentium, the trysting-place of all the mongrels of the world. [33] We observe the same on all sides. We see the English race arising out of a mutual fusion of separated but closely related Teutonic tribes; the Norman invasion provides in this case the last brilliant touch; on the other hand, geographical and historical conditions have so wrought that the somewhat more distantly related Celts remained by themselves, and even to-day only gradually mingle with the ruling race. How manifestly stimulating and refreshing, even to the present day, is the influence of the immigration of French Huguenots into Berlin! They were alien enough to enrich the life there with new elements and related enough to produce with their Prussian hosts not "mongrels that seem screwed together" but men of strong character and rare gifts. To see the opposite, we need only look over to South America. Where is there a more pitiful sight than that of the mestizo States there? The so-called savages of Central Australia lead a much more harmonious, dignified and, let us say, more" holy" life than these unhappy Peruvians, Paraguayans, &c., mongrels from two and often more than two incongruous races, from two cultures with nothing in common, from two stages of development, too different in age and form to be able to form a marriage union -- children of an unnatural incest. Anyone who earnestly desires to know what race signifies can learn much from the example of these States; let him but consult the statistics, he will find the most different relations between the pure European or pure Indian population and the half-caste, and he will see that relative degeneration goes exactly hand in hand with the mixture of blood. I take the two extreme examples, Chile and Peru. In Chile, the only one of these States [34] that can make a modest claim to true culture and that can also point to comparatively well- ordered political conditions, about 30 per cent. of the inhabitants are still of pure Spanish origin, and this third is sufficient to check moral disintegration. [35] On the other hand, in Peru, which, as is well known, gave the first example to the other republics of a total moral and material bankruptcy, there are almost no Europeans of pure race left; with the exception of the still uncivilised Indians in the interior the whole population consists of Cholos, Musties, Fusties, Tercerones, Quarterones, &c., crossings between Indians and Spaniards, between Indians and Negroes, Spaniards and Negroes, further between the different races and those mestizos or crosses of the mestizo species among each other; in recent years many thousands of Chinese have been added ... here we see the promiscuity longed for by Ratzel and Virchow in progress, and we observe what the result is! Of course it is an extreme example, but all the more instructive. If the enormous force of surrounding civilisation did not artificially support such a State on all sides, if by any chance it were isolated and left to itself, it would in a short time fall a prey to total barbarism -- not human, but bestial barbarism. All these States are moving towards a similar fate. [36] -- Here too I leave it to the reader to think over the matter and to collect evidence with regard to this fifth law, which shows us that every crossing is a dangerous matter and can only help to ennoble the race when definite conditions are observed, as also that many possible crossings are absolutely detrimental and destructive; once the eyes of the reader are opened, he will find everywhere both in the past and in the present proofs of this law as well as of the other four. [37] These then are the five principles which seem to me to be fundamental: the quality of the material. inbreeding, artificial selection, the necessity of crossings, the necessity of strictly limiting these crossings both in respect of choice and of time. From these principles we further deduce the conclusion that the origin of a very noble human race depends among other things upon definite historical and geographical conditions; it is these that unconsciously bring about the ennobling of the original material, the in-breeding and the artificial selection, it is these too -- when a happy star shines over the birthplace of a new people -- that produce happy tribal marriages and prevent the prostitution of the noble in the arms of the ignoble. The fact that there was a time in the nineteenth century when learned investigators, with Buckle at their head, could assert that geographical conditions produced the races, we may now appropriately mention with the scant honour of a paraleipsis; for that doctrine is a blow in the face of all history and all observation. On the other hand, every single one of the laws enumerated, and in addition the examples of Rome, Greece, England, Judea and South America in particular, let us see so clearly in how far the historical and geo· graphical conditions not only contribute to the origin and the decline of a race but are actually decisive factors therein, that I can refrain from further discussion of the matter. [38] Is the question of race now exhausted? Far from it! These biological problems are remarkably complex. They embrace, for example, the still so mysterious subject of heredity, in regard to the fundamental principles of which the most important specialists are more at variance every day. [39] Besides, many other circumstances which profounder study reveals would have to be taken into account. Nature is in fact inexhaustible; however deep we sink the plummet, we never reach the bottom. Whoever would make a study of these matters must not, for example, overlook the fact that small numbers of foreign elements are wont in a short time to be entirely absorbed by a strong race, but that there is, as the chemists say, a definite capacity, a definite power of absorption, beyond which a loss of the purity of the blood, revealed by the diminution of the characteristic qualities, is involved. We have an instance of this in Italy, where the proudly passionate and brilliant families of strong Teutons, who had kept their blood pure till the fourteenth century, later gradually mingled with absolutely mongrel Italians and Italiots and so entirely disappeared (see chaps. vi. and ix.): crossing obliterates characters. The careful observer will further notice that in crossings between human stems, which are not closely related, the relative generative power is a factor which can prevail after centuries and gradually bring about the decline of the nobler portion of a mixed people, because in fact this generative power often stands in inverse relation to the nobility of the race. [40] In Europe at the present day we have an example of this: the short round skulls are constantly increasing in numbers and so gradually superseding the narrow "dolichocephali," of which, according to the unanimous testimony of excavated tombs, almost the whole of the genuine old Teutonic, Slavonic and Celtic races consisted; in this we see the growing predominance of an alien race which had been conquered by the Indo-Teutonic (to-day it is mostly called "Turanic"), and which by animal force gradually overpowers the mentally superior race. [41] In this connection too perhaps should be mentioned the peculiar fact that dark eyes are becoming so much more prevalent than grey and blue, because in marriages between people with differently coloured eyes the dark are almost without exception much more frequently represented in the descendants than the light. [42] If I were minded to follow up this argument it would land us in one of the thorniest branches of modern science. This, however, is absolutely unnecessary for my purpose. Without troubling myself about any definition, I have given a picture of Race as it is exhibited in the individual character, in the mighty achievements of genius, in the most brilliant pages of the history of man: in the next place I have called attention to the most important conditions which scientific observation has pointed out as laying the foundation for the origin of noble races. That the introduction of contrary conditions must be followed by degeneration, or at any rate by the retarding of the development of noble qualities, seems to be in the highest degree probable, and might be proved in many ways by reference both to the past and the present. I have purposely exercised caution and self-restraint. In such labyrinthine tangles the narrowest path is the safest. The only task which I have proposed to myself has been to call into being a really vivid representation of what Race is, of what it has meant for mankind in the past and still means in the present. There is one point which I have not expressly formulated, but it is self-evident from all that I have said; the conception of Race has nothing in it unless we take it in the narrowest and not in the widest sense: if we follow the usual custom and use the word to denote far remote hypothetical races, it ends by becoming little more than a colourless synonym for "mankind" -- possibly including the long-tailed and short-tailed apes: Race only has a meaning when it relates to the experiences of the past and the events of the present. Here we begin to understand what nation signifies for race. It is almost always the nation, as a political structure, that creates the conditions for the formation of race or at least leads to the highest and most individual activities of race. Wherever, as in India, nations are not formed, the stock of strength that has been gathered by race decays. But the confusion which prevails with regard to the idea of race hinders even the most learned from understanding this great significance of nations, whereby they are at the same time prevented from understanding the fundamental facts of history. For, in fact, what is it that our historians to-day teach us concerning the relation of race to nation? I take up any book by chance -- Renan's discourse, What is a Nation? In hundreds of others we find the same doctrines. The thesis is clearly formulated by Renan: "The fact of race," he writes, "originally of decisive importance, loses significance every day." [43] On what does he base this assertion? By pointing to the fact that the most capable nations of Europe are of mixed blood. What a mass of delusive conclusions this one sentence contains, what incapacity to be taught by what is evident to the eye! Nature and history do not furnish a single example of pre-eminently noble races with individual physiognomies, which were not produced by crossing: and now we are to believe that a nation of such distinct individuality as the English does not represent a race, because it originated from a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Norman blood (stems moreover that were closely related)! I am to deny the clearest evidence which shows me that the Englishman is at least as markedly unique a being as the Greek and the Roman of the most brilliant epochs, and that in favour of an arbitrary, eternally indemonstrable abstraction, in favour of the presupposed, original "pure race." Two pages before, Renan himself had stated on the basis of anthropological discoveries that among the oldest Aryans, Semites, Turanians (les groupes aryen primitif, semitique primitif, touranien primitif) one finds men of very different build of body, some with long, others with short skulls, so that they too had possessed no common "physiological unity." What delusions will not arise, as soon as man seeks for supposed "origins"! Again and again I must quote Goethe's great remark: "Animated inquiry into cause does infinite harm." Instead of taking the given fact, the discoverable as it is, and contenting ourselves with the knowledge of the nearest, demonstrable conditions, we ever and again fancy we must start from absolutely hypothetical causes and suppositions lying as far back as possible, and to these we sacrifice without hesitation that which is present and beyond doubt. That is what our "empiricists" are like. That they do not see further than their own noses, we gladly believe from their own confession, but unfortunately they do not see even so far, but run up against solid facts and complain then about the said facts, not about their own shortsightedness. What kind of thing is this originally "physiologically uniform race" of which Renan speaks? Probably a near relation of Haeckel's human apes. And in favour of this hypothetical beast I am to deny that the English people, the Prussians, the Spaniards have a definite and absolutely individual character I Renan misses physiological unity: does he not comprehend that physiological unity is brought about by marriage? Who then tells him that the hypothetical aboriginal Aryans were not also the result of gradual development? We know nothing about it: but what we do know entitles us to suppose it from analogy. There were among them narrow heads and broad ones: who knows but this crossing was necessary to produce one very noble race? The common English horse and the Arabian horse (which doubtless was produced originally by some crossing) were also "physiologically" very different, and yet from their union was produced in the course of time the most physiologically uniform and noblest race of animals in the world, the English thoroughbred. Now the great scholar Renan sees the English human thoroughbred, so to speak, arising before his eyes: the ages of history are before him. What does he deduce therefrom? He says: since the English- man of to-day is neither the Celt of Caesar's time nor the Anglo-Saxon of Hengist, nor the Dane of Knut, nor the Norman of the Conqueror, but the outcome of a crossing of all four, one cannot speak of an English race at all. That is to say because the English race, like every other race of which we have any knowledge, has grown historically, because it is something peculiar and absolutely new, therefore it does not exist! In truth, nothing beats the logic of the scholar!
Our opinion concerning the importance of nationality in the formation of race must be quite different. The Roman Empire in the imperial period was the materialisation of the anti-national principle; this principle led to racelessness and simultaneously to intellectual and moral chaos; mankind was only rescued from this chaos by the more and more decisive development of the opposite or national principle. [45] Political nationality has not always played the same role in the production of individual races as it has in our modern culture; I need only refer to India, Greece and the Israelites; but the problem was nowhere solved so beautifully, successfully and as it appears so lastingly, as by the Teutonic peoples. As though conjured up out of the soil there arose in this small corner of Europe a number of absolutely new, differentiated national organisms. Renan is of opinion' that race existed only in the old "polis," because it was only there that the numerical limitation had permitted community of blood; this is absolutely false; one need only reckon back a few centuries, and everyone has a hundred thousand ancestors; what, therefore, in the narrow circle of Athens took place in a comparatively short time, namely, the physiological union, took place in our case in the course of several centuries and is still continued. Race formation, far from decreasing in our nations, must daily increase. The longer a definite group of countries remains politically united, the closer does the "physiological unity" which is demanded become, and the more quickly and thoroughly does it assimilate strange elements. Our anthropologists and historians simply presuppose that in their hypothetical primitive races the specific distinguishing characteristics were highly developed, but that they are now progressively decreasing; there is consequently, they aver, a movement from original complexity to increasing simplicity. This supposition is contrary to all experience, which rather teaches us that individualisation is a result of growing differentiation and separation. The whole science of biology contradicts the supposition that an organic creature first appears with clearly marked characteristics, which then gradually disappear; it actually forces us to the very opposite hypothesis that the early human race was a variable, comparatively colourless aggregate, from which the individual types have developed with increasing divergence and increasingly distinct individuality; a hypothesis which all history confirms. The sound and normal evolution of man is therefore not from race to racelessness but on the contrary from racelessness to ever clearer distinctness of race. The enrichment of life by new individualities seems everywhere to be one of the highest laws of inscrutable nature. Now here in the case of man the nation plays a most important part, because it almost always brings about crossing, followed by inbreeding. All Europe proves this. Renan shows how many Slavs have united with the Teutonic peoples, and asks somewhat sneeringly whether we have any right to call the Germans of to-day "Teutonic": well, we need not quarrel about names in such a case -- what the Germans are to-day Renan has been able to learn in the year 1870; he has been taught it too by the German specialists, to whose industry he owes nine-tenths of his knowledge. That is the valuable result of the creation of race by nation-building. And since race is not a mere word, but an organic living thing, it follows as a matter of course that it never remains stationary; it is ennobled or it degenerates, it develops in this or that direction and lets this or that quality decay. This is a law of all individual life. But the firm national union is the surest protection against going astray: it signifies common memory, common hope, common intellectual nourishment; it fixes firmly the existing bond of blood and impels us to make it ever closer. Just as important as the clear comprehension of the organic relation of race to nation is that of the organic relation of race to its quintessence, the hero or genius. We are apt to fancy we must choose between hero-worship and the opposite. But the one as well as the other testifies to poverty of insight. What I have said in the general introduction need not be repeated; but here, where the question of race is in the forefront, this problem takes a particularly clear form, and with some power of intuition we must surely perceive that the influence of intellectually pre-eminent units in a race, like the human, the individuality of which depends upon the development of its intellectual faculties, is immeasurable, for good and for evil; these units are the feet that carry and the hands that mould, they are the countenance on which we others gaze, they are the eye which beholds the rest of the world in a definite way and then communicates what it has seen to the rest of the organism. But they are produced by the whole corporation; they can arise only from its vital action, only in it and from it do they gain importance. What is the use of the hand if it does not grow out of a strong arm as part and parcel of it? What is the use of the eye if the radiant forms which it has seen are not reflected in a dark, almost amorphous brain mass lying behind it? Phenomena only gain significance when they are united to other phenomena. The richer the blood that courses invisibly through the veins, the more luxuriant will be the blossoms of life that spring forth. The assertion that Homer created Greece is indeed literally true, but remains onesided and misleading as long as we do not add: only an incomparable people, only a quite definite, ennobled race could produce this man, only a race in which the seeing and shaping eye had been "extravagantly" developed. [46] Without Homer Greece would not have become Greece, without the Hellenes Homer would never have been born. It was the same race which gave birth to the great seer of forms that produced the inventive seer of figures, Euclid, the lynx-eyed arranger of ideas, Aristotle, the man who first perceived the system of the cosmos, Aristarchus, and so on ad infinitum. Nature is not so simple as scholastic wisdom fancies: if great personality is our "most precious gift," communal greatness is the only soil on which it can grow. It is the whole race, for instance, that creates the language, and therewith at the same time definite artistic, philosophical, religious, in fact even practical possibilities, but also insuperable limitations. No philosopher could ever arise on Hebrew soil, because the spirit of the Hebrew language makes the interpretation of metaphysical thoughts absolutely impossible; for the same reason no Semitic people could possess a mythology in the same sense as the Indians and the Teutonic peoples. One Sees what definite paths are marked out even for the greatest men by the common achievements of the whole race. [47] But it is not a question of language alone. Homer had to find the myths in existence in order to be able to mould them into shape; Shakespeare put upon the stage the history which the English people had made; Bach and Beethoven spring from races which had attracted the attention of the ancients by their singing. And Mohammed? Could he have made the Arabs a world-power, had they not as one of the purest bred races in the world possessed definite "extravagant" qualities? But for the new Prussian race, could the Great Elector have begun, the Great Frederick have extended, and the Great William have completed the structure which is now United Germany? The first task set us in this chapter is now fulfilled: we have got a clear concrete idea of what race is and what it signifies for mankind; we have seen too, from some examples of the present time, how fatal the absence of race, that is, the chaos of unindividualised, speciesless human agglomerates, is. Anyone who perceives this and ponders over it will gradually realise what it signifies for our Teutonic culture that the inherited culture of antiquity, which at important points still not only forms the foundations but also the walls of the structure, was not transmitted to us by a definite people but by a nationless mixture without physiognomy, in which mongrels held the whip-hand, namely, by the racial chaos of the decaying Roman Empire. Our whole intellectual development is still under the curse of this unfortunate intermediate stage; it is this that supplied weapons to the anti-national, anti-racial powers even in the nineteenth century. Even before Julius Caesar, the Chaos begins to appear; through Caracalla it is elevated to the official principle of the Roman Empire. [48] Throughout the whole extent of the Empire there was thorough mixing of blood, but in such a way that real bastardising, that is, the crossing of unrelated or of noble and ignoble races occurred almost wholly in the most southern and eastern parts, where the Semites met the Indo-Europeans -- that is to say, in the capitals Rome and Constantinople, along the whole north coast of Africa (as well as on the coasts of Spain and Gaul), above all in Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. It is as easy as it is important to form an idea of the area of this complicated geographical condition. The Danube and the Rhine almost meet at their source. The two river-districts fit so closely into each other that there is, it is said, in the neighbourhood of the Albula Pass a small lake, which when there is high water flows on the one side into the Albula and the Rhine, on the other into the Inn and the Danube. Now if we follow the courses of these rivers, up the Rhine from the mouth of the old Rhine near Leyden and down the Danube till it falls into the Black Sea, we get an unbroken line crossing the Continent from north- est to south-east; this, roughly speaking, forms the northern boundary of the Roman Empire for a long period of time; except in parts of Dacia (the Roumania of to-day) the Romans never asserted themselves for long north and east of this line. [49] This line divides Europe (if We include the African and Asian possessions of Rome) into two almost equal parts. In the south the great transfusion of blood (as the doctors call the injecting of strange blood into an organism) took place. If Maspero in his history of the peoples of the Classical East entitles one volume "The First Chaos of Races," then we may well speak here of a second chaos. In Britain, in Rhetia, in the extreme north of Gaul, &c., it seems indeed that in spite of the Roman sway there was no thorough fusion; in the rest of Gaul too, as well as in Spain, the newly imported elements from Rome had at least several centuries of comparative isolation to mingle with the former inhabitants before other elements came, a circumstance which rendered possible the formation of a new and very characteristic race, the Gallo-Roman. In the south-east, on the other hand, and especially in all centres of culture (which, as already pointed out, all lay in the south and the east), there was a medley all the more fundamentally pernicious in that those who came in streams from the Levant were themselves nothing but half-castes. For example, we must not imagine that the Syrians of that time were a definite nation, a people, a race: they were rather a motley agglomeration of pseudo-Hittite, pseudo-Semitic, pseudo-Hellenic, pseudo- ersian, pseudo-Scythian mongrels. What the French call un charme troublant -- superficial cleverness combined with a peculiar sort of beauty-is often the characteristic of the half- aste; one can observe this daily at the present day in cities like Vienna, where people of all nations meet; but the peculiar unsteadiness, the small power of resistance, the want of character, in short, the moral degeneracy of these people is equally marked. I name the Syrian because I prefer examples to wordy enumerations; he was the very pattern of the bastard sundered from all national relationship, and for that very reason, up to the time of the Teutonic invasion, and even later, he played a leading part. We find Syrians upon the imperial throne; Caracalla belongs to them, and Heliogabalus, that monster robed in silk and gold, tricked out like a dancing girl, was imported direct from Syria; we find them in all administrative offices and prefectures; they, like their counterpart, the African mongrels, have great influence in the codification of the Law and an absolute casting-vote in the constitution of the universal Roman Church. Let us look more closely at one of these men; we shall in that way gain a lively picture of the civilised fraction of the Empire of that day with its pushing culture-mongers, and at the same time obtain an insight into the soul of the Chaos of Peoples. Everyone, I fancy, knows the author Lucian, at least
by name; his exceptional talents force him upon our
notice. Born on the banks of the Euphrates, not far
from the first spurs of the Tauric mountain range (in
which energetic races of Indo-European descent still
lived), in addition to the Syrian patois, the boy begins to
learn to murder Greek. Having shown a talent for
drawing and sculpture he is apprenticed to a sculptor, but
only after a family council has been held to decide how
the boy may as speedily as possible make a fortune.
During his whole life, in spite of the amount of his
subsequent wealth, this desire for money remains the
guiding star -- no, that is too fine an expression -- the
driving impulse of this gifted Syrian; in his Nigrinus he admits with enviable frankness that money and fame
are the things dearest to him in the world, and even as
an old man he writes expressly, that he accepts the high
official position offered by the Gladiator-Emperor
Commodus for the sake of the money. But in art he makes no progress. In
a famous book The Dream, [50]
which, however, as far as I know, is not appreciated
according to its true purport by any historian, Lucian tells
us why he gave up art and preferred to become a jurist
and belles-lettrist. In a dream two women had appeared
to him: the one" looked like work," had hard hands,
her dress covered over and over with plaster; the other
was elegantly dressed and stood calmly there; the one
was Art, the other-he who does not know will never
guess, the other was-Culture. [51] Poor Art tries to inspire
her new disciple with zeal by the example of Phidias
and Polycletus, of Myron and Praxiteles, but in vain;
for Culture proves convincingly that Art is an "ignoble
occupation"; that the artist remains the whole day
bent over his work in a dirty smockfrock, like a slave;
even Phidias was only "a common workman," who
"lived from the toil of his hands"; whoever, on the other
hand, chooses Culture instead of Art, has the prospect
of riches and high offices, and when he goes for a walk
in the street, the people will nudge each other and say, "See, there
goes that famous man!" [52] Quickly
making up his mind Lucian sprang to his feet: "I left
the ugly toilsome life and went over to Culture." To-day
sculptor, to-morrow advocate; he who is born without
a definite calling can choose any; [53] whoever seeks gold
and fame does not need to look aloft and runs no risk
of falling into the well, like the hero of the German fairy
tale. Do not imagine that The Dream is a satire; Lucian
gave it as a lecture in his native town, when he visited it
later, honoured and wealthy; he himself tells us that
he set up his life as an example to the youth of Samosata.
Such men, otherwise so clever, never understand what a
bitter satire their fate is on the life of the really great;
how otherwise could a Heine have placed himself on the
same plane as a Goethe? Lucian had chosen Culture,
and to acquire it he went to Antioch. Athens was indeed
still the great high school of knowledge and taste, but
was considered old-fashioned; Syrian Antioch and the
so-called "Hellenic" Ephesus, which nevertheless was
even in the second century thoroughly saturated with
alien elements, offered much greater attractions to the cosmopolitan
youth of the Roman Empire. There Lucian
studied law and eloquence. But to him as an intelligent
man the abuse of the Greek language by his teachers was
painful; he guessed the value of a pure style and moved
to Athens. It is characteristic that he ventured after
a short spell of study to appear there as advocate and
orator; in the meantime he had learned everything, except
propriety; the Athenians taught him this, they laughed
at the "barbarian" with his pedantic tags of strange
culture and thereby gave him a valuable hint; he disappeared
to a place where taste was not so indispensable,
to Marseilles. This seaport of the Phoenician Diaspora
had just received by the arrival of thousands of Jews from
Palestine such a clearly marked character that it was
simply called "the city of the Jews"; but Gauls, Romans,
Spaniards, Ligurians, all conceivable races met there. Here,
in New Athens, as the inhabitants, with a delicate recognition
of their own intellectual worth, called it, Lucian
lived for many years and became a rich man; he gave up
the profession of advocate, for which he would have needed
to learn Latin thoroughly; besides, there was great competition,
and even in Antioch he had not had great success
as a pleader; what these mushroom plutocrats chiefly
wanted was Culture, modern Culture and rules of etiquette.
Had not "Culture" been Lucian's ideal, his
dream? Had he not studied in Antioch and "spoken
openly" even in Athens? Accordingly he gave lectures;
but the listeners did not laugh at him, as in Athens, but
paid any entrance fee that he cared to ask. Besides, he
travelled over all Gaul as professional orator, at that time
a very profitable business: to-day commemorating the
virtues of a dead person, whom he had never seen in life,
to-morrow taking part in the celebration of a religious
festival that was given in honour of some local Gallo-Roman
divinity, whose name a Syrian could not even
pronounce. Anyone who wishes to get an idea of this
oratory should look at the Florida of Apuleius, a contemporary
but African mestizo; [54] this is a collection of
shorter and longer oratorical passages written for effect,
to be put into any speech whatever, in order that the
audience might think it a sudden inspiration, and be
startled and carried away by the great knowledge, wit
and pathos of the orator; there it is all in stock: the
profound, the pointed, the clever anecdote, the devoutly
submissive, the proud claims of freedom, even the
excuse for being unprepared and the thanks for the
statues that might be offered to the orator as a surprise I
Just such things are pictures of a man and not of a man only, but of a
whole Culture or, to use Lucian's word,
of a whole
But one thing he understood and therein lies for us his whole importance as a writer; he understood the spirit that he resembled, namely, the totally bastardised, depraved and degenerate world around him; he pictures it and scourges it, as only one who himself belonged to it could, one who knew its motives and methods from his own experience. Here the kernel was not lacking. Hence his delightful satires on the Homeric critics, on the learned professions which were rotten to the core, on religious swindlers, on puffed-up, rude and ignorant millionaires, on medical quacks, &c. Here his talent and his knowledge of the world together contributed to the accomplishment of great things. -- And in order that my description may not be incomplete, I may add that the second stay in Athens, if it did not teach Lucian the meaning of mythology, or of metaphysics, or of the heroic character, yet became for him a new source of money-making. Here he turned his attention industriously to authorship, wrote his Conversations of the Gods, his Conversations of the Dead, in all probability most of his best things. He invented a light form of dialogue (for which he gave himself the title of "Prometheus the author"!); at bottom they are good feuilletons, of the kind which the philistine to this day likes to read in the morning with his coffee. They brought him in considerable sums of money, when he began to travel again and delivered them in public as lectures. But this fashion also passed, or perhaps with age he had tired of a vagabond life. He discarded the one legacy, Hellenic art and philosophy, and turned to the other -- Roman Law; he became State Advocate (as some say) or President of the Court (as others say) in Egypt and died in this office. I think that a single career such as this shows us, more clearly than many a learned exposition, what the mental chaos was, which at that time lay sheltered beneath the uniform mantle of the tyrannical Roman Empire. We cannot say of a man like Lucian that he was immoral; no, what we learn from such an example is that morality and arbitrariness are two contradictory ideas. Men who do not inherit definite ideals with their blood are neither moral nor immoral, they are simply "without morals." If I may be allowed to use a current phrase to explain my meaning, I should say they are neither good nor bad, equally they are neither beautiful nor ugly, deep nor shallow. The individual in fact cannot make for himself an ideal of life and a moral law; these very things can only exist as a gradual growth. For this reason it was very wise of Lucian, in spite of his talent, to give up in time his idea of emulating Phidias. He could become an orator for the Massillians, and a President of Court for the Egyptians, even, if you will, a feuilletonist for all time, but an artist or a thinker never. We may be met by the objection that out of the old Chaos of Peoples there arose men of great importance, whose influence has made itself felt upon succeeding generations, until this day, in a far more penetrating sense. This presents no difficulty for the irrefutable acceptance of the importance of race to humanity. In the midst of a chaos single individuals may still be of perfectly pure race, or they may at least belong principally to one. definite race. Such a man, for example; as Ambrosius must surely be of genuine, noble descent, of that strong race which had made Rome great; I cannot indeed prove it, for in the confusion of those times history is unable to furnish exact information as to the pedigree of any man of importance. At the same time no One can prove the contrary, so the personality of the individual must decide the question. Moreover, it must not be overlooked that, unless crossing without plan or method goes on with wild recklessness, the qualities of a dominant race will remain conspicuous for generations, though maybe in a much weakened condition, and that they are capable of flashing up again as atavism in single individuals. The breeding of animals furnishes numerous examples of this. Take a piece of paper and sketch a genealogical tree; we shall see that, as soon as we go back only four generations, an individual bas already thirty ancestors, whose blood flows in his veins. If we now suppose two races A and B, such a table will clearly show how very different the hybridisation in the case of a crossing of peoples must be, from the full hybrid directly composed of A and B to the individual of whose sixteen ancestors only one was a hybrid. Besides, experience daily teaches us that exceptionally gifted and beautiful human beings are frequently produced by crossing; it is, however, as I have said, not a question of the individual only, but of his relation to other individuals, to a uniform complex; if this single mongrel enters into a definite race-centre, he may have a very quickening effect upon it; if he falls among a mere heap of beings, he is, like Lucian, only a stick among slicks, not a branch on a living tree. The immeasurable power of ideas must also be reckoned with. They are indeed misconstrued, mishandled and abused by illegitimate successors -- as we saw in the case of pseudo-Roman law and Platonic philosophy -- but they continue to have a formative influence. What was it if not the death-agony of the old genuine imperial idea that held together this agglomeration of peoples till the strong Dietrich of Berne came to set them free? Whence did those men of the chaos derive their thoughts and their religion? Not from themselves, but only from Jews and Hellenes. And so all that held them together, all upon which their very existence depended, was drawn from the inheritance of noble races. Take any of the greatest men of the chaotic period, for example the venerable Augustine, distinguished alike by temperament and ability. To be unbiased, let us leave our own purely religious standpoint and ask ourselves whether there was not a hopeless chaos in the brain of this eminent man? In the world of his imagination we find the Jewish belief in Jehovah, the mythology of Greece, Alexandrine Neoplatonism, Romish priestcraft, the Pauline conception of God, and the contemplation of the Crucified Lord, all jumbled together in heterogeneous confusion. Augustine has to reject, in deference to Hebraic materialism, many incomparably loftier religious thoughts -- loftier because pure and genuinely racial thoughts -- which Origenes held, but at the same time he introduces into theology as predestination the ancient Aryan conception of necessity, whereby the old dogma of all Judaism, the unconditional arbitrariness of will, goes to the wall. [57] He spends twelve years writing a book against the heathen gods, but himself believes in their existence in so tangible and fetichist a sense as no cultured Greek for a thousand years before him; he looks upon them in fact as daemons and therefore creations of God; but one must not, he thinks, regard them as creators ("immundos spiritus esse et perniciosa daemonia, vel certe creaturas non Creatorem, veritas Christiana convincit"). In his chief work, De Civitate Dei, Augustine disputes in chapter after chapter with his countryman Apuleius regarding the nature of the daemons and other good and bad spirits, endeavouring, if not to deny their existence, at least to reduce them to an unimportant and uninfluential element and thus to replace crass superstition by genuine religion; nevertheless, he inclines in all earnest to the belief that Apuleius himself was changed by the unguent of the Thessalian witch into an ass, and this is all the more comical to us, because Apuleius, although he wrote a great deal about daemons, never thought of representing this transformation as an actual occurrence when he wrote his novel, The Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass. [58] I cannot of course enter more fully into this matter here, that would take me too far; it would deserve a whole book to itself; and yet the detailed characterisation of the intellectual condition of the noble among these sons of the chaos would be the right complement to the sketch of the frivolous Lucian. [59] We should see that everywhere the equilibrium is disturbed. In Lucian the unfettered intellect is uppermost and Jack of moral strength ruins the finest qualities; in Augustine, character wrestles with intellect in a tussle of doubtful issue, and does not rest until intellect is thrown and put in fetters. Such were the men who handed down to us the legacy of antiquity. "We are like shipwrecked sailors thrown on the shore by the wild breakers," Ambrosius exclaims in pain. Philosophy and law, ideas of State, freedom, human dignity passed through their hands; it was they who raised to the dignity of acknowledged dogmas the superstition (belief in daemons, witchcraft, &c.) which formerly was found only among the most ignorant scum of the population; it was they who forged a new religion out of the most incompatible elements, who gave to the world the gift of the Roman Church, a kind of changeling born of the Roman imperial idea; at the same time it was they who with the fanaticism of the weak destroyed everything beautiful belonging to the past on which they could lay their hands, every memory of great generations. Hatred and disdain of every great achievement of the pure races were taught; a Lucian scoffs at the great thinkers, an Augustine reviles the heroes of Rome's heroic age, a Tertullian calls Homer "a liar." As soon as the orthodox emperors -- Constantius, Theodosius, and others-ascend the throne (without exceptions mongrels in race, the great Diocletian being the last Emperor of pure blood [60]) the systematic destruction of all the monuments of antiquity begins. At the same time is introduced the deliberate lie that is supposed to further truth: such eminent Church fathers as Hieronymus and Chrysostomus encourage the pia fraus, the pious deception; immediately upon this follows the foundation of the might and right of the Roman see, not by courage and conquest, but by the colossal forgery of documents. Even so respectable an historian as Eusebius has the simplicity worthy of a better cause to confess that he remodels history wherever he sees the opportunity of furthering "the good cause." In very truth this chaos which arose out of race fusion and the universal craze for anti-nationalism is an appalling spectacle! Perhaps the fact has never yet been pointed out -- I at least know of no book where it is -- that the epidemic of asceticism which broke out at that time was directly connected with the feeling of disgust for that frightful condition of the world; Some would fain see in it an unexampled religious awakening, others a religious disease; but that is interpreting the facts allegorically, for religion and asceticism are not necessarily connected. Nothing in the example of Christ could encourage asceticism; the early Christians knew it not; two hundred years after Christ Tertullian still wrote: "We Christians are not like the Brahmans and Gymnosophists of India, we do not live in forests or in banishment from the society of men: we feel that we owe God the Lord and Creator thanks for everything and we forbid the enjoyment of none of his works; we only practise moderation in order that we may not enjoy these things more than is good for us or make a bad use of them" (Apologeticus, chap. xlii.). Why now did un-Christian asceticism all at once enter into Christianity 1 I for my part believe that we have here to deal with physical reasons. Even before the birth of Christ asceticism had taken its rise in the altogether bastardised Syria and Egypt; wherever blood was most mixed, it had taken a firm hold. Pachomius, the founder of the first Christian cloister, the author of the first monkish rule, is a servant of Scrap;s from Upper Egypt, who transferred to Christianity what he had learned in the societies of the fasting and self-chastising ascetics of Serapis. [61] Anyone who still possessed a spark of noble impulse in that world of the unnational chaos was bound in fact to be disgusted with himself. Nowhere, where, sound conditions prevailed, has unconditional asceticism been preached; on the contrary, the ancient peoples -- Aryans, Semites, Mongolians -- led by a marvellous instinct, are at one in regarding the begetting of children as one of the most sacred duties; whoever died without a son was laden with a curse. In Ancient India, of course, there were ascetics; but they might not disappear into the solitude of the forest till the son of their son was born; here the intention and fundamental idea are almost diametrically opposed to the asceticism of the Syrian Christians. To-day we understand this; for we see that only one thing contributes to the ennobling of man: the begetting of pure races, the founding of definite nations. To beget sons, sons of the right kind, is without question the most sacred duty of the individual towards society; whatever else he may achieve, nothing will have such a lasting and indelible influence as the contribution to the increasing ennoblement of the race. From the limited, false standpoint of Gobineau it certainly does not much matter, for we can only decline and fall sooner or later; still less correct are they who appear to contradict him, but adopt the same hypothetical acceptation of aboriginal pure nations; but anyone who understands how noble races are in reality produced, knows that they can arise again at any moment; that depends on us; here nature has clearly pointed out to us a great duty. Those men of the chaos therefore, who considered begetting a sin, and complete abstinence therefrom the highest of all virtues, committed a crime against the most sacred law of nature, they tried to prevent all good, noble men and women from leaving descendants, thus promoting the increase of the evil only, which meant of course that they did their best to bring about the deterioration of the human race. A Schopenhauer may joyfully collect from the Church fathers their pronouncements against marriage and see therein a confirmation of his pessimism; for me the connection is quite different: this sudden horror of the most natural impulses of man, their transformation from the most sacred duty to the most disgraceful sin, has a deeper foundation in those incomprehensible sources of our existence, where the physical and the metaphysical are not yet separated. After wars and pestilences, statistics tell us, births increase to an abnormal degree -- nature helps herself; in that chaos which threatened all culture with eternal destruction, the births had to be retarded as much as possible; with horror the noble turned away from that world of sin, buried themselves in the deserts or in the caves of the hills, perched themselves on high pillars, chastised themselves and did penance. Childless they passed away. [62] Even where human society is in a state of disintegration, we see in fact a great connection; what each man by himself thinks and does always admits of a double interpretation -- the subjective or individual, and the objective interpretation in relation to the world at large. Here we touch upon a deep scientific fact; we are touching upon the revelation of the most important secret of all human history. Everyone comprehends that man can in the true sense of the word only become "man" in connection with others. Many, too, have grasped the meaning of Jean Paul's profound remark, which I prefixed as motto to a former chapter, that "only through man does man enter into the light of day"; few, however, have realised the fact that this attainment of manhood -- this entry into the light of life -- depends in degree upon definite organic conditions, conditions which in old days were observed instinctively and unconsciously, but which, now that owing to the increase of knowledge and the development of thought the impulses of instinct have lost their power, it becomes our duty consciously to recognise and respect. This study of the Roman Chaos of Peoples teaches us that race, and nationality which renders possible the formation of race, possess a significance which is not only physical and intellectual but also moral. Here there is before us something which we can characterise as a sacred law, the sacred law in accordance with which we enter upon the rights and duties of manhood: a "law," since it is found everywhere in nature, "sacred," in so far as it is left to our free will to ennoble ourselves or to degenerate as we please. This law teaches us to look upon the physical constitution as the basis of all that ennobles. For what is the moral apart from the physical? What would a soul be without body? I do not know. If our breast conceals something that is immortal, if we men reach with our thoughts to something transcendent, which we, like the blind, touch with longing hands without ever being able to see it, if our heart is the battlefield between the finite and the infinite, then the constitution of this body -- breast, brain, heart -- must be of immeasurable consequence. "However the great dark background of things may in truth be constituted, the entrance to it is open to us only in this poor life of ours, and so even our ephemeral actions contain this earnest, deep, and inevitable significance," says Solon in the beautiful dialogue of Heinrich von Stein. [63] "Only in this life!" But wherewith do we live if not with our body? Indeed, we do not need to look forth into any world beyond (which will appear problematic to many people), as Solon does in the passage quoted; the entrance even to this earthly life is solely and only open to us through our body and this life will be for us poor or rich, ugly or beautiful, insipid or precious, according to the constitution of this our one, all-embracing organ of life. I have already shown from examples taken from methodical animal breeding and from human history how race arises and is gradually ennobled, also how it degenerates; what then is this race if not a collective term for a number of individual bodies? It is no arbitrary idea, no abstraction; these individualities are linked with one another by an invisible but absolutely real power resting upon material facts. Of course the race consists of individuals; but the individual himself can only attain to the full and noblest development of his qualities within definite conditions which are embraced in the word "race." This is based upon a simple law, but it points simultaneously in two directions. All organic nature, vegetable as well as animal, proves that the choice of the two parents is of decisive influence upon the individual that is born; but besides this it proves that the principle prevailing here is a collective and progressive one, because in the first place a common parent-stock must gradually be formed, from which then, similarly step by step, are produced individuals who are on an average superior to those outside such a union, and among these again numerous individuals with really transcendent qualities. That is a fact of nature, just in the same sense as any other, but here, as in all phenomena of life, we are far from being able to analyse and explain it. Now what must not be lost sight of in the case of the human race is the circumstance that the moral and intellectual qualities are of preponderating importance. That is why in men any want of organic racial consistency, or fitness in the parent stock, means above all things a lack of all moral and intellectual coherence. The man who starts from nowhence reaches nowhither. The individual life is too short to be able to fix the eye on a goal and to reach it. The life of a whole people, too, would be too short if unity of race did not stamp it with a definite, limited character, if the transcendent splendour of many-sided and varying gifts were not concentrated by unity of stem, which permits a gradual ripening, a gradual development in definite directions, and finally enables the most gifted individual to live for a super-individual purpose. Race, as it arises and maintains itself in space and time, might be compared to the so-called range of power of a magnet. If a magnet be brought near to a heap of iron filings, they assume definite directions, so that a figure is formed with a clearly marked centre, from which lines radiate in all directions; the nearer we bring the magnet the more distinct and more mathematical does the figure become; very few pieces have placed themselves in exactly the same direction, but all have united into a practical and at the same time ideal unity by the possession of a common centre, and by the fact that the relative position of each individual to all the others is not arbitrary but obedient to a fixed law. It has ceased to be a heap, it has become a form. In the same way a human race, a genuine nation, is distinguished from a mere congeries of men. The character of the race becoming more and more pronounced by pure breeding is like the approach of the magnet. The individual members of the nation may have even so different qualities, the direction of their activities may be utterly divergent, yet together they form a moulded unity, and the power -- or let us say rather the importance -- of every individual is multiplied a thousandfold by his organic connection with countless others. I have shown above how Lucian with all his gifts absolutely squandered his life; I have shown Augustine helplessly swaying to and fro like a pendulum between the loftiest thoughts and the crassest and silliest superstition: such men as these, cut off from all racial belongings, mongrels among mongrels, are in a position almost as unnatural as a hapless ant, carried and set down ten miles from its own nest. The ant, however, would suffer at least only through outward circumstances, but these men are by their own inner constitution barred from all genuine community of life. The consideration of these facts teaches us that whatever may be our opinion as to the causa finalis of existence, man cannot fulfil his highest destiny as an isolated individual, as a mere exchangeable pawn, but only as a portion of an organic whole, as a member of a specific race. [64] There is no doubt about it! The raceless and nationless chaos of the late Roman Empire was a pernicious and fatal condition, a sin against nature. Only one ray of light shone over that degenerate world. It came from the north. Ex septentrione Lux! If we take up a map, the Europe of the fourth century certainly seems at the first glance to be more or less in a state of chaos even north of the Imperial boundary; we see quite a number of races established side by side, incessantly forcing their way in different directions: the Alemanni, the Marcomanni, the Saxons, the Franks, the Burgundians, the Goths, the Vandals, the Slavs, the Huns and many others. But it is only the political relations that are chaotic there; the nations are genuine, pure-bred races, men who carry with them their nobility as their only possession wherever destiny drives them. In one of the next chapters I shall have to speak of them. In the meantime I should like merely to warn those whose reading is less wide, against the idea that the "barbarians" suddenly "broke into" the highly civilised Roman Empire. This view, which is widespread among the superficially educated, is just as little in accordance with the facts as the further view that the" night of the Middle Ages" carne down upon men because of this inroad of the barbarians. It is this historical lie which veils the annihilating influence of that nationless time, and which turns into a destroyer the deliverer, the slayer of the laidly worm. For centuries the Teutons had been forcing their way into the Roman Empire, and though they often carne as foes, they ended by becoming the sole principle of life and of might. Their gradual penetration into the Imperium, their gradual rise to a decisive power had taken place little by little just as their gradual civilisation had done; [65] already in the fourth century one could count numerous colonies of soldiers from entirely different Teutonic tribes (Batavians, Franks, Suevians, &c.) in the whole European extent of the Roman Empire; [66] in Spain, in Gaul, in Italy, in Thrace, indeed often even in Asia Minor, it is Teutons in the main that finally fight against Teutons. It was Teutonic peoples that so often heroically warded off the Asiatic peril from the Eastern Empire; it was Teutonic peoples that on the Catalaunian fields saved the Western Empire from being laid waste by the Huns. Early in the third century a bold Gothic shepherd had been already proclaimed Emperor. One need only look at the map of the end of the fifth century to see at once what a uniquely beneficent moulding power had here begun to assert itself. Very noteworthy too is the difference which reveals itself here in a hundred ways, between the innate decency, taste and intuition of rough but pure, noble races and the mental barbarism of civilised mestizos. Theodosius, his tools (the Christian fanatics) and his successors had done their best to destroy the monuments of art; on the other hand, the first care of Theodoric, the Eastern Goth, was to take strong measures for the protection and restoration of the Roman monuments. This man could not write, to sign his name he had to use a metal stencil, but the Beautiful, which the bastard souls in their "Culture," in their hunting after offices and distinctions, in their greed of gold had passed by unheeded, the Beautiful, which to the nobler souls among the Chaos of Peoples was a hateful work of the devil, the Goth at once knew how to appreciate; the sculptures of Rome excited his admiration to such a degree that he appointed a special official to protect them. Religious toleration; too, appeared for a time wherever the still unspoiled Teuton became master. Soon also there came upon the scene the great Christian missionaries from the highlands of the north, men who convinced not by means of "pious lies" but by the purity of their hearts. It is nothing but a false conception of the Middle Ages, in conjunction with ignorance as to the significance of race, which is responsible for the regrettable delusion that the entry upon the scene of the rough Teutons meant the falling of a pall of night over Europe. It is inconceivable that such hallucinations should be so long-lived. If we wish to know to what lengths the bastard culture of the Empire might have led, we must study the history, the science and the literature of the later Byzantium, a study to which our historians are devoting themselves to-day with a patience worthy of a better subject. It is a sorry spectacle. The capture of the Western Roman Empire by the Barbarians, on the contrary, works like the command of the Bible, "Let there be Light." It is admitted that its influence was mainly in the direction of politics rather than of civilisation; and a difficult task it was -- one that is even now not wholly accomplished. But was it a small matter? Whence does Europe draw its physiognomy and its significance-whence its intellectual and moral preponderance, if not from the foundation and development of Nations? This work was in very truth the redemption from chaos. If we are something to-day -- if we may hope perhaps some day to become something more -- we owe it in the first instance to that political upheaval which, after long preparation, began in the fifth century, and from which were born in the fulness of time new noble races, new beautiful languages, and a new culture entitling us to nourish the keenest hopes for the future. Dietrich of Berne, the strong wise man, the unlearned friend of art and science, the tolerant representative of Freedom of Conscience in the midst of a world in which Christians were tearing one another to pieces like hyenas, was as it were a pledge that Day might once more break upon this poor earth. In the time of wild struggle that followed, during that fever by means of which alone European humanity could recover and awaken from the hideous dream of the degenerate curse-laden centuries of a chaos with a veneer of order to a fresh, healthy, stormily pulsing national life -- in such a time learning and art and the tinsel of a so-called civilisation might well be almost forgotten, but this, we may swear, did not mean Night, but the breaking of a new Day. It is hard to say what authority the scribblers have for honouring only their own weapons. Our European world is first and foremost the work not of philosophers and book-writers and painters, but of the great Teuton Princes, the work of warriors and statesmen. The progress of development -- obviously the political development out of which our modern nations have sprung -- is the one fundamental and decisive matter. We must not, however, overlook the fact that to these true and noble men we equally owe everything else that is worth possessing. Everyone of those centuries, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, produced great scholars; but the men who protected and encouraged them were the Princes. It is the fashion to say that it was the Church that was the saviour of science and of culture; that is only true in a restricted sense. As I shall show in the next division of the first part of this book, we must not look upon the Early Christian Church as a simple, uniform organism, not even within the limits of the Roman union in Western Europe; the centralisation and obedience to Rome which we have lived to see to-day, were in earlier centuries absolutely unknown. We must admit that almost all learning and art were the property of the Church; her cloisters and schools were the retreats and nurseries in which in those rough times peaceful intellectual work sought refuge; but the entry into the Church as monk or secular priest meant little more than being accepted into a privileged and specially protected class, which imposed upon the favoured individual hardly any return in the way of special duties. Until the thirteenth century every educated man, every teacher and student, every physician and professor of jurisprudence belonged to the clergy: but this was a matter of pure formality, founded exclusively upon certain legal conditions; and it was out of this very class, that is, out of the men who best knew the Church, that every revolution against her arose -- it was the Universities that became the high-schools of national emancipation. The Princes protected the Church, the learned clerics on the contrary attacked her. That is the reason why the Church waged unceasing war against the great intellects which, that they might work in peace, had sought refuge with her; had she had her way, science and culture would never again have been fledged. But the same Princes who protected the Church also protected the scholars whom she persecuted. No later than the ninth century there arose in the far north (out of the schools of England, which even in those early days were rich in important men) the great Scotus Erigena: the Church did all that she could to extinguish this brilliant light, but Charles the Bald, the same man who was supposed to have sent great tribute to the Pope of Rome, stretched his princely hand over Scotus; when this became insufficient, Alfred bade him to England where he raised the school of Oxford to a pinnacle of success, till he was stabbed to death by monks at the bidding of the central government of the Church. From the ninth century to the nineteenth, from the murder of Scotus to the issue of the Syllabus, it has been the same story. A final judgment shows the intellectual renaissance to be the work of Race in opposition to the universal Church which knows no Race, the work of the Teuton's thirst for knowledge, of the Teuton's national struggle for freedom. Great men in uninterrupted succession have arisen from the bosom of the Catholic Church; men to whom, as we must acknowledge, the peculiar catholic order of thought with its all- embracing greatness, its harmonious structure, its symbolical wealth and beauty has given birth, making them greater than they could have become without it; but the Church of Rome, purely as such, that is to say, as an organised secular theocracy, has always behaved as the daughter of the fallen Empire, as the last representative of the universal, anti-national Principle. Charlemagne by himself did more for the diffusion of education and knowledge than all the monks in the world. He caused a complete collection to be made of the national poetry of the Teutons. The Church destroyed it. I spoke a little while ago of Alfred. What Prince of the Church, what schoolman, ever did so much for the awakening of new intellectual powers, for the clearing up of living idioms, for the encouragement of national consciousness (so necessary at that time), as this one Prince? The most important recent historian of England has summed up the personality of this great Teuton in the one sentence: "Alfred was in truth an artist." [67] Where, in the Chaos of Peoples, was the man of whom the same could be said? In those so-called dark centuries the farther we travel northward, that is to say, the farther from the focus of a baleful "culture," and the purer the races with which we meet, the more activity do we find in the intellectual life. A literature of the noblest character, side by side with a freedom and order worthy of the dignity of man, develops itself from the ninth to the thirteenth century in the far-away republic of Iceland; in the same way, in remote England, during the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries we find a true popular poetry flourishing as it seldom has done since. [68] The passionate love of music which then came to light touches us as though we heard the beating of the wings of a guardian angel sent down from heaven, an angel heralding the future. When we hear King Alfred taking part in the songs of his chosen choir -- when a century later we see the passionate scholar and statesman Dunstan never. whether on horseback or in the Council Chamber, parted from his harp: then we call to mind the old Grecian legend that Harmonia was the daughter of Ares the God of War. Fighting, in lieu of a sham order. was what our wild ancestors brought with them, but at the same time they brought creative power instead of dreary barrenness. And as a matter of fact in all the more important Princes of that time we find a specially developed power of imagination: they were essentially fashioners. We should be perfectly justified were we to compare what Charlemagne was and did at the end of the eighth and beginning of the ninth centuries, with what Goethe did at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Both rode a tilt against the Powers of Chaos. both were artists; both" avowed themselves as belonging to the race which out of darkness is striving to reach the light." No I and a thousand times no! The annihilation of that monstrosity, a State without a nation, of that empty form, of that soulless congeries of humanity, that union of mongrels bound together only by a community of taxes and superstitions, not by a common origin and a common heart-beat, of that crime against the race of mankind which we have summed up in the definition "Chaos of Peoples" -- that does not mean the falling darkness of night, but the salvation of a great inheritance from unworthy hands, the dawn of a new day. Yet even to this hour we have not succeeded in purging our blood of all the poisons of that Chaos. In wide domains the Chaos ended by retaining the upper hand. Wherever the Teuton had not a sufficient majority physically to dominate the rest of the inhabitants by assimilation. as, for instance, in the south, there the chaotic element asserted itself more and more. We have but to look at our present position to see where power exists and where it is wanting, and how this depends upon the composition of races. I am not aware whether anyone has already observed with what peculiar exactitude the modern boundary of the universal Church of Rome corresponds with what I have pointed out as the general boundary of the Roman Imperium, and consequently of the chaotic mongreldom. To the east I admit that the line does not hold good, because here in Servia, Bosnia, &c., the Slavonic invaders of the eighth century and the Bulgarians annihilated everything foreign; in few districts of modern Europe is Race so uncontaminated, and the pure Slavs have never accepted the Church of Rome. In other places too there have been encroachments on both sides of the old boundary-line, but these have been unimportant, and moreover easily explained by political relations. On the whole the agreement is sufficiently striking to give rise to serious thought: Spain, Italy, Gaul, the Rhenish provinces, and the countries south of the Danube! It is still morning, and the powers of darkness are ever stretching out their polypus arms, clinging to us with their powers of suction in a hundred places, and trying to drag us back into the Night out of which we were striving to escape. We can arrive at a judgment upon these apparently confused, but really transparent, conditions, not so much by poring over the details of chronicles, as by obtaining a clear insight into the fundamental historical facts which I have set out in this chapter. _______________ Notes: 1. Der Ubergang aus dem philosophischen in das naturwissenschaftliche Zeitalter, Rektoratsrede, 1893, p. 30. I choose this example from hundreds, since Virchow, being one of the most ardent anthropologists and ethnographers of the nineteenth century, and in addition, a man of great learning and experience, ought to have been well informed on the subject. 2. See especially Darwin's Plants and Animals under Domestication, chaps. xv. xix. "Free crossing obliterates characters." For the "superstitious care with which the Arabs keep their horses pure bred" see interesting details in Gibbon's Roman Empire, chap. 50. See also Burton's Mecca, chap. xxix. 3. Even with this very qualified statement, derived from the best books I know, I seem to have presupposed more than science can with certainty assert: for I read in a specialised treatise, Les Aryens au nord et au sud de l'Hindou-Kousch, by Charles de Ujfalvi (Paris, 1896, p. 15), "Le terme d'aryen est de pure convention; les peuples eraniens au nord et les tribus hindoues au sud du Caucase indien, different absolument comme type et descendent, sans aucun doute, de deux races differentes." 4. G. Schrader (Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte), who has studied the question more from the linguistic standpoint, comes to the conclusion, "It is proved that the Indo-Teutonic peoples were settled in Europe at a very ancient period"; Johannes Ranke (Der Mensch) is of opinion that it is now an established fact that at least a great part of the population of Europe were Aryans as early as the stone age; and Virchow, whose authority is all the greater in the sphere of anthropology because he shows unconditional respect for facts and, unlike Huxley and many others, builds no Darwinian castles in the air, says that from anatomical discoveries one may assert that "the oldest troglodytes of Europe were of Aryan descent!" (quoted from Ranke, Der Mensch, ii. 578). 5. Ehrenreich: Anthropologische Studien uber die Urbewohner Brasiliens, 1897. 6. When I use the word Aryan in this book, I take it in the sense of the original Sanscrit "arya," which means "belonging to the friends," without binding myself to any hypothesis. The relationship in thought and feeling signifies in any case an homogeneousness. Cf. the note on p. 93. 7. R. Hartmann: Die Negritier (1876), p. 185. Similarly Luschan and many investigators. Salomon Reinach, for instance, writes in L'Origine des Aryens, 1892, p. 90: "Parler d'une race aryenne d'il y a trois mille ans, c'est emettre une hypothese gratuite: en parler comme si elle existait aujourd'hui, c'est dire tout simplement une absurdite." 8. Friedrich Ratzel, Johannes Ranke, Paul Ehrenreich, &c., in fact the more modern, widely travelled ethnographers. But they hold the view with many variations, since the relationship does not neces sarily rest upon common origin, but might have been produced by crossing. Ratzel, for instance, who in one place positively asserts the uniformity of the whole Indo- European race (Litterarisches Centralblatt, 1897, p. 1295), says in another (Volkerkunde, 1895, ii. 751), "the supposition that all these peoples have a uniform origin is not necessary or probable." -- It is worth remarking that even those who deny the fact of an Aryan race still constantly speak of it; they cannot do without it as a "working hypothesis." Even Reinach, after proving that there never was an Aryan race, speaks in an unguarded moment (loc. cit. p. 98) of the "common origin of the Semites and the Aryans." Ujfalvi, quoted above, has after profound study arrived at the opposite conclusion and believes in a "grande famille aryenne." In fact anthropologists, ethnographers and even historians, theologians, philologists and legal authorities find the idea "Aryan" more and more indispensable every year. And yet if one of us makes even the most cautious and strictly limited use of the conception, he is scorned and slandered by academic scribes and nameless newspaper reviewers. May the reader of this book trust science more than the official simplifiers and levellers and the professional anti-Aryan confusion-makers. Though it were proved that there never was an Aryan race in the past, yet we desire that in the future there may be one. That is the decisive stand point men for action. 9. The physical scientist Lichtenberg makes a similar remark: "The teaching of nature is, for me at least, a kind of sinking fund for religion, when overbold reason falls into debt" (Fragmentarische Bemerkungen uber physikalisch Gegenstande, 15). 10. Materialien zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre, the part dealing with Newton's personality. 11. It is well known that it was but gradually extinguished, and that in spite of a political situation, which must assuredly have brought speedy destruction on everything Hellenic, had not race qualities here had a decisive influence. Till late in the Christian era Athens remained the centre of intellectual life for mankind; Alexandria was more talked of, the strong Semitic contingent saw to that; but anyone who wished to study in earnest travelled to Athens, till Christian narrow-mindedness for ever closed the schools there in the year 529, and we learn that as late as this even the man of the people was distinguished in Athens "by the liveliness of his intellect, the correctness of his language and the sureness of his taste" (Gibbon, chap. xl.). There is in George Finlay's book, Medieval Greece, chap. i., a complete and very interesting and clear account of the gradual destruction of the Hellenic race by foreign immigration. One after the other colonies of Roman soldiers from all parts of the Empire, then Celts, Teutonic peoples, Slavonians, Bulgarians, Wallachians, Albanesians, &c., had moved into the country and mixed with the original population. The Zaconians, who were numerous even in the fifteenth century, but have now almost died out, are said to be the only pure Hellenes. 12. Cf. p. 109, note. 13. See the novels Tancred and Coningsby. In the latter Sidonia says: "Race is everything; there is no other truth. And every race must fall which carelessly suffers its blood to become mixed." 14. Das Bestandige in den Menschenrassen und die Spielweite ihrer Veranderlichkeit, 1868, p. 26. 15. Mention should also be made of Japan, where likewise a felicitous crossing and afterwards insular isolation have contributed to the production of a very remarkable race, much stronger and (within the Mongoloid sphere of possibility) much more profoundly endowed than most Europeans imagine. Perhaps the only books in which one gets to know the Japanese soul are those of Lafcadio Hearn: Kokoro, Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life; Gleanings in Buddha Fields. and others. 16. Natural children are not at all taken into the community by orthodox Jews. Among the Sephardim of East Europe to-day, a girl who is known to have gone wrong is immediately taken by the pleni-potentiaxies of the community to a strange land and provided for there; neither she nor her child can venture ever to let anything be heard of them, they are regarded as dead. Thus they provide against blind love introducing strange blood into the tribe. 17. See Graetz. as above, chap. ix., on The Period of the Diaspora. 18. In Tiberias, for example, there was a Rabbi's school which for centuries set the fashion. (Regarding the ennobling of the Sephardim by Gothic blood, see below.) 19. The Goths, who in a later age went over to Mohammedanism in great crowds, and became its noblest and most fanatical protagonists. are said to have at an earlier period adopted Judaism in great numbers, and a learned specialist of Vienna University assures me that the moral and intellectual as well as the physical superiority of the so- called "Spanish" and "Portuguese" Jews is to be explained rather by this rich influx of Teutonic blood than by that breeding which 1 have singled out to emphasise, and the importance of which he too would not incline to underestimate. Whether this view is justifiable or not may remain an open question. 20. The literature is very great: for simplicity, comprehensibility and many-sidedness I recommend to every layman especially Darwin's Animals and Plants under Domestication. In the Origin of Species the same subject is treated rather briefly and with too much bias. 21. Jhering demonstrates with particular clearness that the epoch of the migrations, which lasted for many centuries, necessarily had upon the Teutonic peoples the effect of an ever more and more ennobling artificial selection (Vorgeschichte. p. 462 f.). 22. See especially pp. 109, 272, 286 and 293. 23. See Curtius: Griechische Geschichte, i. 4, and ii. 1 and 2. Count Gobineau asserts that the extraordinary intellectual and above all artistic talent of the Greeks is to be explained by an infiltration of Semitic blood: this shows to what senseless views one is forced by fundamental hypotheses which are false, artificial and contrary to history and natural observation. 24. This thorough crossing was caused by the fact that the Burgundians settled individually over the whole land and each of them became the "hospes" of a former inhabitant, of whose cultivated land he received two-thirds, and of his buildings and garden a half, while woods and pastures remained common property. Now though there might not be much sympathy between the new-comer and the old possessor, yet they lived side by side and were solidly united in disputes about boundaries and such-like questions of property; thus crossing could not be long deferred. (Cf. especially Savigny, Geschichte des romischen Rechts im Mittelalter. chap. v. div. 1.) 25. See the facts in Haeckel: Naturliche Schopjungsgeschichte (lect. 8). Still more detail in a book by P. Jacoby, which I have unfortunately not before me, his Etudes sur la selection dans ses rapports avec l'heredite chez l'homme. 26. In this connection too we have the well-known evil results of marriage between near relatives: the organs of sense (in fact the whole nervous system) and the sexual organs suffer most frequently from this. (See George H. Darwin's lectures, Die Ehen zwischen Geschwisterkindern und ihre Folgen, Leipzig, 1876.) 27. I should recommend the large number of people who unfortunately still keep aloof from natural science, to read carefully Christian Konrad Sprengel's Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befrucht ung der Blumen, 1793. The whole German nation ought to be proud of this work: since 1893 there has been a facsimile reprint of it (Mayer and Muller, Berlin) and it can be read by any layman. Of more recent publications Hermann Muller's Alpenblumen, ihre Befruchtung durch Insekten und ihre Anpassungen an dieselben (Engelmann, 1881) is specially stimulating, clear by reason of the many illustrations, and complete. A summary account, which includes plants other than European, is found in the same author's Blumen und Insekten in Trewendt's Encyklopadie der Naturwissenschaften. There are certainly few speculations that introduce us so directly to the most mysterious wonders of nature as this revelation of the mutual relations of the plant and animal worlds. What are all our knowledge and hypotheses in comparison with such phenomena? They teach us to observe faithfully and to be satisfied with the circle of things attainable. (During the printing of this book Knuth's Handbuch der Blutenbiologie, published by Engelmann, began to appear.) 28. For this question of the mixture of blood indispensable to the origin of pre-eminently gifted races Reibmayr's book, Inzucht und Vermischung beim Menschen, 1897, should be consulted. 29. Darwin, Animals and Plants, chap. xv. 30. For this too there are numerous examples in Darwin. As regards dogs in particular, examples will occur to everyone. 31. We must, however, not overlook the fact that, if we could make experiments in breeding with men, very great differences in physique also could certainly be achieved in regard to size, hair, proportions, &c. Place a dwarf from the primeval forest of the Middle Congo, little more than 3 feet high, the whole body covered with hair, beside a Prussian Grenadier of the Guards: one will see what plastic possibilities slumber in the human body. -- As far as the dog is concerned, we must remember also that the various breeds certainly originate from more than one wild species" (Claus, Zoologie, 4th edit. ii. 458); hence its almost alarming polymorphism. 32. It is very instructive to observe, on the other hand, that the Hellenes in Ionia, who were subject to every kind of mongrel crossing, disappeared much more quickly. 33. Long before me Gibbon had recognised the physical degeneration of the Roman race as the cause of the decline of the Roman Empire; now that is more fully demonstrated by O. Seeck in his Geschicht, der Unterganges der antiken Welt. It was only the immigration of the vigorous Teutonic peoples that kept the chaotic empire artificially alive for a few centuries longer. 34. In Portugese Brazil the conditions are essentially different. 35. According to Albrecht Wirth, Volkstum und Weltmacht in der Geschichte, 1901, p. 159, the Chilians also derive advantage from the fact that their Indians -- the Araucani -- are of particularly noble race. 36. As is well known, very similar conditions prevail in the Spanish colonies. The island of Porto Rico forms the sole exception: here the native Caribbees were exterminated. and the result is a pure Indo-European population, distinguished for industry, shrewdness and love of order; a striking example of the significance of race! 37. In his book Altersklassen und Mannerb nde (po 23), Heinrich Schurtz comes to the conclusion that, "Successful crossings are possible and advantageous only within a certain sphere of relationship. If the relationship is too close, really near blood-relationship, sickly tendencies are not counterbalanced but increased; if it is too remote, no felicitous mixing of the qualities is possible." 38. If, for example. the climate of Attica had been the decisive thing, as is often asserted, it would be impossible to understand why the genius of its inhabitants was produced only under certain racial conditions and disappeared for ever with the removal of these conditions; on the other hand, the importance of the geographical and historical conditions becomes quite clear, when we observe that they isolated Attica for centuries from the ceaseless changes brought about by the migrations, but at the same time contributed to the influx of a select, noble population from different but related tribes, which mingled to form a new race. 39. The reader will find an interesting summary of the different opinions of modern times in Friedrich Rohde's Entstehung und Vererbung individueller Eigenschaften. 1895. 40. Professor August Forel, the well-known psychiatrist, has made interesting studies in the United States and the West Indian islands, on the victory of intellectually inferior races over higher ones because of their greater virility. "Though the brain of the negro is weaker than that of the white, yet his generative power and the predominance of his qualities in the descendants are all greater than those of the whites. The white race isolates itself (therefore) from them more and more strictly, not only in sexual but in all relations, because it has at last recognised that crossing means its own destruction." Forel shows by numerous examples how impossible it is for the negro to assimilate our civilisation more than skin-deep, and how so soon as he is left to himself he everywhere degenerates into the "most absolute primitive African savagery." (For more detail on this subject, see the interesting book of Hesketh Pritchard, Where Black rules White, Hayti, 1900; anyone who has been reared on phrases of the equality of mankind, &c., will shudder when he learns how matters really stand so soon as the blacks in a State get the upper hand.) And Forel, who as scientist is educated in the dogma of the one, everywhere equal, humanity, comes to the conclusion: "Even for their own good the blacks must be treated as what they are, an absolutely subordinate, inferior, lower type of men, incapable themselves of culture. That must once for all be clearly and openly stated." (See the account of his journey in Harden's Zukunft, February 17, 1900.) -- For this question of race-crossings and the constant victory of the inferior race over the superior, see also the work of Ferdinand Hueppe, which is equally rich in facts and perceptions, Uber die modernen Kolonisations bestrebungen und die Anpassungsmoglichkeit der Europaer an die Tropen (Berlincr klinische Wochenschrijt, 1901). In Australia, for example, a process of sifting is quietly but very quickly going on, whereby the tall fair Teuton -- so strongly represented in the English blood -- is disappearing, while the added element of the homo alpinus is gaining the upper hand. 41. There is a clear and simple summary in Johannes Ranke, Der Mensch. ii; 296 ff. The discussion of all these questions in Topinard's L'Anthropologie, Part II., is more thorough, but for that reason much more difficult to follow. It is remarkable that the latter only uses the word "race" to denote a hypothetical entity, the actual existence of which at any time cannot be proved. Il n'y a plus de races pures. Who seeks to prove that there ever were any in this a priori sense of anthropological presuppositions? Pure animal races are obtained only by breeding and on the fundamental basis of crossing; why should the opposite hold of men? -- Besides. this whole "Turanic" hypothesis is, like all these things, still very much of an airy abstraction. See further details in chap. vi. 42. Alphonse de Candolle: Histoire des Sciences et des Savants depuis deux Siecles, 2e ed., p, 576. 43. Renan: Discours et Conferences, 3e ed., p. 297. "Le fait de la race, capital a l'origine, va donc toujours perdant de son importance." 44. What you do
not reckon, 45. This forms the subject of the eighth chapter (vol. ii.). 46. Anyone who wants to gain a vivid conception of the extraordinary strength of these races, capable of serving as basis for a Homer, should read the description of the strongholds of Tiryns and Mycenae from the Atridean time, as they still stand to-day after tens of centuries. 47. According to Renan (Israel, i. 102) the Hebrew language is utterly incapable of expressing a philosophical thought, a mythological conception, the feeling of the Infinite, the emotions of the human soul or even pure observation of nature. 48. See p. 124. 49. The Roman fortified boundary did indeed include a considerable portion north of the Danube and east of the Rhine, because the limes branched off westwards above Regensberg, came near Stuttgart, then north again till it met the Maine west of Wurzburg. But this tithe-land. as it was called, was not colonised by Italians, but, as Tacitus tells us. by "the most fickle of the Gauls" (Cf. Wietersheim, Volkerwanderune, i. 161 ff.). 50. Not to be confused with the Dream of the Shoemaker Micyllus. 51. Greek word
52. The faint echo we have heard in the nineteenth century: "When the best names are named, mine too will be mentioned" (Heine). 53. Cf. p. 242. 54. Apuleius boasts expressly of his mixed origin. He too studied in Syria and Egypt and travelled in Greece, hence had practically the same educational course as Lucian. 55. The Fliegende
Blatter of 1896 has a picture which shows a Counsellor of Commerce and
his wife just entering their carriage: 56. The one fault in this second comparison is that Heine did belong to a definite people and in consequence possessed a more definite physiognomy. 57. Augustine is indeed extremely cautious; he says, for example, of the prescience of God and the contradictory view, the free will of man: "We embrace both convictions, we confess to both, truly and honestly; to the one that we may believe rightly, to the other that we may live rightly" (illud, ut bene credamus: hoc, ut bene vivamus); cf; De Civ. Dei, v. 10. With this is closely connected that further question, whether God himself is free or stands under the law; the intellect inclines clearly in the case of Augustine to the latter view, his dogmatic creed to the former. Is an action bad because God has forbidden it, or had he to forbid it because it is bad? In his Contra Mendaium, chap. xv., Augustine takes the second alternative; in other writings the former. 58. This story seems to have been in vogue at the time; for Lucian too has a Lucius or the Enchanted Ass, which looks indeed as if it were translated from fragments of the Apuleian one. Augustine says of the transformation "aut finxit, aut indicavit," but he clearly inclines to the latter view. 59. The irreconcilable contradictions in the religious thought and feeling of Augustine are fully discussed in the seventh chapter (vol. ii.) and the gap here left is thus to some extent filled. 60. Cf. also what is said on p. 129 f. 61. Cf. Otto Zockler: Askese und Monchlum, 1897, i. 193 ff. 62. In the fourth century the Roman Empire numbered hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns. It was not unusual for an abbot to have 10,000 monks in one cloister and in the year 373 the one single Egyptian town Oxyrynchus had 20,000 nuns and 10,000 monks! Now consider the total numbers of the population of that time, and it will be clear what a great influence this ascetic epidemic must have had upon the non-multiplication of the bastard races. (See further details in Lecky's History of European Morals, 11th ed. ii. 105 ff.) 63. Helden und Welt: dramatische Bilder (Chemnitz, 1883). 64. "The individuals and the whole are identical," the Indian thinkers had taught (see Garbe's Samkhya-Philosophie, p. 158). 65. Hermann is a Roman cavalier, speaks Latin fluently and has thoroughly studied the Roman art of administration. So, too, most of the Teutonic princes. Their troops, too, were at home in the whole Roman empire and so acquainted with the customs of so-called civilised men, long before they immigrated with all their goods and chattels into these lands. 66. See Gobineau: Inequality of the Human Races, Bk. VI. chap. iv. 67. Green: History of the English People, Bk. I, c. iii. 68. Olive F. Emerson; History of the Engish Language, p. 54
|
German Bildung: so the best
translators. It is not a question of the education of children, and
"Science" would imply too much. The possible objection that the first
woman does not introduce herself as "Art" simply, but as the "Art of
cutting Hermae" may be met by the rejoinder that later she is described
as 
and that the appeal to Phidias and
other artists admits no doubt about the intention.