There are born destiny-men and causality-men. A whole world separates the purely living man--peasant and warrior, statesman and general, man of the world and man of business, everyone who wills to prosper, to rule, to fight, and to dare, the organizer or entrepreneur, the adventurer or bravo or gambler--from the man who is destined either by the power of his mind or the defect of his blood to be an “intellectual”--the saint, priest, savant, idealist, or ideologue. Being and waking-being, pulse and tension, motives and ideas, cyclic organs and touch-organs--there has rarely been a man of any significance in whom the one side or the other has not markedly predominated. All that motives and urges, the eye for men and situations, the belief in his star which every born man of action possesses and which is something wholly different from belief in the correctness of a standpoint, the voices of the blood that speak in moments of decision, and the immovably quiet conviction that justifies any aim and any means--all these are denied to the critical, meditative man. Even the footfall of the fact-man sounds different from, sounds more planted than, that of the thinker, in whom the pure microcosmic can acquire no firm relation with earth.

Destiny has made the man so or so--subtle and fact-shy, or active and contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole man, whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without (and even against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries to master actuality as well as its own world, for then we get all those ethico-politico-social reform-projects which demonstrate, unanswerably, how things ought to be and how to set about making them so--theories that without exception rest upon the hypothesis that all men are as rich in ideas and as poor in motives as the author is (or thinks he is). Such theories, even when they have taken the field armed with the full authority of a religion or the prestige of a famous name, have not in one single instance effected the slightest alteration in life. They have merely caused us to _think_ otherwise than before about life. And this, precisely, is the doom of the “late” ages of a Culture, the ages of much writing and much reading--that they should perpetually confuse the opposition of life and thought with the opposition between thought-about-life and thought-about-thought. All world-improvers, priests, and philosophers are unanimous in holding that life is a fit object for the nicest meditation, but the life of the world goes its own way and cares not in the least what is said about it. And even when a community succeeds in living “according to rule,” all that it achieves is, at best, a note on itself in some future history of the world--if there is space left after the proper and only important subject-matter has been dealt with.

For, in the last resort, only the active man, the man of destiny, lives in the _actual_ world, the world of political, military, and economic decisions, in which concepts and systems do not figure or count. Here a shrewd blow is more than a shrewd conclusion, and there is sense in the contempt with which statesmen and soldiers of all times have regarded the “ink-slinger” and the “bookworm” who think that world-history exists for the sake of the intellect or science or even art. Let us say it frankly and without ambiguity: the understanding divorced from sensation is only one, and not the decisive, side of life. A history of Western thought may not contain the name of Napoleon, but in the history of actuality Archimedes, for all his scientific discoveries, was possibly less effective than that soldier who killed him at the storming of Syracuse.

Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at the head and not in the train of great events. They misunderstand completely the rôle played, for example, by the political Sophists in Athens or by Voltaire and Rousseau in France. Often enough a statesman does not “know” what he is doing, but that does not prevent him from following with confidence just the one path that leads to success; the political doctrinaire, on the contrary, always knows what should be done, and yet his activity, once it ceases to be limited to paper, is the least successful and therefore the least valuable in history. These intrusions happen only too frequently in times of uncertainty, like that of the Attic enlightenment, or the French or the German revolutions, when the ideologue of word or pen is eager to be busy with the actual history of the people instead of with systems. He mistakes his place. He belongs with his principles and programs to no history but the history of a literature. Real history passes judgment on him not by controverting the theorist, but by leaving him and all his thoughts to himself. A Plato or a Rousseau--not to mention the smaller intellects--could build up abstract political structures, but for Alexander, Scipio, Cæsar, and Napoleon, with their schemes and battles and settlements, they were entirely without importance. The thinker could discuss destiny if he liked; it was enough for these men to be destiny.

Under all the plurality of microcosmic beings, we are perpetually meeting with the formation of _inspired mass-units_, beings of a higher order, which, whether they develop slowly or come into existence in a moment, contain all the feelings and passions of the individual, enigmatic in their inward character and inaccessible to reasoning--though the connoisseur can see into and reckon upon their reactions well enough. Here too we distinguish the generic animal unities which are sensed, the unities profoundly dependent upon Being and Destiny--like the way of an eagle in the air or the way of the stormers on the breach--from the purely human associations which depend upon the understanding and cohere on the basis of like opinions, like purposes, or like knowledge. Unity of cosmic pulse one has without willing to have it; unity of common ground is acquired at will. One can join or resign from an intellectual association as one pleases, for only one’s waking-consciousness is involved. But to a cosmic unity one is _committed_, and committed with one’s entire being. Crowds of this order of unity are seized by storms of enthusiasm or, as readily, of panic. They are noisy and ecstatic at Eleusis or Lourdes, or heroically firm like the Spartans of Thermopylæ and the last Goths in the battle of Vesuvius.[16] They form themselves to the music of chorales, marches, and dances, and are sensitive like human and animal thoroughbreds to the effects of bright colours, decoration, costume, and uniform.

These inspired aggregates are born and die. Intellectual associations are mere sums in the mathematical sense, varying by addition and subtraction, unless and until (as sometimes happens) a mere coincidence of opinion strikes so impressively as to reach the blood and so, suddenly, to create out of the sum a Being. In any political turning-point words may become fates and opinions passions. A chance crowd is herded together in the street and has _one_ consciousness, _one_ sensation, _one_ language--until the short-lived soul flickers out and everyone goes his way again. This happened every day in the Paris of 1789, whenever the cry of “_A la lanterne!_” fell upon the ear.

These souls have their special psychology,[17] and the knowledge of this psychology is for the public man an essential. A single soul is the mark of every genuine order or class, be it the chivalry and military orders of the Crusades, the Roman Senate or the Jacobin club, polite society under Louis XIV or the Prussian country “_Adel_,” peasantry or guilds, the masses of the big city or the folk of the secluded valley, the peoples and tribes of the migrations or the adherents of Mohammed and generally, of any new-founded religion or sect, the French of the Revolution or the Germans of the Wars of Liberation. The mightiest beings of this kind that we know are the higher Cultures, which are born in great spiritual upheavals, and in a thousand years of existence weld all aggregates of lower degree--nations, classes, towns, generations--into one unit.

All grand events of history are carried by beings of the cosmic order, by peoples, parties, armies, and classes, while the history of the intellect runs its course in loose associations and circles, schools, levels of education, “tendencies” and “isms.” And here again it is a question of destiny whether such aggregates at the decisive moments of highest effectiveness find a leader or are driven blindly on, whether the chance headmen are men of the first order or men of no real significance tossed up, like Robespierre or Pompey, by the surge of events. It is the hall-mark of the statesman that he has a sure and penetrating eye for these mass-souls that form and dissolve on the tide of the times, their strength and their duration, their direction and purpose. And even so, it is a question of Incident[18] whether he is one who _can_ master them or one who is swept away by them.