Primeval man is a _ranging_ animal, a being whose waking-consciousness restlessly feels its way through life, all microcosm, under no servitude of place or home, keen and anxious in its senses, ever alert to drive off some element of hostile Nature. A deep transformation sets in first with agriculture--for that is something _artificial_, with which hunter and shepherd have no touch. He who digs and ploughs is seeking not to plunder, but to _alter_ Nature. To plant implies, not to take something, but to produce something. _But with this, man himself becomes plant_--namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a new earth-boundness of being, a new feeling, pronounces itself. Hostile Nature becomes the friend; earth becomes _Mother_ Earth. Between sowing and begetting, harvest and death, the child and the grain, a profound affinity is set up. A new devoutness addresses itself in chthonian cults to the fruitful earth that grows up along with man. And as completed expression of this life-feeling, we find everywhere the _symbolic shape of the farmhouse_, which in the disposition of the rooms and in every line of external form tells us about the blood of its inhabitants. The peasant’s dwelling is the great symbol of settledness. It is itself plant, thrusts its roots deep into its “own” soil.[137] It is _property_ in the most sacred sense of the word. The kindly spirits of hearth and door, floor and chamber--Vesta, Janus, Lares and Penates--are as firmly fixed in it as the man himself.

This is the condition precedent of every Culture, which itself in turn grows up out of a mother-landscape and renews and intensifies the intimacy of man and soil. What his cottage is to the peasant, that the town is to the Culture-man. As each individual house has its kindly spirits, so each town has its tutelary god or saint. The town, too, is a plantlike being, as far removed as a peasantry is from nomadism and the purely microcosmic. Hence the development of a high form-language is linked always to a landscape. Neither an art nor a religion can alter the site of its growth; only in the Civilization with its giant cities do we come again to despise and disengage ourselves from these roots. Man as civilized, as _intellectual nomad_, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free _intellectually_ as hunter and herdsman were free sensually. “_Ubi bene, ibi patria_” is valid _before_ as well as _after_ a Culture. In the not-yet-spring of the Migrations it was a Germanic yearning--virginal, yet already maternal--that searched the South for a home in which to nest its future Culture. To-day, at the end of this Culture, the rootless intellect ranges over all landscapes and all possibilities of thought. But between these limits lies the time in which a man held a bit of soil to be something _worth dying for_.

It is a conclusive fact--yet one hitherto never appreciated--that all great Cultures are town-Cultures. Higher man of the Second Age is a town-tied animal. Here is the real criterion of “world-history” that differentiates it with utter sharpness from man’s history--_world-history is the history of civic man_. Peoples, states, politics, religion, all arts, and all sciences rest upon _one_ prime phenomenon of human being, the town. As all thinkers of all Cultures themselves live in the town (even though they may reside bodily in the country), they are perfectly unaware of what a bizarre thing a town is. To feel this we have to put ourselves unreservedly in the place of the wonder-struck primitive who for the first time sees this mass of stone and wood set in the landscape, with its stone-enclosed streets and its stone-paved squares--a domicile, truly, of strange form and strangely teeming with men!

But the real miracle is the birth of the _soul_ of a town. A mass-soul of a wholly new kind--whose last foundations will remain hidden from us for ever--suddenly buds off from the general spirituality of its Culture. As soon as it is awake, it forms for itself a visible body. Out of the rustic group of farms and cottages, each of which has its own history, arises a _totality_. And the whole lives, breathes, grows, and acquires a face and an inner form and history. Thenceforward, in addition to the individual house, the temple, the cathedral, and the palace, the town-figure itself becomes a unit objectively expressing the form-language and style-history that accompanies the Culture throughout its life-course.

It goes without saying that what distinguishes a town from a village is not size, but the presence of a soul. Not only in primitive conditions, such as those of central Africa, but in Late conditions too--China, India, and industrialized Europe and America--we find very large settlements that are nevertheless not to be called cities. They are centres of landscape; they do not inwardly form worlds in themselves. They have no soul. Every primitive population lives wholly as peasant and son of the soil--the being “City” does not exist for it. That which in externals develops from the village is not the city, but the market, a mere meeting-point of rural life-interests. Here there can be no question of a separate existence. The inhabitant of a market may be a craftsman or a tradesman, but he lives and thinks as a peasant. We have to go back and sense accurately what it means when out of a primitive Egyptian or Chinese or Germanic village--a little spot in a wide land--a city comes into being. It is quite possibly not differentiated in any outward feature, but spiritually it is _a place from which the countryside is henceforth regarded, felt, and experienced as “environs,”_ as something different and subordinate. From now on there are two lives, that of the inside and that of the outside, and the peasant understands this just as clearly as the townsman. The village smith and the smith in the city, the village headman and the burgomaster, live in two different worlds. The man of the land and the man of the city are different essences. First of all they feel the difference, then they are dominated by it, and at last they cease to understand each other at all. To-day a Brandenburg peasant is closer to a Sicilian peasant than he is to a Berliner. From the moment of this specific attunement, the City comes into being, and it is this attunement which underlies, as something that goes without saying, the entire waking-consciousness of every Culture.

Every springtime of a Culture is _ipso facto_ the springtime of a new city-type and civism. The men of the pre-Culture are filled with a deep uneasiness in the presence of these types, with which they cannot get into any inward relation. On the Rhine and the Danube the Germans frequently, as at Strassburg, settled down at the gates of Roman cities that remained uninhabited.[138] In Crete the conquerors built, on the ruins of the burnt-out cities like Gournia and Cnossus--villages. The Orders of the Western pre-Culture, the Benedictines, and particularly the Cluniacs and Premonstratensians, settled like the knights on free land; it was the Franciscans and Dominicans who began to build in the Early Gothic city. There the new soul had just awakened. But even there a tender melancholy still adheres to the architecture, as to Franciscan art as a whole--an almost mystical fear of the individual in presence of the new and bright and conscious, which as yet was only dully accepted by the generality. Man hardly yet dared to cease to be peasant; the first to live with the ripe and considered alertness of genuine megalopolitans are the Jesuits. It is a sign that the countryside is still unconditionally supreme, and does not yet recognize the city, when the ruler shifts his court every spring from palace to palace. In the Egyptian Old Kingdom the thickly-populated centre of the administration was at the “White Wall” (Memphis), but the residences of the Pharaohs changed incessantly as in Sumerian Babylon and the Carolingian Empire.[139] The Early Chinese rulers of the Chóu dynasty had their court as a rule at Lo-Yang (the present Ho-nan-fu) from about 1160, but it was not until 770--corresponding to our sixteenth century--that the locality was promoted to be the permanent royal residence.[140]

Never has the feeling of earth-boundness, of the plantwise-cosmic, expressed itself so powerfully as it did in the architecture of the petty early towns, which consisted of hardly more than a few streets about a market-place or a castle or a place of worship. Here, if anywhere, it is manifest that every grand style is itself plantlike. The Doric column, the Egyptian pyramid, the Gothic cathedral, _grow out of_ the ground, earnest, big with destiny, Being without waking-consciousness. The Ionic column, the buildings of the Middle Kingdom and those of the Baroque, calmly aware and conscious of themselves, free and sure, _stand on_ the ground. There, separated from the power of the land--cut off from it, even, by the pavement underfoot--Being becomes more and more languid, sensation and reason more and more powerful. Man becomes intellect, “free” like the nomads, whom he comes to resemble, but narrower and colder than they. “Intellect,” “_Geist_,” “_esprit_,” is the specific urban form of the understanding waking-consciousness. All art, all religion and science, become slowly intellectualized, alien to the land, incomprehensible to the peasant of the soil. With the Civilization sets in the climacteric. The immemorially old roots of Being are dried up in the stone-masses of its cities. And the free intellect--fateful word!--appears like a flame, mounts splendid into the air, and pitiably dies.