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

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

But these human beings possess also the microcosmic-animal side of life, in waking-consciousness and receptivity and reason. And the form in which the waking-consciousness of one man gets into relation with that of another I call _language_, which begins by being a mere unconscious living expression that is received as a sensation, but gradually develops into a conscious _technique of communication_ that depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching to signs.

In the limit, every race is a single great body, and every language[161] the efficient form of _one_ great waking-consciousness that connects many individual beings. And we shall never reach the ultimate discoveries about either unless they are treated together and constantly brought into comparison with one another.

But, further, we shall never understand man’s higher history if we ignore the fact that man, as constituent of a race and as possessor of a language, as derivative of a blood-unit and as member of an understanding-unit, has different Destinies, that of his being and that of his waking-being. That is, the origin, development, and duration of his race side and the origin, development, and duration of his language side are _completely independent of one another_. Race is _something cosmic and psychic_ (_Seelenhaft_), periodic in some obscure way, and in its inner nature partly conditioned by major astronomical relations.

Languages, on the other hand, are causal forms, and operate through the polarity of their means. We speak of race-instincts and of the spirit of a language. But they are two distinct _worlds_. To Race belong the deepest meanings of the words “time” and “yearning”; to language those of the words “space” and “fear.” But all this has been hidden from us, hitherto, by the overlying idea of “peoples.”

There are, then, _currents of being_ and _linkages of waking-being_. The former have physiognomy, the latter are based on system. Race, as seen in the picture of the world-around, is the aggregate of all bodily characters so far as these exist for the sense-perceptions of conscious creatures. Here we have to remember that a body develops and fulfils from childhood to old age the specific inner form that was assigned to it at the moment of its conception, while at the same time that which the body is (considered apart from its form) is perpetually being renewed. Consequently nothing of the body actually remains in the man except the living meaning of his existence, and of this all that we know is so much as presents itself in the world of waking-consciousness. Man of the higher sort is limited, as to the impression of race that he can receive, almost wholly to what appears in the light-world of his eye, so that for him race is essentially a sum of _visible_ characters. But even for him there are not inconsiderable relics of the power to observe non-optical characters such as smell, the cries of animals, and, above all, the modalities of human speech. In the other higher animals, on the contrary, the capacity to receive the impression of race is decidedly _not_ dominated by sight. Scent is stronger, and, besides, the animals have modes of sensation that entirely elude human understanding. It is, however, only men and animals that can _receive the impression of race_, and not the plants, and yet these too _have_ race, as every nurseryman knows. It is, to me, a sight of deep pathos to see how the spring flowers, craving to fertilize and be fertilized, cannot for all their bright splendour attract one another, or even see one another, but must have recourse to animals, for whom alone these colours and these scents exist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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