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

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

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

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

Obviously, the _chaotic_ in the total expression of the human body is not in the least realized. Quite apart from smell (which for the Chinese, for example, is a most characteristic mark of race) and sound (the sound of speech, song, and, above all, laughter, which enables us accurately to sense deep differences inaccessible to scientific method) the profusion of images before the eye is so embarrassingly rich in details, either actually visible or sensible to the inner vision, that the possibility of marshalling them under a few aspects is simply unthinkable. And all these sides to the picture, all these traits composing it, are independent of one another and have each their individual history. There are cases in which the bony structure (and particularly the skull-form) completely alter without the expression of the fleshy parts--i.e., the face--becoming different. The brothers and sisters of the same family may all present almost every differentia posited by Blumenbach, Müller, and Huxley, and yet the identity of their living race-expression may be patent to anyone who looks at them. Still more frequent is similarity of bodily build accompanied by thorough diversity of living expression--I need only mention the immeasurable difference between genuine peasant-stock, like the Frisians or the Bretons, and genuine city-stock.[174] But besides the energy of the blood--which coins the same living features (“family” traits) over and over again for centuries--and the power of the soil--evidenced in its stamp of man--there is that mysterious cosmic force of the syntony of close human connexions. What is called the “_Versehen_” of a pregnant woman[175] is only a particular and not very important instance of the workings of a very deep and powerful formative principle inherent in all that is of the race side. It is a matter of common observation that elderly married people become strangely like one another, although probably Science with its measuring instruments would “prove” the exact opposite. It is impossible to exaggerate the formative power of this living pulse, this strong inward feeling for the perfection of one’s own type. The feeling for race-beauty--so opposite to the conscious taste of ripe urbans for intellectual-individual traits of beauty--is immensely strong in primitive men, and for that very reason never emerges into their consciousness. But such a feeling is race-forming. It undoubtedly moulded the warrior- and hero-type of a nomad tribe more and more definitely on _one bodily ideal_, so that it would have been quite unambiguous to speak of the race-figure of Romans or Ostrogoths. The same is true of any ancient nobility--filled with a strong and deep sense of its own unity, it achieves the formation of a bodily ideal. Comradeship breeds races. French _noblesse_ and Prussian _Landadel_ are genuine race-denotations. But it is just this, too, that has bred the types of the European Jew, with his immense race-energy and his thousand years of ghetto life; and it always will forge a population into a race whenever it has stood for long together spiritually firm and united in the presence of its Destiny. Where a race-ideal exists, as it does, supremely, in the Early period of the Culture--the Vedic, the Homeric, the knightly times of the Hohenstaufen--the yearning of a ruling class towards this ideal, its will to be just _so_ and not otherwise, operates (quite independently of the choosing of wives) towards actualizing this ideal and eventually achieves it. Further, there is a statistical aspect of the matter which has received far less attention than it should. For every human being alive to-day there were a million ancestors even in A.D. 1300 and ten million in A.D. 1000. This means that every German now living, without exception, is a blood-relative of every European of the age of the Crusades and that the relationship becomes a hundred and a thousand times more intensely close as we narrow the limits of its field, so that within twenty generations or less the population of a land grows together into _one single family_; and this, together with the choice and voice of the blood that courses through the generations, ever driving congeners into one another’s arms, dissolving and breaking marriages, evading or forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to innumerable procreations that in utter unconsciousness fulfil the _will of the race_.

Primarily, this applies to the vegetal race-traits, the “physiognomy of position,” as apart from movement of the mobile--i.e., everything which does _not_ differ in the living and in the dead animal-body and cannot but express itself even in stiffened members. There is undoubtedly something cognate in the growth of an ilex or a Lombardy poplar and that of a man--“thickset,” “slim,” “drooping,” and so forth. Similarly, the outline of the back of a dromedary, or the striping of a tiger- or zebra-skin is a vegetal race-mark. And so, too, are the motion-actions of nature _upon and with a creature_--a birch-tree or a delicately built child, which both sway in the wind, an oak with its splintered crown, the steady circles or frightened flutterings of birds in the storm, all belong to the plant side of race. But on which side of the line do such characters stand when _blood and soil contend for the inner form of the “transplanted” species_, human or animal? And how much of the constitution of the soul, the social code, the house, is of this kind?

It is quite another picture that presents itself when we attune ourselves to receive the impressions of the purely animal. The difference between plantwise being and animalwise waking-being (to recall what has been said earlier) is such that we are here concerned, not simply with waking-being itself and its language, but with the combination of cosmic and microcosmic to form a freely moving body, a microcosm _vis-à-vis_ a macrocosm, whose independent life-activity possesses an expression peculiar to itself, which makes use in part of the organs of waking-consciousness and which--as the corals show--is mostly lost again with the cessation of mobility.

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

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

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

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

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

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