With this are laid, at last, the foundations for a _morphology of peoples_. Directly its essence is seen, we see also an inward order in the historical stream of the peoples. They are neither linguistic nor political nor zoölogical, but spiritual, units. And this leads at once to the further distinction between _peoples before, within, and after a Culture_. It is a fact that has been profoundly felt in all ages that Culture-peoples are _more distinct_ in character than the rest. Their predecessors I will call primitive peoples. These are the fugitive and heterogeneous associations that form and dissolve without ascertainable rule, till at last, in the presentiment of a still unborn Culture (as, for example, in the pre-Homeric, the pre-Christian, and the Germanic periods), phase by phase, becoming ever more definite in type, they assemble the human material of a population into groups, though all the time little or no alteration has been occurring in the stamp of man. Such a superposition of phases leads from the Cimbri and Teutones through the Marcomanni and Goths to the Franks, Lombards, and Saxons. Instances of primitive peoples are the Jews and Persians of the Seleucid age, the “Sea-peoples,” the Egyptian Nomes of Menes’s time.[240] And that which follows a Culture we may call--from its best-known example, the Egyptians of post-Roman times--fellah-peoples.

In the tenth century of our era the Faustian soul suddenly awoke and manifested itself in innumerable shapes. Amongst these, side by side with the architecture and the ornament, there appears a distinctly characterized form of “people.” Out of the people-shapes of the Carolingian Empire--the Saxons, Swabians, Franks, Visigoths, Lombards--arise suddenly the German, the French, the Spaniards, the Italians. Hitherto (consciously and deliberately or not) historical research has uniformly regarded these Culture-peoples as something in being, as primaries, and have treated the Culture itself as secondary, as their product. The creative units of history, accordingly, were simply the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, and so on. As the Greek Culture was the work of the Hellenes, they must have been in existence as such far earlier; therefore they must have been immigrants. Any other idea of creator and creation seemed inconceivable.

I regard it, therefore, as a discovery of decisive importance that the facts here set forth lead to the reverse conclusion. It will be established in all rigour that the great Cultures are entities, primary or original, that arise out of the deepest foundations of spirituality, and that the peoples under the spell of a Culture are, alike in their inward form and in their whole manifestation, its products and not its authors. These shapes in which humanity is seized and moulded possess style and style-history no less than kinds of art and modes of thought. The people of Athens is a symbol not less than the Doric temple, the Englishman not less than modern physics. There are peoples of Apollinian, Magian, Faustian cast. The Arabian Culture was _not_ created by “the Arabs”--quite the contrary; for the Magian Culture begins in the time of Christ, and the Arabian people represents its last great creation of that kind, a community bonded by Islam as the Jewish and Persian communities before it had been bonded by their religions. World-history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these Cultures fulfil their Destinies.

In each of these Cultures, Mexican and Chinese, Indian and Egyptian, there is--whether our science is aware of it or not--_a group of great peoples of identical style_, which arises at the beginning of the springtime, forming states and carrying history, and throughout the course of its evolution bears its fundamental form onward to the goal. They are in the highest degree unlike amongst themselves--it is scarcely possible to conceive of a sharper contrast than that between Athenians and Spartans, Germans and Frenchmen, Tsin and Tsu--and all military history shows national hatred as the loftiest method of inducting historic decisions. But the moment that a people alien to the Culture makes an appearance in the field of history, there awakens everywhere an overpowering feeling of spiritual relationship, and the notion of the barbarian--meaning the man who inwardly does _not_ belong to the Culture--is as clear-cut in the peoples of the Egyptian settlements and the Chinese world of states as it is in the Classical. The energy of the form is so high that it grasps and recasts neighbouring peoples, witness the Carthaginians of Roman times with their half-Classical style, and the Russians who have figured as a people of Western style from Catherine the Great to the fall of Petrine Tsardom.

Peoples in the style of their Culture we will call _Nations_, the word itself distinguishing them from the forms that precede and that follow them. It is not merely a strong feeling of “we” that forges the inward unity of its most significant of all major associations; _underlying the nation there is an Idea_. This stream of a collective being possesses a very deep relation to Destiny, to Time, and to History, a relation that is different in each instance and one, too, that determines the relation of the human material to race, language, land, state, and religion. As the styles of the Old Chinese and the Classical peoples differ, so also the styles of their histories.

Life as experienced by primitive and by fellaheen peoples is just the zoölogical up-and-down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last analysis, devoid of significance. The only historical peoples, the peoples whose existence _is world-history_, are the nations. Let us be perfectly clear as to what is meant by this. The Ostrogoths suffered a great destiny, and therefore, inwardly, they have no history. Their battles and settlements were not necessary and therefore were episodic; their end was insignificant. In 1500 B.C. that which lived about Mycenæ and Tiryns was not _as yet_ a nation, and that which lived in Minoan Crete was _no longer_ a nation. Tiberius was the last ruler who tried to lead a Roman nation further on the road of history, who sought to _retrieve_ it for history. By Marcus Aurelius there was only a Romanic population to be defended--a field for occurrences, but no longer for history. How many free pre-generations of Mede or Achæan or Hun folk there were, in what sort of social groups their predecessors and their descendants lived, cannot be determined and depends upon no rule. But of a nation the life-period _is_ determinate, and so are the pace and the rhythm in which its history moves to fulfilment. From the beginning of the Chóu period to the rulership of Shih-Hwang-ti, from the events on which the Troy legend was founded to Augustus, and from Thinite times to the XVIII Dynasty, the numbers of generations are more or less the same. The “Late” period of the Culture, from Solon to Alexander, from Luther to Napoleon, embraces no more than about ten generations. Within such limits the destiny of the genuine Culture-people, and with it that of world-history in general, reach fulfilment. The Romans, the Arabs, the Prussians, are late-born nations. How many generations of Fabii and Junii had already come and gone _as Romans_ by the time Cannæ was fought?

Further, nations are _the true city-building peoples_. In the strongholds they arose, with the cities they ripen to the full height of their world-consciousness, and in the world-cities they dissolve. Every town-formation that has character has also _national_ character. The village, which is wholly a thing of race, does not yet possess it; the megalopolis possesses it no longer. Of this essential, which so characteristically colours the nation’s public life that its slightest manifestation identifies it, we cannot exaggerate--we can scarcely imagine--the force, the self-sufficingness, and the _loneliness_. If between the souls of two Cultures the screen is impenetrable, if no Western may ever hope completely to understand the Indian or the Chinese, this is equally so, even more so, as between well-developed nations. Nations understand one another as little as individuals do so. Each understands merely a self-created picture of the other, and individuals with the insight to penetrate deeper are few and far between. _Vis-à-vis_ the Egyptians, all the Classical peoples necessarily felt themselves as relatives in one whole, but as between themselves they never understood each other. What sharper contrast is there than that between the Athenian and the Spartan spirit? German, French, and English modes of philosophical thinking are distinct, not merely in Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz, but already in the age of Scholasticism;[241] and even now, in modern physics and chemistry, the scientific method, the choice and type of experiments and hypotheses, their inter-relations, and their relative importance for the course and aim of the investigation are markedly different in every nation. German and French piety, English and Spanish social ethics, German and English habits of life, stand so far apart that for the average man, and, therefore, for the public opinion of his community, the real inwardness of every foreign nation remains a deep secret and a source of continual and pregnant error. In the Roman Empire men began generally to understand one another, but this was precisely because there had ceased to be anything worth understanding in the Classical city. With the advent of mutual comprehension this particular humanity ceased to live in nations, _and ipso facto ceased to be historic_.[242]

Owing to the very depth of these experiences, it is not possible for a whole people to be _uniformly and throughout_ a Culture-people, a nation. Amongst primitives each individual man has the same feeling of group-obligations, but the awakening of a nation into self-consciousness invariably takes place in gradations--that is, pre-eminently in the particular class that is strongest of soul and holds the others spellbound by a power derived from what it has experienced. _Every nation is represented in history by a minority._ At the beginning of the springtime it is the nobility,[243] which in that period of its first appearance is the fine flowering of the people, the vessel in which the national character--unconscious, but felt all the more strongly in its cosmic pulse--receives its destined Style. The “we” is the knightly class, in the Egyptian feudal period of 2700 not less than in the Indian and the Chinese of 1200. The Homeric heroes _are_ the Danai; the Norman barons _are_ England. Centuries later, Saint-Simon--the embodiment, it is true, of an older France--used to say that “all France” was assembled in the King’s ante-room, and there was a time in which Rome and the Senate were actually identical. With the advent of the town the burgher becomes the vessel of nationality, and (as we should expect from the growth of intellectuality) of a national _consciousness_ that it gets from the nobility and carries through to its fulfilment. Always it is particular circles, graduated in fine shades, that _in the name of_ the people live, feel, act, and know how to die, but these circles become larger and larger. In the eighteenth century arose the Western _concept_ of the Nation which sets up (and on occasion energetically insists upon) the claim to be championed by everybody without exception; but in reality, as we know, the _émigrés_ were just as convinced as the Jacobins that they were _the_ people, _the_ representatives of the French nation. A Culture-people which is coincident with “all” does not exist--this is possible only in primitive and fellaheen peoples, only in a mere joint being without depth or historical dignity. So long as a people is a nation and works out the Destiny of a nation, there is in it a minority which in the name of all represents and fulfils its history.