It follows from this that true history is _not_ “cultural” in the sense of anti-political, as the philosophers and doctrinaires of all commencing Civilizations assert. On the contrary, it is breed history, war history, diplomatic history, the history of being-streams in the form of man and woman, family, people, estate, state, reciprocally defensive and offensive in the wave-beat of grand facts. _Politics in the highest sense is life, and life is politics._ Every man is willy-nilly a member of this battle-drama, as subject or as object--there is no third alternative. The kingdom of the spirit is _not_ of this world. True, but it presupposes it, as waking-being presupposes being. It is only possible as a consistent _saying_ of “no” to the actuality that nevertheless exists and, indeed, must exist before it can be renounced. Race can dispense with language, but the very speaking of a language is an expression of antecedent race,[588] as are religions and arts and styles of thought and everything else that happens in the history of the spirit--and that there _is_ such a history is shown by the power that blood possesses over feeling and reason. For all these are active waking-consciousness “in form,” expressive, in their evolution and symbolism and passion, of the blood (again the blood) that courses through these forms in the waking-being of generation after generation. A hero does not need to know anything at all of this second world--he is life through and through--but a saint can only by the severest asceticism beat down the life that is in him and gain solitary communion with his spirit--and his strength for this again comes from life itself. The hero despises death and the saint life, but in the contrast between the heroism of great ascetics and martyrs and the piety of most (which is of the kind described in Revelation iii, 16[589]) we discover that greatness, even in religion, presupposes Race, that life must be strong indeed to be worthy of such wrestlers. The rest is mere philosophy.

For this very reason nobility in the world-historical sense is much more than comfortable Late periods consider it; it is not a sum of titles and privileges and ceremonies, but an inward possession, hard to acquire, hard to retain--worth, indeed, for those who understand, the sacrifice of a whole life. An old family betokens not simply a set of ancestors (we all have ancestors), but ancestors who lived through whole generations on the heights of history; who not merely had Destiny, but were Destiny; in whose blood the form of happening was bred up to its perfection by the experience of centuries. As history in the grand sense begins with the Culture, it was mere panache for a Colonna to trace back his ancestry into Late Roman times. But it was not meaningless for the grandee of Late Byzantium to derive himself from Constantine, nor is it so for an American of to-day to trace his ancestry to a _Mayflower_ immigrant of 1620. In actual fact Classical nobility begins with the Trojan period and not the Mycenæan, and the Western with the Gothic and not the Franks and Goths--in England with the Normans and not the Saxons. Only from these real starting-points is there History, and, therefore, only from then can there be an original aristocracy, as distinct from nobles and heroes. That which in the first chapter of this volume[590] called cosmic beat or pulse receives in this aristocracy its fulfilment. For all that in riper times we call diplomatic and social “tact”--which includes strategic and business flair, the collector’s eye for precious things, and the subtle insight of the judge of men--and generally all that which one has and does not learn; which arouses the impotent envy of the rest who cannot participate; which as “form” directs the course of events; is nothing but a particular case of the same cosmic and dreamlike sureness that is visibly expressed in the circlings of a flock of birds or the controlled movements of a thoroughbred horse.

The priest _circumscribes_ the world-as-nature and deepens his picture of it by _thinking_ into it. The noble _lives_ in the world-as-history and deepens it by altering its picture. Both evolve towards the great tradition, but the evolution of the one comes of shaping and that of the other from training. This is a fundamental difference between the two Estates, and consequently only one of them is truly an Estate, and the other only _appears_ to be such because of the completeness of the contrast. The field of effect of breed and training is the blood, and they pass on, therefore, from the fathers to the sons. Shaping (_Bildung_), on the other hand, presupposes talents, and consequently a true and strong priesthood is always a sum of individual gifts--a community of waking-consciousness--having no relation to origin in the race sense; and thus, in this respect as in others, it is a negation of Time and History. Intellectual affinity and blood-affinity--ponder and probe into the depths of these contrasted expressions! Heritable priesthood is a contradiction in terms. It existed indeed, in a sense, in Vedic India, but the basis of that existence was the fact that there was a second nobility, which reserved the privilege of priesthood to the gifted members of its own circle.[591] And elsewhere celibacy made an end even of this much infringement of principle. The “priest in the man”--whether the man be noble or not--stands for a focus of sacred Causality in the world. The priestly power is itself of a causal nature, brought about by higher causes and itself in turn an efficient cause. The priest is the _middleman_ in the timeless extended that is stretched taut between the waking-consciousness and the ultimate secret; and, therefore, the importance of the clergy in each Culture is determined by its prime-symbol. The Classical soul denies Space and therefore needs no middleman for dealings with it, and so the Classical priesthood disappears in its very beginnings. Faustian man stands face to face with the Infinite, nothing _a priori_ shields him from the crushing force of this aspect, and so the Gothic priesthood elevated itself to the heights of the Papal idea.

As two world-outlooks, two modes of blood-flow in the veins and of thought in the daily being and doing, are interwoven, there arise in the end (in every Culture) two sorts of moral, of which each looks down upon the other--namely, noble custom, and priestly askesis, reciprocally censured as worldly and as servile. It has been shown already[592] how the one proceeds from the castle and the other from the cloister and the minster, the one from full being in the flood of History and the other, aloof therefrom, out of pure waking-consciousness in the ambiance of a God-pervaded nature. The force with which these primary impressions act upon men is something that later periods will be unable even to imagine. The secular and the spiritual class-feeling are starting on their upward career, and cutting out for themselves an ethical _class-ideal_ which is accessible only to the right people, and even to them only by way of long and strict schooling. The _great_ being-stream _feels_ itself as a unit as against the residue of dull, pulseless, and aimless blood. The _great_ mind-community _knows_ itself as a unit as against the residue of uninitiated. These units are the band of heroes and the community of saints.

It will always remain the great merit of Nietzsche that he was the first to recognize the dual nature of all moral.[593] His designations of “master-” and “slave-” moral were inexact, and his presentation of “Christianity” placed it much too definitely on the one side of the dividing line, but at the basis of all his opinions this lies strong and clear, that _good and bad are aristocratic, and good and evil priestly, distinctions_. Good and bad, which are Totemistic distinctions among primitive groups of men and tribes, describe, not dispositions, but men, and describe them comprehensively in respect of their living-being. The good are the powerful, the rich, the fortunate. Good means strong, brave, thoroughbred, in the idiom of every Springtime. Bad, cheap, wretched, common, in the original sense, are the powerless, propertyless, unfortunate, cowardly, negligible--the “sons of nobody” as ancient Egypt said.[594] Good and evil, Taboo concepts, assign value to a man according to his perceptions and reason--that is, his waking disposition and his _conscious_ actions. To offend against love-ethic in the race sense is ungentle, to sin against the Church’s love-command is wicked. The noble habit is the perfectly unconscious result of a long and continuous training. It is learned in intercourse and not from books. It is a felt rhythm, and not a notion. But the other moral is enunciated, ordered on the basis of cause and consequence, and therefore learnable and expressive of a _conviction_.

The one is historical through and through, and recognizes rank-distinctions and privileges as actual and axiomatic. Honour is always class-honour--there is no such thing as an “honour of humanity.” The duel is not an obligation of unfree persons. Every man, be he Bedouin or Samurai or Corsican, peasant or workman, judge or bandit, has his own binding notions of honour, loyalty, courage, revenge, that do not apply to other kinds of life. Every life _has_ custom-ethic--it is unthinkable without it. Children have it already in their play; they know at once, of themselves, what is fitting. No one has laid down these rules, but they exist. They arise, quite unconsciously, out of the “we” that has formed itself out of the uniform pulse of the group. Here, too, each being is “in form.” Every crowd that, under one or another stimulus, has collected in the street has for the moment its own ethic, and anyone who does not absorb it and stand for it as self-evident--to say “follow it” would presume more rationality in the action than there is--is a poor, mean creature, an outsider. Uneducated people and children possess an astonishingly fine reactivity to this. Children, however, are also required to learn the Catechism, and in it they hear about the good and evil that are laid down--and are any thing rather than self-evident. Custom-ethic is not that which is _true_, but that which is _there_; it is a thing of birth and growth, feeling and organic logic. Moral, in contrast to this, is never actuality (for, if it were, all the world would be saintly), but an eternal demand hanging over the consciousness--and, _ex hypothesi_, over that of all men alike, irrespective of all differences of actual life and history. And, therefore, all moral is negative and all custom-ethic affirmative. In the latter “devoid of honour” is the worst, in the former “devoid of sin” is the highest, that can be said of anyone.

The basic concept of all living custom-ethic is honour. Everything else--loyalty, modesty, bravery, chivalry, self-control, resolution--is comprised in it. And honour is a matter of the blood and not of the reason. One does not reflect on a point of honour--that is already dishonour. To lose honour means to be annulled so far as Life and Time and History are concerned. The honour of one’s class, one’s family, of man and woman, of one’s people and one’s country, the honour of peasant and soldier and even bandit--honour means that the life in a person is something that has worth, historical dignity, delicacy, nobility. It belongs to directional Time, as sin belongs to timeless Space. To have honour in one’s body means about the same as to have race. The opposite sort are the Thersites-natures, the mud-souled, the riff-raff, the “kick-me-but-let-me-live’s.” To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy--all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous. But this is not at all the same thing as priestly moral, for that moral does not cleave to life at any cost of degradation, but rather rejects and abstains from life as such, and therefore incidentally from honour. As has been said already, every moral action is, at the very bottom, a piece of askesis and a killing of being. And _eo ipso_ it stands outside the field of life and the world of history.