Here it is necessary to anticipate somewhat, and to consider whence it is that world-history (especially in the Late periods of the grand Cultures and the beginnings of the Civilizations) derives its rich variety of colour and the profound symbolism of its events. The primary Estates, nobility and clergy, are the purest expressions of the two sides of life, but they are not the only ones. In very early times--often, indeed, foreshadowed in the Primitive Age itself--yet other being-streams and waking-linkages break forth, in which the symbolism of Time and Space comes to living expression, and which, when (and not until) combined with these two, make up the whole fullness of what we call _social organization_ or _society_.

While Priesthood is microcosmic and animal-like, Nobility is cosmic and plantlike (hence its profound connexion with the land). It is itself a plant, strongly rooted in the soil, established on the soil--in this, as in so many other respects, a supreme peasantry. It is from this kind of cosmic boundness that the idea of _property_ arises, which to the microcosm as such, freely moving in space, is wholly alien. Property is a primary feeling and not a concept; it belongs to Time and History and Destiny, and not to Space and Causality. It cannot be logically based, but it is there.[595] “Having” begins with the plant, and propagates itself in the history of higher mankinds just to the precise extent that history contains plant-character and race. Hence property in the most genuine sense is always ground-property, and the impulse to convert other acquisitions into ground and soil is an evidence of sound stock. The plant _possesses_ the ground in which it roots. It is its property,[596] which it defends to the utmost, with the desperate force of its whole being, against alien seeds, against overshadowing neighbour plants, against all nature. So, too, a bird defends the nest in which it is hatching. The bitterness fights over property occur--not in the Late periods of great Cultures, between rich and poor, and about movable goods--but here in the beginnings of the plant-world. When, in a wood, one feels all about one the silent, merciless battle for the soil that goes on day and night, one is appalled by the depth of an impulse that is almost identical with life itself. Here is a yearlong, tenacious, embittered wrestle, a hopeless resistance of the weak against the strong, that goes on to the point that the victor too is broken--such as is only paralleled in the most primitive of mankind when an old peasant-family is expelled from the clod, _from the nest_, or a family of noble stock is uprooted or, more truly, cut off from its roots, by money.[597] The far more conspicuous conflicts in the later cities have quite another meaning, for here--in communism of all kinds--it is not the experience of possessing, but the idea of property purely as material means that is fought for. The negation of property is never race-impulse, but the doctrinaire protest of the purely intellectual, urban, uprooted, anti-vegetal waking-consciousness of saints, philosophers, and idealists. The same reason actuates the monk of the hermitage and the scientific Socialist--be his name Moh-ti, Zeno, or Marx--to reject the plantlike; the same feeling impels men of race to defend it. Here, as ever, fact and truth are opposed. “Property is theft” is the ultra-materialistic form of the old thought: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” When the priest gives up property, he is giving up something dangerous and alien; when a noble does so, he is giving up himself.

This brings us to a duality of the property-idea feeling--_Having as power_ and _Having as spoil_. Both, in primitive men of race, lie immediately together. Every Bedouin or Viking intends both. The sea-hero is always a sea-robber also; every war is concerned with possessions and, above all, possessions in land. But a step, and the knight becomes the robber-knight, the adventurer becomes conqueror and king, like Rurik the Norman in Russia and many an Achæan and Etruscan pirate in Homeric times. In all heroic poetry we find, side by side with the strong and natural satisfaction of winning battles and power and women, and the unbridled outbursts of joy and grief, anger, and love, the immense delight of “having.” When Odysseus lands at home, the first thing he does is to count the treasures in his boat, and when, in the Icelandic Saga, the peasants Hjalmar and Ölvarod perceive each that the other has no goods in his ship, they abandon their duel at once--he who fights from pride and for honour is a fool for his pains. In the Indian hero-epic, eagerness for battle means eagerness for cattle, and the “colonizing” Greeks of the tenth century were primarily corsairs like the Normans. On the high seas an alien ship is _a priori_ good prize. But out of the feuds of South-Arabian and Persian Knights of A.D. 200, and the “private wars” of the Provençal barons of A.D. 1200--which were hardly more than cattle-raids--there developed at the end of the feudal period the war proper, the great war with acquisition of land and people as its object. All this, in the end, brings the aristocratic Culture to the “top of its form,” while, correspondingly, priests and philosophers despise it.

As the Culture rises to its height, these two primary urges trend widely apart, and hostility develops between them. _The history of this hostility is almost the same thing as world-history. From the feeling of power come conquest and politics and law; from that of spoil, trade and economy and money._ Law is the property of the powerful. Their law is the law of all. Money is the strongest weapon of the acquiring: with it he subdues the world. Economics likes and intends a state that is weak and subservient to it. Politics demands that economic life shall adapt itself to and within the State--Adam Smith and Friedrich List, Capitalism and Socialism. All Cultures exhibit at the outset a war- and a trade-nobility, then a land- and a money-nobility, and finally a military and an economic war-management and a ceaseless struggle of money against law.

Equally, on the other hand, _priesthood_ and _learning_ separate out. Both are directed towards, not the factual, but the true; both belong to the Taboo side of life and to Space. Fear before death is the source, not merely of all religion, but of all philosophy and natural science as well. Now, however, there develops a profane Causality in contrast to the sacred. “Profane” is the new counter-concept to “religious,” which so far had tolerated learning only as a handmaiden. The whole of Late criticism, its spirit, its method, its aims, are profane--and the Late theology, even, is no exception to the rule. But invariably, nevertheless, the learning of all Cultures moves in the forms of the preceding priesthood--thus showing that it is merely a product of the contradiction itself, and how dependent it is and remains, in every particular, upon the primary image. Classical science, therefore, lives in cult-communities of the Orphic style, such as the school of Miletus, the Pythagorean society, the medical schools of Croton and Cos, the Attic schools of the Academy, the Peripatos, and the Stoa, every one of whose leaders belongs to the type of the sacrificial priest and seer, and even the Roman legal schools of the Sabiniani and Proculiani. The sacred book, the Canon is, scientifically as in other respects, Arabian--the scientific canon of Ptolemy (Almagest), the medical of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and the philosophical corpus designated “Aristotle,” but so largely spurious--so also the (mostly unwritten) laws and methods of quotation:[598] the Commentary as the form of thought-development; the universities as cloisters (Medrashim) which provided teachers and students with cell, food, and clothing; and tendencies in scholarship taking form as brotherhoods. The learned world of the West possesses unmistakably the form of the Catholic Church, and more particularly so in Protestant regions. The connecting link between the learned orders of the Gothic period and the order-like schools of the nineteenth century--the schools of Hegel, of Kant, of historical jurisprudence, and not a few of the English university colleges--is formed by the Maurists and Bollandists[599] of France, who from 1650 on mastered and largely created the ancillary “science” of history. In all the specialist sciences (medicine and lecture-room philosophy included) there are fully developed hierarchies leading up to school-popes, grades, and dignities (the doctor’s degree as an ordination), sacraments and councils. The uninitiate is rigorously treated as the “layman,” and the idea of a generalized priesthood residing in the believers themselves, which is manifested in “popular” science--for example, Darwinism--is passionately combated. The language of learning was originally Latin, but to-day all sorts of special languages have formed themselves which (in the domain of radioactivity, for example, or that of the law of contract) are unintelligible save to those who have received the higher initiation. There are founders of sects, such as many of Kant’s and Hegel’s disciples were; there are missionaries to the unbelievers, like the Monists. There are heretics, like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, there is the weapon of the ban, and there is the Index in the form of the Conspiracy of Silence. There are ethical truths (for example, in Law the division of the objects into persons and things) and dogmas (like that of energy and mass, or the theory of inheritance), a ritual in the citation of orthodox writings, and even a scientific sort of beatification.[600]

More, the savant-type of the West (which in the nineteenth century reached its zenith, corresponding to the nadir of true priesthood) has brought to high perfection the study as the cell of a profane monachism that has its unconscious vows--of Poverty, in the shape of honourable disdain for fat living and wealth; and unfeigned contempt for the commercial professional and for all exploitation of scientific results for gain; of Chastity, which has evolved a veritable celibacy of science, with Kant as exemplar and culmination; and of Obedience, even to the point of sacrificing oneself to the standpoint of the School. Further, and lastly, there is a sort of estrangement from the world which is the profane echo of the Gothic flight from it, and leads to an almost complete disregard of the life in public and the forms of good society--little “breeding,” much too much “shaping.” Nobility, even in its later ramifications--the judge, the squire, the officer--still retains the old root-strong natural satisfaction in carrying on the stock, in possessions and honour, but the scientist counts these things as little beside the possession of a pure scientific conscience and the carrying on of a method or a view unimpaired by the commercialism of the world. The fact that the savant to-day has ceased to be remote from the world, and puts his science at the service of (not seldom, indeed, most shrewdly applies it to) technics and money-making, is a sign that the pure type is entering upon its decline and that the great age of intellectual optimism that is livingly expressed in him belongs already to the past.

In sum, we see that the Estates have a natural build which in its evolution and action forms the basic structure of every Culture’s life-course. No specific decision made it; revolutions only alter it when they are forms of the evolution and not results of some private will. It never, in its full cosmic significance, enters the consciousness of men as doers and thinkers, because it lies too deep in human being to be other than a self-evident datum. It is merely from the surface that men take the catchwords and causes over which they fight on that side of history which theory regards as horizontally layered, but which in actuality is an aggregate of inseparable interpenetrations. First, nobility and priesthood arise out of the open landscape, and figure the pure symbolism of Being and Waking-Being, Time and Space. Then out of the one under the aspect of booty, and out of the other under the aspect of research, there develop doubled types of lower symbolic force, which in the urban Late periods rise to prepotency in the shapes of _economy_ and _science_. In these two being-streams the ideas of Destiny and Causality are thought out to their limit, unrelentingly and anti-traditionally. Forces emerge which are separated by a deadly enmity from the old class-ideals of heroism and saintliness--these forces are _money and intellect_, and they are related to those ideals as the city to the country. Henceforward property is called riches, and world-outlook knowledge--a desanctified Destiny and a profane Causality. But science is in contradiction with Nobility too, for this does not prove or investigate, but _is_. “_De omnibus dubitandum_” is the attitude of a burgher and not of an aristocrat, while at the same time it contradicts the basic feeling of priesthood, for which the proper rôle of critique is that of a handmaid. Economy, too, finds an enemy here, in the shape of the ascetic moral which rejects money-getting, just as the genuine land-based nobility despises it. Even the old merchant-nobility has in many cases perished (e.g., Hanse Towns, Venice, Genoa), because with its traditions it could not and would not fall in with the business outlook of the big city. And, with all this, economy and science are themselves at enmity; once more, in the conflicts of money-getting and knowledge, _between counting-house and study_, business liberalism and doctrinaire liberalism, we meet the old great oppositions of action and contemplation, castle and cathedral. In one form or in another this order of things emerges in the structure of every Culture--hence the possibility of a comparative morphology in the social as in the other aspects of history.

Wholly outside the category of the true Estates are the calling-classes of the craftsmen, officials, artists, and labourers, whose organization in guilds (e.g., of smiths in China, of scribes in Egypt, and of singers in the Classical world) dates from pristine antiquity, and who because of their professional segregation (which sometimes goes as far as to cut off their _connubium_ with others) actually develop into genuine tribes, as, for instance, the Falasha[601] of Abyssinia and some of the Sudra classes named in Manu’s code. Their separation is due merely to their technical accomplishments and therefore not to their being vessels of the symbolism of Time and Space. Their tradition, likewise, is limited to their techniques and does not refer to a customary-ethic or a moral _of their own_, such as is always found in economy and science as such. As derived from a nobility, judges and officers are classes, whereas officials are a profession; as derived from priesthood, scholars are a class, while artists are a profession. Sense of honour, conscience, adhere in one case to the status, in the other to the achievement. There is something, slight though it may be, of symbolism in every category on the one side, and none in any category on the other. And consequently something of strangeness, irregularity, often disgrace, clings to them--consider, for example, executioners, actors, and strolling singers, or the Classical estimation of the artist. Their classes or guilds separate from general society, or seek the protection of other orders of society (or individual patrons and Mæcenases), but fit themselves in with that society they cannot, and their inability to do so finds expression in the guild-wars of the old cities and in uncouthness of every sort in the instincts and manners of artists.