Chapter X: The State (2)

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.

V

A history of estates or classes, ignoring in principle that of profession-classes, is therefore a presentation of the metaphysical element in higher mankind, so far as this rises to grand symbolism in species of onflowing life, species in and along which the history of the Cultures moves to fulfilment.

At the very beginning, the sharply defined type of the peasant is something new. In Carolingian times, and under the Tsarist system of the “Mir” in Russia,[602] there were freemen and hinds cultivating the soil, _but no peasantry_. Only when there emerges the feeling of being different from the two symbolic “lives”--Freidank’s _Bescheidenheit_[603] comes into our minds--does this life become an Estate, the _nourishing_ estate in the fullest sense of the word, the root of the great plant Culture, which has driven its fibres deep into Mother Earth and darkly, industriously, draws all juices into itself and sends them to the upper parts, where trunks and branches tower up in the light of history. It serves the great lives not merely by the nourishment that it wins out of the soil for them, but also with that other harvest of mother earth--its own blood; for blood flowed up for centuries from the villages into the high places, received there the high forms, and maintained the high lives. The relation is called (from the noble’s point of view) _vassalage_, and we find it arising--whatever the superficial causes may be in each case--in the West between 1000 and 1400 and in the other Cultures at the “contemporary” periods. The Helotry of Sparta belongs with it, and equally so the old Roman _clientela_, from which after 471 the _rural_ Plebs--that is, a free yeomanry--grew up.[604] Astonishing indeed is the force of this striving towards symbolic form in the Pseudomorphosis of the Late Roman East, where the caste system of the principate founded by Augustus (with its division into senatorial and equestrian officialdom) evolved backwards until, about 300, it had returned, wherever the Magian world-feeling prevailed, to a condition parallel to that of the Gothic in 1300--the condition, in fact, of the Sassanid Empire of its own time.[605] Out of the officialdom of a highly Civilized administration came a minor nobility of decurions, village knights, and town politicians, who were responsible to the sovereign in body and goods for all outgoings--a feudalism formed backwards--and gradually made their positions heritable, just as happened under the Egyptian Vth dynasty and the first Chóu centuries[606] and the Europe of the Crusades. Military status, of officers and soldiers alike, became hereditary in the same way,[607] and service as a feudal obligation, and all the rest of what Diocletian presently reduced to formal law. The individual was firmly bound to the status (_corpori adnexus_), and the principle was extended as compulsory guild-membership to all trades, as in the Gothic or in old Egypt. But, above all, there necessarily arose from the ruins of the Late Classical slave-economy of “Latifundia”[608] the colonate of hereditary small farmers, while the great estates became administrative districts and the lord was made responsible for its taxes and its recruit-quota.[609] Between 250 and 300 the “colonus” became legally bound to the soil (_adscriptus glebæ_). And with that the differentiation of feudal lord and vassal _as class and class_[610] was reached.

Every new Culture has potentially its nobility and its priesthood. The apparent exceptions to this are due merely to the absence to tangible tradition. We know to-day that a real priesthood existed in ancient China[611] and we may assume as self-evident that there was a priest-estate in the beginnings of Orphism in the eleventh century B.C.--the more confidently as we have plain indications of it in the epic figures of Calchas and Tiresias. Similarly the development of the feudal constitution in Egypt presupposes a primitive nobility as early as the IIIrd Dynasty.[612] But the form in which, and the force with which, these Estates first realized themselves and then took charge of the course of history--shaped it, carried it, and even represented it in their own destinies--depend upon the Prime-symbol on which each individual Culture, with its entire form-language, is based.

The nobility, wholly plantlike, proceeds everywhere from the land, which is its primary property and with which it is fast bound. It possesses everywhere the basic form of the family, the gens (in which, therefore, the “other” gender of history, the feminine, is expressed also), and it manifests itself through the will-to-duration--duration, namely, of the blood--as the great symbol of Time and History. It will appear that the early officialdom of the vassal state, based on personal trustworthiness, everywhere--in China and Egypt, in the Classical and the Western World--[613] goes through the same development, first creating quasi-feudal court offices and dignities, then seeking hereditary connexion with the soil, and so finally becoming the origin of noble family-lines.

The Faustian will-to-infinity comes to expression in the _genealogical principle_, which--strange as it may seem--is peculiar to this Culture. And in this Culture, moreover, it intimately permeates and moulds all the historical forms, and supremely those of the states themselves. The historical sense that insists upon getting to know the destinies of its own blood backwards through the centuries and seeing _archival_ proofs of dates and provenances up to the first ancestors; the careful ordering of the genealogical tree, which is potent enough to make present possession and inheritance dependent upon the fortunes of a single marriage contracted perhaps five hundred years ago; the conceptions of _pure blood_, birth-equivalence, _mésalliance_--all this is will-to-direction in time, will towards Time’s remote distances. There is no second example of it, save perhaps in the Egyptian nobility, and there the comparable forms that were attained were far weaker.

Nobility of the Classical style, on the contrary, relates to the present estate of the agnatic family, and from it straight to a _mythical_ origin, which does not imply the historical sense in the least, but only a craving, sublimely regardless of historic probability, for splendid backgrounds to the here and now of the living. Only thus can we explain the otherwise baffling naïveté with which an individual saw behind his grandfather Theseus and Heracles in one plane, and fashioned himself a family tree (or several, perhaps, as Alexander did), and the light-heartedness with which respectable Roman families would forge the names of reputed ancestors into the old consular lists. At the funeral of a Roman noble the wax masks of great forefathers were introduced into the cortège, but it was only for the number and sound of the famous names and not in the least on account of any genealogical connexion with the present. This trait appears throughout the Classical nobility, which like the Gothic formed, structurally and spiritually, one inward unit from Etruria to Asia Minor. On it rested the power that, even at the beginning of the Late period, was still in the possession of order-like family-groupings throughout the cities (phylæ, phratriæ, tribus, and what not) which maintained a purely present membership and unity by means of sacral forms--for example, the three Doric and the four Ionic phylæ, and the three Etruscan tribes that appear in the earlier Roman history as Tities, Ramnes, and Luceres. In the Vedas the “father-” and the “mother-”souls had claims to soul-rites only in respect of three nearer and three further generations,[614] after which the past claimed them; and nowhere do we find the Classical cult of souls reaching any further back than the Indian. It is the very reverse of the ancestor-worship of the Chinese and the Egyptians, which was by hypothesis without end, and therefore maintained the family in a definite ordering even beyond bodily death. In China there still lives to-day a duke, Kong, who is the descendant of Confucius and equally the descendant of Lao-tse, of Chang-lu, and others. It is not a question of a many-branched tree, but of carrying the line, the _tao_ of being, straight on--if necessary, frankly by adoption (the adopted member, pledged to the ancestor-cult, is thereby spiritually incorporated in the family) or other expedients.

An unbridled joy of life streams through the flourishing centuries of this estate, _the_ Estate _par excellence_, which is direction and destiny and race through and through. Love, because woman _is_ history, and war because fighting _makes_ history, are the acknowledged foci of its thoughts and feelings. The Northern skald-poetry and the Southern _Minnesang_ correspond to the old love-songs of the Chinese age of chivalry in the Shi-King,[615] which were sung in the Pi-Yung, the places of noble training (_hiao_). And the ceremonial public archery-displays, like the Early Classical agon, and the Gothic and the Persian-Byzantine[616] tourney, were manifestations of the life on its Homeric side.

In opposition to this side stands the _Orphic_--the expression of the space-experience of a Culture through the style of its priesthood. It was in accord with the Euclidean character of Classical extension--which needed no intermediaries for intercourse with near and corporeal gods--that in this case priesthood, from beginnings as an estate, rapidly degenerated into city-officialdom. Similarly, it was expressive of the Chinese _tao_ that the place of the original hereditary priesthood came to be taken by professional classes of praying men, scribes, and oracle-priests, who could accompany the religious performances of the authorities and heads of families with the prescribed rites. It was in conformity, again, with the Indian world-feeling that lost itself in measureless infinity that the priest-class there became a second nobility, which with immense power, intruding upon every sort of life, planted itself between the people and its wilderness of gods. It is an expression, lastly, of the “cavern” feeling that the priest of true Magian cast is the monk and the hermit, and becomes more and more so, while the secular clergy steadily loses in symbolic significance.

In contrast to all these there is the Faustian priesthood, which, still without any profound import or dignity in 900, rose up thereafter to that sublime rôle of intermediary which placed it in principle between humanity (_all_ humanity) and a macrocosm strained to all imaginable expanse by the Faustian passion of the third dimension. Excluded from history by celibacy and from time by its _character indelebilis_, it culminated in the Papacy, which represented the highest symbol of God’s dynamic Space that it was possible to conceive; even the Protestant idea of a generalized priesthood has not destroyed it, but merely decentralized it from one point and one person into the heart of each individual believer.

The contradiction between being and waking-being that exists in every microcosm necessarily drives the two Estates against one another. Time seeks to absorb and subordinate Space, Space Time. Spiritual and worldly power are magnitudes so different in structure and tendency that any reconciliation, or even understanding, between them seems impossible. But this conflict has not in all Cultures come to world-historical expression. In China it promoted the _tao_ idea that primacy should reside securely in an aristocracy. In India the conception of Space as infinite-indefinite required a primacy of the priesthood. In the Arabian Culture the Magian world-feeling involved in principle the inclusion of the worldly visible society of believers as a constituent in the grand consensus, and therefore the unity of spiritual and temporal polity, law, and sovereignty. Not that there was not friction between the two estates; far from it; in the Sassanid Empire there were bloody feuds between the country aristocracy of the Dikhans and the party of the Magi--even in some instances murders of sovereigns--and in Byzantium the whole fifth century is full of the struggles between the Imperial power and the clergy, which from an ever-present background to the Monophysite and Nestorian controversies.[617] But the basic interconnexion of the two orders was not in dispute.

In the Classical world, which abhorred the infinite in every sense, Time was reduced to the present and Extension to tangible unit-bodies; as the result, the grand symbolic estates became so voided of meaning that, as compared with the city-state, which expressed the Classical prime-symbol in the strongest imaginable form, they did not count as independent forces at all. In the history of Egyptian mankind, on the other hand, which is the history of striving with equal force towards distances of time and of space, the struggle of the two estates and their symbolisms is constantly recognizable right into the period of complete fellahdom. For the transition from the IVth to the Vth Dynasty is accompanied also by a visible triumph of the priestly over the knightly world-feeling; the Pharaoh, from being the body and vessel of the supreme deity, becomes its servant, and the Re sanctuary overpowers the tomb-temple of the ruler both in architectural and in suggestive force. The New Empire witnessed, immediately after its great Cæsars, the political autocracy of the Amen priesthood, Thebes, and then again the revolution of the “heretic” king Amenophis IV (Akhenaton)--in which one feels unmistakably a political as well as a religious side--and so on until after interminable conflicts between warrior- and priestly-castes, the Egyptian world ended in foreign domination.

In the Faustian Culture this battle between two high symbols of equal force has been waged in somewhat the same spirit, but with far greater passion still than in the Egyptian--so that, from the early Gothic onward, only armistice, never peace, has seemed possible between State and Church. But in this conflict the handicap against waking-being tells--it would shake off its dependence upon being, but it cannot. The mind needs the blood, but the blood does not need the mind. War belongs to the world of time and history--_intellectual battle is only a fight with reasons, only disputation_--and, therefore a _militant_ Church must step from the world of truths into the world of facts--from the world of Jesus into that of Pilate. And so it becomes an element in race-history and subject to the formative powers of the _political_ side of life. From early Feudalism to modern Democracy it fights with sword and cannon, poison and dagger, bribery and treason, all the weapons of party conflict in use at the time. It sacrifices articles of belief to worldly advantages, and allies itself with heretics and unbelievers against orthodox powers. The Papacy _as an idea_ has a history of its own, but this bears no relation to the position of the popes in the sixth and seventh centuries as Byzantine viceroys of Syrian and Greek provenance; or to their later evolution into powerful landowners, with crowds of subject peasants; or to the Patrimonium Petri of the early Gothic--a sort of duchy in the possession of great families of the Campagna (Colonna, Orsini, Savelli, Frangipani), which alternately set up the popes, until finally the general Western feudalism prevailed here also, and the Holy See came to be an object of investiture within the families of the Roman baronage, so that each new pope, like a German or a French king, had to confirm the rights of his vassals. In 1032 the Counts of Tusculum nominated a twelve-year-old boy as pope. In those days eight hundred castle-towers stood up in the city area of Rome amongst and upon the Classical ruins. In 1045 three popes entrenched themselves in the Vatican, the Lateran, and Santa Maria Maggiore respectively, and were defended by their noble supporters.

Now supervened the city with its own soul, first emancipating itself from the soul of the countryside, then setting up as an equal to it, and finally seeking to suppress and extinguish it. But this evolution accomplished itself in _kinds of life_, and it also, therefore, is part of the history of the estates. The _city-life_ as such emerges--through the inhabitants of these small settlements acquiring a common soul, and becoming conscious that the life within is something different from the life outside--and at once the spell of _personal freedom_ begins to operate and to attract within the walls life-streams of more and more new kinds. There sets in a sort of passion for becoming urban and for propagating urban life. It is this, and not material considerations, that produced the fever of the colonization period in the Classical world, which is still recognizable to us in its last offshoots, and which it is not quite exact to speak of as colonization at all. For it was a creative enthusiasm in the man of the city that from the tenth century B.C. (and “contemporaneously” in other Cultures) drew generation after generation under the spell of a new life, with which there emerges for the first time in human history the idea of _freedom_. This idea is not of political (still less of abstract) origin, but is something bringing to expression the fact that within the city walls plantlike attachment to a soil has ceased, and that the threads that run through the whole life of the countryside have been snapped. And consequently the freedom-idea ever contains a negative; it looses, redeems, defends, always frees a man _from_ something. Of _this_ freedom the city is the expression; the city-spirit is understanding become free, and everything in the way of intellectual, social, and national movements that bursts forth in Late periods under the name of Freedom leads back to an origin _in this one prime fact of detachment from the land_.

But the city is older than the “citizen.” It attracts first the calling-classes, which as such are outside the symbolic estates, and, when urban, take form as guilds. Then it draws in the primary estates themselves; the minor nobility moves its castles, the Franciscans their cloisters, within the contour. As yet, not much is inwardly altered. Not only Papal Rome, but all Italian cities of this time are filled with the fortified towers of the families, who issued thence to fight out their feuds in the streets. In a well-known fourteenth-century picture of Siena these towers stand up like factory chimneys round the market-place.[618] As for the Florentine palace of the Renaissance, if, in respect of the bright life within, it is the successor of Provençal courts, it is equally, with its “rusticated” façade, an offshoot of the Gothic castles that the French and German knights were still building on their hills. It was, in fact, only slowly that the new life separated out. Between 1250 and 1450, throughout the West, the immigrant families concentrated, _vis-à-vis_ the guilds, into the patriciate, and in so doing detached themselves, spiritually as in other respects, from the country nobility. It was exactly the same in early China, Egypt, and the Byzantine Empire, and it is only in the light of this that we become able to understand the older Classical city-leagues (such as the Etruscan and, it may be, even the Latin) and the sacral connexions of colonial daughter-cities with their mother city. It was not the Polis as such, so far, that was the backbone of events, but the patriciate of phylæ and phratriæ within it. _The original Polis is identical with the nobility_, as Rome was up to 471, and Sparta and the Etruscan cities throughout. Synœcism grew out of it, and the city-state was formed by it. But here, as in other Cultures, the difference between country- and city-nobility was at first quite unimportant as compared with the strong and deep distinction between the nobility (in general) and the residue.

The burgher proper emerges when the fundamental distinction between town and country has brought the “families and the guilds,” in spite of their otherwise implacable hostility to one another, to a sense of unity _vis-à-vis_ the old nobility, the feudal system generally, and the feudal position of the Church. The notion of the “Third Estate” (to use the catchword of 1789) is essentially only a unit of _contradiction_, incapable of definition by positive content, and having neither customary-ethic of its own--for the higher bourgeois society took after the nobility, and the urban piety after the older priesthood--nor symbolism of its own--for the idea that life was not for the service of practical aims, but for the consistent expression of a symbolism of Time and Space, and could claim true dignity only to the extent that it was the worthy vessel of these, was necessarily repugnant to the urban reason as such. This reason, which dominates the entire political literature of the Late period, asserts a new grouping of estates as from the rise of cities--at first only in theory, but finally, when rationalism becomes omnipotent, in practice, even the bloody practice of revolutions. Nobility and clergy, so far as they are still extant, appear rather markedly as _privileged_ classes, the tacit significance of the emphasis being that their claim to prescriptive rights on the ground of historical status is (from the point of view of timeless rational or “natural” law) obsolete nonsense. They now have their centre in the _capital city_ (this also a Late-period idea) and now, and now only, develop aristocratic forms to that imposing combination of hauteur and elegance that we see, for example, in the portraits of Reynolds and Lawrence. In opposition to them stand the intellectual powers of the now supreme city, _economy and science_, which in conjunction with the mass of artisans, functionaries, and labourers feel themselves as a party, diverse in its constituents, but invariably solid at the call to battle for freedom--that is, for urban independence of the great old-time symbols and the rights that flowed from them. As components of the Third Estate, which counts by heads and not by rank, they are all, in all Late periods of all Cultures, “liberal” in one way or another--namely, free from the inward powers of non-urban life. Economy is freed to make money, science freed to criticize. And so in all the great decisions we perceive the intellect with its books and its meetings having the word (“Democracy”), and money obtaining the advantages (“Plutocracy”)--and it is never ideas, but always capital, that wins. But this again is just the opposition of truths and facts, in the form in which it develops from the city-life.

Moreover, by way of protest against the ancient symbols of the soil-bound life, the city opposes to the aristocracy of birth the notion of an aristocracy of money and an aristocracy of intellect--the one not very explicit as a claim, but all the more effective as a fact; the other a truth, but nothing more than that and, as a spectacle for the eye, not very convincing. In every Late period there grows on to the ancient nobility--that in which some big bit of history (say, Crusades, or Norman conquest) has become stored as form and beat, but which often has inwardly decayed at the great courts--a genuine second crop. Thus in the fourth century B.C. the entry of great plebeian families as _conscripti_ into the Roman Senate of _patres_ produced within the senatorial order an aristocracy of “_nobiles_”--a nobility holding lands, but entitled by office. In just the same way a nobility of nepotism arose in Papal Rome; in 1650 there were scarcely fifty families of more than three centuries’ status. In the Southern States of the American Union there grew up, from Baroque times onward, that planter-aristocracy which was annihilated by the money-powers of the North in the Civil War of 1861-5. The old merchant-nobility of the type of the Fugger, Welser, and Medici and the great Venetian and Genoese houses--to this type, too, must be assigned practically the whole of the patriciate of the Hellenic colonial cities of 800--had always something of aristocracy in them,[619] race, tradition, high standards, and the nature-impulse to re-establish connexion with the soil by acquiring lands (although the old family house in town was no bad substitute). But the new money-aristocracy of deals and speculations rapidly acquired a taste for polite forms and at last forced its way into the birth-nobility--in Rome, as Equites, from the first Punic War, in France under Louis XIV[620]--which it disintegrated and corrupted, while the intellectual aristocracy of the Enlightenment, for its part, overwhelmed it with scorn. The Confucians took the old Chinese idea of _Shi_ from the ethic of nobility and put it into the virtue of intellect, and made the Pi-Yung, from a centre of knightly battle-play, into an “intellectual wrestling-school,” a gymnasium--quite in the spirit of our eighteenth century.

With the close of the Late period of every Culture the history of its estates also comes to a more or less violent end. The mere desire to live in rootless freedom prevails over the great imperative Culture-symbols, which a mankind now wholly dominated by the city no longer comprehends or tolerates. Finance sheds every trace of feeling for earth-bound immovable values, and scientific criticism every residue of piety. Another such victory also, in a measure, is the liberation of the peasant, which consists in relieving him from the pressure of servage, but hands him over to the power of money, which now proceeds to turn the land into movable property--which happened in our case in the eighteenth century; in Byzantium about 740 under the Nomos Georgikos of the legislator Leo III[621] (after which the colonate slowly disappeared); in Rome along with the founding of the Plebeian order in 471. In Sparta the simultaneous attempt of Pausanias to emancipate the Helots failed.

_This Plebs is the Third Estate in the form in which it is constitutionally recognised as a unit_; its representatives are the Tribunes, not officials, but trusted persons armed with a guaranteed immunity. The reform of 471,[622] which _inter alia_ replaced the old three Etruscan tribes by four urban tribes or wards (a highly suggestive fact in itself), has been variously regarded as a pure emancipation of peasantry[623] or as an organization of the trading class.[624] But the Plebs, as Third Estate, as residue, is only susceptible of negative definition--as meaning everyone who does not belong to the land-nobility or is not the incumbent of a great priestly office. The picture is as variegated as that of the French “_Tiers État_” of 1789. Only the protest holds it together. In it are traders, craftsmen, day-labourers, clerks. The gens of the Claudii contained patrician _and_ plebeian families--that is, great landlords and prosperous yeomen (for example, the Claudii Marcelli). The Plebs in the Classical city-state is what a combination of peasant and burgher is in a Baroque state of the West, when it protests in an assembled states-general against the autocracy of a prince. Outside politics--that is, socially--the plebs, as a unit distinguished from nobility and priesthood, has no existence, but falls apart at once into special callings that are perfectly distinct in interests. It is a _Party_, and what it stands for as such is freedom in the urban sense of the word. The fact emerges still more distinctly from the success which the Roman land-nobility won immediately afterwards, in adding sixteen country tribes, designated by family names and unchallengeably controlled by themselves, to the four urban tribes that stood for bourgeoisie proper--namely, money and mind. Not until the great social conflict during the Samnite wars (contemporary with Alexander, and corresponding exactly to the French Revolution), which ended with the Lex Hortensia of 287, was the status-idea legally abolished and the history of the symbolic Estates closed. _The Plebs became the Populus Romanus_ in the same way as in 1789 the “_Tiers État_” constituted itself the Nation. From this point on, in every Culture, it is something fundamentally different that happens under the label of social conflict.

The nobility of every Springtime had been _the_ Estate in the most primary sense, history become flesh, race at highest potential. The priesthood was its _counter-estate_, saying no wherever nobility said yes and thus displaying the other side of life in a grand symbol.

The Third Estate, without proper inward unity, was the non-estate--the protest, in estate-form, against the existence of estates; not against this or that estate, but against the symbolic view of life in general. It rejects all differences not justified by reason or practically useful. And yet it does mean something itself, and means it very distinctly--_the city-life as estate_ in contradistinction to that of the country, _freedom as a condition_ in contrast to attachment. But, looked at from within its own field, it is by no means the unclassified residue that it appears in the eyes of the primary estates. The bourgeoisie has definite limits; it belongs to the Culture; it embraces, in the best sense, all who adhere to it, and under the name of people, _populus, demos_, rallies nobility and priesthood, money and mind, craftsman and wage-earner, as constituents of itself.

This is the idea that Civilization finds prevailing when it comes on the scene, and this is what it destroys by its notion of the Fourth Estate, _the Mass_, which rejects the Culture and its matured forms, lock, stock, and barrel. It is the absolute of formlessness, persecuting with its hate every sort of form, every distinction of rank, the orderliness of property, the orderliness of knowledge. It is the new nomadism of the Cosmopolis,[625] for which slaves and barbarians in the Classical world, Sudras in the Indian, and in general anything and everything that is merely human, provide an undifferentiated floating something that falls apart the moment it is born, that recognizes no past and possesses no future. Thus the Fourth Estate becomes the expression of the passing of a history over into the historyless. The mass is the end, the radical nullity.