Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 4 of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain's The
Foundations of the 19th century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
258
FOURTH CHAPTER
THE CHAOS
So viel ist wohl mit
Wahrscheinlichkeit
zu urteilen: dass die Vermischung der Stämme, welche nach und nach
die Charaktere auslöscht, dem Menschengeschlecht, alles
vorgeblichen
Philanthropismus ungeachtet, nicht zuträglich sei.
IMMANUEL
KANT.
SCIENTIFIC
CONFUSION
THE remarks
which
I made in the introduction to
the
second division will suffice as a general preface to this chapter
on
the chaos of peoples in the dying Roman Empire; they explain to what
time
and what countries I refer in speaking of the “chaos of peoples.“ Here,
as elsewhere, I presuppose historical knowledge, at least in general
outline,
and as I should not like to write a single line in this whole book
which
did not originate from the need of comprehending and of judging the
nineteenth
century better, I think I should use the subject before us especially
to
discuss and answer the important question: Is nation, is race a mere
word?
Is it the case, as the ethnographer Ratzel asserts, that the fusion of
all mankind should be kept before us as our “aim and duty, hope and
wish“?
Or do we not rather deduce from the example of Hellas and Rome, on the
one hand, and of the pseudo-Roman empire on the other, as well as from
many other examples in history, that man can only attain his zenith
within
those limits in which sharply defined, individualistic national types
are
produced? Is the present condition of things in
259
THE CHAOS
Europe with its many fully formed
idioms,
each with its own peculiar poetry and literature, each the expression
of
a definite, characteristic national soul — is this state of things
really
a retrograde step in comparison with the time, when Latin and Greek, as
a kind of twin Volapuk, formed a bond of union between all those
Roman subjects who had no fatherland to call their own? Is community of
blood nothing? Can community of memory and of faith be replaced by
abstract
ideals? Above all, is the question one to be settled by each as he
pleases,
is there no clearly distinguishable natural law, according to which we
must fit our judgment? Do not the biological sciences teach us that in
the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms pre-eminently noble races —
that
is, races endowed with exceptional strength and vitality — are produced
only under definite conditions, which restrict the begetting of new
individuals?
Is it not possible, in view of all these human and non-human phenomena,
to find a clear answer to the question, What is race? And shall we not
be able, from the consciousness of what race is, to say at once what
the
absence of definite races must mean for history? When we look at those
direct heirs of the great legacy, these questions force themselves upon
us. Let us in the first place discuss races quite generally; then, and
then only, shall we be able to discuss with advantage the conditions
prevailing
in this special case, their importance in the course of history, and
consequently
in the nineteenth century.
There is perhaps
no question about which such absolute ignorance prevails among highly
cultured,
indeed learned, men, as the question of the essence and the
significance
of the idea of “race.“ What are pure races? Whence do they come? Have
they
any historical importance? Is the idea, to be taken in a broad or a
narrow
sense? Do we know anything on the subject or not? What is the relation
of the ideas of race and of nation to one another?
260 THE
CHAOS
I confess that all I have ever read
or heard on this subject has been disconnected and contradictory: some
specialists among the natural investigators form an exception, but even
they very rarely apply their clear and detailed knowledge to the human
race. Not a year passes without our being assured at international
congresses,
by authoritative national economists, ministers, bishops, natural
scientists,
that there is no difference and no inequality between nations. Teutons,
who emphasise the importance of race-relationship, Jews, who do not
feel
at ease among us and long to get back to their Asiatic home, are by
none
so slightingly and scornfully spoken of as by men of science. Professor
Virchow, for instance, says * that the stirrings of consciousness of
race
among us are only to be explained by the “loss of sound common sense“:
moreover, that it is “all a riddle to us, and no one knows what it
really
means in this age of equal rights.“ Nevertheless, this learned man
closes
his address with the expression of a desire for “beautiful
self-dependent
personalities.“ As if all history were not there to show us how
personality
and race are most closely connected, how the nature of the personality
is determined by the nature of its race, and the power of the
personality
dependent upon certain conditions of its blood! And as if the
scientific
rearing of animals and plants did not afford us an extremely rich and
reliable
material, whereby we may become acquainted not only with the conditions
but with the importance of “race“! Are the so-called (and rightly
so-called)
“noble“ animal races, the draught-horses of Limousin, the American
trotter,
the Irish hunter, the absolutely reliable sporting
* Der
Übergang aus dem philosophischen in das naturwissenschaftliche
Zeitalter,
Rektoratsrede, 1893, p. 30. I choose this example from hundreds, since
Virchow, being one of the most ardent anthropologists and ethnographers
of the nineteenth century, and in addition, a man of great learning and
experience, ought to have been well informed on the subject.
261 THE
CHAOS
dogs, produced by chance and
promiscuity?
Do we get them by giving the animals equality of rights, by throwing
the
same food to them and whipping them with the same whip? No, they are
produced
by artificial selection and strict maintenance of the purity of the
race.
Horses and especially dogs give us every chance of observing that the
intellectual
gifts go hand in hand with the physical; this is specially true of the
moral qualities: a mongrel is frequently very clever, but never
reliable;
morally he is always a weed. Continual promiscuity between two
pre-eminent
animal races leads without exception to the destruction of the
pre-eminent
characteristics of both. * Why should the human race form an exception?
A father of the Church might imagine that it does, but is it becoming
in
a renowned natural investigator to throw the weight of his great
influence
into the scale of mediaeval ignorance and superstition? Truly one could
wish that these scientific authorities of ours, who are so utterly
lacking
in philosophy, had followed a course of logic under Thomas Aquinas; it
could only be beneficial to them. In spite of the broad common
foundation,
the human races are, in reality, as different from one another in
character,
qualities, and above all, in the degree of their individual capacities,
as greyhound, bulldog, poodle and Newfoundland dog. Inequality is a
state
towards which nature inclines in all spheres; nothing extraordinary is
produced without “specialisation“; in the case of men, as of animals,
it
is this specialisation that produces noble races; history and ethnology
reveal this secret to the dullest eye. Has not every genuine race its
own
glorious, incomparable physiognomy? How could Hellenic art have arisen
without Hellenes?
* See
especially Darwin's Plants and Animals under Domestication,
chaps.
xv.
xix.
“Free crossing obliterates characters.“ For the “superstitious care
with
which the Arabs keep their horses pure bred“ see interesting
details
in Gibbon's Roman Empire, chap. 50. See also Burton's Mecca,
chap.
xxix.
262 THE
CHAOS
How quickly has the jealous hostility
between the different cities of the small country of Greece given each
part its sharply defined individuality within its own family type! How
quickly this was blurred again, when Macedonians and Romans with their
levelling hand swept over the land! And how everything which had given
an everlasting significance to the word “Hellenic“ gradually
disappeared
when from North, East and West new bands of unrelated peoples kept
flocking
to the country and mingled with genuine Hellenes! The equality, before
which Professor Virchow bows the knee, was now there, all walls were
razed
to the ground, all boundaries became meaningless; the philosophy, too,
with which Virchow in the same lecture breaks so keen a lance, was
destroyed,
and its place taken by the very soundest “common sense“; but the
beautiful
Hellenic personality, but for which all of us would to-day be merely
more
or less civilised barbarians, had disappeared, disappeared for ever. “Crossing
obliterates characters.“
If the men who should
be the most competent to pronounce an opinion on the essence and
significance
of Race show such an incredible lack of judgment — if in dealing with a
subject where wide experience is necessary for sure perception, they
bring
to bear upon it nothing but hollow political phrases — how can we
wonder
that the unlearned should talk nonsense even when their instinct points
out the true path? For the subject has in these days aroused interest
in
widely various strata of society, and where the learned refuse to
teach,
the unlearned must shift for themselves. When in the fifties Count
Gobineau
published his brilliant work on the inequality of the races of mankind,
it passed unnoticed: no one seemed to know what it all meant. Like poor
Virchow men stood puzzled before a riddle. Now that the Century has
come
to an end things have changed: the more passionate, more impulsive
element
in the
263
THE CHAOS
nations pays great and direct attention
to this question. But in what a maze of contradiction, errors and
delusions
public opinion moves! Notice how Gobineau bases his account — so
astonishingly
rich in intuitive ideas which have later been verified and in
historical
knowledge — upon the dogmatic supposition that the world was peopled by
Shem, Ham and Japhet. Such a gaping void in capacity of judgment in the
author suffices, in spite of all his documentary support, to relegate
his
work to the hybrid class of scientific phantasmagorias. With this is
connected
Gobineau's further fantastic idea, that the originally “pure“ noble
races
crossed with each other in the course of history, and with every
crossing
became irrevocably less pure and less noble. From this we must of
necessity
derive a hopelessly pessimistic view of the future of the human race.
But
this supposition rests upon total ignorance of the physiological
importance
of what we have to understand by “race.“ A noble race does not fall
from
Heaven, it becomes noble gradually, just like fruit-trees, and this
gradual
process can begin anew at any moment, as soon as accident of geography
and history or a fixed plan (as in the case of the Jews) creates the
conditions.
We meet similar absurdities at every step. We have, for example, a
powerful
Anti-Semitic movement: are we to consider the Jews as identical with
the
rest of the Semites? Have not the Jews by their very development made
themselves
a peculiar, pure race profoundly different from the others? Is it
certain
that an important crossing did not precede the birth of this people?
And
what is an Aryan? We hear so many and so definite pronouncements on
this
head. We contrast the Aryan with the “Semite,“ by whom we ordinarily
understand
“the Jew“ and nothing more, and that is at least a thoroughly concrete
conception based upon experience. But what kind of man is the Aryan?
What
concrete conception does he correspond to? Only
264
THE CHAOS
he who knows nothing of ethnography
can give a definite answer to this question. As soon as we do not limit
this expression to the Indo-Eranians who are doubtless interrelated, we
get into the sphere of uncertain hypotheses. * The peoples whom we have
learned to classify together as “Aryans“ differ physically very much
from
each other; they reveal the most different structure of skull, also
different
colour of skin, eyes and hair; and even granted that there was once a
common
ancestral Indo-European race, what evidence can we offer against the
daily
increasing sum of facts which make it probable that other absolutely
unrelated
types have also been from time immemorial richly represented in our
so-called
Aryan nations of to-day, so that we can never apply the term “Aryan“ to
a whole people, but, at most, to single individuals? Relationship of
language
is no conclusive proof of community of blood; the theory of the
immigration
of the so-called Indo-Europeans from Asia, which rests upon very slight
grounds, encounters the grave difficulty that investigators are finding
more and more reason to believe that the population which we are
accustomed
to call Indo-European was settled in Europe from time immemorial; † for
the opposite hypothesis
*
Even
with this very qualified statement, derived from the best books I know,
I seem to have presupposed more than science can with certainty assert;
for I read in a specialised treatise, Les Aryens au nord et au sud
de
l'Hindou-Kousch, by Charles de Ujfalvi (Paris, 1896, p. 15), “Le
terme
d'aryen est de pure convention; les peuples éraniens au nord et
les tribus hindoues au sud du Caucase indien, diffèrent
absolument
comme type et descendent, sans aucun doute, de deux races
différentes.“
† G.
Schrader (Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte), who has studied
the question more from the linguistic standpoint, comes to the
conclusion,
“It is proved that the Indo-Teutonic peoples were settled in Europe at
a very ancient period“; Johannes Ranke (Der Mensch) is of
opinion
that it is now an established fact that at least a great part of the
population
of Europe were Aryans as early as the stone age; and Virchow, whose
authority
is all the greater in the sphere of anthropology because he shows
unconditional
respect for facts and,
265 THE
CHAOS
of a colonisation of India from Europe
there are not the slightest grounds... in short, this question is what
miners call “swimming land“; he who knows the danger sets foot on it as
little as possible. The more we study the specialists, the less certain
we become. It was originally the philologists who established the
collective
idea “Aryans.“ Then came the anatomical anthropologists; the
inadmissibility
of conclusions drawn from mere philology was demonstrated, and now
skull-measuring
began; craniometry became a profession, and it did provide a mass of
extremely
interesting material; lately, however, the same fate is overtaking this
so-called “somatic anthropology“ that formerly overtook philology:
ethnographers
have begun to travel and to make scientifically systematic observations
from living man, and in this way have been able to prove that the
measuring
of bones by no means deserves the importance that was wont to be
attached
to it; one of the greatest of Virchow's pupils has become convinced
that
the idea of solving problems of ethnology by the measurement of skulls
is fruitless. * All these advances have been made in the second half of
the nineteenth century; who knows what will be taught about “Aryans“ †
in the year 1950? At present, at any rate, the layman can say nothing
on
the subject. If he turns up one of the well-known authorities, he will
be told that the Aryans “are an invention of the study and not a
unlike Huxley and
many
others, builds no Darwinian castles in the air, says that from
anatomical
discoveries one may assert that “the oldest troglodytes of Europe were
of Aryan descent!“ (quoted from Ranke, Der Mensch, ii. 578).
*
Ehrenreich:
Anthropologische
Studien über die Urbewohner Brasiliens, 1897.
†
When
I use the word Aryan in this book, I take it in the sense of the
original
Sanscrit “ârya,“ which means “belonging to the friends,“ without
binding myself to any hypothesis. The relationship in thought and
feeling
signifies in any case an homogeneousness. Cf. the note on p. 93.
266
THE CHAOS
primeval people,“ * if he seeks
information
from another, he receives the answer that the common characteristics of
the Indo-Europeans, from the Atlantic Ocean to India, suffice to put
the
actual blood-relationship beyond all doubt. †
I hope I have clearly
illustrated in these two paragraphs the great confusion which is
prevalent
among us to-day in regard to the idea “race.“ This confusion is not
necessary,
that is, with practical, active men who belong to life as we do. And it
is unnecessary for this reason, that we, in order to interpret the
lessons
of history and to comprehend our present age in connection therewith,
do
not in any way need to seek for hidden origins and causes. In the
former
division I have already quoted the words
*
R.
Hartmann: Die Negritier (1876), p. 185. Similarly Luschan and
many
investigators. Salomon Reinach, for instance, writes in L'Origine
des
Aryens, 1892, p. 90: “Parler d'une race aryenne d'il y a trois
mille
ans, c'est émettre une hypothèse gratuite: en parler
comme
si elle existait encore aujourd'hui, c'est dire tout simplement une
absurdité.“
†
Friedrich
Ratzel, Johannes Ranke, Paul Ehrenreich, &c., in fact the more
modern,
widely travelled ethnographers. But they hold the view with many
variations,
since the relationship does not necessarily rest upon common origin,
but
might have been produced by crossing. Ratzel, for instance, who in one
place positively asserts the uniformity of the whole Indo-European race
(Litterarisches Centralblatt, 1897, p. 1295), says in another (Völkerkunde,
1895, ii. 751), “the supposition that all these peoples have a uniform
origin is not necessary or probable.“ — It is worth remarking that even
those who deny the fact of an Aryan race still constantly speak of it;
they cannot do without it as a “working hypothesis.“ Even Reinach,
after
proving that there never was an Aryan race, speaks in an unguarded
moment
(loc. cit. p. 98) of the “common origin of the Semites and the
Aryans.“
Ujfalvi, quoted above, has after profound study arrived at the opposite
conclusion and believes in a “grande famille aryenne.“ In fact
anthropologists,
ethnographers and even historians, theologians, philologists and legal
authorities find the idea “Aryan“ more and more indispensable every
year.
And yet if one of us makes even the most cautious and strictly limited
use of the conception, he is scorned and slandered by academic scribes
and nameless newspaper reviewers. May the reader of this book trust
science
more than the official simplifiers and levellers and the professional
anti-Aryan
confusion-makers. Though it were proved that there never was an Aryan
race
in the past, yet we desire that in the future there may be one. That is
the decisive standpoint for men for action.
267
THE CHAOS
of Goethe, “Animated inquiry into cause
does great harm.“ What is clear to every eye suffices, if not for
science,
at least for life. Science must, of course, ever wander on its thorny
but
fascinating path; it is like a mountain climber, who every moment
imagines
that he will reach the highest peak, but soon discovers behind it a
higher
one still. But life is only indirectly interested in these changing
hypotheses.
One of the most fatal errors of our time is that which impels us to
give
too great weight in our judgments to the so-called “results“ of
science.
Knowledge can certainly have an illuminating effect; but it is not
always
so, and especially for this reason, that knowledge always stands upon
tottering
feet. For how can intelligent men doubt but that much which we think we
know to-day will be laughed at as crass ignorance, one hundred, two
hundred,
five hundred years hence? Many facts may, indeed, be looked upon to-day
as finally established; but new knowledge places these same facts in
quite
a new light, unites them to figures never thought of before, or changes
their perspective; to regulate our judgments by the contemporary state
of science may be compared to an artist's viewing the world through a
transparent,
ever-changing kaleidoscope, instead of with the naked eye. Pure science
(in contrast to industrial science) is a noble plaything; its great
intellectual
and moral worth rests in no small degree upon the fact that it is not
“useful“;
in this respect it is quite analogous to art, it signifies the
application
of thought to the outward world; and since nature is inexhaustibly
rich,
she thereby ever brings new material to the mind, enriches its
inventory
of conceptions and gives the imagination a new dream-world to replace
the
gradually fading old one. * Life,
*
The
physical scientist Lichtenberg makes a similar remark: “The teaching of
nature is, for me at least, a kind of sinking fund for religion, when
overbold
reason falls into debt“ (Fragmentarische Bemerkungen über
physikalische
Gegenstände, 15).
268 THE
CHAOS
on the other hand, purely as such, is
something different from systematic knowledge, something much more
stable,
more firmly founded, more comprehensive; it is in fact the essence of
all
reality, whereas even the most precise science represents the thinned,
generalised, no longer direct reality. Here I understand by “life“ what
is otherwise also called “nature,“ as when, for instance, modern
medicine
teaches us that nature encourages by means of fever the change of
matter
and defends man against the illness which has seized him. Nature is in
fact what we call “automatic,“ its roots go very much deeper than
knowledge
will ever be able to follow. And so it is my conviction that we — who
as
thinking, well-informed, boldly dreaming and investigating beings are
certainly
just such integral parts of nature as all other beings and things, and
as our own bodies — may entrust ourselves to this nature — to this
“life“
— with great confidence. Though science leaves us in the lurch at many
points, though she, fickle as a modern parliamentarian, laughs to-day
at
what she yesterday taught as everlasting truth, let this not lead us
astray;
what we require for life, we shall certainly learn. On the whole
science
is a splendid but somewhat dangerous friend; she is a great juggler and
easily leads the mind astray into wild sentimentality; science and art
are like the steeds attached to Plato's car of the soul; “sound common
sense“ (whose loss Professor Virchow lamented) proves its worth not
least
of all in pulling the reins tight and not permitting these noble
animals
to bolt with its natural, sound judgment. The very fact that we are
living
beings gives us an infinitely rich and unfailing capacity of hitting
upon
the right thing, even without learning, wherever it is necessary.
Whoever
simply and with open mind questions nature — the “mother“ as the old
myths
called her — can be sure of being answered, as a mother answers her
son,
not
269
THE CHAOS
always in blameless logic, but correctly
in the main, intelligibly and with a sure instinct for the best
interests
of the son. So is it, too, in regard to the question of the
significance
of race: one of the most vital, perhaps the most vital, questions that
can confront man.
IMPORTANCE
OF RACE
Nothing is so
convincing
as the consciousness of the possession of Race. The man who belongs to
a distinct, pure race, never loses the sense of it. The guardian angel
of his lineage is ever at his side, supporting him where he loses his
foothold,
warning him like the Socratic Daemon where he is in danger of going
astray,
compelling obedience, and forcing him to undertakings which, deeming
them
impossible, he would never have dared to attempt. Weak and erring like
all that is human, a man of this stamp recognises himself, as others
recognise
him, by the sureness of his character, and by the fact that his actions
are marked by a certain simple and peculiar greatness, which finds its
explanation in his distinctly typical and super-personal qualities.
Race
lifts a man above himself: it endows him with extraordinary — I might
almost
say supernatural — powers, so entirely does it distinguish him from the
individual who springs from the chaotic jumble of peoples drawn from
all
parts of the world: and should this man of pure origin be perchance
gifted
above his fellows, then the fact of Race strengthens and elevates him
on
every hand, and he becomes a genius towering over the rest of mankind,
not because he has been thrown upon the earth like a flaming meteor by
a freak of nature, but because he soars heavenward like some strong and
stately tree, nourished by thousands and thousands of roots — no
solitary
individual, but the living sum of untold souls striving for the same
goal.
He who has eyes to see at once detects Race in
270 THE
CHAOS
animals. It shows itself in the whole
habit of the beast, and proclaims itself in a hundred peculiarities
which
defy analysis: nay more, it proves itself by achievements, for its
possession
invariably leads to something excessive and out of the common — even to
that which is exaggerated and not free from bias. Goethe's dictum,
“only
that which is extravagant (überschwänglich) makes
greatness,“
is well known. * That is the very quality which a thoroughbred race
reared
from superior materials bestows upon its individual descendants —
something
“extravagant“ — and, indeed, what we learn from every racehorse, every
thoroughbred fox-terrier, every Cochin China fowl, is the very lesson
which
the history of mankind so eloquently teaches us! Is not the Greek in
the
fulness of his glory an unparalleled example of this “extravagance“?
And
do we not see this “extravagance“ first make its appearance when
immigration
from the North has ceased, and the various strong breeds of men,
isolated
on the peninsula once for all, begin to fuse into a new race, brighter
and more brilliant, where, as in Athens, the racial blood flows from
many
sources — simpler and more resisting where, as in Lacedaemon, even this
mixture of blood had been barred out. Is the race not as it were
extinguished,
as soon as fate wrests the land from its proud exclusiveness and
incorporates
it in a greater whole? † Does not Rome teach us the same
* Materialien
zur Geschichte der Farbenlehre, the part dealing with Newton's
personality.
† It
is well known that it was but gradually extinguished, and that in spite
of a political situation, which must assuredly have brought speedy
destruction
on everything Hellenic, had not race qualities here had a decisive
influence.
Till late in the Christian era Athens remained the centre of
intellectual
life for mankind; Alexandria was more talked of, the strong Semitic
contingent
saw to that; but any one who wished to study in earnest travelled to
Athens,
till Christian narrow-mindedness for ever closed the schools there in
the
year 529, and we learn that as late as this even the man of the people
was distinguished in Athens “by the liveliness of his intellect, the
correctness
of his language and the sureness of his taste“ (Gibbon,
271 THE
CHAOS
lesson? Has not in this case also a
special mixture of blood produced an absolutely new race, * similar in
qualities and capacities to no later one, endowed with exuberant power?
And does not victory in this case effect what disaster did in that, but
only much more quickly? Like a cataract the stream of strange blood
overflooded
the almost depopulated Rome and at once the Romans ceased to be. Would
one small tribe from among all the Semites have become a
world-embracing
power had it not made “purity of race“ its inflexible fundamental law?
In days when so much nonsense is talked concerning this question, let
Disraeli
teach us that the whole significance of judaism lies in its purity of
race,
that this alone gives it power and duration, and just as it has
outlived
the people of antiquity, so, thanks to its knowledge of this law of
nature,
will it outlive the constantly mingling races of to-day. †
What is the use of
detailed scientific investigations as to whether there are
distinguishable
races? whether race has a worth? how this is possible? and so on. We
turn
the tables and say: it is evident that there are such races: it is a
fact
of direct experience that the quality of the race is of vital
importance;
your province is only to find out the how and the wherefore, not to
deny
the facts themselves in order to indulge your ignorance. One of the
greatest
ethnologists of the present day,
chap. xl.). There is
in
George Finlay's book, Medieval Greece, chap. i., a complete and
very interesting and clear account of the gradual destruction of the
Hellenic
race by foreign immigration. One after the other colonies of Roman
soldiers
from all parts of the Empire, then Celts, Teutonic peoples, Slavonians,
Bulgarians, Wallachians, Albanesians, &c., had moved into the
country
and mixed with the original population. The Zaconians, who were
numerous
even in the fifteenth century, but have now almost died out, are said
to
be the only pure Hellenes.
* Cf.
p.
109, note.
† See
the novels Tancred and Coningsby. In the latter Sidonia
says:
“Race is everything; there is no other truth. And every race must fall
which carelessly suffers its blood to become mixed.“
272
THE CHAOS
Adolf Bastian, testifies that, “what
we see in history is not a transformation, a passing of one race into
another,
but entirely new and perfect creations, which the ever-youthful
productivity
of nature sends forth from the invisible realm of Hades.“ * Whoever
travels
the short distance between Calais and Dover, feels almost as if he had
reached a different planet, so great is the difference between the
English
and French, despite their many points of relationship. The observer can
also see from this instance the value of purer “inbreeding.“ England is
practically cut off by its insular position: the last (not very
extensive)
invasion took place 800 years ago; since then only a few thousands from
the Netherlands, and later a few thousand Huguenots have crossed over
(all
of the same origin), and thus has been reared that race which at the
present
moment is unquestionably the strongest in Europe. †
Direct experience,
however, offers us a series of quite different observations on race,
all
of which may gradually contribute to the extension of our knowledge as
well as to its definiteness. In contrast to the new, growing,
Anglo-Saxon
race, look, for instance, at the Sephardim, the so-called “Spanish
Jews“;
here we find how a genuine race can by purity keep itself noble for
centuries
and tens of centuries, but at the same time how very necessary it is to
distinguish between the nobly reared portions of a nation and the rest.
In England, Holland and Italy there are still genuine Sephardim but
very
few, since
* Das
Beständige in den Menschenrassen und die Spielweite ihrer
Veränderlichkeit,
1868, p. 26.
†
Mention
should also be made of Japan, where likewise a felicitous crossing and
afterwards insular isolation have contributed to the production of a
very
remarkable race, much stronger and (within the Mongoloid sphere of
possibility)
much more profoundly endowed than most Europeans imagine. Perhaps the
only
books in which one gets to know the Japanese soul are those of Lafcadio
Hearn: Kokoro, Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life; Gleanings
in
Buddha Fields, and others.
273 THE
CHAOS
they can scarcely any longer avoid
crossing
with the Ashkenazim (the so-called “German Jews“). Thus, for example,
the
Montefiores of the present generation have all without exception
married
German Jewesses. But every one who has travelled in the East of Europe,
where the genuine Sephardim still as far as possible avoid all
intercourse
with German Jews, for whom they have an almost comical repugnance, will
agree with me when I say that it is only when one sees these men and
has
intercourse with them that one begins to comprehend the significance of
Judaism in the history of the world. This is nobility in the fullest
sense
of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful figures, noble heads,
dignity in speech and bearing. The type is Semitic in the same sense as
that of certain noble Syrians and Arabs. That out of the midst of such
people Prophets and Psalmists could arise — that I understood at the
first
glance, which I honestly confess that I had never succeeded in doing
when
I gazed, however carefully, on the many hundred young Jews — “Bochers“
— of the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. When we study the Sacred Books of
the Jews we see further that the conversion of this monopolytheistic
people
to the ever sublime (though according to our ideas mechanical and
materialistic)
conception of a true cosmic monotheism was not the work of the
community,
but of a mere fraction of the people; indeed this minority had to wage
a continuous warfare against the majority, and was compelled to enforce
the acceptance of its more exalted view of life by means of the highest
Power to which man is heir, the might of personality. As for the rest
of
the people, unless the Prophets were guilty of gross exaggeration, they
convey the impression of a singularly vulgar crowd, devoid of every
higher
aim, the rich hard and unbelieving, the poor fickle and ever possessed
by the longing to throw themselves into the arms of the wretchedest and
filthiest idolatry. The
274 THE
CHAOS
course of Jewish history has provided
for a peculiar artificial selection of the morally higher section: by
banishments,
by continual withdrawals to the Diaspora — a result of the poverty and
oppressed condition of the land — only the most faithful (of the better
classes) remained behind, and these abhorred every marriage contract —
even with Jews! — in which both parties could not show an absolutely
pure
descent from one of the tribes of Israel and prove their strict
orthodoxy
beyond all doubt. * There remained then no great choice; for the
nearest
neighbours, the Samaritans, were heterodox, and in the remoter parts of
the land, except in the case of the Levites who kept apart, the
population
was to a large extent much mixed. In this way race was here produced.
And
when at last the final dispersion of the Jews came, all or almost all
of
these sole genuine Jews were taken to Spain. The shrewd Romans in fact
knew well how to draw distinctions, and so they removed these dangerous
fanatics, these proud men, whose very glance made the masses obey, from
their Eastern home to the farthest West, † while, on the other hand,
they
did not disturb the Jewish people outside of the narrower Judea more
than
the Jews of the Diaspora. ‡ — Here, again, we have a most interesting
object-lesson
on the origin and worth of “race“! For of all the men whom we are wont
to characterise as Jews, relatively few are descended from these great
genuine Hebrews, they are rather the descendants of the Jews of the
Diaspora,
*
Natural
children are not at all taken into the community by orthodox Jews.
Among
the Sephardim of East Europe to-day, a girl who is known to have gone
wrong
is immediately taken by the plenipotentiaries of the community to a
strange
land and provided for there; neither she nor her child can venture ever
to let anything be heard of them, they are regarded as dead. Thus they
provide against blind love introducing strange blood into the tribe.
† See
Graetz, as above, chap. ix., on The Period of the Diaspora.
‡ In
Tiberias, for example, there was a Rabbi's school which for centuries
set
the fashion. (Regarding the ennobling of the Sephardim by Gothic blood,
see
below.)
275 THE
CHAOS
Jews who did not take part in the last
great struggles, who, indeed, to some extent did not even live through
the Maccabean age; these and the poor country people who were left
behind
in Palestine, and who later in Christian ages were banished or fled,
are
the ancestors of “our Jews“ of to-day. Now whoever wishes to see with
his
own eyes what noble race is, and what it is not, should send for the
poorest
of the Sephardim from Salonici or Sarajevo (great wealth is very rare
among
them, for they are men of stainless honour) and put him side by side
with
any Ashkenazim financier; then will he perceive the difference between
the nobility which race bestows and that conferred by a monarch. *
THE
FIVE CARDINAL LAWS
It would be easy
to
multiply examples. But I think that we now have all the material that
is
necessary for a systematic analysis of our knowledge regarding race,
from
which we may then derive the cardinal principles of a conscious and
appropriate
judgment. We are not reasoning from hypothetical conditions in the
remote
past to possible results, but arguing from sure facts back to their
direct
causes. The inequality of gifts even in what are manifestly related
races
is evident; it is, moreover, equally evident to every one who observes
more closely that here and there, for a shorter or a longer time, one
tribe
does not only distinguish itself from the
*
The
Goths, who in a later age went over to Mohammedanism in great crowds,
and
became its noblest and most fanatical protagonists, are said to have at
an earlier period adopted Judaism in great numbers, and a learned
specialist
of Vienna University assures me that the moral and intellectual as well
as the physical superiority of the so-called “Spanish“ and “Portuguese“
Jews is to be explained rather by this rich influx of Teutonic blood
than
by that breeding which I have singled out to emphasise, and the
importance
of which he too would not incline to underestimate. Whether this view
is
justifiable or not may remain an open question.
276 THE
CHAOS
others, but is easily pre-eminent among
them because there is something beyond the common in its gifts and
capabilities.
That this is due to racial breeding I have tried to illustrate
graphically
by the preceding examples. The results deducible from these examples
(and
they can be multiplied to any extent) enable us to affirm that the
origin
of such noble races is dependent upon five natural laws.
(1) The first and
fundamental condition is undoubtedly the presence of excellent
material.
Where there is nothing, the king has no rights. But if I am asked,
Whence
comes this material? I must answer, I know not, I am as ignorant in
this
matter as if I were the greatest of all scholars and I refer the
questioner
to the words of the great world-seer of the nineteenth century, Goethe,
“What no longer originates, we cannot conceive as originating. What has
originated we do not comprehend.“ As far back as our glance can reach,
we see human beings, we see that they differ essentially in their gifts
and that some show more vigorous powers of growth than others. Only one
thing can be asserted without leaving the basis of historical
observation:
a high state of excellence is only attained gradually and under
particular
circumstances, it is only forced activity that can bring it about;
under
other circumstances it may completely degenerate. The struggle which
means
destruction for the fundamentally weak race steels the strong; the same
struggle, moreover, by eliminating the weaker elements, tends still
further
to strengthen the strong. Around the childhood of great races, as we
observe,
even in the case of the metaphysical Indians, the storm of war always
rages.
(2) But the presence
of excellent human material is not enough to give birth to the
“extravagant“;
such races as the Greeks, the Romans, the Franks, the Swabians, the
Italians
and Spaniards in the period of their splendour,
277
THE CHAOS
the Moors, the English, such abnormal
phenomena as the Aryan Indians and the Jews only spring from continued
inbreeding. They arise and they pass away before our eyes. Inbreeding
means
the producing of descendants exclusively in the circle of the related
tribesmen,
with the avoidance of all foreign mixture of blood. Of this I have
already
given striking examples.
(3) But inbreeding
pur
et simple does not suffice: along with it there must be selection,
or, as the specialists say, “artificial selection.“ We understand this
law best when we study the principles of artificial breeding in the
animal
and vegetable worlds; I should recommend every one to do so, for there
are few things which so enrich our conceptions of the plastic
possibilities
of life. * When one has come to understand what miracles are performed
by selection, how a racehorse or a Dachshund or a choice chrysanthemum
is gradually produced by the careful elimination of everything that is
of indifferent quality, one will recognise that the same phenomenon is
found in the human race, although of course it can never be seen with
the
same clearness and definiteness as in the other spheres. I have already
advanced the example of the Jews; the exposure of weak infants is
another
point and was in any case one of the most beneficial laws of the
Greeks,
Romans and Teutonic peoples; hard times, which only the strong man and
the hardy woman can survive, have a similar effect. †
(4) There is another
fundamental law hitherto little heeded, which seems to me quite clear
from
history, just as it is a fact of experience in the breeding of animals:
*
The
literature is very great: for simplicity, comprehensibility and
many-sidedness
I recommend to every layman especially Darwin's Animals
and Plants
under
Domestication. In the Origin of Species the same
subject is
treated rather briefly and with too much bias.
†
Jhering
demonstrates with particular clearness that the epoch of the
migrations,
which lasted for many centuries, necessarily had upon the Teutonic
peoples
the effect of an ever more and more ennobling artificial selection (Vorgeschichte,
p. 462 f.).
278 THE
CHAOS
the origin of extraordinary races is,
without exception, preceded by a mixture of blood. As that acute
thinker,
Emerson, says: “we are piqued with pure descent, but nature loves
inoculation.“
Of the Aryan Indians of course we can say nothing as regards this,
their
previous history being hidden in the misty distance of time; on the
other
hand, with regard to the Jews, Hellenes and Romans the facts are
perfectly
clear, and they are no less so in regard to all the nations of Europe
which
have distinguished themselves by their national achievements and by the
production of a great number of individuals of “extravagant“
endowments.
With regard to the Jews I refer the reader to the following
chapter, as regards the Hellenes, Romans and English I have often
pointed
to this fact; * nevertheless, I would urge the reader not to grudge the
labour of carefully reading in Curtius and Mommsen those chapters at
the
beginning which, on account of the many names and the confusion of
detail,
are usually rather glanced through than studied. There has never been
so
thorough and successful a mixture as in Greece: with the old common
stock
as basis there have gradually sprung up in the valleys, separated by
mountains
or seas, characteristically different tribes, composed here of
huntsmen,
there of peaceful farmers, in other parts of seafarers, &c.; among
these differentiated elements we find a mixing and crossing, so fine
that
a human brain selecting artificially could not have reasoned the matter
out more perfectly. In the first place we have migrations from East to
West, later from West to East over the Aegean Sea; in the meantime,
however,
the tribes of the extreme North (in the first place the Dorians)
advanced
to the extreme South, forcing many of the noblest who would not submit
to bondage from the South to that North from which they themselves had
just come, or over the sea to
* See
especially pp. 109, 272,
286
and 293.
279 THE
CHAOS
the islands and the Hellenic coast of
Asia. But every one of these shiftings meant mixture of blood. Thus,
for
example, the Dorians did not all move to the Peloponnese, portions of
them
remained at every stopping-place in their slow wanderings and there
fused
with the former population. Indeed, these same original Dorians, whose
special unity is such an apparent characteristic, knew in the old times
that they were composed of three different stems, one of which moreover
was called “Pamphyle,“ that is, “the stem of people of various
descent.“
The most exuberant talent showed itself where the crossing had been
happiest
— in New Ionia and in Attica. In New Ionia “Greeks came to Greeks,
Ionians
returned to their old home, but they came so transformed that from the
new union of what was originally related, a thoroughly national
development,
much improved, rich, and in its results absolutely new, began in the
old
Ionian land.“ But most instructive is the history of the development of
the Attic and particularly of the Athenian people. In Attica (just as
in
Arcadia, but nowhere else) the original Pelasgic population remained;
it
“was never driven out by the power of the stranger.“ But the coastland
that belonged to the Archipelago invited immigration; and this came
from
every side; and while the alien Phoenicians only founded commercial
stations
on the neighbouring islands, the related Greeks pressed on into the
interior
from this side and that side of the sea, and gradually mingled with the
former inhabitants. Now came the time of the already mentioned Dorian
migrations
and the great and lasting changes; Attica alone was spared; and thither
fled many from all directions, from Boeotia, Achaea, Messenia, Argos
and
Aegina, &c.; but these new immigrants did not represent whole
populations;
in the great majority of cases they were chosen men, men of
illustrious,
often of royal birth. By their influx the one
280 THE
CHAOS
small land became exceptionally rich
in genuine, pure nobility. Then and then only, that is, after a varied
crossing, arose that Athens to which humanity owes a greater debt than
could ever be reckoned up. * — The least reflection will show that the
same law holds good in the case of Germans, French, Italians and
Spaniards.
The individual Teutonic tribes, for example, are like purely brutal
forces
of nature, till they begin to mingle with one another; consider how
Burgundy,
which is rich in great men, owes its peculiar population to a thorough
crossing of the Teutonic and the Romance elements, and develops its
characteristic
individuality by long-continued political isolation; † the Franks grow
to their full strength and give the world a new type of humanity where
they mingle with the Teutonic tribes who preceded them and with
Gallo-Romans,
or where they, as in Franconia, form the exact point of union of the
most
diverse German and Slavonic elements; Swabia, the home of Mozart and
Schiller,
is inhabited by a half-Celtic race; Saxony, which has given Germany so
many of its greatest men, contains a population quickened almost
throughout
by a mixture of Slavonic blood; and has not Europe seen within the last
three centuries how a nation of recent origin — Prussia — in which the
* See
Curtius: Griechische Geschichte, i. 4, and ii. 1 and 2. Count
Gobineau
asserts that the extraordinary intellectual and above all artistic
talent
of the Greeks is to be explained by an infiltration of Semitic blood:
this
shows to what senseless views one is forced by fundamental hypotheses
which
are false, artificial and contrary to history and natural observation.
†
This
thorough crossing was caused by the fact that the Burgundians settled
individually
over the whole land and each of them became the “hospes“ of a former
inhabitant,
of whose cultivated land be received two-thirds, and of his buildings
and
garden a half, while woods and pastures remained common property. Now
though
there might not be much sympathy between the new-comer and the old
possessor,
yet they lived side by side and were solidly united in disputes about
boundaries
and such-like questions of property; thus crossing could not be long
deferred.
(Cf. especially Savigny, Geschichte des römischen
Rechts
im Mittelalter, chap. v. div. 1.)
281 THE
CHAOS
mixture of blood was still more
thorough,
has raised itself by its pre-eminent power to become the leader of the
whole German Empire? — It cannot of course be my task to give a
detailed
proof of what is here simply pointed out; but as I am advocating
especially
the great importance of purely-bred races, I desire particularly to
emphasise
the necessity, or at least the advantage, of mixture of blood and that
not merely to meet the objection of one-sidedness and bias a priori,
but because it is my conviction that the advocates of this theory have
injured it very much by disregarding the important law of crossing.
They
get then to the mystical conception of a race pure in itself, which is
an airy abstraction that retards instead of furthering. Neither history
nor experimental biology has anything to say for such a view. The race
of English thoroughbreds has been produced by the crossing of Arabian
stallions
with ordinary, but of course specially chosen, English mares, followed
by inbreeding, yet in such a way that later crossing between varieties
not far removed, or even with Arabians, is advisable from time to time;
one of the noblest creatures that nature possesses, the so-called
“genuine“
Newfoundland dog, originated from the crossing of the Eskimo dog and a
French hound; in consequence of the isolated position of Newfoundland,
it became by constant inbreeding fixed and “pure,“ it was then brought
to Europe by fanciers and raised to the highest perfection by
artificial
selection. — Many of my readers may be amused at my constant references
to the breeding of animals. But it is certain that the laws of life are
great simple laws, embracing and moulding everything that lives; we
have
no reason to look upon the human race as an exception; and as we are
unfortunately
not in a position to make experiments in this matter with human beings,
we must seek counsel from the experiments made with plants and animals.
— But I cannot
282 THE
CHAOS
close my discussion of the fourth law
without emphasising another side of this law of crossing; continued
inbreeding
within a narrow circle, what one might call “close breeding,“ leads in
time to degeneration and particularly to sterility. Countless
experiences
in animal breeding prove that. Sometimes in such a case a single
crossing,
applied, for example, only to single members of a pack of hounds, will
suffice to strengthen the weakened race and restore its productivity.
In
the case of men the attraction of Passion provides sufficiently for
this
quickening, so that it is only in the highest circles of the nobility
and
in some royal houses * that we observe increasing mental and physical
degeneration
in consequence of “close breeding.“ †
The slightest
increase
of remoteness in the degree of relationship of those marrying (even
within
the strict limits of the same type) suffices to give all the great
advantages
of inbreeding and to prevent its disadvantages. Surely it is manifest
that
here we have the revelation of a mysterious Law of Life, a Law of Life
so urgent that in the vegetable kingdom — where fructification within
one
and the same blossom seems at the first glance the natural and
unavoidable
thing — there are in most cases the most complicated arrangements to
hinder
this and at the same time to see that the pollen, when not borne by the
wind, is carried by insects from the one individual flower to the
other.
‡ When we perceive
* See
the facts in Haeckel: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte
(lect. 8). Still more detail in a book by P. Jacoby, which I have
unfortunately
not before me, his Études sur la sélection dans ses
rapports
avec l'hérédité chez l'homme.
† In
this connection too we have the well-known evil results of marriage
between
near relatives: the organs of sense (in fact the whole nervous system)
and the sexual organs suffer most frequently from this. (See
George
H. Darwin's lectures, Die Ehen zwischen Geschwisterkindern und ihre
Folgen, Leipzig, 1876.)
‡ I
should recommend the large number of people who unfortunately still
keep
aloof from natural science, to read carefully Christian Konrad
Sprengel's
Das
entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befrucht-
283 THE
CHAOS
what is so evidently a fundamental law
of nature, we are led to suppose that it is not by mere chance that
pre-eminent
races have sprung from an original fusing of different stems, such as
we
have observed in history; the historical facts rather provide still
further
proof for the view that mixture of blood supplies particularly
favourable
physiological conditions for the origin of noble races. *
(5) A fifth law must
also be mentioned, although it is restrictive and explanatory rather
than
contributive of any new element to the question of race. Only quite
definite,
limited mixtures of blood contribute towards the ennoblement of a race,
or, it may be, the origin of a new one. Here again the clearest and
least
ambiguous examples are furnished by animal breeding. The mixture of
blood
must be strictly limited as regards time, and it must, in addition, be
appropriate; not all and any crossings, but only definite ones can form
the basis of ennoblement. By time-limitation I mean that the influx of
new blood must take place as quickly as possible and then cease;
continual
crossing ruins the strongest race. To take an extreme example, the most
famous
ung der Blumen,
1793. The whole German nation ought to be proud of this work: since
1893
there has been a facsimile reprint of it (Mayer and Müller,
Berlin)
and it can be read by any layman. Of more recent publications Hermann
Müller's
Alpenblumen,
ihre Befruchtung durch Insekten und ihre Anpassungen an dieselben
(Engelmann,
1881) is specially stimulating, clear by reason of the many
illustrations,
and complete. A summary account, which includes plants other than
European,
is found in the same author's Blumen und Insekten in Trewendt's
Encyklopädie
der Naturwissenschaften. There are certainly few speculations that
introduce us so directly to the most mysterious wonders of nature as
this
revelation of the mutual relations of the plant and animal worlds. What
are all our knowledge and hypotheses in comparison with such phenomena?
They teach us to observe faithfully and to be satisfied with the circle
of things attainable. (During the printing of this book Knuth's
Handbuch
der Blütenbiologie, published by Engelmann, began to appear.)
* For
this question of the mixture of blood indispensable to the origin of
pro-eminently
gifted races Reibmayr's book, Inzucht und Vermischung beim Menschen,
1897, should be consulted.
284 THE
CHAOS
pack of greyhounds in England was
crossed
once only with bulldogs, whereby it gained in courage and endurance,
but
further experiments prove that when such a crossing is continued, the
characters
of both races disappear and quite characterless mongrels remain behind.
* Crossing obliterates characters. The limitation to definitely
appropriate crossings means that only certain crossings, not all,
ennoble.
There are crossings which, far from having an ennobling influence, ruin
both races, and moreover, it frequently happens that the definite,
valuable
characters of two different types cannot fuse at all; in the latter
case
some of the descendants take after the one parent, others after the
other,
but naturally with mingled characteristics, or again, genuine real
mongrels
may appear, creatures whose bodies give the impression of being screwed
together from parts that do not fit, and whose intellectual qualities
correspond
exactly to the physical. † Here too it should be remarked that the
union
of mongrel with mongrel brings about with startling rapidity the total
destruction of all and every pre-eminent quality of race. It is
therefore
an entirely mistaken idea that mixture of blood between different stems
invariably ennobles the race, and adds new qualities to the old. It
does
so only with the strictest limitations and under rare and definite
conditions;
as a rule mixture of blood leads to degeneration. One thing is
perfectly
clear: that the crossing of two very different types contributes to the
formation of a noble race only when it takes place very seldom and is
followed
by strict inbreeding (as in the case of the English thoroughbred and
the
Newfoundland dog); in all other cases crossing is a success only when
it
takes place between those closely related, i.e., between those
that
belong to the same funda-
*
Darwin,
Animals
and Plants, chap. xv.
† For
this too there are numerous examples in Darwin. As regards dogs in
particular,
examples will occur to every one.
285 THE
CHAOS
mental type. — Here too no one who knows
the detailed results of animal breeding can doubt that the history of
mankind
before us and around us obeys the same law. Naturally, it does not
appear
with the same clearness in the one case as in the other; we are not in
a position to shut in a number of human beings and make experiments
with
them for several generations; moreover, while the horse excels in
swiftness,
the dog in remarkable and plastic flexibility of body, man excels in
mind:
here all his vigour is concentrated, here too, therefore, is
concentrated
all his variability, and it is just these differences in character and
intelligence that are not visible to the eye. * But history has carried
out experiments on a large scale, and every one whose eye is not
blinded
by details, but has learned to survey great complexes, every one who
studies
the soul-life of nations, will discover any amount of proofs of the law
here mentioned. While, for example, the “extravagantly“ gifted Attics
and
the uniquely shrewd and strong Roman race are produced by the fusion of
several stems, they are nevertheless nearly related and noble, pure
stems,
and these elements are then, by the formation of States, isolated for
centuries,
so that they have time to amalgamate into a new solid unity; when, on
the
other hand, these States are thrown open to every stranger, the race is
ruined, in Athens slowly, because owing to the political situation
there
was not much to get there, and the mixing in consequence only took
place
gradually
*
We
must, however, not overlook the fact that, if we could make experiments
in breeding with men, very great differences in physique also could
certainly
be achieved in regard to size, hair, proportions, &c. Place a dwarf
from the primeval forest of the Middle Congo, little more than 3 feet
high,
the whole body covered with hair, beside a Prussian Grenadier of the
Guards:
one will see what plastic possibilities slumber in the human body. — As
far as the dog is concerned, we must remember also that the various
breeds
“certainly originate from more than one wild species“ (Claus, Zoologie,
4th edit. ii. 458); hence its almost alarming polymorphism.
286
THE CHAOS
and then for the most part with
Indo-European
peoples, * in Rome with frightful rapidity, after Marius and Sulla had,
by murdering the flower of the genuine Roman youth, dammed the source
of
noble blood and at the same time, by the freeing of slaves, brought
into
the nation perfect floods of African and Asiatic blood, thus
transforming
Rome into the cloaca gentium, the trysting-place of all the
mongrels
of the world. † We observe the same on all sides. We see the English
race
arising out of a mutual fusion of separated but closely related
Teutonic
tribes; the Norman invasion provides in this case the last brilliant
touch;
on the other hand, geographical and historical conditions have so
wrought
that the somewhat more distantly related Celts remained by themselves,
and even to-day only gradually mingle with the ruling race. How
manifestly
stimulating and refreshing, even to the present day, is the influence
of
the immigration of French Huguenots into Berlin! They were alien enough
to enrich the life there with new elements and related enough to
produce
with their Prussian hosts not “mongrels that seem screwed together“ but
men of strong character and rare gifts. To see the opposite, we need
only
look over to South America. Where is there a more pitiful sight than
that
of the mestizo States there? The so-called savages of Central Australia
lead a much more harmonious, dignified and, let us say, more “holy“
life
than these unhappy Peruvians, Paraguayans, &c., mongrels from two
and
often more than two incongruous races, from two cultures
*
It
is very instructive to observe, on the other hand, that the Hellenes in
Ionia, who were subject to every kind of mongrel crossing, disappeared
much more quickly.
†
Long
before me Gibbon had recognised the physical degeneration of the Roman
race as the cause of the decline of the Roman Empire; now that is more
fully demonstrated by O. Seeck in his Geschichte der Unterganges
der
antiken Welt. It was only the immigration of the vigorous Teutonic
peoples that kept the chaotic empire artificially alive for a few
centuries
longer.
287
THE CHAOS
with nothing in common, from two stages
of development, too different in age and form to be able to form a
marriage
union — children of an unnatural incest. Any one who earnestly desires
to know what race signifies can learn much from the example of these
States;
let him but consult the statistics, he will find the most different
relations
between the pure European or pure Indian population and the half-caste,
and he will see that relative degeneration goes exactly hand in hand
with
the mixture of blood. I take the two extreme examples, Chile and Peru.
In Chile, the only one of these States * that can make a modest claim
to
true culture and that can also point to comparatively well-ordered
political
conditions, about 30 per cent. of the inhabitants are still of pure
Spanish
origin, and this third is sufficient to check moral disintegration. †
On
the other hand, in Peru, which, as is well known, gave the first
example
to the other republics of a total moral and material bankruptcy, there
are almost no Europeans of pure race left; with the exception of the
still
uncivilised Indians in the interior the whole population consists of
Cholos,
Musties, Fusties, Tercerones, Quarterones, &c., crossings between
Indians
and Spaniards, between Indians and Negroes, Spaniards and Negroes,
further
between the different races and those mestizos or crosses of the
mestizo
species among each other; in recent years many thousands of Chinese
have
been added... here we see the promiscuity longed for by Ratzel and
Virchow
in progress, and we observe what the result is! Of course it is an
extreme
example, but all the more instructive. If the enormous force of
surrounding
civilisation did not artificially support such a State on all sides, if
by any chance it were isolated and left to itself, it would in a short
time fall a prey to total
*
In
Portugese Brazil the conditions are essentially different.
†
According
to Albrecht Wirth, Volkstum und Weltmacht in der Geschichte,
1901,
p. 159, the Chilians also derive advantage from the fact that their
Indians
— the Araucani — are of particularly noble race.
288
THE CHAOS
barbarism — not human, but bestial
barbarism.
All these States are moving towards a similar fate. * — Here too I
leave
it to the reader to think over the matter and to collect evidence with
regard to this fifth law, which shows us that every crossing is a
dangerous
matter and can only help to ennoble the race when definite conditions
are
observed, as also that many possible crossings are absolutely
detrimental
and destructive; once the eyes of the reader are opened, he will find
everywhere
both in the past and in the present proofs of this law as well as of
the
other four. †
These then are the
five principles which seem to me to be fundamental: the quality of the
material, inbreeding, artificial selection, the necessity of crossings,
the necessity of strictly limiting these crossings both in respect of
choice
and of time. From these principles we further deduce the conclusion
that
the origin of a very noble human race depends among other things upon
definite
historical and geographical conditions; it is these that unconsciously
bring about the ennobling of the original material, the in-breeding and
the artificial selection, it is these too — when a happy star shines
over
the birthplace of a new people — that produce happy tribal marriages
and
prevent the prostitution of the noble in the arms of the ignoble. The
fact
that there was a time in the nineteenth century when learned
investigators,
with Buckle at their head, could assert that geographical conditions
produced
the races, we may now appropriately
*
As
is well known, very similar conditions prevail in the Spanish colonies.
The island of Porto Rico forms the sole exception: here the native
Caribbees
were exterminated, and the result is a pure Indo-European population,
distinguished
for industry, shrewdness and love of order: a striking example of the
significance
of race!
† In
his book Altersklassen und Männerbunde (p. 23), Heinrich
Schurtz
comes to the conclusion that, “Successful crossings are possible and
advantageous
only within a certain sphere of relationship. If the relationship is
too
close, really near blood-relationship, sickly tendencies are not
counterbalanced
but increased; if it is too remote, no felicitous mixing of the
qualities
is possible.“
289 THE
CHAOS
mention with the scant honour of a
paraleipsis;
for that doctrine is a blow in the face of all history and all
observation.
On the other hand, every single one of the laws enumerated, and in
addition
the examples of Rome, Greece, England, Judea and South America in
particular,
let us see so clearly in how far the historical and geographical
conditions
not only contribute to the origin and the decline of a race but are
actually
decisive factors therein, that I can refrain from further discussion of
the matter. *
OTHER
INFLUENCES
Is the question of
race now exhausted? Far from it! These biological problems are
remarkably
complex. They embrace, for example, the still so mysterious subject of
heredity, in regard to the fundamental principles of which the most
important
specialists are more at variance every day. † Besides, many other
circumstances
which profounder study reveals would have to be taken into account.
Nature
is in fact inexhaustible; however deep we sink the plummet, we never
reach
the bottom. Whoever would make a study of these matters must not, for
example,
overlook the fact that small numbers of foreign elements are wont in a
short time to be entirely absorbed by a strong race, but that there is,
as the chemists say, a definite capacity, a definite power of
absorption,
beyond
*
If,
for example, the climate of Attica had been the decisive thing, as is
often
asserted, it would be impossible to understand why the genius of its
inhabitants
was produced only under certain racial conditions and disappeared for
ever
with the removal of these conditions; on the other hand, the importance
of the geographical and historical conditions becomes quite clear, when
we observe that they isolated Attica for centuries from the ceaseless
changes
brought about by the migrations, but at the same time contributed to
the
influx of a select, noble population from different but related tribes,
which mingled to form a new race.
† The
reader will find an interesting summary of the different opinions of
modern
times in Friedrich Rohde's Entstehung und Vererbung individueller
Eigenschaften,
1895.
290 THE
CHAOS
which a loss of the purity of the blood,
revealed by the diminution of the characteristic qualities, is
involved.
We have an instance of this in Italy, where the proudly passionate and
brilliant families of strong Teutons, who had kept their blood pure
till
the fourteenth century, later gradually mingled with absolutely mongrel
Italians and Italiots and so entirely disappeared (see chaps.
vi.
and ix.): crossing obliterates characters. The careful observer
will further notice that in crossings between human stems, which are
not
closely related, the relative generative power is a factor which can
prevail
after centuries and gradually bring about the decline of the nobler
portion
of a mixed people, because in fact this generative power often stands
in
inverse relation to the nobility of the race. * In Europe at the
present
day we
*
Professor
August Forel, the well-known psychiatrist, has made interesting studies
in the United States and the West Indian islands, on the victory of
intellectually
inferior races over higher ones because of their greater virility.
“Though
the brain of the negro is weaker than that of the white, yet his
generative
power and the predominance of his qualities in the descendants are all
greater than those of the whites. The white race isolates itself
(therefore)
from them more and more strictly, not only in sexual but in all
relations,
because it has at last recognised that crossing means its own
destruction.“
Forel shows by numerous examples how impossible it is for the negro to
assimilate our civilisation more than skin-deep, and how so soon as he
is left to himself he everywhere degenerates into the “most absolute
primitive
African savagery.“ (For more detail on this subject, see the
interesting
book of Hesketh Pritchard, Where Black rules White, Hayti,
1900;
any one who has been reared on phrases of the equality of mankind,
&c.,
will shudder when he learns how matters really stand so soon as the
blacks
in a State get the upper hand.) And Forel, who as scientist is educated
in the dogma of the one, everywhere equal, humanity, comes to the
conclusion:
“Even for their own good the blacks must be treated as what they are,
an
absolutely subordinate, inferior, lower type of men, incapable
themselves
of culture. That must once for all be clearly and openly stated.“ (See
the account of his journey in Harden's Zukunft, February 17,
1900)
— For this question of race-crossings and the constant victory of the
inferior
race over the superior, see also the work of Ferdinand Hueppe,
which
is equally rich in facts and perceptions, Über die modernen
Kolonisationsbestrebungen
und die Anpassungsmöglichkeit der Europäer an die Tropen
(Berliner klinische Wochenschrift, 1901). In Australia, for
example,
a process of sifting is quietly but very quickly going on, whereby the
tall
291 THE
CHAOS
have an example of this: the short round
skulls are constantly increasing in numbers and so gradually
superseding
the narrow “dolichocephali,“ of which, according to the unanimous
testimony
of excavated tombs, almost the whole of the genuine old Teutonic,
Slavonic
and Celtic races consisted; in this we see the growing predominance of
an alien race which had been conquered by the Indo-Teutonic (to-day it
is mostly called “Turanic“), and which by animal force gradually
overpowers
the mentally superior race. * In this connection too perhaps should be
mentioned the peculiar fact that dark eyes are becoming so much more
prevalent
than grey and blue, because in marriages between people with
differently
coloured eyes the dark are almost without exception much more
frequently
represented in the descendants than the light. †
If I were minded
to follow up this argument it would land us in one of the thorniest
branches
of modern science. This, however, is absolutely unnecessary for my
purpose.
Without troubling myself about any definition, I have given a picture
of
Race as it is exhibited in the individual character, in the mighty
achievements
of genius, in the most brilliant pages of the history of man: in the
next
fair Teuton — so
strongly
represented in the English blood — is disappearing, while the added
element
of the homo alpinus is gaining the upper hand.
*
There
is a clear and simple summary in Johannes Ranke, Der Mensch,
ii.
296 ff. The discussion of all these questions in Topinard's L'Anthropologie,
Part II., is more thorough, but for that reason much more difficult to
follow. It is remarkable that the latter only uses the word “race“ to
denote
a hypothetical entity, the actual existence of which at any time cannot
be proved. Il n'y a plus de races pures. Who seeks to prove
that
there ever were any in this a priori sense of anthropological
presuppositions?
Pure animal races are obtained only by breeding and on the fundamental
basis of crossing; why should the opposite hold of men? — Besides, this
whole “Turanic“ hypothesis is, like all these things, still very much
of
an airy abstraction. See further details in chap. vi.
†
Alphonse
de Candolle: Histoire des Sciences et des Savants depuis deux
Siècles,
2e éd., p. 576.
292 THE
CHAOS
place I have called attention to the
most important conditions which scientific observation has pointed out
as laying the foundation for the origin of noble races. That the
introduction
of contrary conditions must be followed by degeneration, or at any rate
by the retarding of the development of noble qualities, seems to be in
the highest degree probable, and might be proved in many ways by
reference
both to the past and the present. I have purposely exercised caution
and
self-restraint. In such labyrinthine tangles the narrowest path is the
safest. The only task which I have proposed to myself has been to call
into being a really vivid representation of what Race is, of what it
has
meant for mankind in the past and still means in the present.
THE
NATION
There is one point
which I have not expressly formulated, but it is self-evident from all
that I have said; the conception of Race has nothing in it unless we
take
it in the narrowest and not in the widest sense: if we follow the usual
custom and use the word to denote far remote hypothetical races, it
ends
by becoming little more than a colourless synonym for “mankind“ —
possibly
including the long-tailed and short-tailed apes: Race only has a
meaning
when it relates to the experiences of the past and the events of the
present.
Here we begin to
understand what nation signifies for race. It is almost always the
nation,
as a political structure, that creates the conditions for the formation
of race or at least leads to the highest and most individual activities
of race. Wherever, as in India, nations are not formed, the stock of
strength
that has been gathered by race decays. But the confusion which prevails
with regard to the idea of race hinders even the most learned from
understanding
this great significance of
293
THE CHAOS
nations, whereby they are at the same
time prevented from understanding the fundamental facts of history.
For,
in fact, what is it that our historians to-day teach us concerning the
relation of race to nation?
I take up any book
by chance — Renan's discourse, What is a Nation? In hundreds of
others we find the same doctrines. The thesis is clearly formulated by
Renan: “The fact of race,“ he writes, “originally of decisive
importance,
loses significance every day.“ * On what does he base this assertion?
By
pointing to the fact that the most capable nations of Europe are of
mixed
blood. What a mass of delusive conclusions this one sentence contains,
what incapacity to be taught by what is evident to the eye! Nature and
history do not furnish a single example of pre-eminently noble races
with
individual physiognomies, which were not produced by crossing: and now
we are to believe that a nation of such distinct individuality as the
English
does not represent a race, because it originated from a mixture of
Anglo-Saxon,
Danish and Norman blood (stems moreover that were closely related)! I
am
to deny the clearest evidence which shows me that the Englishman is at
least as markedly unique a being as the Greek and the Roman of the most
brilliant epochs, and that in favour of an arbitrary, eternally
indemonstrable
abstraction, in favour of the presupposed, original “pure race.“ Two
pages
before, Renan himself had stated on the basis of anthropological
discoveries
that among the oldest Aryans, Semites, Turanians (les groupes aryen
primitif, sémitique primitif, touranien primitif) one finds
men of very different build of body, some with long, others with short
skulls, so that they too had possessed no common “physiological unity.“
What delusions will not arise, as soon as man seeks for supposed
“origins“!
Again and again I must
*
Renan:
Discours
et Conférences, 3e éd., p. 297, “Le fait de la race,
capital à l'origine, va donc toujours perdant de son importance.“
294 THE
CHAOS
quote Goethe's great remark: “Animated
inquiry into cause does infinite harm.“ Instead of taking the given
fact,
the discoverable as it is, and contenting ourselves with the knowledge
of the nearest, demonstrable conditions, we ever and again fancy we
must
start from absolutely hypothetical causes and suppositions lying as far
back as possible, and to these we sacrifice without hesitation that
which
is present and beyond doubt. That is what our “empiricists“ are like.
That
they do not see further than their own noses, we gladly believe from
their
own confession, but unfortunately they do not see even so far, but run
up against solid facts and complain then about the said facts, not
about
their own shortsightedness. What kind of thing is this originally
“physiologically
uniform race“ of which Renan speaks? Probably a near relation of
Haeckel's
human apes. And in favour of this hypothetical beast I am to deny that
the English people, the Prussians, the Spaniards have a definite and
absolutely
individual character! Renan misses physiological unity: does he not
comprehend
that physiological unity is brought about by marriage? Who then tells
him
that the hypothetical aboriginal Aryans were not also the result of
gradual
development? We know nothing about it: but what we do know entitles us
to suppose it from analogy. There were among them narrow heads and
broad
ones: who knows but this crossing was necessary to produce one very
noble
race? The common English horse and the Arabian horse (which doubtless
was
produced originally by some crossing) were also “physiologically“ very
different, and yet from their union was produced in the course of time
the most physiologically uniform and noblest race of animals in the
world,
the English thoroughbred. Now the great scholar Renan sees the English
human thoroughbred, so to speak, arising before his eyes: the ages of
history
are before him. What does he deduce therefrom? He says: since the
English-
295 THE
CHAOS
man of to-day is neither the Celt of
Caesar's time nor the Anglo-Saxon of Hengist, nor the Dane of Knut, nor
the Norman of the Conqueror, but the outcome of a crossing of all four,
one cannot speak of an English race at all. That is to say because the
English race, like every other race of which we have any knowledge, has
grown historically, because it is something peculiar and absolutely
new,
therefore it does not exist! In truth, nothing beats the logic of the
scholar!
- Was ihr nicht rechnet
- Glaubt ihr, sei nicht wahr. *
Our opinion concerning the importance of
nationality in the formation of race must be quite different. The Roman
Empire in the imperial period was the materialisation of the
anti-national
principle; this principle led to racelessness and simultaneously to
intellectual
and moral chaos; mankind was only rescued from this chaos by the more
and
more decisive development of the opposite or national principle. †
Political
nationality has not always played the same rôle in the
production
of individual races as it has in our modern culture; I need only refer
to India, Greece and the Israelites; but the problem was nowhere solved
so beautifully, successfully and as it appears so lastingly, as by the
Teutonic peoples. As though conjured up out of the soil there arose in
this small corner of Europe a number of absolutely new, differentiated
national organisms. Renan is of opinion that race existed only in the
old
“polis,“ because it was only there that the numerical limitation had
permitted
community of blood; this is absolutely false; one need only reckon back
a few centuries, and every one has a hundred thousand ancestors; what,
therefore, in the narrow circle of Athens took place in a com-
*
What
you do not reckon, / You fancy, is not true.
†
This
forms the subject of the eighth
chapter
(vol. ii.).
296 THE
CHAOS
paratively short time, namely, the
physiological
union, took place in our case in the course of several centuries and is
still continued. Race formation, far from decreasing in our nations,
must
daily increase. The longer a definite group of countries remains
politically
united, the closer does the “physiological unity“ which is demanded
become,
and the more quickly and thoroughly does it assimilate strange
elements.
Our anthropologists and historians simply presuppose that in their
hypothetical
primitive races the specific distinguishing characteristics were highly
developed, but that they are now progressively decreasing; there is
consequently,
they aver, a movement from original complexity to increasing
simplicity.
This supposition is contrary to all experience, which rather teaches us
that individualisation is a result of growing differentiation and
separation.
The whole science of biology contradicts the supposition that an
organic
creature first appears with clearly marked characteristics, which then
gradually disappear; it actually forces us to the very opposite
hypothesis
that the early human race was a variable, comparatively colourless
aggregate,
from which the individual types have developed with increasing
divergence
and increasingly distinct individuality; a hypothesis which all history
confirms. The sound and normal evolution of man is therefore not from
race
to racelessness but on the contrary from racelessness to ever clearer
distinctness
of race. The enrichment of life by new individualities seems everywhere
to be one of the highest laws of inscrutable nature. Now here in the
case
of man the nation plays a most important part, because it almost always
brings about crossing, followed by inbreeding. All Europe proves this.
Renan shows how many Slavs have united with the Teutonic peoples, and
asks
somewhat sneeringly whether we have any right to call the Germans of
to-day
“Teutonic“: well, we need not
297 THE
CHAOS
quarrel about names in such a case —
what the Germans are to-day Renan has been able to learn in the year
1870;
he has been taught it too by the German specialists, to whose industry
he owes nine-tenths of his knowledge. That is the valuable result of
the
creation of race by nation-building. And since race is not a mere word,
but an organic living thing, it follows as a matter of course that it
never
remains stationary; it is ennobled or it degenerates, it develops in
this
or that direction and lets this or that quality decay. This is a law of
all individual life. But the firm national union is the surest
protection
against going astray: it signifies common memory, common hope, common
intellectual
nourishment; it fixes firmly the existing bond of blood and impels us
to
make it ever closer.
THE
HERO
Just as important
as the clear comprehension of the organic relation of race to nation is
that of the organic relation of race to its quintessence, the hero or
genius.
We are apt to fancy we must choose between hero-worship and the
opposite.
But the one as well as the other testifies to poverty of insight. What
I have said in the general introduction need not be repeated; but here,
where the question of race is in the forefront, this problem takes a
particularly
clear form, and with some power of intuition we must surely perceive
that
the influence of intellectually pre-eminent units in a race, like the
human,
the individuality of which depends upon the development of its
intellectual
faculties, is immeasurable, for good and for evil; these units are the
feet that carry and the hands that mould, they are the countenance on
which
we others gaze, they are the eye which beholds the rest of the world in
a definite way and then communicates what it has seen to the rest of
the
organism.
298
THE CHAOS
But they are produced by the whole
corporation;
they can arise only from its vital action, only in it and from it do
they
gain importance. What is the use of the hand if it does not grow out of
a strong arm as part and parcel of it? What is the use of the eye if
the
radiant forms which it has seen are not reflected in a dark, almost
amorphous
brain mass lying behind it? Phenomena only gain significance when they
are united to other phenomena. The richer the blood that courses
invisibly
through the veins, the more luxuriant will be the blossoms of life that
spring forth. The assertion that Homer created Greece is indeed
literally
true, but remains onesided and misleading as long as we do not add:
only
an incomparable people, only a quite definite, ennobled race could
produce
this man, only a race in which the seeing and shaping eye had been
“extravagantly“
developed. * Without Homer Greece would not have become Greece, without
the Hellenes Homer would never have been born. It was the same race
which
gave birth to the great seer of forms that produced the inventive seer
of figures, Euclid, the lynx-eyed arranger of ideas, Aristotle, the man
who first perceived the system of the cosmos, Aristarchus, and so on ad
infinitum. Nature is not so simple as scholastic wisdom fancies: if
great personality is our “most precious gift,“ communal greatness is
the
only soil on which it can grow. It is the whole race, for instance,
that
creates the language, and therewith at the same time definite artistic,
philosophical, religious, in fact even practical possibilities, but
also
insuperable limitations. No philosopher could ever arise on Hebrew
soil,
because the spirit of the Hebrew language makes the interpretation of
metaphysical
thoughts absolutely impossible; for the same reason no Semitic people
could
possess a mythology in the same sense
*
Any
one who wants to gain a vivid conception of the extraordinary strength
of these races, capable of serving as basis for a Homer, should read
the
description of the strongholds of Tiryns and Mycenae from the Atridean
time, as they still stand to-day after tens of centuries.
299 THE
CHAOS
as the Indians and the Teutonic peoples.
One sees what definite paths are marked out even for the greatest men
by
the common achievements of the whole race. * But it is not a question
of
language alone. Homer had to find the myths in existence in order to be
able to mould them into shape; Shakespeare put upon the stage the
history
which the English people had made; Bach and Beethoven spring from races
which had attracted the attention of the ancients by their singing. And
Mohammed? Could he have made the Arabs a world-power, had they not as
one
of the purest bred races in the world possessed definite “extravagant“
qualities? But for the new Prussian race, could the Great Elector have
begun, the Great Frederick have extended, and the Great William have
completed
the structure which is now United Germany?
THE
RACELESS CHAOS
The first task set
us in this chapter is now fulfilled; we have got a clear concrete idea
of what race is and what it signifies for mankind; we have seen too,
from
some examples of the present time, how fatal the absence of race, that
is, the chaos of unindividualised, speciesless human agglomerates, is.
Any one who perceives this and ponders over it will gradually realise
what
it signifies for our Teutonic culture that the inherited culture of
antiquity,
which at important points still not only forms the foundations but also
the walls of the structure, was not transmitted to us by a definite
people
but by a nationless mixture without physiognomy, in which mongrels held
the whip-hand, namely, by the racial chaos of the decaying Roman
Empire.
Our whole intellectual development is still under the curse of this
unfortunate
intermediate
*
According
to Renan (Israël, i. 102) the Hebrew language is utterly
incapable
of expressing a philosophical thought, a mythological conception, the
feeling
of the Infinite, the emotions of the human soul or even pure
observation
of nature.
300 THE
CHAOS
stage; it is this that supplied weapons
to the anti-national, anti-racial powers even in the nineteenth century.
Even before Julius
Caesar, the Chaos begins to appear; through Caracalla it is elevated to
the official principle of the Roman Empire. * Throughout the whole
extent
of the Empire there was thorough mixing of blood, but in such a way
that
real bastardising, that is, the crossing of unrelated or of noble and
ignoble
races occurred almost wholly in the most southern and eastern parts,
where
the Semites met the Indo-Europeans — that is to say, in the capitals
Rome
and Constantinople, along the whole north coast of Africa (as well as
on
the coasts of Spain and Gaul), above all in Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor.
It is as easy as
it is important to form an idea of the area of this complicated
geographical
condition. The Danube and the Rhine almost meet at their source. The
two
river-districts fit so closely into each other that there is, it is
said,
in the neighbourhood of the Albula Pass a small lake, which when there
is high water flows on the one side into the Albula and the Rhine, on
the
other into the Inn and the Danube. Now if we follow the courses of
these
rivers, up the Rhine from the mouth of the old Rhine near Leyden and
down
the Danube till it falls into the Black Sea, we get an unbroken line
crossing
the Continent from north-west to south-east; this, roughly speaking,
forms
the northern boundary of the Roman Empire for a long period of time;
except
in parts of Dacia (the Roumania of to-day) the Romans never asserted
themselves
for long north and east of this line. †
* See
p.
124.
† The
Roman fortified boundary did indeed include a considerable portion
north
of the Danube and east of the Rhine, because the limes branched
off westwards above Regensberg, came near Stuttgart, then north again
till
it met the Maine west of Würzburg. But this tithe-land, as it was
called, was not colonised by Italians, but, as Tacitus tells us, by
“the
most fickle of the Gauls“ (Cf. Wietersheim, Völkerwanderung,
i. 161 ff.).
301 THE
CHAOS
This line divides Europe (if we include
the African and Asian possessions of Rome) into two almost equal parts.
In the south the great transfusion of blood (as the doctors call the
injecting
of strange blood into an organism) took place. If Maspero in his
history
of the peoples of the Classical East entitles one volume “The First
Chaos
of Races,“ then we may well speak here of a second chaos. In Britain,
in
Rhetia, in the extreme north of Gaul, &c., it seems indeed that in
spite of the Roman sway there was no thorough fusion; in the rest of
Gaul
too, as well as in Spain, the newly imported elements from Rome had at
least several centuries of comparative isolation to mingle with the
former
inhabitants before other elements came, a circumstance which rendered
possible
the formation of a new and very characteristic race, the Gallo-Roman.
In
the south-east, on the other hand, and especially in all centres of
culture
(which, as already pointed out, all lay in the south and the east),
there
was a medley all the more fundamentally pernicious in that those who
came
in streams from the Levant were themselves nothing but half-castes. For
example, we must not imagine that the Syrians of that time were a
definite
nation, a people, a race: they were rather a motley agglomeration of
pseudo-Hittite,
pseudo-Semitic, pseudo-Hellenic, pseudo-Persian, pseudo-Scythian
mongrels.
What the French call un charme troublant — superficial
cleverness
combined with a peculiar sort of beauty — is often the characteristic
of
the half-caste; one can observe this daily at the present day in cities
like Vienna, where people of all nations meet; but the peculiar
unsteadiness,
the small power of resistance, the want of character, in short, the
moral
degeneracy of these people is equally marked. I name the Syrian because
I prefer examples to wordy enumerations; he was the very pattern of the
bastard sundered from all national relationship, and for that very
reason,
up to the
302 THE
CHAOS
time of the Teutonic invasion, and even
later, he played a leading part. We find Syrians upon the imperial
throne;
Caracalla belongs to them, and Heliogabalus, that monster robed in silk
and gold, tricked out like a dancing girl, was imported direct from
Syria;
we find them in all administrative offices and prefectures; they, like
their counterpart, the African mongrels, have great influence in the
codification
of the Law and an absolute casting-vote in the constitution of the
universal
Roman Church. Let us look more closely at one of these men; we shall in
that way gain a lively picture of the civilised fraction of the Empire
of that day with its pushing culture-mongers, and at the same time
obtain
an insight into the soul of the Chaos of Peoples.
LUCIAN
Every one, I
fancy,
knows the author Lucian, at least by name; his exceptional talents
force
him upon our notice. Born on the banks of the Euphrates, not far from
the
first spurs of the Tauric mountain range (in which energetic races of
Indo-European
descent still lived), in addition to the Syrian patois, the boy
begins to learn to murder Greek. Having shown a talent for drawing and
sculpture he is apprenticed to a sculptor, but only after a family
council
has been held to decide how the boy may as speedily as possible make a
fortune. During his whole life, in spite of the amount of his
subsequent
wealth, this desire for money remains the guiding star — no, that is
too
fine an expression — the driving impulse of this gifted Syrian; in his
Nigrinus
he admits with enviable frankness that money and fame are the things
dearest
to him in the world, and even as an old man he writes expressly, that
he
accepts the high official position offered by the Gladiator-Emperor
Commodus
for the sake of the money. But in art he
303 THE
CHAOS
makes no progress. In a famous book
The
Dream, * which, however, as far as I know, is not appreciated
according
to its true purport by any historian, Lucian tells us why he gave up
art
and preferred to become a jurist and belles-lettrist. In a dream two
women
had appeared to him: the one “looked like work,“ had hard hands, her
dress
covered over and over with plaster; the other was elegantly dressed and
stood calmly there; the one was Art, the other — he who does not know
will
never guess, the other was — Culture. † Poor Art tries to inspire her
new
disciple with zeal by the example of Phidias and Polycletus, of Myron
and
Praxiteles, but in vain; for Culture proves convincingly that Art is an
“ignoble occupation“; that the artist remains the whole day bent over
his
work in a dirty smockfrock, like a slave; even Phidias was only “a
common
workman,“ who “lived from the toil of his hands“; whoever, on the other
hand, chooses Culture instead of Art, has the prospect of riches and
high
offices, and when he goes for a walk in the street, the people will
nudge
each other and say, “See, there goes that famous man!“ ‡ Quickly making
up his mind Lucian sprang to his feet: “I left the ugly toilsome life
and
went over to Culture.“ To-day sculptor, to-morrow advocate; he who is
born
without a definite calling can choose any; § whoever seeks gold
and
fame does not need to look aloft and runs no risk of falling into the
well,
like the hero of the German fairy
*
Not
to be confused with the Dream of the Shoemaker Micyllus.
†
Greek
word παιδεία German
Bildung;
so the best translators. It is not a question of the education of
children,
and “Science“ would imply too much. The possible objection that the
first
woman does not introduce herself as “Art“ simply, but as the “Art of
cutting
Hermae“ may be met by the rejoinder that later she is described as Τέχνη and that the appeal to
Phidias and other artists admits no doubt about
the intention.
‡ The
faint echo we have heard in the nineteenth century: “When the best
names
are named, mine too will be mentioned“ (Heine).
§
Cf.
p.
242.
304 THE
CHAOS
tale. Do not imagine that The Dream
is a satire; Lucian gave it as a lecture in his native town, when he
visited
it later, honoured and wealthy; he himself tells us that he set up his
life as an example to the youth of Samosata. Such men, otherwise so
clever,
never understand what a bitter satire their fate is on the life of the
really great; how otherwise could a Heine have placed himself on the
same
plane as a Goethe? Lucian had chosen Culture, and to acquire it he went
to Antioch. Athens was indeed still the great high school of knowledge
and taste, but was considered old-fashioned; Syrian Antioch and the
so-called
“Hellenic“ Ephesus, which nevertheless was even in the second century
thoroughly
saturated with alien elements, offered much greater attractions to the
cosmopolitan youth of the Roman Empire. There Lucian studied law and
eloquence.
But to him as an intelligent man the abuse of the Greek language by his
teachers was painful; he guessed the value of a pure style and moved to
Athens. It is characteristic that he ventured after a short spell of
study
to appear there as advocate and orator; in the meantime he had learned
everything, except propriety; the Athenians taught him this, they
laughed
at the “barbarian“ with his pedantic tags of strange culture and
thereby
gave him a valuable hint; he disappeared to a place where taste was not
so indispensable, to Marseilles. This seaport of the Phoenician
Diaspora
had just received by the arrival of thousands of Jews from Palestine
such
a clearly marked character that it was simply called “the city of the
Jews“;
but Gauls, Romans; Spaniards, Ligurians, all conceivable races met
there.
Here, in New Athens, as the inhabitants, with a delicate recognition of
their own intellectual worth, called it, Lucian lived for many years
and
became a rich man; he gave up the profession of advocate, for which he
would have needed to learn Latin thoroughly; besides, there was great
competition,
and even in Antioch he had not had great success
305 THE
CHAOS
as a pleader; what these mushroom
plutocrats
chiefly wanted was Culture, modern Culture and rules of etiquette. Had
not “Culture“ been Lucian's ideal, his dream? Had he not studied in
Antioch
and “spoken openly“ even in Athens? Accordingly he gave lectures; but
the
listeners did not laugh at him, as in Athens, but paid any entrance fee
that he cared to ask. Besides, he travelled over all Gaul as
professional
orator, at that time a very profitable business: to-day commemorating
the
virtues of a dead person, whom he had never seen in life, to-morrow
taking
part in the celebration of a religious festival that was given in
honour
of some local Gallo-Roman divinity, whose name a Syrian could not even
pronounce. Any one who wishes to get an idea of this oratory should
look
at the Florida of Apuleius, a contemporary but African mestizo;
* this is a collection of shorter and longer oratorical passages
written
for effect, to be put into any speech whatever, in order that the
audience
might think it a sudden inspiration, and be startled and carried away
by
the great knowledge, wit and pathos of the orator; there it is all in
stock:
the profound, the pointed, the clever anecdote, the devoutly
submissive,
the proud claims of freedom, even the excuse for being unprepared and
the
thanks for the statues that might be offered to the orator as a
surprise!
Just such things are pictures of a man and not of a man only, but of a
whole Culture or, to use Lucian's word, of a whole παιδεία.
Any one who has seen Prince Bismarck in one of his great speeches
struggling
to express himself will understand what I mean. — When forty years of
age
Lucian turned his back on Gaul; to settle in a definite place, to link
his life perpetually with that of any country never occurs to him;
besides
*
Apuleius
boasts expressly of his mixed origin: He too studied in Syria and Egypt
and travelled in Greece, hence had practically the same educational
course
as Lucian.
306 THE
CHAOS
there were no nations; if Lucian returns
for a short visit to his native place it is not from heartlonging but,
as he himself honestly confesses, to show his rich garments to those
who
knew him when poor. * Then he settles in Athens for a considerable
period,
but keeps silent this time and industriously studies philosophy and
science
in the honest endeavour to find at last what lies concealed behind this
lauded Hellenic culture. That this man, who for twenty years had taught
“Hellenic culture“ and gained riches and honour from it, suddenly
notices
that he never understood even the elements of this culture, is an
almost
pathetic trait and a proof of exceptional gifts. For that reason I have
chosen him in particular. In his writings one finds, alongside of puns
and many good jokes and in addition to fine narrative, many a sharp and
sometimes pathetic remark. But what could be the result of this study?
Little or nothing. We men are not pieces in a game of draughts; there
was
just as little possibility of becoming a different person by learned
instruction
in Athens as there is to-day of becoming a “beautiful personality“ in
Berlin,
as Professor Virchow hopes from the influence of the University there —
if one is not already such at matriculation. With nothing is a man's
knowledge
so intimately bound up as with his Being, in other words, with his
definite
individuality, his definite organisation. Plato expressed the opinion
that
knowledge was remembrance; modern biology gives the word a slightly
different
interpretation but agrees with the philosopher. In a perfectly
significant
sense we can say that each man can only know, what he is. Lucian himself
*
The
Fliegende
Blätter of 1896 has a picture which shows a Counsellor of
Commerce
and his wife just entering their carriage:
“She:
Where shall we drive to to-day?“
“He:
Of course through the town; to make the people envy us!“
That
is exactly the same stage of culture.
307 THE
CHAOS
felt that all that he had learned and
taught hitherto was mere tinsel — matters of fact, not the soul from
which
these facts grow: the covering but without the body, the shell but
without
the kernel. And when at last he understood this and broke the shell,
what
did he find? Nothing. Of course nothing. Nature has first to produce
the
kernel, the shell is a later accrescence; the body must be born before
it can be clothed; the hero's heart must beat before heroic deeds can
be
achieved. The only kernel Lucian could find was himself; as soon as he
tore from his body the rags of Roman Law and Hellenic poetry, he
revealed
a clever Syrian mestizo, a bastard born of fifty unrecorded crossings,
the man who, with the unerring instinct of youth, had despised Phidias
as a workman, and had chosen the career that with the least possible
trouble
would earn for him most money and the applause of the vulgar herd. All
the philologists in the world may assure me that Lucian's remarks about
religion and philosophy are profound, that he was a daring opponent of
superstition, &c., I shall never believe it. Lucian was utterly
incapable
of knowing what religion and philosophy are. In many of his writings he
enumerates all possible “systems“ one after another; for example, in Icaromenippus,
in the Selling of Philosophical Characters, &c.; it is
always
only the most superficial element that he comprehends, the formal
motive
power, without which the utterance of a thought is not possible, but
which
in truth must not be confused with the thought itself. So, too, in
regard
to religion. Aristophanes had scoffed as Voltaire did in later days;
but
the satire of both these men had its origin in a positive, constructive
thought, and everywhere one sees the flash of fanatical love for the
people
of the homeland, for the firm, definite, related community, which
embraced
and supported each one of them with its traditions, its faith and its
great
men; Lucian, on the
308 THE
CHAOS
other hand, scoffs like Heine, * he
has no noble aim, no profound conviction, no thorough understanding; he
drifts about aimlessly like a wreck on the ocean, nowhere at home, not
without noble impulses, but without any definite object to which he
might
devote himself, learned, but yet one of those monsters of learning who,
Calderon says,
- know everything and understand
nothing.
But one thing he understood and therein
lies for us his whole importance as a writer; he understood the spirit
that he resembled, namely, the totally bastardised, depraved and
degenerate
world around him; he pictures it and scourges it, as only one who
himself
belonged to it could, one who knew its motives and methods from his own
experience. Here the kernel was not lacking. Hence his delightful
satires
on the Homeric critics, on the learned professions which were rotten to
the core, on religious swindlers, on puffed-up, rude and ignorant
millionaires,
on medical quacks, &c. Here his talent and his knowledge of the
world
together contributed to the accomplishment of great things. — And in
order
that my description may not be incomplete, I may add that the second
stay
in Athens, if it did not teach Lucian the meaning of mythology, or of
metaphysics,
or of the heroic character, yet became for him a new source of
money-making.
Here he turned his attention industriously to authorship, wrote his Conversations
of the Gods, his Conversations of the Dead, in all
probability
most of his best things. He invented a light form of dialogue (for
which
he gave himself the title of “Prometheus the author“!); at bottom they
are good feuilletons, of the kind which the philistine to this day
likes
to read in
*
The
one fault in this second comparison is that Heine did belong to a
definite
people and in consequence possessed a more definite physiognomy.
309 THE
CHAOS
the morning with his coffee. They
brought
him in considerable sums of money, when he began to travel again and
delivered
them in public as lectures. But this fashion also passed, or perhaps
with
age he had tired of a vagabond life. He discarded the one legacy,
Hellenic
art and philosophy, and turned to the other — Roman Law; he became
State
Advocate (as some say) or President of the Court (as others say) in
Egypt
and died in this office.
I think that a single
career such as this shows us, more clearly than many a learned
exposition,
what the mental chaos was, which at that time lay sheltered beneath the
uniform mantle of the tyrannical Roman Empire. We cannot say of a man
like
Lucian that he was immoral; no, what we learn from such an example is
that
morality and arbitrariness are two contradictory ideas. Men who do not
inherit definite ideals with their blood are neither moral nor immoral,
they are simply “without morals.“ If I may be allowed to use a current
phrase to explain my meaning, I should say they are neither good nor
bad,
equally they are neither beautiful nor ugly, deep nor shallow. The
individual
in fact cannot make for himself an ideal of life and a moral law; these
very things can only exist as a gradual growth. For this reason it was
very wise of Lucian, in spite of his talent, to give up in time his
idea
of emulating Phidias. He could become an orator for the Massillians,
and
a President of Court for the Egyptians, even, if you will, a
feuilletonist
for all time, but an artist or a thinker never.
AUGUSTINE
We may be met by
the
objection that out of the old Chaos of Peoples there arose men of great
importance, whose influence has made itself felt upon succeeding
generations,
until this day, in a far more penetrating
310 THE
CHAOS
sense. This presents no difficulty for
the irrefutable acceptance of the importance of race to humanity. In
the
midst of a chaos single individuals may still be of perfectly pure
race,
or they may at least belong principally to one definite race. Such a
man,
for example, as Ambrosius must surely be of genuine, noble descent, of
that strong race which had made Rome great; I cannot indeed prove it,
for
in the confusion of those times history is unable to furnish exact
information
as to the pedigree of any man of importance. At the same time no one
can
prove the contrary, so the personality of the individual must decide
the
question. Moreover, it must not be overlooked that, unless crossing
without
plan or method goes on with wild recklessness, the qualities of a
dominant
race will remain conspicuous for generations, though maybe in a much
weakened
condition, and that they are capable of flashing up again as atavism in
single individuals. The breeding of animals furnishes numerous examples
of this. Take a piece of paper and sketch a genealogical tree; we shall
see that, as soon as we go back only four generations, an individual
has
already thirty ancestors, whose blood flows in his veins. If we now
suppose
two races A and B, such a table will clearly show how very different
the
hybridisation in the case of a crossing of peoples must be, from the
full
hybrid directly composed of A and B to the individual of whose sixteen
ancestors only one was a hybrid. Besides, experience daily teaches us
that
exceptionally gifted and beautiful human beings are frequently produced
by crossing; it is, however, as I have said, not a question of the
individual
only, but of his relation to other individuals, to a uniform complex;
if
this single mongrel enters into a definite race-centre, he may have a
very
quickening effect upon it; if he falls among a mere heap of beings, he
is, like Lucian, only a stick among sticks, not a branch on a living
tree.
The immeasurable
311
THE CHAOS
power of ideas must also be reckoned
with. They are indeed misconstrued, mishandled and abused by
illegitimate
successors — as we saw in the case of pseudo-Roman law and Platonic
philosophy
— but they continue to have a formative influence. What was it if not
the
death-agony of the old genuine imperial idea that held together this
agglomeration
of peoples till the strong Dietrich of Berne came to set them free?
Whence
did those men of the chaos derive their thoughts and their religion?
Not
from themselves, but only from Jews and Hellenes. And so all that held
them together, all upon which their very existence depended, was drawn
from the inheritance of noble races. Take any of the greatest men of
the
chaotic period, for example the venerable Augustine, distinguished
alike
by temperament and ability. To be unbiased, let us leave our own purely
religious standpoint and ask ourselves whether there was not a hopeless
chaos in the brain of this eminent man? In the world of his imagination
we find the Jewish belief in Jehovah, the mythology of Greece,
Alexandrine
Neoplatonism, Romish priestcraft, the Pauline conception of God, and
the
contemplation of the Crucified Lord, all jumbled together in
heterogeneous
confusion. Augustine has to reject, in deference to Hebraic
materialism,
many incomparably loftier religious thoughts — loftier because pure and
genuinely racial thoughts — which Origenes held, but at the same time
he
introduces into theology as predestination the ancient Aryan conception
of
necessity, whereby the old dogma of all Judaism, the unconditional
arbitrariness
of will, goes to the wall. *
*
Augustine
is indeed extremely cautious; he says, for example, of the prescience
of
God and the contradictory view, the free will of man: “We embrace both
convictions, we confess to both, truly and honestly; to the one that we
may believe rightly, to the other that we may live rightly“ (illud,
ut bene credamus; hoc, ut bene vivamus); cf. De Civ. Dei,
v.
10. With this is closely connected that further question, whether God
himself
is free or stands under the law; the intellect inclines clearly in the
case of Augustine to
312 THE
CHAOS
He spends twelve years writing a book
against the heathen gods, but himself believes in their existence in so
tangible and fetichist a sense as no cultured Greek for a thousand
years
before him; he looks upon them in fact as daemons and therefore
creations
of God; but one must not, he thinks, regard them as creators (“immundos
spiritus esse et perniciosa daemonia, vel certe creaturas non
Creatorem,
veritas Christiana convincit“). In his chief work, De Civitate
Dei,
Augustine disputes in chapter after chapter with his countryman
Apuleius
regarding the nature of the daemons and other good and bad spirits,
endeavouring,
if not to deny their existence, at least to reduce them to an
unimportant
and uninfluential element and thus to replace crass superstition by
genuine
religion; nevertheless, he inclines in all earnest to the belief that
Apuleius
himself was changed by the unguent of the Thessalian witch into an ass,
and this is all the more comical to us, because Apuleius, although he
wrote
a great deal about daemons, never thought of representing this
transformation
as an actual occurrence when he wrote his novel, The Metamorphoses
or
the Golden Ass. * I cannot of course enter more fully into this
matter
here, that would take me too far; it would deserve a whole book to
itself;
and yet the detailed characterisation of the intellectual condition of
the noble among these sons of the chaos would be the right complement
to
the sketch of the frivolous Lucian. † We should see
the latter view, his
dogmatic
creed to the former. Is an action bad because God has forbidden it, or
had he to forbid it because it is bad? In his Contra Mendacium,
chap. xv., Augustine takes the second alternative; in other writings
the
former.
*
This
story seems to have been in vogue at the time; for Lucian too has a Lucius
or the Enchanted Ass, which looks indeed as if it were translated
from
fragments of the Apuleian one. Augustine says of the transformation
“aut
finxit, aut indicavit,“ but he clearly inclines to the latter view.
† The
irreconcilable contradictions in the religious thought and feeling of
Augustine
are fully discussed in the seventh
chapter
(vol. ii.) and the gap here left is thus to some extent filled.
313
THE CHAOS
that everywhere the equilibrium is
disturbed.
In Lucian the unfettered intellect is uppermost and lack of moral
strength
ruins the finest qualities; in Augustine, character wrestles with
intellect
in a tussle of doubtful issue, and does not rest until intellect is
thrown
and put in fetters.
Such were the men
who handed down to us the legacy of antiquity. “We are like shipwrecked
sailors thrown on the shore by the wild breakers,“ Ambrosius exclaims
in
pain. Philosophy and law, ideas of State, freedom, human dignity passed
through their hands; it was they who raised to the dignity of
acknowledged
dogmas the superstition (belief in daemons, witchcraft, &c.) which
formerly was found only among the most ignorant scum of the population;
it was they who forged a new religion out of the most incompatible
elements,
who gave to the world the gift of the Roman Church, a kind of
changeling
born of the Roman imperial idea; at the same time it was they who with
the fanaticism of the weak destroyed everything beautiful belonging to
the past on which they could lay their hands, every memory of great
generations.
Hatred and disdain of every great achievement of the pure races were
taught;
a Lucian scoffs at the great thinkers, an Augustine reviles the heroes
of Rome's heroic age, a Tertullian calls Homer “a liar.“ As soon as the
orthodox emperors — Constantius, Theodosius, and others — ascend the
throne
(without exceptions mongrels in race, the great Diocletian being the
last
Emperor of pure blood *) the systematic destruction of all the
monuments
of antiquity begins. At the same time is introduced the deliberate lie
that is supposed to further truth: such eminent Church fathers as
Hieronymus
and Chrysostomus encourage the pia fraus, the pious deception;
immediately
upon this follows the foundation of the might and right of the Roman
see,
not by courage and conquest, but by the colossal forgery of documents.
* Cf.
also what is said on p. 129 f.
314 THE
CHAOS
Even so respectable an historian as
Eusebius has the simplicity worthy of a better cause to confess that he
remodels history wherever he sees the opportunity of furthering “the
good
cause.“ In very truth this chaos which arose out of race fusion and the
universal craze for anti-nationalism is an appalling spectacle!
ASCETIC
DELUSION
Perhaps the fact
has
never yet been pointed out — I at least know of no book where it is —
that
the epidemic of asceticism which broke out at that time was directly
connected
with the feeling of disgust for that frightful condition of the world;
some would fain see in it an unexampled religious awakening, others a
religious
disease; but that is interpreting the facts allegorically, for religion
and asceticism are not necessarily connected. Nothing in the example of
Christ could encourage asceticism; the early Christians knew it not;
two
hundred years after Christ Tertullian still wrote: “We Christians are
not
like the Brahmans and Gymnosophists of India, we do not live in forests
or in banishment from the society of men: we feel that we owe God the
Lord
and Creator thanks for everything and we forbid the enjoyment of none
of
his works; we only practise moderation in order that we may not enjoy
these
things more than is good for us or make a bad use of them“ (Apologeticus,
chap. xlii.). Why now did un-Christian asceticism all at once enter
into
Christianity? I for my part believe that we have here to deal with
physical
reasons. Even before the birth of Christ asceticism had taken its rise
in the altogether bastardised Syria and Egypt; wherever blood was most
mixed, it had taken a firm hold. Pachomius, the founder of the first
Christian
cloister, the author of the first monkish rule, is a servant of Serapis
from Upper Egypt, who transferred to Christianity
315 THECHAOS
what he had learned in the societies
of the fasting and self-chastising ascetics of Serapis. * Any one who
still
possessed a spark of noble impulse in that world of the unnational
chaos
was bound in fact to be disgusted with himself. Nowhere, where sound
conditions
prevailed, has unconditional asceticism been preached; on the contrary,
the ancient peoples — Aryans, Semites, Mongolians — led by a marvellous
instinct, are at one in regarding the begetting of children as one of
the
most sacred duties; whoever died without a son was laden with a curse.
In Ancient India, of course, there were ascetics; but they might not
disappear
into the solitude of the forest till the son of their son was born;
here
the intention and fundamental idea are almost diametrically opposed to
the asceticism of the Syrian Christians. To-day we understand this; for
we see that only one thing contributes to the ennobling of man: the
begetting
of pure races, the founding of definite nations. To beget sons, sons of
the right kind, is without question the most sacred duty of the
individual
towards society; whatever else he may achieve, nothing will have such a
lasting and indelible influence as the contribution to the increasing
ennoblement
of the race. From the limited, false standpoint of Gobineau it
certainly
does not much matter, for we can only decline and fall sooner or later;
still less correct are they who appear to contradict him, but adopt the
same hypothetical acceptation of aboriginal pure nations; but any one
who
understands how noble races are in reality produced, knows that they
can
arise again at any moment; that depends on us; here nature has clearly
pointed out to us a great duty. Those men of the chaos therefore, who
considered
begetting a sin, and complete abstinence therefrom the highest of all
virtues,
committed a crime against the most sacred law of nature; they tried to
prevent all good, noble men
* Cf.
Otto Zöckler Askese und Mönchtum, 1897, i. 193 ff.
316 THE
CHAOS
and women from leaving descendants,
thus promoting the increase of the evil only, which meant of course
that
they did their best to bring about the deterioration of the human race.
A Schopenhauer may joyfully collect from the Church fathers their
pronouncements
against marriage and see therein a confirmation of his pessimism; for
me
the connection is quite different: this sudden horror of the most
natural
impulses of man, their transformation from the most sacred duty to the
most disgraceful sin, has a deeper foundation in those incomprehensible
sources of our existence, where the physical and the metaphysical are
not
yet separated. After wars and pestilences, statistics tell us, births
increase
to an abnormal degree — nature helps herself; in that chaos which
threatened
all culture with eternal destruction, the births had to be retarded as
much as possible; with horror the noble turned away from that world of
sin, buried themselves in the deserts or in the caves of the hills,
perched
themselves on high pillars, chastised themselves and did penance.
Childless
they passed away. * Even where human society is in a state of
disintegration,
we see in fact a great connection; what each man by himself thinks and
does always admits of a double interpretation — the subjective or
individual,
and the objective interpretation in relation to the world at large.
*
In
the fourth century the Roman Empire numbered hundreds of thousands of
monks
and nuns. It was not unusual for an abbot to have 10,000 monks in one
cloister
and in the year 373 the one single Egyptian town Oxyrynchus had 20,000
nuns and 10,000 monks! Now consider the total numbers of the population
of that time, and it will be clear what a great influence this ascetic
epidemic must have had upon the non-multiplication of the bastard
races.
(See further details in Lecky's History of European Morals,
11th ed. ii. 105 ff.)
317 THE
CHAOS
SACREDNESS
OF PURE RACE
Here we touch upon
a deep scientific fact; we are touching upon the revelation of the most
important secret of all human history. Every one comprehends that man
can
in the true sense of the word only become “man“ in connection with
others.
Many, too, have grasped the meaning of Jean Paul's profound remark,
which
I prefixed as motto to a former chapter, that “only through man does
man
enter into the light of day“; few, however, have realised the fact that
this attainment of manhood — this entry into the light of life —
depends
in degree upon definite organic conditions, conditions which in old
days
were observed instinctively and unconsciously, but which, now that
owing
to the increase of knowledge and the development of thought the
impulses
of instinct have lost their power, it becomes our duty consciously to
recognise
and respect. This study of the Roman Chaos of Peoples teaches us that
race,
and nationality which renders possible the formation of race, possess a
significance which is not only physical and intellectual but also
moral.
Here there is before us something which we can characterise as a sacred
law, the sacred law in accordance with which we enter upon the rights
and
duties of manhood: a “law,“ since it is found everywhere in nature,
“sacred,“
in so far as it is left to our free will to ennoble ourselves or to
degenerate
as we please. This law teaches us to look upon the physical
constitution
as the basis of all that ennobles. For what is the moral apart from the
physical? What would a soul be without body? I do not know. If our
breast
conceals something that is immortal, if we men reach with our thoughts
to something transcendent, which we, like the blind, touch with longing
hands without ever being able to see it,
318
THE CHAOS
if our heart is the battlefield between
the finite and the infinite, then the constitution of this body —
breast,
brain, heart — must be of immeasurable consequence. “However the great
dark background of things may in truth be constituted, the entrance to
it is open to us only in this poor life of ours, and so even our
ephemeral
actions contain this earnest, deep, and inevitable significance,“ says
Solon in the beautiful dialogue of Heinrich von Stein. * “Only in this
life!“ But wherewith do we live if not with our body? Indeed, we do not
need to look forth into any world beyond (which will appear problematic
to many people), as Solon does in the passage quoted; the entrance even
to this earthly life is solely and only open to us through our body and
this life will be for us poor or rich, ugly or beautiful, insipid or
precious,
according to the constitution of this our one, all-embracing organ of
life.
I have already shown from examples taken from methodical animal
breeding
and from human history how race arises and is gradually ennobled, also
how it degenerates; what then is this race if not a collective term for
a number of individual bodies? It is no arbitrary idea, no abstraction;
these individualities are linked with one another by an invisible but
absolutely
real power resting upon material facts. Of course the race consists of
individuals;
but the individual himself can only attain to the full and noblest
development
of his qualities within definite conditions which are embraced in the
word
“race.“ This is based upon a simple law, but it points simultaneously
in
two directions. All organic nature, vegetable as well as animal, proves
that the choice of the two parents is of decisive influence upon the
individual
that is born; but besides this it proves that the principle prevailing
here is a collective and progressive one, because in the first place a
common parent-stock must gradually be formed, from
* Helden
und Welt: dramatische Bilder (Chemnitz, 1883).
319 THE
CHAOS
which then, similarly step by step,
are produced individuals who are on an average superior to those
outside
such a union, and among these again numerous individuals with really
transcendent
qualities. That is a fact of nature, just in the same sense as any
other,
but here, as in all phenomena of life, we are far from being able to
analyse
and explain it. Now what must not be lost sight of in the case of the
human
race is the circumstance that the moral and intellectual qualities are
of preponderating importance. That is why in men any want of organic
racial
consistency, or fitness in the parent stock, means above all things a
lack
of all moral and intellectual coherence. The man who starts from
nowhence
reaches nowhither. The individual life is too short to be able to fix
the
eye on a goal and to reach it. The life of a whole people, too, would
be
too short if unity of race did not stamp it with a definite, limited
character,
if the transcendent splendour of many-sided and varying gifts were not
concentrated by unity of stem, which permits a gradual ripening, a
gradual
development in definite directions, and finally enables the most gifted
individual to live for a super-individual purpose.
Race, as it arises
and maintains itself in space and time, might be compared to the
so-called
range of power of a magnet. If a magnet be brought near to a heap of
iron
filings, they assume definite directions, so that a figure is formed
with
a clearly marked centre, from which lines radiate in all directions;
the
nearer we bring the magnet the more distinct and more mathematical does
the figure become; very few pieces have placed themselves in exactly
the
same direction, but all have united into a practical and at the same
time
ideal unity by the possession of a common centre, and by the fact that
the relative position of each individual to all the others is not
arbitrary
but obedient to a fixed law. It has ceased to be a heap, it has become
a form. In the same way a human
320
THE CHAOS
race, a genuine nation, is distinguished
from a mere congeries of men. The character of the race becoming more
and
more pronounced by pure breeding is like the approach of the magnet.
The
individual members of the nation may have ever so different qualities,
the direction of their activities may be utterly divergent, yet
together
they form a moulded unity, and the power — or let us say rather the
importance
— of every individual is multiplied a thousandfold by his organic
connection
with countless others.
I have shown above
how Lucian with all his gifts absolutely squandered his life; I have
shown
Augustine helplessly swaying to and fro like a pendulum between the
loftiest
thoughts and the crassest and silliest superstition: such men as these,
cut off from all racial belongings, mongrels among mongrels, are in a
position
almost as unnatural as a hapless ant, carried and set down ten miles
from
its own nest. The ant, however, would suffer at least only through
outward
circumstances, but these men are by their own inner constitution barred
from all genuine community of life.
The consideration
of these facts teaches us that whatever may be our opinion as to the causa
finalis of existence, man cannot fulfill his highest destiny as an
isolated individual, as a mere exchangeable pawn, but only as a portion
of an organic whole, as a member of a specific race. *
THE
TEUTONIC PEOPLES
There is no doubt
about it! The raceless and nationless chaos of the late Roman Empire
was
a pernicious and fatal condition, a sin against nature. Only one ray of
light shone over that degenerate world. It came from the north. Ex
septentrione
Lux! If we take up a map, the Europe of the fourth century
certainly
seems at the
*
“The
individuals and the whole are identical,“ the Indian thinkers had
taught
(see Garbe's Sâmkhya-Philosophie, p. 158).
321 THE
CHAOS
first glance to be more or less in a
state of chaos even north of the Imperial boundary; we see quite a
number
of races established side by side, incessantly forcing their way in
different
directions: the Alemanni, the Marcomanni, the Saxons, the Franks, the
Burgundians,
the Goths, the Vandals, the Slavs, the Huns and many others. But it is
only the political relations that are chaotic there; the nations are
genuine,
pure-bred races, men who carry with them their nobility as their only
possession
wherever destiny drives them. In one of the next chapters I shall have
to speak of them. In the meantime I should like merely to warn those
whose
reading is less wide, against the idea that the “barbarians“ suddenly
“broke
into“ the highly civilised Roman Empire. This view, which is widespread
among the superficially educated, is just as little in accordance with
the facts as the further view that the “night of the Middle Ages“ came
down upon men because of this inroad of the barbarians.
It is this historical
lie which veils the annihilating influence of that nationless time, and
which turns into a destroyer the deliverer, the slayer of the laidly
worm.
For centuries the Teutons had been forcing their way into the Roman
Empire,
and though they often came as foes, they ended by becoming the sole
principle
of life and of might. Their gradual penetration into the Imperium,
their
gradual rise to a decisive power had taken place little by little just
as their gradual civilisation had done; * already in the fourth century
one could count numerous colonies of soldiers from entirely different
Teutonic
tribes (Batavians, Franks, Suevians, &c.) in the whole European
extent
of the
*
Hermann
is a Roman cavalier, speaks Latin fluently and has thoroughly studied
the
Roman art of administration. So, too, most of the Teutonic princes.
Their
troops, too, were at home in the whole Roman empire and so acquainted
with
the customs of so-called civilised men, long before they immigrated
with
all their goods and chattels into these lands.
322
THE CHAOS
Roman Empire; * in Spain, in Gaul, in
Italy,
in Thrace, indeed often even in Asia Minor, it is Teutons in the main
that
finally fight against Teutons. It was Teutonic peoples that so often
heroically
warded off the Asiatic peril from the Eastern Empire; it was Teutonic
people
that on the Catalaunian fields saved the Western Empire from being laid
waste by the Huns. Early in the third century a bold Gothic shepherd
had
been already proclaimed Emperor. One need only look at the map of the
end
of the fifth century to see at once what a uniquely beneficent moulding
power had here begun to assert itself. Very noteworthy too is the
difference
which reveals itself here in a hundred ways, between the innate
decency,
taste and intuition of rough but pure, noble races and the mental
barbarism
of civilised mestizos. Theodosius, his tools (the Christian fanatics)
and
his successors had done their best to destroy the monuments of art; on
the other hand, the first care of Theodoric, the Eastern Goth, was to
take
strong measures for the protection and restoration of the Roman
monuments.
This man could not write, to sign his name he had to use a metal
stencil,
but the Beautiful, which the bastard souls in their “Culture,“ in their
hunting after offices and distinctions, in their greed of gold had
passed
by unheeded, the Beautiful, which to the nobler souls among the Chaos
of
Peoples was a hateful work of the devil, the Goth at once knew how to
appreciate;
the sculptures of Rome excited his admiration to such a degree that he
appointed a special official to protect them. Religious toleration,
too,
appeared for a time wherever the still unspoiled Teuton became master.
Soon also there came upon the scene the great Christian missionaries
from
the highlands of the north, men who convinced not by means of “pious
lies“
but by the purity of their hearts.
It is nothing but
a false conception of the Middle Ages,
* See
Gobineau: Inequality of the Human races, Bk. VI. chap. iv.
323 THE
CHAOS
in conjunction with ignorance as to
the significance of race, which is responsible for the regrettable
delusion
that the entry upon the scene of the rough Teutons meant the falling of
a pall of night over Europe. It is inconceivable that such
hallucinations
should be so long-lived. If we wish to know to what lengths the bastard
culture of the Empire might have led, wo must study the history, the
science
and the literature of the later Byzantium, a study to which our
historians
are devoting themselves to-day with a patience worthy of a better
subject.
It is a sorry spectacle. The capture of the Western Roman Empire by the
Barbarians, on the contrary, works like the command of the Bible, “Let
there be Light.“ It is admitted that its influence was mainly in the
direction
of politics rather than of civilisation; and a difficult task it was —
one that is even now not wholly accomplished. But was it a small
matter?
Whence does Europe draw its physiognomy and its significance — whence
its
intellectual and moral preponderance, if not from the foundation and
development
of Nations? This work was in very truth the redemption from chaos. If
we
are something to-day — if we may hope perhaps some day to become
something
more — we owe it in the first instance to that political upheaval
which,
after long preparation, began in the fifth century, and from which were
born in the fulness of time new noble races, new beautiful languages,
and
a new culture entitling us to nourish the keenest hopes for the future.
Dietrich of Berne, the strong wise man, the unlearned friend of art and
science, the tolerant representative of Freedom of Conscience in the
midst
of a world in which Christians were tearing one another to pieces like
hyenas, was as it were a pledge that Day might once more break upon
this
poor earth. In the time of wild struggle that followed, during that
fever
by means of which alone European humanity could recover and awaken from
the hideous
324 THE
CHAOS
dream of the degenerate curse-laden
centuries of a chaos with a veneer of order to a fresh, healthy,
stormily
pulsing national life — in such a time learning and art and the tinsel
of a so-called civilisation might well be almost forgotten, but this,
we
may swear, did not mean Night, but the breaking of a new Day. It is
hard
to say what authority the scribblers have for honouring only their own
weapons. Our European world is first and foremost the work not of
philosophers
and book-writers and painters, but of the great Teuton Princes, the
work
of warriors and statesmen. The progress of development — obviously the
political development out of which our modern nations have sprung — is
the one fundamental and decisive matter. We must not, however, overlook
the fact that to these true and noble men we equally owe everything
else
that is worth possessing. Every one of those centuries, the seventh,
the
eighth, the ninth, produced great scholars; but the men who protected
and
encouraged them were the Princes. It is the fashion to say that it was
the Church that was the saviour of science and of culture; that is only
true in a restricted sense. As I shall show in the next division of the
first part of this book, we must not look upon the Early Christian
Church
as a simple, uniform organism, not even within the limits of the Roman
union in Western Europe; the centralisation and obedience to Rome which
we have lived to see to-day, were in earlier centuries absolutely
unknown.
We must admit that almost all learning and art were the property of the
Church; her cloisters and schools were the retreats and nurseries in
which
in those rough times peaceful intellectual work sought refuge; but the
entry into the Church as monk or secular priest meant little more than
being accepted into a privileged and specially protected class, which
imposed
upon the favoured individual hardly any return in the way of special
duties.
Until the thirteenth century every educated
325
THE CHAOS
man, every teacher and student, every
physician and professor of jurisprudence belonged to the clergy: but
this
was a matter of pure formality, founded exclusively upon certain legal
conditions; and it was out of this very class, that is, out of the men
who best knew the Church, that every revolution against her arose — it
was the Universities that became the high-schools of national
emancipation.
The Princes protected the Church, the learned clerics on the contrary
attacked
her. That is the reason why the Church waged unceasing war against the
great intellects which, that they might work in peace, had sought
refuge
with her; had she had her way, science and culture would never again
have
been fledged. But the same Princes who protected the Church also
protected
the scholars whom she persecuted. No later than the ninth century there
arose in the far north (out of the schools of England, which even in
those
early days were rich in important men) the great Scotus Erigena: the
Church
did all that she could to extinguish this brilliant light, but Charles
the Bald, the same man who was supposed to have sent great tribute to
the
Pope of Rome, stretched his princely hand over Scotus; when this became
insufficient, Alfred bade him to England where he raised the school of
Oxford to a pinnacle of success, till he was stabbed to death by monks
at the bidding of the central government of the Church. From the ninth
century to the nineteenth, from the murder of Scotus to the issue of
the
Syllabus, it has been the same story. A final judgment shows the
intellectual
renaissance to be the work of Race in opposition to the universal
Church
which knows no Race, the work of the Teuton's thirst for knowledge, of
the Teuton's national struggle for freedom. Great men in uninterrupted
succession have arisen from the bosom of the Catholic Church; men to
whom,
as we must acknowledge, the peculiar catholic order of thought with its
all-embracing
326
THE CHAOS
greatness, its harmonious structure,
its symbolical wealth and beauty has given birth, making them greater
than
they could have become without it; but the Church of Rome, purely as
such,
that is to say, as an organised secular theocracy, has always behaved
as
the daughter of the fallen Empire, as the last representative of the
universal,
anti-national Principle. Charlemagne by himself did more for the
diffusion
of education and knowledge than all the monks in the world. He caused a
complete collection to be made of the national poetry of the Teutons.
The
Church destroyed it. I spoke a little while ago of Alfred. What Prince
of the Church, what schoolman, ever did so much for the awakening of
new
intellectual powers, for the clearing up of living idioms, for the
encouragement
of national consciousness (so necessary at that time), as this one
Prince?
The most important recent historian of England has summed up the
personality
of this great Teuton in the one sentence: “Alfred was in truth an
artist.“
* Where, in the Chaos of Peoples, was the man of whom the same could
be
said? In those so-called dark centuries the farther we travel
northward,
that is to say, the farther from the focus of a baleful “culture,“ and
the purer the races with which we meet, the more activity do we find in
the intellectual life. A literature of the noblest character, side by
side
with a freedom and order worthy of the dignity of man, develops itself
from the ninth to the thirteenth century in the far-away republic of
Iceland;
in the same way, in remote England, during the seventh, eighth and
ninth
centuries we find a true popular poetry flourishing as it seldom has
done
since. † The passionate love of music which then came to light touches
us as though we heard the beating of the wings of a guardian angel sent
down from heaven, an angel heralding the
*
Green:
History
of the English People, Bk. I. c. iii.
†
Olive
F. Emerson: History of the English Language, p. 54.
327
THE CHAOS
future. When we hear King Alfred taking
part in the songs of his chosen choir — when a century later we see the
passionate scholar and statesman Dunstan never, whether on horseback or
in the Council Chamber, parted from his harp: then we call to mind the
old Grecian legend that Harmonia was the daughter of Ares the God of
War.
Fighting, in lieu of a sham order, was what our wild ancestors brought
with them, but at the same time they brought creative power instead of
dreary barrenness. And as a matter of fact in all the more important
Princes
of that time we find a specially developed power of imagination: they
were
essentially fashioners. We should be perfectly justified were we to
compare
what Charlemagne was and did at the end of the eighth and beginning of
the ninth centuries, with what Goethe did at the end of the eighteenth
and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Both rode a tilt against the
Powers of Chaos, both were artists; both “avowed themselves as
belonging
to the race which out of darkness is striving to reach the light.“
No! and a thousand
times no! The annihilation of that monstrosity, a State without a
nation,
of that empty form, of that soulless congeries of humanity, that union
of mongrels bound together only by a community of taxes and
superstitions,
not by a common origin and a common heart-beat, of that crime against
the
race of mankind which we have summed up in the definition “Chaos of
Peoples“
— that does not mean the falling darkness of night, but the salvation
of
a great inheritance from unworthy hands, the dawn of a new day.
Yet even to this
hour we have not succeeded in purging our blood of all the poisons of
that
Chaos. In wide domains the Chaos ended by retaining the upper hand.
Wherever
the Teuton had not a sufficient majority physically to dominate the
rest
of the inhabitants by assimilation, as, for instance, in the south,
there
the
328
THE CHAOS
chaotic element asserted itself more
and more. We have but to look at our present position to see where
power
exists and where it is wanting, and how this depends upon the
composition
of races. I am not aware whether any one has already observed with what
peculiar exactitude the modern boundary of the universal Church of Rome
corresponds with what I have pointed out as the general boundary of the
Roman Imperium, and consequently of the chaotic mongreldom. To the east
I admit that the line does not hold good, because here in Servia,
Bosnia,
&c., the Slavonic invaders of the eighth century and the Bulgarians
annihilated everything foreign; in few districts of modern Europe is
Race
so uncontaminated, and the pure Slavs have never accepted the Church of
Rome. In other places too there have been encroachments on both sides
of
the old boundary-line, but these have been unimportant, and moreover
easily
explained by political relations. On the whole the agreement is
sufficiently
striking to give rise to serious thought: Spain, Italy, Gaul, the
Rhenish
provinces, and the countries south of the Danube! It is still morning,
and the powers of darkness are ever stretching out their polypus arms,
clinging to us with their powers of suction in a hundred places, and
trying
to drag us back into the Night out of which we were striving to escape.
We can arrive at a judgment upon these apparently confused, but really
transparent, conditions, not so much by poring over the details of
chronicles,
as by obtaining a clear insight into the fundamental historical facts
which
I have set out in this chapter.
End of page. Last
update: June 12th, 2004.
