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From the Cities and Peoples section concerning language and race in Spengler's Decline of the West
"A race has roots. Race and landscape belong together. Where a plant takes
root, there it dies also: There is certainly a sense in which we can, without
absurdity, work backwards from a race to its "home," but it is much more
important to realize that the race adheres permanently to this home with some
of its most essential characters of body and soul. H in that home the race
cannot now be found, this means that the race has ceased to exist. A race does
not migrate. Men migrate, and their successive generations are born in everchanging landscapes; but the landscape exercises Ii secret force upon the plantnature in them, and eventually the race-expression is completely transformed by
the extinction of the old and the appearance of a new one. Englishmen and
Germans did not migrate to America, but human beings migrated there,
Englishmen and Germans, and their descendants are Americans. It
has long been obvious that the soil of the Indians has made its mark upon them
- generation by generation they become more and more like the people they
eradicated. Gould llnd Baxter have shown that Whites of all races, Indians,
and Negroes have come to the same average in size of body and time of maturity
- and that so rapidly that Irish immigrants, arriving young and developing
very slowly, come under this power of the landscape within the same generation.
Boas has shown that the American-born children of long-headed Sicilian and
short-headed German Jews at once conform to the same head-type. This is not a
special case, but a general phenomenon, and it should serve to make us very
. cautious in dealing with those migrations of history about which we know
nothing more than some names of vagrant tribes and relics of languages (e.g.,
Danai, Etruscans, Pelasgi, Achreans, and Dorians). As to the race of these
"peoples" we Can conclude nothing whatever. That which flowed into the
lands of southern Europe under the diverse names of Goths, Lombards, and
Vandals was without doubt a race in itself. But already by Renaissance times
it had completely grown itself into the root characters of the Proven~, Castilian, and Tuscan soil."
"Obviously, the chaotic in the total expression of the human body is not in
the least realized. Quite apart from smell (which for the Chinese, for example, is a most characteristic mark of race) and sound (the sound of speech, song,
and, above all, laughter, which enables us accurately to sense deep differences
inaccelsible to scientific method) the profusion of images before the eye is so
embarrassingly rich in details, either actually visible or sensible to the inner
vision, that the possibility of marshalling them under a few aspects is simply
unthinkable. And all these sides to the picture, all these traits composing it,
are independent of one another and have each their individual history. There
are Cases in which the bony structure (and particularly the skull-form) completely alter without the expression of the fleshy parts - i.e., the face - becoming different. The brothers and sisters of the same family may all present
almost every differentia posited by Blumenbach, Miiller, and Huxley, and yet
the identity of their living race-expression may be patent to anyone w~o looks
at them. Still more frequent is similarity of bodily build accompanied by
thorough diversity of living expression - I need only mention the immeasurable difference between genuine peasant-stock, like the Frisians or the Bretons,
and genuine city-stock.1 But besides the energy of the blood - which coins
the same living features ("family" traits) over and over again for centuriesand the power of the soil - evidenced in its stamp of man - there is that
mysterious cosmic force of the syntony of close human connexions. What is
called the "Vemhen" of a pregnant woman 2 is only a particular and not very
important instance of the workings of a very deep and powerful formative
principle inherent in all that is of the race side. It is a matter of common
observation that elderly married people become strangely like one another,
although probably Science with its measuring instruments would "prove"
the exact opposite. It is impossible to exaggerate the formative power of this
living pulse, this strong inward feeling for the perfection of one's own type.
The feeling for race-beauty - so opposite to the conscious taste of ripe urbans
for intellectual-individual traits of beauty - is immensely strong in primitive
men, and for that very reason never emerges into their consciousness. But
such a feeling is race-forming. It undoubtedly moulded the warrior- and herotype of a nomad tribe more and more definitely on one bodily ideal, so that it
would have been quite unambiguous to speak of the race-figure of Romans or
Ostrogoths. The same is true of any ancient nobility - filled with a strong
and deep sense of its own unity, it achieves the formation of a bodily ideal.
Comradeship breeds races. French noblesse and Prussian Landadel are genuine
race-denotations. But it is just this, too, that has bred the types of the European Jew, with his immense race-energy and his thousand years of ghetto life;
and it always will forge a population into a race whenever it has stood for long
together spiritually firm and united in the presence of its Destiny. Where a
race-ideal exists, as it does, supremely, in the Early period of the Culture of the Vedic, the Homeric, the knightly times of the Hohenstaufen - the yearning of a ruling class towards this ideal, its will to be just Sq and not otherwise,
operates (quite independently of the choosing of wives) towards actualizing
this ideal and eventualy achieves it. Further, there is a statistical aspect of the
matter which has received far less attention than it should. For every human
being alive to-day there were a million ancestors even in A.D. I300 and ten
million in A.D. 1000. This means that every German now living, without
exception, is a blood-relative of every European of the age of the Crusades
and that the relationship becomes a hundred and a thousand times more intensely close as we narrow the limits of its field, so that within twenty generations or less the population of a land grows together into a single fulfilling;
and this, together with the choice and 'Toke of the blood that courses through
the generations, ever driving congeners into one another's arms, dissolving and
breaking marriages, evading or forcing all obstacles of custom, leads to innumerable procreations that in utter unconsciousness fulfill the will of the race."
Continued....
"Once more, it is the mysterious power of the soil, demonstrable at once in
every living being as soon as we discover a criterion independent of the heavy
hand of the Darwinian age. The Romans brought the vine from the South to
the Rhine, and there ill has certainly not visibly - i.e., botanically - changed.
But in this instance "race" can be determined in other ways. There is a soil~
born difference not merely between Southern and Northern, between Rhine
and Moselle wines, but even between the products of every different site on
every different hill-side; and the same holds good for every other high~grade
vegetable "race," such as tea and tobacco. Aroma, a genuine growth of the
country·side, is one of the hall~marks (all the more significant because they
cannot be measured) of true race. But noble races of men are differentiated in
just the same intellectual way as noble wines. There is a like element, only
sensible to the finest perceptions, a faint aroma in every form, that underneath
all higher Culture connects the Etruscans and the Renaissance in Tuscany,! and
the Sumerians, the Persians of 500 B.C., and the Persians of Islam on the Tigris.
None of this is accessible to a science that measures and weighs. It exists
for the feelings - with a plain certainty and at the first glance - but not
for the savant's treatment. And the conclusion to which I come is that Race,
like Time and Destiny, is a decisive element in every question of life, something
which everyone knows clearly and definitely so long as he does not try to set
himself to comprehend it by way of rational - i.e., soulless - dissection
and ordering. Race, Time, and Destiny belong together. But the moment
scientific thought approaches them, the word "Time" acquires the significance of a dimension, the word "Destiny" that of causal connexion, while Race,
for which even at that stage of scientific (we still retain a very sure feeling,
becomes an incomprehensible chaos of unconnected and heterogeneous characters that (under headings of land, period, culture, stock) interpenetrate
without end and without law. Some adhere toughly and permanently to a
stock and are transmissible; others glide over a population like mere cloudshadows; and many are, as it were, demons of the land, which possess everyone
who inhabits it for as long as he stays in it. Some expel one another, some
seek one another. A strict classification of races - the ambition of all ethnology - is impossible. The attempt is foredoomed from the start, as it contradicts this very essence of the racial, and every systematic lay-out always has
been and will be, inevitably, a falsification and misapprehension of the nature of
its subject. Race, in contrast to speech, is unsystematic through and through.
In the last resort every individual man and every individual moment of his
existence have their own race. And therefore the only mode of approach to the
Totem side is, not classification, but physiognomic fact."
last edit on
5/13/2019 9:50:24 AM
