that the great Cultures are entities, primary or original, that arise out of the deepest foundations of spirituality, and that the peoples under the spell of a Culture are, alike in their inward form and in their whole manifestation, its products and not its authors. These shapes in which humanity is seized and moulded possess style and style-history no less than kinds of art and modes of thought. The people of Athens is a symbol not less than the Doric temple, the Englishman not less than modern physics. There are peoples of Apollinian, Magian, Faustian cast. The Arabian Culture was not created by "the Arabs" — quite the contrary; for the Magian Culture begins in the time of Christ, and the Arabian people represents its last great creation of that kind, a community bonded by Islam as the Jewish and Persian communities before it had been bonded by their religions. World-history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these Cultures fulfil their Destinies.
In each of these Cultures, Mexican and Chinese, Indian and Egyptian, there is — whether our science is aware of it or not — a group of great peoples of identical style, which arises at the beginning of the springtime, forming states and carrying history, and throughout the course of its evolution bears its fundamental form onward to the goal. They are in the highest degree unlike amongst themselves — it is scarcely possible to conceive of a sharper contrast than that between Athenians and Spartans, Germans and Frenchmen, Tsin and Tsu — and all military history shows national hatred as the loftiest method of inducting historic decisions. But the moment that a people alien to the Culture makes an appearance in the field of history, there awakens everywhere an overpowering feeling of spiritual relationship, and the notion of the barbarian — meaning the man who inwardly does not belong to the Culture — is as clear-cut in the peoples of the Egyptian settlements and the Chinese world of states as it is in the Classical. The energy of the form is so high that it grasps and recasts neighbouring peoples, witness the Carthaginians of Roman times with their half-Classical style, and the Russians who have figured as a people of Western style from Catherine the Great to the fall of Petrine Tsardom.
Peoples in the style of their Culture we will call Nations, the word itself distinguishing them from the forms that precede and that follow them. It is not merely a strong feeling of "we" that forges the inward unity of its most significant of all major associations; underlying the nation there is an Idea. This stream of a collective being possesses a very deep relation to Destiny, to Time, and to History, a relation that is different in each instance and one, too, that determines the relation of the human material to race, language, land, state, and religion. As the styles of the Old Chinese and the Classical peoples differ, so also the styles of their histories.
Life as experienced by primitive and by fellaheen peoples is just the zoölogical up-and-down, a planless happening without goal or cadenced march in
