of the house changes also. To the Classical mode of housing corresponds the agnate family of Classical style. This is ever more sharply defined in Hellenic city-law than in the later Roman.[1] It refers entirely to the Estate as present in a Euclidean here-and-now, just as the Polis is conceived as an aggregate of bodies availably present. Blood-relationship, therefore, is neither necessary nor sufficient for it; it ceases at the limit of patria potestas, of the "house." The mother as such is not agnatically related to the offspring of her own body; only in so far as, like them, she is subject to the patria potestas of her living husband is she the agnatic sister of her children.[2] To the "Consensus," on the other hand, corresponds the Magian cognate family (Hebrew, "Mishpasha") which is representatively extended by both the paternal and the maternal blood-relationships, and possesses a "spirit," a little consensus, of its own, but no special head.[3] It is significant of the extinction of the Classical soul and the unfolding of the Magian that the "Roman" law of Imperial times gradually passes from agnatio to cognatio. Justinian's 118th and 127th novels reforming the law of inheritance affirm the victory of the Magian family-idea.[4]
On the other side, we see masses of individual beings streaming past, growing and passing, but making history. The purer, deeper, stronger, more taken-for-granted the common beat of these sequent generations is, the more blood, the more race they have. Out of the infinite they rise, every one with its soul,[5] bands that feel themselves in the common wave-beat of their being, as a whole — not mind-communities like orders, craft-guilds, or schools of learning, which are linked by common truths, but blood-confederates in the mêlée of fighting life.
There are streams of being which are "in form" in the same sense in which the term is used in sports. A field of steeplechasers is "in form" when the legs swing surely over the fences, and the hoofs beat firmly and rhythmically on the flat. When wrestlers, fencers, ball-players are "in form," the riskiest acts and moves come off easily and naturally. An art-period is in form when its tradition is second nature, as counterpoint was to Bach. An army is in form when it is like the army of Napoleon at Austerlitz and the army of Moltke at Sedan. Practically everything that has been achieved in world-history, in war and in that continuation of war by intellectual means[6] that we call politics;
- ↑ Mitteis, Reichsrecht und Volksrecht (1891), p. 63.
- ↑ Sohm, Institutionen (1911), p. 614. [Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, pp. 540-1. — Tr.]
- ↑ This principle formed the basis of the dynastic-idea of the Arabian world (Ommayads, Comneni, Sassanids), which is so hard for us to grasp. When a usurper had seized a throne, he hastened to marry one or another of the female members of the blood-community and so prolonged the dynasty; of law-made succession rights there was no question, nor under this idea could there be. (See also J. Wellhausen, Ein Gemeinwesen ohne Obrigkeit, (1900).
- ↑ See Ency. Brit., XI ed., Vol. XXIII, p. 574. — Tr.
- ↑ See p. 18.
- ↑ An inversion of Clausewitz's famous expression that war is a continuation of policy by other means. (On War, I, i, § 24). — Tr.
