in all successful diplomacy, tactics, strategy; in the competition of states or social classes or parties; has been the product of living unities that found themselves "in form."
The word for race- or breed-education is "training" (Zucht, Züchtung), as against the shaping (Bildung) which creates communities of waking-conciousness on a basis of uniform teachings or beliefs. Books, for example, are shaping agents, while the constant felt pulse and harmony of milieu into which one feels oneself, lives oneself — like a novice or a page of early Gothic times — are training influences. The "good form" and ceremonies of a given society are sense-presentations of the beat of a given species of Being, and to master them one must have the beat of them. Hence women, as more instinctive and nearer to cosmic rhythms, adapt themselves more readily than men to the forms of a new milieu. Women from the bottom strata move in elegant society with entire certainty after a few years — and sink again as quickly. But men alter slowly, because they are more awake and aware. The proletarian man never becomes wholly an aristocrat, the aristocrat never wholly a proletarian — only in the sons does the beat of the new milieu make its appearance.
The profounder the form, the stricter and more repellent it is. To the outsider, therefore, it appears to be a slavery; the member, on the contrary, has a perfect and easy command of it. The Prince de Ligne was, no less than Mozart, master of the form and not its slave; and the same holds good of every born aristocrat, statesman, and captain.
In all high Cultures, therefore, there is a peasantry, which is breed, stock, in the broad sense (and thus to a certain extent nature herself), and a society which is assertively and emphatically "in form." It is a set of classes or Estates, and no doubt artificial and transitory. But the history of these classes and estates is world-history at highest potential. It is only in relation to it that the peasant is seen as historyless. The whole broad and grand history of these six millennia has accomplished itself in the life-courses of the high Cultures, because these Cultures themselves placed their creative foci in Estates possessing breed and training, and so in the course of fulfilment became trained and bred. A Culture is Soul that has arrived at self-expression in sensible forms, but these forms are living and evolving.[1] Their matrix is in the intensified Being of individuals or groups — that is, in that which I have just called Being "in form." And when, and not until, this Being is sufficiently formed to that high rightness, it becomes representative of a representable Culture.[2]
This Culture is not only a grand thing, but wholly unlike any other thing in the organic world. It is the one point at which man lifts himself above the powers of Nature and becomes himself a Creator. Even as to race, breed,
- ↑ Not excluding art, although we are not conscious of them save through deduction from art-history.
- ↑ Original: "Sie liegen im gesteigerten Dasein von Einzelnen und Kreisen, eben in dem, was soeben 'Dasein in Form' genannt worden ist, und durch diese Höhe des Geformtseins erst die Kultur repräsentirt."
