Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/363

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD
347

School. Further, and lastly, there is a sort of estrangement from the world which is the profane echo of the Gothic flight from it, and leads to an almost complete disregard of the life in public and the forms of good society — little "breeding," much too much "shaping." Nobility, even in its later ramifications — the judge, the squire, the officer — still retains the old root-strong natural satisfaction in carrying on the stock, in possessions and honour, but the scientist counts these things as little beside the possession of a pure scientific conscience and the carrying on of a method or a view unimpaired by the commercialism of the world. The fact that the savant to-day has ceased to be remote from the world, and puts his science at the service of (not seldom, indeed, most shrewdly applies it to) technics and money-making, is a sign that the pure type is entering upon its decline and that the great age of intellectual optimism that is livingly expressed in him belongs already to the past.

In sum, we see that the Estates have a natural build which in its evolution and action forms the basic structure of every Culture's life-course. No specific decision made it; revolutions only alter it when they are forms of the evolution and not results of some private will. It never, in its full cosmic significance, enters the consciousness of men as doers and thinkers, because it lies too deep in human being to be other than a self-evident datum. It is merely from the surface that men take the catchwords and causes over which they fight on that side of history which theory regards as horizontally layered, but which in actuality is an aggregate of inseparable interpenetrations. First, nobility and priesthood arise out of the open landscape, and figure the pure symbolism of Being and Waking-Being, Time and Space. Then out of the one under the aspect of booty, and out of the other under the aspect of research, there develop doubled types of lower symbolic force, which in the urban Late periods rise to prepotency in the shapes of economy and science. In these two being-streams the ideas of Destiny and Causality are thought out to their limit, unrelentingly and anti-traditionally. Forces emerge which are separated by a deadly enmity from the old class-ideals of heroism and saintliness — these forces are money and intellect, and they are related to those ideals as the city to the country. Henceforward property is called riches, and world-outlook knowledge — a desanctified Destiny and a profane Causality. But science is in contradiction with Nobility too, for this does not prove or investigate, but is. "De omnibus dubitandum" is the attitude of a burgher and not of an aristocrat, while at the same time it contradicts the basic feeling of priesthood, for which the proper rôle of critique is that of a handmaid. Economy, too, finds an enemy here, in the shape of the ascetic moral which rejects money-getting, just as the genuine land-based nobility despises it. Even the old merchant-nobility has in many cases perished (e.g., Hanse Towns, Venice, Genoa), because with its traditions it could not and would not fall in with the business outlook of the big city. And, with all this, economy and science are themselves