and sowing; fire and metals are exploited, and the properties of inorganic nature made by technical processes serviceable for the conduct of life. All this is perfused with political-religious ethic and meaning, without its being possible distinctly to separate Totem and Taboo, hunger, soul-fear, sex-love, art, war, sacrificial rites, belief, and experience.
Wholly different from this, both in idea and in evolution, and sharply marked off in tempo and duration, are the economic histories of the high Cultures, each of which has its own economic style. To feudalism belongs the economy of the townless countryside. With the State ruled radially from cities appears the urban economy of money, and this rises, with the oncoming of the Civilization, into the dictature of money, simultaneously with the victory of world-city democracy. Every Culture has its own independently developed form-world. Bodily money of the Apollinian style (that is, the stamped coin) is as antithetical to relational money of the Faustian-dynamic style (that is, the booking of credit-units) as the Polis is to the State of Charles V. But the economic life, just like the social, forms itself pyramidally.[1] In the rustic underground a thoroughly primitive condition maintains itself almost unaffected by the Culture. The Late urban economy, which is already the activity of a resolute minority, looks down with steady contempt upon the pristine land-economy that continues all around it, while the latter in turn glares sulkily at the intellectualized style that prevails within the walls. Finally the cosmopolis brings in a Civilized world-economy, which radiates from very small nuclei within a few centres, and subjects the rest to itself as a provincial economy, while in the remoter landscapes thoroughly primitive ("patriarchal") custom often prevails still. With the growth of the cities the way of life becomes ever more artificial, subtle and complex. The great-city worker of Cæsar's Rome, of Haroun-al-Raschid's Baghdad, and of the present-day Berlin feels as self-evidently necessary much that the richest yeoman deep in the country regards as silly luxury, but this self-evident standard is hard to reach and hard to maintain. In every Culture the quantum of work grows bigger and bigger till at the beginning of every Civilization we find an intensity of economic life, of which the tensions are even excessive and dangerous, and which it is impossible to maintain for a long period. In the end a rigid, permanent-set condition is reached, a strange hotch-potch of refined-intellectual and crude-primitive factors, such as the Greeks found in Egypt and we have found in modern India and China — unless, of course, the crust is being disintegrated from below by the pressure of a young Culture, like the Classical in Diocletian's time.
Relatively to this economic movement, men are economically "in form" as an economic class, just as they are in form for world-history as a political Estate. Each individual has an economic position within the economic order just as he has a grade of some sort in the society. Now, both these kinds of allegiances
- ↑ See pp. 172 and 280.
