Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/67

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THE GROUP OF THE HIGHER CULTURES
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days when notions having genuine symbolic force had ceased to be, and the only question was who should have the plain material power. The struggle for the Cæsar-title became steadily more and more negroid, and might have gone on century after century in increasingly primitive and, therefore, "eternal" forms.

These populations no longer possessed a soul. Consequently they could no longer have a history proper to themselves. At best they might acquire some significance as an object in the history of an alien Culture, and whatever deeper meaning this relation possessed would be derived entirely from the will of the alien Life. Any effective historical happening that does take place on the soil of an old Civilization acquires its consistency as a course of events from elsewhere and never from any part played in it by the man of that soil. And so once again we find ourselves regarding the phenomenon of "world-history" under the two aspects — life-courses of the great Cultures and relations between them.