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336 cosmic and microcosmic, which pervades all being that moves freely in space, underlies this dual existence also. Each is possible and necessary only through the other. The Homeric world maintained a conspiracy of hostile silence towards the Orphic, and in turn (as we see from the Pre-Socratics) the former became an object of anger and contempt for the latter. In Gothic times the reforming spirits set themselves with a sacred enthusiasm across the path of the Renaissance-natures. State and Church have never really come to equilibrium, and in the conflict of Empire and Papacy their opposition rose to an intensity only possible for Faustian man.

Of the two, moreover, it is the nobility that is the true Estate, the sum of blood and race, being-stream in the fullest imaginable form. And therefore nobility is a higher peasantry. Even in 1250 the West had a widespread proverb: "One who ploughs in the forenoon jousts in the afternoon," and it was quite usual for a knight to marry the daughter of a peasant. In contrast to the cathedral, the castle was a development, by way of the country noble's house of Frankish times, from the peasant-dwelling. In the Icelandic sagas peasants' crofts are besieged and stormed like castles. Nobility and peasantry are plantlike and instinctive, deep-rooted in the ancestral land, propagating themselves in the family tree, breeding and bred. In comparison with them the priesthood is essentially the counter-estate, the estate of negation, of non-race, of detachment from earth — of free, timeless, and historyless waking-consciousness. In every peasant village, in every peasant family from the Stone Age to the peaks of the Culture, world-history plays itself out in little. Substitute for peoples families, and for lands farms — still the ultimate meaning of their strivings is the same — the maintenance of the blood, the succession of the generations, the cosmic, woman, power. Macbeth and King Lear might perfectly well have been thought out as village tragedies — and the fact is a proof of their tragic truth. In all Cultures nobility and peasantry appear in forms of family descent, and language itself connects them with the sexes, through which life propagates itself, has history, and is history. And as woman is history, the inward rank of peasant and noble families is determined by how much of race their women have in them, how far they are Destiny. And, therefore, there is deep meaning in the fact that the purer and more race-pervaded world-history is, the more the stream of its public life passes into and adapts itself to the private lives of individual great families. This, of course, is the basis of the dynastic principle, and not only that, but the basis of the idea of world-historical personality. The existence of entire states comes to depend on a few private destinies, vastly magnified. The history of Athens in the fifth century is in the main that of the Alcmæonidæ, the history of Rome is that of a few families of the type of the Fabii or the Claudii. The history of states in the Baroque is, broadly speaking, that of the operations of Habsburg and Bourbon family-politics, and its crises take form as marriages and wars of succession. The history of Napoleon's