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Rh eternal forceful variety of life, which the creative power of the Culture elevates to the highest intensities, is a fact, and historically we have no choice but to accept it as such, with all that flows therefrom. Plant-life is only plant-life in relation to animal life; nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition one another. A people is only really such in relation to other peoples, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defence, hostility and war. War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.

A people shapes history inasmuch as it is "in condition" for the task of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history — which gets it into this "condition," in which alone it becomes creative — and an outward history, which consists in this creation. Peoples as State, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the world-as-history there is nothing beyond them. They are Destiny.

Res publica, the public life, the "sword side" of human being-currents, is in actuality invisible. The alien sees merely the men and not their inner connexion, for indeed this resides very deep in the stream of life, and even there is felt rather than understood. Similarly, we do not in actuality see the family, but only certain persons, whose cohesion in a perfectly definite sense we know and grasp by way of our own inward experience. But for each such mental picture there exists a group of constituent persons who are bound together as a life-unit by a like constitution of outer and inner being. This form in the flow of existence is called customary ethic (Sitte) when it arises of itself in the beat and march and is unconscious before it is conscious; and law (Recht) when it is deliberately stated and put forth for acceptance.

Law — irrespective of whether its authority derives from the feelings and impulse (unwritten law, customary law, English "equity") or has been abstracted by reflection, probed, and brought into system as Statute Law (Gesetz) — is the willed form of Being. The jural facts that it embraces are of the two kinds, though both possess time-symbolism — Care in two modes, prevision and provision — but, from the very difference in the proportions of consciousness that they respectively contain, it follows that throughout real history there must be two laws in opposition — the law of the fathers, of tradition, the inherited, grown, and well-tried law, sacrosanct because immemorially old, derived from the experience of the blood and therefore dependable; and the thought and planned law of reason, nature, and broad humanity, the product of reflection and therefore first cousin to mathematics, a law that may not be very workable, but is at any rate "just." It is in these two orders of law that the opposition between land-life and city-life, life-experience and study-experience, ripens till it bursts out in that revolutionary embitterment in which men take a law instead of being given it, and break a law that will not yield.

A law that has been laid down by a community expresses a duty for every