Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/487

Rh Economics and politics are sides of the one livingly flowing current of being, and not of the waking-consciousness, the intellect. In each of them is manifested the pulse of the cosmic flowings that are occluded in the sequent generations of individual existences. They may be said, not to have history, but to be history. Irreversible Time, the When, rules in them. They belong, both of them, to race and not, as religion and science belong, to language with its spatial-causal tensions; they regard facts, not truths. There are economic Destinies as there are political, whereas in scientific doctrines, as in religious, there is timeless connexion of cause and effect.

Life, therefore, has a political and an economic kind of "condition" of fitness for history. They overlie, they support, they oppose each other, but the political is unconditionally the first. Life's will is to preserve itself and to prevail, or, rather, to make itself stronger in order that it may prevail. But in the economic state of fitness the being-streams are fit as self-regarding, whereas in a political they are fit as other-regarding. And this holds good all along the series, from the simplest unicellular plant to swarms and to peoples of the highest free mobility in space. Nourishment and winning-through — the difference of dignity between the two sides of life is recognizable in their relation to death. There is no contrast so profound as that between hunger-death and hero-death. Economically life is in the widest sense threatened, dishonoured, and debased by hunger — with which is to be included stunting of possibilities, straitened circumstances, darkness, and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. Whole peoples have lost the tense force of their race through the gnawing wretchedness of their living. Here men die of something and not for something. Politics sacrifices men for an idea, they fall for an idea; but economy merely wastes them away. War is the creator; hunger the destroyer, of all great things. In war life is elevated by death, often to that point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory, but in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, vulgar, and wholly unmetaphysical sort of fearfulness for one's life under which the higher form-world of a Culture miserably collapses and the naked struggle for existence of the human beasts begins.

The double sense of all history that is manifested in man and woman has been discussed in an earlier chapter. There is a private history which represents "life in space" as a procreation-series of the generations, and a public history that defends and secures it as a political "in-form"-ness — the "spindle side" and the "sword side" of being. They find expression in the ideas of Family and of State, but also in the primary form of the house wherein the good spirits of the marriage-bed — the Genius and the Juno of every old Roman dwelling — were protected by that of the door, the Janus. To this private history of the family