side by side with the strong and natural satisfaction of winning battles and power and women, and the unbridled outbursts of joy and grief, anger, and love, the immense delight of "having." When Odysseus lands at home, the first thing he does is to count the treasures in his boat, and when, in the Icelandic Saga, the peasants Hjalmar and Ölvarod perceive each that the other has no goods in his ship, they abandon their duel at once — he who fights from pride and for honour is a fool for his pains. In the Indian hero-epic, eagerness for battle means eagerness for cattle, and the "colonizing" Greeks of the tenth century were primarily corsairs like the Normans. On the high seas an alien ship is a priori good prize. But out of the feuds of South-Arabian and Persian Knights of A.D. 200, and the "private wars" of the Provençal barons of A.D. 1200 — which were hardly more than cattle-raids — there developed at the end of the feudal period the war proper, the great war with acquisition of land and people as its object. All this, in the end, brings the aristocratic Culture to the "top of its form," while, correspondingly, priests and philosophers despise it.
As the Culture rises to its height, these two primary urges trend widely apart, and hostility develops between them. The history of this hostility is almost the same thing as world-history. From the feeling of power come conquest and politics and law; from that of spoil, trade and economy and money. Law is the property of the powerful. Their law is the law of all. Money is the strongest weapon of the acquiring: with it he subdues the world. Economics likes and intends a state that is weak and subservient to it. Politics demands that economic life shall adapt itself to and within the State — Adam Smith and Friedrich List, Capitalism and Socialism. All Cultures exhibit at the outset a war- and a trade-nobility, then a land- and a money-nobility, and finally a military and an economic war-management and a ceaseless struggle of money against law.
Equally, on the other hand, priesthood and learning separate out. Both are directed towards, not the factual, but the true; both belong to the Taboo side of life and to Space. Fear before death is the source, not merely of all religion, but of all philosophy and natural science as well. Now, however, there develops a profane Causality in contrast to the sacred. "Profane" is the new counter-concept to "religious," which so far had tolerated learning only as a handmaiden. The whole of Late criticism, its spirit, its method, its aims, are profane — and the Late theology, even, is no exception to the rule. But invariably, nevertheless, the learning of all Cultures moves in the forms of the preceding priesthood — thus showing that it is merely a product of the contradiction itself, and how dependent it is and remains, in every particular, upon the primary image. Classical science, therefore, lives in cult-communities of the Orphic style, such as the school of Miletus, the Pythagorean society, the medical schools of Croton and Cos, the Attic schools of the Academy, the Peripatos, and the Stoa, every one of whose leaders belongs to the type of the sacrificial priest and seer, and even the Roman legal schools of the Sabiniani
