Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/20

4 THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

leaves which form and protect the young plant that is presently to turn towards the light, with its organs of the life-cycle and of reproduction, and in addition a third, which contains the future root and tells us that the plant is destined irrevocably to become once again part of a landscape. In the higher animals, on the contrary, we observe that the fertilized egg forms, in the first hours of its individualized existence, an outer sheath by which the inner containers of the cyclic and reproductive components i.e., the plant element in the animal body are enclosed and shut off from the mother body and all the rest of the world. This outer sheath symbolizes the essential character of animal existence and distinguishes the two kinds in which the Living has appeared on this earth. There are noble names for them, found and bequeathed by the Classical world. The plant is something cosmic, and the animal is additionally a micro- cosm in relation to a macrocosm. When, and not until, the unit has thus separated itself from the All and can define its position with respect to the All, it becomes thereby a microcosm. Even the planets in their great cycles are in servitude, and it is only these tiny worlds that move freely relative to a great one which appears in their consciousness as their world-around (environment). Only through this individualism of the microcosm does that which the light offers to its eyes - our eyes acquire meaning as "body," and even to planets we are from some inner motive reluctant to concede the property of bodiliness. All that is cosmic bears the hall-mark of periodicity; it has "beat" (rhythm, tact). All that is microcosmic possesses polarity; it possesses "tension."

We speak of tense alertness and tense thought, but all wakeful states are in their essence tensions. Sense and object, I and thou, cause and effect, thing and property - each of these is a tension between discretes, and when the state pregnantly called "détente" appears, then at once fatigue, and presently sleep, set in for the microcosmic side of life. A human being asleep, discharged of all tensions, is leading only a plantlike existence.

Cosmic beat, on the other hand, is everything that can be paraphrased in terms like direction, time, rhythm, destiny, longing. - from the hoof-beats of a team of thoroughbreds and the deep tread of proud marching soldiers to the silent fellowship of two lovers, the sensed tact that makes the dignity of a social assembly, and that keen quick judgment of a "judge of men" which I have already, earlier in this work,¹ called physiognomic tact.

This beat of cosmic cycles goes on notwithstanding the freedom of micro- cosmic movement in space, and from time to time breaks down the tension of the waking individual's being into the one grand felt harmony. If we have ever fol- lowed the flight of a bird in the high air - how, always in the same way, it rises, turns, glides, loses itself in the distance - we must have felt the plantlike certainty of the "it" and the "we" in this ensemble of motion, which needs no bridge of reason to unite your sense of it with mine. This is the meaning

1 For instance, Vol. I, p. 154. — Tr. -