“Through innumerable kinships, natures are knit together this way and that, until the world hangs in a web of frith. So man draws souls into his circle. For the present age, the war-cry is: rule. Be master of the earth, subdue creation is the watch-word running through our time, and it looks as if this commandment sympathetically strikes the heart-note of our culture and ever sets the pace not only for its actions but also for its speculations. All hypotheses anent past ages in the history of our race hinge on the assumption that man has made his way through an everlasting battle, and that civilization is the outcome of man's struggle for existence. But modern civilization with its cry for mastery and its view of life as a continuous strife is too narrow a base for hypotheses to make history intelligible. The evolutionary theory of an all-embracing struggle for food and survival is only an ætiological myth, as the ethnologists have it, a simple contrivance to explain modern European civilization by throwing our history, its competition and its exclusive interest in material progress back on the screen of the past. When ancient and primitive cultures are presented in the light of modern economical problems, all the proportions and perspectives are disturbed; some aspects are thrown into relief, other aspects are pushed into the shade, without regard to the harmony inherent in the moral and intellectual life of other peoples; and the view as a whole is far more falsified by such capricious playing of searchlights than by any wilful distorting of facts.” SoulNatureKinshipHeathenryFrith Book:The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2 Source: The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2
“The key-note of ancient culture is not conflict, neither is it mastery, but conciliation and friendship. Man strives to make peace with the animals, the trees and the powers that be, or deeper still, he wants to draw them into himself and make them kin of his kin, till he is unable to draw a fast line between his own life and that of the surrounding nature. Culture is too complex — and we may add too unprofitable — a thing to be explained by man's toil for the exigencies and sweets of life, and the play of his intellect and imagination has never —until recent times perhaps — been dominated by the quest of food or clothing. The struggle for daily bread and for the maintenance of life until the morrow is generally a very keen one in early society, and it seems that the exertion calls for the exercise of all faculties and powers. But as a creature struggling for food, man is a poor economist; at any rate he is a bad hand at limiting his expenditure of energy to the needs of the day. There is more than exertion in his work; there is an overshooting force, evidence that the energy which drives him is something more complex than the mere instinct of existence. He is urged on by an irresistible impulse to take up the whole of nature in himself, to make it, by his active sympathy, something human, to make it heore.” SoulSpiritCultureNatureConflictKinshipHeathen Book:The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2 Source: The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2