In a similar way any form of human life, a group, institution, or idea, has a character, a correlation of complex tendencies, a _Motiv_, genius, soul or whatever you may choose to call it, which is the outcome of its past history and works on to new issues in the present situation. These things are very little understood. How a language will behave when it has new forms of life to interpret will depend, we understand, upon its “genius,” its historical organism of tendencies, but I presume the operation of this is seldom known in advance. And likewise with our country as it lives in the minds of the people, with our system of ideas about God and the church, or about plants and animals. These are real forms of life, intricate, fascinating, momentous, sure to behave in remarkable ways, but our understanding of this branch of natural history is very limited. The popular impression that nothing important can take place in human life without the human will being at the bottom of it is an illusion as complete as the old view that the universe revolved about our planet. Here is an example from Ruskin of the working of two styles of architecture in contact with each other. He says that the history of the early Venetian Gothic is “the history of the struggle of the Byzantine manner with a contemporary style [Gothic] quite as perfectly organized as itself, and far more energetic. And this struggle is exhibited partly in the gradual change of the Byzantine architecture into other forms, and partly by isolated examples of genuine Gothic taken prisoner, as it were, in the contest; or rather entangled among the enemy’s forces, and maintaining their ground till their friends came up to sustain them.” The reality of such struggles and adaptations cannot be gainsaid by any one acquainted with the history of art, nor the fact that they are the outworking of complex antecedent tendencies. But I suppose that all the individual builder perceived of this conflict was that men from the north were making window-mouldings and other details in new forms which he could use, if they pleased him, instead of other forms to which he had been accustomed. Of either style as an organic whole with more or less energy he probably knew nothing. But they were there, just as real and active as two contending armies.[1]