For cottage and castle are _buildings in which_ art, and, specifically, imitative art, is _made and done_, the home of Vedic, Homeric and Germanic epos, of the songs of heroes, the dance of boors and that of lords and ladies, of the minstrel’s lay. The cathedral, on the other hand, _is_ art, and, moreover, the only art by which _nothing_ is imitated; it alone is pure tension of persistent forms, pure three- dimensional logic that expresses itself in edges and surfaces and volumes. But the art of villages and castles is derived from the inclinations of the moment, from the laughter and high spirit of feasts and games, and to such a degree is it dependent on Time, so much is it a thing of occasion, that the troubadour obtains his very name from finding, while Improvisation—as we see in the Tzigane music to-day—is nothing but race manifesting itself to alien senses under the influence of the hour. To this free creative power all spiritual art opposes the strict _school_ in which the individual—in the hymn as in the work of building and carving—is the servant of a logic of timeless forms, and so in all Cultures the seat of its style-history is in its early cult architecture. In the castle it is the life and not the structure that possesses style. In the town the plan is an image of the destinies of a people, whereas the silhouette of emergent spires and cupolas tells of the _logic in the builders’ world-picture_, of the “first and last things” of their universe. In the architecture of the living, stone _serves a_ worldly _purpose_, but in the architecture of the cult _it is a symbol_.[226] Nothing has injured the history of the great architectures so much as the fact that it has been regarded as the history of architectural techniques instead of as that of architectural ideas which took their technical expression- means as and where they found them. It has been just the same with the history of musical instruments,[227] which also were developed on a foundation of tone-language. Whether the groin and the flying buttress and the squinch-cupola were imagined specially for the great architectures or were expedients that lay more or less ready to hand and were taken into use, is for art-history a matter of as little importance as the question of whether, technically, stringed instruments originated in Arabia or in Celtic Britain. It may be that the Doric column was, as a matter of workmanship, borrowed from the Egyptian temples of the New Empire, or the late-Roman domical construction from the Etruscans, or the Florentine court from the North-African Moors. Nevertheless the Doric peripteros, the Pantheon, and the Palazzo Farnese belong to wholly different worlds—they subserve the artistic expression of the prime- symbol in three different Cultures. ----- Footnote 210: See Vol. II, pp. 135 et seq. Footnote 211: