Here, then, I lay it down that _Imperialism_, of which petrifacts such as the Egyptian empire, the Roman, the Chinese, the Indian may continue to exist for hundreds or thousands of years—dead bodies, amorphous and dispirited masses of men, scrap-material from a great history—is to be taken as the typical symbol of the passing away. Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated. In this phenomenal form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. The energy of culture-man is directed inwards, that of civilization-man outwards. And thus I see in Cecil Rhodes the first man of a new age. He stands for the political style of a far-ranging, Western, Teutonic and especially German future, and his phrase “expansion is everything” is the Napoleonic reassertion of the indwelling tendency of _every_ Civilization that has fully ripened— Roman, Arab or Chinese. It is not a matter of choice—it is not the conscious will of individuals, or even that of whole classes or peoples that decides. The expansive tendency is a doom, something daemonic and immense, which grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind of the world-city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware.[33] Life is the process of effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are _only extensive_ possibilities.[34] Hard as the half-developed Socialism of to-day is fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch- expansionist with all the vehemence of destiny. Here the form-language of politics, as the direct intellectual expression of a certain type of humanity, touches on a deep metaphysical problem—on the fact, affirmed in the grant of unconditional validity to the causality-principle, that _the soul is the complement of its extension_. When, between 480 and 230,[35] the Chinese group of states was tending towards imperialism, it was entirely futile to combat the principle of Imperialism (Lien-heng), practised in particular by the “Roman” state of Tsin[36] and theoretically represented by the philosopher Dschang Yi, by ideas of a League of Nations (Hoh-tsung) largely derived from Wang Hü, a profound sceptic who had no illusions as to the men or the political possibilities of this “late” period. Both sides opposed the anti- political idealism of Lao-tse, but as between themselves it was Lien- heng and not Hoh-tsung which swam with the natural current of expansive Civilization.[37]