Throughout the nineteenth century the scientific picture of history was vitiated by a notion that was either derived from, or at any rate brought to a point by, Romanticism--the idea of the “People” in the moral-enthusiastic sense of the word. If, here and there, in earlier time a new religion, a new ornamentation, a new architecture, or a new script appeared, the question that it raised presented itself to the investigator thus--What was the name of the _people_ who produced the phenomenon? This enunciation of the problem is peculiar to the Western spirit and the present-day cast of that spirit; but it is so false at every point that the picture that it evokes of the course of events must necessarily be erroneous. “The people” as the absolute basic form in which men are historically effective, the original home, the original settlement, the migrations of “the” peoples--all this is a reflection of the vibrant idea expressed in the “_Nation_” of 1789, of the “_Volk_” of 1813, both of which, in last analysis, are derived from the self-assuredness of England and Puritanism. But the very intensity of passion that the idea contains has protected it only too well from criticism. Even acute investigators have unwittingly made it cover a multitude of utterly dissimilar things, with the result that “peoples” have developed into definite and supposedly well-understood unit-quantities by which all history is _made_. For us, to-day, world-history means--what it cannot be asserted to mean self-evidently, or to mean for, e.g., the Greeks and the Chinese--the history of Peoples. Everything else, Culture, speech, wit, religion, is created by the peoples. The State is the form of a people. The purpose of this chapter is to demolish this romantic conception. What has inhabited the earth since the Ice Age is man, not “peoples.” In the first instance, their Destiny is determined by the fact that the bodily succession of parents and children, the bond of the blood, forms natural groups, which disclose a definite tendency to take root in a landscape. Even nomadic tribes confine their movements within a limited field. Thereby the cosmic-plantlike side of life, of Being, is invested with a character of duration. This I call _race_. Tribes, septs, clans, families--all these are designations for the fact of a blood which circles, carried on by procreation, in a narrow or a wide landscape. But these human beings possess also the microcosmic-animal side of life, in waking-consciousness and receptivity and reason. And the form in which the waking-consciousness of one man gets into relation with that of another I call _language_, which begins by being a mere unconscious living expression that is received as a sensation, but gradually develops into a conscious _technique of communication_ that depends upon a common sense of the meanings attaching to signs.