Of all expressions of race, the purest is the House. From the moment when man, becoming sedentary, ceases to be content with mere shelter and builds himself a dwelling, this expression makes its appearance and marks off, within the race “man” (which is the element of the _biological_ world-picture[165]) the human races of world-history proper, which are streams of being of far greater spiritual significance. The prime form of the house is everywhere a product of feeling and of growth, never at all of knowledge. Like the shell of the nautilus, the hive of the bee, the nest of the bird, it has an innate self-evidentness, and every trait of original custom and form of being, of marriage, of family life, and of tribal order is reflected in the place and in the room-organization of parterre, hall, wigwam, atrium, court, chamber, and gynæceum. One need only compare the lay-out of the old Saxon and that of the Roman house to feel that the soul of the men and the soul of the house were in each case identical. This domain art-history ought never to have laid its hands on. It was an error to treat the building of the dwelling-house as a branch of the art of architecture. It is a form that arises in the obscure courses of being and not for the eye that looks for forms in the light; no room-scheme of the boor’s hovel was ever thought out by an architect as the scheme of a cathedral was thought out. This significant frontier line has escaped the observation of art-research--although Dehio[166] in one place remarks that the old German wooden house has nothing to do with the later great architecture, which arose quite independently--and the result has been a perpetual perplexity in method, of which the art-savant is sensible enough, but which he cannot understand. His science gathers, indiscriminately in all the “pre-” and “primitive” periods, all sorts of gear, arms, pottery, fabrics, funerary monuments, and houses, and considers them from the point of view of form as well as that of decoration; and, proceeding thus, it is not until he comes to the _organic_ history of painting, sculpture, and architecture (i.e., the self-contained and differentiated arts) that he finds himself on firm ground. But, unknowing, he has stepped over a frontier between two worlds, that of soul-_expression_ and that of visual expression-_language_. The house, and like it the completely unstudied basic (i.e., customary) forms of pots, weapons, clothing, and gear, belong to the Totem side. They characterize, not a taste, but a way of fighting, of dwelling, of working. Every primitive seat is the offset of a racial mode of body-posing, every jar-handle an extension of the supple arm. Domestic painting and dressmaking, the garment as ornament, the decoration of weapons and implements, belong, on the contrary, to the Taboo side of life, and indeed for primitive man the patterns and motives on these things possess even magical properties.[167] We all