Primeval man is a _ranging_ animal, a being whose waking-consciousness restlessly feels its way through life, all microcosm, under no servitude of place or home, keen and anxious in its senses, ever alert to drive off some element of hostile Nature. A deep transformation sets in first with agriculture--for that is something _artificial_, with which hunter and shepherd have no touch. He who digs and ploughs is seeking not to plunder, but to _alter_ Nature. To plant implies, not to take something, but to produce something. _But with this, man himself becomes plant_--namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a new earth-boundness of being, a new feeling, pronounces itself. Hostile Nature becomes the friend; earth becomes _Mother_ Earth. Between sowing and begetting, harvest and death, the child and the grain, a profound affinity is set up. A new devoutness addresses itself in chthonian cults to the fruitful earth that grows up along with man. And as completed expression of this life-feeling, we find everywhere the _symbolic shape of the farmhouse_, which in the disposition of the rooms and in every line of external form tells us about the blood of its inhabitants. The peasant’s dwelling is the great symbol of settledness. It is itself plant, thrusts its roots deep into its “own” soil.[137] It is _property_ in the most sacred sense of the word. The kindly spirits of hearth and door, floor and chamber--Vesta, Janus, Lares and Penates--are as firmly fixed in it as the man himself. This is the condition precedent of every Culture, which itself in turn grows up out of a mother-landscape and renews and intensifies the intimacy of man and soil. What his cottage is to the peasant, that the town is to the Culture-man. As each individual house has its kindly spirits, so each town has its tutelary god or saint. The town, too, is a plantlike being, as far removed as a peasantry is from nomadism and the purely microcosmic. Hence the development of a high form-language is linked always to a landscape. Neither an art nor a religion can alter the site of its growth; only in the Civilization with its giant cities do we come again to despise and disengage ourselves from these roots. Man as civilized, as _intellectual nomad_, is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free _intellectually_ as hunter and herdsman were free sensually. “_Ubi bene, ibi patria_” is valid _before_ as well as _after_ a Culture. In the not-yet-spring of the Migrations it was a Germanic yearning--virginal, yet already maternal--that searched the South for a home in which to nest its future Culture. To-day, at the end of this Culture, the rootless intellect ranges over all landscapes and all possibilities of thought. But between these limits lies the time in which a man held a bit of soil to be something _worth dying for_.