Never has the feeling of earth-boundness, of the plantwise-cosmic, expressed itself so powerfully as it did in the architecture of the petty early towns, which consisted of hardly more than a few streets about a market-place or a castle or a place of worship. Here, if anywhere, it is manifest that every grand style is itself plantlike. The Doric column, the Egyptian pyramid, the Gothic cathedral, _grow out of_ the ground, earnest, big with destiny, Being without waking-consciousness. The Ionic column, the buildings of the Middle Kingdom and those of the Baroque, calmly aware and conscious of themselves, free and sure, _stand on_ the ground. There, separated from the power of the land--cut off from it, even, by the pavement underfoot--Being becomes more and more languid, sensation and reason more and more powerful. Man becomes intellect, “free” like the nomads, whom he comes to resemble, but narrower and colder than they. “Intellect,” “_Geist_,” “_esprit_,” is the specific urban form of the understanding waking-consciousness. All art, all religion and science, become slowly intellectualized, alien to the land, incomprehensible to the peasant of the soil. With the Civilization sets in the climacteric. The immemorially old roots of Being are dried up in the stone-masses of its cities. And the free intellect--fateful word!--appears like a flame, mounts splendid into the air, and pitiably dies. III The new Soul of the City speaks a new language, which soon comes to be tantamount to the language of the Culture itself. The open land with its village-mankind is wounded; it no longer understands that language, it is nonplussed and dumb. All genuine style-history is played out in the cities. It is exclusively the city’s destiny and the life-experience of urban men that speaks to the eye in the logic of visible forms. The very earliest Gothic was still a growth of the soil and laid hold of the farmhouse with its inhabitants and its contents. But the Renaissance style flourished only in the Renaissance _city_, the Baroque only in the Baroque _city_--not to mention the wholly megalopolitan Corinthian column or Rococo. There was perhaps some quiet infiltration from these into the landscape; but the land itself was no longer capable of the smallest creative effort--only of dumb aversion. The peasant and his dwelling remained in all essentials Gothic, and Gothic it is to this day. The Hellenic _countryside_ preserved the geometric style, the Egyptian village the cast of the Old Kingdom.