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Just as, for the principle of family life, the earth, firm ground and soil, is the condition, so, for industry, the natural element that animates it outwardly is the sea. Amid the pursuit of acquisition, precisely by exposing it to danger, industry raises itself, at the same time, above that pursuit, and displaces the fixation on the clod of earth, and the limited circles of civil life, its enjoyments and desires, with the element of fluidity, danger, and destruction. Thus, further, through this greatest medium of connection, it brings distant lands into the relation of commerce — a legal relationship that introduces contract — in which commerce shows itself, at once, to be the greatest means of culture, and trade finds its world-historical significance.

That rivers are not natural boundaries, for which they are supposed, in more recent times, to have been asserted, but that they, and likewise the seas, rather connect human beings; that it is a mistaken thought when Horace says (Carmina I, 3):

… deus abscidit
Prudens Oceano dissociabili
Terras …¹

is shown not only by the river basins that are inhabited by a single tribe or people, but also, for example, by the otherwise similar relations of Greece, Ionia, and Magna Graecia, of Brittany and Britain, of Denmark and Norway, Sweden, Finland, Livonia, and so on — chiefly, too, in the contrast between the lesser connection of the inhabitants of the coastal land with those of the interior. |235| But for what a means of culture lies in connection with the sea, one may compare the relation, to the sea, of those nations in which industrial skill has flourished, with that of those which have forbidden themselves seafaring and, like the Egyptians and the Indians, have become dulled in themselves, and sunk into the most dreadful and shameful superstition — and compare how all great nations, striving within themselves, press toward the sea.

1. “… a wise god severed the lands by the unsociable Ocean …” ↩︎