antiquarian history

preserving and revering soul-supplants itself from man into the things of history....the walls, the turreted gate, ancestral furniture, and changes meaning within these things.

When the sense of a people hardens in this way, when history serves past life so as to undermind further and especially higher life, when the thistorical sense no longer preserves life but mummifies it: then the tree dies unnaturally, beginning at the top and slowly dying toward the roots--and in the end the root itself generally decays. Antiquarian history itself degenerates the moment that the fresh life of the present no longer animates and inspires it. Now piety withers away, scholarly habit endures without it and, egoistically complacent, revolves around its own centre. Then you may well witness the repugnant spectacle of a blind lust for collecting, of a restless raking together of all that once has been. Man envelops himself in an odour of decay; through his antiquarian habit he succeeds in degrading even a more significant talent and nobler need to an insatiable craving for novelty, or rather craving for all things and old things; often he sinks so low as finally to be satisfied with any fare and devours with pleasure even the dust of bibliographical quisquilia

quisquilia - also trifle, a minor detail.

antiquarian history merely understands how to preserve life, not how to generate it; therefore it always underestimates what is in process of becoming because it has no instinct for discerning its significance-unlike monumental history, for example which has this instinct. Thus it hinders the powerful resolve for new life, thus paralyzes the man of action who, as man of action, will and must always injure some piety or other.