ass for spiritual
insight, is in the end nothing but pedantry and impotence, so to be
always harping on nationality is to convert what should be a recognition
of natural conditions into a ridiculous pride in one's own oddities.
Nature has hidden the roots of things, and though botany must now and
then dig them up for the sake of comprehension, their place is still
under ground, if flowers and fruits are to be expected. The private
loyalties which a man must have toward his own people, grounding as they
alone can his morality and genius, need nevertheless to be seldom
paraded. Attention, when well directed, turns rather to making immanent
racial forces blossom out in the common medium and express themselves in
ways consonant with practical reason and universal progress. A man's
feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the
world.

What a statesman might well aim at would be to give the special
sentiments and gifts of his countrymen such a turn that, while
continuing all vital traditions, they might find less and less of what
is human alien to their genius. Differences in nationality, founded on
race and habitat, must always subsist; but what has been superadded
artificially by ignorance and bigotry may be gradually abolished in view
of universal relations better understood. There is a certain plane on
which all races, if they reach it at all, must live in common, the plane
of morals and science; which is not to say that even in those activities
the mind betrays no racial accent. What is excluded from science and
morals is not variety, but contradiction. Any community which had begun
to cultivate the Life of Reason in those highest fields would tend to
live rationally on all subordinate levels also; for with science and
morality rationally applied the best possible use would be made of every
local and historical accident. Where traditions had some virtue or
necessity about them they would be preserved; where they were remediable
prejudices they would be superseded.

[Sidenote: The symbol for country may be a man and may become an idol.]

At the birth of society instincts existed, needful to the animal and
having a certain glorious impetuosity about them, which prompted common
action and speech, and a public morality, and men were led to construct
myths that might seem to justify this co-operation. Paternal authority
could easily suggest one symbol for social loyalty: the chief, probably
a venerabl