f interests which no one could have had if he had lived in
isolation, but which accrue to men conscious of living in society, and
in a society having the scope and history of a nation. It was the vice
of liberalism to believe that common interests covered nothing but the
sum of those objects which each individual might pursue alone; whereby
science, religion, art, language, and nationality itself would cease to
be matters of public concern and would appeal to the individual merely
as instruments. The welfare of a flock of sheep is secured if each is
well fed and watered, but the welfare of a human society involves the
partial withdrawal of every member from such pursuits to attend instead
to memory and to ideal possessions; these involve a certain conscious
continuity and organisation in the state not necessary for animal
existence. It is not for man's interest to live unless he can live in
the spirit, because his spiritual capacity, when unused, will lacerate
and derange even his physical life. The brutal individualist falls into
the same error into which despots fall when they declare war out of
personal pique or tax the people to build themselves a pyramid, not
discerning their country's interests, which they might have
appropriated, from interests of their own which no one else can share.

Democracies, too, are full of patriots of this lordly stripe, men whose
patriotism consists in joy at their personal possessions and in desire
to increase them. The resultant of general selfishness might conceivably
be a general order; but though intelligent selfishness, if universal,
might suffice for good government, it could not suffice for nationality.
Patriotism is an imaginative passion, and imagination is ingenuous. The
value of patriotism is not utilitarian, but ideal. It belongs to the
free forms of society and ennobles a man not so much because it nerves
him to work or to die, which the basest passions may also do, but
because it associates him, in working or dying, with an immortal and
friendly companion, the spirit of his race. This he received from his
ancestors tempered by their achievements, and may transmit to posterity
qualified by his own.

CHAPTER VIII

IDEAL SOCIETY

[Sidenote: The gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense.]

To many beings--to almost all that people the earth and sky--each soul
is not attached by any practical interest. Some are too distant to be
perceived; the proximit