age of Scholasticism;[1] and even now, in modern physics and chemistry, the scientific method, the choice and type of experiments and hypotheses, their inter-relations, and their relative importance for the course and aim of the investigation are markedly different in every nation. German and French piety, English and Spanish social ethics, German and English habits of life, stand so far apart that for the average man, and, therefore, for the public opinion of his community, the real inwardness of every foreign nation remains a deep secret and a source of continual and pregnant error. In the Roman Empire men began generally to understand one another, but this was precisely because there had ceased to be anything worth understanding in the Classical city. With the advent of mutual comprehension this particular humanity ceased to live in nations, and ipso facto ceased to be historic.[2]
Owing to the very depth of these experiences, it is not possible for a whole people to be uniformly and throughout a Culture-people, a nation. Amongst primitives each individual man has the same feeling of group-obligations, but the awakening of a nation into self-consciousness invariably takes place in gradations — that is, pre-eminently in the particular class that is strongest of soul and holds the others spellbound by a power derived from what it has experienced. Every nation is represented in history by a minority. At the beginning of the springtime it is the nobility,[3] which in that period of its first appearance is the fine flowering of the people, the vessel in which the national character — unconscious, but felt all the more strongly in its cosmic pulse — receives its destined Style. The "we" is the knightly class, in the Egyptian feudal period of 2700 not less than in the Indian and the Chinese of 1200. The Homeric heroes are the Danai; the Norman barons are England. Centuries later, Saint-Simon — the embodiment, it is true, of an older France — used to say that "all France" was assembled in the King's ante-room, and there was a time in which Rome and the Senate were actually identical. With the advent of the town the burgher becomes the vessel of nationality, and (as we should expect from the growth of intellectuality) of a national consciousness that it gets from the nobility and carries through to its fulfilment. Always it is particular circles, graduated in fine shades, that in the name of the people live, feel, act, and know how to die, but these circles become larger and larger. In the eighteenth century arose the Western concept of the Nation which sets up (and on occasion energetically insists upon) the claim to be championed by everybody without exception; but in reality, as we know, the émigrés were just as convinced as the Jacobins that they were the people, the representatives of the French nation. A Culture-people which is coincident with "all" does not exist — this is possible only in primitive and fellaheen peoples, only in a mere joint being with-
