It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion. Illusion, I
mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for
of course nationality is a fact. People speak some particular language
and are very uncomfortable where another is spoken or where their own
is spoken differently. They have habits, judgments, assumptions to
which they are wedded, and a society where all this is unheard of
shocks them and puts them at a galling disadvantage. To ignorant
people the foreigner as such is ridiculous, unless he is superior to
them in numbers or prestige, when he becomes hateful. It is natural
for a man to like to live at home, and to live long elsewhere without
a sense of exile is not good for his moral integrity. It is right to
feel a greater kinship and affection for what lies nearest to oneself.
But this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is accidental;
like age or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made the basis
of specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a
flag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities.
Yet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol,
perhaps because it is the only distinction they feel they have left.
Anomalies of this sort will never be properly understood until people
accustom themselves to a theory to which they have always turned a
deaf ear, because, though simple and true, it is materialistic:
namely, that mind is not the cause of our actions but an effect,
collateral with our actions, of bodily growth and organisation.
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