Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/131

 a healthy and a fundamental instinct. "There is," he says, "among the individuals (in a nation) … an invisible ground of common impressions.… Forces half instinctive and for that very reason immense and formidable." And he shows how the prodigious strength of the great common emotions that occasionally arise results from the fact that they have grown up out of the most commonplace ordinary acts of daily life, speaking, walking, talking, by which the life of each man in a group mingles with the common life of all. And thus the great movements of the spirit have a basis in Nature. "Yes," he adds, "they are great and good forces, but also full of peril and trouble." And "in the international life man is still a wolf towards his fellow man. The country, by absorbing or rather by exalting individual egoism in a great collective egoism, too often covers the most brutal greed with a semblance of generosity. Men are capable of the illusion that they are serving justice when they are devoting themselves for the interests, even the unjust interests of a force, in which they are included but which is infinitely above them. Thence come blind entanglements and brutal maxims. Thence comes the adherence given even by high-minded men to the detestable formula, 'My country right or wrong.' In the measure that men progress and become enlightened the