Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/303

Rh born or grew up. This love, this sentiment, may be intensified to the point of disease, manifesting itself as the malady of home-sickness.

The object of the sentiment of nationality (country, nation, folk) is one extremely rich in content, and every man who contemplates the idea of nationality and concerns himself about the sentiment of nationality will tend after his own kind to concentrate his attention upon one or more special elements of that content. The idea and the sentiment are determined by men's social, economic, and cultural level. The aristocrat, the bureaucrat, the soldier, the man of culture, the peasant, the townsman, the manual worker, the proletarian—each of these will have his own idea of nation or folk, and the sentiments of each will be peculiarly tinged.

The sentiment of nationality may be blind, instinctive, and elemental. As with love in general, so with love of folk and home, the question arises in each case how far the sentiment is conscious, deliberately motived, based upon clear ideas and judgments.

Nor must we forget that variations in the sentiment are qualitative as well as quantitative. Besides being more or less intense, it may be different; it may be noble and elevated, or it may be comparatively crude.

It is equally obvious that the idea of the nation, and therewith the national sentiment. undergoes modification and development. At different times, in divers epochs, the love of home and the love of folk vary. Without going too far back in history, it will suffiice to point out that the love for one's folk among the eighteenth-century rationalists must have been different in character from that which prevailed among the nineteenth-century romanticists, or from that which prevailed at a later date among the naturalists and realists.

Of great importance to the determination of the sentiment and of the idea of nationality is the state of thought and feeling towards other nations, towards foreigners in general, and more particularly towards neighbour nations. We have to ask to what extent strangers are known, for in the foreign nation the same wealth of qualities has to be considered as in our own; the knowledge of foreigners and the quality of feeling towards foreigners are just as variable and manifold as the knowledge of one's own folk and the feelings associated with that knowledge.

A great many people really care very little for their own