Page:The Spirit of Russia by T G Masaryk, volume 1.pdf/304

278 compatriots, but they hate anything foreign. Yet it is possible to learn to love a foreign language, foreign ways, ideas, and modes of feeling; it is even possible to come to prefer the foreign to the native, and this happens often enough in every department of life.

To a certain extent it may be said that our own national essence is ﬁrst made clear to us by comparison with the foreign essence. For this reason the sentiment of nationality in a multilingual state is more self-conscious and more critical than in a state where "state" coincides with "nation." This is especially true of Russia, of Austria-Hungary, and of the Balkan lands. The force of contrast is yet more powerful when multiformity of language is associated with the dominance, partial or complete, of a single language and a single folk. Once more we think of Russia, of Austria and Hungary, of the Balkans, and to some extent also of Germany. The dominance may be political, economic, linguistic, cultural, or ecclesiastico-religious. It may be such a predominance as was exercised by the French in eighteenth-century Russia and also in eighteenth- century Germany; it may be the predominance of Russian as an official language; and so on.

The course of historical evolution displays to us a continuous severance and differentiation of individual nations, whilst simultaneously interactions occur in the political, economic, and cultural fields. There have been multilingual states, and at times these have been organised to form world-wide realms (Alexander, the Roman empire, the Frankish realm, the medieval emperordom, the Napoleonic empire, modern imperialism); there exist also world-wide churches, world-wide economic unions, etc. The organisation of great areas of the world, of entire continents, and ultimately of humanity as a whole, makes continuous progress.

Between the incessant struggles and suitable combinations of the petty stocks and tubes in a primitive stage, on the one hand, and the struggles and alliances of the great states and nations of modern times on the other, we can discern numerous transitional forms of this simultaneous differentiation and assimilation. Nearly every one of us to-day is member and instrument of some superstate, superchurch, or other world-wide organisation.

The modern sentiment of nationality and the modern idea of nationality originated in the west with the reformation and