Nationality, the national character or "spirit," is displayed not only in language, but also in manifold manners and customs (clothing, etc.), in the methods of settlement and habitation (arrangement of houses, villages and towns), work and domestic economy, law and the state, morals, religion, science and philosophy, culture and art—any and all of these may be regarded as expressions of national character. Thus the idea of nationality is extremely intricate.
If we enquire what is the character of a nation, what is the essence of nationality, we may be told that it is to be discovered in one or in several of the before-mentioned departments, or in the complex of them all. Of late, people have become aware of racial differences, and therewith arises the problem, wherein "race" consists; whether we are to conceive it in a physiological sense only or psychically as well.
Moreover, when we are determining a national character, we must not confine our attention to single elements, but must consider the synthesis of all these elements into an organic whole. For this synthesis to be possible it must be presupposed that the various elements have been fully grasped and appropriately valued in their mutual dependence. We must then select the most important, most characteristic central element, and appraise its relationship to the others.
Obviously, too, each individual element must be subjected to further, detailed analysis. Think, for example, how rich in content is the idea of language, and how in practice language is apt to be chosen as the favourite index and characteristic of nationality.[1]
Attention must be drawn to another extremely important problem of the philosophy of nationality. We accept the idea of development and progress in all departments of social life. National character too, thererore, must develop, and what are the causes of this evolution? How extensive is the change? Is the modern Russian the same in essence and character with the Russian who lived under John the Terrible and the Russian who lived under Vladimir of Kiev? Manifestly we are not
- ↑ We have to think at the concepts of mother tongue, dialect, and written language; of speech as a means of communication (the language of daily intercourse) , of the parallelism between speech and thought, between feeling and willing; of language as an object of art. Writing, too, as a means for giving a fixed and permanent form to what is spoken, is of significance here, and we think of the different methods of writing.
