All other national
characteristics are imbibed as subtly. What makes a nation is a certain
common spirit,--_Volksgeist_, as the German psychologists have christened
it,--and this spirit exercises a hypnotic effect over all that comes
within its range, moulding and transforming. There is action and
reaction. The nation makes the national spirit, and the national spirit
makes the nation. The flag, the constitution, the national anthems, the
national prejudices, the language, the proverbs--these are the product of
the people they produce.
I am inclined to allow more importance to education and environment than
to actual birth in a country, and to believe that for a "native," birth
is only an etymological necessity. Natives are made as well as born. The
"born" native has merely the advantage of prior arrival, and if the
"foreign" immigrant is only of a plastic age he may come to love the
step-mother-country more than one of her own sons, educated abroad. This
consideration would solve every _Uitlander_ question: is the national
spirit strong enough to suck in the foreigners? Can the nation digest
them, to vary the metaphor--assimilate them to its own substance? I once
proposed to a biologist--who flouted it--that a definition of Life might
be "the power of converting foreign elements, taken in as food, to one's
own substance.
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