appearance of being ruled by a kind of common mind—a veritable spirit of the hive—although no trace of any directive apparatus can be detected.
A close study of England gives the impression of some agency comparable with a “spirit of the hive” being at work within it. The impression is not perhaps to be taken as altogether fantastic, when we remember how her insular station and her long history have forced upon her a physical seclusion and unity resembling, though of course far less complete than, that of the hive. I am of course not unaware that disquisitions upon the national spirit are very familiar to us. These, however, are so loosely conceived, so much concerned with purely conventional personifications of quite imaginary qualities, that I cannot regard them as referring to the phenomenon I am trying to describe.
The conception in my mind is that of an old and isolated people, developing, by the slow mingling and attrition of their ideas, and needs, and impulses, a certain deeply lying unity which becomes a kind of “instinct” for national