nd have together endured the joys and sorrows
of thousands of years." It is that sort of being whereof one speaks when
one expresses true loyalty to the country. The country is the spiritual
entity that is none of us and all of us--none of us because it is our
unity; all of us because in it we all find our patriotic unity.

Such, then, is the idea that the loyal have of the real nature of the
causes which they serve. I repeat, If the loyal are right, then the real
world contains other beings than mechanisms and individual human and
animal minds. It contains spiritual unities which are as real as we are,
but which certainly do not belong to the realm of a mere nature
mechanism. Does not all this put the problems of our philosophy of life
in a new light?

But I have no doubt that you may at once reply: All this speech about
causes is after all merely more or less pleasing metaphor. As a fact,
human beings are just individual natural creatures. They throng and
struggle for existence, and love and hate and enjoy and sorrow and die.
These causes are, after all, mere dreams, or at best entities as we have
just described. The friends like to talk of being one; but there are
always two or more of them, and the unity is a pretty phrase. The
country is, in the concrete, the collection of the countrymen, with
names, formulas, songs, and so on, attached, by way of poetical license
or of convenient abbreviation or of pretty fable. The poet really meant
simply that he was fond of the landscape, and was not wholly averse to a
good many of his countrymen, and was in any case fond of a good song.
Loyalty, like the rest of human life, is an illusion. Nature is real.
The unity of the spirit is a fancy.

This, I say, may be your objection. But herewith we indeed stand in the
presence of a certain very deep philosophical problem concerning the
true definition of what we mean by reality. Into this problem I have
neither time nor wish to enter just now. But upon one matter I must,
nevertheless, stoutly insist. It is a matter so simple, so significant,
so neglected, that I at once need and fear to mention it to you,--need
to mention it, because it puts our philosophy into a position that quite
transforms the significance of that whole modern view of nature upon
which I have been dwelling since the outset of this lecture; fear to
mention it, because the fact that it is so commonly neglected shows how
hard to be understood it has proved.

Th