ly in the sacrifice of their egoism that it
consists. It is the temper of mind which determines them to defer their
own interests to those of their country.

132. Supposing it possible for any parallel sentiment to animate a
nation as one body, it could have reference only to the position it held
among other families of the world. The name of the emotion would then be
properly "Cosmism," and would signify the resolution of such a people to
sacrifice its own special interests to those of Mankind. Cosmism
hitherto has indeed generally asserted itself only in the desire of the
Cosmic nation that all others should adopt its theological opinions, and
permit it to adopt their personal property; but Patriotism has truly
existed, and even as a dominant feeling, in the minds of many persons
who have been greatly influential on the fates of their races, and that
one of our leading philosophers should be unconscious of the nature of
this sentiment, and ignorant of its political power, is to be noted as
painfully characteristic of the present state of England itself.

It does not indeed follow that a feeling of which we are unaware is
necessarily extinguished in us; and the faculties of perception and
analysis are always so paralyzed by the lingual ingenuities of logic
that it is impossible to say, of any professed logician, whether he may
not yet be acting under the real force of ideas of which he has lost
both the consciousness and conception. No man who has once entangled
himself in what Mr. Spencer defines, farther on, as the "science of the
relations implied by the conclusions, exclusions, and overlappings of
classes," can be expected during the rest of his life to perceive more
of any one thing than that it is included, excluded, or overlapped by
something else; which is in itself a sufficiently confused state of
mind, and especially harmful in that it permits us to avoid considering
whether our intellectual linen is itself clean, while we concern
ourselves only to ascertain whether it is included, excluded, or
overlapped by our coat collar. But it is a grave phenomenon of the time
that patriotism--of all others--should be the sentiment which an English
logician is not only unable to define, but attempts to define as its
precise contrary. In every epoch of decline, men even of high
intellectual energy have been swept down in the diluvium of public life,
and the crystalline edges of their minds worn away by friction with
blun