believe that they understand themselves. The charm which binds these
poor people together in their sober and modest existence is less the
_penchant_ of natural and intimate affection, than the chain of habit,
the necessity of a life of fraternal community and sentiment. A
certain equality of position and social development gives them the
same desires, the same ends of existence, and like ideas produce an
easy mutual understanding. Each one reads, as it were, in the eye of
the other; and when they talk, each knows what the other will say
almost before he has opened his lips. All the ordinary relations of
life are thus present to their memory; and so, by a simple intonation
of the voice, by the expression of the visage, by a mute gesture, they
excite, _inter se_, as many smiles or tears, more joy or vexation,
than we, among our equals, could perhaps evoke by the longest
demonstrations or declarations. For we civilised ones live, on an
average, in intellectual solitude; each of us, thanks to our
particular form of mind or education, has received a different bias of
character; each of us, morally weighed, thinks, acts, and believes
differently from his neighbour; and hence misunderstandings arise so
frequently among us, that, even in the largest families, life in
common becomes difficult, and we are often, as it were, apart, utterly
unknown one to another, and everywhere feel ourselves as on strange
territory.

Races, indeed, have lived--aye, for centuries--in a state of community
of ideas and sentiments such as I have described in the Isle of Gozo.
Perhaps, but only perhaps, the Roman Church of the Middle Ages wished
to establish among the nations of Catholic Europe such a state of
equality and uniformity of spirit. Hence, no doubt, the reason why she
took under her guardianship all the social relations, all the force
and manifestations of this life--in fine, man himself, moral and
physical man. I will not deny, nor will any one else, that much
peaceful happiness, much piety has been established by these means;
that human existence in the Middle Ages took an expression of greater
fervour and intimacy; that the arts, like flowers, mysteriously
developed, unfolded then, and showed to the day a beauty we now admire
and deplore, and that the rash and unquiet spirit of modern days
cannot imitate. But mind has its rights from all eternity; mind will
not be fettered by dogmas, or lulled to sleep by the ringing of a
bell; mind h