132 THE MORAL ASPECT OF 



come about a landward town ? De'il ! an' I had as gude 

 pith as I hae gudewill and a gude cause, I should gie some 

 o' them a day's kempin'." 



This homely picture of his "country" drawn by a 

 humble patriot seems to me to imply more than kindly 

 sentiment towards a fiscal jimit-rrrthgJgQpden idoLof our 

 times. And grave philosophers and statesmen, in all ages 

 of the world, Pericles and Pitt, Plato and Aristotle, and 

 Hegel and Burke, agree in this with Edie Ochiltree 

 rather than with our more modern prophet. Their con- 

 ception of their country is more human, their obligations 

 to it are more deep. For what is the individual to them 

 apart from the State, and outside of its great social partner- 

 ship? He is, in strict truth, nothing but a name. Heir 

 to no social inheritance, sharer in the destiny of no people, 

 his soul is blank and his hands empty ; he stands refused 

 by the moral order, without a duty to perform or the 

 power to conceive it. For he has veritably nothing of his 

 own which he has not borrowed. 'The tongue that he 

 makes his own is his country's language, the ideas and 

 sentiments that make up his life are the ideas and senti- 

 ments of his race." He is, continues Mr. F. H. Bradley 

 in one of his intense passages, "penetrated, infected, 

 characterised by his relations with his fellows. . . . The 

 soul within him is saturated, is filled, is qualified by, it has 

 assimilated, has built itself up from, it is one and the same 

 life with the universal life ; and if he turns against this, 

 he turns against himself ; if he thrusts it from him, he 

 tears his own vitals ; if he attacks it, he sets the weapon 

 against his own heart." l 



The ancient philosophers recognised this inexhaustible 

 1 Ethical Studies, pp. 155, 156. 



