ABSTRACT
The possible area of a genuine society, a nation, is determined by the extension of a “consciousness of kind,” an “ethical like-mindedness”. This may be applied as a limiting condition by a “little Englander” or as an expansive principle to justify imperial expansion, according to the quantity and quality of like-mindedness taken as the basis of social unity in a “nation” or an “empire”. Modern scientific transport, hitherto centripetal in its main economy, seems to tend more to become centrifugal, while the wider spread of culture does something, and may do much, to cause a moral and aesthetic revolt against the life and work of towns. That scientific theories, religious, social, and political arts and institutions gain by free, friendly, vital intercourse with other theories, arts and institutions, undergoing serviceable accretions, excretions, and modifications, is a commonplace of intellectual life.
