Abstract
TO emphasise the State as the most important human grouping on the large scale leads us so far astray that even some serious students of social psychology try, with obvious ill-success, to discuss the psychology of whole nations like France, England, and Germany. The very inadequate justification is that a political group like a nation-State usually has one official language and tries to organise one educational system and thus endeavours to develop a common measure of social heritage and early experience to unify its population. As a matter of fact, unity of language within a State is not so common as one imagines. Spain has Basque, Catalan, and Galician; France has Basque, Provencal, Breton, Flemish, German, besides her dialects related to Languedoc and Langue d'oil. Germany has many dialects and also Wendish and Yiddish; Finland has Swedish and now also a Lapp element, and so on; while Switzerland has built successfully upon toleration of language diversity. This illustrates the diversity of biological units even within the most modern States, while the very noticeable trend in the treaties towards rearrangement of Central Europe on a language basis emphasises the fact that the biological unit has been uneasy under, the political conditions of the centuries since the rise of the organised nation-State.
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Abridged from a citizens' lecture delivered at Edinburgh on September 12 during the meeting of the British Association.
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FLEURE, H. Countries as Personalities1. Nature 108, 573–575 (1921). https://doi.org/10.1038/108573a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/108573a0