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It acts as a kind of stopcock for one's infinity, for screwing on or screwing off one's vast race-consciousness, one's all-humanityness, all those unsounded deeps or reservoirs of human energy, of hope and memory, of love, of passionate thought, of earthly and heavenly desire that are lent to each of us as we slip softly by for seventy years, by a whole human race.
This race-consciousness is none other than the ever-present "will-to-live" which is the basis of physical evolution that automatically acting principle which causes plants to turn towards the sun, animals to seek their proper food, and both animals and men to try instantly to escape from immediate danger. It is what we call instinct which does not reason.
This is especially true of stories of things and persons in the history of our own race. They foster race-consciousness, the feeling of kinship and community of blood. It is this property which makes the historical story so good an agent for furthering a proper national pride in children.
When this mold has been well established, as by centuries of national greatness and power, all sorts of waves of outer circumstance may roll over the race, and apparently wash its raciality clean away; and yet something in the unseen operates to resist, and, when the waves recede, to raise up first the old race-consciousness, and finally national existence again. Take Ireland for example.
The terrible struggle which characterized the attainment of cosmic consciousness, by so many of the sages and saviours of history, is, we believe, clue to the fact that no one individual may hope to rise so immeasurably above the plane of the race-consciousness of his day and age, except through intense and overwhelming desire.
The Serbs are a smaller people, more intense and less adaptable than the Russians. The difference between the two races as one sees and hears them on the streets of Belgrade is very remarkable. The soft pervasive accents of Russian speech are pregnant with a great race-consciousness and a feeling of world destiny. The ill-health of our new Europe needs no demonstration.
All fear-thoughts are due to undeveloped race-consciousness which reacts upon individual consciousness and is stamped more or less upon every atom of matter. You 'fear' because you think you are the body.
So spoke the haughty race-consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, contemplating these Mediterranean hordes, the very shape of whose heads was objectionable. But Hal stuck it out; and little by little new vision came to him. First of all, it was the fascination of the mines. They were old mines veritable cities tunnelled out beneath the mountains, the main passages running for miles.
It is in this one little modest unnoticed place that he is supposed to keep his race-consciousness, his subconscious memory of a whole human race, and it is here that the desires and the delights and labours of thousands of years of other people are turned off and turned on in him. It is the brain that has been given to every man for the heavy everyday hard work of living.
I have enough to live on. Why not let it go at that?" The days of man under the old dispensation, or, rather, according to that supposedly biblical formula, which persists, are threescore years and ten. It is so ingrained in the race-consciousness by mouth-to-mouth utterance that it seems the profoundest of truths.
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