In Like Manner All Thoughts And Feelings Would Pass Freely From One To
Another, Although Not Necessarily Communicated By Speech; And All Would
Be Participants In Virtue Of That Sympathy And Solidarity Uniting The
Members Of A Small Isolated Community.
No one would be capable of a
thought or emotion which would seem strange to the others.
The temper,
the mood, the outlook, of the individual and the village would be the
same.
I remember that something once occurred in a village where I was
staying, which was in a way important to the villagers, although it
gave them nothing and took nothing from them: it excited them without
being a question of politics, or of "morality," to use the word in its
narrow popular sense. I spoke first to a woman of the village about it,
and was not a little surprised at the view she took of the matter, for
to me this seemed unreasonable; but I soon found that all the villagers
took this same unreasonable view, their indignation, pity and other
emotions excited being all expended as it seemed to me in the wrong
direction. The woman had, in fact, merely spoken the mind of the
village.
Owing to this close intimacy and family character of the village which
continues from generation to generation, there must be under all
differences on the surface a close mental likeness hardly to be
realised by those who live in populous centres; a union between mind
and mind corresponding to that reticulation as it appeared to me, of
plot with plot and with all they contained.
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