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Bennett, Arnold, 1867-1931

"English Prose A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice"

It is the life of their common
personality. It is a new spiritual person on a higher level.
Or again, you are loyal to some such union as a family or a fraternity
represents. Or you are loyal to your class, your college, your
community, your country, your church. In all these cases, with endless
variety in the details, your loyalty has for its object each time, not
merely a group of detached personalities, but some ideally significant
common life; an union of many in one; a community which also has the
value of a person, and which, nevertheless, cannot be found distributed
about in a collection of fragments found inside the detached lives of
the individual members of the family, the club, the class, the college,
the country, the church. If this common life to which you are loyal is a
reality, then the real human world does not consist of separate
creatures alone, of the mere persons who flock in the streets and who
live in the different houses. The human world, if the loyal are right,
contains personality that is not merely shut up within the skin, now of
this, now of that, human creature.


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