To have a common consciousness, the individuals of a group do not have to be acquainted by sense experience with all their land or its people. Imagination and sympathy are means by which men feel themselves one of a society and parts of an institution. And if, even after imagination and sympathy have come to one’s help, a country and its ideals are said to be abstract and vague, even so, it is such abstract things that become a cause, and it is such vague ideals that have the greatest motive power. They possess us. We think with them rather than of them, and they become a spirit in which we approach all things. It is not necessary that we should have an exact formula of them in order to make them real. Realities do not only then come to exist when we have a clear-cut formula for them, nor do ideas first have being when they are put into formal expression. One quest of men has been, consciously or unconsciously, to create for themselves a unified world. In doing this they have, among other things, formed themselves into nations. Nations have met their needs, and helped them to feel at home in their world. Countries are real, and come close home. With this in mind we can appreciate the feeling of the traveler abroad who has a sense of the wholeness of his home-land and longs for it. The following quotation is an illustration of this feeling at the same time that it catalogues some of the elements that go into the makeup of a country. “Every time his passport is presented, every time he enters a new dominion or crosses a new frontier, every time he is delayed at the custom-house, or questioned by a policeman, or challenged by a sentinel, every time he is perplexed by a new language, or puzzled by a new variety of coinage or currency,--he thanks his God with fresh fervency that through all the length and breadth of that land, beyond the swelling floods, which he is privileged and proud to call his own land, there is a common language, a common currency, a common Constitution, common laws and liberties, a common inheritance of glory from the past, and, if it be only true to itself, a common destiny of glory for the future!”[182] Is there anything to indicate that the organizing principles of a nation are permanently necessary ones? The ultimate existence and value of patriotism will be involved in the answer to that question. Is patriotism called for by the fundamental order of reality?