CHAPTER VIII THE NATIONAL CHARACTER SPIRITUALLY TRANSFORMED: THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY, OR THE ORGANIZATION OF MANKIND There is such a thing as a national character.[91] The national character is reflected in the language, literature, laws and customs, arts, institutions and religion of a people. Even when the religion professed by different peoples is the same in name it is strongly tinctured in the different countries by the national differences. Compare for example the Christianity of Prussia with that of France, or that of England with that of Russia. The national character, like that of the individual, has its plus and minus qualities, its excellent and its repellent traits. The national character is to be spiritualized by raising the plus traits to the Nth degree. To this end, as before, the three-fold reverence and especially the third reverence is the means. _The backward peoples of the earth are the paramount object of reverence._ The more advanced peoples are to bring to light the spiritual life latent in the backward. In order to do so, they are to carry out the principle of reverence toward past civilization, to sift out what is vital in the work of previous generations. And further, they are to conform to the second principle of reverence, that toward contemporaries approximately on the same level, _i.e._, toward the other civilized nations. No single nation is really competent to undertake the great task of awaking the stationary peoples of India and China, of educating the primitive peoples of Africa. A union of the civilized nations should be formed in order that together they may jointly accomplish _the pedagogy of the less developed_. The educational point of view once again appears as the ethical. The relation of the less developed to the more advanced peoples should be analogous to that of the child towards the parents. Just as neither the father singly nor the mother alone can release spiritual life in the offspring, so the different civilized nations, each of which has its own gift, its own plus traits, are to interact for the purpose of jointly awakening the creative energies within the slumbering souls of the undeveloped peoples.