Owing to the very depth of these experiences, it is not possible for a whole people to be _uniformly and throughout_ a Culture-people, a nation. Amongst primitives each individual man has the same feeling of group-obligations, but the awakening of a nation into self-consciousness invariably takes place in gradations--that is, pre-eminently in the particular class that is strongest of soul and holds the others spellbound by a power derived from what it has experienced. _Every nation is represented in history by a minority._ At the beginning of the springtime it is the nobility,[243] which in that period of its first appearance is the fine flowering of the people, the vessel in which the national character--unconscious, but felt all the more strongly in its cosmic pulse--receives its destined Style. The “we” is the knightly class, in the Egyptian feudal period of 2700 not less than in the Indian and the Chinese of 1200. The Homeric heroes _are_ the Danai; the Norman barons _are_ England. Centuries later, Saint-Simon--the embodiment, it is true, of an older France--used to say that “all France” was assembled in the King’s ante-room, and there was a time in which Rome and the Senate were actually identical. With the advent of the town the burgher becomes the vessel of nationality, and (as we should expect from the growth of intellectuality) of a national _consciousness_ that it gets from the nobility and carries through to its fulfilment. Always it is particular circles, graduated in fine shades, that _in the name of_ the people live, feel, act, and know how to die, but these circles become larger and larger. In the eighteenth century arose the Western _concept_ of the Nation which sets up (and on occasion energetically insists upon) the claim to be championed by everybody without exception; but in reality, as we know, the _émigrés_ were just as convinced as the Jacobins that they were _the_ people, _the_ representatives of the French nation. A Culture-people which is coincident with “all” does not exist--this is possible only in primitive and fellaheen peoples, only in a mere joint being without depth or historical dignity. So long as a people is a nation and works out the Destiny of a nation, there is in it a minority which in the name of all represents and fulfils its history. IV