Consider a single illustration of this parallelism of the individual with the national mind. Take the aesthetic faculty. In the individual mind there develops a certain capacity for finding pleasure in certain objects and impressions, such as young children and even the animals have; and then, with the growth of self-consciousness, the individual sets himself deliberately to cultivate this faculty, to specialise it along particular lines and to exercise it as something apart from his other mental functions; while, nevertheless, it becomes for him, in proportion as it is developed and specialised, more and more an essential part of his total experience. Just so there spontaneously develop in a people some rudimentary aesthetic practices and traditions and some class of persons, say the bards, who are more skilled than other men in ministering to the aesthetic demands of their fellows. Then, as national self-consciousness develops, the place and value of these functions in the system of national life becomes explicitly recognised, and they are deliberately fostered by the establishment of national institutions, schools of art, academies of letters and music, the award of public titles and honours and so forth; whereby the specialisation of these national functions is increased, their dependence on the life of the whole rendered more intimate, and, at the same time, the life of the whole rendered more dependent upon the life of these parts, because the richer aesthetic development of the parts reacts upon the whole, diffusing itself through and elevating the life of the whole. Bosanquet recognises in national life only the lower kind of unity and not the unity of self-consciousness. He seems to reject the notion of national self-consciousness, on the ground that the life of a nation is so complex that it cannot be fully and adequately reflected in the consciousness of any individual; yet in this respect the difference between the national mind and the individual mind is one of degree only and not of kind. In the individual mind also, even the most highly developed and self-conscious, the capacities and dispositions and tendencies that make up the whole mind are never fully and adequately present to consciousness; the individual never knows himself exhaustively, though he may continually progress towards a more nearly complete self-knowledge. Just so the national mind may progress towards a more complete self-knowledge, and, though at the present time no nation has attained more than a very imperfect self-knowledge, yet the process is accelerating rapidly among the more advanced nations; and such increasing self-knowledge promises to become the dominating factor in the life of nations, as it is in the lives of all men, save the most primitive.