4. It might seem fanciful to say that our district is to our family as space to time; but it would suggest something of the point of view from which it is well to look at the structure of our ethical ideas. It is desirable to realise how the simplest characters of our surroundings and their necessary connections are ethically important, not because they impose anything upon us, but because they respond to something within us, or rather, to a possibility which is to be realised by the world, as in us its variety strives towards unity. Parentage, we saw, was a universal animal fact, and from it, in an experience capable of unity and permanence, springs the family household and all that it implies for our lives. One’s district, as an element of life, implies, of course, some stability--a home, not merely permanent as a { 305} home, like the Scythian’s waggon, but located on some spot of earth. The nomad, we must suppose, to a great extent carries his neighbourhood--his tribe--along with him, and for that very reason the fact of neighbourhood has not its full effect on him.
But when a permanent home is fixed on some spot of earth, presumably with the beginnings of agriculture, a new condition begins to operate--the “indifference” of space. Perhaps we are surprised that “indifference” should be an ethical stimulus. But nothing is more instructive than to note how qualities of our surroundings, which by themselves seem negative or the barest natural necessities, spring into significance when taken up into the unity of life. Locality means a potential neighbourhood. It may be long before any one comes near you except your own cousinhood, your tribe or clan. But the indifference of space is a standing invitation, and it is pretty certain that some day strangers will become your neighbours, and that you will have to take up some mental attitude towards them. Historians and jurists have described to us the struggle between the principle of kinship and the principle of neighbourhood. When we read that a plebeian, in the eyes of a Roman patrician, simply could not make a real marriage any more than the beasts of the field, this is not, as it may have become by survival, intentional arrogance on the patrician’s part. It was rather the state of mind of Mrs. Transome towards Rufus Lyon, “sheer inability to consider him.” A proof of what a struggle it involved to reach a new attitude of mind as regarded the resident alien is given by { 306} the half-way house at which it was found necessary to pause in the process. The recognition of kinship on the ground of residence was the fiction, we are told, by which the mind assisted itself to a positive attitude towards those whom the indifference of space insisted on bringing within its range. And the positive attitude towards which it was groping its way was of course the recognition of humanity, the equality of man in the truest sense which that ambiguous phrase will bear.