Introduction

Herde was the first european thinker to enunciate, altogether what it is that he meant by saying that man were social. He passionately protested against the notion that society had in some sense been formed by almost a species of mutual agreement between men originally isolated. The proposition that man was by nature social is n ancient, a truth or gratitude, which sert goes back to aristotle and saint thomas. And the particular link which unites human beings is not blood, not soil, but language. Has the nation anything more precious than the language of its fathers?