Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

32 NATIONAL IDENTITY, HOME RULE AND ULSTER
intellectual and spiritual in man. The soul was not the mind, he
believed, but it acted by way of the mind and it was through the
mind that one got glimpses of the soul. It was possible to speak of
a national mind and a national soul, and to distinguish one from
the other. Pearse could not convince himself that there was
actually a mystical entity which was the soul of Ireland and
expressed itself through the mind of Ireland, but he believed that
there was really a spiritual tradition which was the soul of Ireland,
the thing that made Ireland a living nation, and that there was
such a spiritual tradition corresponding to every true nationality.
This spiritual thing was distinct from the intellectual facts in which
chiefly it made its revelation, and it was distinct from them in a
way analogous to that in which a man’s soul was distinct from his
mind. Like other spiritual things it was independent of the
material, whereas the mind was to a large extent dependent on the
material.
Pearse speculated that spiritually the United States and England
were one nation, while intellectually apart, and he was sure that
spiritually the Walloons of Belgium were one nation with the
French, and that spiritually the Austrians were one nation with the
Germans. The spiritual thing which was essential to nationality
seemed to reside chiefly in the language, if language was
understood to include literature and folklore, as well as sounds
and idioms preserved chiefly by language. But it also revealed
itself in all the arts, institutions, inner life, and actions of the
nation. If nationality could be regarded as the sum of the facts,
spiritual and intellectual, and freedom as the condition which
allowed these facts full scope and development, it would be seen,
argued Pearse, that both the spiritual and the intellectual facts,
nationality, and the physical condition (freedom) entered into a
proper definition of independence or nationhood. Freedom was a
condition which could be lost and won and lost again; but
nationality was a life which, if once lost, could never be recovered.
A nation was a stubborn thing, very difficult to kill; but a dead
nation did not come back to life, any more than a dead man did. 87
Arthur Griffith also believed that the loss of the national
language would equate with the demise of the Irish nation. The
ethics of Sinn Fein attracted cultural nationalists regardless as to
their views on the format that a new Irish state should take—for
example, whether it should be republic or a monarchy These
ethics dictated that the Irishman who did not speak Irish was,
against his will, a representative of English domination, whereas
every word of Irish spoken, every letter addressed in Irish, was a
blow against that domination, an awakening of the foundations of