The curiously cosmopolitan vocabulary of the learned class put still another obstacle in the path of their efforts to understand their neighbors. The consciousness of the common people was provincial and myopic. They could hear the voices only of the living. At the same time the learned were afflicted by a narrow farsightedness. They thought over the heads of their marketplace contemporaries to a special language and literature of faraway and long ago. Nothing in human nature required that a community be divided in this way. This was an accident of European history which for centuries shaped,
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