Contemplativeness is another distinctive feature of the Finns

The disasters, the wars, the bad crops, the famines, from which the Finnish peasant has so often had to suffer, have created his capacity of grave and uncomplaining submission to fate ; but the relative liberty he has always enjoyed has prevented him from developing that sad spirit of resignation, that deep sorrow which too often characterizes his Russian brother. Never having been a personal serf, he is not servile; he always maintains his personal dignity and speaks with the same grave intonation and self-respect to a Russian tsar as to his neighbor. A lymphatic temperament, slowness of movement and of thought, and sullen indifference have often been imputed to him. In fact, when I have entered on a Sunday a peasant house in eastern Finland, and found several men sitting on the benches round the wall, dropping only a few words at long intervals, plunged in a mute reverie as they enjoyed their inseparable pipes, I could not help remembering this reproach addressed to the Finnish peasant. But I soon perceived that though the Finn is always very deliberate in his movement, slowness of thought and indifference are peculiar only to those, unhappily too numerous, village paupers whom long continued want and the struggle for life without hope of improvement have rendered callous. Still, a Finnish peasant family must be reduced to very great destitution before the wife loses her habits of cleanliness, which are not devoid of a certain aesthetical tint. The thrift of the Finn is striking; not only among those who have no choice, for they are compelled to live upon rye bread, baked four times a year and containing an admixture "of the bark of our black pines," as Runeberg says. Simplicity of life is the rule in all classes of society; the unhealthy luxury of the European cities is yet unknown to the Finns ; and the Russian tchinovnik cannot but wonder how the Finnish official lives, without stealing, on the scanty allowance granted him by the State.

Contemplativeness — if I am permitted to use this ugly word — is another distinctive feature of the Finns : Tawastes, Sawas, and Karelians are alike prone to it. Contemplation of nature, a meditative, mute contemplation, which finds its expression rather in a song than in words, or incites to the reflection about nature's mysteries rather than about the facts, is characteristic as well of the peasant as of the savant. It may be akin to, without being identical with, mystical reverie. It may, in certain circumstances, give rise to mysticism, as it did at the beginning of our century; it produced that tendency towards sorcery and witchcraft for which the Finns were, and are still, renowned among and feared by their Russian neighbors ; but actually it gives rise among the instructed classes to a tendency towards a philosophic and pantheistic conception of nature, instead of the childish wonder with which others are satisfied. It also colors the Finnish folk-lore with an idealism which makes it so strongly contrast with the sensualism of the folk-lore of so many other nationalities.

P. Kropotkin: Finland: a rising nationality. (Littell's Living age. v.165. 1885)