must necessarily
appear to be great, exalted and inspiring ideas because they are his
own, while everything that opposes them must seem obscure, common
folk, enemies of their own weal, evil-minded, and hateful. Such a man,
in order to justify this self-conceit to himself as a divine vocation,
and entirely absorbed in this thought, must stake everything upon it,
nor can he rest until he has trampled under foot all that will not
think as highly of him as he does himself, or until his own belief in
his divine mission is reflected from the whole contemporary world. I
shall not say what would be his fortunes in case a spiritual vision
that is true and clear within itself should actually come against
him on the field of battle, but he certainly wins from those limited
gamblers, for he hazards everything against those who do not so
hazard; no spirit inspires them, but he is altogether inspired by a
fanatical spirit--that of his mighty and powerful self-conceit.

It follows from all this that the state, as mere governance of human
life proceeding in its normal peaceable course, is not a primal thing
and one existing for itself, but that it is simply the means to the
higher end of the eternally uniform development of the purely human in
this nation; that it is only the vision and the love of this eternal
development which is continually to guide the higher outlook upon the
administration of the state, even in periods of calm, and which alone
can save the independence of the nation when this is endangered. In
the case of the Germans, among whom, as being a primitive people, this
love of country was possible and, as we firmly believe, has actually
existed hitherto, such patriotism could, up to our own time, count
with a high degree of certainty upon the safety of its most important
interests. As was the case only among the Greeks in antiquity, among
the Germans the State and the nation were actually severed from
each other, and each was represented separately; the former in the
individual German kingdoms and principalities; the latter visibly in
the Federation of the Empire, and invisibly--valid not in consequence
of written law but as a sequence of a law living in the hearts of all,
and in its results striking the eyes at every turn--in a multitude
of customs and institutions. As far as the German language extended,
every one who saw the light within its domain could regard himself
as a citizen in a two-fold sense, partly of his