n reference to the entire race of man or
to some branches of it, as exclusively that condition of things in which
the legal element is combined with a due recognition of the moral and
emotional parts of our nature, and in which justice, as united with
these, truly influences the intercourse of the social units. The basis
of the patriarchal condition is the family relation, which develops the
primary form of conscious morality, succeeded by that of the State as
its second phase. The patriarchal condition is one of transition, in
which the family has already advanced to the position of a race of
people, where the union, therefore, has already ceased to be simply a
bond of love and confidence and has become one of plighted service.

We must first examine the ethical principle of the Family, which may be
reckoned as virtually a single person, since its members have either
mutually surrendered their individual personality and consequently their
legal position toward one another, with the rest of their particular
interests and desires, as in the case of the parents, or, in the care of
children who are primarily in that merely natural condition already
mentioned, have not yet attained such an independent personality. They
live, therefore, in a unity of feeling, love, confidence, and faith in
one another, and, in a relation of mutual love, the one individual has
the consciousness of himself in the consciousness of another; he lives
out of self; and in this mutual self-renunciation each regains the life
that had been virtually transferred to the other--gains, in fact, the
other's existence and his own, as involved with that other. The ultimate
interests connected with the necessities and external concerns of life,
as well as the development that has to take place within their circle,
i. e., of the children, constitute a common object for the members of the
family. The spirit of the family--the _Penates_--form one substantial
being, as much as the spirit of a people in the State; and morality in
both cases consists in a feeling, a consciousness, and a will, not
limited to individual personality and interest, but embracing the common
interests of the members generally. But this unity is, in the case of
the family, essentially one of feeling, not advancing beyond the limits
of the merely natural. The piety of the family relation should be
respected in the highest degree by the State; by its means the State
obtains as its members ind