There is always an ideality of the
human spirit in all its works, if one will search them, which is the
main thing. The State, as a social aggregate with a joint life which
constitutes it a nation, is dynamically an embodiment of human
conviction, desire, and tendency, with a common basis of wisdom and
energy of action, seeking to realize life in accordance with its ideal,
whether traditional or novel, of what life should be; and government is
no more than the mode of administration under which it achieves its
results both in national life and in the lives of its citizens. All
society is a means of escape from personality, and its limitations of
power and wisdom, into this larger communal life; the individual, in so
far, loses his particularity, and at the same time intensifies and
strengthens that portion of his life which is thus made one with the
general life of men,--that universal and typical life which they have in
common and which moulds them with similar characteristics. It is by this
fusion of the individual with the mass, this identification of himself
with mankind in a joint activity, this reenforcement of himself by what
is himself in others, that a man becomes a social being.
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