Within the world-as-history, in which we are so livingly woven that our perception and our reason constantly obey our feelings, the cosmic flowings appear as that which we call actuality, real life, being-streams in bodily form. Their common badge is Direction. But they can be grasped differently according as it is the _movement_ or _the thing moved_ that is looked at. The former aspect we call history and the latter family or stock or estate or people, but the one is only possible and existent through the other. History exists only as the history of something. If we are referring to the history of the great Cultures, then nation is the thing moved. State, _status_, means condition, and we obtain our impression of the State when, as a Being in moved Form flows past us, we fix in our eyes the Form as such, as something extended and timelessly standing fast, and entirely ignore direction and Destiny. State is history regarded as at the halt, history the State regarded as on the move. The State of actuality is the physiognomy of a historical unit of being; only the planned State of the theorist is a system.

A movement _has_ form, and that which is moved is “_in form_,” or, to use another sporting expression, when it is “going all out” it is in perfect condition. This is equally true for a racehorse or a wrestler and for an army or a people. The form abstracted from the life-stream of a people is the “condition” of that people with respect to its wrestle in and with history. But only the smallest part of this can be got at and identified by means of the reason. No real constitution, when taken by itself and brought down to paper as a system, is complete. The unwritten, the indescribable, the usual, the felt, the self-evident, so outweigh everything else that--though theorists never see it--the description of a state or its constitutional archives cannot give us even the silhouette of that which underlies the living actuality of a state as its essential form; an existence-unit of history is spoilt when we seriously subject its movement to the constraint of a written constitution.

The individual class or family is the smallest, the nation the largest unit in the stream of history.[626] Primitive peoples are subject to a movement that is not historical in the higher sense--the movement may be a jog-trot or may be a charge, but it has no organic character and no profound importance. Nevertheless, these primitive peoples are in motion through and through, to such an extent, indeed, as to seem perfectly formless to the hasty observer. Fellaheen, on the contrary, are the rigid objects of a movement that comes from outside and impinges on them unmeaningly and fortuitously. The former includes the “State” of the Mycenæan period; that of the Thinite period; that of the Shang dynasty in China up to, say, the migration to Yin (1400); the Frankish realm of Charlemagne; the Visigothic Kingdom to Eurich; and Petrine Russia--state-forms often ample and efficient, but still destitute of symbolism and necessity. To the latter belong the Roman, Chinese, and other Imperia, whose form has ceased to have any expressive content whatever.

But between primitive and fellah lies the history of the great Culture. A people in the style of a Culture--a historical people, that is--is called a Nation.[627] A nation, as a living and battling thing, possesses a State not merely as a condition of movement, but also (above all) _as an idea_. The State in the simplest sense of the term may be as old as free-moving life itself. Swarms and herds of even very lowly animal genera may have “constitutions” of some sort--and those of the ants, of the bees, of many fish, or migrating birds, of beavers, have reached an astounding degree of perfection--but the State of the grand style is as old as and no older than its two prime Estates, nobility and priesthood. These emerge _with_ the Culture, they vanish into it, their Destinies are to a high degree identical. Culture is the being of nations in State-form.

A people is _as_ State, a kindred is _as_ family, “in form”--that is, as we have seen, the difference between political and cosmic history, public and private life, _res publica_ and _res privata_. And both, moreover, are symbols of care.[628] The woman _is_ world-history. By conceiving and giving birth she cares for the perpetuation of the blood. The mother with the child at her breast is the grand emblem of cosmic life. Under this aspect, the life of man and woman is “in form” as marriage. The man, however, _makes_ history, which is an unending battle for the preservation of that other life. Maternal care is supplemented and paralleled by paternal. The man with weapon in hand is the other grand emblem of the will-to-duration. A people “in condition” is originally a band warriorhood, a deep and intimately felt community of men fit for arms. State is the affair of man, it is Care for the preservation of the whole (including the spiritual self-preservation called honour and self-respect), the thwarting of attacks, the foreseeing of dangers, and, above all, the positive aggressiveness which is natural and self-evident to every life that has begun to soar.

If all life were _one_ uniform being-stream, the words “people,” “state,” “war,” “policy,” “constitution,” would never have been heard of. But the eternal forceful _variety_ of life, which the creative power of the Culture elevates to the highest intensities, is a fact, and historically we have no choice but to accept it as such, with all that flows therefrom. Plant-life is only plant-life in relation to animal life; nobility and priesthood reciprocally condition one another. _A people is only really such in relation to other peoples_, and the substance of this actuality comes out in natural and ineradicable oppositions, in attack and defence, hostility and war. War is the creator of all great things. All that is meaningful in the stream of life has emerged through victory and defeat.

A people shapes history inasmuch as it is “in condition” for the task of doing so. It livingly experiences an inward history--which gets it into this “condition,” in which alone it becomes creative--and an outward history, which _consists_ in this creation. Peoples as State, then, are the real forces of all human happening. In the world-as-history there is nothing beyond them. They _are_ Destiny.

_Res publica_, the public life, the “sword side” of human being-currents, is in actuality invisible. The alien sees merely the men and not their inner connexion, for indeed this resides very deep in the stream of life, and even there is felt rather than understood. Similarly, we do not in actuality see the family, but only certain persons, whose cohesion in a perfectly definite sense we know and grasp by way of our own inward experience. But for each such mental picture there exists a group of constituent persons who are bound together as a life-unit by a like constitution of outer and inner being. This form in the flow of existence is called _customary ethic_ (_Sitte_) when it arises of itself in the beat and march and is unconscious before it is conscious; and _law_ (_Recht_) when it is _deliberately stated_ and put forth for _acceptance_.

Law--irrespective of whether its authority derives from the feelings and impulse (unwritten law, customary law, English “equity”) or has been abstracted by reflection, probed, and brought into system as Statute Law (_Gesetz_)--is the _willed_ form of Being. The jural facts that it embraces are of the two kinds, though both possess time-symbolism--Care in two modes, prevision and provision--but, from the very difference in the proportions of consciousness that they respectively contain, it follows that throughout real history there must be two laws in opposition--the law of the fathers, of tradition, the inherited, grown, and well-tried law, sacrosanct because immemorially old, derived from the experience of the blood and therefore dependable; and the thought and planned law of reason, nature, and broad humanity, the product of reflection and therefore first cousin to mathematics, a law that may not be very workable, but is at any rate “just.” It is in these two orders of law that the opposition between land-life and city-life, life-experience and study-experience, ripens till it bursts out in that revolutionary embitterment in which men take a law instead of being given it, and break a law that will not yield.

A law that has been laid down by a community expresses a _duty_ for every member, but it is no proof of every member’s _power_. On the contrary, it is a question of Destiny, who makes the law and for whom it is made. There are subjects and there are objects in the _making_ of laws, although everyone is an object as to the validity thereof--and this holds good without distinction for the inner law of families, guilds, estates, and states. But for the State, which is the highest law-subject existing in historical actuality, there is, besides, an external law that it imposes upon aliens by hostilities. Ordinary civil law is a case of the first kind, a peace treaty of the second. But in all cases the law of the stronger is the law of the weaker also. To “have the right” is an expression of power. This is a historical fact that every moment confirms, but it is not acknowledged in the realm of truth, which is not of this world. In their conceptions of right, therefore, as in other things, being and waking-being, Destiny and Causality, stand implacably opposed. To the priestly and idealistic moral of good and evil belongs the _moral distinction of right and wrong_, but in the race-moral of good and bad the distinction is between those who give and those who receive the law. An abstract idea of justice pervades the minds and writings of all whose spirit is noble and strong and whose blood is weak, pervades all religions and all philosophies--but the fact-world of history knows only the _success_ which turns the law of the stronger into the law of all. Over ideals it marches without pity, and if ever a man or a people renounces its power of the moment in order to remain righteous--then, certainly, his or its theoretical fame is assured in the second world of thought and truth, but assured also is the coming of a moment in which it will succumb to another life-power that has better understood realities.

So long as a historical power is so superior to its constituent units--as the State or the estate so often is to families and calling-classes, or the head of the family to its children--a just law _between_ the weaker is possible as a gift from the all-powerful hand of the disinterested. But Estates seldom, and states almost never, feel a power of this magnitude over themselves, and consequently between them the law of the stronger acts with immediate force--as is seen in a victor’s treaty, unilateral in terms and still more so in interpretation and observance. That is the difference between the _internal_ and the _external_ rights of historical life-units. In the first the will of an arbiter to be impartial and just can be effective--although we are apt to deceive ourselves badly as to the degree of effective impartiality even in the best codes of history, even in those which call themselves “civil” or “_bürgerlich_,” for the very adjective indicates that _an estate_ has possessed the superior force to impose them on everyone.[629] Internal laws are the result of strict logical-causal thought centring upon truths, but for that very reason their validity is ever dependent upon the material power of their author, be this Estate or State. A revolution that annihilates this power annihilates also these laws--they remain true, but they are no longer actual. External laws on the other hand, such as all peace treaties, are essentially never true and always actual--indeed appallingly so. They set up no pretension whatever of being just--it is quite enough that they are valid. Out of them speaks _Life_, which possesses no causal and moral logic, but is organically all the more consistent and consequent for the lack of it. Its will is to possess validity _itself_; it feels with an inward certainty what is required to that end and, seeing that, knows what is law for itself and _has to be made_ law for others. This logic is seen in every family, and particularly in old true-born peasant families as soon as authority is shattered and someone other than the head tries to determine “what is.” It appears in every state, as soon as one party therein dominates the position. Every feudal age is filled with the contests between lords and vassals over the “right to rights.” In the Classical world this conflict ended almost everywhere with the unconditional victory of the First Estate, which deprived the kingship of its legislative powers and made it an object of its own law-making--as the origin and significance of the Archons in Athens and the Ephors in Sparta prove beyond doubt. But the same happened in the Western field too--for a moment in France (institution of the States-General, 1302), and for good in England, where in 1215 the Norman baronage and the higher clergy imposed Magna Charta and thus sowed the seed that was to ripen into the effective sovereignty of Parliament. Hence it was that the old Norman law of the Estates here remained permanently valid. In Germany, on the contrary, the weak Imperial power, hard-pressed by the claims of the great feudatories, called in the “Roman” law of Justinian (that is, the law of the unlimited central power) to aid it against the early German land-laws.[630]

The Draconian Constitution, the πατρίος πολιτεία of the Oligarchs, was dictated by the nobility like the strictly patrician law of the Twelve Tables in Rome;[631] but by then the Late period of the Culture was well under way and the power of the city and of money were already fully developed, so that laws directed against these powers necessarily gave way very promptly to laws of the Third Estate (Solon, the Tribunate). Yet these, too, were estate-founded laws not less than their predecessors. The struggle between the two primary estates for the right of law-making has filled the entire history of the West, from the early Gothic conflict of secular and canon law for supremacy, to the controversy (not ended even to-day) concerning civil marriage.[632] And, for that matter, what are the constitutional conflicts that have occurred since the end of the eighteenth century but the acquisition by the _Tiers État_ (which, according to Sieyès’s famous remark in 1789, “was nothing, but could be all”) of the right to legislate bindingly upon all, producing a law that is just as much burghers law as ever Gothic was nobles’ law. The nakedest form in which right appears as the expression of might is (as I have already observed) in interstate treaty-making, in peace treaties, and in that Law of Nations of which already Mirabeau could say it is the law of the strong of which the observance is imposed upon the weak. A large part of the decisions of world-history is contained in laws of this kind. They are the constitution under which militant history progresses, so long as it does not revert to the original form of the armed conflict--original, and also basic; for every treaty that is valid and is meant to have real effects is an intellectual continuation thereof. If policy is war by other means,[633] the “right to give the law” is the spoil of the successful party.