of history as the realization of the absolute purpose is increasingly emphasized. History is the continuous life of a divine Ego by which it realizes in fact what it is in idea or destiny. Its phases are successive stages in the founding of the Kingdom of God on earth. It and it only is the revelation of the Absolute. Along with this growing deification of history is the increased significance attached to nationalism in general and the German nation in particular. The State is the concrete individual interposed between generic humanity and particular beings. In his words, the national folk is the channel of divine life as it pours into particular finite human beings. He says:
"While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement thence spread over the entire race."
Since the State is an organ of divinity, patriotism is religion. As the Germans are the
only truly religious people, they alone are truly capable of patriotism. Other peoples are products of external causes; they have no self-formed Self, but only an acquired self due to general convention. In Germany there is a self which is self-wrought and self-owned. The very fact that Germany for centuries has had no external unity proves that its selfhood is metaphysical, not a gift of circumstance. This conception of the German mission has been combined with a kind of anthropological metaphysics which has become the rage in Germany. The Germans alone of all existing European nations are a pure race. They alone have preserved unalloyed the original divine deposit. Language is the expression of the national soul, and only the Germans have kept their native speech in its purity. In like vein, Hegel attributes the inner disharmony characteristic of Romance peoples to the fact that they are of mixed Germanic and Latin blood. A purely artificial cult of race has so flourished in Germany that many social movements—like anti-Semitism—and some of Germany's political ambitions cannot be understood apart from the mystic identification of Race, Culture and the State. In the
light of actual science, this is so mythological that the remark of an American periodical that race means a number of people reading the same newspapers is sober scientific fact compared with it.[101:A]
At the beginning of history Fichte placed an "Urvolk." His account of it seems an attempt to rationalize at one stroke the legends of the Golden Age, the Biblical account of man before the Fall and Rousseau's primitive "state of nature." The Urvolk lived in a paradise of innocence, a paradise without knowledge, labor or art.
The philosophy which demands such a Folk is comparatively simple. Except as a manifestation of Absolute Reason, humanity could not exist at all. Yet in the first stage of the manifestation, Reason could not have been appropriated by the self-conscious effort of man. It existed without consciousness of itself, for it was given, not, like all true self-consciousness, won by morally creative struggle. Rational in substance, in form it was but feeling or instinct. In a sense, all subsequent history is but a return to this primitive condition. But "humanity must make the journey on its own feet; by its own strength it must bring itself back to that state in which it was once without its own coöperating labor. . . . If humanity does not recreate its own true being, it has no real life." While philosophy compels us to assume a Normal People who, by "the mere fact of their existence, without science and art, found themselves in a state of perfectly developed reason," there is no ground for not admitting the existence at the same time of "timid and rude earth-born savages." Thus the original state of humanity would have been one of the greatest possible inequality, being divided between the Normal Folk existing as a
manifestation of Reason and the wild and savage races of barbarism.
In his later period of inflamed patriotism this innocuous speculation grew a sting. He had determined that the present age—the Europe of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—is the age of liberation from the external authority in which Reason had presented itself in the second age. Hence it is inherently negative: "an age of absolute indifference toward the Truth, an age of entire and unrestrained licentiousness." But the further evolution of the Divine Idea demands a Folk which has retained the primitive principle of Reason, which may redeem, therefore, the corrupt and rebellious modes of humanity elsewhere existing. Since the Germans are this saving remnant, they are the Urvolk, the Normal Nation, of the modern period. From this point on, idealization of past Germanic history and appeal to the nation to realize its unique calling by victory over Napoleon blend.
The Fichtean scaffolding tumbled, but these ideas persisted. I doubt if it is possible to exaggerate the extent to which German history has