If we regard the life of the individual or of the nation as something purely material, as an incident which terminates in death and outward decay, we must logically consider that the highest goal which man can attain is the enjoyment of the most happy life and the greatest possible diminution of all bodily suffering.  The State will be regarded as a sort of assurance office, which guarantees a life of undisturbed possession and enjoyment in the widest meaning of the word.  We must endorse the view which Wilhelm von Humboldt professed in his treatise on the limits of the activity of the State.[D] The compulsory functions of the State must be limited to the assurance of property and life.  The State will be considered as a law-court, and the individual will be inclined to shun war as the greatest conceivable evil.

[Footnote D:  W. von Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen der Wirksamkelt des Staates zu bestimmen.”]

If, on the contrary, we consider the life of men and of States as merely a fraction of a collective existence, whose final purpose does not rest on enjoyment, but on the development of intellectual and moral powers, and if we look upon all enjoyment merely as an accessory of the chequered conditions of life, the task of the State will appear in a very different light.  The State will not be to us merely a legal and social insurance office, political union will not seem to us to have the one object of bringing the advantages of civilization within the reach of the individual; we shall assign to it the nobler task of raising the intellectual and moral powers of a nation to the highest expansion, and of securing for them that influence on the world which tends to the combined progress of humanity.  We shall see in the State, as Fichte taught, an exponent of liberty to the human race, whose task it is to put into practice the moral duty on earth.  “The State,” says Treitschke, “is a moral community.  It is called upon to educate the human race by positive achievement, and its ultimate object is that a nation should develop in it and through it into a real character; that is, alike for nation and individuals, the highest moral task.”

This highest expansion can never be realized in pure individualism.  Man can only develop his highest capacities when he takes his part in a community, in a social organism, for which he lives and works.  He must be in a family, in a society, in the State, which draws the individual out of the narrow circles in which he otherwise would pass his life, and makes him a worker in the great common interests of humanity.  The State alone, so Schleiermacher once taught, gives the individual the highest degree of life.[E]

[Footnote E:  To expand the idea of the State into that of humanity, and thus to entrust apparently higher duties to the individual, leads to error, since in a human race conceived as a whole struggle and, by Implication, the most essential vital principle would be ruled out.  Any action in favour of collective humanity outside the limits of the State and nationality is impossible.  Such conceptions belong to the wide domain of Utopias.]