The true State is the ethical whole and the realization of freedom.  It is the absolute purpose of reason that freedom should be realized.  The State is the spirit, which lives in the world and there realizes itself consciously; while in nature it is actual only as its own other or as dormant spirit.  Only as present in consciousness, knowing itself as an existing object, is it the State.  The State is the march of God through the world, its ground is the power of reason realizing itself as will.  The idea of the State should not connote any particular State, or particular institution; one must rather consider the Idea only, this actual God, by itself.  Because it is more easy to find defects than to grasp the positive meaning, one readily falls into the mistake of emphasizing so much the particular nature of the State as to overlook its inner organic essence.  The State is no work of art.  It exists in the world, and thus in the realm of caprice, accident, and error.  Evil behavior toward it may disfigure it on many sides.  But the ugliest man, the criminal, the invalid, and the cripple, are still living human beings.  The affirmative, life, persists in spite of defects, and it is this affirmative which alone is here in question.

In the State, everything depends upon the unity of the universal and the particular.  In the ancient States the subjective purpose was absolutely one with the will of the State.  In modern times, on the contrary, we demand an individual opinion, an individual will and conscience.  The ancients had none of these in the modern sense; the final thing for them was the will of the State.  While in Asiatic despotisms the individual had no inner self and no self-justification, in the modern world man demands to be honored for the sake of his subjective individuality.

The union of duty and right has the twofold aspect that what the State demands as duty should directly be the right of the individual, since the State is nothing but the organization of the concept of freedom.  The determinations of the individual will are given by the State objectivity, and it is through the State alone that they attain truth and realization.  The State is the sole condition of the attainment of the particular end and good.

Political disposition, called patriotism—­the assurance resting in truth and the will which has become a custom—­is simply the result of the institutions subsisting in the State, institutions in which reason is actually present.

Under patriotism one frequently understands a mere willingness to perform extraordinary acts and sacrifices.  But patriotism is essentially the sentiment of regarding, in the ordinary circumstances and ways of life, the weal of the community as the substantial basis and the final end.  It is upon this consciousness, present in the ordinary course of life and under all circumstances, that the disposition to heroic effort is founded.  But as people are often rather magnanimous than just, they easily persuade themselves that they possess the heroic kind of patriotism, in order to save themselves the trouble of having the truly patriotic sentiment, or to excuse the lack of it.