From the very beginning of the heroic age on, the development of political society gave rise to phenomena that were fundamentally different from those of earlier times. The irreconcilability of this fact with the view, still held by historians and philosophers, that the State represents the earliest form of an ordered community life, is evident. Such theories were possible only when the whole of totemic culture was as yet a _terra incognita_. Totemic tribal organization cannot possibly be interpreted as an incomplete and undeveloped form of the State. Rather is it true that totemic and political societies are completely different in kind. Essentially different characteristics and conditions of origin demarcate them from one another, even though there are certain hybrid forms, representing primarily a partial survival of older tribal customs within the newly established political society. Now, in so far as mental history always involves a regular order of development, one would, of course, be justified in maintaining that human society also necessarily eventuates in the State--that is, in a political society. Indeed, this may perhaps be the meaning of Aristotle's statement that man is a "political animal." This statement may be interpreted to refer to a _predisposition_ rather than to an inherited characteristic. Nevertheless, Aristotle's view that the State gradually developed out of the family and the village community is in contradiction with the actual facts. To read back a tendency toward political development into the very beginnings of human society, moreover, results in a failure to give proper emphasis to those essential differences which distinguish the great periods of this development--differences which at the crucial points assume the form of antitheses. Furthermore, we must not overlook the fact that there are peoples who have even as yet not progressed beyond totemic tribal organization and who will very possibly never advance to the formation of a State, particularly in case this depends upon their own initiative. On the other hand, it is doubtless to be assumed that those peoples who later acquired a political organization at one time possessed a totemic tribal structure. The higher stage of political organization, however, obviously differs fundamentally from that which preceded it. The older motives have been superseded by such as are connected with the great folk migrations and tribal fusions, and with the changes consequent upon them. True, when the time was ripe, these migrations and fusions of peoples came to pass with the same necessity as did the original division of the primitive horde into two halves. Nevertheless, a new set of conditions became operative. These, of course, arose in a regular course of development out of the most primitive modes of life, and yet they were not directly derived from them. The creative power characteristic of all mental activity