Society is an expression of man's egoistic nature; his natural seeking for personal advantage and profit. Its typical manifestation is in competitive economic struggle and in the struggle for honor and recognized social status. These have their proper place; but with respect even to them it is the duty of the State to intervene so that the struggle may contribute to ideal ends which alone are universal. Hence the significance of the force or power of the State. Unlike other forms of force, it has a sort of sacred import, for it represents force consecrated to the assertion and expansion of final goods which are spiritual, moral, rational. These absolute ends can be maintained only in struggle against man's individualistic ends. Conquest through conflict is the law of morals everywhere. In Kant we find only the beginnings of this political philosophy. He is still held back by the individualism of the eighteenth century. Everything legal and political is conceived by him as external and hence outside the strictly moral realm of inner motivation. Yet he is not content to leave the State and its law as a wholly unmoral matter. The _natural_ motives of man are, according to Kant (evidently following Hobbes), love of power, love of gain, love of glory. These motives are egoistic; they issue in strife--in the war of all against all. While such a state of affairs does not and cannot invade the inner realm of duty, the realm of the moral motive, it evidently presents a regime in which the conquest of the world of sense by the law of reason cannot be effected. Man in his rational or universal capacity must, therefore, will an outward order of harmony in which it is at least possible for acts dictated by rational freedom to get a footing. Such an outer order is the State. Its province is not to promote moral freedom directly--only the moral will can do that. But its business is to hinder the hindrances to freedom: to establish a social condition of outward order in which truly moral acts may gradually evolve a kingdom of humanity. Thus while the State does not have a directly moral scope of action (since the coercion of motive is a moral absurdity), it does have a moral basis and an ultimate moral function. It is the law of reason, "holy and inviolable," which impels man to the institution of the State, not natural sociability, much less considerations of expediency. And so necessary is the State to humanity's realization of its moral purpose that there can be no right of revolution. The overthrow and execution of the sovereign (Kant evidently had the French Revolution and Louis XVI in mind) is "an immortal and inexpiable sin like the sin against the Holy Ghost spoken of by theologians, which can never be forgiven in this world or in the next."