Kant was enough of a child of the eighteenth century to be cosmopolitan, not nationalistic, in his feeling. Since humanity as a whole, in its universality, alone truly corresponds to the universality of reason, he upheld the ideal of an ultimate republican federation of states; he was one of the first to proclaim the possibility of enduring peace among nations on the basis of such a federated union of mankind. The threatened domination of Europe by Napoleon following on the wars waged by republican France put an end, however, to cosmopolitanism. Since Germany was the greatest sufferer from these wars, and since it was obvious that the lack of national unity, the division of Germany into a multitude of petty states, was the great source of her weakness; since it was equally obvious that Prussia, the one strong and centralized power among the German states, was the only thing which saved them all from national extinction, subsequent political philosophy in Germany rescued the idea of the State from the somewhat ambiguous moral position in which Kant had left it. Since a state which is an absolute moral necessity and whose actions are nevertheless lacking in inherent moral quality is an anomaly, the doctrine almost calls for a theory which shall make the State the supreme moral entity. Fichte marks the beginning of the transformation; and, in his writings, it is easy to detect a marked difference of attitude toward the nationalistic state before and after 1806, when in the battle of Jena Germany went down to inglorious defeat. From the time of Fichte, the German philosophy of the State blends with its philosophy of history, so that my reservation of the latter topic for the next section is somewhat arbitrary, and I shall not try rigidly to maintain the division of themes. I have already mentioned the fact that Kant relaxes the separation of the moral realm of freedom from the sensuous realm of nature sufficiently to assert that the former is _meant_ to influence the latter and finally to subjugate it. By means of the little crack thus introduced into nature, Fichte rewrites the Kantian philosophy. The world of sense must be regarded from the very start as material which the free, rational, moral Ego has created in order to have material for its own adequate realization of will. Fichte had a longing for an absolute unity which did not afflict Kant, to whom, save for the concession just referred to, a complete separation of the two operations of legislative reason sufficed. Fichte was also an ardently _active_ soul, whose very temperament assured him of the subordination of theoretical knowledge to moral action.