The bases of this philosophy are already before us. Even in Kant we find the idea of a single continuous development of humanity, as a progress from a reign of natural instinct to a final freedom won through adherence to the law of reason. Fichte sketched the stages already traversed on this road and located the point at which mankind now stands. In his later writings, the significance of history as the realization of the absolute purpose is increasingly emphasized. History is the continuous life of a divine Ego by which it realizes in fact what it is in idea or destiny. Its phases are successive stages in the founding of the Kingdom of God on earth. It and it only is the revelation of the Absolute. Along with this growing deification of history is the increased significance attached to nationalism in general and the German nation in particular. The State is the concrete individual interposed between generic humanity and particular beings. In his words, the national folk is the channel of divine life as it pours into particular finite human beings. He says: "While cosmopolitanism is the dominant will that the purpose of the existence of humanity be actually realized in humanity, patriotism is the will that this end be first realized in the particular nation to which we ourselves belong, and that this achievement _thence_ spread over the entire race." Since the State is an organ of divinity, patriotism is religion. As the Germans are the only truly religious people, they alone are truly capable of patriotism. Other peoples are products of external causes; they have no self-formed Self, but only an acquired self due to general convention. In Germany there is a self which is self-wrought and self-owned. The very fact that Germany for centuries has had no external unity proves that its selfhood is metaphysical, not a gift of circumstance. This conception of the German mission has been combined with a kind of anthropological metaphysics which has become the rage in Germany. The Germans alone of all existing European nations are a pure race. They alone have preserved unalloyed the original divine deposit. Language is the expression of the national soul, and only the Germans have kept their native speech in its purity. In like vein, Hegel attributes the inner disharmony characteristic of Romance peoples to the fact that they are of mixed Germanic and Latin blood. A purely artificial cult of race has so flourished in Germany that many social movements--like anti-Semitism--and some of Germany's political ambitions cannot be understood apart from the mystic identification of Race, Culture and the State. In the light of actual science, this is so mythological that the remark of an American periodical that race means a number of people reading the same newspapers is sober scientific fact compared with it.[101:A]