For, as a matter of fact, the state is not a person but a concept, an institution created by man in the interests of one individual, of a few, of many or of all; an organization of habits and interests, a relation in which individuals live together. The mysticism of the weak-minded has transformed it into a person with human features, with the qualities, desires, duties, and aims of an individual; these men are intellectually incapable of penetrating to the fundamental facts underlying the concept, and cling entirely to word-pictures which are mere verbalism. Scholasticism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was chiefly occupied in a quarrel about Nominalism and Realism. It was allowed to drop and was not fought out to a decision. Perhaps because it is impossible to convince these superficial babblers who take a name or a word for an object actually existent in time and space, that they are in error. The fight between Abelard and Roscelet and that between the two of them and Duns Scotus ought to be taken up again. Above all, one ought to knock it into the heads of those who make a fetish of the state that it is a mere word, the famous "_flatus vocis_" of the Nominalists, which they worship, to which they build altars and make human sacrifices. This humiliating form of idolatry is practised by the school of sociologists known as organicistic, as well as by the practical politicians. This school maintains that the individual has no independent existence at all, that he continues to exist only in the community, by the community, as a totally subordinate, dependent and incomplete fraction of the community; that the only real thing in the species is society, the state; that this must be regarded as a living organism, in which the individual human being is merely a cell which in solitude, outside the community and detached from it, is as little capable of life and has as little significance as a cell separated from a highly differentiated creature, such as a man or some other mammal. In my book "_Der Sinn der Geschichte_" (The Meaning of History), I threw as much light as I possibly could on this superstition, and I pointed out in detail its lack of sense as well as its dangers. I can, therefore, content myself here with a résumé and a few indications.