But this formula fares as do the doctrines of science: hitherto it has remained a theory everywhere. The franchise, representation of the people, responsibility of ministers, constitutional limitation of the ruler's power, are infallibly effective weapons or instruments, but no people has yet learnt how to handle them rightly. That is why pessimists speak of the bankruptcy of civilization, that is why the aim of civilization, the liberation of the person and the enforcement of its sovereignty, has nowhere been attained, that is why, to quote Napoleon I in his interview with Goethe at Erfurt, "In our times the power of fate is politics." And yet all these institutions of a modern constitutional state, from the ballot-paper and the voting of taxes in Parliament to the enforced resignation of the ministry on a vote of censure and the oath of the ruler to observe the constitution, recognize the rights of the individual as opposed to the state, and at least theoretically give the lie to the bold declaration that the state is everything and the individual nothing. It is no less untrue to say that the state is superior to Morality and is not bound by it. In order to prove this we need only be brave enough not to be intimidated by the mysterious mien and gestures and the dark, pompous phrases of the mystics who worship the state, and to penetrate to the real, conceptual idea of the word. The hocus pocus that the worshippers of the state perform around their idol puts one in mind of Kempelen, who created a sensation with his automaton in the beginning of the nineteenth century. This figure, got up as a Turkish woman, gave rise to astonishment and, among not a few, to superstitious fear. It played chess, and so well, too, that it almost always succeeded in winning, even against its most skilled opponents. People cudgelled their brains to solve the riddle, all sorts of explanations were suggested, one more impossible than the other, but still the mystery remained dark, until the owner, having made enough money and sick of the part of an itinerant swindler, revealed the trick. In the hollow figure there sat a clever chess player who worked its hands and with them carried out the moves on the board.