This anecdote can be applied literally to the state. Simpletons, drunk with phrases, and cunning cheats contend that the state is a supernatural creation in which the "spirit of the universe," the "spirit of history" takes shape, and through which it realizes its aims; these aims, utterly transcending the understanding of the individual, are unintelligible to man. Such overwhelming phrases strike the simple, credulous hearer dumb and send cold shudders of awe up his spine. But let us look at the inside of this magic machine whose works are driven by the "spirit of the world" and with whose help this spirit fulfils its impenetrable designs. What do we find? Men, quite ordinary mortals, who sit in the machine and work its levers; men whose intellectual powers are only in rare cases superior to those of their enslaved subjects bereft of will; men who are, as a rule, of average intelligence and not seldom even below the average. These men are the rulers, ministers who cling to office, high officials, party leaders and professional politicians who would like to become ministers, generals who seek to make themselves conspicuous, publicists who hope to derive personal profit by dint of bowing and scraping before the men in power, by flattering the stupidest and most despicable prejudices of the masses, or even by implanting such prejudices with persuasive talk and purposely leading them astray. These men are formed on the same model as all individuals of the species and are therefore full of human weaknesses, a prey to all human desires, moved by all human impulses. They are selfish, vain, the sport of likes and dislikes, of self-deception as to the value of their ideas, opinions and judgments, disputatious, arrogant, greedy of possessions, power and pleasure, spurred by the instinct to magnify and swell their personality and impose it upon others. And these men are to be liberated from the discipline of the moral law? They are to be superior to the moral law? For whom, then, was the moral law created and developed if not for these men--whose actions, although they spring from the same motives and aspire to the same satisfaction of self as those of all other men, can be fraught with consequences incomparably more evil, because they make use of the state machine for their purposes. Through the force and momentum given by the machinery of the state these actions are boundlessly augmented, their range being indefinitely increased and their results multiplied a thousandfold. The simplest logic shows that these men within the state machine, rendered so specially dangerous by their terrible armament and weapons, far from being liberated from the coercion of moral law, ought to be subjected to it with extraordinary severity, a severity which should be greater than that which suffices for the average man, in proportion as their power to do harm is greater than that of the man in the street.