118 This would be to be guilty of explaining _ignotum_ per _ignotius_. And yet, there are a great many modern writers who imagine that they have said something all-sufficient, when they have told us that the state is an organism. As early a writer as _Hufeland_ (N. Grundlegung, I, 113), enters his protest against such abuses. The person who would operate with this notion, should, at least, have read the acute observations, so well calculated to dissipate preconceived opinions, made by _Lotze_, in his Allgemeine Physiologie des körperlichen Lebens, 1-165. The organic conception of national life, the life of a whole people, where the individual organs are free and rational beings, is evidently a much more difficult one to form than that of the animal or human body. 119 I first called attention, in my work on the life-work and age of _Thucydides_, to the fact that that great historian always accounts for causes in the following manner: A. is produced by B., and B. by A. (_Roscher_, Leben Work und Zeitalter des Thukydides, 199 ff.; compare especially _Thucyd._, I, 2, 7, seq.) Such a circle is not a vicious one. All first class historians have thus explained historical phenomena. The one-sided deduction of A. from B., and B. from C., etc., which the so-called pragmatic writers like _Polybius_, for instance, is the result of overlooking all reciprocal action. _Scialoja_, Principii (1840), p. 60, makes a somewhat similar observation for Political Economy. 120 Whether we call the unknown and inexplicable ground back of all analysis, and which our analysis cannot reach, vital force, generic form, spirit of the nation, or God’s thought, is for the present a matter of scientific indifference. All the more necessary are the self-knowledge and honesty, in general, which admit the existence of this background, and which do not, by denying it, deny the connection of the whole, which is, for the most part, much more important than the analyzed parts. But I must at the same time, enter my energetic protest against the imputations of heresy made by those who do not comprehend the sacred duty of science, by never ceasing investigation, to push farther back the bounds of this inexplicable background.