The view so far proposed rests upon a frank acceptance of social “parallelism.”[78] Hans Kelsen has subjected the theories of parallelism of psychological states (common emotion and the like) to a sharp, and in many ways devastating, criticism. He says that “common emotion, common volition and common idea can never mean anything more than a description of the coincidence in consciousness of a number of individuals.” But if one really wished to consider the state as consisting of a community of consciousness such as this, and as a matter of fact, such a realistic, empirical psychological meaning is often attributed to what is called the collective will or the collective interest of the state, then, in order to avoid inadmissible fictions, one would have only to be consistent enough really to consider the state as formed only by the contents of those whose consciousness had shown the necessary agreement. One would be bound to realize that community of will, feeling or thought, as a psychological group manifestation, fluctuates tremendously at different times and places. In the ocean of psychic happenings, such communities may rise like waves in the sea and after a brief space be lost again in an ever-changing ebb and flow.[79] In this keen dialectic Kelsen has been led astray by a failure to recognize the time dimension of the events referred to by such a concept as the state. Subjective facts are located in time in relation to one another when viewed from the standpoint of any observer. The concept of the state involves similar events in relation to one another within a duration. The concept of the state includes this idea of a temporal frame, and can best be grasped as a relational system (a manifold) in which a certain frequency of subjective events is maintained. Thus the state is not abolished when some individuals sleep or occupy themselves with the banalities of existence, unless the state is defined with reference to a duration of a few seconds or hours or days. But there is no reason whatever for choosing such a transitory frame of reference. It is just as valid to use a year as a minute, or a decade as a year, for the time dimension. Thus the state can be treated in what Kelsen speaks of as an “empirical psychological” sense. It is a durable empirical fact just so long as a certain frequency of subjective events occurs. If Kelsen agrees that contents of consciousness are “empirical,” he is bound to see them in a world of duration, and he has no authority to prescribe that the state must refer to subjective events as a “knife-edge instant.” The state, then, is a time-space manifold of similar subjective events. Kelsen is incorrect in alleging that the acceptance of the parallelism of psychological phenomena as a fundamental fact destroys the state as a permanent institution.