The rapid increase of national self-consciousness among the peoples of the world and the increasing part everywhere played by the sentiment for national existence are in short the dominant facts in the present period of world history; their influence overshadows all others. Since, then, any nation exists only in virtue of the existence of the idea of the nation in the minds of the individuals of whom it is composed, and in virtue of the influence of this idea upon their actions, and since this idea plays so great a part in shaping the history of the world, it is absurd to maintain that the general will is but the blind resultant of the conflict of individual wills striving after private ends and unconscious of the ends or purposes of the nation. In opposition to such a view, we must maintain that a population seeking only individual ends cannot form or continue to be a nation, though all the other conditions we have noticed be present; that a nation is real and vigorous in proportion as its consciousness of its self is full and clear. In fact national progress and power and success depend in chief part upon the fulness and the extension, the depth and width of this self-consciousness—the accuracy and fulness with which each individual mind reflects the whole; and upon the strength of the sentiments which are centred upon it and which lead men to act for the good of the whole, to postpone private to public ends. And the same holds good of all the many forms of corporate life within the nation. Each individual’s sense of duty, in so far as it is a true sense of duty, and not a fictitious sense due merely to superstitious fear or to habit formed by suggestion and compulsion, is chiefly founded upon the consciousness of the society of which he forms a part, upon the group spirit that binds him to his fellows and makes him one with them. And the nations in which this national self-consciousness is strongest and most widely diffused will be the successful nations.