The age of progress through which the world has recently passed was an age of progress due to increase of human intercourse and consequent increasing understanding by each nation of other nations and peoples. This better knowledge of other peoples is now reacting upon the self-knowledge of each nation, rapidly enriching it. Each of the great nations is beginning to understand itself, and to take thought for the morrow in the light of this self-knowledge; and this increase of national self-knowledge, this enrichment of national self-consciousness, is the great new factor which alone can secure the further progress of mankind. We saw in an earlier chapter that a nation is essentially the realization of an idea, the idea of a nation, that only in so far as the idea of the nation exists and operates in the minds of the members of the nation, controlling their conduct and directing it to actions having reference to the nation as a whole, does a nation come into and continue in existence. The self-consciousness of nations is therefore not a new factor in their life. But their self-consciousness is now becoming reflective and immensely richer in content; so much so that it promises to operate virtually as a new factor of tremendous efficiency. We may illustrate the influence of this new factor by reverting again to the analogy between the mind of the individual and the mind of the nation which we developed at some length in an earlier chapter. In the developing individual, as in the evolving animal series, the development of self-consciousness is the condition of the development of true volition. Before self-consciousness and a self-regarding sentiment are developed, conduct is determined by feelings and impulses or by ideas and the desires they arouse, either some one desire rising alone to consciousness and issuing at once in action, or through a conflict of impulses and desires, some one of which eventually predominates over the others and determines action; but action issuing from such a conflict of impulses and desires is not true volition. Action is truly volitional only when the ideal of the self in relation to the idea of the end to be achieved by each of the conflicting tendencies determines the issue of the conflict.