But, for all that, there is the state still; and although we may not say with Hegel, the special hero of state omnipotence, that all that is real is rational, yet never is anything that really is, entirely irrational. The state is still the soil on which we stand and which we till, that it may be able to receive the seed of the spirit—the state is an evolutionary stage of human culture. It is a vessel for the reception of the life of the human spirit. It is one of the conditions of life through which present man must make his way of necessity, if he is to fulfil his highest destiny. Therefore it is also folly and superstition, an idolatry of one’s own ego, and of one’s own personality, if a man thinks he can unfold the wealth of the human by turning aside from the state. Where the life interests of man solidify to political tendencies, there remains something for the solitary man to see and to learn, to do and to achieve; and it is a subtle and dangerous temptation when a man in his solitude proposes to find his satisfaction in the enjoyment of his books and in the world of his own thoughts and feelings without concern for the weal or woe of the political body of which he is a member. Politics is raw to refined natures. But so is all the material with which man labors, and out of which he fashions what is fine. Let creative spirits make out of the state a human society in which all human greatness can grow. The idolatry of the state is, like any idolatry, a poison in popular life. But the antidote which anarchism administers to the present generation, sick of the state, namely, dominion on the part of the ego, the _cultus_ of the _Ichmensch_, does not make the matter better, but perhaps only worse. The personality of man is indeed his _summum bonum_, his soul and life; but only the whole, free, full personality, which feels the pulsations of the common life of humanity, of the world—only the man to whom, as old Terence said, nothing human is foreign, because he is in a position to read in all the human the language and revelation of the eternal. This man is a political being, but not a political being alone. He has his own soul which he affirms against any claim of politics and preserves from injury. He lives in the state, but also above the state. He knows well-springs of being without which the state would be a desert and dry ground. He is a religious personality who falls down and supplicates no majesty, because he knows God whom alone we ought to worship and serve! Book Discussion Egomania _Contemporary Portraits, by Frank Harris. New York: Mitchell Kennerley._