Language may or may not be in the formation of a man's nationality. What however must be ever present is the Will by which man every moment of his life renovates his own personality. Can the Will, by which each one of us is what he is, be his own Will, exclusively his own? Or is the Will itself, like language, not perhaps a national heirloom, but surely a common act, a communion of life, in such a way that we live our own life while living the life of the nation? Of course, in the abstract, as I have explained above, my will is particular. But we must be reminded that Will is one thing, and faint wishing another. There is such a thing as real effective volition, and there is something which strives to be such and fails; this latter we might call "velleity." Real will does not rest satisfied with intentions, designs, or sterile desires; it acts, and by its effectiveness it reveals itself, and by its value shows its reality. And our being results not from velleities but from the real will. We are not what we might conditionally desire to be, but what we actually will to be. A velleity we might say is the will directed to an end which is either relatively or absolutely impossible; will is that which becomes effective. But, then, when is it that my will really is effective, really _wills_? I am a citizen of a state which has power; this power, this will of the state expresses itself to me in laws which I must obey. The transgression of laws, if the state is in existence, bears with it the inevitable punishment of the transgressor, that is, the application of that law which the offender has refused to recognise. The state is supported by the inviolability of laws, of those sacred laws of the land which Socrates, as Plato tells us, taught his pupils to revere. I, then, as a citizen of my country, am bound by its Law in such a manner that to will its transgression is to aim at the impossible. If I did so, I should be indulging in vain velleities, in which my personality, far from realising itself, would on the contrary be disintegrated and scattered. I then want what the law wants me to will. It makes no difference that, from a material and explicit point of view, a system of positive law does not coincide throughout with the sphere of my activity, and that therefore the major part of the standards of my conduct must be determined by the inner dictates of my particular conscience. For it is the Will of the State that determines the limits between the moral and the juridical, between what is imposed by the law of the land and what is demanded by the ethical conscience of the individual. And there is no limit which pre-exists to the line by which the constituent and legislative power of the State delimits the sphere subject to its sanctions. So that positively or negatively, either by command or by permission, our whole conduct is subject to that will by which the State establishes its reality.