appearance of the Eternal and Absolute. Having thus described the nation as an organic totality, he goes on to point out that the political constitution shows this character by forming a triplicity of political orders. In one of these there is but a silent, practical identity, in faith and trust, with the totality: in the second there is a thorough disruption of interest into particularity: and in the third, there is a living and intellectual identity or indifference, which combines the widest range of individual development with the completest unity of political loyalty. This last order is that which lives in conscious identification of private with public duty: all that it does has a universal and public function. Such a body is the ideal Nobility—the nobility which is the _servus servorum Dei_, the supreme servant of humanity. Its function is to maintain general interests, to give the other orders (peasantry and industrials) security,—receiving in return from these others the means of subsistence. _Noblesse oblige_ gives the death-blow to particular interests, and imposes the duty of exhibiting, in the clearest form, the supreme reality of absolute morality, and of being to the rest an unperturbed ideal of aesthetic, ethical, religious, and philosophical completeness. It is here alone, in this estate which is absolutely disinterested, that the virtues appear in their true light. To the ordinary moralising standpoint they seem severally to be, in their separation, charged with independent value. But from the higher point of view the existence, and still more the accentuation of single virtues, is a mark of incompleteness. Even quality, it has been said, involves its defects: it can only shine by eclipsing or reflecting something else. The completely moral is not the sum of the several virtues, but the reduction of them to indifference. It is thus that when Plato tries to get at the unity of virtue, their aspect of difference tends to be subordinated. “The movement of absolute morality runs through all the virtues, but settles fixedly in none.” It is more than love _to_ fatherland, and nation, and laws:—that still implies a relation to something and involves a difference. For love—the mortal passion, where “self is not annulled”—is the process of approximation, while unity is not yet attained, but wished and aimed at: and when it is complete—and become “such love as spirits know(113)”—it gives place to a calmer rest and an active immanence. The absolute morality is _life in_ the fatherland and for the nation. In the individual however it is the process upward and inward that we see, not the consummation. Then the identity appears as an ideal, as a tendency not yet accomplished to its end, a possibility not yet made fully actual. At bottom—in the divine substance in which the individual inheres—the identity is present: but in the appearance, we have only the passage from possible to actual, a passage which has the aspect of a struggle. Hence