at the planet with all its mighty
curve is but as the stage to the piece enacted thereon; it is the
moving theatre on which the drama of life, from its first dark
unconscious motions to the freest energy of the soul in its airy
imaginings, is accomplished. And the thought of Pascal which might be
a rejoinder to this of Aristotle is well known, that though the
universe rise up against man to destroy him, yet man is greater than
the universe, because he knows that he dies, but of its power to
destroy the universe knows nothing.

If this then be the origin of the individual soul, and if its recorded
and unrecorded history and action in the universe be of this height, it
is not astonishing that the laws and operations of the soul of the
State, which is of an order yet more complex and mysterious, should
baffle investigation, and foil the most assiduous efforts to reduce
them to a system, and compel speculation to have recourse to such false
analogies and misleading resemblances as those to which reference has
in these lectures more than once been made.

Sec. 2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART

Thus we trace the unity of the State to the unity of the individual
soul, and thence to the Divine unity. The soul of the State is the
higher, the more complex unity, and it is not merely in the actions of
the individual in relation to or as an organic part of the State that
we must seek for the entire influence of the State upon individual
life, or for the perfect expression of the abstract energy of the State
in itself and by itself. Man in such relations does often merit the
reprobation of Rousseau, and his theory of the deteriorating effects of
a complex unity upon the single unity of the individual soul seems
often to find justification. Similarly, the exclusive admiration of
many unwitting disciples of Rousseau for the deeds of the individual as
opposed to the deeds of the State, for art as opposed to politics,
discovers in a first study of these relations strong support. But the
artist is not isolated and self-dependent. If the supreme act of a
race is war, if its supreme thought is its religion, and its supreme
poems, its language--deeds, thoughts, and poems to which the whole race
has contributed--so in manifold, potent, if unperceived ways the State
affects those energizings in art and thought which seem most
independent of the State. The sentence of Aristotle is familiar, "The
solitary man is either a brute or a