ABSTRACT
THERE is no doubt, in the case of very many societies,what was the true nature of the aims pursued by theState. To keep on expanding its power and to add lustre to its fame-this was the sole or main object of public activity. Individual interests and needs did not come into the reckoning. The ingrained religious character of the political system of societies makes us appreciate this indifference of the State for what concerns the individual. The destiny of a State was closely bound up with the fate of the gods worshipped at its altars. If a State suffered reverses, then the prestige of its gods declined in the same measure-and vice versa. Public religion and civic morals were fused: they were but different aspects of the same reality. To bring glory to the City was the same as enhancing the glory of the gods of the City: it worked both ways. Now, the phenomena in the religious sphere can be recognized because they are wholly unlike those of the human order. They belong to a world apart. The individual qua individual is part of the profane world, whilst the gods are the very nucleus of the religious world, and between these two worlds there is a gulf. The gods are, in their substance, different from men: they have other ideas, other needs and an existence with no likeness to that of men. Anyone who holds that the aims of the political system were religious and the religious aims political, might as well say that there was a cleavage between the aims of the State and the ends pursued by individuals on their own. How then came it that the individual could thus occupy himself with the pursuit of aims which were to such a degree foreign to his own private concerns? The answer is this: his private concerns were relatively unimportant to him and his personality and everything that hung on it had but slight moral weight. His personal views, his
private beliefs and all his diverse aspirations as an individual seemed insignificant factors. What was prized by all, were the beliefs held in common, the collective aspirations, the popular traditions and the symbols that were an expression of them. That being so, it was gladly and without any demur that the individual yielded to the instrument by which the aims of no immediate concern to himself were secured. Absorbed, as he was, into the mass of society, he meekly gave way to its pressures and subordinated his own lot to the destinies of collective existence without any sense of sacrifice. This is because his particular fate had in his own eyes nothing of the meaning and high significance that we nowadays attribute to it. If we are right in that estimate, it was in the nature of things that it should be so; societies could only exist at that time by virtue of this subservience.
