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454 The Ideal of Human Unityand instinct or intuition of the group-life rather than by thestricter structure of the reason.The first marked sign of a rational evolution is the tendencyof code and constitution to prevail over custom. But still thereare codes and codes. For first there are systems that are unwrittenor only partly written and do not throw themselves into the strictcode form, but are a floating mass of laws, decreta, precedents,and admit still of a large amount of merely customary law. Andagain there are systems that do take the strict code form, like theHindu Shastra, but are really only an ossification of custom andhelp to stereotype the life of the society but not to rationalise it.Finally, there are those deliberately ordered codes which are anattempt at intelligent systematisation; a sovereign authority fixesthe cadres of the law and admits from time to time changes thatare intelligent accommodations to new needs, variations that donot disturb but merely modify and develop the intelligent unityand reasonable fixity of the system. The coming to perfectionof this last type is the triumph of the narrower but more selfconsciousand self-helpful rational over the larger but vaguerand more helpless life-instinct in the society. When it has arrivedat this triumph of a perfectly self-conscious and systematicallyrational determination and arrangement of its life on one sideby a fixed and uniform constitution, on the other by a uniformand intelligently structural civil and criminal law, the society isready for the second stage of its development. It can undertakethe self-conscious, uniform ordering of its whole life in the lightof the reason which is the principle of modern socialism and hasbeen the drift of all the Utopias of the thinkers.But before we can arrive at this stage, the great questionmust be settled, who is to be the State? Is the embodiment of theintellect, will and conscience of the society to be a king and hiscounsellors or a theocratic, autocratic or plutocratic governingclass or a body which shall at least seem to stand sufficientlyfor the whole society, or is it to be a compromise between someor all of these possibilities? The whole course of constitutionalhistory has turned upon this question and to all appearancewavered obscurely between various possibilities; but in reality,