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70 The Human Cycledefensive or offensive, the law of its action in the world — andnot, as it unfortunately is, a temporary necessity, — this attitudeof societies, races, religions, communities, nations, empires isevidently an aberration of the human reason, quite as much asthe claim of the individual to live for himself egoistically is anaberration and the deformation of a truth.The truth deformed into this error is the same with the communityas with the individual. The nation or community is anaggregate life that expresses the Self according to the general lawof human nature and aids and partially fulfils the developmentand the destiny of mankind by its own development and thepursuit of its own destiny according to the law of its being andthe nature of its corporate individuality. It has like the individualthe right to be itself, and its just claim, as against any attemptat domination by other nations or of attack upon its separatedevelopment by any excessive tendency of human uniformityand regimentation, is to defend its existence, to insist on beingitself, to persist in developing according to the secret Idea withinit or, as we say, according to the law of its own nature. This rightit must assert not only or even principally for its own sake, butin the interests of humanity. For the only things that we canreally call our rights are those conditions which are necessaryto our free and sound development, and that again is our rightbecause it is necessary to the development of the world and thefulfilment of the destiny of mankind.Nor does this right to be oneself mean with the nation orcommunity any more than with the individual that it should rollitself up like a hedgehog, shut itself up in its dogmas, prejudices,limitations, imperfections, in the form and mould of its past orits present achievement and refuse mental or physical commerceand interchange or spiritual or actual commingling with therest of the world. For so it cannot grow or perfect itself. Asthe individual lives by the life of other individuals, so does thenation by the life of other nations, by accepting from themmaterial for its own mental, economic and physical life; but ithas to assimilate this material, subject it to the law of its ownnature, change it into stuff of itself, work upon it by its own