in its purest form.  The qualitative conception is the most coherent and truest form and is therefore the most moral, because it sees a people realised in the consciousness and will of the few or even of one only; an ideal which moves to its realisation in the consciousness and will of all.  By “all” is meant all who derive their justification as a nation, ethnically speaking, from their nature and history, and who follow the same line of spiritual formation and development as one single will and consciousness—­not as a race nor as a geographically determined region, but as a progeny that is rather the outcome of a history which perpetuates itself; a multitude unified by an idea embodied in the will to have power and to exist, conscious of itself and of its personality.

10.  Conception of the State.

This higher personality is truly the nation, inasmuch as it is the State.  The nation does not beget the State, according to the decrepit nationalistic concept which was used as a basis for the publicists of the national States in the Nineteenth Century.  On the contrary, the nation is created by the State, which gives the people, conscious of their own moral unity, the will, and thereby an effective existence.  The right of a nation to its independence is derived not from a literary and ideal consciousness of its own existence, much less from a de facto situation more or less inert and unconscious, but from an active consciousness, from an active political will disposed to demonstrate in its right; that is to say, a kind of State already in its pride (in fieri).  The State, in fact, as a universal ethical will, is the creator of right.

11.  Dynamic Reality.

The nation as a State is an ethical reality which exists and lives in measure as it develops.  A standstill is its death.  Therefore the State is not only the authority which governs and which gives the forms of law and the worth of the spiritual life to the individual wills, but it is also the power which gives effect to its will in foreign matters, causing it to be recognised and respected by demonstrating through facts the universality of all the manifestations necessary for its development.  Hence it is organization as well as expansion, and it may be thereby considered, at least virtually, equal to the very nature of the human will, which in its evolution recognises no barriers, and which realises itself by proving its infinity.

12.  The Role of the State.

The Fascist State, the highest and the most powerful form of personality is a force, but a spiritual one.  It reassumes all the forms of the moral and intellectual life of man.  It cannot, therefore, be limited to a simple function of order and of safeguarding, as was contended by Liberalism.  It is not a simple mechanism which limits the sphere of the presumed individual liberties.  It is an internal form and rule, a discipline of the entire person:  it penetrates the will as well as the intelligence.  Its principle, a central inspiration of the living human personality in the civil community, descends into the depths and settles in the heart of the man of action as well as the thinker, of the artist as well as of the scientist; the soul of our soul.