Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/211

 were at first willing and obedient subjects were developed, they must have begun to regard with envious eyes the power of government exercised over them by other men. Thus communities united by common descent, and inhabiting a common country, separated themselves from the general mass, and, when fortune favoured them, sometimes even attained a dominion over the whole.

In this manner had the State, in our opinion, its beginning in Central Asia, as the cradle of the historical existence of the Human Race. He who first subjected the will of other Freemen to his own in this quarter of the World, may indeed have been, according to a well-known tradition, a mighty hunter; but the troops of men once assembled, were afterwards employed for other purposes than the chase. At a later time, Assyrians, Medes, Persians, and other nations whose names are unknown to us, made their appearance upon this stage, and one after another assumed the sovereignty over their former Rulers, as well as over their former companions in servitude. It is only of these governing nations and of their chief leaders that History makes mention: of the subdued, and those who never attained to sovereignty,—of their knowledge, their domestic relations, their manners, their Culture,—she is silent; their existence passed away in obscurity, unnoticed by Political History. That these nations, however, may have been essentially not worse, but probably far superior to their conquerors, is proved,—by the history of civilization among the Jews who for the first time during their dispersion among these people were emancipated from their former rude superstition and elevated to better conceptions of God and of the Spiritual World;—by that of the Greeks who acknowledge that they have received the sublimest elements of their philosophy from these countries;—and finally, by the history of Christianity which, according to a previous remark, ascribes to itself not a Jewish but an Asiatic origin. The greatest share