Into the relation of states to one another — since within it they are particular — there falls the most agitated play of inner particularity: of passions, interests, purposes, of talents and virtues, of violence, wrong, and vice, as well as of external contingency, in the greatest dimensions of appearance — a play in which the ethical whole itself, the independence of the state, is exposed to contingency. The principles of the spirits of nations are, on account of their particularity — in which, as existing individuals, they have their objective actuality and their self-consciousness — limited in general, and their fates and deeds in their relations to one another are the manifest dialectic of the finitude of these spirits, out of which the universal spirit, the spirit of the world, produces itself as unlimited, just as it is this spirit that exercises its right — and its right is the highest right of all — over them in world history, as the court of the world.