These are the greatest geniuses of the world, not the kings, the wealthy magnates and marshals of war. The civic duty of man is a basic commonsense consideration that one should have to the environment of people and the world, and it is good to be always friendly with the community around. If charity begins at home, love and service also start in the immediate neighbourhood. Goodness of behaviour is more a quality of outlook than a quantitative reach of one s actions to distant corners of the world. To be qualitatively good in respect of even one person would speak more gloriously of that source of service than to be just quantitatively philanthropic to a large number of individuals.
Civic obligations arise from human nature itself.
They spring from the very needs of human make-up which has connections with different kinds of facility that is expected to be received from the world. If we accept the theory of the cave-man, the hunter and the tribal as the initial stages of human effort towards preservation of life and maintenance of security and read through the following stages of the development of the human mind, it would become obvious that there was a developing tendency of individuals to form themselves into small groups for the purpose of facilitating the acquisition of the common needs of life, as also to protect the group from rival communities. Perhaps, here is the crude beginning of the formation of principalities and such regional associations with a common cause, and with a leader, mostly of a warrior type, to become later a local suzerain, a royalty, the traditional king occupied with the protection of his jurisdiction and always cautious to ward off interference from other ambitious guardians of people living in different localities, which could very easily be proclaimed as the beginnings of kingdoms, investing their leaders even with a kind of superhuman divinity. This so-called divine right of kings, thus originated and proclaimed by certain rulers, is a mixture of supposed human power and angelic superintendence over communities recognised as superphysical glories enhancing the status and recognition of the earthly potentates. It is the specific contribution of Hegel in his studies of the phenomenology of mind that the original form of life was just identical with brute consciousness, which is a state of sleeping consciousness, gradually opening itself out into the vegetable type, animal type and human type of consciousness, self-consciousness becoming aware of itself only at the human level.