In Hannah Arendt's view, an entirely private identity is inherently phantasmatic, lacking empirically verifiable and tangible reality, without permanence and without a future. By the same token, a ‘life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we should say, shallow. While it retains visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense’. For Arendt, both the public and the private are indispensable aspects of the human condition; while the public is artificial and constructed, it is nonetheless the arena in which one emerges fully realized as a citizen, with all the rights and responsibilities integral to this identity. The eighteenth century, described by Adam Ferguson in his History of Civil Society (1767) as ‘the age of separations’, saw a sharpening of the division with the formation of a public sphere, although as Michael McKeon writes, this distinction clearly ‘antedate[s] Ferguson's age by many centuries’.