Just as the stipulation of the contract already contains, for itself, the true transfer of property (§ 79), so the solemn declaration of consent to the ethical bond of marriage, and the corresponding recognition and confirmation of it by the family and the community (that the church enters in, in this respect, is a further determination, not to be developed here), constitute the formal conclusion and actuality of marriage — so that this union is constituted as ethical only through the preceding of this ceremony, as the accomplishment of the substantial through the sign, language, as the most spiritual existence of the spiritual (§ 78). Thereby the sensuous moment, belonging to natural vitality, is posited within its ethical relationship as a consequence and an accidentality, one belonging to the external existence of the ethical union, which can also be exhausted solely in reciprocal love and assistance.

If the question is raised as to what must be regarded as the chief purpose of marriage, in order to derive or assess the legal determinations from it, what is meant by this chief purpose is which of the individual aspects of its actuality must be taken as essential before the others. But none of them, taken by itself, constitutes the whole compass of its content that is in and for itself, the ethical; and one or another aspect of its existence can be lacking without prejudice to the essence of marriage. — If the conclusion of marriage as such — the solemnity through which the essence of this union is expressed and established as an ethical [bond] elevated above the contingency of feeling and particular inclination — is taken to be a merely external formality, a so-called merely civil precept, then nothing remains for this act but, at most, the purpose of edification and of the certification of the civil relationship, or even to be the merely positive arbitrariness of a civil or ecclesiastical precept — one not only indifferent to the nature of marriage, but which, insofar as a value is placed on this formal conclusion by the disposition on account of the precept, and it is regarded as a preceding condition of the mutual, complete devotion, disunites the disposition of love and, as something alien, runs counter to the inwardness of this union. Such an opinion, in claiming to give the highest concept of the freedom, inwardness, and completion of love, rather denies the ethical [character] of love — the higher inhibition and setting-back of the mere natural drive, which is already contained, in a natural way, in shame, and is raised, through the more determinate spiritual consciousness, to chastity and discipline. More precisely, that view rejects the ethical determination that consists in this: that consciousness gathers itself, out of its naturalness and subjectivity, to the thought of the substantial, and, instead of still reserving to itself the contingency and arbitrariness of sensuous inclination, withdraws the union from this arbitrariness and hands it over to the substantial, binding itself to the Penates, and reduces the sensuous moment to something conditioned, [distinguished] from the true and ethical [aspect] of the relationship and from the recognition of the union as an ethical one. — It is impudence, and the understanding that supports it, that is unable to grasp the speculative nature of the substantial relationship — a nature to which, however, the uncorrupted ethical disposition, as well as the legislation of Christian peoples, correspond.