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|197| In that, within social need, as the connection of the immediate or natural need with the spiritual need of representation, the latter, as the universal, makes itself the predominant [element], there lies, in this social moment, the aspect of liberation: that the strict natural necessity of need is concealed, and the human being relates himself to his own — and indeed to a general — opinion, and to a merely self-made necessity, instead of only to an external one, that is, to an inner contingency, to arbitrary choice.

The representation that the human being, in a so-called state of nature, in which he had only so-called simple natural needs, and used, for their satisfaction, only the means that a contingent nature immediately afforded him, lived, with respect to needs, in freedom, is — even leaving aside the moment of liberation that lies in labour, of which more later — an untrue opinion; for natural need as such, and its immediate satisfaction, would be nothing but the condition of a spirituality submerged in nature, and hence of crudeness and unfreedom, whereas freedom lies solely in the reflection of the spiritual within itself, in its distinguishing itself from the natural, and in its reflection upon this.