Just as, in civil society, right in itself becomes law, so too the previously immediate and abstract existence of my individual right passes over into the significance of being recognized, as an existence within the existing universal will and knowing. Acquisitions and transactions concerning property must therefore be undertaken and furnished with the form that this existence gives to them. Property now rests on contract, and on the formalities that make it capable of proof and legally valid.

The original, that is, immediate, kinds and titles of acquisition (§ 54 ff.) properly fall away in civil society, and occur only as isolated contingencies or limited moments. — It is, in part, the feeling that remains fixed in the subjective, in part the reflection that holds fast to the abstraction of its own essentialities, which rejects the formalities — formalities that, for their part, dead understanding can, in turn, insist on against the matter, and multiply into the infinite. — Moreover, it lies in the course of culture, in progressing, with long and hard labour, from the sensuous and immediate form of a content to the form of its thought, and thus to a simple expression appropriate to it, that, in the condition of a legal culture that is only just beginning, solemnities and formalities are of great circumstantiality, and count for more as the matter itself than as its sign; whence, in Roman law too, a multitude of determinations, and especially of expressions, from these solemnities have been retained, rather than having been replaced by determinations of thought and their adequate expression.