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The purpose of the corporation, as a restricted and finite one — like the separation present in the external arrangement of the police, and its relative identity — has its truth in the purpose that is universal in and for itself, and in its absolute actuality; civil society therefore passes over into the state.

Town and country — the former the seat of civic trade, of reflection turning in upon and individualizing itself, the latter the seat of an ethical life resting on nature — and the individuals who, in relation to other legal persons, mediate their self-preservation, together with the family, constitute the two still ideal moments in general out of which the state emerges as their true ground. |240| This development of immediate ethical life, through the diremption of civil society, to the state — which shows itself to be their true ground — and only such a development, is the scientific proof of the concept of the state. Because, in the course of the scientific concept, the state appears as a result, inasmuch as it turns out to be the true ground, that mediation and that semblance equally sublate themselves into immediacy. In actuality, therefore, the state as such is rather the first thing, within which the family first develops into civil society; and it is the Idea of the state itself which divides itself into these two moments. In the development of civil society, ethical substance attains its infinite form, which contains within itself the two moments: 1. infinite differentiation, extending to the self-subsistent inward being of self-consciousness, and 2. the form of universality present in culture — the form of thought — by which spirit is objective and actual, as an organic totality, in laws and institutions, its thought-out will.