Public opinion therefore contains within itself the eternal substantial principles of justice, the true content and result of the whole constitution, legislation, and the universal condition generally, in the form of common sense, as the ethical foundation running through everyone in the shape of prejudices, as well as the true needs and correct tendencies of actuality. — At the same time, as this inner content enters consciousness and comes to be represented in universal propositions — partly on its own account, partly for the purposes of concrete reasoning about events, arrangements, and relations of the state and felt needs — the whole contingency of opinion enters in as well, its ignorance and distortion, false knowledge and false judgment. Since what is at issue here is consciousness of the idiosyncrasy of one’s view and knowledge, an opinion is the more idiosyncratic the worse its content is; for what is bad is what is wholly particular and idiosyncratic in its content, whereas what is rational is the universal in and for itself, and it is precisely this idiosyncrasy on which opinion prides itself.

For this reason, it is not to be regarded as a difference of subjective opinion when, at one time, it is said:

Vox populi, vox dei,

and at another (in Ariosto¹, for example):

Che’l Volgare ignorante ogn’ un riprenda
E parli più di quel che meno intenda.²

Both are present at once in public opinion; since truth and endless error are so immediately united within it, neither the one nor the other is truly a matter of earnest concern. Which of the two is meant in earnest can seem difficult to distinguish; and indeed it will be so, if one holds fast to the immediate utterance of public opinion. But since what is substantial is its inner content, it is only with this that it is truly in earnest; and this cannot be known from public opinion itself, but — precisely because it is the substantial — only from and through itself. Whatever passion may be invested in what is meant, and however earnestly it may be asserted, attacked, or disputed, this is no criterion of what is actually at issue; but this kind of opinion would be least of all able to be persuaded that its earnestness is not anything earnest. — A great mind once posed, for public answer, the question whether it is permissible to deceive a people³. One had to answer that a people cannot be deceived about its substantial foundation, the essence and determinate character of its spirit, but that it can be deceived by itself about the way in which it knows this and, in accordance with this way, judges its own actions, events, and so forth.

¹ Oder bei Goethe [„Sprichwörtliches”]: Zuschlagen kann die Masse, / Da ist sie respektabel: / Urteilen gelingt ihr miserabel. [Or, as Goethe put it in “Sprichwörtliches” (“Proverbial”): “The masses can strike a blow — there they are respectable; but judging is something at which they fail miserably.”]

² Orlando furioso, Canto XXVIII, 1: “That the ignorant populace finds fault with everyone, and talks most about what it understands least.”

³ Frederick II; prize question of the Berlin Academy of 1778, suggested by d’Alembert.