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|351| 1. The Oriental Realm

This first realm is the substantial world-view, proceeding from the patriarchal natural whole and undivided within itself, in which secular government is theocracy, the ruler is also high priest or god, and constitution and legislation are at the same time religion, just as religious and moral commandments — or rather customs — are equally laws of state and of right. In the splendor of this whole, individual personality perishes without right; external nature is immediately divine, or an adornment of the god, and the history of actuality is poetry. The distinctions that develop on the various sides of custom, government, and the state become, in place of laws — where custom is simple — cumbersome, elaborate, superstitious ceremonies, or contingencies of personal power and arbitrary rule; and the articulation into estates becomes the natural fixity of castes. The Oriental state is therefore alive only in its movement, which, since nothing within it is stable and what is fixed has turned to stone, is directed outward and becomes an elemental raging and devastation. Inner repose is a private life and a sinking into weakness and exhaustion.

The moment of a still substantial, natural spirituality in the formation of the state — which, as form, constitutes the absolute starting point in the history of every state — has been historically highlighted and demonstrated with regard to particular states, with both profundity and erudition, in the work Vom Untergange der Naturstaaten [On the Decline of the Natural States], Berlin 1812 (by Dr. |352| Stuhr), thereby clearing the way for a rational consideration of the history of the constitution, and of history in general. The principle of subjectivity and self-conscious freedom is likewise demonstrated there in the Germanic nation; but since the treatise extends only to the decline of the natural states, it too is carried only as far as the point where this principle appears in part as restless mobility, human caprice, and corruption, and in part, in its particular shape, as heart, without having developed to the objectivity of self-conscious substantiality, to organic legality.