In relation to external things, the rational factor is that I possess property; the side of particularity, however, comprises subjective aims, needs, arbitrary will, talents, external circumstances, and so forth (§ 45); on this depends possession merely as such, but this particular side is not yet, within this sphere of abstract personality, posited as identical with freedom. What and how much I possess is therefore a matter of legal contingency.

In respect of personality, the several persons — if we may here speak of several, where no such distinction as yet obtains — are equal. But this is an empty tautological proposition; for the person, as the abstract, is precisely that which is not yet particularized and posited in determinate difference. – Equality is the abstract identity of the understanding, into which reflective thinking, and with it the mediocrity of spirit in general, first falls whenever it encounters the relation of a unity to a difference. Here, equality would be only the equality of abstract persons as such, outside of which, precisely for that reason, everything pertaining to possession — this ground of inequality — falls. – The demand, sometimes made, for equality in the distribution of land, or even of whatever wealth is further available, is an understanding all the more empty and superficial in that this particularity comprises not only external natural contingency but also the entire compass of spiritual nature in its infinite particularity and diversity, as well as in its reason as developed into an organism. – One cannot speak of an injustice of nature in the unequal distribution of possessions and wealth, for nature is not free and is therefore neither just nor unjust. That all human beings should have a livelihood sufficient for their needs is, on the one hand, a moral wish, and, expressed in this indeterminacy, a well-meant one, but, like whatever is merely well-meant in general, it possesses no objective being; on the other hand, a livelihood is something other than possession and belongs to another sphere, that of civil society.