The possibility of participating in the universal resource — that is, particular resources — is, however, conditioned, in part by an immediate basis of one’s own (capital), and, in part, by skill, which is, for its part, again conditioned, in turn, by that basis, but also by contingent circumstances, whose manifold variety brings forth a difference in the development of natural, bodily and spiritual, capacities that are already, for themselves, unequal — a difference that displays itself, within this sphere of particularity, in all directions and at every level, and which, together with the rest of contingency and arbitrary will, has as its necessary consequence the inequality of resources and skills among individuals.

To set the demand for equality against the objective right of the particularity of spirit, contained in the Idea — a right which does not abolish the inequality of human beings, in civil society, set by nature, the element of inequality, but rather produces it out of spirit itself, and elevates it into an inequality of skill, of resources, and even of intellectual and moral culture — belongs to the empty understanding, which takes this, its own abstraction and its ought, for what is real and rational. This sphere of particularity, which imagines itself to be the universal, retains within it, in this merely relative identity with that universal, just as much natural as arbitrary particularity, and hence a remainder of the state of nature. Further, it is the reason immanent within the system of human needs and their movement that articulates this system into an organic whole of differences; see the following §.