a) The substantial estate has its resources in the natural products of a soil that it works — a soil capable of being exclusive private property, and requiring not merely indeterminate use, but an objective formation. Against the tying of labour and acquisition to particular fixed periods of nature, and the dependence of the yield on the variable character of the natural process, the purpose of need makes itself into a provision for the future; but, on account of its conditions, it retains the manner of a subsistence less mediated by reflection and one’s own will, and, in this, the substantial disposition, in general, of an immediate ethical life resting on the family relationship and on trust.

With right, the true beginning and first founding of states has been placed in the introduction of agriculture, together with the introduction of marriage, since that principle brings with it the forming of the soil, and thereby exclusive private property (compare § 170, Remark), and leads the roaming life of the savage, seeking its subsistence in wandering, back to the calm of private right and to the security of the satisfaction of need — with which is bound up the limitation of sexual love into marriage, and thus the expansion of this bond into a lasting bond, universal within itself, of need into family care, and of possession into family property. Security, consolidation, and durability in the satisfaction of needs, and so on — characteristics which chiefly recommend these institutions — are nothing other than forms of universality, and shapings of the way in which rationality, the absolute final purpose, asserts itself within these objects. — What could be more interesting, for this subject matter, than the equally ingenious and learned disclosures that my greatly esteemed friend, Herr Creuzer, has given us, in particular in the fourth volume of his Mythology and Symbolism,¹ (Friedrich Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, 4 vols., 1810/12.) concerning the agrarian festivals, images, and sanctuaries of the ancients, who became conscious of the introduction of agriculture, and of the institutions connected with it, as divine deeds, and thus dedicated to them religious veneration.

That the substantial character of this estate undergoes modifications — on the part of the laws of private right, in particular of the administration of justice, as well as on the part of instruction and culture, and also of religion — not with respect to its substantial content, but with respect to its form and the development of reflection, is a further consequence that likewise holds in respect of the other estates.