Besides application to the particular, the being-posited of right also includes within it applicability to the individual case. Thereby it enters into the sphere of the quantitative that is undetermined by the concept (the quantitative for itself, or as the determination of value in the exchange of one qualitative thing for another qualitative thing). The determinacy of the concept gives only a general boundary, within which a going back and forth still takes place. This, however, must be broken off for the sake of actualization, whereby a decision, contingent and arbitrary within that boundary, enters in.

It is chiefly in this sharpening of the universal, not merely to the particular, but to singularization — that is, to immediate application — that the purely positive [element] of laws lies. It cannot be rationally determined, nor decided by the application of a determinacy derived from the concept, whether, for an offence, a corporal punishment of forty strokes, or of forty less one, is just; nor whether a fine of five talers, or, again, of four talers and twenty-three groschen, and so on; nor whether a term of imprisonment of one year, or of three hundred and sixty-four days, and so on, or of one year and one, two, or three days, is the just amount. And yet already one stroke too many, one taler or one groschen, one week, one day of imprisonment too many or too few, is an injustice. — It is reason itself that recognizes that contingency, contradiction, and semblance have their own — but limited — sphere and right, and does not trouble itself to bring such contradictions into equality and justice; here, the only interest present is that of actualization — the interest that something be determined and decided at all, in whatever way it may be (within a boundary). This deciding belongs to formal certainty of itself, to abstract subjectivity, which may hold entirely only to this: that it, within that boundary, simply breaks off and fixes something, so that something is fixed — or else to such grounds of determination as a round number is, or as the number forty less one may contain. — That the law, perhaps, does not fix this final determinacy, which actuality requires, but rather leaves it to the judge to decide, limiting him only by a minimum and a maximum, makes no difference to the matter, for this minimum and maximum are each, in themselves, such a round number, and this does not remove the fact that such a finite, purely positive determination must then be grasped by the judge, but rather concedes this to him, as is necessary.