Third Section. The State
The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea — ethical spirit as the revealed, self-transparent, substantial will, which thinks and knows itself and accomplishes what it knows, and insofar as it knows it. It has its immediate existence in custom, and its mediated existence in the self-consciousness of the individual, in the latter’s knowledge and activity; while self-consciousness, in turn, has its substantial freedom in the disposition it holds toward the state as its essence, purpose, and the product of its activity.
The Penates are the inner, lower gods; the spirit of a people (Athena) is the divine that knows and wills itself; piety is feeling, and the ethical life that comports itself within feeling; political virtue is the willing of the thought-out purpose that is in and for itself.

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