power is no longer in conformity with the concept of universal freedom; it is supposed to oversee the supreme power generally, and, as soon as a private will takes the place of the general will within it, to wrest that power away from it, and the manner in which this is to happen is supposed to be a public declaration, having absolute effect, of the total nullity, from that moment on, of all acts of the supreme power of the state. That the power should separate itself off of its own accord, by its own judgment—which would be insurrection—is not, must not, be allowed to happen; for this pure power consists of nothing but private wills, which therefore cannot constitute themselves as a common will. But it is that second common will which is to declare this multitude, as the commons, or the pure power, likewise united with the Idea of the general will, once it is no longer present in the previous holders of power. Whatever determinacy be posited, by which something is to be compelled against the supreme power, that determinacy would have to be conjoined not with mere possibility but with real power; but since this real power lies in the hands of the other representation of the common will, this latter is capable of preventing any such determinacy, and of nullifying whatever functions may be assigned to the Ephorate—the overseeing, the public declaration of the interdict, and whatever formalities may be devised; and indeed with just as much right as those in whose hands the efficacy of this determinacy would be placed, for these ephors are no less, at the same time, private wills than those others are; and whether the private will of these has separated itself from the general will is something the government can just as well judge as the Ephorate can judge concerning it, and can, moreover, unconditionally make that judgment prevail.

As is well known, on the occasion of the dissolution, undertaken in recent times by a government, of a rivaling legislative power that was hampering it, a man who had himself been caught up in the affair rightly judged, regarding the notion that the establishment of a supervisory commission similar to the Fichtean Ephorate would have prevented such an act of violence, that a council so charged with oversight, and wishing to resist the government, would have been dealt with just as violently. — Finally, however, if the supreme power-holders were voluntarily to permit this second representative of the general will to summon the commons, so that they might judge between them and the overseers, what would be to be done with such a rabble, which is itself supervised in everything that is a private matter, still less leads a public life, and is thus formed not at all for a consciousness of the common will and for acting in the spirit of a whole, but solely for the opposite?

What has hereby been shown is that the ethical, which is posited solely in terms of the relation—that is, externality and coercion—when thought as a totality,

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