true justice corresponding to the determinacy of the laws is, in the concrete exercise of judicial power, impossible in itself. As for the first: since the absolute is supposed to be within determinacies as such, it is only the infinite, and it is precisely the same empirical infinity, and an in-itself endless determinability, that is posited in the thought of comparing a determinate measure with an absolutely indeterminate line, or a determinate line with an absolutely indeterminate measure — of measuring an infinite line, or of absolutely dividing a determinate line. As for the second: of the likewise infinitely many, and infinitely differently shaped, intuitions that are the object of judicial activity, each is determined ever more manifoldly by the growing multitude of determinations; that formation of distinctions through legislation makes each individual intuition more distinguishable and more cultivated, and the expansion of legislation is not an approach toward the goal of a positive perfection — which, as shown above, has no truth here — but only the formal moment of increasing cultivation. And in order that, within this manifold, the one of judicial intuition of right and of judgment may organize itself, may become a true one and a whole, it is absolutely necessary that each individual determinacy be modified — that is, precisely insofar as it presents itself, as an absolute existing for itself, as law, be in part sublated, so that its being-absolute is not respected; and there can be no talk of a pure application, for a pure application would be the positing of individual determinacies to the exclusion of others; but through their being, these others make, just as much, the demand that they be taken into consideration, so that the counter-effect, determined not by parts but by the whole, may itself be a whole. To this clear and determinate cognition, the empty hope and the formal thought of an absolute legislation, as well as of an adjudication withdrawn from the inner judgment of the judge, must succumb.

It has been shown, in the system of reality just considered, that absolute ethical life must comport itself negatively toward it; within it, the Absolute, as it appears under the fixed determinacy of that system, is posited as negatively absolute, as infinity, which presents itself, over against the opposition, as a formal, relative, abstract unity — in that negative comportment, hostile; in this latter, itself under its dominion; in neither indifferent toward it. But the unity that is the indifference of the opposed terms, and that annihilates and comprehends them within itself, and the unity that is only a formal indifference, or the identity of the relationship of subsisting realities, must themselves be simply one, through a complete taking-up of the relationship into indifference itself. That is to say, the absolutely ethical must, as shape — for the relationship is the abstraction of the side of shape —

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