Now, if the absolutely ethical thus has its own peculiar organic body in individuals, and its movement and vitality, in the common being and doing of all, is absolutely identical as universal and particular, and we have considered it in particularity, but in such a way that its essence is the absolutely identical, so — that is, in that identity in general — it must also present itself in the form of universality and of cognition, as a system of legislation; such that this system perfectly expresses the reality, or the living, present customs; so that it does not happen, as is often the case, that what is right and is in actuality in a people cannot be recognized from its laws — which incapacity to bring true customs into the form of laws, and this anxiety about thinking these customs, about regarding and acknowledging them as one’s own, is the mark of barbarism. But this ideality of customs, and their form of universality in the laws, must, insofar as it subsists as ideality, at the same time also be perfectly reunited again with the form of particularity, and thus ideality as such must receive a pure, absolute shape, and so be beheld and worshipped as the god of the people, and this intuition itself must in turn have its own vitality and joyful movement in a cult.

Having thus presented absolute ethical life in the moments of its totality, and constructed its Idea, and having likewise annihilated as insubstantial figments of thought the distinction, prevailing in relation to it, between legality and morality, together with the abstractions of a universal freedom of a formal practical reason connected therewith — and having determined the differences between the science of natural right and morality according to the absolute Idea, not through some mixture of the two principles, but through the sublation of these and the constitution of the absolute ethical identity — we have thereby established that their essence is not an abstraction but the vitality of the ethical, and that their difference concerns only what is external and negative; and that this difference is at the same time the wholly inverted relation to the other distinction, inasmuch as, according to the latter, the formal and the negative are supposed to be given to natural right as its essence, and the absolute and the positive to morality — but in such a way that even this absolute, according to the truth, is no less formal and negative, and that what is here called the formal and negative is, in the end, simply nothing at all.

In order now to indicate the relation of natural right to the positive sciences of right, we need only take up its threads again where we did not pursue them further, and mark the point at which it runs out.

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