of natural right, this external justice — the formal infinity, reflected within the subsisting finite, that constitutes the principle of civil right — has acquired a peculiar supremacy over the right of the state and the right of nations. The form of such a subordinate relation as the contract has forced its way into the absolute majesty of the ethical totality, and, for example, the absolute universality of the monarchical center-point, and the being-one of the particular within it, has come to be conceived — now, following the contract of authorization, as a relation between a supreme official of the state and the abstractum of the state; now, following the relation of the ordinary contract in general, as a matter between two determinate parties, each of whom needs the other, as a relation of mutual performance — and through such relations, which lie wholly within the finite, the Idea and absolute majesty have been immediately annihilated; just as it is also inherently contradictory when, for the right of nations, the relation of the civil contract — which pertains immediately to the singularity and dependence of subjects — is made to determine the relation of absolutely independent and free peoples, who are ethical totalities. So too could the right of the state as such relate itself purely to the single individual, and, as a perfected police, seek to permeate entirely the being of the individual, and thereby annihilate civil freedom — which would be the harshest despotism; as when Fichte wants all the doing and being of the individual as such to be supervised, known, and determined by the universal opposed to it, and by abstraction. The moral principle, too, could force its way into the system of absolute ethical life, and seek to place itself at the head of public right as well as of private right, and of the right of nations as well; which would be just as much the greatest weakness as the deepest despotism, and the complete loss of the Idea of an ethical organization, since the moral principle, like that of civil right, exists only within the finite and the single.

Just as, in science, such a fixing and isolating of the individual principles and their systems, and their encroachment upon one another, is prevented solely by philosophy — inasmuch as the part does not recognize its own limit, but must rather have the tendency to constitute itself as a whole and an absolute, while philosophy stands, in the Idea of the whole, above the parts, and thereby both holds each within its limit and, through the very sublimity of the Idea, prevents the part from proliferating endlessly in its own subdivision into infinite minuteness — so, in actuality, this limiting and idealizing of the powers presents itself as the history of the ethical totality, in which, over time, fixed within its absolute equilibrium, it oscillates up and down between the opposed powers,

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