From this individuality of the whole and the determinate character of a people, the whole system into which the absolute totality organizes itself is likewise to be recognized; it is to be recognized how all parts of the constitution and of legislation, all determinations of ethical relations, are simply determined through the whole, and form a structure in which no connection and no ornament was present for itself a priori, but each has come to be through the whole and is subject to it. In this sense Montesquieu grounded his immortal work on the intuition of the individuality and character of peoples, and, even if he did not raise himself to the most living Idea, he nonetheless simply did not deduce the individual institutions and laws from so-called reason, nor did he abstract them from experience and then elevate them into something universal, but comprehended both the higher relations of the parts of constitutional right and the lower determinations of civil relations, down to testaments, marriage laws, and so on, entirely and solely out of the character of the whole and its individuality – and thereby showed, in a manner intelligible to them, to the empirical theorists who fancy they have derived the contingencies of their systems of state and of laws from reason and drawn them out of common human understanding itself, or else out of universal experience, that the reason, and the common human understanding, and the experience from which determinate laws derive are not an a priori reason and common human understanding, nor an a priori experience that would be absolutely universal, but entirely and solely the living individuality of a people – an individuality whose highest determinacies are in turn to be comprehended out of a more universal necessity.

As was shown above with regard to science, that any individual power can be fixed and science can thereby become positive, so exactly the same must be asserted of the ethical individual, or of the people. For according to necessity, the totality, as the subsistence of determinacies thrown apart from one another, must present itself in it, and the individual link of the chain under which it is posited in the present must pass away, and another must enter in. As the individual grows in this way, one power emerging more strongly while another recedes, it happens that the parts which had organized themselves in the latter find themselves cast out and died off. This division, in which some part ripens toward a new life, while the other, which has fixed itself at the stage of a determinacy, remains behind and sees life flee from it, is possible only because the determinacy of a stage has been fixed and made formally absolute; the form of law, which has been given to the determinate custom, and which is the universality or the negatively absolute of identity, gives it the

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