appearance of something existing in itself; and if the mass of a people is great, then the part of it that organizes itself within that determinacy is great too; and the consciousness that stands over it in the law carries great weight over the unconscious part of the newly aspiring life. When custom and law were one, determinacy was nothing positive; but just as, with the growth of the individual, the whole does not advance uniformly, so law and custom separate, the living unity that binds the members together weakens, and there is no longer, in the present of the whole, any absolute connection and necessity. Here, then, the individual cannot be recognized out of itself, for its determinacy is without the life that explains and renders it comprehensible; and as the new custom likewise begins to take itself up into laws, an inner contradiction of the laws among themselves must simply emerge. Just as previously in history only one side of the view was in question, and what is necessary was at the same time free, so here, by contrast, necessity is no longer one with freedom, and so far falls entirely to pure history; what has no truly living ground in the present has its ground in a past, that is, a time is to be sought in which the determinacy fixed in law, but now dead, was living custom and in agreement with the rest of legislation. But the effect of the purely historical explanation of laws and institutions reaches no further than precisely for this purpose of cognition; it will overstep its proper determination and truth if, through it, the law that had truth only in a past life is meant to be justified for the present; on the contrary, this historical cognition of the law, which knows how to point out its ground solely in lost customs and a life that has died off, proves precisely that it now, in the living present, lacks understanding and meaning, even though, through the form of law, and through the fact that parts of the whole still have an interest in it and tie their existence to it, it still has power and force.

But for the proper distinction between what is dead and has no truth, and what is still living, a distinction must be recalled which can escape the formal view, and which must prevent what is in itself negative from being taken for living law, and thus the dominance of laws that are in themselves negative from being taken for the animation of the organization. For laws that withdraw individual determinacies and parts from the supreme rule of the whole, exclude its power from them, and constitute exceptions of the individual from the universal, are in themselves something negative, and signs of an incipient death which becomes ever more threatening to life the more the negative and the exceptions multiply, and the more these laws, which tend toward this dissolution, become too powerful for the true laws which constitute the unity of the whole. To the positive and the died-off, then, must be reckoned not only that which belongs wholly to a past

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