[p. 526]
|526| determinacy is great, and the consciousness that is over them in the law has great weight over the unconscious element of the newly aspiring life. As long as custom and law were one, the determinacy was nothing positive; but as with the growth of the individual the whole does not progress evenly, law and custom separate, the living unity that binds the members grows weak, and in the present of the whole there is no longer absolute connection and necessity. Here, then, the individual cannot be recognised from itself, for its determinacy is without the life which explains it and makes it comprehensible; and as the new custom likewise begins to grasp itself in laws, an inner contradiction of the laws among themselves must absolutely emerge. As in the foregoing history was only one side of the view and what is necessary is at the same time free, so here, by contrast, necessity is no longer one with freedom and to that extent falls wholly to pure history; what has no truly living ground in the present has its ground in a past, i.e. a time is to be sought in which the determinacy fixed in the 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 this purpose of cognition; it will exceed its vocation and truth if through it the law, which had truth only in a bygone life, is to be justified for the present. On the contrary, this historical cognition of the law, which knows how to show its ground solely in lost customs and a dead life, demonstrates precisely that it now lacks sense and meaning in the living present, even if it still has power and force through the form of law and through the fact that parts of the whole are still interested in it and tie their existence to it.
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