Hegel’s own outline of what the Groundlines carry out: abstract right, morality and ethical life in the third edition of the Encyclopaedia. The footnotes to § 135 (Enc. §§ 507 ff.) and to § 270 (Enc. § 552) of the Groundlines refer to this page.
The text follows the third edition of 1830 as given in the Werke. There are no Additions from the lectures to this part — for the elaboration Hegel refers to the Groundlines themselves. Under each § heading stands the paragraph of the Groundlines to which it corresponds; the assignment follows the parallel-passage comments of the individual paragraphs.
Contents
- Second Division: Objective Spirit: § 483 · § 484 · § 485 · § 486 · § 487
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → A. Right → a. Property: § 488 · § 489 · § 490 · § 491 · § 492
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → A. Right → b. Contract: § 493 · § 494 · § 495
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → A. Right → c. Right against Wrong: § 496 · § 497 · § 498 · § 499 · § 500 · § 501 · § 502
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → B. Morality: § 503
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → B. Morality → a. Purpose: § 504
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → B. Morality → b. Intention and Welfare: § 505 · § 506
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → B. Morality → c. The Good and Evil: § 507 · § 508 · § 509 · § 510 · § 511 · § 512
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → C. Ethical Life: § 513 · § 514 · § 515 · § 516 · § 517
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → C. Ethical Life → a. The Family: § 518 · § 519 · § 520 · § 521 · § 522
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → C. Ethical Life → b. Civil Society: § 523 · § 524 · § 525 · § 526 · § 527 · § 528 · § 529 · § 530 · § 531 · § 532 · § 533 · § 534
- Second Division: Objective Spirit → C. Ethical Life → c. The State: § 535 · § 536 · § 537 · § 538 · § 539 · § 540 · § 541 · § 542 · § 543 · § 544 · § 545 · § 546 · § 547 · § 548 · § 549 · § 550 · § 551 · § 552
Second Division: Objective Spirit
§ 483
Objective spirit is the absolute Idea, but only as being in itself; since it is thereby on the ground of finitude, its actual rationality retains at it the side of external appearing. The free will has immediately, at first, the differences at it that freedom is its inner determination and purpose and relates itself to an external, already given objectivity, which divides into the anthropological element of particular needs, into the external things of nature, which are for consciousness, and into the relation of single wills to single wills, which are a self-consciousness of themselves as different and particular; this side constitutes the external material for the existence of the will.
§ 484
The purposive activity of this will, however, is to realize its concept, freedom, in the externally objective side, so that this side may be a world determined by that concept, so that the will may in that world be with itself, closed together with itself, and the concept may thereby be completed into the Idea. Freedom, shaped into the actuality of a world, receives the form of necessity, whose substantial connection is the system of the determinations of freedom, and whose appearing connection is power, being recognized, that is, its counting in consciousness.
§ 485
This unity of the rational will with the single will, which is the immediate and distinctive element in which the former is put into action, constitutes the simple actuality of freedom. Since this unity and its content belong to thought and are the universal in itself, the content has its true determinateness only in the form of universality. Posited in this form for the consciousness of intelligence, with the determination of being a power that counts, the content is law — freed from the impurity and contingency which it has in practical feeling and in drive; and, likewise no longer in their form but impressed in its universality upon the subjective will, as the latter’s habit, cast of mind and character, it is custom.
§ 486
This reality in general, as the existence of the free will, is right, which is to be taken not merely as the limited juridical right, but as comprehending the existence of all determinations of freedom. These determinations, in relation to the subjective will, in which as universal they are to have and alone can have their existence, are its duties, just as, being habit and cast of mind within it, they are custom. What is a right is also a duty, and what is a duty is also a right. For an existence is a right only on the ground of the free substantial will; it is the same content which, in relation to the will distinguishing itself as subjective and single, is duty. It is the same content which subjective consciousness acknowledges as duty and which it brings into existence in these determinations. The finitude of the objective will is to that extent the semblance of a difference between rights and duties.
In the field of appearance right and duty are at first correlata, in such a way that to a right on my side there corresponds a duty in another. But according to the concept my right in a thing is not mere possession; as the possession of a person it is property, rightful possession, and it is a duty to possess things as property, that is, to be as a person, which, placed in the relation of appearance, of relation to another person, develops into the duty of the other to respect my right. Moral duty in general is, in me as a free subject, at the same time a right of my subjective will, of my disposition. But in the moral sphere there enters the difference between a merely inner determination of the will (disposition, intention), which has its existence only within me and is only subjective duty, and the actuality of that determination, and hence also a contingency and imperfection which constitutes the one-sidedness of the merely moral standpoint. In the ethical sphere both have attained their truth, their absolute unity, although here too, in the manner of necessity, duty and right return into one another and close together through mediation. The rights of the father of a family over its members are just as much duties towards them, as the duty of obedience of the children is their right to be brought up into free human beings. The penal justice of the government, its rights of administration and so forth, are at the same time duties of the government to punish, to administer and so on, just as the contributions of the members of the state in taxes, military service and the like are duties and equally their right to the protection of their private property and of the universal substantial life in which they have their root; all the purposes of society and of the state are the own purposes of private persons; but the path of mediation, through which their duties come back to them as the exercise and enjoyment of rights, produces the semblance of difference, to which is added the manner in which value, in exchange, takes on manifold shapes, although it is in itself the same. But it holds essentially that whoever has no rights has no duties, and conversely.
§ 487
The free will is: A. itself at first immediate and therefore as a single will — the person; the existence which the person gives to its freedom is property. Right as such is formal, abstract right; B. reflected into itself, so that it has its existence within itself and is thereby at the same time determined as particular, the right of the subjective will — morality; C. the substantial will as the actuality, conformable to its concept, in the subject and as the totality of necessity — ethical life, in family, civil society and state. Since I have carried out this part of philosophy in my Groundlines [of the Philosophy] of Right (Berlin 1821), I can be briefer here than about the other parts.
a. Property
§ 488
Spirit, in the immediacy of its freedom existing for itself, is single, but a single that knows its singularity as absolutely free will; it is person, the self-knowing of this freedom, which, as abstract and empty within itself, has its particularity and fulfilment not yet in its own self but in an external thing. This thing, over against the subjectivity of intelligence and of the arbitrary will, is something devoid of will and without right, and is made by that subjectivity into its accident, the external sphere of its freedom — possession.
§ 489
The merely practical predicate of the mine, which the thing at first receives through the judgement of possession in external seizure, has here, however, the meaning that I place my personal will into it. Through this determination possession is property, which as possession is a means, but as the existence of personality is purpose.
§ 490
In property the person is closed together with itself. But the thing is something abstractly external, and I am in it abstractly external. The concrete return of myself into myself within externality is that I, the infinite relation of myself to myself, am as person the repulsion of myself from myself, and have the existence of my personality in the being of other persons, in my relation to them and in the mutual being recognized by them.
§ 491
The thing is the middle term through which the extremes close together, extremes which, in the knowledge of their identity as free persons at the same time self-subsistent over against one another, are held apart. My will has for them its determinate, recognizable existence in the thing through the immediate bodily seizure of possession, or through giving it form, or also through the mere marking of it.
§ 492
The contingent side of property is that I place my will in this thing; to that extent my will is arbitrary will, so that I can just as well place it therein or not, and can withdraw it or not. But in so far as my will lies in a thing, only I myself can withdraw it, and the thing can pass over to another only with my will, and becomes the other’s property likewise only with the other’s will — contract.
b. Contract
§ 493
The two wills and their agreement in the contract are, as something inner, distinct from its realization, the performance. The relatively ideal utterance in the stipulation contains the actual giving up of a property by the one, its passing over into and its being taken up by the other will. The contract is valid in and for itself and does not become so only through the performance of the one or the other party, which would involve an infinite regress or an infinite division of the thing, of the labour and of the time. The utterance in the stipulation is complete and exhaustive. The inwardness of the will giving up the property and of the will taking it up is in the realm of representation, and in this realm the word is deed and thing (§ 462), and indeed the fully valid deed, since the will here does not come into consideration as moral (whether it is meant in earnest or deceitfully), but is rather only will concerning an external thing.
§ 494
Just as in the stipulation the substantial element of the contract distinguishes itself from the performance as the real utterance, which is reduced to a consequence, so there is thereby posited, in the thing or the performance, the difference between its immediate specific constitution and its substantial element, value, in which that qualitative element alters itself into quantitative determinateness; a property thus becomes comparable with another and can be equated with what is qualitatively quite heterogeneous. It is thus posited in general as an abstract, universal thing.
§ 495
The contract, as an agreement arising out of the arbitrary will and concerning a contingent thing, contains at the same time the positedness of the accidental will; this will is just as much also not conformable to right and thus brings forth wrong, whereby, however, right, which is in and for itself, is not sublated, but only a relation of right to wrong arises.
c. Right against Wrong
§ 496
Right, as the existence of freedom in what is external, falls into a plurality of relations to this external element and to other persons (§§ 491, 493 ff.). Thereby there are, 1., several grounds of right, of which, since property is exclusively individual on the side of the person as well as on that of the thing, only one is the right one, but which, because they stand against one another, are jointly posited as the semblance of right, over against which right is now determined as right in itself.
§ 497
Since, over against this semblance, the one right in itself, still in immediate unity with the different grounds of right, is posited as affirmative, is willed and acknowledged, the difference lies only in this, that this thing is subsumed under right through the particular will of these persons — unprejudiced wrong. — This wrong is a simple negative judgement, which expresses the civil suit at law, for whose settlement a third judgement is required, one which, as the judgement of right in itself, is without interest in the matter and has the power to give itself existence over against that semblance.
§ 498
2. But if the semblance of right as such is willed against right-in-itself by the particular will, which thereby becomes evil, then the external acknowledgement of right is separated from its value, and only the former is respected while the latter is violated. This gives the wrong of fraud — the infinite judgement as identical (§ 173) — the formal relation retained with the substance left out.
§ 499
3. In so far, finally, as the particular will sets itself against right-in-itself in the negation both of right itself and of its acknowledgement or semblance (the negatively infinite judgement, § 173, in which both the genus and the particular determinateness, here the appearing acknowledgement, are negated), it is a violently evil will which commits a crime.
§ 500
Such an action is, as a violation of right, null in and for itself. As will and as a thinking being, the agent sets up in it a law, though only a formal one and one acknowledged only by him, a universal which counts for him and under which, by his action, he has at the same time subsumed himself. The exhibited nullity of this action, the carrying out in one act of this formal law and of right-in-itself, at first through a subjective single will, is revenge, which, because it proceeds from the interest of immediate, particular personality, is at the same time a new violation, and so on to infinity. This progress likewise sublates itself in a third judgement which is without interest, punishment.
§ 501
The making good of right-in-itself is mediated α) by the fact that a particular will, the judge, is conformable to right and has the interest of turning against crime (which in revenge is at first contingent), and β) by the (at first likewise contingent) power of execution, to negate the negation of right posited by the criminal. This negation of right has its existence in the will of the criminal; revenge or punishment therefore turns, 1., against the person or the property of the criminal, and, 2., exercises coercion against him. Coercion takes place in this sphere of right in general already against the thing, in seizing it and in maintaining it against another’s seizure, since in this sphere the will has its existence immediately in an external thing (as such or as bodily being) and can be seized only at this. — Coercion, however, is no more than possible, in so far as I, being free, can withdraw myself from every existence, indeed from the whole compass of existence, from life. It is rightful only as the sublating of a first, immediate coercion.
§ 502
A difference between right and the subjective will has developed. The reality of right, which the personal will at first gives itself in an immediate manner, shows itself to be mediated through the subjective will, the moment which gives existence to right-in-itself or which also severs itself from it and sets itself against it. Conversely, the subjective will in this abstraction, that of being the power over right, is for itself something null; it has truth and reality essentially only in so far as it is in its own self the existence of the rational will — morality.
The expression natural right, which has been the customary one for the philosophical doctrine of right, contains the ambiguity whether right is meant as something present in an immediate natural manner, or whether it is meant as determining itself through the nature of the matter, that is, through the concept. The former sense is the one formerly usually intended; so that at the same time a state of nature was invented in which natural right was supposed to hold, whereas the condition of society and of the state was said rather to demand and to bring with it a restriction of freedom and a sacrifice of natural rights. In fact, however, right and all its determinations are grounded solely upon free personality, a self-determination which is rather the opposite of natural determination. The right of nature is therefore the existence of strength and the making good of force, and a state of nature is a state of violence and of wrong, of which nothing truer can be said than that one must depart from it. Society, by contrast, is rather the condition in which alone right has its actuality; what is to be restricted and sacrificed is precisely the arbitrariness and violence of the state of nature.
B. Morality
§ 503
The free individual, in (immediate) right only a person, is now determined as subject — a will reflected into itself, so that the determinateness of the will in general, as existence within it, is its own, distinguished from the existence of freedom in an external thing. With the determinateness of the will being posited thus inwardly, the will is at the same time posited as a particular will, and its further particularizations and their relations to one another come forth. The determinateness of the will is partly that which is in itself, that of the reason of the will, what is in itself rightful (and ethical); partly the existence present in the actual utterance, which takes place and enters into relation with it. The subjective will is morally free in so far as these determinations are inwardly posited as its own and are willed by it. Its actual utterance with this freedom is action, in whose externality it acknowledges as its own, and lets be imputed to it, only that which it has known and willed within itself.
It is above all this subjective or moral freedom that is called freedom in the European sense. By virtue of the right of this freedom a human being must have a knowledge of his own of the difference between good and evil in general; ethical as well as religious determinations are not to make their claim upon him merely as external laws and prescriptions of an authority to be followed by him, but are to have their assent, acknowledgement or even their grounding in his heart, disposition, conscience, insight and so forth. The subjectivity of the will in its own self is an end in itself, an utterly essential moment. The moral must be taken in the wider sense in which it does not signify merely the morally good. “Le moral” in French is opposed to “le physique” and signifies the spiritual, the intellectual in general. Here, however, the moral has the sense of a determinateness of the will in so far as this determinateness is in the inwardness of the will in general, and it therefore comprehends purpose and intention as well as moral evil.
a. Purpose
§ 504
In so far as the action immediately concerns existence, what is mine is to that extent formal, since external existence is also self-subsistent over against the subject. This externality can pervert the subject’s action and bring to light something other than lay within it. Although every alteration as such, in so far as it is posited through the activity of the subject, is the subject’s deed, the subject does not on that account acknowledge it as its action, but acknowledges as its own, as its responsibility, only that existence within the deed which lay in its knowing and willing, which was its purpose.
b. Intention and Welfare
§ 505
The action has, 1., according to its empirically concrete content, a manifold of particular sides and connections; in point of form the subject must have known and willed the action according to its essential determination, which comprehends these single details within it — the right of intention. — Purpose concerns only the immediate existence, intention, however, the substantial element and the purpose of that existence. 2. The subject has likewise the right that the particularity of the content in the action, as regards its matter, should not be something external to it, but should contain the subject’s own particularity, its needs, interests and purposes, which, likewise gathered into one purpose, as in happiness (§ 479), constitute its welfare — the right of welfare. Happiness is distinguished from welfare only in that the former is represented as an immediate existence in general, the latter as justified in relation to morality.
§ 506
But the essentiality of the intention is at first the abstract form of universality, and in the empirically concrete action reflection can place this or that particular side into this form and thereby make it essential to the intention, or restrict the intention to it, whereby the supposed essentiality of the intention and the true essentiality of the action can be brought into the greatest contradiction (as a good intention in a crime). — Likewise welfare is abstract and can be placed in this or in that; as belonging to this subject it is in general something particular.
c. The Good and Evil
§ 507
The truth of these particularities and the concrete element of their formalism is the content of the universal will that is in and for itself, the law and the substance of all determinateness, the good that is in and for itself, hence the absolute final purpose of the world and the duty for the subject, which ought to have insight into the good, to make it its intention and to bring it forth through its activity.
§ 508
But the good is indeed the universal of the will determined in its own self and thus encloses particularity within itself; in so far, however, as this particularity is at first itself still abstract, no principle of determination is present; the determining also arises outside that universal, and as the determining of the free will existing for itself over against it, the deepest contradiction awakens here. α) On account of the indeterminate determining of the good there are in general various goods and many kinds of duties, whose difference is dialectical against one another and brings them into collision. At the same time they ought to stand in agreement for the sake of the unity of the good, and yet each of them, particular though it be, is absolute as duty and as good. The subject ought to be the dialectic which decides upon a combination of them with the exclusion of the others, and hence with the sublating of this absolute validity.
§ 509
β) For the subject, which in the existence of its freedom is essentially something particular, its interest and welfare ought, for the sake of this existence of its freedom, to be an essential purpose and therefore a duty. At the same time, however, in the purpose of the good, which is not the particular but only the universal of the will, the particular interest ought to be no moment. On account of this self-subsistence of the two determinations it is likewise contingent whether they harmonize. But they ought to harmonize, because in general the subject, as singular and universal, is in itself one identity. γ) But the subject is not only in its existence something particular in general; it is also a form of its existence to be abstract certainty of itself, abstract reflection of freedom into itself. Thus it is distinguished from the reason of the will and is capable of making the universal itself into something particular and hence into a semblance. The good is thus posited as something contingent for the subject, which can accordingly resolve upon something opposed to the good, can be evil.
§ 510
δ) External objectivity, likewise according to the difference of the subjective will which has come in (§ 503), constitutes, over against the inner determinations of the will, the other self-subsistent extreme, a distinctive world of its own. It is therefore contingent whether it agrees with the subjective purposes, whether the good realizes itself in it and evil, the purpose null in and for itself, is null within it; — further, whether the subject finds its welfare in it, and more closely whether the good subject becomes happy in it and the evil one unhappy. At the same time, however, the world ought to let the essential, the good action, be carried out within it, just as it ought to grant the good subject the satisfaction of its particular interest, but to refuse it to the evil subject, and likewise to bring evil itself to nought.
§ 511
The all-round contradiction which this manifold ought, this absolute being which at the same time is not, expresses, contains the most abstract analysis of spirit within itself, its deepest going into itself. The relation of the self-contradicting determinations to one another is only the abstract certainty of itself, and for this infinity of subjectivity the universal will, the good, right and duty, just as much is as is not; it is this subjectivity which knows itself as that which chooses and decides. This pure certainty of itself, raising itself to its peak, appears in the two forms, immediately passing over into one another, of conscience and of evil. The former is the will of the good, which, however, in this pure subjectivity is the non-objective, non-universal, the unsayable, and about which the subject knows itself to be deciding in its singularity. Evil, however, is this same knowing of its singularity as that which decides, in so far as that singularity does not remain in this abstraction but, over against the good, gives itself the content of a subjective interest.
§ 512
This highest peak of the phenomenon of the will, which has evaporated into this absolute vanity — a goodness that is not objective but only certain of itself, and a certainty of itself in the nullity of the universal — collapses immediately into itself. Evil, as the innermost reflection of subjectivity into itself over against the objective and universal, which to it is only semblance, is the same as the good disposition of the abstract good, which reserves the determination of that good to subjectivity — the wholly abstract showing, the immediate perverting and annihilating of itself. The result, the truth of this showing, is, on its negative side, the absolute nullity of this willing which is for itself over against the good, as well as of the good which is supposed to be only abstract; on the affirmative side, in the concept, that showing, thus collapsing into itself, is the same simple universality of the will which is the good. Subjectivity in this its identity with the good is only the infinite form, the putting into action and the development of the good; the standpoint of the mere relation of the two to one another and of the ought is thereby abandoned, and the transition made to ethical life.
C. Ethical Life
§ 513
Ethical life is the completion of objective spirit, the truth of subjective and objective spirit themselves. The one-sidedness of objective spirit is, partly, to have its freedom immediately in reality, hence in what is external, in the thing, partly to have it in the good as an abstract universal; the one-sidedness of subjective spirit is to be self-determining in its inward singularity, likewise abstractly over against the universal. With these one-sidednesses sublated, subjective freedom is the rational will universal in and for itself, which in the consciousness of single subjectivity has its knowledge of itself and its disposition, as well as its being put into action and its immediate universal actuality, at the same time as custom — self-conscious freedom become nature.
§ 514
The substance which knows itself as free, in which the absolute ought is just as much being, has actuality as the spirit of a people. The abstract diremption of this spirit is its singularization into persons, of whose self-subsistence it is the inner power and necessity. The person, however, as thinking intelligence, knows that substance as its own essence, ceases in this disposition to be an accident of it, and intuits it as its absolute final purpose in actuality, as an attained here and now just as much as it brings it forth through its activity, yet as something which rather simply is; thus, without the reflection that chooses, it fulfils its duty as its own and as something that is, and has in this necessity itself and its actual freedom.
§ 515
Because substance is the absolute unity of the singularity and the universality of freedom, the actuality and activity of each single individual, that of being for itself and caring for itself, is conditioned both by the presupposed whole, within whose connection alone it is present, and is likewise a passing over into a universal product. — The disposition of individuals is the knowledge of substance and of the identity of all their interests with the whole; and that the other single individuals reciprocally know themselves and are actual only in this identity, is trust — the true, ethical disposition.
§ 516
The relations of the single individual within the relationships into which substance particularizes itself constitute its ethical duties. Ethical personality, that is, subjectivity permeated by substantial life, is virtue. In relation to external immediacy, to a destiny, virtue is a comportment towards being as towards something not negative, and thereby a quiet resting within itself; — in relation to substantial objectivity, to the whole of ethical actuality, it is, as trust, a deliberate working for that whole and the capacity to sacrifice oneself for it; — in relation to the contingency of relationships with others it is first justice and then benevolent inclination; in which sphere, as in the comportment towards its own existence and bodily being, individuality expresses its particular character, temperament and so forth as virtues.
§ 517
Ethical substance is a. as immediate or natural spirit — the family; b. the relative totality of the relative relations of individuals as self-subsistent persons to one another in a formal universality — civil society; c. self-conscious substance as spirit developed into an organic actuality — the constitution of the state.
a. The Family
§ 518
Ethical spirit, as in its immediacy, contains the natural moment that the individual has its substantial existence in its natural universality, the genus — the relation of the sexes, but raised into a spiritual determination; — the oneness of love and of the disposition of trust; — as family, spirit is feeling spirit.
§ 519
1. The difference of the natural sexes appears at the same time as a difference of intellectual and ethical determination. The personalities here unite, according to their exclusive singularity, into one person; the subjective intimacy, determined to substantial unity, makes this union into an ethical relationship — into marriage. The substantial intimacy makes marriage an undivided bond of the persons — into monogamous marriage; the bodily union is a consequence of the ethically tied bond. The further consequence is the community of personal and particular interests.
§ 520
2. The property of the family as one person receives an ethical interest through the community in which, in relation to that property, the various individuals who make up the family likewise stand, as do acquisition, labour and provision.
§ 521
The ethical element bound up with the natural procreation of children, at first posited as original (§ 519) in the conclusion of marriage, realizes itself in the second birth of the children, the spiritual one — their upbringing into self-subsistent persons.
§ 522
3. Through this self-subsistence the children step out of the concrete aliveness of the family to which they originally belong, have become for themselves, but are determined to found a new actual family of the same kind. Marriage essentially moves towards dissolution through the natural moment contained in it, the death of the spouses; but intimacy too, as a merely feeling substantiality, is in itself subject to contingency and transience. In accordance with such contingency the members of the family enter into the relation of persons towards one another, and only thereby do legal determinations, which are in themselves alien to this bond, enter into it.
b. Civil Society
§ 523
Substance, as spirit particularizing itself abstractly into many persons (the family is only one person), into families or single individuals who are for themselves in self-subsistent freedom and as particulars, at first loses its ethical determination, in that these persons as such have in their consciousness and for their purpose not the absolute unity but their own particularity and their being-for-self — the system of atomism. In this way substance becomes only a universal, mediating connection of self-subsistent extremes and of their particular interests; the inwardly developed totality of this connection is the state as civil society, or as the external state.
§ 524
1. The particularity of persons comprehends in the first instance their needs. The possibility of satisfying them is here placed in the social connection, which is the universal resources from which all obtain their satisfaction. The immediate taking into possession (§ 488) of external objects as means to this no longer takes place, or scarcely takes place, in the condition in which this standpoint of mediation is realized; the objects are property. Their acquisition is on the one hand conditioned and mediated by the will of the possessors, which as a particular will has for its purpose the satisfaction of needs determined in manifold ways, and on the other hand by the ever renewed bringing forth of exchangeable means through one’s own labour; this mediation of satisfaction through the labour of all constitutes the universal resources.
§ 525
2. Universality shows within the particularity of needs at first in such a way that the understanding distinguishes within them and thereby multiplies both the needs themselves and the means for these distinctions indefinitely, making both ever more abstract; this singularizing of the content through abstraction gives the division of labour. The habit of this abstraction in enjoyment, acquaintance, knowledge and conduct constitutes culture in this sphere — formal culture in general.
§ 526
Labour, which thereby becomes at the same time more abstract, leads on the one hand, through its uniformity, to the ease of labour and to the increase of production, on the other hand to restriction to one skill and thus to unconditional dependence upon the social connection. Skill itself becomes in this way mechanical and acquires the capacity to let the machine take the place of human labour.
§ 527
3. But the concrete division of the universal resources, which are equally a universal business, into the particular masses determined according to the moments of the concept, masses which possess a distinctive basis of subsistence and, in connection with it, corresponding modes of labour, of needs and of the means of satisfying them, and further corresponding purposes and interests as well as spiritual culture and habit, constitutes the difference of estates. — Individuals allot themselves to these according to natural talent, skill, arbitrary will and contingency. Belonging to such a determinate, fixed sphere, they have their actual existence, which as existence is essentially a particular one, and within it their ethical life as rectitude, their being recognized and their honour.
Where civil society and with it the state are present, the estates come forth in their difference; for universal substance exists as living only in so far as it particularizes itself organically; the history of constitutions is the history of the formation of these estates, of the legal relations of individuals to them and of their relations to one another and to their central point.
§ 528
The substantial, natural estate has a natural and fixed resource in the fruitful soil and ground; its activity receives its direction and content through natural determinations, and its ethical life is grounded upon faith and trust. The second, the reflecting estate is directed to the resources of society, to the element placed in mediation, in representation and in a concurrence of contingencies, and the individual is thrown back upon his subjective skill, talent, understanding and industry. The third, the thinking estate has the universal interests for its business; like the second it has a subsistence mediated by its own skill, and like the first a subsistence, though one secured by the whole of society.
§ 529
The principle of contingent particularity, developed into the system mediated by natural need and free arbitrary will, into universal relations within that system and into a course of external necessity, has within it, as the determination of freedom that stands fast for itself, in the first instance formal right. 1. The actualization belonging to right in this sphere of the understanding’s consciousness is that right be brought to consciousness as the fixed universal, be known in its determinateness and be posited as that which counts; law.
The positive element of laws concerns in the first instance only their form, that of being valid and known in general, whereby at the same time the possibility is given of their being known by all in the usual external manner. The content may thereby be in itself rational, or also irrational and hence wrong. But since right, grasped as in determinate existence, is something developed, and since its content analyses itself in order to gain determinateness, this analysis, on account of the finitude of the material, falls into the progress of the spurious infinity; the final determinateness, which is simply essential and which breaks off this progress of unreality, can in this sphere of the finite be obtained only in a manner bound up with contingency and arbitrary will; whether three years, ten thalers and so forth, or only 21/2, 23/4, 24/5 and so on years, and so on to infinity, would be the just thing, cannot in any way be decided by the concept, and yet the higher consideration is that a decision be made. Thus the positive element enters right of itself, though of course only at the ends of determining, on the side of external existence, as contingency and arbitrariness. This happens, and has always happened of itself in all legislation; it is only necessary to have a determinate consciousness of this, over against the supposed aim and the talk that the law could and should be determined on all sides by reason or by juridical understanding, by purely rational and intelligent grounds. It is the empty opinion of perfection to make such an expectation and demand of the sphere of the finite. Those to whom laws are even an evil and something unholy, and who hold governing and being governed out of natural love, inborn divinity or nobility, through faith and trust, to be the genuine condition, but the rule of laws to be the corrupt and unjust one, overlook the circumstance that the stars and the like, as also the beasts, are governed by laws, and indeed governed well — laws which, however, in these objects are only inward, not for them themselves, not as posited laws; but that the human being is this, to know his law, and that he can therefore truly obey only such a known law, just as his law can be a just law only as a known one, while otherwise, even as regards its essential content, it must be contingency and arbitrariness, or at least mixed and polluted with them. The same empty demand for perfection is used for the opposite of the above, namely for the opinion of the impossibility or impracticability of a code of laws. There occurs in this the further defect of thought of placing the essential and universal determinations in one class with the particular detail. Finite material is determinable further and further into the spurious infinite; but this progress is not, as it is represented in space, for example, a generating of spatial determinations of the same quality as the preceding ones, but a proceeding into ever more special matters through the acuteness of the analysing understanding, which invents new distinctions that make new decisions necessary. If determinations of this kind likewise receive the name of new decisions or new laws, then in proportion to the advance of this development the interest and the substance of these determinations decreases. They fall within the already existing substantial, universal laws, as improvements to a floor, a door and so forth fall within the house and are indeed something new, but are not a house. If the legislation of an uncultivated condition has begun with single determinations and by its nature has continually multiplied them, then in the growth of this mass there arises, on the contrary, the need for a simpler code of laws, that is, for gathering that mass of single details into their universal determinations, to know how to find and express which befits the understanding and the culture of a people; — as in England this formulation of single details into universal forms, which alone in fact deserve the name of laws, has recently been begun on several sides by the minister Peel, who has thereby won the thanks, indeed the admiration, of his countrymen.
§ 530
2. The positive form of laws, that of being pronounced and made known as laws, is the condition of external obligation towards them, since as laws of strict right they concern only the abstract will (that is, a will itself external in itself), not the moral or ethical will. The subjectivity to which the will has a right in this respect is here only the being known. This subjective existence is, as the existence of what is in and for itself in this sphere, that of right, at the same time an externally objective existence, as universal validity and necessity. The legal element of property and of private transactions concerning it receives, according to the determination that the legal is something posited, acknowledged and thereby valid, its universal guarantee through the formalities.
§ 531
3. The necessity into which objective existence determines itself is received by the legal element in the administration of justice. Right-in-itself has to present itself to the court, to individualized right, as proved, in which connection right-in-itself may be distinguished from what is provable. The court decides and acts in the interest of right as such, takes from the existence of right its contingency, and in particular transforms this existence, as it is in revenge, into punishment. (§ 500)
The comparison of the two kinds, or rather moments, of the judges’ conviction concerning the facts of an action in relation to the accused — whether through the mere circumstances and the testimony of others alone, or through the further required addition of the confession of the accused — constitutes the chief matter in the question of so-called trial by jury. It is an essential determination that the two constituents of a judicial finding — the judgement upon the facts of the case and the judgement as the application of the law to them — because they are in themselves different sides, should be exercised as different functions. Through the institution named they are even allotted to differently qualified bodies, of which the one is expressly not to consist of individuals belonging to the profession of official judges. To carry that difference of functions as far as this separation within the courts rests more upon inessential considerations; the chief matter remains only the separate exercise of those sides which are in themselves different. — More important is whether the confession of the person accused of a crime is to be made a condition of a sentence or not. The institution of trial by jury abstracts from this condition. What matters is that certainty, above all on this ground, is inseparable from truth; but confession is to be regarded as the highest peak of assurance, which by its nature is subjective; the final decision therefore lies in it, and to this point the accused has therefore an absolute right as regards the finality of the proof and of the judges’ conviction. — This moment is incomplete, because it is only one moment; but the other, taken equally abstractly, proof from mere circumstances and testimony, is still more imperfect; and jurors are essentially judges and pronounce a judgement. In so far as they are thrown back upon such objective proofs, while at the same time incomplete certainty is admitted in so far as it is only within them, trial by jury contains the mingling and confusion (belonging properly to barbarous times) of objective proof and of subjective so-called moral conviction. To declare extraordinary punishments an absurdity is easy, and indeed too shallow a way of taking offence at a mere name. In substance this determination contains the difference between objective proof with and without the moment of that absolute assurance which lies in confession.
§ 532
The administration of justice has the determination of bringing into necessity only the abstract side of the freedom of the person in civil society. But this activity rests in the first instance upon the particular subjectivity of the judge, since the necessary unity of that subjectivity with right-in-itself is not yet present here. Conversely, the blind necessity of the system of needs is not yet raised into the consciousness of the universal and put into action from that standpoint.
§ 533
The administration of justice of itself excludes what belongs only to the particularity of actions and interests, and leaves to contingency both the occurrence of crimes and the regard for welfare. In civil society the satisfaction of need, and indeed of need as that of the human being, in a fixed universal manner, that is, the securing of this satisfaction, is the purpose. But in the mechanics of the necessity of society the contingency of this satisfaction is present in the most manifold ways, both in respect of the changeableness of the needs themselves, in which opinion and subjective preference have a great share, and through localities, the connections of one people with others, through errors and deceptions which can be introduced into single parts of the whole machinery and are able to throw it into disorder, and especially through the conditioned capacity of the single individual to acquire for himself out of those universal resources. The course of that necessity at the same time sacrifices the particularities through which it is brought about; it does not for itself contain the affirmative purpose of securing the satisfaction of single individuals, but may in regard to them be adequate or also not; and single individuals are to themselves here the morally justified purpose.
§ 534
The consciousness of the essential purpose, the knowledge of the mode of operation of the powers and changeable ingredients of which that necessity is composed, and the holding fast of that purpose within it and against it, has on the one hand, towards the concrete of civil society, the relation of an external universality; this order, as an active power, is the external state, which, in so far as it is rooted in the higher, the substantial state, appears as the police of the state. On the other hand, within this sphere of particularity the purpose of substantial universality and its putting into action remains restricted to the business of particular branches and interests — the corporation, in which the particular citizen as a private person finds the securing of his resources, just as he thereby steps out of his single private interest and has a conscious activity for a relatively universal purpose, just as he has his ethical life in his legal duties and the duties of his estate.
c. The State
§ 535
The state is the self-conscious ethical substance — the union of the principle of the family and of civil society; the same unity which in the family is as the feeling of love is its essence, which at the same time, however, through the second principle of knowing and self-actively willing, receives the form of known universality, a form which, like the determinations developing themselves within knowledge, has knowing subjectivity for its content and absolute purpose, that is to say, wills this rational element for itself.
§ 536
The state is α) first its inner formation as a self-relating development — internal constitutional law, or the constitution; it is β) a particular individual, and so in relation to other particular individuals — external constitutional law; γ) but these particular spirits are only moments in the development of the universal Idea of spirit in its actuality — world history.
§ 537
The essence of the state is the universal in and for itself, the rational element of the will, but, as knowing and putting itself into action, it is simply subjectivity, and as actuality one individual. Its work in general consists, in relation to the extreme of singularity as the multitude of individuals, in a twofold task: on the one hand to preserve them as persons, and thus to make right into a necessary actuality, and then to promote their welfare, which each at first looks after for himself, but which simply has a universal side, to protect the family and to guide civil society; — on the other hand, however, to lead both, and the whole disposition and activity of the single individual, who strives to be a centre for himself, back into the life of the universal substance, and in this sense, as a free power, to curtail those spheres subordinate to it and to maintain them in substantial immanence.
§ 538
The laws express the determinations of content of objective freedom. First: for the immediate subject, for its self-subsistent arbitrary will and particular interest, they are limitations. But they are, secondly, the absolute final purpose and the universal work; thus they are brought forth through the functions of the various estates, which singularize themselves further out of the universal particularization, and through all the activity and private care of single individuals; and, thirdly, they are the substance of the willing and of the disposition of individuals who are free therein, and are thus presented as custom that counts.
§ 539
The state as living spirit is simply only as an organized whole, differentiated into particular activities which, proceeding from the one concept (even if not known as concept) of the rational will, continually produce it as their result. The constitution is this articulation of the power of the state. It contains the determinations of the manner in which the rational will, in so far as it is in individuals only in itself the universal will, partly comes to consciousness and understanding of itself and is found, partly is posited in actuality through the activity of the government and its particular branches and is maintained therein, and is likewise protected both against the contingent subjectivity of the government and against that of single individuals. It is existing justice as the actuality of freedom in the development of all its rational determinations.
Freedom and equality are the simple categories into which what is supposed to constitute the fundamental determination and the final aim and result of the constitution has frequently been gathered. True as this is, the defect of these determinations is in the first instance that they are wholly abstract; held fast in this form of abstraction, they are precisely what does not let the concrete, that is, an articulation of the state, that is, a constitution and government in general, come into being at all, or else destroys them. With the state there enters inequality, the difference between governing powers and the governed, authorities, offices, directorates and so forth. The consistent principle of equality rejects all differences and thus lets no kind of political condition subsist. — Those determinations are indeed the foundations of this sphere, but as the most abstract they are also the most superficial and precisely for that reason easily the most current; it is therefore of interest to consider them somewhat more closely. As regards equality first of all, the current proposition that all human beings are by nature equal contains the misunderstanding of confusing what is natural with the concept; it must be said that by nature human beings are rather only unequal. But the concept of freedom, as it at first exists as such without further determination and development, is abstract subjectivity as a person capable of property, § 488; this single abstract determination of personality constitutes the actual equality of human beings. But that this equality is present, that it is the human being — and not, as in Greece, Rome and so forth, only some human beings — who is acknowledged as a person and counts in law, is so little a matter of nature that it is rather only the product and result of the consciousness of the deepest principle of spirit and of the universality and cultivation of this consciousness. — That citizens are equal before the law contains a lofty truth, which, however, thus expressed is a tautology; for thereby only the lawful condition in general, that the laws rule, is stated. But in regard to what is concrete, citizens are, apart from personality, equal before the law only in that in which they are otherwise equal outside it. Only that equality of resources, of age, of physical strength, of talent, of skill and so forth, or also of crimes and so forth, which is otherwise contingently present, in whatever manner, can and should make them capable of equal treatment before the law in the concrete — in regard to taxes, liability to military service, admission to state offices, punishment and so forth. The laws themselves, except in so far as they concern that narrow circle of personality, presuppose unequal conditions and determine the unequal legal entitlements and duties arising from them. As regards freedom, it is most immediately taken partly in the negative sense as against the arbitrary will of others and lawless treatment, partly in the affirmative sense of subjective freedom; but to this freedom a great latitude is given, both for one’s own arbitrary will and activity for one’s particular purposes and in respect of the claim of one’s own insight and of activity and participation in universal affairs. Formerly the legally determined rights, both the private and the public rights of a nation, a city and so forth, were called their liberties. In fact every true law is a freedom, for it contains a determination of reason of objective spirit, and thus a content of freedom. Nothing, by contrast, has become more current than the notion that everyone must limit his freedom in relation to the freedom of others, and that the state is the condition of this mutual limiting and the laws are the limitations. In such notions freedom is grasped only as contingent preference and arbitrary will. — Thus it has also been said that modern peoples are capable only, or more, of equality than of freedom, and this indeed for no other reason than that with an assumed determination of freedom (chiefly the participation of all in the affairs and actions of the state) one could nevertheless not come to terms with actuality, which is more rational and at the same time more powerful than abstract presuppositions. — On the contrary, it is to be said that precisely the high development and cultivation of modern states brings forth the highest concrete inequality of individuals in actuality, whereas through the deeper rationality of the laws and the consolidation of the lawful condition it brings about all the greater and better grounded freedom, and can permit and bear it. Even the superficial distinction which lies in the words freedom and equality indicates that the former bears upon inequality; but conversely the current concepts of freedom lead back only to equality. But the more freedom is consolidated as security of property, as the possibility of developing and making good one’s talents and good qualities and so forth, the more it appears to go without saying; the consciousness and the valuing of freedom then turns chiefly towards its subjective sense. But this subjective freedom itself — the freedom of an activity which tries itself on all sides and indulges itself at its own pleasure in particular and in universal spiritual interests, the independence of individual particularity as well as the inner freedom in which the subject has principles, its own insight and conviction, and thereby gains moral self-subsistence — contains partly, for itself, the highest cultivation of that particularity in which human beings are unequal and through which cultivation they make themselves still more unequal; partly it grows up only under the condition of that objective freedom and is and could grow to this height only in the modern states. If, with this cultivation of particularity, the multitude of needs and the difficulty of satisfying them, argumentation and knowing better and its unsatisfied vanity, increase beyond all measure, this belongs to that abandoned particularity which is left to generate for itself, within its sphere, all possible entanglements and to come to terms with them. This sphere is then of course at the same time the field of limitations, because freedom is here entangled in naturalness, in preference and in arbitrary will, and therefore has to limit itself, and indeed also in accordance with the naturalness, preference and arbitrary will of others, but chiefly and essentially in accordance with rational freedom. As regards political freedom, however, namely in the sense of a formal participation in the public affairs of the state, by the will and activity even of those individuals who otherwise make the particular purposes and business of civil society their chief determination, it has in part become customary to call constitution only that side of the state which concerns such participation of those individuals in universal affairs, and to regard a state in which this does not formally take place as a state without a constitution. On this meaning it is in the first instance only to be said that by constitution must be understood the determination of rights, that is, of liberties in general, and the organization of their actualization, and that political freedom can in any case constitute only a part of it; of this part the following §§ will speak.
§ 540
The guarantee of a constitution, that is, the necessity that the laws be rational and their actualization secured, lies in the spirit of the whole people, namely in the determinateness according to which it has the self-consciousness of its reason (religion is this consciousness in its absolute substantiality) — and then at the same time in the actual organization conformable to that spirit, as the development of that principle. The constitution presupposes that consciousness of spirit, and conversely spirit presupposes the constitution; for actual spirit itself has the determinate consciousness of its principles only in so far as these are present for it as existing.
The question to whom, to what authority and to an authority organized in what way, the power belongs to make a constitution, is the same as the question who has to make the spirit of a people. If one separates the notion of a constitution from that of spirit in such a way as if spirit could well exist or have existed without possessing a constitution conformable to it, such an opinion only proves the superficiality of thought concerning the connection of spirit, of its consciousness of itself and of its actuality. What is thus called making a constitution has, on account of this inseparability, never occurred in history, any more than has the making of a code of laws; a constitution has only developed out of spirit, identically with spirit’s own development, and has at the same time passed through, together with spirit, the stages of formation and the alterations necessary through the concept. It is the indwelling spirit and history — and indeed history is only its history — by which constitutions have been and are made.
§ 541
The living totality, the preservation, that is, the continuing bringing forth of the state in general and of its constitution, is the government. The naturally necessary organization is the emergence of the family and of the estates of civil society. The government is the universal part of the constitution, that is, the part which has the preservation of those parts as its deliberate purpose, but which at the same time grasps and puts into action the universal purposes of the whole, purposes which stand above the determination of the family and of civil society. The organization of the government is likewise its differentiation into powers, whose distinctive characters are determined by the concept, but which in the concept’s subjectivity interpenetrate into actual unity.
Since the nearest categories of the concept are those of universality and of singularity, and their relation is that of the subsumption of singularity under universality, it has come about that in the state a legislative and an executive power have been distinguished, but distinguished in such a way that the former should exist for itself as simply the highest, and the latter should divide again into governmental or administrative power and into judicial power, according to the application of the laws to universal or to private affairs. The division of these powers has been regarded as the essential relation, in the sense of their independence of one another in existence, though with the connection mentioned of the subsumption of the powers of the single under the power of the universal. In these determinations the elements of the concept are not to be mistaken, but they have been combined by the understanding into a relation of unreason instead of into the closing together of living spirit with itself. That the affairs of the universal interests of the state should also be organized separately from one another in their necessary difference — this division is the one absolute moment of the depth and actuality of freedom; for freedom has depth only in so far as it is developed into its differences and has attained their existence. But to make the business of legislating (and this even with the notion that at some time a constitution and the basic laws — in a condition into which an already existing development of the differences is projected — are first to be made) into a self-subsistent power, and indeed into the first, with the further determination of the participation of all in it, and to make the governmental power into a power dependent on it and merely executive — this presupposes the lack of the cognition that the true Idea, and with it living and spiritual actuality, is the concept closing together with itself, and thus subjectivity, which contains universality within it as only one of its moments. Individuality is the first and the highest pervading determination in the organization of the state. Only through the governmental power, and through the fact that it comprehends within itself the particular affairs, to which the business of legislation, itself particular and abstract for itself, also belongs, is the state one. — As essential as it is everywhere and alone true is the rational relation of the logical over against the external relation of the understanding, which only arrives at the subsumption of the single and the particular under the universal. What disorganizes the unity of the logically rational likewise disorganizes actuality.
§ 542
In the government as an organic totality there is, 1., subjectivity as the infinite unity of the concept with itself in the development of the concept, the will of the state which holds everything together and decides, the highest peak of the state as well as its all-pervading unity — the princely governmental power. In the perfect form of the state, in which all moments of the concept have attained their free existence, this subjectivity is not a so-called moral person or a deciding proceeding from a majority — forms in which the unity of the deciding will has no actual existence — but, as actual individuality, the will of a single deciding individual; monarchy. The monarchical constitution is therefore the constitution of developed reason; all other constitutions belong to lower stages of the development and realization of reason.
The union of all concrete powers of the state in one existence, as in the patriarchal condition or as in the democratic constitution with the participation of all in all affairs, conflicts for itself with the principle of the division of powers, that is, with the developed freedom of the moments of the Idea. But just as much must the division, the cultivation of the moments carried on into a free totality, be led back into ideal unity, that is, into subjectivity. The cultivated differentiation, the realization of the Idea, essentially involves that this subjectivity should have attained actual existence as a real moment, and this actuality is solely the individuality of the monarch — the subjectivity of abstract, final deciding present in one person. To all those forms of a common deciding and willing which are supposed to proceed and to be counted out democratically or aristocratically from the atomism of single wills, the unreality of an abstraction clings. It depends only on the two determinations, the necessity of a moment of the concept and the form of its actuality. Only the nature of the speculative concept can truly come to terms with this. — That subjectivity, being the moment of abstract deciding in general, proceeds partly to the determination that the name of the monarch appears as the external bond and the sanction under which everything in the government takes place; partly to the determination that, as the simple relation to itself, it has at it the determination of immediacy and hence of nature, so that the determination of individuals for the dignity of the princely power is established by heredity.
§ 543
2. In the particular governmental power there emerges partly the division of the business of the state into its otherwise determined branches, the legislative power, the administration of justice or judicial power, the administrative and police power and so forth, and with it the distribution of these among particular authorities which, being referred to the laws for their business, possess for this reason both independence in their activity and at the same time stand under a higher supervision; — partly there enters the participation of several in the business of the state, who together constitute the universal estate (§ 528) in so far as they make a business of universal purposes into the essential determination of their particular life, the further condition of being able to participate in which individually is cultivation and skill for it.
§ 544
3. The authority of the estates concerns a participation of all those who belong to civil society in general and to that extent are private persons, in the governmental power, and indeed in legislation, namely in the universal element of the interests which do not concern the appearance and action of the state as an individual (such as war and peace) and therefore do not belong exclusively to the nature of the princely power. By virtue of this participation subjective freedom and imagination and their universal opinion can show themselves in an existing activity and enjoy the satisfaction of counting for something.
The division of constitutions into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy still gives their difference in relation to the power of the state most determinately. They must at the same time be regarded as necessary formations in the course of development, and thus in the history of the state. For this reason it is superficial and foolish to represent them as an object of choice. The pure forms of their necessity are connected partly, in so far as they are finite and transient, with the forms of their degeneration, ochlocracy and so forth, partly with earlier transitional formations, neither of which forms is to be confused with those true formations. Thus, for instance, on account of the similarity that the will of one individual stands at the head of the state, oriental despotism is comprehended under the vague name of monarchy, as is feudal monarchy, to which even the favoured name of constitutional monarchy cannot be denied. The true difference of these forms from true monarchy rests upon the substance of the principles of right that count, which have their actuality and guarantee in the power of the state. These principles are those developed in the earlier spheres, of the freedom of property and, in any case, of personal freedom, of civil society, of its industry and its communities, and of the regulated activity of the particular authorities, dependent upon the laws. The question most discussed has been in what sense the participation of private persons in the affairs of the state is to be grasped. For the members of assemblies of estates are in the first instance to be taken as private persons, whether they count as individuals for themselves or as representatives of many or of the people. The aggregate of private persons is frequently called the people; but as such an aggregate it is vulgus, not populus; and in this respect it is the sole purpose of the state that a people should not come to existence, to power and to action as such an aggregate. Such a condition of a people is the condition of lawlessness, of unethical life, of unreason in general; in it the people would be only a formless, wild, blind force, like that of the stormy, elemental sea, which however does not destroy itself, as the people, being a spiritual element, would do. One has often been able to hear such a condition represented as that of true freedom. For it to make sense to enter upon the question of the participation of private persons in universal affairs, one must presuppose not the irrational but an already organized people, that is, one in which a governmental power is present. The interest of such participation, however, is to be placed neither in the advantage of particular insight in general which private persons are supposed to possess over state officials — the opposite is necessarily the case — nor in the advantage of good will for the universal good; the members of civil society are rather such as make their particular interest, and, as chiefly in the feudal condition, that of their privileged corporation, their nearest determination. As experience shows of England, for example, whose constitution is regarded as the freest precisely because private persons have a preponderant participation in the business of the state, that country stands furthest behind the other cultivated states of Europe in civil and criminal legislation, in the right and freedom of property, in the institutions for art and science and so forth, and objective freedom, that is, rational right, is rather sacrificed to formal freedom and particular private interest (this even in the institutions and possessions that are supposed to be dedicated to religion). — The interest of a share of private persons in public affairs is to be placed partly in the more concrete and therefore more urgent feeling of universal needs, but essentially in the right that the common spirit should also attain the appearance of an externally universal will in an ordered and express activity for the public concern, and through this satisfaction should receive an enlivening for itself, just as such an enlivening flows into the administrative authorities, which are thereby kept in present consciousness of the fact that, much as they have duties to demand, they just as essentially have rights before them. The citizens are in the state the disproportionately greater multitude, and a multitude of such as are acknowledged as persons. Willing reason therefore presents its existence in them as a plurality of free persons or in a universality of reflection, to which its actuality is granted in a share in the power of the state. But it has already been noted as a moment of civil society (§§ 527, 534) that single individuals raise themselves out of the external into the substantial universality, namely as a particular genus — the estates; and it is not in the inorganic form of single individuals as such (in the democratic manner of voting), but as organic moments, as estates, that they enter into that share; a power or an activity in the state must never appear and act in a formless, inorganic shape, that is, from the principle of plurality and of the multitude. The assemblies of estates have already been wrongly designated as the legislative power, in the respect that they constitute only one branch of this power, in which the particular governmental authorities have an essential share and the princely power has the absolute share of the final decision. Besides, in a cultivated state legislating can further be only a further development of the existing laws, and so-called new laws can be only extremes of detail and particularities (cf. Remark to § 529), whose content has already been prepared or even provisionally decided by the practice of the courts. — The so-called finance law, in so far as it comes to a co-determination by the estates, is essentially an affair of government; it is called a law only improperly, in the general sense that it comprehends a wide, indeed the whole, compass of the external means of government. The finances concern, even if they concern the complex as a whole, by their nature only the particular, ever newly arising, changeable needs. If the chief constituent of the requirement were regarded as permanent — as indeed it well is — then the determination about it would have more the nature of a law; but to be a law it would have to be given once for all and not to be given anew every year or every few years. The portion that changes with time and circumstances in fact concerns the smallest part of the amount, and the determination about it has all the less the character of a law; and yet it is, and can only be, this small changeable part that is disputable and can be subjected to a changeable, annual determination, which thereby falsely bears the high-sounding name of the granting of the budget, that is, of the whole of the finances. That a law should be given for one year and given annually strikes even common human sense as inappropriate, since common sense distinguishes the universal in and for itself, as the content of a true law, from a universality of reflection which only externally comprehends something that is by its nature a manifold. The name of a law for the annual fixing of the financial requirement serves only to maintain, given the presupposed separation of the legislative from the governmental power, the illusion that this separation really takes place, and to conceal the fact that the legislative power, in deciding about the finances, is in fact occupied with proper governmental business. — But the interest placed in the capacity to grant the financial estimate ever anew, namely that the assembly of estates should possess in it a means of compulsion against the government and thereby a guarantee against wrong and violence — this interest is on the one hand a superficial semblance, since the provision for the finances, necessary for the subsistence of the state, cannot be conditioned by any other circumstances, nor can the subsistence of the state be placed in annual doubt; as little as the government could concede and order the institution of the administration of justice, for example, only ever for a limited time, in order to reserve to itself, in the threat of suspending the activity of such an institution and in the fear of an ensuing condition of robbery, a means of compulsion against private persons. On the other hand, however, notions of a relation for which it might be useful and requisite to have means of compulsion in hand rest partly on the false notion of a contractual relation between government and people, partly they presuppose the possibility of such a divergence of the spirit of the two that constitution and government can no longer be thought of at all. If one imagines the empty possibility of helping by such a means of compulsion to have come into existence, such help would rather be the disruption and dissolution of the state, in which there would no longer be a government but only parties, and which only force and the oppression of one party by the other could remedy. — To represent the institution of the state as a mere constitution of the understanding, that is, as the mechanism of an equilibrium of powers external to one another within it, goes against the fundamental Idea of what a state is.
§ 545
The state has finally the side of being the immediate actuality of a single and naturally determined people. As a single individual it is exclusive towards other such individuals. In their relation to one another arbitrary will and contingency have their place, because the universal element of right, on account of the autonomous totality of these persons, only ought to be between them and is not actual. This independence makes the conflict between them into a relation of force, a condition of war, for which the universal estate determines itself to the particular purpose of preserving the self-subsistence of the state against others, into the estate of valour.
§ 546
This condition shows the substance of the state in its individuality advancing to abstract negativity, as the power in which the particular self-subsistence of single individuals and the condition of their being submerged in the external existence of possession and in natural life feels itself to be something null, and which mediates the preservation of the universal substance through the sacrifice, taking place in the disposition of that substance, of this natural and particular existence, through the bringing to nought of what is vain over against it.
§ 547
Through the condition of war the self-subsistence of states is put at stake, and on one side the mutual recognition of free national individuals is brought about (§ 430), and through peace settlements, which are supposed to last for ever, both this universal recognition and the particular entitlements of peoples towards one another are established. External constitutional law rests partly upon these positive treaties, but to that extent contains only rights which lack true actuality (§ 545), partly upon so-called international law, whose universal principle is the presupposed being recognized of states, and which therefore limits their otherwise unbound actions towards one another in such a way that the possibility of peace remains — which also distinguishes individuals as private persons from the state, and which in general rests upon custom.
§ 548
The determinate spirit of a people, since it is actual and its freedom is as nature, has on this natural side the moment of geographical and climatic determinateness; it is in time and, as regards content, has essentially a particular principle and a development of its consciousness and its actuality determined by that principle to run through; — it has a history within itself. As a limited spirit its self-subsistence is something subordinate; it passes over into universal world history, whose events present the dialectic of the particular spirits of peoples, the judgement of the world.
§ 549
This movement is the path of the liberation of spiritual substance, the deed through which the absolute final purpose of the world accomplishes itself within the world, through which spirit, at first only in itself, brings itself to consciousness and self-consciousness and thereby to the revelation and actuality of its essence which is in and for itself, and becomes also externally universal, becomes world spirit. Since this development is in time and in existence and thus as history, its single moments and stages are the spirits of peoples; each, as a single and natural spirit in a qualitative determinateness, is determined to fill out only one stage and to accomplish only one piece of the whole deed.
That the presupposition of a purpose existing in and for itself, and of the determinations developing out of it according to the concept, should be made in the case of history, has been called an a priori consideration of history, and philosophy has been reproached with a priori history-writing; on this, and on history-writing in general, a closer remark is to be made. That history, and indeed essentially world history, has a final purpose in and for itself lying at its ground, and that this purpose has actually been and is being realized within it — the plan of providence — that in general there is reason in history, must be settled philosophically for its own sake and thus as necessary in and for itself. Blame can be deserved only for presupposing arbitrary notions or thoughts and wishing to find and represent events and deeds as conformable to them. Of such an a priori seductive procedure, however, those have nowadays chiefly made themselves guilty who give out that they wish to be pure historians and at the same time occasionally declare themselves expressly against philosophizing, partly in general, partly in history; philosophy is to them a troublesome neighbour, as being opposed to the arbitrary and to fancies. Such a priori history-writing has sometimes spread from a side from which one would least expect it, chiefly from the philological side, and has taken hold in Germany more than in France and England, where history-writing has purified itself into a firmer and riper character. To invent fictions, such as those of a primeval state and its primeval people, which is supposed to have been in possession of the true cognition of God and of all the sciences, of priestly peoples, and, more particularly, for example, of a Roman epic which is supposed to have been the source of the accounts that pass for historical concerning the earlier history of Rome and so forth, has taken the place of the pragmatizing inventions of psychological grounds and connections, and it seems to be regarded in a wide circle as the requirement of a learned and ingenious history-writing drawing on the sources, to hatch out such hollow notions and boldly to combine them out of a learned sweepings-heap of remote external circumstances, in defiance of the best attested history. If we set aside this subjective treatment of history, then the properly opposed demand, that history should not be considered according to an objective purpose, is on the whole equivalent to the demand, which seems still more justified, that the historian should proceed with impartiality. This demand is made in particular of the history of philosophy, in which no leaning towards one notion or opinion is to show itself, just as a judge should have no particular interest for either of the two contending parties. In the case of a judge it is at the same time assumed that he would administer his office foolishly and badly if he did not have an interest, indeed the exclusive interest, for right, if he did not have it as his purpose and sole purpose, and if he refrained from judging. This requirement of the judge one may call partiality for right, and one knows here very well how to distinguish this from a subjective partiality. But in the case of the impartiality demanded of the historian, that distinction is extinguished in sober, self-satisfied talk, and both kinds of interest are rejected when it is demanded that the historian should bring with him no determinate purpose and view according to which he selects, arranges and judges the events, but should narrate them precisely in the contingent manner in which he finds them, in their relationless and thoughtless particularity. This much is conceded, that a history must have an object, for example Rome, its fortunes, or the decline of the greatness of the Roman empire. It takes little reflection to see that this is the presupposed purpose which lies at the ground of the events themselves as well as of the judgement which gives them an importance, that is, a nearer or more remote relation to it. A history without such a purpose and without such judgement would be only a feeble-minded wandering of representation, not even a children’s tale; for even children demand in stories an interest, that is, a purpose at least given to be surmised, and the relation of the events and actions to it. In the existence of a people the substantial purpose is to be a state and as such to preserve itself; a people without the formation of a state (a nation as such) properly has no history, as peoples existed before their formation of a state and as others still exist now as wild nations. What happens to a people and what goes on within it has its essential significance in relation to the state; the mere particularities of individuals are the furthest removed from that object which belongs to history. If in the character of the distinguished individuals of a period the universal spirit of an age in general is imprinted, and if even their particularities are the more remote and duller media in which it still plays in weakened colours, and if often even the details of a small event, of a word, express not a subjective particularity but an age, a people, a culture with striking vividness and brevity, the selection of which is the business only of an ingenious historian — then, by contrast, the mass of other details is a superfluous mass, through whose faithful collection the objects worthy of history are oppressed and obscured; the essential character of spirit and of its age is always contained in the great events. A correct sense has led to relegating such depictions of the particular and the gleaning of its traits to the novel (such as Walter Scott’s and the like); it is to be held good taste to combine the pictures of inessential, particular aliveness with an inessential material, such as the novel takes from private events and subjective passions. But in the interest of so-called truth to weave the individual trivialities of the age and of persons into the representation of universal interests is not only against judgement and taste, but against the concept of objective truth, in whose sense only what is substantial is the true for spirit, and not the emptiness of external existences and contingencies, and in whose sense it is a matter of complete indifference whether such insignificances are formally attested or, as in the novel, characteristically invented and ascribed to this or that name and circumstances. — The interest of biography, to mention this here as well, seems to stand directly opposed to a universal purpose; but biography itself has the historical world as its background, with which the individual is entangled; even the subjectively original, the humorous and so forth touches upon that substance and thereby heightens its interest; but what is merely a matter of temperament has another ground and another interest than history. The demand for impartiality in the history of philosophy, and likewise, one may add, of religion, partly in general, partly in church history, usually contains more closely the still more express exclusion of the presupposition of an objective purpose. As above the state was named as the matter to which judgement would have to relate the events in political history, so here truth would have to be the object to which the single deeds and events of spirit would be related. But rather the opposite presupposition is made, namely that those histories are to have only subjective purposes, that is, only opinions and notions, and not the object existing in and for itself, truth, as their content — and this for the simple reason that there is said to be no truth. According to this assumption the interest for truth likewise appears only as a partiality in the ordinary sense, namely for opinions and notions which, being all of equal emptiness, count as indifferent. Historical truth itself thereby has only the sense of correctness, of an exact report of what is external, without judgement except about this correctness itself, so that only qualitative and quantitative judgements, and no judgements of necessity and of the concept (cf. Remarks to §§ 172 and 178), are admitted. In fact, however, if in political history Rome or the German empire and so forth are an actual and true object and the purpose to which the appearances are to be related and according to which they are to be judged, then still more, in universal history, is universal spirit itself, the consciousness of itself and of its essence, a true and actual object, content and purpose, which in and for itself all other appearances serve, so that they have their worth and even their existence solely through the relation to it, that is, through the judgement in which they are subsumed under it and it inheres in them. That in the course of spirit (and it is spirit that does not merely hover over history as over the waters, but weaves within it and alone is what moves) freedom, that is, the development determined by its concept, is what determines, and that its concept alone is the final purpose, that is, the truth, since spirit is consciousness — or, in other words, that there is reason in history — will partly be at least a plausible belief, but partly it is the cognition of philosophy.
§ 550
This liberation of spirit, in which it goes to come to itself and to actualize its truth, and the business of this liberation, is the highest and absolute right. The self-consciousness of a particular people is the bearer of the present stage of development of universal spirit in its existence and the objective actuality into which that spirit places its will. Against this absolute will the will of the other particular spirits of peoples is without right; that people is the one that dominates the world; but just as much does spirit stride beyond its property of the moment as beyond a particular stage, and then hands it over to its contingency and judgement.
§ 551
Since such a business of actuality appears as action and thus as the work of single individuals, these are, in respect of the substantial content of their labour, instruments, and their subjectivity, which is what is distinctively theirs, is the empty form of activity. What they have therefore attained for themselves through the individual share they have taken in the substantial business, prepared and determined independently of them, is a formal universality of subjective representation — fame, which is their reward.
§ 552
The spirit of a people contains natural necessity and stands in external existence (§ 483); the ethical substance, infinite within itself, is for itself a particular and limited one (§§ 549 and 550), and its subjective side is burdened with contingency, is unconscious custom, and consciousness of its content as something temporally present and standing in relation to an external nature and world. But it is spirit, thinking within ethical life, which sublates within itself the finitude it has as the spirit of a people in its state and in that state’s temporal interests, the system of laws and of customs, and raises itself to the knowledge of itself in its essentiality — a knowledge which, however, itself has the immanent limitedness of the spirit of a people. But the thinking spirit of world history, in that it at the same time strips off those limitations of the particular spirits of peoples and its own worldliness, grasps its concrete universality and raises itself to the knowledge of absolute spirit, as the eternally actual truth in which knowing reason is free for itself and in which necessity, nature and history serve only its revelation and are the vessels of its honour.
Of the formal aspect of the elevation of spirit to God there was mention in the Introduction to the Logic (cf. especially Remark to § 51). — As regards the starting points of this elevation, Kant in general seized upon the most correct one in so far as he regards faith in God as proceeding from practical reason. For the starting point contains implicitly the content or material which constitutes the content of the concept of God. But the true concrete material is neither being (as in the cosmological proof) nor merely purposive activity (as in the physico-theological proof), but spirit, whose absolute determination is effective reason, that is, the self-determining and self-realizing concept itself, freedom. That the elevation of subjective spirit to God which takes place in this determination is in the Kantian presentation again reduced to a postulate, a mere ought, is the perversity discussed earlier, of immediately restoring as true and valid the opposition of finitude, the sublating of which into truth is that very elevation. It has been shown earlier of the mediation which the elevation to God is (§ 192, cf. Remark to § 204) that the moment of negation, as that through which the essential content of the starting point is purified of its finitude and thereby emerges free, is chiefly to be attended to. This moment, abstract in its logical form, has now received its most concrete meaning. The finite from which we here set out is real ethical self-consciousness; the negation through which it raises its spirit to its truth is the purification of its knowledge from subjective opinion, actually accomplished in the ethical world, and the liberation of its will from the selfishness of desire. True religion and true religiosity proceed only from ethical life, and are ethical life thinking, that is, becoming conscious of the free universality of its concrete essence. Only out of ethical life and from it is the Idea of God known as free spirit; outside ethical spirit it is therefore vain to seek true religion and religiosity. But this proceeding gives itself at the same time, as everywhere in the speculative, the significance that what is at first placed as the consequent and as having proceeded is rather the absolute prius of that through which it appears as mediated, and is here also known in spirit as its truth. This is therefore the place to enter more closely into the relation of state and religion and thereby to shed light on categories which are current on this subject. The immediate consequence of what precedes is that ethical life is the state led back to its substantial inwardness, that the state is the development and actualization of ethical life, but that the substantiality of ethical life itself and of the state is religion. According to this relation the state rests upon the ethical disposition and this upon the religious one. Since religion is the consciousness of absolute truth, what is to count as right and justice, as duty and law, that is, as true in the world of the free will, can count only in so far as it has a part in that truth, is subsumed under it and follows from it. But for the truly ethical to be a consequence of religion, it is required that religion have the true content, that is, that the Idea of God known within it be the true one. Ethical life is the divine spirit as indwelling in self-consciousness in its actual presence as a people and as the individuals of that people; this self-consciousness, going into itself out of its empirical actuality and bringing its truth to consciousness, has in its faith and in its conscience only what it has in the certainty of itself, in its spiritual actuality. The two are inseparable; there cannot be two kinds of conscience, a religious one and an ethical one differing from it in substance and content. But in point of form, that is, for thinking and knowing — and religion and ethical life belong to intelligence and are a thinking and knowing — there belongs to the religious content, as the pure truth existing in and for itself and therefore the highest truth, the sanctioning of the ethical life that stands in empirical actuality; thus religion is for self-consciousness the basis of ethical life and of the state. It has been the monstrous error of our times to wish to regard these inseparables as separable from one another, indeed even as indifferent towards one another. Thus the relation of religion to the state has been considered in such a way that the state already exists for itself otherwise and out of some power and force, and that the religious element, as the subjective element of individuals, would have to be added only for its consolidation, as something perhaps desirable, or would even be indifferent, and that the ethical life of the state, that is, rational right and constitution, stands firm for itself on its own ground. Given the inseparability of the two sides indicated, it is of interest to draw attention to the separation which appears on the side of religion. It concerns in the first instance the form, that is, the relation of self-consciousness to the content of truth. Since this content is substance as the indwelling spirit of self-consciousness in its actuality, self-consciousness has the certainty of itself in this content and is free within it. But the relation of unfreedom may take place as regards the form, although the content of religion which is in itself is absolute spirit. This great difference, to mention what is more determinate, is found within the Christian religion itself, in which it is not the natural element that constitutes the content of God, nor does such an element enter into God’s substance as a moment, but God, who is known in spirit and in truth, is the content. And yet in the Catholic religion this spirit is in actuality set rigidly over against self-conscious spirit. In the first place God is presented in the host to religious adoration as an external thing (whereas in the Lutheran church the host as such is consecrated and raised to the present God first and solely in partaking, that is, in the annihilation of its externality, and in faith, that is, in spirit which is at the same time free and certain of itself). From that first and highest relation of externality flow all the other external and hence unfree, unspiritual and superstitious relations; namely a lay estate which receives the knowledge of divine truth as well as the direction of its will and conscience from outside and from another estate, which itself does not attain the possession of that knowledge in a spiritual manner alone, but essentially requires for it an external consecration. Further, the manner of praying which partly merely moves the lips and is partly spiritless in this, that the subject renounces the direct turning to God and asks others to pray for it; — the directing of devotion to miracle-working images, indeed even to bones, and the expectation of miracles through them; — in general, justice through external works, a merit which is supposed to be acquired through actions, indeed even to be transferable to others, and so forth — all this binds spirit under a being-outside-itself, whereby its concept is misconceived and perverted in its innermost part, and right and justice, ethical life and conscience, imputability and duty are corrupted at their root. To such a principle and to this development of the unfreedom of spirit in religion there corresponds only a legislation and a constitution of legal and ethical unfreedom and a condition of lawlessness and unethical life in the actual state. Consistently, the Catholic religion has been and still often is loudly praised as the only one in which the stability of governments is secured — in fact of such governments as are bound up with institutions which are grounded upon the unfreedom of a spirit that is supposed to be legally and ethically free, that is, upon institutions of wrong and a condition of ethical corruption and barbarism. But these governments do not know that in fanaticism they have the fearful power which does not turn against them only so long and only on the condition that they remain caught in the servitude of wrong and immorality. But there is still another power present in spirit; against that being-outside-itself and being-torn-apart, consciousness gathers itself into its inner free actuality; worldly wisdom awakens in the spirit of governments and of peoples, that is, the wisdom about what is in and for itself right and rational in actuality. With right has the production of thought, and more determinately philosophy, been called worldly wisdom; for thinking makes the truth of spirit present, introduces it into the world and thus liberates it in its actuality and in its own self. With this the content gives itself a quite different shape. The unfreedom of the form, that is, of knowledge and of subjectivity, has for the ethical content the consequence that self-consciousness is represented as not immanent within it, that the content is represented as withdrawn from self-consciousness, so that it is supposed to be truly only as negative towards the actuality of self-consciousness. In this untruth the ethical substance is called something holy. But through the introduction of the divine spirit into actuality, through the liberation of actuality towards it, what is supposed to be holiness in the world is displaced by ethical life. Instead of the vow of chastity, it is now marriage that first counts as the ethical, and hence the family as the highest in this side of the human being; instead of the vow of poverty (to which, entangling itself in contradiction, there corresponds the merit of giving away one’s goods to the poor, that is, of enriching them), there counts the activity of acquiring for oneself through understanding and industry, and rectitude in this commerce and use of resources, the ethical life of civil society; instead of the vow of obedience, there counts obedience to the law and to the lawful institutions of the state, which is itself true freedom, because the state is reason itself, actualizing itself — ethical life in the state. Only thus can right and morality then be present. It is not enough that in religion it is commanded: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s; for the question is precisely to determine what Caesar is, that is, what belongs to the secular government; and it is well enough known what the secular government too has arrogated to itself in arbitrariness, as has the spiritual government for its part. The divine spirit must immanently pervade the secular; thus wisdom is concrete within it and its warrant determined in its own self. But that concrete indwelling consists in the formations of ethical life cited: the ethical life of marriage against the holiness of the celibate state, the ethical life of the activity of resources and of acquisition against the holiness of poverty and its idleness, the ethical life of an obedience dedicated to the right of the state against the holiness of an obedience without duty and without right, the servitude of conscience. With the need of right and of ethical life and with the insight into the free nature of spirit, their conflict with the religion of unfreedom sets in. It would be of no help if the laws and the order of the state were recast into a rational organization of right, if in religion the principle of unfreedom were not given up. The two are incompatible with one another; it is a foolish notion to wish to assign them separate domains, in the opinion that their difference will behave quietly towards one another and not break out into contradiction and struggle. Principles of legal freedom can only be abstract and superficial, and state institutions derived from them must be untenable for themselves, if the wisdom of those principles so misconceives religion as not to know that the principles of the reason of actuality have their last and highest confirmation in religious conscience, in the subsumption under the consciousness of absolute truth. If, in whatever way it may have happened, a legislation had arisen, so to speak a priori, which had rational principles for its foundation, but in contradiction with the religion of the land based upon principles of spiritual unfreedom, then the putting into effect of the legislation lies with the individuals of the government as such and of the whole administration branching through all classes; it is only an abstract, empty notion to delude oneself that it is possible for individuals to act only according to the sense or letter of the legislation and not according to the spirit of their religion, in which lies their innermost conscience and highest obligation. In this opposition to what is declared holy by religion the laws appear as something made by human beings; even if they were sanctioned and externally introduced, they could offer no lasting resistance to the contradiction and the attacks of the religious spirit against them. Thus such laws, even if their content were the true one, founder upon conscience, whose spirit is different from the spirit of the laws and does not sanction them. It is to be held a folly of recent times to have altered a system of corrupt ethical life, its constitution and legislation, without altering religion, to have made a revolution without a reformation, to suppose that with the old religion and its holy things a constitution opposed to it could have quiet and harmony within itself, and that stability could be procured for the laws through external guarantees — for example so-called chambers and the power given to them to determine the financial estimate (cf. Remark to § 544) and the like. It is to be regarded as no more than an emergency expedient to wish to separate rights and laws from religion, given the existing impotence to descend into the depths of the religious spirit and to raise it itself to its truth. Those guarantees are rotten supports against the consciences of the subjects who are to handle the laws, among which the guarantees themselves belong; this is rather the highest, the most unholy contradiction, to wish to bind religious conscience, to which secular legislation is something unholy, to that legislation and to subject it to it. In Plato the cognition had dawned more determinately concerning the division which had entered in his time between the existing religion and the constitution of the state on the one hand and, on the other, the deeper demands which freedom, now becoming conscious of its inwardness, made upon religion and the political condition. Plato grasps the thought that true constitution and political life are more deeply grounded upon the Idea, upon the principles of eternal justice, universal and true in and for themselves. To know and to cognize these is indeed the determination and the business of philosophy. From this point of view Plato breaks out into the famous or notorious passage in which he lets Socrates declare very emphatically that philosophy and the power of the state must coincide in one, that the Idea must be the ruler, if the misfortune of peoples is to see an end. Plato had in this the determinate notion that the Idea, which of course is in itself free self-determining thought, can also come to consciousness only in the form of thought; as a substance which, in order to be true, must be raised into universality and brought to consciousness in universality’s most abstract form. In order to compare the Platonic standpoint in complete determinateness with the point of view from which the state is here considered in relation to religion, the differences of the concept upon which it here essentially depends must be recalled. The first consists in this, that in natural things their substance, the genus, is different from their existence, in which it is as subject; but this subjective existence of the genus is further distinguished from that which the genus, or the universal in general, raised out as such for itself, receives in the representing, thinking being. This further individuality, the ground of the free existence of the universal substance, is the self of thinking spirit. The substance of natural things does not receive the form of universality and essentiality through itself, and their individuality is not itself the form which subjective thinking alone is for itself and which gives that universal substance existence for itself in philosophy. The human substance, by contrast, is free spirit itself and comes to existence in its self-consciousness. This absolute substance, spirit concrete within itself, is precisely this, to have the form, thinking, itself for its content; to the height of the thinking consciousness of this determination Aristotle raised himself in his concept of the entelechy of thinking, which is νόησις τῆς νοήσεως, above the Platonic Idea (the genus, the substantial). But thinking in general contains, and indeed on account of that very determination, the immediate being-for-self of subjectivity just as much as universality; and the true Idea of spirit concrete within itself is just as essentially in the one of its determinations, that of subjective consciousness, as in the other, that of universality, and is in the one as in the other the same substantial content. But to that form belong feeling, intuition and representation, and it is rather necessary that the consciousness of the absolute Idea be grasped in time first in this shape and be there earlier, as religion in its immediate actuality, than as philosophy. Philosophy first develops itself again only out of that foundation, just as Greek philosophy is later than Greek religion and reached its completion precisely in this, in grasping and comprehending the principle of spirit, which first manifests itself in religion, in its whole determinate essentiality. But Greek philosophy could set itself up only in opposition to its religion, and could comport itself only in a hostile manner, with the unity of thought and the substantiality of the Idea, against the polytheism of imagination, against the serene and frivolous jesting of that poetizing. The form in its infinite truth, the subjectivity of spirit, first broke forth only as subjective free thinking, which was not yet identical with substantiality itself, and substantiality was therefore not yet grasped as absolute spirit. Thus religion could at first appear only as purified through pure thinking existing for itself, through philosophy; but the form immanent to the substantial, which philosophy combated, was that poetizing imagination. The state, which develops itself in the same way out of religion, but earlier than philosophy, presents in actuality, as corruption, the one-sidedness which its Idea, true in itself, has at it. Plato, in common with all his thinking contemporaries, recognizing this corruption of democracy and the defectiveness even of its principle, brought the substantial to the fore, but was unable to impress upon his Idea of the state the infinite form of subjectivity, which was still hidden from his spirit; his state is therefore in its own self without subjective freedom (Remarks to §§ 503, 513 and so forth). The truth which was to indwell the state, to constitute and to govern it, he therefore grasps only in the form of thought truth, of philosophy, and thus made that pronouncement that, so long as philosophers do not rule in the states, or those who are now called kings and rulers do not philosophize thoroughly and comprehensively, so long will there be no liberation from evils either for the state or for the human race; so long can the Idea of its constitution not ripen into possibility and see the light of the sun. It was not granted to Plato to be able to go on to say that, so long as the true religion does not come forth in the world and become dominant in the states, so long has the true principle of the state not come into actuality. But so long could this principle also not come into thought, nor could the true Idea of the state be grasped by thought — the Idea of substantial ethical life with which the freedom of self-consciousness existing for itself is identical. Only in the principle of spirit which knows its essence, which is in itself absolutely free and has its actuality in the activity of its liberating itself, is the absolute possibility and necessity present that the power of the state, religion and the principles of philosophy coincide in one, that the reconciliation of actuality in general with spirit, of the state with religious conscience and likewise with philosophical knowledge, is accomplished. Since subjectivity existing for itself is absolutely identical with substantial universality, religion as such as well as the state as such, as forms in which the principle exists, contain within them the absolute truth, so that this truth, in being as philosophy, is itself only in one of its forms. But since religion too, in the development of itself, develops the differences contained in the Idea (§§ 566 ff.), its determinate being can, indeed must, appear in its first immediate, that is, itself one-sided manner, and its existence can be corrupted into sensuous externality and thereby further into the suppression of the freedom of spirit and into the perversion of political life. But the principle contains the infinite elasticity of the absolute form, to overcome this corruption of its determinations of form and of the content through them, and to bring about the reconciliation of spirit within itself. Thus at last the principle of the religious and that of the ethical conscience become one and the same in the Protestant conscience — free spirit knowing itself in its rationality and truth. The constitution and legislation, as well as their activities, have for their content the principle and the development of ethical life, which proceeds, and can proceed only, from the truth of religion restored to its original principle and thereby first actual as such. The ethical life of the state and the religious spirituality of the state are thus the mutual firm guarantees of one another.