System of Ethical Life

[p. 302]

|302| performance to a later time etc.; the moment, the present, is lacking in appearance. That performance is something inner, presupposes truthfulness, is something wholly formal; for what is at issue is precisely that the exchange has not happened, the interchange, the transition, is not realised; and the uncertainty rests on multiplicity and on coming apart, and on the possibility of abstraction from it, or on freedom.

(the third of this second potency b.)

γ. This unreason, or the opposition of this empty possibility and freedom to actuality and appearance, is to be sublated; or the inner of the intelligences that exchange must likewise come forth; this freedom must become equal to necessity, so that the transition is withdrawn from its empirical contingencies, and its middle, the identity, is posited as something necessary and fixed. The nature and form of exchange remain, but it is taken up into quantity and universality.

This transformation of exchange is contract. In it the moment of absolute presence, which is in pure exchange, forms itself into a rational middle, which not only admits the empirical appearances of exchanging, but, in order to be a totality, requires them as a necessary difference, which is indifferentiated in contract.

Through the necessity which the transition receives in contract, the empirical element, the coming apart of the performance of each party in appearance, the unity of the present, becomes indifferent and something contingent, which does no harm to the security of the whole; it is as good as if the performance itself had already taken place; the right of that singular one to his thing is already transferred to the other, the transition itself is to be regarded as having taken place; the external appearance, that performance has not yet been made, that the transition has not presented [itself] in empirical reality, is wholly empirical and contingent, or rather annihilated; property is thus wholly withdrawn from the external relation through which it not only designates itself as possession, but is still possession for the one who has already transferred it.

In that contract thus transforms the transition from a real into an ideal one, but in such a way that this ideal transition is the true, necessary one, it must, in order to be this, itself have absolute reality; the ideality or

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