[p. 303]
|303| universality which the moment of the present receives must therefore exist; but reality itself lies above the sphere of this formal potency; this much emerges formally, that ideality as such and at the same time as reality in general can be nothing other than a spirit, which presents itself as existing, in which the contracting parties are annihilated as singular ones, the universal subsuming them, which is the absolutely objective essence and the binding middle of the contract; through the absolute being-one in it, freedom and possibility are sublated with respect to the members of the transition; the being-one is not something inner, good faith, in which inner the individual subsumes the identity under itself, but the individual is, against the absolutely universal, the subsumed; thus its arbitrary will and peculiarity are excluded, since in contract it invokes this absolute universality; but even if its whole force does enter into the contract, this nevertheless happens only formally; the determinacies which are linked through it and subsumed under it are and remain determinacies; they [are] posited as infinite only empirically, as this or that or whichever it may be, but they are subsisting; they are regarded as singularity of the individuals or of the things about which the contract is made; and therefore true reality cannot fall within this potency; for the side [of] reality is here a finitude subsisting for itself, which is not to be annihilated in ideality; whereby it is impossible that the reality should be a true and absolute one.
c.
The third potency is the indifference of the preceding ones; the relation of exchange, and of the recognising of a possession, and thereby property, – which hitherto related to singular things, becomes here totality, but always within singularity itself; or the second relation is taken up into universality, the concept of the first.
α) relative identity, or relation.
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