[p. 345]
|345| yet be a nothing; γ) absolute government is non-formal solely through presupposing the distinction of the estates, and thus being truly the supreme; if it does not presuppose it, then the whole power of reality falls into one lump, however much this might otherwise ramify within itself, and the crudeness of this lump would have its equally crude and wisdomless power undivided at its summit; there [could] be no true objective distinction in it, and that which was to hover above its distinctions [would be] a pure nothing; for absolute government, in being the absolute Idea, absolutely posits infinite movement, or the absolute concept; in this the distinctions must be, and they must therefore, because in the concept they are universal, infinite, be systems; and only thus is an absolute government possible, and absolute living identity, but born forth into appearance and reality.
This is the external form of its absolute power, that it belongs to no estate, notwithstanding that it has emerged from the first; from this it must emerge; for in reality the crude living identity, without wisdom and without difference, is the third, the third estate; but the second is that in which difference is fixed, which however has unity, as formal universality, united with itself but hovering above it; the first, however, is the clear, mirror-pure identity, the spirit of the others; but through being fixed in opposition it is the infinite side, the others however the finite; but the infinite is nearer to the absolute than the finite, and, if one may speak thus, ascending from below, it soars immediately forth and upwards out of infinity, which is its formal, negative side. This government is absolute potency for all the estates in being above them; its power, that through which it is potency, is nothing external through which it would itself be, as a particular, against a particular, would have an army or whatever else it might be as executors of its ordinances; rather it is entirely withdrawn from opposition, nothing against which something could set itself up as a particular and thereby make it into a particular itself; rather it is absolutely only universality against the particular; and as this absolute ideal universal, against which everything else is a particular, it is the appearance of God, its words are his pronouncements, and it can appear and be under no other form; it is the immediate priesthood of the Most High, in whose sanctuary it takes
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