System of Ethical Life

[p. 348]

|348| true one, with which it is posited as one. These are the moments which have been conceived as the different powers of the state; the positing of the universal as legislative power; ideal subsuming as judicial power in general, justice; real subsuming as executive power. (Kant conceived the real subsumption, or the conclusion of the syllogism, as judicial power; but the ideal subsumption, or the minor premiss, as real subsuming, as executive power.)

Every real or living movement is an identity of these three moments, and in every act of government all three are united; they are abstractions to which no reality of their own can be given, or which cannot be constituted and organised as powers; legislating, judging and executing are something wholly formal, empty, without content. A content makes them real, but through this connection of form and content each would immediately be an identity of the universal and particular, or, as movement, a subsuming of the particular under the universal, and would thus unite all three moments in itself. These abstractions can, however, indeed obtain reality; each for itself can be linked with individuals who limit themselves to it, but then their true reality is in that which unites the three, or, since the conclusion, the executive power, is this union, this is properly always the government, and whether the others are not mere abstractions, empty activities, depends on the executive power, and this is absolutely the government; and after those distinctions have been made and powerless powers constituted, the first task returns again: to recognise not the executive power as such, but it as government.

The movement of the people is government for this reason: because movement as such is something formal, since in it it is not determined in and for itself which of those standing in relation in the movement is the potency and which the particular, and that they have the relation of movement seems contingent; whereas in the movement of the people the universal and particular are absolutely bound to one another, and the absolutely universal as such is absolutely determined, and with it also the particular.

Organic movement must be recognised insofar as intuition subsumes the

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