System of Ethical Life

[p. 354]

|354| power, he sublates the form of thoroughgoing physical dependence, that of being dependent on a universal, not on a particular. Then high wealth, which is likewise bound up with the deepest poverty, – for in the separation labour becomes universal, objective on both sides; – [brings forth], on the one side in ideal universality, on the other in real universality, mechanically, and this purely quantitative, inorganic element of labour, singularised down to the concept, is immediately the highest crudeness. The first character of the estate of acquisition, that it is capable of an organic absolute intuition, and of respect for something divine, albeit posited outside it, falls away; and the bestiality of contempt for all that is high sets in; the wisdomless, purely universal, the mass of wealth, is the in-itself; and the absolute bond of the people, the ethical, has vanished, and the people is dissolved.

The government has to work to the utmost against this inequality, and against its own and the universal destruction; immediately it is able to do this externally by making high gain more difficult, and if it sacrifices a part of this estate to mechanical and factory labour and abandons it to crudeness, it must absolutely preserve the whole in the livingness possible to it. This, however, happens most necessarily, or rather immediately, through the constitution of the estate within itself. The relation of physical dependence is absolute particularisation, and dependence on something thought, abstract; the constitution posits a living dependence, and a relation of individuality to individuality, another, an inner active connection, which is not that of physical dependence. This estate is constituted within itself means: within its limitation it is a living universal; what its universal, its law and right, is, is at the same time as being in the individuals, real in them, through their will and self-activity. This organic existence of this estate makes each singular individual, insofar as there is livingness in him, one with the others; but the estate cannot be in absolute unity; thus it also makes them in part dependent, but ethically, in trust, respect and the like, and this ethical life sublates the elemental, the pure mass, quantity, posits a living relation; and

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