[p. 592]
|592| had already lain close to the heart of the assembly of estates, that all fundamental laws of the land and of the ruling house of the former duchy, insofar as they have not been changed by that draft, retain their continuing binding force, must always partly be conceded, as something innocent, to the reassurance of the formal conscience; partly a constitution is in general indeed something firm, but nothing absolutely at rest, and it is above all the sitting together of an assembly of estates whose labours are a constant, calm further formation of it. – This is the true general clause which the world spirit appends on its own account to every existing constitution. – The activity of an assembly of estates, insofar as they have a matter and content – otherwise they are in any case no labours -, or already the present working on a draft constitution, makes the formal principle of right without further content, which for this assembly was for months its highest goal, vanish of itself from the heads. A coherent labour on a whole of a constitution in determinate propositions makes it, moreover, in itself impossible merely to keep to positive provisions, given the confusedness, scatteredness and altogether the multitude of those countless documents and rescripts cited, and leads to using one’s own understanding and reason, as in the so-called natural public law. – Effects which result unconsciously, through the nature of the matter, in the heads, of themselves, against their stiffest and most decidedly expressed notions, are always the most important result, on account of whose certainty clear-sighted ministries, as the Württemberg one also did, look past the preceding phenomena of passionateness, prejudices, perverted concepts, spite, and so on.
As regards, however, the business of the assembly of estates itself from December 1815 to the same month of 1816, it related partly to matters other than those of the constitution,
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