[p. 466]
|466| to society, all united themselves in a universal and found freedom in common free submission to a supreme public power.
The wholly peculiar principle of German public law stands in inseparable connection with the condition of Europe in which the nations took part in the supreme power not mediately through laws but immediately. The supreme state power was among the European peoples a universal power in which each had a kind of free and personal share, and this free, personal share, dependent on arbitrary will, the Germans did not want to transform into the free share, independent of arbitrary will, which consists in the universality and force of laws, but have built their latest condition wholly upon the foundation of that condition of arbitrary will that was not contrary to law but lawless.
The later condition proceeds immediately from that condition in which the nation, without being a state, constituted a people. In this time of the old German freedom the individual stood for himself in his life and action; he had his honour and his fate resting not on connection with an estate but on himself. In his own sense and strength he shattered himself against the world or shaped it for his enjoyment. He belonged to the whole through custom, religion, an invisible living spirit and a few great interests. Otherwise – in his enterprise and deed – he let himself not be restricted by the whole, but bounded himself without fear and doubt only [by] himself; but what lay within his circle was so much and so wholly He himself that one could not even call it his property, but for what belonged to him in his circle, what we would call a part, and in which we would therefore also stake only a part of ourselves, he staked body and life and soul and salvation. The division and calculation on which our
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