[p. 453]
|453| of the present time; the whole fate of more than one century is stamped upon its forms, and the justice and force, bravery and cowardice, the honour, the blood, the need and the well-being of long-vanished times, of long-decayed generations dwell in them; the life and the forces, whose development and activity are the pride of the present living generation, have no share in them, no interest in it and no nourishment from them; the edifice with its pillars, its flourishes stands isolated from the spirit of the time in the world.
4)There has come down to us the legend of German freedom, of the time, such as few countries had, when in Germany the individual, unbowed by a universal, without subjection to a state, stood for himself and had his honour and his fate resting on himself, in his own sense and character shattered his strength against the world or shaped it for his enjoyment – when there was as yet no state, when the individual belonged to the whole through character and custom and religion, but in his enterprise and deed was not restricted by the whole, but, without fear and without doubt of himself, was bounded by his own sense; indeed this condition, in which not laws but customs bound a multitude into a people, equal interest, not a universal command, presented the people as a state, was called German freedom.5) The circles of power which each created for himself according to character and chance, the possession he won for himself, these changeable things, the passing time gradually fixed, and as exclusive property wholly separated individuals from one another, concepts became that in which they were united, and makeshift laws began to rule.
4) In the margin: German freedom
5) In the margin: German constitutional law is private law.
As cowardly and feeble as it is to call the sons of that condition abominable, unhappy and stupid, [and] to believe ourselves
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