[p. 506]
|506| laws, but that, after the manner of civil rights, the relation of each estate to the whole is something particular in the form of a property. Hereby the nature of public power is essentially affected.
An act that issues from public power is a universal one, and through its true universality it contains within itself at the same time the rule of its application. That which it concerns is a universal, equal to itself. The act of public power introduces a free and universal determinacy, and its execution is at the same time its application, just as its application, because there is nothing distinguishable in that to which it is applied, [must] be determined in the act itself, and no brittle and unequal material resists its application.
If the act issues from public power that every hundredth man of a certain age is to present himself as a soldier, or that a certain percentage of property or a certain levy is to be paid from every hide of land, then that about which it is decreed is quite generally men of a certain age, property or land, and there is no difference between man and man, property [and property], land and land; the determinacy which comes into the self-equal surface can be posited purely by public power. The hundredth man, the fifth per cent and so on are these entirely universal determinacies, which need no particular application in order to be introduced into the self-equal material; for no lines have been drawn which would first have to be erased or to which the determinate ones would have to be fitted – like the straight line on a tree trunk according to which it is to be hewn.
But if that to which the law is to be applied is itself manifoldly determined for this law, then the law cannot contain the rule of application completely within itself, but on the contrary there is for each particular part of the material a separate application,
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