[p. 507]
|507| and between the law and its execution there enters the separate act of application, which falls to the judicial power.
A law of the Empire therefore cannot, as for a blank tablet, give the universal rule of the lines and divisions that are to be made in it, nor carry out the actual arrangement according to one and the same such rule; rather the material for which a law of the Empire is made confronts it in its peculiar determinacies, already given beforehand, and before its execution the possibility has first to be ascertained of how the particular line and shape which each part bears can fit with the one prescribed by the law, or how much obligation the universal law has for each. In the event of contradictions arising, a judicial power has to ascertain this, and with regard to this ascertainment it emerges, properly, that the ascertainment is indeed to take place, but that, first, it is so organised that little is possible for it to ascertain, second, that what it has ascertained theoretically is again not realised and remains an ascertainment in thought, and finally [that] the whole business of ascertainment is made only somewhat less than impossible by the fact that the particular determinacy which the material has stands to a universal law in the relation of a straight line to an arc of a circle, so that an incompatibility of this determinacy of the universal material of public power with a law of the same [exists] in advance. In this way the state of thought and the system of public law and of the laws of the state is the straight line; but that in which the state of thought is to be realised has the shape of a circular line, and one knows that both lines are incommensurable; and this circular shape does not make itself incompatible with the straight line de facto either; it does not bear the form of force, injustice and arbitrary will, but that it is this incommensurable
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