SECTION II. MIND OBJECTIVE.

§ 483. The objective Mind is the absolute Idea, but only existing _in

posse_: and as it is thus on the territory of finitude, its actual

rationality retains the aspect of external apparency. The free will finds

itself immediately confronted by differences which arise from the

circumstance that freedom is its _inward_ function and aim, and is in

relation to an external and already subsisting objectivity, which splits

up into different heads: viz. anthropological data (i.e. private and

personal needs), external things of nature which exist for consciousness,

and the ties of relation between individual wills which are conscious of

their own diversity and particularity. These aspects constitute the

external material for the embodiment of the will.

§ 484. But the purposive action of this will is to realise its concept,

Liberty, in these externally-objective aspects, making the latter a world

moulded by the former, which in it is thus at home with itself, locked

together with it: the concept accordingly perfected to the Idea. Liberty,

shaped into the actuality of a world, receives the _form of Necessity_ the

deeper substantial nexus of which is the system or organisation of the

principles of liberty, whilst its phenomenal nexus is power or authority,

and the sentiment of obedience awakened in consciousness.

§ 485. This unity of the rational will with the single will (this being

the peculiar and immediate medium in which the former is actualised)

constitutes the simple actuality of liberty. As it (and its content)

belongs to thought, and is the virtual _universal_, the content has its

right and true character only in the form of universality. When invested

with this character for the intelligent consciousness, or instituted as an

authoritative power, it is a _Law_(150). When, on the other hand, the

content is freed from the mixedness and fortuitousness, attaching to it in

the practical feeling and in impulse, and is set and grafted in the

individual will, not in the form of impulse, but in its universality, so

as to become its habit, temper and character, it exists as manner and

custom, or _Usage_(151).

§ 486. This “reality,” in general, where free will has _existence_, is the

_Law_ (Right),—the term being taken in a comprehensive sense not merely as

the limited juristic law, but as the actual body of all the conditions of

freedom. These conditions, in relation to the _subjective_ will, where

they, being universal, ought to have and can only have their existence,

are its _Duties_; whereas as its temper and habit they are _Manners_. What

is a right is also a duty, and what is a duty, is also a right. For a mode

of existence is a right, only as a consequence of the free substantial

will: and the same content of fact, when referred to the will

distinguished as subjective and individual, is a duty. It is the same

content which the subjective consciousness recognises as a duty, and

brings into existence in these several wills. The finitude of the

objective will thus creates the semblance of a distinction between rights

and duties.

In the phenomenal range right and duty are _correlata_, at least in the

sense that to a right on my part corresponds a duty in some one else. But,

in the light of the concept, my right to a thing is not merely possession,

but as possession by a _person_ it is _property_, or legal possession, and

it is a _duty_ to possess things as _property_, i.e. to be as a person.

Translated into the phenomenal relationship, viz. relation to another

person—this grows into the duty of some one _else_ to respect _my_ right.

In the morality of the conscience, duty in general is in me—a free

subject—at the same time a right of my subjective will or disposition. But

in this individualist moral sphere, there arises the division between what

is only inward purpose (disposition or intention), which only has its

being in me and is merely subjective duty, and the actualisation of that

purpose: and with this division a contingency and imperfection which makes

the inadequacy of mere individualistic morality. In social ethics these

two parts have reached their truth, their absolute unity; although even

right and duty return to one another and combine by means of certain

adjustments and under the guise of necessity. The rights of the father of

the family over its members are equally duties towards them; just as the

children’s duty of obedience is their right to be educated to the liberty

of manhood. The penal judicature of a government, its rights of

administration, &c., are no less its duties to punish, to administer, &c.;

as the services of the members of the State in dues, military services,

&c., are duties and yet their right to the protection of their private

property and of the general substantial life in which they have their

root. All the aims of society and the State are the private aim of the

individuals. But the set of adjustments, by which their duties come back

to them as the exercise and enjoyment of right, produces an appearance of

diversity: and this diversity is increased by the variety of shapes which

value assumes in the course of exchange, though it remains intrinsically

the same. Still it holds fundamentally good that he who has no rights has

no duties and _vice versa_.

Distribution.

§ 487. The free will is

A. itself at first immediate, and hence as a single being—the _person_:

the existence which the person gives to its liberty is _property_. The

_Right as_ right (law) is _formal, abstract right_.

B. When the will is reflected into self, so as to have its existence

inside it, and to be thus at the same time characterised as a

_particular_, it is the right of the _subjective_ will, _morality_ of the

individual conscience.

C. When the free will is the substantial will, made actual in the subject

and conformable to its concept and rendered a totality of necessity,—it is

the ethics of actual life in family, civil society, and state.

Sub-Section A. Law.(152)

(a) Property.

§ 488. Mind, in the immediacy of its self-secured liberty, is an

individual, but one that knows its individuality as an absolutely free

will: it is a _person_, in whom the inward sense of this freedom, as in

itself still abstract and empty, has its particularity and fulfilment not

yet on its own part, but on an external _thing_. This thing, as something

devoid of will, has no rights against the subjectivity of intelligence and

volition, and is by that subjectivity made adjectival to it, the external

sphere of its liberty;—_possession_.

§ 489. By the judgment of possession, at first in the outward

appropriation, the thing acquires the predicate of “mine.” But this

predicate, on its own account merely “practical,” has here the

signification that I import my personal will into the thing. As so

characterised, possession is _property_, which as possession is a _means_,

but as existence of the personality is an _end_.

§ 490. In his property the person is brought into union with itself. But

the thing is an abstractly external thing, and the I in it is abstractly

external. The concrete return of me into me in the externality is that I,

the infinite self-relation, am as a person the repulsion of me from

myself, and have the existence of my personality in the _being of other

persons_, in my relation to them and in my recognition by them, which is

thus mutual.

§ 491. The thing is the _mean_ by which the extremes meet in one. These

extremes are the persons who, in the knowledge of their identity as free,

are simultaneously mutually independent. For them my will has its

_definite recognisable existence_ in the thing by the immediate bodily act

of taking possession, or by the formation of the thing or, it may be, by

mere designation of it.

§ 492. The casual aspect of property is that I place my will in _this_

thing: so far my will is _arbitrary_, I can just as well put it in it as

not,—just as well withdraw it as not. But so far as my will lies in a

thing, it is only I who can withdraw it: it is only with my will that the

thing can pass to another, whose property it similarly becomes only with

his will:—_Contract_.

(b) Contract.

§ 493. The two wills and their agreement in the contract are as an

_internal_ state of mind different from its realisation in the

_performance_. The comparatively “ideal” utterance (of contract) in the

_stipulation_ contains the actual surrender of a property by the one, its

changing hands, and its acceptance by the other will. The contract is thus

thoroughly binding: it does not need the performance of the one or the

other to become so—otherwise we should have an infinite regress or

infinite division of thing, labour, and time. The utterance in the

stipulation is complete and exhaustive. The inwardness of the will which

surrenders and the will which accepts the property is in the realm of

ideation, and in that realm the word is deed and thing (§ 462)—the full

and complete deed, since here the conscientiousness of the will does not

come under consideration (as to whether the thing is meant in earnest or

is a deception), and the will refers only to the external thing.

§ 494. Thus in the stipulation we have the _substantial_ being of the

contract standing out in distinction from its real utterance in the

performance, which is brought down to a mere sequel. In this way there is

put into the thing or performance a distinction between its immediate

specific _quality_ and its substantial being or _value_, meaning by value

the quantitative terms into which that qualitative feature has been

translated. One piece of property is thus made comparable with another,

and may be made equivalent to a thing which is (in quality) wholly

heterogeneous. It is thus treated in general as an abstract, universal

thing or commodity.

§ 495. The contract, as an agreement which has a voluntary origin and

deals with a casual commodity, involves at the same time the giving to

this “accidental” will a positive fixity. This will may just as well not

be conformable to law (right), and, in that case, produces a _wrong_: by

which however the absolute law (right) is not superseded, but only a

relationship originated of right to wrong.

(c) Right versus Wrong.

§ 496. Law (right) considered as the realisation of liberty in externals,

breaks up into a multiplicity of relations to this external sphere and to

other persons (§§ 491, 493 seqq.). In this way there are (1) several

titles or grounds at law, of which (seeing that property both on the

personal and the real side is exclusively individual) only one is the

right, but which, because they face each other, each and all are invested

with a _show_ of right, against which the former is defined as the

intrinsically right.

§ 497. Now so long as (compared against this show) the one intrinsically

right, still presumed identical with the several titles, is affirmed,

willed, and recognised, the only diversity lies in this, that the special

thing is subsumed under the one law or right by the _particular_ will of

_these_ several persons. This is naïve, non-malicious wrong. Such wrong in

the several claimants is a simple _negative judgment_, expressing the

_civil suit_. To settle it there is required a third judgment, which, as

the judgment of the intrinsically right, is disinterested, and a power of

giving the one right existence as against that semblance.

§ 498. But (2) if the semblance of right is willed as such _against_ right

intrinsical by the particular will, which thus becomes _wicked_, then the

external _recognition_ of right is separated from the right’s true value;

and while the former only is respected, the latter is violated. This gives

the wrong of _fraud_—the infinite judgment as identical (§ 173),—where the

nominal relation is retained, but the sterling value is let slip.

§ 499. (3) Finally, the particular will sets itself in opposition to the

intrinsic right by negating that right itself as well as its recognition

or semblance. [Here there is a negatively infinite judgment (§ 173) in

which there is denied the class as a whole, and not merely the particular

mode—in this case the apparent recognition.] Thus the will is violently

wicked, and commits a _crime_.

§ 500. As an outrage on right, such an action is essentially and actually

null. In it the agent, as a volitional and intelligent being, sets up a

law—a law however which is nominal and recognised by him only—a universal

which holds good _for him_, and under which he has at the same time

subsumed himself by his action. To display the nullity of such an act, to

carry out simultaneously this nominal law and the intrinsic right, in the

first instance by means of a subjective individual will, is the work of

_Revenge_. But, revenge, starting from the interest of an immediate

particular personality, is at the same time only a new outrage; and so on

without end. This progression, like the last, abolishes itself in a third

judgment, which is disinterested—_punishment_.

§ 501. The instrumentality by which authority is given to intrinsic right

is (α) that a particular will, that of the judge, being conformable to the

right, has an interest to turn against the crime (—which in the first

instance, in revenge, is a matter of chance), and (β) that an executive

power (also in the first instance casual) negates the negation of right

that was created by the criminal. This negation of right has its existence

in the will of the criminal; and consequently revenge or punishment

directs itself against the person or property of the criminal and

exercises _coercion_ upon him. It is in this legal sphere that coercion in

general has possible scope,—compulsion against the thing, in seizing and

maintaining it against another’s seizure: for in this sphere the will has

its existence immediately in externals as such, or in corporeity, and can

be seized only in this quarter. But more than _possible_ compulsion is

not, so long as I can withdraw myself as free from every mode of

existence, even from the range of all existence, i.e. from life. It is

legal only as abolishing a first and original compulsion.

§ 502. A distinction has thus emerged between the law (right) and the

subjective will. The “reality” of right, which the personal will in the

first instance gives itself in immediate wise, is seen to be due to the

instrumentality of the subjective will,—whose influence as on one hand it

gives existence to the essential right, so may on the other cut itself off

from and oppose itself to it. Conversely, the claim of the subjective will

to be in this abstraction a power over the law of right is null and empty

of itself: it gets truth and reality essentially only so far as that will

in itself realises the reasonable will. As such it is _morality_(153)

proper.

The phrase “Law of Nature,” or Natural Right(154), in use for the

philosophy of law involves the ambiguity that it may mean either right as

something existing ready-formed in nature, or right as governed by the

nature of things, i.e. by the notion. The former used to be the common

meaning, accompanied with the fiction of a _state of nature_, in which the

law of nature should hold sway; whereas the social and political state

rather required and implied a restriction of liberty and a sacrifice of

natural rights. The real fact is that the whole law and its every article

are based on free personality alone,—on self-determination or autonomy,

which is the very contrary of determination by nature. The law of

nature—strictly so called—is for that reason the predominance of the

strong and the reign of force, and a state of nature a state of violence

and wrong, of which nothing truer can be said than that one ought to

depart from it. The social state, on the other hand, is the condition in

which alone right has its actuality: what is to be restricted and

sacrificed is just the wilfulness and violence of the state of nature.

Sub-Section B. The Morality Of Conscience(155).

§ 503. The free individual, who, in mere law, counts only as a _person_,

is now characterised as a _subject_, a will reflected into itself so that,

be its affection what it may, it is distinguished (as existing in it) as

_its own_ from the existence of freedom in an external thing. Because the

affection of the will is thus inwardised, the will is at the same time

made a particular, and there arise further particularisations of it and

relations of these to one another. This affection is partly the essential

and implicit will, the reason of the will, the essential basis of law and

moral life: partly it is the existent volition, which is before us and

throws itself into actual deeds, and thus comes into relationship with the

former. The subjective will is _morally_ free, so far as these features

are its inward institution, its own, and willed by it. Its utterance in

deed with this freedom is an _action_, in the externality of which it only

admits as its own, and allows to be imputed to it, so much as it has

consciously willed.

This subjective or “moral” freedom is what a European especially calls

freedom. In virtue of the right thereto a man must possess a personal

knowledge of the distinction between good and evil in general: ethical and

religious principles shall not merely lay their claim on him as external

laws and precepts of authority to be obeyed, but have their assent,

recognition, or even justification in his heart, sentiment, conscience,

intelligence, &c. The subjectivity of the will in itself is its supreme

aim and absolutely essential to it.

The “moral” must be taken in the wider sense in which it does not signify

the morally good merely. In French _le moral_ is opposed to _le physique_,

and means the mental or intellectual in general. But here the moral

signifies volitional mode, so far as it is in the interior of the will in

general; it thus includes purpose and intention,—and also moral

wickedness.

a. Purpose(156).

§ 504. So far as the action comes into immediate touch with _existence_,

_my part_ in it is to this extent formal, that external existence is also

_independent_ of the agent. This externality can pervert his action and

bring to light something else than lay in it. Now, though any alteration

as such, which is set on foot by the subject’s action, is its _deed_(157),

still the subject does not for that reason recognise it as its

_action_(158), but only admits as its own that existence in the deed which

lay in its knowledge and will, which was its _purpose_. Only for that does

it hold itself _responsible_.

b. Intention and Welfare(159).

§ 505. As regards its empirically concrete _content_ (1) the action has a

variety of particular aspects and connexions. In point of _form_, the

agent must have known and willed the action in its essential feature,

embracing these individual points. This is the right of _intention_. While

_purpose_ affects only the immediate fact of existence, _intention_

regards the underlying essence and aim thereof. (2) The agent has no less

the right to see that the particularity of content in the action, in point

of its matter, is not something external to him, but is a particularity of

his own,—that it contains his needs, interests, and aims. These aims, when

similarly comprehended in a single aim, as in happiness (§ 479),

constitute his _well-being_. This is the right to well-being. Happiness

(good fortune) is distinguished from well-being only in this, that

happiness implies no more than some sort of immediate existence, whereas

well-being regards it as also justified as regards morality.

§ 506. But the essentiality of the intention is in the first instance the

abstract form of generality. Reflection can put in this form this and that

particular aspect in the empirically-concrete action, thus making it

essential to the intention or restricting the intention to it. In this way

the supposed essentiality of the intention and the real essentiality of

the action may be brought into the greatest contradiction—e.g. a good

intention in case of a crime. Similarly well-being is abstract and may be

set on this or that: as appertaining to this single agent, it is always

something particular.

c. Goodness and Wickedness(160).

§ 507. The truth of these particularities and the concrete unity of their

formalism is the content of the universal, essential and actual, will,—the

law and underlying essence of every phase of volition, the essential and

actual good. It is thus the absolute final aim of the world, and _duty_

for the agent who _ought_ to have _insight_ into the _good_, make it his

_intention_ and bring it about by his activity.

§ 508. But though the good is the universal of will—a universal determined

in itself,—and thus including in it particularity,—still so far as this

particularity is in the first instance still abstract, there is no

principle at hand to determine it. Such determination therefore starts up

also outside that universal; and as heteronomy or determinance of a will

which is free and has rights of its own, there awakes here the deepest

contradiction. (α) In consequence of the indeterminate determinism of the

good, there are always _several sorts_ of good and _many kinds of duties_,

the variety of which is a dialectic of one against another and brings them

into _collision_. At the same time because good is one, they _ought_ to

stand in harmony; and yet each of them, though it is a particular duty, is

as good and as duty absolute. It falls upon the agent to be the dialectic

which, superseding this absolute claim of each, concludes such a

combination of them as excludes the rest.

§ 509. (β) To the agent, who in his existent sphere of liberty is

essentially as a _particular_, his _interest and welfare_ must, on account

of that existent sphere of liberty, be essentially an aim and therefore a

duty. But at the same time in aiming at the good, which is the

not-particular but only universal of the will, the particular interest

_ought not_ to be a constituent motive. On account of this independency of

the two principles of action, it is likewise an accident whether they

harmonise. And yet they _ought_ to harmonise, because the agent, as

individual and universal, is always fundamentally one identity.

(γ) But the agent is not only a mere particular in his existence; it is

also a form of his existence to be an abstract self-certainty, an abstract

reflection of freedom into himself. He is thus distinct from the reason in

the will, and capable of making the universal itself a particular and in

that way a semblance. The good is thus reduced to the level of a mere “may

happen” for the agent, who can therefore resolve itself to somewhat

opposite to the good, can be wicked.

§ 510. (δ) The external objectivity, following the distinction which has

arisen in the subjective will (§ 503), constitutes a peculiar world of its

own,—another extreme which stands in no rapport with the internal

will-determination. It is thus a matter of chance, whether it harmonises

with the subjective aims, whether the good is realised, and the wicked, an

aim essentially and actually null, nullified in it: it is no less matter

of chance whether the agent finds in it his well-being, and more precisely

whether in the world the good agent is happy and the wicked unhappy. But

at the same time the world _ought_ to allow the good action, the essential

thing, to be carried out in it; it _ought_ to grant the good agent the

satisfaction of his particular interest, and refuse it to the wicked; just

as it _ought_ also to make the wicked itself null and void.

§ 511. The all-round contradiction, expressed by this repeated _ought_,

with its absoluteness which yet at the same time is _not_—contains the

most abstract ’analysis’ of the mind in itself, its deepest descent into

itself. The only relation the self-contradictory principles have to one

another is in the abstract certainty of self; and for this infinitude of

subjectivity the universal will, good, right, and duty, no more exist than

not. The subjectivity alone is aware of itself as choosing and deciding.

This pure self-certitude, rising to its pitch, appears in the two directly

inter-changing forms—of _Conscience_ and _Wickedness_. The former is the

will of goodness; but a goodness which to this pure subjectivity is the

_non-objective_, non-universal, the unutterable; and over which the agent

is conscious that _he_ in his _individuality_ has the decision. Wickedness

is the same awareness that the single self possesses the decision, so far

as the single self does not merely remain in this abstraction, but takes

up the content of a subjective interest contrary to the good.

§ 512. This supreme pitch of the “_phenomenon_” of will,—sublimating

itself to this absolute vanity—to a goodness, which has no objectivity,

but is only sure of itself, and a self-assurance which involves the

nullification of the universal—collapses by its own force. Wickedness, as

the most intimate reflection of subjectivity itself, in opposition to the

objective and universal, (which it treats as mere sham,) is the same as

the good sentiment of abstract goodness, which reserves to the

subjectivity the determination thereof:—the utterly abstract semblance,

the bare perversion and annihilation of itself. The result, the truth of

this semblance, is, on its negative side, the absolute nullity of this

volition which would fain hold its own against the good, and of the good,

which would only be abstract. On the affirmative side, in the notion, this

semblance thus collapsing is the same simple universality of the will,

which is the good. The subjectivity, in this its _identity_ with the good,

is only the infinite form, which actualises and developes it. In this way

the standpoint of bare reciprocity between two independent sides,—the

standpoint of the _ought_, is abandoned, and we have passed into the field

of ethical life.

Sub-Section C. The Moral Life, Or Social Ethics(161).

§ 513. The moral life is the perfection of spirit objective—the truth of

the subjective and objective spirit itself. The failure of the latter

consists—partly in having its freedom _immediately_ in reality, in

something external therefore, in a thing,—partly in the abstract

universality of its goodness. The failure of spirit subjective similarly

consists in this, that it is, as against the universal, abstractly

self-determinant in its inward individuality. When these two imperfections

are suppressed, subjective _freedom_ exists as the covertly and overtly

_universal_ rational will, which is sensible of itself and actively

disposed in the consciousness of the individual subject, whilst its

practical operation and immediate universal _actuality_ at the same time

exist as moral usage, manner and custom,—where self-conscious _liberty_

has become _nature_.

§ 514. The consciously free substance, in which the absolute “ought” is no

less an “is,” has actuality as the spirit of a nation. The abstract

disruption of this spirit singles it out into _persons_, whose

independence it however controls and entirely dominates from within. But

the person, as an intelligent being, feels that underlying essence to be

his own very being—ceases when so minded to be a mere accident of it—looks

upon it as his absolute final aim. In its actuality he sees not less an

achieved present, than somewhat he brings it about by his action,—yet

somewhat which without all question _is_. Thus, without any selective

reflection, the person performs its duty as _his own_ and as something

which _is_; and in this necessity _he_ has himself and his actual freedom.

§ 515. Because the substance is the absolute unity of individuality and

universality of freedom, it follows that the actuality and action of each

individual to keep and to take care of his own being, while it is on one

hand conditioned by the pre-supposed total in whose complex alone he

exists, is on the other a transition into a universal product.—The social

disposition of the individuals is their sense of the substance, and of the

identity of all their interests with the total; and that the other

individuals mutually know each other and are actual only in this identity,

is confidence (trust)—the genuine ethical temper.

§ 516. The relations between individuals in the several situations to

which the substance is particularised form their _ethical duties_. The

ethical personality, i.e. the subjectivity which is permeated by the

substantial life, is _virtue_. In relation to the bare facts of external

being, to _destiny_, virtue does not treat them as a mere negation, and is

thus a quiet repose in itself: in relation to substantial objectivity, to

the total of ethical actuality, it exists as confidence, as deliberate

work for the community, and the capacity of sacrificing self thereto;

whilst in relation to the incidental relations of social circumstance, it

is in the first instance justice and then benevolence. In the latter

sphere, and in its attitude to its own visible being and corporeity, the

individuality expresses its special character, temperament, &c. as

personal _virtues_.

§ 517. The ethical substance is

AA. as “immediate” or _natural_ mind,—the _Family_.

BB. The “relative” totality of the “relative” relations of the individuals

as independent persons to one another in a formal universality—_Civil

Society_.

CC. The self-conscious substance, as the mind developed to an organic

actuality—the _Political Constitution_.

AA. The Family.

§ 518. The ethical spirit, in its _immediacy_, contains the _natural_

factor that the individual has its substantial existence in its natural

universal, i.e. in its kind. This is the sexual tie, elevated however to a

spiritual significance,—the unanimity of love and the temper of trust. In

the shape of the family, mind appears as feeling.

§ 519. (1) The physical difference of sex thus appears at the same time as

a difference of intellectual and moral type. With their exclusive

individualities these personalities combine to form a _single person_: the

subjective union of hearts, becoming a “substantial” unity, makes this

union an ethical tie—_Marriage_. The ’substantial’ union of hearts makes

marriage an indivisible personal bond—monogamic marriage: the bodily

conjunction is a sequel to the moral attachment. A further sequel is

community of personal and private interests.

§ 520. (2) By the community in which the various members constituting the

family stand in reference to property, that property of the one person

(representing the family) acquires an ethical interest, as do also its

industry, labour, and care for the future.

§ 521. The ethical principle which is conjoined with the natural

generation of the children, and which was assumed to have primary

importance in first forming the marriage union, is actually realised in

the second or spiritual birth of the children,—in educating them to

independent personality.

§ 522. (3) The children, thus invested with independence, leave the

concrete life and action of the family to which they primarily belong,

acquire an existence of their own, destined however to found anew such an

actual family. Marriage is of course broken up by the _natural_ element

contained in it, the death of husband and wife: but even their union of

hearts, as it is a mere “substantiality” of feeling, contains the germ of

liability to chance and decay. In virtue of such fortuitousness, the

members of the family take up to each other the status of persons; and it

is thus that the family finds introduced into it for the first time the

element, originally foreign to it, of _legal_ regulation.

BB. Civil Society(162).

§ 523. As the substance, being an intelligent substance, particularises

itself abstractly into many persons (the family is only a single person),

into families or individuals, who exist independent and free, as private

persons, it loses its ethical character: for these persons as such have in

their consciousness and as their aim not the absolute unity, but their own

petty selves and particular interests. Thus arises the system of

_atomistic_: by which the substance is reduced to a general system of

adjustments to connect self-subsisting extremes and their particular

interests. The developed totality of this connective system is the state

as civil society, or _state external_.

a. The System of Wants(163).

§ 524. (α) The particularity of the persons includes in the first instance

their wants. The possibility of satisfying these wants is here laid on the

social fabric, the general stock from which all derive their satisfaction.

In the condition of things in which this method of satisfaction by

indirect adjustment is realised, immediate seizure (§ 488) of external

objects as means thereto exists barely or not at all: the objects are

already property. To acquire them is only possible by the intervention, on

one hand, of the possessors’ will, which as particular has in view the

satisfaction of their variously defined interests; while on the other hand

it is conditioned by the ever continued production of fresh means of

exchange by the exchangers’ _own labour_. This instrument, by which the

labour of all facilitates satisfaction of wants, constitutes the general

stock.

§ 525. (β) The glimmer of universal principle in this particularity of

wants is found in the way intellect creates differences in them, and thus

causes an indefinite multiplication both of wants and of means for their

different phases. Both are thus rendered more and more abstract. This

“morcellement” of their content by abstraction gives rise to the _division

of labour_. The habit of this abstraction in enjoyment, information,

feeling and demeanour, constitutes training in this sphere, or nominal

culture in general.

§ 526. The labour which thus becomes more abstract tends on one hand by

its uniformity to make labour easier and to increase production,—on

another to limit each person to a single kind of technical skill, and thus

produce more unconditional dependence on the social system. The skill

itself becomes in this way mechanical, and gets the capability of letting

the machine take the place of human labour.

§ 527. (γ) But the concrete division of the general stock—which is also a

general business (of the whole society)—into particular masses determined

by the factors of the notion,—masses each of which possesses its own basis

of subsistence, and a corresponding mode of labour, of needs, and of means

for satisfying them, besides of aims and interests, as well as of mental

culture and habit—constitutes the difference of Estates (orders or ranks).

Individuals apportion themselves to these according to natural talent,

skill, option and accident. As belonging to such a definite and stable

sphere, they have their actual existence, which as existence is

essentially a particular; and in it they have their social morality, which

is _honesty_, their recognition and their _honour_.

Where civil society, and with it the State, exists, there arise the

several estates in their difference: for the universal substance, as

vital, _exists_ only so far as it organically _particularises_ itself. The

history of constitutions is the history of the growth of these estates, of

the legal relationships of individuals to them, and of these estates to

one another and to their centre.

§ 528. To the “substantial,” natural estate the fruitful soil and ground

supply a natural and stable capital; its action gets direction and content

through natural features, and its moral life is founded on faith and

trust. The second, the “reflected” estate has as its allotment the social

capital, the medium created by the action of middlemen, of mere agents,

and an ensemble of contingencies, where the individual has to depend on

his subjective skill, talent, intelligence and industry. The third,

“thinking” estate has for its business the general interests; like the

second it has a subsistence procured by means of its own skill, and like

the first a certain subsistence, certain however because guaranteed

through the whole society.

b. Administration of Justice(164).

§ 529. When matured through the operation of natural need and free option

into a system of universal relationships and a regular course of external

necessity, the principle of casual particularity gets that stable

articulation which liberty requires in the shape of _formal right_. (1)

The actualisation which right gets in this sphere of mere practical

intelligence is that it be brought to consciousness as the stable

universal, that it be known and stated in its specificality with the voice

of authority—the _Law_(165).

The _positive_ element in laws concerns only their form of _publicity_ and

_authority_—which makes it possible for them to be known by all in a

customary and external way. Their content _per se_ may be reasonable—or it

may be unreasonable and so wrong. But when right, in the course of

definite manifestation, is developed in detail, and its content analyses

itself to gain definiteness, this analysis, because of the finitude of its

materials, falls into the falsely infinite progress: the _final_

definiteness, which is absolutely essential and causes a break in this

progress of unreality, can in this sphere of finitude be attained only in

a way that savours of contingency and arbitrariness. Thus whether three

years, ten thalers, or only 2-1/2, 2-3/4, 2-4/5 years, and so on _ad

infinitum_, be the right and just thing, can by no means be decided on

intelligible principles,—and yet it should be decided. Hence, though of

course only at the final points of deciding, on the side of external

existence, the “positive” principle naturally enters law as contingency

and arbitrariness. This happens and has from of old happened in all

legislations: the only thing wanted is clearly to be aware of it, and not

be misled by the talk and the pretence as if the ideal of law were, or

could be, to be, at _every_ point, determined through reason or legal

intelligence, on purely reasonable and intelligent grounds. It is a futile

perfectionism to have such expectations and to make such requirements in

the sphere of the finite.

There are some who look upon laws as an evil and a profanity, and who

regard governing and being governed from natural love, hereditary,

divinity or nobility, by faith and trust, as the genuine order of life,

while the reign of law is held an order of corruption and injustice. These

people forget that the stars—and the cattle too—are governed and well

governed too by laws;—laws however which are only internally in these

objects, not _for them_, not as laws _set to_ them:—whereas it is man’s

privilege to _know_ his law. They forget therefore that he can truly obey

only such known law,—even as his law can only be a just law, as it is a

_known_ law;—though in other respects it must be in its essential content

contingency and caprice, or at least be mixed and polluted with such

elements.

The same empty requirement of perfection is employed for an opposite

thesis—viz. to support the opinion that a code is impossible or

impracticable. In this case there comes in the additional absurdity of

putting essential and universal provisions in one class with the

particular detail. The finite material is definable on and on to the false

infinite: but this advance is not, as in the mental images of space, a

generation of new spatial characteristics of the same quality as those

preceding them, but an advance into greater and ever greater speciality by

the acumen of the analytic intellect, which discovers new distinctions,

which again make new decisions necessary. To provisions of this sort one

may give the name of _new_ decisions or _new_ laws; but in proportion to

the gradual advance in specialisation the interest and value of these

provisions declines. They fall within the already subsisting

“substantial,” general laws, like improvements on a floor or a door,

within the house—which though something _new_, are not a new _house_. But

there is a contrary case. If the legislation of a rude age began with

single provisos, which go on by their very nature always increasing their

number, there arises, with the advance in multitude, the need of a simpler

code,—the need i.e. of embracing that lot of singulars in their general

features. To find and be able to express these principles well beseems an

intelligent and civilised nation. Such a gathering up of single rules into

general forms, first really deserving the name of laws, has lately been

begun in some directions by the English Minister Peel, who has by so doing

gained the gratitude, even the admiration, of his countrymen.

§ 530. (2) The positive form of Laws—to be _promulgated and made known_ as

laws—is a condition of the _external obligation_ to obey them; inasmuch

as, being laws of strict right, they touch only the abstract will,—itself

at bottom external—not the moral or ethical will. The subjectivity to

which the will has in this direction a right is here only publicity. This

subjective existence is as existence of the essential and developed truth

in this sphere of Right at the same time an externally objective

existence, as universal authority and necessity.

The legality of property and of private transactions concerned

therewith—in consideration of the principle that all law must be

promulgated, recognised, and thus become authoritative—gets its universal

guarantee through _formalities_.

§ 531. (3) Legal forms get the necessity, to which objective existence

determines itself, in the _judicial __ system_. Abstract right has to

exhibit itself to the _court_—to the individualised right—as _proven_:—a

process in which there may be a difference between what is abstractly

right and what is provably right. The court takes cognisance and action in

the interest of right as such, deprives the existence of right of its

contingency, and in particular transforms this existence,—as this exists

as revenge—into _punishment_ (§ 500).

The comparison of the two species, or rather two elements in the judicial

conviction, bearing on the actual state of the case in relation to the

accused,—(1) according as that conviction is based on mere circumstances

and other people’s witness alone,—or (2) in addition requires the

confession of the accused, constitutes the main point in the question of

the so-called jury-courts. It is an essential point that the two

ingredients of a judicial cognisance, the judgment as to the state of the

fact, and the judgment as application of the law to it, should, as at

bottom different sides, be exercised as _different functions_. By the said

institution they are allotted even to bodies differently qualified,—from

the one of which individuals belonging to the official judiciary are

expressly excluded. To carry this separation of functions up to this

separation in the courts rests rather on extra-essential considerations:

the main point remains only the separate performance of these essentially

different functions.—It is a more important point whether the confession

of the accused is or is not to be made a condition of penal judgment. The

institution of the jury-court loses sight of this condition. The point is

that on this ground certainty is completely inseparable from truth: but

the confession is to be regarded as the very acmé of certainty-giving

which in its nature is subjective. The final decision therefore lies with

the confession. To this therefore the accused has an absolute right, if

the proof is to be made final and the judges to be convinced. No doubt

this factor is incomplete, because it is only one factor; but still more

incomplete is the other when no less abstractly taken,—viz. mere

circumstantial evidence. The jurors are essentially judges and pronounce a

judgment. In so far, then, as all they have to go on are such objective

proofs, whilst at the same time their defect of certainty (incomplete in

so far as it is only _in them_) is admitted, the jury-court shows traces

of its barbaric origin in a confusion and admixture between objective

proofs and subjective or so-called “moral” conviction.—It is easy to call

_extraordinary_ punishments an absurdity; but the fault lies rather with

the shallowness which takes offence at a mere name. Materially the

principle involves the difference of objective probation according as it

goes with or without the factor of absolute certification which lies in

confession.

§ 532. The function of judicial administration is only to actualise to

necessity the abstract side of personal liberty in civil society. But this

actualisation rests at first on the particular subjectivity of the judge,

since here as yet there is not found the necessary unity of it with right

in the abstract. Conversely, the blind necessity of the system of wants is

not lifted up into the consciousness of the universal, and worked from

that period of view.

c. Police and Corporation(166).

§ 533. Judicial administration naturally has no concern with such part of

actions and interests as belongs only to particularity, and leaves to

chance not only the occurrence of crimes but also the care for public

weal. In civil society the sole end is to satisfy want—and that, because

it is man’s want, in a uniform general way, so as to _secure_ this

satisfaction. But the machinery of social necessity leaves in many ways a

casualness about this satisfaction. This is due to the variability of the

wants themselves, in which opinion and subjective good-pleasure play a

great part. It results also from circumstances of locality, from the

connexions between nation and nation, from errors and deceptions which can

be foisted upon single members of the social circulation and are capable

of creating disorder in it,—as also and especially from the unequal

capacity of individuals to take advantage of that general stock. The

onward march of this necessity also sacrifices the very particularities by

which it is brought about, and does not itself contain the affirmative aim

of securing the satisfaction of individuals. So far as concerns them, it

_may_ be far from beneficial: yet here the individuals are the

morally-justifiable end.

§ 534. To keep in view this general end, to ascertain the way in which the

powers composing that social necessity act, and their variable

ingredients, and to maintain that end in them and against them, is the

work of an institution which assumes on _one_ hand, to the concrete of

civil society, the position of an external universality. Such an order

acts with the power of an external state, which, in so far as it is rooted

in the higher or substantial state, appears as state “police.” On the

_other_ hand, in this sphere of particularity the only recognition of the

aim of substantial universality and the only carrying of it out is

restricted to the business of particular branches and interests. Thus we

have the _corporation_, in which the particular citizen in his private

capacity finds the securing of his stock, whilst at the same time he in it

emerges from his single private interest, and has a conscious activity for

a comparatively universal end, just as in his legal and professional

duties he has his social morality.

CC. The State.

§ 535. The State is the _self-conscious_ ethical substance, the

unification of the family principle with that of civil society. The same

unity, which is in the family as a feeling of love, is its essence,

receiving however at the same time through the second principle of

conscious and spontaneously active volition the _form_ of conscious

universality. This universal principle, with all its evolution in detail,

is the absolute aim and content of the knowing subject, which thus

identifies itself in its volition with the system of reasonableness.

§ 536. The state is (α) its inward structure as a self-relating

development—constitutional (inner-state) law: (β) a particular individual,

and therefore in connexion with other particular

individuals,—international (outer-state) law; (γ) but these particular

minds are only stages in the general development of mind in its actuality:

universal history.

α. Constitutional Law(167).

§ 537. The essence of the state is the universal, self-originated and

self-developed,—the reasonable spirit of will; but, as self-knowing and

self-actualising, sheer subjectivity, and—as an actuality—one individual.

Its _work_ generally—in relation to the extreme of individuality as the

multitude of individuals—consists in a double function. First it maintains

them as persons, thus making right a necessary actuality, then it promotes

their welfare, which each originally takes care of for himself, but which

has a thoroughly general side; it protects the family and guides civil

society. Secondly, it carries back both, and the whole disposition and

action of the individual—whose tendency is to become a centre of his

own—into the life of the universal substance; and, in this direction, as a

free power it interferes with those subordinate spheres and retains them

in substantial immanence.

§ 538. The laws express the special provisions for objective freedom.

First, to the immediate agent, his independent self-will and particular

interest, they are restrictions. But, secondly, they are an absolute final

end and the universal work: hence they are a product of the “functions” of

the various orders which parcel themselves more and more out of the

general particularising, and are a fruit of all the acts and private

concerns of individuals. Thirdly, they are the substance of the volition

of individuals—which volition is thereby free—and of their disposition:

being as such exhibited as current usage.

§ 539. As a living mind, the state only is as an organised whole,

differentiated into particular agencies, which, proceeding from the one

notion (though not known as notion) of the reasonable will, continually

produce it as their result. The _constitution_ is this articulation or

organisation of state-power. It provides for the reasonable will,—in so

far as it is in the individuals only _implicitly_ the universal

will,—coming to a consciousness and an understanding of itself and being

_found_; also for that will being put in actuality, through the action of

the government and its several branches, and not left to perish, but

protected both against _their_ casual subjectivity and against that of the

individuals. The constitution is existent _justice_,—the actuality of

liberty in the development all its reasonable provisions.

Liberty and Equality are the simple rubrics into which is frequently

concentrated what should form the fundamental principle, the final aim and

result of the constitution. However true this is, the defect of these

terms is their utter abstractness: if stuck to in this abstract form, they

are principles which either prevent the rise of the concreteness of the

state, i.e. its articulation into a constitution and a government in

general, or destroy them. With the state there arises inequality, the

difference of governing powers and of governed, magistracies, authorities,

directories, &c. The principle of equality, logically carried out, rejects

all differences, and thus allows no sort of political condition to exist.

Liberty and equality are indeed the foundation of the state, but as the

most abstract also the most superficial, and for that very reason

naturally the most familiar. It is important therefore to study them

closer.

As regards, first, Equality, the familiar proposition, All men are by

nature equal, blunders by confusing the “natural” with the “notion.” It

ought rather to read: _By nature_ men are only unequal. But the notion of

liberty, as it exists as such, without further specification and

development, is abstract subjectivity, as a person capable of property (§

488). This single abstract feature of personality constitutes the actual

_equality_ of human beings. But that this freedom should exist, that it

should be _man_ (and not as in Greece, Rome, &c. _some_ men) that is

recognised and legally regarded as a person, is so little _by nature_,

that it is rather only a result and product of the consciousness of the

deepest principle of mind, and of the universality and expansion of this

consciousness. That the citizens are equal before the law contains a great

truth, but which so expressed is a tautology: it only states that the

legal status in general exists, that the laws rule. But, as regards the

concrete, the citizens—besides their personality—are equal before the law

only in these points when they are otherwise equal _outside the law_. Only

that equality which (in whatever way it be) they, as it happens, otherwise

have in property, age, physical strength, talent, skill, &c.—or even in

crime, can and ought to make them deserve equal treatment before the

law:—only it can make them—as regards taxation, military service,

eligibility to office, &c.—punishment, &c.—equal in the concrete. The laws

themselves, except in so far as they concern that narrow circle of

personality, presuppose unequal conditions, and provide for the unequal

legal duties and appurtenances resulting therefrom.

As regards Liberty, it is originally taken partly in a negative sense

against arbitrary intolerance and lawless treatment, partly in the

affirmative sense of subjective freedom; but this freedom is allowed great

latitude both as regards the agent’s self-will and action for his

particular ends, and as regards his claim to have a personal intelligence

and a personal share in general affairs. Formerly the legally defined

rights, private as well as public rights of a nation, town, &c. were

called its “liberties.” Really, every genuine law is a liberty: it

contains a reasonable principle of objective mind; in other words, it

embodies a liberty. Nothing has become, on the contrary, more familiar

than the idea that each must _restrict_ his liberty in relation to the

liberty of others: that the state is a condition of such reciprocal

restriction, and that the laws are restrictions. To such habits of mind

liberty is viewed as only casual good-pleasure and self-will. Hence it has

also been said that “modern” nations are only susceptible of equality, or

of equality more than liberty: and that for no other reason than that,

with an assumed definition of liberty (chiefly the participation of all in

political affairs and actions), it was impossible to make ends meet in

actuality—which is at once more reasonable and more powerful than abstract

presuppositions. On the contrary, it should be said that it is just the

great development and maturity of form in modern states which produces the

supreme concrete inequality of individuals in actuality: while, through

the deeper reasonableness of laws and the greater stability of the legal

state, it gives rise to greater and more stable liberty, which it can

without incompatibility allow. Even the superficial distinction of the

words liberty and equality points to the fact that the former tends to

inequality: whereas, on the contrary, the current notions of liberty only

carry us back to equality. But the more we fortify liberty,—as security of

property, as possibility for each to develop and make the best of his

talents and good qualities, the more it gets taken for granted: and then

the sense and appreciation of liberty especially turns in a _subjective_

direction. By this is meant the liberty to attempt action on every side,

and to throw oneself at pleasure in action for particular and for general

intellectual interests, the removal of all checks on the individual

particularity, as well as the inward liberty in which the subject has

principles, has an insight and conviction of his own, and thus gains moral

independence. But this liberty itself on one hand implies that supreme

differentiation in which men are unequal and make themselves more unequal

by education; and on another it only grows up under conditions of that

objective liberty, and is and could grow to such height only in modern

states. If, with this development of particularity, there be simultaneous

and endless increase of the number of wants, and of the difficulty of

satisfying them, of the lust of argument and the fancy of detecting

faults, with its insatiate vanity, it is all but part of that

indiscriminating relaxation of individuality in this sphere which

generates all possible complications, and must deal with them as it can.

Such a sphere is of course also the field of restrictions, because liberty

is there under the taint of natural self-will and self-pleasing, and has

therefore to restrict itself: and that, not merely with regard to the

naturalness, self-will and self-conceit, of others, but especially and

essentially with regard to reasonable liberty.

The term political liberty, however, is often used to mean formal

participation in the public affairs of state by the will and action even

of those individuals who otherwise find their chief function in the

particular aims and business of civil society. And it has in part become

usual to give the title constitution only to the side of the state which

concerns such participation of these individuals in general affairs, and

to regard a state, in which this is not formally done, as a state without

a constitution. On this use of the term, the only thing to remark is that

by constitution must be understood the determination of rights, i.e. of

liberties in general, and the organisation of the actualisation of them;

and that political freedom in the above sense can in any case only

constitute a part of it. Of it the following paragraphs will speak.

§ 540. The guarantee of a constitution (i.e. the necessity that the laws

be reasonable, and their actualisation secured) lies in the collective

spirit of the nation,—especially in the specific way in which it is itself

conscious of its reason. (Religion is that consciousness in its absolute

substantiality.) But the guarantee lies also at the same time in the

actual organisation or development of that principle in suitable

institutions. The constitution presupposes that consciousness of the

collective spirit, and conversely that spirit presupposes the

constitution: for the actual spirit only has a definite consciousness of

its principles, in so far as it has them actually existent before it.

The question—To whom (to what authority and how organised) belongs the

power to make a constitution? is the same as the question, Who has to make

the spirit of a nation? Separate our idea of a constitution from that of

the collective spirit, as if the latter exists or has existed without a

constitution, and your fancy only proves how superficially you have

apprehended the nexus between the spirit in its self-consciousness and in

its actuality. What is thus called “making” a “constitution,” is—just

because of this inseparability—a thing that has never happened in history,

just as little as the making of a code of laws. A constitution only

develops from the national spirit identically with that spirit’s own

development, and runs through at the same time with it the grades of

formation and the alterations required by its concept. It is the

indwelling spirit and the history of the nation (and, be it added, the

history is only that spirit’s history) by which constitutions have been

and are made.

§ 541. The really living totality,—that which preserves, in other words

continually produces the state in general and its constitution, is the

_government_. The organisation which natural necessity gives is seen in

the rise of the family and of the ’estates’ of civil society. The

government is the _universal_ part of the constitution, i.e. the part

which intentionally aims at preserving those parts, but at the same time

gets hold of and carries out those general aims of the whole which rise

above the function of the family and of civil society. The organisation of

the government is likewise its differentiation into powers, as their

peculiarities have a basis in principle; yet without that difference

losing touch with the _actual unity_ they have in the notion’s

subjectivity.

As the most obvious categories of the notion are those of _universality_

and _individuality_ and their relationship that of _subsumption_ of

individual under universal, it has come about that in the state the

legislative and executive power have been so distinguished as to make the

former exist apart as the absolute superior, and to subdivide the latter

again into administrative (government) power and judicial power, according

as the laws are applied to public or private affairs. The _division_ of

these powers has been treated as _the_ condition of political equilibrium,

meaning by division their _independence_ one of another in

existence,—subject always however to the above-mentioned subsumption of

the powers of the individual under the power of the general. The theory of

such “division” unmistakably implies the elements of the notion, but so

combined by “understanding” as to result in an absurd collocation, instead

of the self-redintegration of the living spirit. The one essential canon

to make liberty deep and real is to give every business belonging to the

general interests of the state a separate organisation wherever they are

essentially distinct. Such real division must be: for liberty is only deep

when it is differentiated in all its fullness and these differences

manifested in existence. But to make the business of legislation an

independent power—to make it the first power, with the further proviso

that all citizens shall have part therein, and the government be merely

executive and dependent, presupposes ignorance that the true idea, and

therefore the living and spiritual actuality, is the self-redintegrating

notion, in other words, the subjectivity which contains in it universality

as only one of its moments. (A mistake still greater, if it goes with the

fancy that the constitution and the fundamental laws were still one day to

make,—in a state of society, which includes an already existing

development of differences.) Individuality is the first and supreme

principle _which_ makes itself fall through the state’s organisation. Only

through the government, and by its embracing in itself the particular

businesses (including the abstract legislative business, which taken apart

is also particular), is the state _one_. These, as always, are the terms

on which the different elements essentially and alone truly stand towards

each other in the logic of “reason,” as opposed to the external footing

they stand on in ’understanding,’ which never gets beyond subsuming the

individual and particular under the universal. What disorganises the unity

of logical reason, equally disorganises actuality.

§ 542. In the government—regarded as organic totality—the sovereign power

(principate) is (_a_) _subjectivity_ as the _infinite_ self-unity of the

notion in its development;—the all-sustaining, all-decreeing will of the

state, its highest peak and all-pervasive unity. In the perfect form of

the state, in which each and every element of the notion has reached free

existence, this subjectivity is not a so-called “moral person,” or a

decree issuing from a majority (forms in which the unity of the decreeing

will has not an _actual_ existence), but an actual individual,—the will of

a decreeing individual,—_monarchy_. The monarchical constitution is

therefore the constitution of developed reason: all other constitutions

belong to lower grades of the development and realisation of reason.

The unification of all concrete state-powers into one existence, as in the

patriarchal society,—or, as in a democratic constitution, the

participation of all in all affairs—impugns the principle of the division

of powers, i.e. the developed liberty of the constituent factors of the

Idea. But no whit less must the division (the working out of these factors

each to a free totality) be reduced to “ideal” unity, i.e. to

_subjectivity_. The mature differentiation or realisation of the Idea

means, essentially, that this subjectivity should grow to be a _real_

“moment,” an _actual_ existence; and this actuality is not otherwise than

as the individuality of the monarch—the subjectivity of abstract and final

decision existent in _one_ person. All those forms of collective decreeing

and willing,—a common will which shall be the sum and the resultant (on

aristocratical or democratical principles) of the atomistic of single

wills, have on them the mark of the unreality of an abstraction. Two

points only are all-important, first to see the necessity of each of the

notional factors, and secondly the form in which it is actualised. It is

only the nature of the speculative notion which can really give light on

the matter. That subjectivity—being the “moment” which emphasises the need

of abstract deciding in general—partly leads on to the proviso that the

name of the monarch appear as the bond and sanction under which everything

is done in the government;—partly, being simple self-relation, has

attached to it the characteristic of _immediacy_, and then of

_nature_—whereby the destination of individuals for the dignity of the

princely power is fixed by inheritance.

§ 543. (_b_) In the _particular_ government-power there emerges, first,

the division of state-business into its branches (otherwise defined),

legislative power, administration of justice or judicial power,

administration and police, and its consequent distribution between

particular boards or offices, which having their business appointed by

law, to that end and for that reason, possess independence of action,

without at the same time ceasing to stand under higher supervision.

Secondly, too, there arises the participation of _several_ in

state-business, who together constitute the “general order” (§ 528) in so

far as they take on themselves the charge of universal ends as the

essential function of their particular life;—the further condition for

being able to take individually part in this business being a certain

training, aptitude, and skill for such ends.

§ 544. The estates-collegium or provincial council is an institution by

which all such as belong to civil society in general, and are to that

degree private persons, participate in the governmental power, especially

in legislation—viz. such legislation as concerns the universal scope of

those interests which do not, like peace and war, involve the, as it were,

personal interference and action of the State as one man, and therefore do

not belong specially to the province of the sovereign power. By virtue of

this participation subjective liberty and conceit, with their general

opinion, can show themselves palpably efficacious and enjoy the

satisfaction of feeling themselves to count for something.

The division of constitutions into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, is

still the most definite statement of their difference in relation to

sovereignty. They must at the same time be regarded as necessary

structures in the path of development,—in short, in the history of the

State. Hence it is superficial and absurd to represent them as an object

of _choice_. The pure forms—necessary to the process of evolution—are, in

so far as they are finite and in course of change, conjoined both with

forms of their degeneration,—such as ochlocracy, &c., and with earlier

transition-forms. These two forms are not to be confused with those

legitimate structures. Thus, it may be—if we look only to the fact that

the will of one individual stands at the head of the state—oriental

despotism is included under the vague name monarchy,—as also feudal

monarchy, to which indeed even the favourite name of “constitutional

monarchy” cannot be refused. The true difference of these forms from

genuine monarchy depends on the true value of those principles of right

which are in vogue and have their actuality and guarantee in the

state-power. These principles are those expounded earlier, liberty of

property, and above all personal liberty, civil society, with its industry

and its communities, and the regulated efficiency of the particular

bureaux in subordination to the laws.

The question which is most discussed is in what sense we are to understand

the participation of private persons in state affairs. For it is as

private persons that the members of bodies of estates are primarily to be

taken, be they treated as mere individuals, or as representatives of a

number of people or of the nation. The aggregate of private persons is

often spoken of as the _nation_: but as such an aggregate it is _vulgus_,

not _populus_: and in this direction, it is the one sole aim of the state

that a nation should _not_ come to existence, to power and action, _as

such an aggregate_. Such a condition of a nation is a condition of

lawlessness, demoralisation, brutishness: in it the nation would only be a

shapeless, wild, blind force, like that of the stormy, elemental sea,

which however is not self-destructive, as the nation—a spiritual

element—would be. Yet such a condition may be often heard described as

that of true freedom. If there is to be any sense in embarking upon the

question of the participation of private persons in public affairs, it is

not a brutish mass, but an already organised nation—one in which a

governmental power exists—which should be presupposed. The desirability of

such participation however is not to be put in the superiority of

particular intelligence, which private persons are supposed to have over

state officials—the contrary may be the case—nor in the superiority of

their good will for the general best. The members of civil society as such

are rather people who find their nearest duty in their private interest

and (as especially in the feudal society) in the interest of their

privileged corporation. Take the case of _England_ which, because private

persons have a predominant share in public affairs, has been regarded as

having the freest of all constitutions. Experience shows that that

country—as compared with the other civilised states of Europe—is the most

backward in civil and criminal legislation, in the law and liberty of

property, in arrangements for art and science, and that objective freedom

or rational right is rather _sacrificed_ to formal right and particular

private interest; and that this happens even in the institutions and

possessions supposed to be dedicated to religion. The desirability of

private persons taking part in public affairs is partly to be put in their

concrete, and therefore more urgent, sense of general wants. But the true

motive is the right of the collective spirit to appear as an _externally

universal_ will, acting with orderly and express efficacy for the public

concerns. By this satisfaction of this right it gets its own life

quickened, and at the same time breathes fresh life in the administrative

officials; who thus have it brought home to them that not merely have they

to enforce duties but also to have regard to rights. Private citizens are

in the state the incomparably greater number, and form the multitude of

such as are recognised as persons. Hence the will-reason exhibits its

existence in them as a preponderating majority of freemen, or in its

“reflectional” universality, which has its actuality vouchsafed it as a

participation in the sovereignty. But it has already been noted as a

“moment” of civil society (§§ 527, 534) that the individuals rise from

external into substantial universality, and form a _particular_ kind,—the

Estates: and it is not in the inorganic form of mere individuals as such

(after the _democratic_ fashion of election), but as organic factors, as

estates, that they enter upon that participation. In the state a power or

agency must never appear and act as a formless, inorganic shape, i.e.

basing itself on the principle of multeity and mere numbers.

Assemblies of Estates have been wrongly designated as the _legislative

power_, so far as they form only one branch of that power,—a branch in

which the special government-officials have an _ex officio_ share, while

the sovereign power has the privilege of final decision. In a civilised

state moreover legislation can only be a further modification of existing

law, and so-called new laws can only deal with minutiae of detail and

particularities (cf. § 529, note), the main drift of which has been

already prepared or preliminarily settled by the practice of the

law-courts. The so-called _financial law_, in so far as it requires the

assent of the estates, is really a government affair: it is only

improperly called a law, in the general sense of embracing a wide, indeed

the whole, range of the external means of government. The finances deal

with what in their nature are only particular needs, ever newly recurring,

even if they touch on the sum total of such needs. If the main part of the

requirement were—as it very likely is—regarded as permanent, the provision

for it would have more the nature of a law: but to be a law, it would have

to be made once for all, and not be made yearly, or every few years,

afresh. The part which varies according to time and circumstances concerns

in reality the smallest part of the amount, and the provisions with regard

to it have even less the character of a law: and yet it is and may be only

this slight variable part which is matter of dispute, and can be subjected

to a varying yearly estimate. It is this last then which falsely bears the

high-sounding name of the “_Grant_” of the _Budget_, i.e. of the whole of

the finances. A law for one year and made each year has even to the plain

man something palpably absurd: for he distinguishes the essential and

developed universal, as content of a true law, from the reflectional

universality which only externally embraces what in its nature is many. To

give the name of a law to the annual fixing of financial requirements only

serves—with the presupposed separation of legislative from executive—to

keep up the illusion of that separation having real existence, and to

conceal the fact that the legislative power, when it makes a decree about

finance, is really engaged with strict executive business. But the

importance attached to the power of from time to time granting “supply,”

on the ground that the assembly of estates possesses in it a _check_ on

the government, and thus a guarantee against injustice and violence,—this

importance is in one way rather plausible than real. The financial

measures necessary for the state’s subsistence cannot be made conditional

on any other circumstances, nor can the state’s subsistence be put yearly

in doubt. It would be a parallel absurdity if the government were e.g. to

grant and arrange the judicial institutions always for a limited time

merely; and thus, by the threat of suspending the activity of such an

institution and the fear of a consequent state of brigandage, reserve for

itself a means of coercing private individuals. Then again, the pictures

of a condition of affairs, in which it might be useful and necessary to

have in hand means of compulsion, are partly based on the false conception

of a contract between rulers and ruled, and partly presuppose the

possibility of such a divergence in spirit between these two parties as

would make constitution and government quite out of the question. If we

suppose the empty possibility of getting _help_ by such compulsive means

brought into existence, such help would rather be the derangement and

dissolution of the state, in which there would no longer be a government,

but only parties, and the violence and oppression of one party would only

be helped away by the other. To fit together the several parts of the

state into a constitution after the fashion of mere understanding—i.e. to

adjust within it the machinery of a balance of powers external to each

other—is to contravene the fundamental idea of what a state is.

§ 545. The final aspect of the state is to appear in immediate actuality

as a single nation marked by physical conditions. As a single individual

it is exclusive against other like individuals. In their mutual relations,

waywardness and chance have a place; for each person in the aggregate is

autonomous: the universal of law is only postulated between them, and not

actually existent. This independence of a central authority reduces

disputes between them to terms of mutual violence, a _state of war_, to

meet which the general estate in the community assumes the particular

function of maintaining the state’s independence against other states, and

becomes the estate of bravery.

§ 546. This state of war shows the omnipotence of the state in its

individuality—an individuality that goes even to abstract negativity.

Country and fatherland then appear as the power by which the particular

independence of individuals and their absorption in the external existence

of possession and in natural life is convicted of its own nullity,—as the

power which procures the maintenance of the general substance by the

patriotic sacrifice on the part of these individuals of this natural and

particular existence,—so making nugatory the nugatoriness that confronts

it.

β. External Public Law(168).

§ 547. In the game of war the independence of States is at stake. In one

case the result may be the mutual recognition of free national

individualities (§ 430): and by peace-conventions supposed to be for ever,

both this general recognition, and the special claims of nations on one

another, are settled and fixed. External state-rights rest partly on these

positive treaties, but to that extent contain only rights falling short of

true actuality (§ 545): partly on so-called _international_ law, the

general principle of which is its presupposed recognition by the several

States. It thus restricts their otherwise unchecked action against one

another in such a way that the possibility of peace is left; and

distinguishes individuals as private persons (non-belligerents) from the

state. In general, international law rests on social usage.

γ. Universal History(169).

§ 548. As the mind of a special nation is actual and its liberty is under

natural conditions, it admits on this nature-side the influence of

geographical and climatic qualities. It is in time; and as regards its

range and scope, has essentially a _particular_ principle on the lines of

which it must run through a development of its consciousness and its

actuality. It has, in short, a history of its own. But as a restricted

mind its independence is something secondary; it passes into universal

world-history, the events of which exhibit the dialectic of the several

national minds,—the judgment of the world.

§ 549. This movement is the path of liberation for the spiritual

substance, the deed by which the absolute final aim of the world is

realised in it, and the merely implicit mind achieves consciousness and

self-consciousness. It is thus the revelation and actuality of its

essential and completed essence, whereby it becomes to the outward eye a

universal spirit—a world-mind. As this development is in time and in real

existence, as it is a history, its several stages and steps are the

national minds, each of which, as single and endued by nature with a

specific character, is appointed to occupy only one grade, and accomplish

one task in the whole deed.

The presupposition that history has an essential and actual end, from the

principles of which certain characteristic results logically flow, is

called an _a priori_ view of it, and philosophy is reproached with _a

priori_ history-writing. On this point, and on history-writing in general,

this note must go into further detail. That history, and above all

universal history, is founded on an essential and actual aim, which

actually is and will be realised in it—the plan of Providence; that, in

short, there is Reason in history, must be decided on strictly

philosophical ground, and thus shown to be essentially and in fact

necessary. To presuppose such aim is blameworthy only when the assumed

conceptions or thoughts are arbitrarily adopted, and when a determined

attempt is made to force events and actions into conformity with such

conceptions. For such _a priori_ methods of treatment at the present day,

however, those are chiefly to blame who profess to be purely historical,

and who at the same time take opportunity expressly to raise their voice

against the habit of philosophising, first in general, and then in

history. Philosophy is to them a troublesome neighbour: for it is an enemy

of all arbitrariness and hasty suggestions. Such _a priori_

history-writing has sometimes burst out in quarters where one would least

have expected it, especially on the philological side, and in Germany more

than in France and England, where the art of historical writing has gone

through a process of purification to a firmer and maturer character.

Fictions, like that of a primitive age and its primitive people, possessed

from the first of the true knowledge of God and all the sciences,—of

sacerdotal races,—and, when we come to minutiae, of a Roman epic, supposed

to be the source of the legends which pass current for the history of

ancient Rome, &c., have taken the place of the pragmatising which detected

psychological motives and associations. There is a wide circle of persons

who seem to consider it incumbent on a _learned_ and _ingenious_ historian

drawing from the original sources to concoct such baseless fancies, and

form bold combinations of them from a learned rubbish-heap of

out-of-the-way and trivial facts, in defiance of the best-accredited

history.

Setting aside this subjective treatment of history, we find what is

properly the opposite view forbidding us to import into history an

_objective purpose_. This is after all synonymous with what _seems_ to be

the still more legitimate demand that the historian should proceed with

_impartiality_. This is a requirement often and especially made on the

_history of philosophy_: where it is insisted there should be no

prepossession in favour of an idea or opinion, just as a judge should have

no special sympathy for one of the contending parties. In the case of the

judge it is at the same time assumed that he would administer his office

ill and foolishly, if he had not an interest, and an exclusive interest in

justice, if he had not that for his aim and one sole aim, or if he

declined to judge at all. This requirement which we may make upon the

judge may be called _partiality_ for justice; and there is no difficulty

here in distinguishing it from _subjective_ partiality. But in speaking of

the impartiality required from the historian, this self-satisfied insipid

chatter lets the distinction disappear, and rejects both kinds of

interest. It demands that the historian shall bring with him no definite

aim and view by which he may sort out, state and criticise events, but

shall narrate them exactly in the casual mode he finds them, in their

incoherent and unintelligent particularity. Now it is at least admitted

that a history must have an object, e.g. Rome and its fortunes, or the

Decline of the grandeur of the Roman empire. But little reflection is

needed to discover that this is the presupposed end which lies at the

basis of the events themselves, as of the critical examination into their

comparative importance, i.e. their nearer or more remote relation to it. A

history without such aim and such criticism would be only an imbecile

mental divagation, not as good as a fairy tale, for even children expect a

_motif_ in their stories, a purpose at least dimly surmiseable with which

events and actions are put in relation.

In the existence of a _nation_ the substantial aim is to be a state and

preserve itself as such. A nation with no state formation, (a _mere

nation_), has strictly speaking no history,—like the nations which existed

before the rise of states and others which still exist in a condition of

savagery. What happens to a nation, and takes place within it, has its

essential significance in relation to the state: whereas the mere

particularities of individuals are at the greatest distance from the true

object of history. It is true that the general spirit of an age leaves its

imprint in the character of its celebrated individuals, and even their

particularities are but the very distant and the dim media through which

the collective light still plays in fainter colours. Ay, even such

singularities as a petty occurrence, a word, express not a subjective

particularity, but an age, a nation, a civilisation, in striking

portraiture and brevity; and to select such trifles shows the hand of a

historian of genius. But, on the other hand, the main mass of

singularities is a futile and useless mass, by the painstaking

accumulation of which the objects of real historical value are overwhelmed

and obscured. The essential characteristic of the spirit and its age is

always contained in the great events. It was a correct instinct which

sought to banish such portraiture of the particular and the gleaning of

insignificant traits, into the _Novel_ (as in the celebrated romances of

Walter Scott, &c.). Where the picture presents an unessential aspect of

life it is certainly in good taste to conjoin it with an unessential

material, such as the romance takes from private events and subjective

passions. But to take the individual pettinesses of an age and of the

persons in it, and, in the interest of so-called truth, weave them into

the picture of general interests, is not only against taste and judgment,

but violates the principles of objective truth. The only truth for mind is

the substantial and underlying essence, and not the trivialities of

external existence and contingency. It is therefore completely indifferent

whether such insignificancies are duly vouched for by documents, or, as in

the romance, invented to suit the character and ascribed to this or that

name and circumstances.

The point of interest of _Biography_—to say a word on that here—appears to

run directly counter to any universal scope and aim. But biography too has

for its background the historical world, with which the individual is

intimately bound up: even purely personal originality, the freak of

humour, &c. suggests by allusion that central reality and has its interest

heightened by the suggestion. The mere play of sentiment, on the contrary,

has another ground and interest than history.

The requirement of impartiality addressed to the history of philosophy

(and also, we may add, to the history of religion, first in general, and

secondly, to church history) generally implies an even more decided bar

against presupposition of any objective aim. As the State was already

called the point to which in political history criticism had to refer all

events, so here the “_Truth_” must be the object to which the several

deeds and events of the spirit would have to be referred. What is actually

done is rather to make the contrary presupposition. Histories with such an

object as religion or philosophy are understood to have only subjective

aims for their theme, i.e. only opinions and mere ideas, not an essential

and realised object like the truth. And that with the mere excuse that

there is no truth. On this assumption the sympathy with truth appears as

only a partiality of the usual sort, a partiality for opinion and mere

ideas, which all alike have no stuff in them, and are all treated as

indifferent. In that way historical truth means but correctness—an

accurate report of externals, without critical treatment save as regards

this correctness—admitting, in this case, only qualitative and

quantitative judgments, no judgments of necessity or notion (cf. notes to

§§ 172 and 175). But, really, if Rome or the German empire, &c. are an

actual and genuine object of political history, and the aim to which the

phenomena are to be related and by which they are to be judged; then in

universal history the genuine spirit, the consciousness of it and of its

essence, is even in a higher degree a true and actual object and theme,

and an aim to which all other phenomena are essentially and actually

subservient. Only therefore through their relationship to it, i.e. through

the judgment in which they are subsumed under it, while it inheres in

them, have they their value and even their existence. It is the spirit

which not merely broods _over_ history as over the waters, but lives in it

and is alone its principle of movement: and in the path of that spirit,

liberty, i.e. a development determined by the notion of spirit, is the

guiding principle and only its notion its final aim, i.e. truth. For

Spirit is consciousness. Such a doctrine—or in other words that Reason is

in history—will be partly at least a plausible faith, partly it is a

cognition of philosophy.

§ 550. This liberation of mind, in which it proceeds to come to itself and

to realise its truth, and the business of so doing, is the supreme right,

the absolute Law. The self-consciousness of a particular nation is a

vehicle for the contemporary development of the collective spirit in its

actual existence: it is the objective actuality in which that spirit for

the time invests its will. Against this absolute will the other particular

natural minds have no rights: _that_ nation dominates the world: but yet

the universal will steps onward over its property for the time being, as

over a special grade, and then delivers it over to its chance and doom.

§ 551. To such extent as this business of actuality appears as an action,

and therefore as a work of _individuals_, these individuals, as regards

the substantial issue of their labour, are _instruments_, and their

subjectivity, which is what is peculiar to them, is the empty form of

activity. What they personally have gained therefore through the

individual share they took in the substantial business (prepared and

appointed independently of them) is a formal universality or subjective

mental idea—_Fame_, which is their reward.

§ 552. The national spirit contains nature-necessity, and stands in

external existence (§ 423): the ethical substance, potentially infinite,

is actually a particular and limited substance (§§ 549, 550); on its

subjective side it labours under contingency, in the shape of its

unreflective natural usages, and its content is presented to it as

something _existing_ in time and tied to an external nature and external

world. The spirit, however, (which _thinks_ in this moral organism)

overrides and absorbs within itself the finitude attaching to it as

national spirit in its state and the state’s temporal interests, in the

system of laws and usages. It rises to apprehend itself in its

essentiality. Such apprehension, however, still has the immanent

limitedness of the national spirit. But the spirit which thinks in

universal history, stripping off at the same time those limitations of the

several national minds and its own temporal restrictions, lays hold of its

concrete universality, and rises to apprehend the absolute mind, as the

eternally actual truth in which the contemplative reason enjoys freedom,

while the necessity of nature and the necessity of history are only

ministrant to its revelation and the vessels of its honour.

The strictly technical aspects of the Mind’s elevation to God have been

spoken of in the Introduction to the Logic (cf. especially § 51, note). As

regards the starting-point of that elevation, Kant has on the whole

adopted the most correct, when he treats belief in God as proceeding from

the practical Reason. For that starting-point contains the material or

content which constitutes the content of the notion of God. But the true

concrete material is neither Being (as in the cosmological) nor mere

action by design (as in the physico-theological proof) but the Mind, the

absolute characteristic and function of which is effective reason, i.e.

the self-determining and self-realising notion itself,—Liberty. That the

elevation of subjective mind to God which these considerations give is by

Kant again deposed to a _postulate_—a mere “ought”—is the peculiar

perversity, formerly noticed, of calmly and simply reinstating as true and

valid that very antithesis of finitude, the supersession of which into

truth is the essence of that elevation.

As regards the “mediation” which, as it has been already shown (§ 192, cf.

§ 204 note), that elevation to God really involves, the point specially

calling for note is the “moment” of negation through which the essential

content of the starting-point is purged of its finitude so as to come

forth free. This factor, abstract in the formal treatment of logic, now

gets its most concrete interpretation. The finite, from which the start is

now made, is the real ethical self-consciousness. The negation through

which that consciousness raises its spirit to its truth, is the

purification, _actually_ accomplished in the ethical world, whereby its

conscience is purged of subjective opinion and its will freed from the

selfishness of desire. Genuine religion and genuine religiosity only issue

from the moral life: religion is that life rising to think, i.e. becoming

aware of the free universality of its concrete essence. Only from the

moral life and by the moral life is the Idea of God seen to be free

spirit: outside the ethical spirit therefore it is vain to seek for true

religion and religiosity.

But—as is the case with all speculative process—this development of one

thing out of another means that what appears as sequel and derivative is

rather the absolute _prius_ of what it appears to be mediated by, and what

is here in mind known as its truth.

Here then is the place to go more deeply into the reciprocal relations

between the state and religion, and in doing so to elucidate the

terminology which is familiar and current on the topic. It is evident and

apparent from what has preceded that moral life is the state retracted

into its inner heart and substance, while the state is the organisation

and actualisation of moral life; and that religion is the very substance

of the moral life itself and of the state. At this rate, the state rests

on the ethical sentiment, and that on the religious. If religion then is

the consciousness of “absolute”_ truth_, then whatever is to rank as right

and justice, as law and duty, i.e. as _true_ in the world of free will,

can be so esteemed only as it is participant in that truth, as it is

subsumed under it and is its sequel. But if the truly moral life is to be

a sequel of religion, then perforce religion must have the _genuine_

content; i.e. the idea of God it knows must be the true and real. The

ethical life is the divine spirit as indwelling in self-consciousness, as

it is actually present in a nation and its individual members. This

self-consciousness retiring upon itself out of its empirical actuality and

bringing its truth to consciousness, has in its _faith_ and in its

_conscience_ only what it has consciously secured in its spiritual

actuality. The two are inseparable: there cannot be two kinds of

conscience, one religious and another ethical, differing from the former

in body and value of truth. But in point of form, i.e. for thought and

knowledge—(and religion and ethical life belong to intelligence and are a

thinking and knowing)—the body of religious truth, as the pure

self-subsisting and therefore supreme truth, exercises a sanction over the

moral life which lies in empirical actuality. Thus for self-consciousness

religion is the “basis” of moral life and of the state. It has been the

monstrous blunder of our times to try to look upon these inseparables as

separable from one another, and even as mutually indifferent. The view

taken of the relationship of religion and the state has been that, whereas

the state had an independent existence of its own, springing from some

force and power, religion was a later addition, something desirable

perhaps for strengthening the political bulwarks, but purely subjective in

individuals:—or it may be, religion is treated as something without effect

on the moral life of the state, i.e. its reasonable law and constitution

which are based on a ground of their own.

As the inseparability of the two sides has been indicated, it may be worth

while to note the separation as it appears on the side of religion. It is

primarily a point of form: the attitude which self-consciousness takes to

the body of truth. So long as this body of truth is the very substance or

indwelling spirit of self-consciousness in its actuality, then

self-consciousness in this content has the certainty of itself and is

free. But if this present self-consciousness is lacking, then there may be

created, in point of form, a condition of spiritual slavery, even though

the _implicit_ content of religion is absolute spirit. This great

difference (to cite a specific case) comes out within the Christian

religion itself, even though here it is not the nature-element in which

the idea of God is embodied, and though nothing of the sort even enters as

a factor into its central dogma and sole theme of a God who is known in

spirit and in truth. And yet in Catholicism this spirit of all truth is in

actuality set in rigid opposition to the self-conscious spirit. And, first

of all, God is in the “host” presented to religious adoration as an

_external thing_. (In the Lutheran Church, on the contrary, the host as

such is not at first consecrated, but in the moment of enjoyment, i.e. in

the annihilation of its externality, and in the act of faith, i.e. in the

free self-certain spirit: only then is it consecrated and exalted to be

present God.) From that first and supreme status of externalisation flows

every other phase of externality,—of bondage, non-spirituality, and

superstition. It leads to a laity, receiving its knowledge of divine

truth, as well as the direction of its will and conscience from without

and from another order—which order again does not get possession of that

knowledge in a spiritual way only, but to that end essentially requires an

external consecration. It leads to the non-spiritual style of

praying—partly as mere moving of the lips, partly in the way that the

subject foregoes his right of directly addressing God, and prays others to

pray—addressing his devotion to miracle-working images, even to bones, and

expecting miracles from them. It leads, generally, to justification by

external works, a merit which is supposed to be gained by acts, and even

to be capable of being transferred to others. All this binds the spirit

under an externalism by which the very meaning of spirit is perverted and

misconceived at its source, and law and justice, morality and conscience,

responsibility and duty are corrupted at their root.

Along with this principle of spiritual bondage, and these applications of

it in the religious life, there can only go in the legislative and

constitutional system a legal and moral bondage, and a state of

lawlessness and immorality in political life. Catholicism has been loudly

praised and is still often praised—logically enough—as the one religion

which secures the stability of governments. But in reality this applies

only to governments which are bound up with institutions founded on the

bondage of the spirit (of that spirit which should have legal and moral

liberty), i.e. with institutions that embody injustice and with a morally

corrupt and barbaric state of society. But these governments are not aware

that in fanaticism they have a terrible power, which does not rise in

hostility against them, only so long as and only on condition that they

remain sunk in the thraldom of injustice and immorality. But in mind there

is a very different power available against that externalism and

dismemberment induced by a false religion. Mind collects itself into its

inward free actuality. Philosophy awakes in the spirit of governments and

nations the wisdom to discern what is essentially and actually right and

reasonable in the real world. It was well to call these products of

thought, and in a special sense Philosophy, the wisdom of the world(170);

for thought makes the spirit’s truth an actual present, leads it into the

real world, and thus liberates it in its actuality and in its own self.

Thus set free, the content of religion assumes quite another shape. So

long as the form, i.e. our consciousness and subjectivity, lacked liberty,

it followed necessarily that self-consciousness was conceived as not

immanent in the ethical principles which religion embodies, and these

principles were set at such a distance as to seem to have true being only

as negative to actual self-consciousness. In this unreality ethical

content gets the name of _Holiness_. But once the divine spirit introduces

itself into actuality, and actuality emancipates itself to spirit, then

what in the world was a postulate of holiness is supplanted by the

actuality of _moral_ life. Instead of the vow of chastity, _marriage_ now

ranks as the ethical relation; and, therefore, as the highest on this side

of humanity stands the family. Instead of the vow of poverty (muddled up

into a contradiction of assigning merit to whosoever gives away goods to

the poor, i.e. whosoever enriches them) is the precept of action to

acquire goods through one’s own intelligence and industry,—of honesty in

commercial dealing, and in the use of property,—in short moral life in the

socio-economic sphere. And instead of the vow of obedience, true religion

sanctions obedience to the law and the legal arrangements of the state—an

obedience which is itself the true freedom, because the state is a

self-possessed, self-realising reason—in short, moral life in the state.

Thus, and thus only, can law and morality exist. The precept of religion,

“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” is not enough:

the question is to settle what is Caesar’s, what belongs to the secular

authority: and it is sufficiently notorious that the secular no less than

the ecclesiastical authority have claimed almost everything as their own.

The divine spirit must interpenetrate the entire secular life: whereby

wisdom is concrete within it, and it carries the terms of its own

justification. But that concrete indwelling is only the aforesaid ethical

organisations. It is the morality of marriage as against the sanctity of a

celibate order;—the morality of economic and industrial action against the

sanctity of poverty and its indolence;—the morality of an obedience

dedicated to the law of the state as against the sanctity of an obedience

from which law and duty are absent and where conscience is enslaved. With

the growing need for law and morality and the sense of the spirit’s

essential liberty, there sets in a conflict of spirit with the religion of

unfreedom. It is no use to organise political laws and arrangements on

principles of equity and reason, so long as in religion the principle of

unfreedom is not abandoned. A free state and a slavish religion are

incompatible. It is silly to suppose that we may try to allot them

separate spheres, under the impression that their diverse natures will

maintain an attitude of tranquillity one to another and not break out in

contradiction and battle. Principles of civil freedom can be but abstract

and superficial, and political institutions deduced from them must be, if

taken alone, untenable, so long as those principles in their wisdom

mistake religion so much as not to know that the maxims of the reason in

actuality have their last and supreme sanction in the religious conscience

in subsumption under the consciousness of “absolute” truth. Let us suppose

even that, no matter how, a code of law should arise, so to speak _a

priori_, founded on principles of reason, but in contradiction with an

established religion based on principles of spiritual unfreedom; still, as

the duty of carrying out the laws lies in the hands of individual members

of the government, and of the various classes of the administrative

_personnel_, it is vain to delude ourselves with the abstract and empty

assumption that the individuals will act only according to the letter or

meaning of the law, and not in the spirit of their religion where their

inmost conscience and supreme obligation lies. Opposed to what religion

pronounces holy, the laws appear something made by human hands: even

though backed by penalties and externally introduced, they could offer no

lasting resistance to the contradiction and attacks of the religious

spirit. Such laws, however sound their provisions may be, thus founder on

the conscience, whose spirit is different from the spirit of the laws and

refuses to sanction them. It is nothing but a modern folly to try to alter

a corrupt moral organisation by altering its political constitution and

code of laws without changing the religion,—to make a revolution without

having made a reformation, to suppose that a political constitution

opposed to the old religion could live in peace and harmony with it and

its sanctities, and that stability could be procured for the laws by

external guarantees, e.g. so-called “chambers,” and the power given them

to fix the budget, &c. (cf. § 544 note). At best it is only a temporary

expedient—when it is obviously too great a task to descend into the depths

of the religious spirit and to raise that same spirit to its truth—to seek

to separate law and justice from religion. Those guarantees are but rotten

bulwarks against the consciences of the persons charged with administering

the laws—among which laws these guarantees are included. It is indeed the

height and profanity of contradiction to seek to bind and subject to the

secular code the religious conscience to which mere human law is a thing

profane.

The perception had dawned upon Plato with great clearness of the gulf

which in his day had commenced to divide the established religion and the

political constitution, on one hand, from those deeper requirements which,

on the other hand, were made upon religion and politics by liberty which

had learnt to recognise its inner life. Plato gets hold of the thought

that a genuine constitution and a sound political life have their deeper

foundation on the Idea,—on the essentially and actually universal and

genuine principles of eternal righteousness. Now to see and ascertain what

these are is certainly the function and the business of _philosophy_. It

is from this point of view that Plato breaks out into the celebrated or

notorious passage where he makes Socrates emphatically state that

philosophy and political power must coincide, that the Idea must be

regent, if the distress of nations is to see its end. What Plato thus

definitely set before his mind was that the Idea—which implicitly indeed

is the free self-determining thought—could not get into consciousness save

only in the form of a thought; that the substance of the thought could

only be true when set forth as a universal, and as such brought to

consciousness under its most abstract form.

To compare the Platonic standpoint in all its definiteness with the point

of view from which the relationship of state and religion is here

regarded, the notional differences on which everything turns must be

recalled to mind. The first of these is that in natural things their

substance or genus is different from their existence in which that

substance is as subject: further that this subjective existence of the

genus is distinct from that which it gets, when specially set in relief as

genus, or, to put it simply, as the universal in a mental concept or idea.

This additional “individuality”—the soil on which the universal and

underlying principle _freely_ and expressly exists,—is the intellectual

and thinking _self_. In the case of _natural_ things their truth and

reality does not get the form of universality and essentiality through

themselves, and their “individuality” is not itself the form: the form is

only found in subjective thinking, which in philosophy gives that

universal truth and reality an existence of its own. In man’s case it is

otherwise: his truth and reality is the free mind itself, and it comes to

existence in his self-consciousness. This absolute nucleus of man—mind

intrinsically concrete—is just this—to have the form (to have thinking)

itself for a content. To the height of the thinking consciousness of this

principle Aristotle ascended in his notion of the entelechy of thought,

(which is νοῆσις τῆς νοήσεως), thus surmounting the Platonic Idea (the

genus, or essential being). But thought always—and that on account of this

very principle—contains the immediate self-subsistence of subjectivity no

less than it contains universality; the genuine Idea of the intrinsically

concrete mind is just as essentially under the one of its terms

(subjective consciousness) as under the other (universality): and in the

one as in the other it is the same substantial content. Under the

subjective form, however, fall feeling, intuition, pictorial

representation: and it is in fact necessary that in point of time the

consciousness of the absolute Idea should be first reached and apprehended

in this form: in other words, it must exist in its immediate reality as

religion, earlier than it does as philosophy. Philosophy is a later

development from this basis (just as Greek philosophy itself is later than

Greek religion), and in fact reaches its completion by catching and

comprehending in all its definite essentiality that principle of spirit

which first manifests itself in religion. But Greek philosophy could set

itself up only in opposition to Greek religion: the unity of thought and

the substantiality of the Idea could take up none but a hostile attitude

to an imaginative polytheism, and to the gladsome and frivolous humours of

its poetic creations. The _form_ in its infinite truth, the _subjectivity_

of mind, broke forth at first only as a subjective free _thinking_, which

was not yet identical with the _substantiality_ itself,—and thus this

underlying principle was not yet apprehended as _absolute mind_. Thus

religion might appear as first purified only through philosophy,—through

pure self-existent thought: but the form pervading this underlying

principle—the form which philosophy attacked—was that creative

imagination.

Political power, which is developed similarly, but earlier than

philosophy, from religion, exhibits the onesidedness, which in the actual

world may infect its _implicitly_ true Idea, as demoralisation. Plato, in

common with all his thinking contemporaries, perceived this demoralisation

of democracy and the defectiveness even of its principle; he set in relief

accordingly the underlying principle of the state, but could not work into

his idea of it the infinite form of subjectivity, which still escaped his

intelligence. His state is therefore, on its own showing, wanting in

subjective liberty (§ 503 note, § 513, &c.). The truth which should be

immanent in the state, should knit it together and control it, he, for

these reasons, got hold of only the form of thought-out truth, of

philosophy; and hence he makes that utterance that “so long as

philosophers do not rule in the states, or those who are now called kings

and rulers do not soundly and comprehensively philosophise, so long

neither the state nor the race of men can be liberated from evils,—so long

will the idea of the political constitution fall short of possibility and

not see the light of the sun.” It was not vouchsafed to Plato to go on so

far as to say that so long as true religion did not spring up in the world

and hold sway in political life, so long the genuine principle of the

state had not come into actuality. But so long too this principle could

not emerge even in thought, nor could thought lay hold of the genuine idea

of the state,—the idea of the substantial moral life, with which is

identical the liberty of an independent self-consciousness. Only in the

principle of mind, which is aware of its own essence, is implicitly in

absolute liberty, and has its actuality in the act of self-liberation,

does the absolute possibility and necessity exist for political power,

religion, and the principles of philosophy coinciding in one, and for

accomplishing the reconciliation of actuality in general with the mind, of

the state with the religious conscience as well as with the philosophical

consciousness. Self-realising subjectivity is in this case absolutely

identical with substantial universality. Hence religion as such, and the

state as such,—both as forms in which the principle exists—each contain

the absolute truth: so that the truth, in its philosophic phase, is after

all only in one of its forms. But even religion, as it grows and expands,

lets other aspects of the Idea of humanity grow and expand also (§ 500

sqq.). As it is left therefore behind, in its first immediate, and so also

one-sided phase, Religion may, or rather _must_, appear in its existence

degraded to sensuous externality, and thus in the sequel become an

influence to oppress liberty of spirit and to deprave political life.

Still the principle has in it the infinite “elasticity” of the “absolute”

form, so as to overcome this depraving of the form-determination (and of

the content by these means), and to bring about the reconciliation of the

spirit in itself. Thus ultimately, in the Protestant conscience the

principles of the religious and of the ethical conscience come to be one

and the same: the free spirit learning to see itself in its reasonableness

and truth. In the Protestant state, the constitution and the code, as well

as their several applications, embody the principle and the development of

the moral life, which proceeds and can only proceed from the truth of

religion, when reinstated in its original principle and in that way as

such first become actual. The moral life of the state and the religious

spirituality of the state are thus reciprocal guarantees of strength.