d out, but they are
marked by brutal passions and deeds of violence; while, however rude and
simple their, conditions, they involve social arrangements which, to use
the common phrase, "restrain freedom." That assumption is one of those
nebulous images which theory produces, an idea which it cannot avoid
originating, but which it fathers upon real existence without sufficient
historical justification.

What we find such a state of nature to be, in actual experience, answers
exactly to the idea of a merely natural condition. Freedom as the ideal
of that which is original and natural does not exist as original and
natural; rather must it first be sought out and won, and that by an
incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral powers. The
state of nature is, therefore, predominantly that of injustice and
violence, of untamed natural impulses, of inhuman deeds and feelings.
Limitation is certainly produced by society and the State, but it is a
limitation of the mere brute emotions and rude instincts, as also, in a
more advanced stage of culture, of the premeditated self-will of caprice
and passion. This kind of constraint is part of the instrumentality by
which only the consciousness of freedom and the desire for its
attainment, in its true--that is, its rational and ideal form--can be
obtained. To the ideal of freedom, law and morality are indispensably
requisite; and they are, in and for themselves, universal existences,
objects, and aims, which are discovered only by the activity of thought,
separating itself from the merely sensuous and developing itself in
opposition thereto, and which must, on the other hand, be introduced
into and incorporated with the originally sensuous will, and that
contrarily to its natural inclination. The perpetually recurring
misapprehension of freedom consists in regarding that term only in its
formal, subjective sense, abstracted from its essential objects and
aims; thus a constraint put upon impulse, desire, passion--pertaining to
the particular individual as such--a limitation of caprice and
self-will is regarded as a fettering of freedom. We should, on the
contrary, look upon such limitation as the indispensable proviso of
emancipation. Society and the State are the very conditions in which
freedom is realized.

We must notice a second view, contravening the principle of the
development of moral relations into a legal form. The patriarchal
condition is regarded, either i