ited and particular. By sacrifice man expresses his renunciation of
his property, his will, his individual feelings. The religious
concentration of the soul appears in the form of feeling; it
nevertheless passes also into reflection; a form of worship (_cultus_)
is a result of reflection. The second form of the union of the objective
and subjective in the human spirit is art; this advances farther into
the realm of the actual and sensuous than religion. In its noblest walk
it is occupied with representing, not, indeed, the Spirit of God, but
certainly the Form of God; and, in its secondary aims, that which is
divine and spiritual generally. Its office is to render visible the
divine, presenting it to the imaginative and intuitive faculty. But the
true is the object not only of conception and feeling, as in
religion--and of intuition, as in art--but also of the thinking faculty;
and this gives us the third form of the union in question--philosophy.
This is consequently the highest, freest, and wisest place. Of course we
are not intending to investigate these three phases here; they have only
suggested themselves in virtue of their occupying the same general
ground as the object here considered the _State._

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW (1832)

BY GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

TRANSLATED BY J. LOEWENBERG, PH.D. Assistant in Philosophy, Harvard
University

THE STATE

IDEA AND AIM OF THE STATE

The State is the realization of the ethical idea. It is the ethical
spirit as revealed, self-conscious, substantial will. It is the will
which thinks and knows itself, and carries out what it knows, and in so
far as it knows. The unreflected existence of the State rests on custom,
and its reflected existence on the self-consciousness of the individual,
on his knowledge and activity. The individual, in return, has his
substantial freedom in the State, as the essence, purpose, and product
of his activity.

The true State is the ethical whole and the realization of freedom. It
is the absolute purpose of reason that freedom should be realized. The
State is the spirit, which lives in the world and there realizes itself
consciously; while in nature it is actual only as its own other or as
dormant spirit. Only as present in consciousness, knowing itself as an
existing object, is it the State. The State is the march of God through
the world, its ground is the power of reason realizing itself as will.
The idea of the State should n