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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.
(b) CIVIL SOCIETY(2)
¤ 523 As the substance, being an intelligent substance, particularizes 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(3)
¤ 524 (a) 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 realized,
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 possessor's 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.
C. THE MORAL LIFE, OR SOCIAL ETHICS(1) 49
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
¤ 525 (b) 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,
learning, 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 (c) 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,
also 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 particularizes 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(4)
¤ 529 When matured through the operation of natural need and free option into a system of universal
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