Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/521

THE STATE AND HISTORY. 499 custom ruling in the community which is felt by the indi- vidual not as a command from without, but as his own nature. Here the good appears as the spirit of the family and of the people, pervading individuals as its substance. Marriage is neither a merely legal nor a merely sentimental relation, but an " ethical " {sittliches) institution. While love rules in the family, in civil society each aims at the satisfaction of his private wants, and yet, in working for himself, subserves the good of the whole. Class distinctions are based on the division of labor demanded by the variant needs of men (the agricultural, industrial, and thinking classes). Class and party honor is, in Hegel's view, among the most essential supports of general morality. Strange to say, he brings the administration of justice and the police into the same sphere. The state, the unity of the family and civil society, is the completed actualization of freedom. Its organs are the political powers (which are to be divided, but not to be made independent): the legislative power determines the universal, the executive subsumes the particular there- under, the power of the prince combines both into personal unity. In the will of the prince the state becomes sub- ject. The perfect form of the state is constitutional mon- archy, its establishment the goal of history, which Hegel, like Kant, considers chiefly from the political standpoint. History is the development of the rational state ; the world-spirit the guiding force in this development ; its instruments the spirits of the nations and great men. A par- ticular people is the expression of but one determinate moment of the universal spirit ; and when it has fulfilled its commission it loses its legal warrant, and yields up its dominion to another, now the only authorized one: the history of the world is the judgment of the world, which is held over the nations. The world-historical characters, also, are only the instruments of a higher power, the purposes of which they execute while imagining that they are acting in their own interests — their own deed is hidden from them, and is neither their purpose nor their object. This should be called the cunning of reason, that it makes the passions work in its service.