Elements of the Philosophy of Right

The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the coming of the dusk.

What is reasonable is real; that which is real is reasonable.

Uneducated people delight in argument and fault-finding, for it is easy to find fault, but difficult to recognize the good and its inner necessity.

When a father inquired about the best method of educating his son in ethical conduct, a Pythagorean replied: "Make him a citizen of a state with good laws

But if they realize that their true freedom consists in the acceptance of principles, of laws which are the own, a synthesis of universal and particular interests becomes possible.

The important question of how poverty can be remedied is one which agitates and torments modern societies especially

By means of the simple folk remedy of ascribing to feeling what is the millennia-long labor of reason and of its understanding, all are spared the bother of rational insight and knowledge.

The middle class, to which the civil servants belong, has a political consciousness and is the most conspicuously educated class. For this reason, it is the mainstay of the state as far as integrity and intelligence are concerned. Consequently, the level of a state which has no middle class cannot be high.

Every kind of falsehood and truth is present in public opinion, but it is the prerogative of the great man to discover the truth within it. He who expresses the will of his age, tells it what its will is, and accomplishes this will, is the great man of the age.

Education in its early stages always begins with fault-finding, but when it is complete, it sees the positive element in everything.

One cannot speak of an injustice of nature in the unequal distribution of possessions and resources, for nature is not free and is therefore neither just nor unjust.

Man is an animal, but even in his animal functions, he is not confined to the implicit, as the animal is; he becomes conscious of them, recognizes them, and lifts them, as, for instance, the process of digestion, into self-conscious science. In this way man breaks the barrier of his implicit and immediate character, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself as spirit.

When we hear it said that freedom in general consists in being able to do as one pleases

Everything that is rational is real, and everything that is real is rational.

The concept of this Idea has being only as mind, as something knowing itself and actual, because it is the objectification of itself, the movement running through the form of its moments. It is therefore (A) ethical mind in its natural or immediate phase—the Family. This substantiality loses its unity, passes over into division, and into the phase of relation, i.e. into (B) Civil Society—an association of members as self-subsistent individuals in a universality which, because of their self-subsistence, is only abstract. Their association is brought about by their needs, by the legal system—the means to security of person and property—and by an external organisation for attaining their particular and common interests. This external state (C) is brought back, to and welded into unity in the Constitution of the State which is the end and actuality of both the substantial universal order and the public life devoted thereto.

The spirit has actuality, and the individuals are its accidents. Thus, there are always only two possible viewpoints in the ethical realm: either one starts from substantiality, or one proceeds atomistically and moves upward from the basis of individuality [Einzelheit]. This latter viewpoint excludes spirit, because it leads only to an aggregation, whereas spirit is not something individual [nichts Einzelnes] but the unity of the individual and the universal.

Only by resolving can a human being step into actuality, however bitter this may be to him. Inertia lacks the will to abandon the inward brooding which allows it to retain everything as as a possibility. But possibility is not yet actuality.

Freedom is to will something determinate

The basis [Boden] of right is the realm of spirit in general and its precise location and point of departure is the will; the will is free