story, is Hegel's most
brilliant achievement. It divides as follows: (1) Right (property,
contract, punishment); (2) Morality (purpose, intention and welfare, good
and evil); (3) Social Morality: (a) the family; (b) civil society; (c) the
state (internal and external polity, and the history of the world). In
right the will or freedom attains to outer actuality, in morality it
attains to inner actuality, in social morality to objective and subjective
actuality at once, hence to complete actuality.

Right, as it were a second, higher nature, because a necessity posited and
acknowledged by spirit, is originally a sum of prohibitions; wherever it
seems to command the negative has only received a positive expression.
Private right contains two things--the warrant to be a person, and the
injunction to respect other persons as such. Property is the external
sphere which the will gives to itself; without property no personality.
Through punishment (retaliation) right is restored against un-right
(_Unrecht_), and the latter shown to be a nullity. The criminal is treated
according to the same maxim as that of his action--that coercion is
allowable.

In the stadium of morality the good exists in the form of a requirement
which can never be perfectly fulfilled, as a mere imperative; there remains
an irrepressible opposition between the moral law and the individual will,
between intention and execution. Here the judge of good and evil is the
conscience, which is not secure against error. That which is objectively
evil may seem good and a duty to subjective conviction. (According to
Fichte this was impossible).

On account of the conflict between duty and will, which is at this stage
irrepressible, Hegel is unable to consider morality, the sphere of the
subjective disposition, supreme. He thinks he knows a higher sphere,
wherein legality and morality become one: "social morality"
(_Sittlichkeit_). This sphere takes its name from _Sitte_, that custom
ruling in the community which is felt by the individual 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 t