209. The relative principle of the mutual exchange of wants and labour for their satisfaction has in the first instance its return into itself in the infinite personality generally, i.e., in abstract right. Yet it is the very sphere of the relative which in the form of education gives embodiment to right, by fixing it as something universally acknowledged, known, and willed. The relative also, through the interposition of knowledge and will, supplies right with validity and objective actuality.
Note.— It is the essence of education and of thought, which is the consciousness of the individual in universal form, that the I should be apprehended as a universal person, in whom all are identical. Man must be accounted a universal being, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, or Italian, but because he is a man. This thinking or reflective consciousness, is of infinite importance. It is defective only when it plumes itself upon being cosmopolitan, in opposition to the concrete life of the citizen.
Addition.— From one point of view it is by means of the system of particularity that right becomes externally necessary as protection of individuals. Although right proceeds out of the conception, it enters into being only because it is serviceable for wants. To have the thought of right, one must be educated to the stage of thinking, and not linger in the region of the merely sensible. We must adapt the form of universality to the objects, and direct the will according to a universal principle. Only after man has found out for himself many wants, the acquisition of which is an inseparable element of his satisfaction, is he able to frame laws.
210. The objective actuality of right consists partly in existing for consciousness, or more generally in its being known, and partly in having, and being generally recognized as having, the validity and force of a reality.