§ 531. (3) Legal forms get the necessity, to which objective existence determines itself, in the _judicial __ system_. Abstract right has to exhibit itself to the _court_—to the individualised right—as _proven_:—a process in which there may be a difference between what is abstractly right and what is provably right. The court takes cognisance and action in the interest of right as such, deprives the existence of right of its contingency, and in particular transforms this existence,—as this exists as revenge—into _punishment_ (§ 500). The comparison of the two species, or rather two elements in the judicial conviction, bearing on the actual state of the case in relation to the accused,—(1) according as that conviction is based on mere circumstances and other people’s witness alone,—or (2) in addition requires the confession of the accused, constitutes the main point in the question of the so-called jury-courts. It is an essential point that the two ingredients of a judicial cognisance, the judgment as to the state of the fact, and the judgment as application of the law to it, should, as at bottom different sides, be exercised as _different functions_. By the said institution they are allotted even to bodies differently qualified,—from the one of which individuals belonging to the official judiciary are expressly excluded. To carry this separation of functions up to this separation in the courts rests rather on extra-essential considerations: the main point remains only the separate performance of these essentially different functions.—It is a more important point whether the confession of the accused is or is not to be made a condition of penal judgment. The institution of the jury-court loses sight of this condition. The point is that on this ground certainty is completely inseparable from truth: but the confession is to be regarded as the very acmé of certainty-giving which in its nature is subjective. The final decision therefore lies with the confession. To this therefore the accused has an absolute right, if the proof is to be made final and the judges to be convinced. No doubt this factor is incomplete, because it is only one factor; but still more incomplete is the other when no less abstractly taken,—viz. mere circumstantial evidence. The jurors are essentially judges and pronounce a judgment. In so far, then, as all they have to go on are such objective proofs, whilst at the same time their defect of certainty (incomplete in so far as it is only _in them_) is admitted, the jury-court shows traces of its barbaric origin in a confusion and admixture between objective proofs and subjective or so-called “moral” conviction.—It is easy to call _extraordinary_ punishments an absurdity; but the fault lies rather with the shallowness which takes offence at a mere name. Materially the principle involves the difference of objective probation according as it goes with or without the factor of absolute certification which lies in confession.