The one is, accordingly, the spiritual [element] as that which divides itself into personal self-subsistence that is for itself, and into the knowing and willing of free universality — the self-consciousness of comprehending thought and the willing of the objective final purpose; the other is the spiritual [element] preserving itself in unity, as the knowing and willing of the substantial in the form of concrete singularity and feeling — the former, in its relation outward, the powerful and active [element], the latter the passive and subjective [element]. The man therefore has his actual substantial life in the state, in science, and the like, and otherwise in struggle and labour with the external world and with himself, so that it is only out of his division that he fights his way to self-subsistent unity with himself; he has its calm intuition, and feeling, subjective ethical life, in the family, in which the woman has her substantial determination, and, in this piety, her ethical disposition.

Piety is therefore expressed, in one of its most sublime presentations, the Sophoclean Antigone, preeminently as the law of woman, and is presented as the law of feeling, subjective substantiality, of inwardness, which has not yet attained its complete actualization — as the law of the ancient gods, of the underworld, as an eternal law of which no one knows whence it appeared, and in opposition to the manifest law, the law of the state — an opposition that is the highest ethical, and therefore the highest tragic, opposition, and one individualized there in femininity and masculinity; compare Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 383 ff., 417 ff.