3. The Roman Realm

In this realm, the differentiation is consummated into an infinite laceration of ethical life, into the extremes of personal private self-consciousness, on the one hand, and abstract universality, on the other. The opposition, proceeding from the substantial outlook of an aristocracy set against the principle of free personality in democratic form, develops on the former side into superstition and the assertion of cold, rapacious power, and on the latter into the corruption of a rabble; and the dissolution of the whole ends in universal misfortune and the death of ethical life, in which the individualities of the nations die out into the unity of a pantheon, and all individuals sink down into private persons and equals endowed with formal right — a condition now held together only by an abstract caprice driving itself toward monstrous excess.