The ethical, insofar as it is reflected in the individual character determined by nature as such, is virtue, which, insofar as it shows nothing but the individual’s simple adequacy to the duties of the relations to which it belongs, is rectitude.

What a human being must do, which duties he has to fulfil in order to be virtuous, is easy to say in an ethical community — there is nothing else for him to do than what is prescribed, expressed, and known to him within his relations. Rectitude is the universal that can be demanded of him, in part legally, in part ethically. But from the moral standpoint it easily appears as something rather subordinate, beyond which one must demand still more of oneself and others; for the craving to be something particular is not satisfied with what is in and for itself and universal; it finds the consciousness of its own peculiarity only in an exception. — The various sides of rectitude can equally well also be called virtues, because they are, in equal measure, the property — though not particular, in comparison with others — of the individual. But talk of virtue as such easily borders on empty declamation, because it speaks only of something abstract and undetermined, just as such talk, with its grounds and presentations, addresses itself to the individual as to an arbitrariness and subjective liking. Under an existing ethical condition, whose relations are fully developed and actualized, virtue proper has its place and actuality only in extraordinary circumstances and collisions of those relations — in genuine collisions, for moral reflection can create collisions for itself everywhere, and give itself the consciousness of something particular and of sacrifices made. In the uncultivated condition of society and community, the form of virtue as such occurs more, because here the ethical and its actualization are more a matter of individual liking and of a peculiar, gifted nature of the individual — just as the ancients predicated virtue especially of Hercules. In the ancient states too, because ethical life had not yet developed, within them, into this free system of a self-subsistent development and objectivity, it had to be the peculiar genius of individuals that made up for this deficiency. — The doctrine of the virtues, insofar as it is not merely a doctrine of duties, and thus comprises the particular, that which is grounded on the natural determinacy of character, will accordingly be a spiritual natural history.

Since the virtues, in their application to the particular, and according to this subjective side, are something undetermined, the quantitative — the more and the less — comes in for their determination; their consideration therefore brings with it the opposing deficiencies or vices, as in Aristotle, who, in accordance with his correct sense of the matter, determined the particular virtue as the mean between a too much and a too little. — The same content, which takes on the form of duties and then of virtues, is also that which has the form of drives (§ 19, Remark). These too have the same content as their basis; but because in them it still belongs to the immediate will and to natural sensation, and is not yet cultivated up to the determination of ethical life, they have in common with the content of duties and virtues only the abstract object, which, as devoid of determination in itself, does not contain for them the boundary of good or evil — that is, according to the abstraction of the positive they are good, and conversely, according to the abstraction of the negative, evil (§ 18).