but rather a bringing-together and objectifying of them; and hence, since this indifference and the differing determinacies are unconditionally united, it is no separation—of the former as possibility, the latter as actualities, or of the latter itself, partly as possible and partly as actual—but rather absolute presence. And in this power of intuition and presence lies the power of ethical life in general, and naturally also of that particular ethical life which that legislating reason is primarily concerned with, and from which, rather, precisely that form of the concept, of formal unity and universality, is unconditionally to be kept away; for it is precisely this form through which the essence of ethical life is immediately sublated, in that it makes what is ethically necessary into something contingent by letting it appear in opposition to something else; but what is contingent in ethical life—and the contingent is one with the empirically necessary—is unethical. A pain that exists is raised, by the power of intuition, out of the feeling in which it is an accident and a contingency, into unity, and into the shape of an objective, self-subsistent necessity, and is preserved in its absolute presence by this immediate unity, which does not look to left or right at the possibilities that formal unity brings in its train; but through the objectivity of intuiting and the elevation into this unity of being-for-itself, it is truly separated from the subject, and, in the fixed intuiting of it, made ideal; whereas, when compared through the unity of reflection with other determinacies, or thought as a universal and not found to be universal, it is in both ways made contingent, and thereby the subject recognizes itself merely in its contingency and particularity—a recognition which is the sentimentality and unethical nature of powerlessness. Or, if the ethical relates to relations of individuals to individuals, then it is the pure intuition and ideality present, for example, in the trust placed in a deposit, that is to be held fast, and from which the intrusion of formal unity and of the thought of the possibility of other determinations is to be kept away; the expression of that unity of intuition—property of another entrusted to me is the property of another entrusted to me and nothing else whatsoever—has an entirely different meaning than the universally expressing tautology of practical legislation: property of another entrusted to me is property of another entrusted to me; for this proposition is opposed just as well by the other: a non-property of another entrusted to me is non-property of the other; that is to say, a determinacy that is raised into the concept thereby becomes ideal, and its opposite can just as well be posited. The expression of intuition, by contrast, contains a this; a living relation and absolute presence, with which possibility itself is unconditionally

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