but rather, while indeed acknowledging this same being-one as the essence and as the absolute, it posits the separation into one and many just as absolutely, and places the one alongside the other with equal dignity; through this, it is not the positive absolute that constitutes the essence of both, and in which they would be one, but rather the negative, or the absolute concept; and, further, that necessary being-one becomes formal, and the two opposed determinacies, posited as absolute, thereby fall, in their subsistence, under ideality, which to that extent is the mere possibility of both; it is possible that right and duty have reality independently, as something particular, separate from the subjects, and the subjects separate from that; but it is also possible that the two be conjoined. And it is absolutely necessary that these two possibilities be kept particular and distinguished, so that each grounds its own science: the one, which concerns the being-one of the pure concept and the subjects, or the morality of actions; the other, which concerns the not-being-one, or legality; and indeed in such a way that, once in this division of the ethical into morality and legality these two become mere possibilities, precisely for that reason both are equally positive. The one is indeed negative for the other; but this holds for both alike; it is not that the one is the absolute positive and the other the absolute negative, but each is both, in its relation to the other; and, because, in the first place, both are only relatively positive, neither legality nor morality is absolutely positive or truly ethical; and then, because both, the one as positive as the other, are absolutely necessary, the possibility that the pure concept and the subject of duty and right are not one must be posited as unalterable and unconditional.

The fundamental concepts of the system of legality follow from this immediately, in the following way: it is a condition of pure self-consciousness—and this pure self-consciousness, I, is the true essence and the absolute, yet, notwithstanding this, it is conditioned, and its condition is that it proceed onward into a real consciousness—that these, in this relation of being conditioned upon one another, remain unconditionally opposed to one another; that pure self-consciousness, the pure unity, or the empty moral law, the universal freedom of all, is opposed to real consciousness, i.e. to the subject, the rational being, individual freedom; which Fichte expresses in a more popular way as the presupposition that good faith is lost; and upon this presupposition a system is grounded, by which, notwithstanding the separation of the concept and the subject of ethical life, but precisely for that reason only formally and externally—and this relation is called coercion—the two are supposed to be united. In that, then, this externality of the being-one

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