For although in the living shape or the organic totality of ethical life that which constitutes its real side is in the finite, and therefore cannot, in and for itself, take up its bodily essence perfectly into its divinity, it nevertheless already expresses, in itself, its absolute Idea, though distorted; it does not indeed unite within itself, into absolute infinity, the moments of that Idea which are held apart as necessity, but has this unity only as an imitated negative independence, namely as the freedom of the individual; but this real essence is nonetheless absolutely bound to the absolute, indifferent nature and shape of ethical life; even if it must behold that nature only as something alien, it does behold it, and is, in spirit, one with it. It is, even for it, absolutely the first thing that the wholly pure and indifferent shape and the absolute ethical consciousness be, and the second, indifferent matter, that it, as the real, relate to that shape only as its empirical consciousness; just as it is the first thing that an absolute work of art be, and only the second whether this particular individual is its author, or merely beholds and enjoys it. As necessary as that existence of the absolute is, so necessary too is this distribution: that one part be the living spirit, the absolute consciousness and the absolute indifference of the ideal and the real of ethical life itself, and the other its bodily and mortal soul and its empirical consciousness, which may not perfectly unite its absolute form and its inner essence, but nonetheless enjoys the absolute intuition of it as of something as it were alien to it, and, for the real consciousness, is one with it through fear and trust as well as through obedience, but for the ideal consciousness, in religion, in the common god and the service of that god, unites itself wholly with it.
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