But that which we have set on one side under the outer form of the first estate is the real absolute consciousness of ethical life. It is consciousness, and as such, on its negative side, pure infinity, and the highest abstraction of freedom, that is, the relation of subduing driven to the point of its own sublation, or the free, violent death; but on the positive side, consciousness is the singularity and particularity of the individual. But this in-itself negative, namely consciousness in general, of which the distinctions indicated are only its two sides, is absolutely taken up into the positive, its particularity and infinity or ideality absolutely taken up into the universal and real in a perfect manner; and this being-one is the Idea of the absolute life of ethical life. In this being-one of infinity and reality within the ethical organization, the divine nature shines forth of which Plato says that it is an immortal animal whose soul and body, however, are eternally born together, so as to present the wealth of its manifoldness at once in the highest energy of infinity and unity, which becomes the wholly simple nature of the ideal element. For the most perfect mineral does indeed present, in every part separated from a mass, the nature of the whole, but its ideal form, both as the inner form of the fracture and as the outer form of crystallization, is an outside-one-another, and not, as in the elements of water, fire, and air, is each particular part the perfect nature and the representative of the whole, both according to essence and according to form or infinity. No less is its real form penetrated by the true identity of infinity; rather its senses have no consciousness, its light is a single color, and does not see; or if it is the indifference of these, then there is no point of arrest against their passage through it; its tone sounds when struck by something alien, but not out of itself; its taste does not taste, its smell does not smell, its weight and hardness do not feel; and if it does not belong to the singularity of the sense-determinations but unites them in indifference, it is the undeveloped, closed-up lack of differentiation, not the unity that separates itself within itself and subjugates its own separation; just as the elements too, which are equal to themselves in all their parts, contain within themselves only the possibility, not the actuality, of differences, and only the indifference under the form of quantity, not indifference as the qualitatively posited. The earth, however, as the organic and individual element, spreads itself out, through the system of its shapes, from its first rigidity and individuality onward into the qualitative and into difference, and only resumes itself, in the absolute indifference of ethical nature alone, into the perfect equality of all parts and the absolute real being-one of the individual with the absolute — into the first Aether, which, out of its self-equal, fluid and soft form, scatters its pure quantity, through individual formations, into singularity and number, and thereby perfectly subdues this absolutely brittle and rebellious system, in that number is purified into pure unity and into infinity, and becomes intelligence, and thus the negative — precisely by becoming absolutely negative, for the absolute concept is the absolute immediate opposite of itself, and nothing is, as an ancient says, no less than something — can be perfectly one with the positively absolute; and in intelligence, form, or the ideal, is absolute form, and as such real, and in absolute ethical life the absolute form is most truly united with the absolute substance. Of the individualities of the formations that lie between simple substance in reality, as pure Aether, and it as espoused with absolute infinity, none can bring form and qualitative unity — whether through the quantitative, elemental equality of wholes and parts, or, in higher formations, through an individualization that goes into the more particular details of the parts, together with the formal unification of these into a whole through the sociability of the leaves of plants, of sex, of the herd-like life and communal labor of animals — into absolute indifference with the essence and substance that is present in ethical life; because it is in intelligence alone that individualization is driven to the absolute extreme, namely to the absolute concept, the negative driven to the point of being absolutely negative, the unmediated opposite of itself. This alone is therefore capable, in that it is absolute singularity, of being absolute universality; in that it is absolute negation and subjectivity, of being absolute position and objectivity; in that it is absolute difference and infinity, of being absolute indifference, and the totality actu in the unfolding of all oppositions, and potentia in the absolute annihilatedness and being-one of these — the highest identity of reality and ideality. When the Aether has cast out its absolute indifference, in the indifferences of light, into manifoldness, and has, in the flowers of the solar systems, given birth outward, into expansion, to its inner reason and totality, yet those individuals of light are scattered in a plurality; while those which form the circling leaves of these must relate to them in a rigid individuality, so that the unity of the former lacks the form of universality, and the unity of the latter lacks pure unity, and neither of the two bears the absolute concept as such within itself — then, in the system of ethical life, the flower of the heavenly system, unfolded outside-one-another, is folded back together, and the absolute individuals are perfectly united into universality, and reality, or the body, is at the highest degree one with the soul, because the real plurality of the body itself is nothing other than abstract ideality, absolute concepts, pure individuals, whereby these themselves are capable of being the absolute system. For this reason, if the Absolute consists in this: that it beholds itself, and indeed as itself, and that intuition and this self-cognition, that infinite expansion and this infinite taking-back of itself into itself, are absolutely one, then, if both are real as attributes, spirit is higher than nature; for while nature is the absolute self-beholding and the actuality of the infinitely differentiated mediation and unfolding, spirit, which is the beholding of itself as itself, or absolute cognition, is, in the taking-back of the universe into itself, both the totality of this plurality cast outward, over which it reaches, and also the absolute ideality of that plurality, in which it annihilates this outside-one-another, and reflects it into itself as the unmediated point of unity of the infinite concept.

(To be continued in the next issue.)

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