Absolute ethical life, however, is, according to what has gone before, so essentially the ethical life of all that one cannot say of it that it is merely mirrored, as such, in the individual; for it is as much his essence as the Aether that permeates nature is the inseparable essence of the shapes of nature, and as space, the ideality of nature’s appearing forms, does not simply particularize itself into a nothing in any one of them; but just as the lines and edges of the crystal, in which it expresses the outer form of its nature, are negations, so ethical life, insofar as it expresses itself in the individual as such, is a negative. It cannot, in the first place, express itself in the individual unless it is his soul, and it is his soul only insofar as it is a universal and the pure spirit of a people; the positive is, by nature, prior to the negative; or, as Aristotle says, the people is by nature prior to the individual; for since the individual, taken separately, is nothing self-subsistent, he must, like all the parts, be in one unity with the whole; but whoever cannot be in community, or needs nothing from self-subsistence, is no part of the people, and is therefore either animal or god. Accordingly, insofar as ethical life expresses itself in the individual as such, it is posited under the form of negation, that is, it is the possibility of the universal spirit; and the ethical properties that belong to the individual, such as courage, or moderation, or thrift, or generosity, and so on, are negative ethical life, meaning namely that in the particularity of the individual no singularity is in truth fixed, and no real abstraction is made; and they are possibilities or capacities for being within universal ethical life. These virtues, which are in themselves possibilities and are of a negative significance, are the object of morals, and one sees that the relation of natural right and morals has thereby been inverted; namely that to morals belongs only the domain of the in-itself negative, while to natural right belongs the truly positive, as its name indicates, in that it is to construe how ethical nature attains its true right; whereas, by contrast, if the negative, as well as this negative taken as the abstraction of externality, of the formal moral law, of pure will and of the will of the individual, and then the syntheses of these abstractions, such as coercion, the restriction of the freedom of the individual through the concept of universal freedom, and so on, were to express the determination of natural right, it would be a natural wrong, since, upon the laying of such negations as its foundation, taken as realities, ethical nature is cast into the highest ruin and misfortune.

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