But just as these properties are the reflex of absolute ethical life in the individual as the negative, yet in the individual who is in absolute indifference with the universal and the whole, and are thus its reflex in his pure consciousness; so too there must be a reflex of the same in his empirical consciousness, and such a reflex must constitute the ethical nature of the second estate, which is in fixed reality, in possession and property, and outside of valor. It is this reflex of ethical life, then, for which the ordinary meaning of morality can more or less fit; the formal indifference-positing of the determinacies of the relationship, that is, the ethical life of the bourgeois or of the private person, for whom the difference of relationships is fixed, and who depends on them and is in them. A science of this morality is, accordingly, in the first instance, the knowledge of these relationships themselves; so that, insofar as they are considered in relation to the ethical — since, for the sake of the absolute fixedness in question, this relation can only be formal — precisely that above-mentioned pronouncement of tautology has its place here: this relationship is only this relationship; if you are in this relationship, then be, in relation to it, within it; for if, in actions which bear a relation to this relationship, you do not act in relation to it, then you annihilate it, you sublate it. The true sense of this tautology at the same time immediately includes within itself that this relationship itself is nothing absolute, and hence also that the morality which pertains to it is something dependent, and nothing truly ethical; which true sense follows, according to what was said above, from the fact that only the form of the concept, the analytic unity, is the absolute, and hence negatively absolute, on account of the content, which, as something determinate, contradicts the form.

Those properties, however, that are truly ethical, in that in them the particular or negative appears purely taken up into indifference, may be called ethical properties, and only then virtues, when they individualize themselves anew in a higher energy and, still within absolute ethical life, become as it were their own living shapes, like the virtues of an Epaminondas, a Hannibal, a Caesar, and a few others. As such energies they are shapes, and hence not absolute in themselves, no more than the shapes of the other organic formations are, but rather the stronger emergence of one side of the Idea of the whole; and the morals of the virtues — or, if we wish to distinguish morals in general from morality, and if the name Ethics were to be taken for the presentation of virtue — Ethics must for this reason be only a natural description of the virtues.

Now just as this bears a relation to the subjective or negative, the negative in general must also be distinguished as the subsistence of difference, and as the lack of it; that first negative is the one of which we spoke above; but this other negative, the lack of difference, presents the totality as something enveloped and undeveloped, in which movement and infinity are not present in their reality. The living thing under this form of the negative is the becoming of ethical life, and upbringing, according to its determinacy, is the appearing, ongoing sublation of the negative or subjective; for the child, as the form of the possibility of an ethical individual, is a subjective or negative thing, whose attaining of maturity is the ceasing of this form, and whose upbringing is the discipline or the subduing of it; but the positive, and the essence, is that, nourished at the breast of universal ethical life, it lives in the absolute intuition of that life at first as of something alien, comprehends it ever more, and thus passes over into the universal spirit. It follows of itself from this that those virtues, as well as absolute ethical life, no less than the becoming of that life through upbringing, are not an endeavor after a peculiar and separate ethical life of one’s own, and that the striving after a peculiar, positive ethical life of one’s own is something vain and in itself impossible; and, with regard to ethical life, the saying of the wisest men of antiquity alone is true, that to be ethical is to live in accordance with the customs of one’s own land; and, with regard to upbringing, that which a Pythagorean answered to one who asked him what the best upbringing for his son would be: if you make him the citizen of a well-ordered people.

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