Because, like everything living, so too the ethical is simply an identity of the universal and the particular, it is an individuality and a shape; it carries particularity, necessity, relation – that is, relative identity – within itself, but rendered indifferent, assimilated, and thereby it is free within it; and this, which from the standpoint of reflection can be regarded as particularity, is not something positive or opposed as against the living individual, which is thereby bound up with contingency and necessity, yet living; this side is its inorganic nature, but organized in itself within the shape and individuality. Thus, to name the most general instance, the determinate climate of a people, and its period of time within the formation of the universal human race, belongs to necessity, and of the far-flung chain of these only one link falls to its present; which is to be comprehended, on the one side, out of geography, on the other out of history. But into this link the ethical individuality has organized itself, and its determinacy does not pertain to it as such, but to necessity; for the ethical vitality of a people consists precisely in this, that it has a shape in which determinacy is present, yet not as something positive (in our previous use of this word), but absolutely united with universality, and animated by it. And this side is also very important for this reason, that it teaches us to recognize how philosophy teaches us to honor necessity, both because it is a whole, and only limited insight clings to singularity and despises it as a contingency – and also because it sublates the view of singularity and contingency in such a way as to show of it that it does not impede life in itself, but rather that life, while letting it subsist as it is according to necessity, at the same time also wrests it from that necessity, pervades it, and animates it. Just as little as the element of water, to which a part of the animal world is organized, and the element of air, to which another part is organized, is, because they are individual elements, something positive or dead for the fish in the one case and for the bird in the other, just as little is this form of ethical life, in which it organizes itself within this climate and this period of a particular and of the universal culture, something positive within that same life. As in the nature of the polyp there is just as much the totality of life as in the nature of the nightingale and the lion, so the world spirit has, in every shape, its more dull or more developed but absolute self-feeling, and in every people, under every whole of customs and laws, its essence, and enjoyment of itself. – Outwardly the stage is justified in just the same way, insofar as this outward side belongs to necessity as such; for even in this abstraction of necessity, singularity is once again simply sublated through the Idea; this singularity of the stage

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