of the polyp and of the nightingale and of the lion is a power of a whole, and within this context it is honored. Above the individual stages hovers the Idea of totality, which, however, is reflected back out of its whole scattered-abroad image, and beholds and recognizes itself therein; and this totality of the extended image is the justification of the individual as something subsisting. It is therefore the formal standpoint that brings to an individuality the form of particularity, and sublates the vitality in which particularity is real; but the empirical standpoint, which, where the reality of a determinate stage is posited, demands a higher one – that higher stage, too, in its developed reality, and empirically, is present just as much; the higher development of the life of the plant is in the polyp, the higher development of the polyp in the insect, and so on. It is only empirical unreason that wishes to see in the polyp the empirical presentation of the higher stage of the insect; the polyp, were it not a polyp, would remain nothing but this determinate dead piece of matter standing to me in an empirical relation, which is dead and matter precisely by my positing it as an empty possibility of being something else – an emptiness which is death; if it is taken absolutely without an empirical relation for the sake of the higher presentation, then that is to be found, for it must be present according to absolute necessity. – Thus, for example, the feudal constitution may well appear as something wholly positive; but in the first place, from the side of necessity, it is not an absolute singular, but simply within the totality of necessity; inwardly, however, as against life itself, whether it is positive depends on whether the people has truly organized itself as an individuality within it, whether it fills out the shape of that system completely and pervades it livingly, whether the law of these relations is custom. If, then, the genius of a nation stands generally lower and is a weaker one, and the weakness of ethical life is at its harshest in barbarism and in formal culture, if they have had to let themselves be conquered by another, have had to lose their independence, and have thus preferred the misfortune and disgrace of the loss of self-sufficiency to struggle and death; if they have sunk so crudely into the reality of animal life that they do not even rise to the formal ideality, to the abstraction of a universal, and thus, in the determination of relations for physical need, can endure not the relation of right but only that of personality – or likewise, if the reality of the universal and of right has lost all faith and all truth, and they are no longer able to feel and enjoy the image of divinity within themselves, but must set it outside themselves, and must make do for it with a dull feeling, or with the wholly painful feeling of its distant remoteness and sublimity – then the feudal constitution and bondage have absolute truth, and this relation is the sole possible form of ethical life, and hence the necessary and just and ethical one.

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