and no longer has any living present, and possesses only an uncomprehending and, because it is without inner meaning, shameless power, but also that is without genuinely positive truth which fixes the negative, the dissolution and separation from the ethical totality; the former is the history of a past life, the latter, however, the determinate representation of the present death. Thus in a dissolved people – as, for instance, indeed in the German – the laws can appear to have truth, if one does not distinguish whether they are laws of the negative and of separation, or laws of the truly positive and of unity. Immediately with the fact that the laws organizing a whole have meaning only for a past, and refer to a shape and individuality that has long since been shed as a dead husk, that they have interest only for parts, and thereby set up not a living relation toward the whole but a power and dominion foreign to it, and that that in which a living bond and inner unity presents itself no longer has, as a means for its end, the very least fitness, so that this means has neither understanding nor truth – for the truth of a means lies in its being adequate to the end – through which innermost untruth of the whole it then also follows that in the science of philosophy in general, in ethical life, and likewise in religion, little truth can still be present – immediately with this the dissolution determines and consolidates itself and posits itself in a system of the negative, thereby giving itself the formal semblance both of cognition and of laws, whose inner essence is nothing; when the cognition and science of such a people expresses itself in saying that reason knows and cognizes nothing, and is only in empty freedom, as a flight, in nothing and in its semblance, then the content and essence of negative legislation is that there is no law, no unity, no whole; that first untruth, then, is the one that is unconscious and unselfconscious in being so, this second, however, is the one that arrogates to itself the form, and thereby consolidates itself.

It is therefore not philosophy that takes the particular to be a positive because it is a particular; but only insofar as it has won, outside the absolute connection of the whole, self-sufficiency as a separate part. Absolute totality checks itself as necessity in each of its powers, brings itself forth upon it as totality, both repeating there the preceding powers and anticipating the ones that follow, but one of them is the greatest power, in whose color and determinacy the totality appears, without, however, being anything restrictive for life, any more than water is for the fish, or air for the bird. It is at the same time necessary that individuality advance, metamorphose itself, and that what belongs to the ruling power weaken and

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