die off, so that all the stages of necessity may appear in it as such; but the misfortune of the period of transition, that this consolidating of the new formation has not purified itself absolutely of the past, is that in which the positive consists. And nature, although within a determinate shape it proceeds with a uniform, yet not mechanically uniform, but rather uniformly accelerated motion, nonetheless also enjoys a new shape which it has won; as it leaps into it, so it lingers within it. As the bomb makes a lurch toward its culmination and then rests a moment at it; or as heated metal does not soften like wax but leaps at once into flux, and lingers upon it; for appearance is the transition into the absolutely opposite, hence infinite, and this stepping-forth of the opposite out of infinity, or out of its nothing, is a leap, and the existence of the shape in its newly born power is at first for itself alone, before it becomes conscious of its relation to something foreign; so, too, growing individuality has both the joyfulness of that leap and a duration of enjoyment of its new form, until it gradually opens itself to the negative, and, even in its downfall, is likewise sudden and breaking.

Now when the philosophy of ethical life teaches us to comprehend this necessity and to recognize the coherence of its content, as well as the determinacy of that content, as absolutely bound up with spirit and as its living body, and sets itself against formalism, which regards whatever it can subsume under the concept of particularity as contingent and as dead, the philosophy of ethical life at the same time recognizes that this vitality of individuality in general, whatever its shape may be, is a formal vitality; for the limitedness of that which belongs to necessity, although absolutely taken up into indifference, is only a part of necessity, not the absolute total necessity itself, and hence always a non-correspondence of absolute spirit and its shape.

For this absolute shape, however, it cannot flee to the shapelessness of cosmopolitanism, nor to the emptiness of the rights of humanity, and the like emptiness of a federation of peoples and of the world republic, since these abstractions and formalities contain the very opposite of ethical vitality, and are by their essence protestant and revolutionary against individuality; rather, it must, for the high Idea of absolute ethical life, also recognize the most beautiful shape; and since the absolute Idea is in itself absolute intuition, with its construction the purest and freest individuality is at once likewise determined, in which spirit beholds itself perfectly objectively in its shape, and, wholly without any return to itself out of intuition, recognizes instead the intuition itself immediately as itself, and precisely thereby is absolute spirit and perfect ethical life – which, at the same time, in the manner set forth above, wards off its entanglement

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