[p. 333]
|333| its property is preserved for it in ignorance of right, and disputes are settled according to passion and persuasion. – This trust, because it relies on something eternal, is then also capable of bravery.
In the real absolute totality of ethical life these three forms of it must likewise be real; each must organise itself for itself, be an individual, and take on shape; for their intermixture is the formlessness of the naturally ethical and of what is without wisdom; it goes without saying that, in that each organises itself, it is by that very fact totality, and carries within itself the other potencies of the form, but in conformity with itself and organised in; as they have already been shown in each according to their concepts. Individualisation, living life, is not possible without isolation; each principle and potency must absolutely go towards its concept, for it [is] real, and must strive after its self-enjoyment and to be for itself. In its concept, or in its own indifference, it has taken the relative identity with the other completely into itself and has thus given itself shape, and everything that is a potency must press towards this shape of its own; for infinity is absolutely one with reality; but in infinity lies the difference of the potencies. That physical nature, after its own fashion, expresses the potencies in pure shape and posits each as living for itself seems easier to accept only because, according to the principle of the multiplicity of nature, each singular thing may be incomplete; in ethical nature, however, each must be something absolutely complete, and each absolutely lays claim for itself to the absolute real totality, because the singularity of each is the absolute one, or the pure concept, and thus the negation of all determinacies. But precisely this absolute concept and negation is the highest abstraction, and immediately the negative; the positive is the unity of this form with the essence; and this is the spreading out of ethical life into a system of potencies (and of nature); and the ethical potency which organises itself can organise itself only in individuals as its material, and it is not the individual as such that is the true, but only the formally absolute; the true is the system of ethical life. For that reason this system cannot be thought, either, as being present in its purity in the individual as such, namely as developed, distributing itself completely into its potencies; for its essence is ethereality, the elemental, pure, which has subjected the unities to itself
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