[p. 342]
|342| and of preserving the whole in and through all its parts. Only to the highest indifferent, to God and nature, to the priests and to the old, can the preservation of the whole be tied; for every other form of reality is in difference; but the indifference which nature produces in the old, and God in his priests consecrated to him alone, seems to be that which lies outside ethical life, and ethical life seems to have to flee outside its domain to nature, to the unconscious. But this must be so because here the discussion concerns reality, and reality belongs to nature and to necessity; it belongs to the ethical to recognise nature, and to connect with the ethical potency that potency of nature which for itself formally expresses the determinacy of an ethical potency. Nature conducts itself here as tool; it is what mediates the determinate Idea of the ethical and its external appearance; as tool it must formally accord with the former, without ethical content for itself, it is true, but agreeing with the Idea according to formal potency and determinacy; or its content is itself nothing other than precisely the possibility, the negative of the ethical determinacy. The latter, posited ideally, requires a tool, or its subjective reality, its immediate body, taken up into its unity and indifferentiated in it, appears, considered for itself, as its tool; and posited ideally for the Idea, opposed to reality, this body of it appears as something contingent for it, as something that is found, that fits and agrees; in nature the soul immediately forms its body for itself, and neither is to be posited or comprehended without the other; it is originally, unconsciously, one without separation. But in the ethical the separation of the soul from the body is the first thing, and the identity is a totality or a reconstructed identity; the body is therefore to be sought for the ideal as something present, formal, negative in itself, and to be connected with it, and herein consists the essence of the construction of government: that for the determinacy of the soul, or the ethical determinacy whose reality is to be recognised, that be found which is outside difference in the respect in which it is the ethical determinacy, but at the same time that this tool be not something universal, adequate for much else, but only for precisely this determinacy; for partly the tool would
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