to a minimum, to what is most abstract. With this the determination of the content becomes arbitrary, for in that minimum there exists nothing determinate. This is a weighty consequence, from a theoretical as well as a practical point of view. Chiefly from a practical, for since, for the justification of disposition and action, reasons are necessary, the faculty of argument must still be very untrained, and very little skilled in its work, if it does not know how to assign good reasons for what is arbitrary.
Another feature in the situation, which the withdrawal into immediate knowledge and into feeling brings into view, concerns the relation of men to other men, and their spiritual fellowship. The objective, the true fact or Thing, is what is in-and-for-itself universal, and is so, therefore, for all. As what is most universal, it is implicitly thought in general; and thought is the common basis. The man who betakes himself to feeling, to immediate knowledge, to his own ideas or his own thoughts, shuts himself up, as I have already said, in his own particularity, and breaks off any fellowship or community with others—the only way is to leave him alone. But this kind of feeling and heart lets us see more closely into the nature of feeling and heart. Restricting itself in accordance with its first principle to its own feeling, the consciousness of a content degrades it to the determinate form belonging to itself; it maintains itself rigidly as self-consciousness, in which this determinateness inheres; the self is for consciousness the object which it sets before itself, the substance which has the content only as an attribute, as a predicate in it, so that it is not the independent element in which the subject is sublated, or loses itself. The subject is itself in this way a fixed condition, which has been called the life of feeling. In the so-called Irony, which is connected with it, the “myself “is abstract only in relation to itself; in the distinction of itself from its content it stands as pure consciousness of itself, and as separated from it.
