alities—heroes who put their conscious life into one of these powers, find therein determinateness of character, and procure their effective activity and reality. This universal individualisation descends again, as will be remembered, to the immediate reality of existence proper, and is presented before a crowd of spectators, who find in the chorus their image and counterpart, or rather their own thought giving itself expression.
The content and movement of spirit, which is object to itself here, have been already considered as the nature and realisation of the substance of ethical life. In its form of religion spirit attains to consciousness about itself, or reveals itself to its consciousness in its purer form and its simpler mode of embodiment. If, then, the ethical substance by its very principle broke up, as regards its content, into two powers—which were defined as divine and human law, law of the nether world and law of the upper world, the one the family, the other state sovereignty, the first bearing the impress and character of woman, the other that of man—in the same way, the previously multiform circle of gods, with its wavering and unsteady characteristics, confines itself to these powers, which owing to this feature are brought closer to individuality proper. For the previous dispersion of the whole into manifold abstract forces, which appear hypostatised, is the dissolution of the subject which comprehends them merely as moments in its self; and individuality is therefore only the superficial form of those entities. Conversely, a further distinction of characters than that just named is to be imputed to contingent and inherently external personality.
At the same time, the essential nature [in the case of
