a consciousness therefore which can give up neither the difference falling within that substance, nor the knowledge of this difference. That giving laws and testing laws have turned out futile indicates that both, taken individually and in isolatign, are merely unstable moments of the ethical consciousness ; and the process in which they appear has the formal significance, that the substance of ethical life is thereby shown to be consciousness. So far as both these moments are more precise determinations of the consciousness of "fact as such" {Sache sellist) they can be looked on as forms of that honesty of nature which now, as was the case with its formal moments, is much occupied with a content which " ought to be " good and right, and with testing definite fixed truth of this sort, and supposes itself to possess in healthy reason and intelligent insight the force and validity of ethical commands. have validity as essential realities of consciousness, and the process of testing likewise does not hold good as an activity inside consciousness. Rather, these moments, when they appear directly as a reality each by itself, express in the one case the illegitimate establishment and mere de facto existence of actual laws, and in the other an equally illegitimate independence and detachment from them. The law as determinate has an accidental content : this means here that it is a law made by a particular individual conscious of an arbitrary content. To legislate immediately in that way is thus tyrannical insolence and wickedness, which makes caprice into a law, and morality into obedience to such caprice -- obedience to laws which are merely laws and not at the same time commands. So, too, the second process, testing the laws, so far as it is taken by itself, means moving the immovable, and the insolence of knowledge, which treats absolute laws in a spirit of intellectual detachment, and takes them for a caprice that is alien and external to it. In both forms these moments are negative in relation to the substance of the moral life, to the real spiritual nature. In other words, the substance does not find in them its reality: but instead consciousness contains the substance still in the form of its own immediacy ; and the substance is, as yet, only a process of willing and knowing on the part of a given particular individual, i.e. the " ought " of an unreal command and a knowledge of formal universality. But since these modes were cancelled, consciousness has passed back into the universal and those oppositions have vanished. The spiritual reality is actual substance precisely through these modes not holding good individually, but merely as cancelled