And just this very immediacy, which constitutes its actual reality, is the entire actuality; for the immediate is being, and qua pure immediacy, immediacy made transparent by thoroughgoing negation, this immediacy is pure being, is being in general, is all being. by the characteristic of being the simple essence of merely as knowledge. What consciousness did not know would have no sense and can be no power in its life. Into its self-conscious knowing will, all objectivity, the . whole world, has withdrawn. It is absolutely free in that it knows its freedom ; and just this very knowledge of its freedom is its substance, its purpose, its sole and . only content. a Self-consciousness knows and accepts duty as the Absolute. It is bound by that alone, and this substance is its own conscious life pure and simple ; duty cannot, for it, take on the form of something alien and external. When thus shut up and confined within itself, however, moral self-consciousness is not yet affirmed and looked at as consciousness* The object is immediate knowledge, and, being thus permeated purely by the self, is not object. But, this knowledge being essentially mediation and negativity, there is implied in its very conception relation to some otherness ; and thus it is consciousness. This other, because duty constitutes its sole essential purpose and objective content, is a reality completely devoid of significance for consciousness. But again because this consciousness is so entirely confined within itself, it takes up towards this otherness a perfectly free and detached attitude ; and the existence of this other is, therefore, an existence completely set free from self-consciousness, and in like manner relating itself merely to itself. The freer self-consciousness becomes, the freer also is the negative object of its consciousness. The object is thus a complete world within itself, with an individuality of its own, an independent whole of laws peculiar to itself, as well as an independent procedure and an unfettered active realisation of those laws. It is altogether a nature, a nature whose laws and also whose action belong to itself as a being which is not disturbed about the moral self-consciousness, just as the latter is not troubled about it. Starting with a specific character of this sort, there is formed and established a moral outlook or point of view which consists in a process of relating the implicit aspect of morality and the explicit aspect . This relation presupposes both thorough reciprocal indifference and specific independence as between nature and moral purposes and activity ; and also, on the other side, a conscious sense of