cancelled, i.e. is the fulfilling of pure duty. But at the same time conscience is detached from every possible content. It absolves itself from every specific duty, which would try to pass for a law. In the strength of its certainty of itself, it has the majesty of absolute self-sufficiency, of absolute avrdpKeia, to bind or to loose. This self-determination is at once, therefore, absolute conformity to duty. Duty is the knowledge itself ; this pure and simple selfhood, however, is the immanent principle and essence ; for this inherent principle is pure self -identity, and self-identity lies in this consciousness. This pure knowledge is immediately objective, is existence-for-another ; for, qua pure self -identity, it is immediacy, it is objective being. This being, however, is at the same time pure universality, the selfhood of all : in other words, action is acknowledged, and hence actual. This being forms the element by which conscience directly stands on a footing of equality with every self-consciousness ; and this relation means not an abstract impersonal law, but the self of conscience. In that this right which conscience does is at the same time, however, a fact for others, a disparity seems to affect conscience. The duty which it fulfils is a determinate content; that content is, no doubt, the self of consciousness, and so its knowledge of itself, its identity with its self. But when fulfilled, when planted in the general element of existence, this identity is no longer knowledge, no longer this process of distinction which directly and at the same time does away with its distinctions. Rather, in the sphere of existence, distinction is set up as subsistent, and the act is a determinate specific one, not identical with the element of everybody's self-consciousness, and hence not necessarily acknowledged and recognised. Both aspects, conscience qua acting, and the general consciousness acknowledging this act to be duty, stand equally loose from the specific character belonging to this deed. On account of this freedom and detachment, the relation of the two within the common medium of their connection is rather a relationship of complete disparity as a result of which, the consciousness doing and owning the act finds itself in complete uncertainty regarding the spirit which does the act and is " certain of itself." This spirit acts and places in existence a particular determinate characteristic ; others hold to this existence, as its truth, and are therein certain of this spirit ; it has therein expressed what it takes to be