being evil, but in so doing would at once cancel itself and cease to be hypocrisy, and so would not qua hypocrisy be unmasked. It confesses itself, in fact, to be evil by asserting that, while opposing what is recognised as universal, it is acting according to inner law and conscience. For were this law and conscience not the law of its particularity and caprice, it would not be something inward, something private, but what is universally accepted and acknowledged. When, therefore, any one says he acts towards others from a law and conscience of his own, he is saying, in point of fact, that he is abusing and wronging them. But actual conscience is not this insistence on a knowledge and a will which are opposed to what is universal ; the universal is the element of its existence, and its very language pronounces its action to be recognised duty. Just as little, when the universal consciousness emphasises and persists in its own judgment, does this unmask and dissipate hypocrisy. When that universal consciousness stigmatises hypocrisy as bad, base, and so on, it appeals, in passing such a judgment, to its own law, just as the evil consciousness, on its side, does too. For the former law makes its appearance in opposition to the latter, and thereby is a particular law. It has, therefore, no antecedent claim over the other law; rather it legitimises this other law. Hence the universal consciousness, by thus emulating the other, does precisely the opposite of what it means to do : for it shows that its so-called " true duty," which ought to be universally acknowledged, is something not acknowledged and recognised, and consequently it grants the other an equal right of independently existing on its own account. This judgment [of universal consciousness], however, has, at the same time, another side to it, from which it leads the way to the dissolution of the opposition in question. Consciousness of the universal does not proceed, qua real and qua acting, to deal with the evil consciousness ; for this latter, rather, is the real. In opposing the latter, it is a consciousness which is not entangled in the opposition of particular and universal involved in action. It stays within the universality of thought, takes up the attitude of an apprehending intelligence, and its first act is merely that of judgment. Through this judgment it now places itself, as was just observed, alongside the first consciousness, and the latter, through this identity, this likeness, between them, comes to see itself in this other consciousness.