Human Freedom

ALL created life exists under two aspects, and includes in itself what may be denominated a two-fold form of being. In one view, it is something individual and single, the particular revelation as such, by which, in any given case, it makes itself known in the actual world. In another view, it is a general, universal force, which lies back of all such revelation, and communicates to this its true significance and power. In this form, it is an idea; not an abstraction or notion simply, fabricated by the understanding, to represent its own sense of a certain common character, belonging to a multitude of individual objects; but the inmost substantial nature of these objects themselves, which goes before them, in the order of existence, at least, if not in time, and finds its perpetual manifestation through their endlessly diversified forms. All life is at once ideal and actual, and in this respect, at once single and universal. It belongs to the very nature of the idea, (as a true subsistence and not a mere notion,) to be without parts and without limits. It includes in itself the possibility, indeed, of distinction and self-limitation; but this possibility made real, is nothing more nor less than the transition of the idea over into the sphere of actual life. In itself, it is boundless, universal, and always identical. It belongs to the very conception of the actual world, on the other hand, that it should exist by manifold distinction, and the resolution of the infinite and universal into the particular and finite. All life, we say then, is at one and the same time, as actual and ideal, individual also, and general; something strictly single, and yet something absolutely universal.