ought to assert itself in a one-sided and independent isolation, yet, none the less, as an essential factor in the organic process, must be maintained as such and not be sacrificed. In this respect the religious reconciliation remains itself _one-sided_, and declares itself in the truly simple heart as an intensity of belief which is deficient in comprehensiveness, that is, as the piety of the self-secluded soul, which has not yet attained in its growth to the fully expanded self-reliance of maturity, and to conviction based on genuine insight and circumspection. When the force of a soul deficient in these qualities maintains its opposition to the world which is thus treated in a purely negative way, and forcefully breaks loose from all human ties, even though they may originally be the very closest, we can only characterize such conduct as the rawness of Spirit and a barbaric result of the power of abstraction, which is simply repulsive. So we may say that though from the point of view of the religious consciousness, as we find it to-day, it is indeed possible to honour, and to honour highly, this opening germ of religiosity in such representations, if, however, such a pious tendency proceeds to such lengths that we find it advancing to lay siege to what is both essentially rational and moral, then, so far from sympathizing with such a fanaticism of sanctity, we can only protest that a kind of abnegation such as this, which casts off from itself, shatters and treads upon that which is independently justifiable, and even sacred, appears to us both immoral in itself and subversive of the very type of religion it represents. There are many legends, tales, and poems which deal with this extreme form of the pious craze. We have, for example, the tale of a man who, though full of tenderness for his wife and family, and, moreover, beloved by all his friends, leaves his home and makes a pilgrimage. When at last he returns home in the guise of a beggar he refuses to disclose his identity. Alms are given him, and out of compassion a permanent lodging provided under the stairs.
In this plight he lives for twenty years; he sees the grief of his family on his account, and only declares who he is on his death-bed.
This kind of thing, which we are asked to revere as sanctity, is, of course, merely the egotism of a fanatic which revolts us. This long endurance of renunciation may remind us of the distrait nature of those penances, which the Hindoos voluntarily impose on themselves on religious grounds. But the endurance of the Hindoo has a very different significance. In that case a man deliberately places himself in a condition of vacuum and unconsciousness; in the case which we are now considering the _pain_, and the deliberate consciousness and feeling of the same is the real object, which it is assumed will be attained with just so much more purity as the suffering is associated with the consciousness of the value of and devotion to the severities which are accepted, and is, moreover, united with a vision for ever concentrated on the renunciation thus made. The richer the heart which takes on itself the burden of such ordeals, the nobler the content of its own possessions, and yet withal believes that it is bound to condemn them as of no merit, just so much the more difficult grows the task of reconciliation, and the more prone it is to bring about the most terrible convulsions and the most raving distraction. Indeed, to our vision, it is clear enough that a soul such as this, which is only at home in a world which, however full of ideas, is not the world of common experience, and which consequently only feels its grasp slipping from the stable and paramount centres of activity and aims of this our actual world, ay, and although it be with heart and soul held in and associated with that world, yet regards all that is moral there simply as something which contradicts its absolute destination--we can only say that such a soul, both in its self-inflicted sufferings and its renunciations, is from the rational point of view simply mad, so mad that we can neither feel any profound compassion for it, nor propose any means of liberation. What is lamentably lacking to a mode of life of this kind is an object of real substance and valid significance; what it proposes to secure is an aim wholly personal, an object sought for by the individual for himself alone, for the salvation of his own soul, for his own blessedness. Few are likely to concern themselves very deeply whether an individual, at any rate one of this type, is or ever will be happy[238].
(_b_) _The inward Penance and Conversion_ The kind of representation, in the same general class of cases which we shall now contrast with the one above examined, turns aside from the extremity of merely bodily suffering, as it is also from a further point of view more indifferent to the purely negative impulse directed against what is essentially just and right in the actual conditions of the world; the material of such representations consequently, both in respect to its content and its form, opens up a ground which is more conformable with ideal art. And this ground is the conversion of the _inner_ life of the soul, which only here seeks to express itself in its _spiritual_ pain, and its change of heart. Here, therefore, we find in the first place that we have no more of those ever repeated horrors and barbarities of pain inflicted on man's poor body: and, secondly, that which we have referred to as the barbarian religiosity of the soul no longer holds fast to its antagonism as against the purely ethical aspects of humanity in order to trample under iron foot in the abstraction of its purely conceptive satisfaction[239], and in the pain of an absolute renunciation that other kind of sensuous enjoyment; for the most part its attention is now solely directed against what is in fact sinful, criminal, and evil in human Nature.
We find here a lofty assurance that faith, this spiritual impulse towards God, is capable of converting the past action, even though it be a sin or a crime, into something alien to the man who perpetrated it, washing it away in fact. This withdrawal out of evil, that wholly negative condition, which is realized in the individual by the subjective volition and spirit at once scorning and confounding itself under its former state of evil--this return to the positive which is now self-established as the only real in contrast to the former state of sinfulness, is the truly infinite content of religious love, the presence and actuality of absolute Spirit in the individual soul itself. The feeling of the stability and endurability of the personal existence, which through God, to which it addresses itself, triumphs over evil, and in so far as it is thus mediated with Him is aware of itself as one with Him, produces as its effect the fruition and blessedness of contemplating God, it is true, in the first instance as the absolute Other in His opposition to the sin inherent in finite existence, but further of knowing this Infinite Presence as identical with me as this particular person, of knowing, in short, that I carry this self-consciousness of God, as the seat of my own personality, that is to say, my own self-consciousness, as certainly as I carry the sense of my own self-identity. Such a revolution takes place no doubt entirely within the shrine of the soul, and belongs, therefore, rather to religion than art: for the reason, however, that it is the intimate movement of the soul, which pre-eminently makes itself master of this act of conversion, and also is able to throw a gleam of light through the external embodiment, a plastic art such as painting can also claim to make visible the history of such conversions. If it attempts, however, to depict the entire course of events which belong to such a transition, much that is very far from being beautiful may readily appear in the result, because in such a case both that which is sinful and repulsive requires to be depicted, as, for example, in the story of the prodigal son. Painting, therefore, achieves its greatest success when it concentrates the act of conversion into _one_ picture where that is the prevailing motive, and pays little or no attention to the previous course of events. The ordinary presentations of Mary Magdelene may be noted as an admirable example of this kind of work, and particularly in the hands of the old Italian masters has been treated in a way both excellent in itself and throughout consistently with fine Art. She is depicted here both in the characterization of her soul and her external presence as the _fair sinner_, in whom the sin no less than the sanctity is intended to exercise a sort of fascination on the spectator. But at the same time neither sin nor sanctity are treated with any great intensity. She is forgiven much because she has loved much, and her forgiveness is in a measure the portion both of her love and her beauty. And what affects us most of all in this picture is this, that she makes for herself a conscience as it were out of her love, and robed in the beauty of her sensitive soul pours forth her sorrow in a flood of tears. We are not led to feel that the fact that she has loved so much is her error, but rather that her fair and fascinating folly is this, namely, that she _believes_ herself to be a sinner,[240] for her exquisitely sensitive beauty only leaves us the impression that in her love she is both noble and profound.
The final aspect, which is closely associated with the two above considered, and is frequently asserted as a concomitant of both, is that of miracle. It plays in fact an important part throughout this stage of our inquiry. In this connection we may define miracle as the conversion-history of the immediate existence of Nature. Such reality lies before us as a commonplace, contingent existence. This finite substance is touched by the hand of God, which, in so far as it strikes upon what is purely external and particular, breaks it up, transmutes it into something entirely different, interrupting what in ordinary parlance we call the natural course of things. To bring before us the soul arrested by such inexplicable phenomena, in which it imagines it recognizes the presence of the Divine, vanquished, in short, in its ordinary view of finite events, this is the main subject-matter of a host of legends. In fact, however, the Divine can only touch and dominate Nature as Reason, that is, in the unalterable laws of Nature herself, as implanted therein by God, and the Divine has no occasion to exploit Himself in the supreme sense of this term in particular circumstances and modes of causation which run contrary to these laws of Nature, for it is only the eternal laws and determinations of reason which apply in any real sense to Nature. From another point of view legends frequently carry with them quite unnecessarily an amount of matter which is abstruse, out of taste, senseless, and ridiculous, inasmuch as the intention is that both intellect and heart should be stimulated to believe in the presence and activity of God by precisely those things which are essentially irrational, false, and heathenish. The consequent emotion, piety, and conversion of the soul may even then awake our interest, but in that case it is only on the _one_ side, namely, that of the soul: so soon as that enters into relation with somewhat else outside it, and the idea is that this external correlative shall effect the conversion of the heart, then we inevitably require that such should not be wholly a meaningless and irrational sequence of events.
Such, then, would be the fundamental divisions of the substantive content at this particular stage of our inquiry, regarding that content as the self-subsistent Nature of God, or in its aspect as a spiritual process, through which and in which He is Spirit. We have here the absolute object, which art neither creates nor reveals out of itself, but which it has received from religion which it approaches with the conviction that it is _essentially_ true that it may express and represent the same conformably to its modes. It is the content of the believing, yearning soul, which is intrinsically the infinite totality itself, so that for it the external medium remains to a more or less degree outside it, or a matter of indifference, and is unable to be brought completely into harmony with that inner life. And for this reason it frequently presents a repellent material which art finds itself unable wholly to subdue to its aims.
[Footnote 224: _Nicht aufnehmend._ Not ready to absorb extraneous matter.]
[Footnote 225: This of course is an opinion which may be strongly contested in its application to particular artists.]
[Footnote 226: Hegel means not so much the history in which the whole totality of events is comprised as that aspect of human history which declares its universal significance as infinite spirit.]
[Footnote 227: That is, of self-consciousness in all that it implies--the personality of Christ, for example.]
[Footnote 228: Hegel does not further dwell upon this relativity. But the next paragraph explains what is really in his mind. The important question, however, how far such events are worthy of credence as objective history, to say nothing of the inadequacy of their artistic presentation, one cannot but feel is deliberately evaded. What Hegel would say no doubt was that the bare historical aspect was only of relative importance. The main question was their significance in the spiritual process. It is in this direction that much of our noblest modern thought finds a certain indissoluble unreality of statement.]
[Footnote 229: That is in Christ.]
[Footnote 230: _Gleichkeit._ Equality, reciprocity.]
[Footnote 231: We are reminded of our treasures in Christian art such as the Virgin and Child in Tintoret's "Flight into Egypt," Rafael's San, Sisto Madonna and the rest.]
[Footnote 232: In other words as regarded at a later date by the Church.]
[Footnote 233: This statement hardly does justice to the profound idealism of the epistles of St. Paul.]
[Footnote 234: Perhaps "the infinite form of subjectivity" is better.
He means "the infinite form of individual self-consciousness."]
[Footnote 235: That is, characterized by personality.]
[Footnote 236: _Geschichte._ Life as an evolved Process.]
[Footnote 237: Compare the poem of Meredith, "Theodolinda," in his ballads of the Tragic Life. It is, in another aspect, that iron crown which that thoughtful contemporary writer, Mr. H. W. Nevinson, refers to in his Essays on Rebellion.]
[Footnote 238: The elimination even of sympathy with such fanaticism where it is quite sincere, a rare case no doubt, seems severe. The best illustration in modern literature I know of the principle "all or nothing," is Ibsen's great drama "Brandt." Readers of Carlyle will doubtless recall from "Past and Present" and elsewhere that prophet's repeated denunciations of the craze for personal happiness.]
[Footnote 239: By _intellectuellen Befriedigung_ Hegel does not mean "intellectual" in a good sense, but merely that the man imagines his happiness in his mind rather than feels it through the senses. The psychology of religious ecstasy, however, is a rather involved problem.]
[Footnote 240: This analysis is rather surprising. Did Hegel, the robust Swabian, really think the above the finest type of art's presentations of the Magdalene? Does it not lean very closely to that soft sentimentalism which a Carlo Dolci gives us in its decadence? At any rate the idea that the Magdalene was not really a sinner flatly contradicts the original references to her in the gospels, and to my mind at any rate seems from the artistic point of view also to destroy half the rare beauty of her repentance. The principle of such an interpretation is surely the entirely pagan one, whether Greek or French, that a great passion is its own justification quite irrespective of moral considerations. She is the historical impersonation of the frailty of a love too dependent on the senses, not of one in which either nobility of bearing or extreme selflessness is conspicuous. Hegel's analysis may be true enough of certain pictures--but do they really present us the ideal; most assuredly not.]
CHAPTER II CHIVALRY The principle of the essentially infinite subjective consciousness possesses for the content of faith and art in the first instance, as we have already discovered, the Absolute itself, in other words the Spirit of God as it is mediated and reconciled with the conscious spirit of man and thereby is first itself independently free. This romantic mysticism in its self-limitation to the sense of blessedness in the Absolute Presence remains a mode of spiritual inwardness which is abstract, because it confronts the things of the world in opposition and rejects the same. Faith is, in an abstraction of this kind, alienated from life, from the concrete reality of human existence, removed from the positive relations of mankind to one another, who only know and love each other in faith, and for the sake of their belief as completely bound together in yet a third association, namely, the spirit of the Christ community. This association is alone the clear spring in which the image of that blessedness is reflected, without it being necessary for man to look his brother first in the face, to enter into any direct relation with another, or to experience the unity of love, of trust, of confidence, of mutual aims and actions in contact with the living concrete presence. That which constitutes the hope and yearning of the inner life man here, in this sense of exclusive religious intimacy, can only discover as actual life in the kingdom of God, in the society of the Church. He has not as yet[241] withdrawn this single identity in a third factor from his conscious life in order that he may possess all that he is really himself in his entire spiritual concreteness no less before his eyes directly in the knowledge and volition of that other whole. The collective religious content, it is true, assumes the mode of real existence, but it is still an existence which is located in the ideal world of an imagination which consumes the expanding boundaries of actual life. It is still far away from attempting to satisfy its own life also in that abundance which it receives from the world and its realization in the world as the higher demand in the medium of life itself.
It follows that the soul which found its initial consummation in the simple feeling of Divine blessedness must step forth from this heavenly kingdom peculiar to the _religious_ sphere, must undertake the effort of self-introspection and assimilate a content which is, as vitally present, adequate to the demands of the individual consciousness in its fullest extension. And in this process that which was before a _religious_ coalescence of soul is changed to one of _secular_ type.
Christ indeed said; "Ye must leave father and mother, and follow Me."
And in the like spirit: "Brother shall hate brother; men shall crucify you and persecute you." But as soon as the kingdom of God has secured a foothold in the world, and is actively employed in transfusing with its spirit and illumining the aims and interests of that world; when father, mother, and brother are already numbered in the community, then the things of the world on their side commence to assert their just claim to recognition and furtherance. If this claim is not merely fought for but vindicated then also the negative attitude of the religious spirit, which was at first exclusively hostile to all that was merely human, vanishes; the spirit of man enlarges, it explores the full scope of its actual presence, and unfolds its heart in the entire world of reality[242]. The fundamental principle suffers no alteration; the substantive and infinite self-consciousness merely directs its attention to another province of its own kingdom. We may perhaps define this transition in the statement that the individual singularity is now as such singularity independent of its mediation with God and self-subsistently free. For precisely in that mediation, whereby it divested itself of its purely finite limitation and natural life, it has passed over the path of mere negation, and reappears after having thus secured an essentially _affirmative_ position, in the condition of a consciousness that is free and as such makes the demand that it shall, in virtue of its own infinitude, though the infinitude is here only in the first instance one of pure form, secure complete recognition both for itself and others. In this the religious mode of the individual consciousness is reposed the entire spiritual wealth of the infinite soul, which it has hitherto filled up with God. If we, however, made the inquiry, of what material the heart of man is suffused in this its inward repletion, such a content merely concerns the infinite relation of the subjective consciousness in its active self-relation; it is simply replete with its own formal medium, that is, as essentially infinite singularity without further and more concrete expansion and significance as a content of interests, aims, and actions which is itself essentially objective and substantive[243]. If we further examine the matter, however, more closely we shall see there are in the main _three_ emotions, which in their independence rise up in the individual soul to the level of this infinite mode, namely personal _honour, love_, and _fidelity._ They are not so much moral qualities and virtues as simply modes which inform the intimate presence of the individual soul when fulfilled with its own self-relation as such is recognized by romance. For the personal self-subsistency for which _honour_ contends does not assert itself as intrepitude on behalf of a communal weal, and the repute of thoroughness in relation to it and integrity of private life.
On the contrary it contends simply for the recognition and formal inviolability of the individual person. The same principle applies to _love_, which forms the central subject-matter of this sphere. It is merely the adventitious passion of one individual for another; and however much it may expand under the wand of imagination or may be deepened by excess of emotion, it is for all that neither the ethical relation of marriage or family. _Fidelity_ possesses no doubt more the appearance of a moral character, inasmuch as it does not merely will its own but holds fast to something higher, something shared with itself, surrenders itself to another's will, whether it be the wish or behest of a master, and thereby renounces the personal desire and independence of its own particular volition. But the feeling of loyalty does not concern the objective interest of the social weal in its independent form, that is, in the concrete freedom of the developed state life, but associates itself merely with the _person_ of a master, who, in his own fashion, acts with independence, or concentrates himself in more general relations and is active on their behalf[244]. These three modes of feeling taken together and as they reciprocally affect one another constitute with the exception of the religious relation, which also has its part to play here, the principal content of _chivalry_, and furnish the necessary steps of advance from the principle of purely religious enthusiasm to the entrance of the individual soul into the concrete social life of the world, in the kingdom of which romantic art now secures a platform on which it can from its own resources work out its independence, and at the same time embody a freer type of beauty. It stands here, so to speak, in the free room midway between the absolute content of the independently stable religious conceptions and the varied particularity and restricted boundaries of the finite world. Among the various arts it is pre-eminently poetry which has shown itself most qualified to master such a material, its modes of expression being directed to the life of the soul as wholly occupied with its own domain and as realized in its aims and events.
Inasmuch as we now have before us a material which man takes possession of in his own spiritual life, or rather, from the world of his pure humanity, we might at first suppose that romantic art occupied the same ground as that of classic art. This, therefore, is an excellent opportunity for placing them together both in comparison and contrast. We have already defined classical art the Ideal of humanity certified as true in its objective self-subsistence. Its imaginative vitality requires as its core a content which is substantive in type and excludes an ethical pathos. The Homeric poems, the tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, are in the main concerned with interests of an absolutely factual content, an austere treatment of the passions reflected therein, a solid style of speech and execution in conformity with the nature of the ideas expressed, and above this domain of heroes and other figures which alone are in their individual self-concentration at home in such an atmosphere of pathos we have the realm of the gods at a still more advanced stage of objective presentment. Even in the case where art, in more introspective fashion, is occupied with the infinite experiments of sculpture, bas-reliefs and similar forms, or the later elegies, epigrams, and other diversions of lyrical poetry, we still have the same type before us, that is to say, the type which portrays the object more or less as it finds it, and obedient to the claim that it already has secured its constructive presentment. We have, in short, represented figures of the imagination already established and defined in their characterization such as Venus, Bacchus, or the Muses. It is just the same with the later epigrams, where we get the description of a material already to hand or, as in the case of Meleager, a posy of well-known flowers, bound together with the cords of exquisite feeling and taste. It is, in short, an exhilarating mode of activity carried on in a wealthily furnished house overflowing in its stores with every kind of bounty, image and provision for every conceivable object. The poet and the artist is simply the magician, who wafts them into use, collects and groups them.
It is wholly different in romantic poetry. In so far as it is of the world worldly, and is not directly associated with the story of our Lord, the virtues and objects of its heroism are not those of the Greek heroes, whose type of morality Christendom in its early days simply regarded as a brilliant enormity. Greek morality presupposes the presence of humanity in its complete configuration, in which the volition then and there as it ought to act conformably to its essential notion of independence has received a definite content and the actual conditions of freedom imperatively valid such as belong to that content. Such are the relations of parents and children, married persons, or of citizens of city or State in the realized liberty of such. Now inasmuch as this objective content of human affairs belongs to the _evolution_ of man's spirit on the basis of Nature cognized and insured as actual fact, it is unable any longer to satisfy that self-absorbed introspection of the religious life, which seeks to destroy the natural aspect of human life, and must deviate considerably from the virtue of humility which opposes it, and the surrender of human freedom and its staunch self-dependence. The virtues of Christian piety simply prove the death of such a world-attitude if held in their extreme of abstraction, and only make the individual free, when he absolutely denies the human part of him. The individual freedom of our present sphere is no doubt no longer conditioned by mere endurance and self-sacrifice but essentially positive in the world arena; that infinite self-relation of the individual has, however, as we have already discovered, the inward realm of the soul as its content and only that, the subjective soul, that is, whose movement is in its own peculiar medium, as the secular ground of its own domain. In this connection poetry does not draw from any objective material already presented it, no mythology, for instance, no imaginative pictures and embodiments, which already lie ready waiting for its expression.
It stands there wholly free, without any extraneous matter, purely creative and productive. It is free as a bird that sings straight from its breast. It follows, then, if this subjective activity proceeds also from a noble will and a profound soul, we shall merely have in its workings and relations and existence the evidence of caprice and contingency, for the reason that freedom and its aims proceed, relatively to a content which is throughout immaterial, from internal self-reflection. And, consequently, we do not find so much in individuals a particular pathos in the Greek conception of the term and a vital self-subsistency of character associated with it by the closest bonds, as that which is simply a grade of heroic conception in its connection with love, honour, bravery, and fidelity; a grade into which it is mainly the nobility or depravity of soul which imports the distinguishing features. The characteristic trait, however, which the heroes of the Middle Ages possess in common with those of antiquity is that of _bravery._ Yet even this receives a totally different complexion. It is not so much a natural courage, which reposes on the character that is sane and sound, and flows forth from the growth of an unimpaired robustness of body and will, assisting the execution of objective interests. Rather it is the outcome of the secret wealth of the soul, its honour and chivalry, and is in the main a creation of the phantasy, which undertakes adventures that have their origin in individual caprice and the chance intricacies of external circumstance or the impulses of mystical piety, and we may add generally the personal attitude of the individual.
This romantic type of art finds a home, then, in two hemispheres, in the Western world as this penetration into the more intimate shrine of Spirit, in the Eastern this its first expansion of the self-absorbed consciousness as it frees itself from the finite environment. In the West poetry reposes on a soul which is withdrawn upon its resources, which has become the centre of its activity, yet possesses this flavour of secularly merely as one part of its complexion, as one aspect, over which is superposed a yet loftier world of belief. In the East it is the Arab above all, who as a solitary,[245] who in the first instance has nothing before his eyes but his dried-up desert and his heavens, stands forth in the full strength of life as the proclaimer of the splendour and primary extension of the world of Nature, and thereby still preserves at the same time the freedom of his soul. And generally we may say that in the Orient it is the Mohammedan religion, which has cleared the ground, made an end of all idolatry in the service of finite things or the imagination, and given the soul at the same time the personal freedom, which wholly floods the same, so that the secularity does not here only constitute another province, but runs beyond it into the universal licence, where heart and mind, without ascribing any objective reality to God, find their reconciliation in the jubilant lust of living just like beggars by throwing the glory of their fancy on the objects around them: enjoy their loves and are happy, blessed, and contented.
1. HONOUR The motive of honour was unknown to ancient classic art. In the "Iliad" it is quite true that the wrath of Achilles constitutes both the content and the motive principle, so that the entire series of events is dependent upon it; but what we moderns understand by the term honour is not grasped here at all. Achilles believes himself to be insulted to all intents and purposes only in the fact that the share in the booty which he considers justly to belong to him and the reward of his personal merits, his _γέρας_, has been taken away by Agamemnon.
The insult here has a direct reference to something actual, a bounty, in which no doubt a privilege, a recognition of fame and bravery was reposed, and Achilles is enraged because Agamemnon meets him unworthily and lets the Greeks know that they are not to pay any attention to him. An insult of this kind is not driven home to the real centre of personality in its abstract purity; in fact Achilles expresses himself satisfied with the restitution of the abducted slave and the addition of other goods and bounties, and Agamemnon finally makes this reparation although from our point of view they have both insulted one another in the grossest fashion. Maledictions of this kind, however, have only made them angry; and, after all, the particular insult, which has reference to a matter of fact, is done away with in the same matter of fact fashion.
(_a_) The honour of romance is, on the contrary, of another kind.
Insult has no reference here to the factual values of real things, property, status, obligation, etc., but to personality simply, and its idea of its own importance, the work which the individual claims as his right. This worth is in the cases we are now discussing of an infinite significance equal to that of personality itself. In honour, therefore, man possesses the earliest positive consciousness of his infinite spiritual medium, independent of the content. What the individual has, what in him something peculiar creates, after the loss of which it may yet subsist precisely as it did before--in this elusive something the absolute validity of the entire subjective life is reposed and apprehended in it both for itself and others.
The determining measure of honour therefore does not depend on what the individual really is, but on what is contained in this personal self-regard. This regard, however, raises all particularity to the level of the universal conception that the personal core in its full significance resides in this particularity which it claims as its own.
Honour is merely an outward show it is sometimes said. No doubt this is so: but from our present point of view we must, if we look at it more narrowly, accept it as the appearance and reappearance of the personal medium self-reflected, which as the semblance of an entity essentially infinite is itself infinite. And through this infinitude it is just this show or semblance of honour which is the real existence of the individual, its highest actuality; and every particular quality, into which honour is reflected and appropriates as its own is by virtue of this show exalted itself to an infinite worth. This type of honour constitutes a fundamental determinant in the romantic world, and presupposes that man has not merely passed beyond the limits of purely