In the second place, as regards morality in the individual, we see on the one hand religion in its truly noble and attractive form in a few isolated individuals alone. I refer to those solitary spirits who are dead to the world and far removed therefrom, who find in their emotions what satisfies them, and, living in a little circle, can limit themselves to the sphere of religion. This is the case with women in the Middle Ages, or with the monks or other solitaries who were able to preserve themselves in a restricted and contracted state of fervour such as this, in which the spiritual side makes itself infinitely felt, although it lacks actuality. The one truth stood isolated and alone in man, the whole actuality of mind was not yet penetrated by it. On the other hand it is, however, essential that mind as will, impulse and passion, should demand quite another position, another mode of venting and realizing itself, than any such solitary and contracted sphere affords, that the world should require a more extended sphere of existence, an actual association of individuals, reason and thought coming together in actual relations and actions. This circle in which mind is realized—the human life—is, however, at first separated from the spiritual region of truth. Subjective virtue partakes more of the character of suffering and privation on its own account, morality is just this renunciation and self-surrender, and virtue as regards others merely has the character of benevolence, a fleeting, accidental character destitute of relation. All that pertains to actuality is hence not perfected by the truth, which remains a heavenly truth alone, a Beyond. Actuality, the earthly element, is consequently God-forsaken and hence arbitrary; a few isolated individuals are holy, and the others are not holy. In these others we first see the holiness of a moment in the quarter of an hour of worship, and then for weeks a life of rudest selfishness and violence and the most ruthless passion. Individuals fall from one extreme into another, from the extreme of rude excess, lawlessness, barbarism, and self-will, into the renunciation of all things without exception, the conquest of all desires.