thyself above thyself and lettest God o’errule; then in thy spirit happens ascension into heaven.”--“The body in the spirit must arise, the spirit, too, in God: if thou in him, my man, will live for ever blessed.”--“So much mine ‘I’ in me doth ’minish and decrease; so much therefore to power cometh the Lord’s own ‘I.’” From such a point of view, man recognises his meaning and the meaning of all things in the realm of eternal necessity. The natural All appears to him immediately as the Divine Spirit. The thought of a divine All-Spirit, who could still have being and sub-existence over and beside the things of the world, vanishes away as a superseded conception. This All-Spirit appears so outpoured into things, so becomes one in being with the things, that it could no longer be thought at all, if even one single member were thought away from its being. “Naught is but I and thou; and if we twain were not; then is God no more God, and heaven falleth in.”--Man feels himself as a necessary link in the world-chain. His doing has no longer aught of arbitrariness or of individuality in it. What he does is necessary in the whole, in the world-chain, which would fall to pieces if this his doing were to fall out from it. “God may not make without me a single little worm: if I with him uphold it not, straightway must it burst asunder.”--“I know that without me God can no moment live: if I come to naught, he needs must give up the ghost.”--Upon this height, man for the first time sees things in their real being. He no longer needs to ascribe from outside to the smallest thing, to the grossly sensible, a spiritual entity. For just as this minutest thing is, in all its smallness and gross sensibility, it is a link in the Whole. “No grain of dust is so vile, no mote can be so small: the wise man seeth God most gloriously therein.”--“In a mustard seed, if thou wilt understand it, is the image of all things above and beneath.” Man feels himself free upon this height. For constraint is there only where a thing can constrain from without. But when all that is without has flowed into the within, when the opposition between “I and world,” “Without and Within,” “Nature and Spirit,” has disappeared, man then feels all that impels him as his own impulse. “Shut me, as strongly as thou wilt, in a thousand irons: I still will be quite free and unfettered.”--“So far as my will is dead, so far must God do what I will; I myself prescribe to him the pattern and the goal.”--At this point cease all moral obligations, coming from without: man becomes to himself measure and goal. He is subject to no law; for the law, too, has become his being. “For the wicked is the law; were there no command written, still would the pious love God and their neighbour.”