(_a_) Pursuant to the foregoing considerations we may, to begin with, emphasize the following points: (_α_) The Ideal is essential unity; not a purely formal and external unity, but the immanent unity of the content in itself. This substantive repose on its own resources we have already characterized as the self-sufficiency, rest, and beatitude of the Ideal. We will, in direct relation to the plane of discussion we have now reached, develop this characteristic of _self-subsistency_[300], making it a primary demand of our argument that what we have termed the general condition of the world appear in such a self-subsistent form as will enable it to accept the embodiment of the Ideal. (_αα_) Now self-subsistency is an equivocal expression to start with. In ordinary parlance that which is essentially substantial is called simply self-subsistent by virtue of the element of causation being implied within this substantiality; we are wont to use it in this sense when describing the intrinsically divine and absolute. But as retained in this universality of substance merely as such it is not declared as itself subjective, and consequently meets with its irresolvable contradiction in the particularity of concrete individuality. In this bare antithesis all true self-subsistency disappears. (_ββ_) On the other hand, it is not uncommon to find such subsistency ascribed to purely formal individuality, consisting solely in its self-reliance upon the fixed determinacy of its subjective characteristics. This subjectivity, however, in so far as the actual content of life drops away from it, so that the forces and substances which lie without it acquire in themselves an independent stability, and as such confront the subject and the inward life as a content wholly unrelated, lapses through this, too, into unequivocable contradiction with the actual substantiality of determinate existence, and forfeits all claim to self-subsistency and freedom of content. True self-subsistence consists alone in the unity and interpenetration of both individuality and universality with each other. The universal acquires through the individual a concrete existence; the subjectivity of the particular thing discovers for the first time in the universal the unassailable basis and the most genuine form of its realized totality.