This concept of the _vocation_ has a mystical and religious origin and preserves that form; but it is clear that by means of the previous considerations we have divested it of that form and reduced it to a scientific concept. The individual is not a "monad" or a "real," he is not a "soul" created by a God all in a moment and all of a piece; the individual is the historical situation of the universal spirit at every instant of time, and, therefore, the sum of the habits due to the historical situations. Those modes of conceiving and talking of one _and the same_ individual in two _different_ situations, or of two _different_ individuals in the _same_ situation, are to be avoided, because individual and situation are all one. But when the individual has been thus defined, it remains none the less true that each individual must direct his life according to pre-existing habits and personal dispositions, and thus we discover the true meaning of the mythologies and religions that have been mentioned, and the struggles to find the suitable employment can be expressed with the words that religion has taught us when we were children: the "vocation" and the special "mission" that is allotted to us in life, until the last giving of accounts and the words of dismissal and repose: _Nunc dimitte servum tuum, Domine!_ We are the children of that Reality which generates us and knows more than we, the Reality of which religions have caught a glimpse and called it God, father, and eternal wisdom. [Sidenote: _Misunderstandings as to the rights of individuality. Evil individuality._] The affirmation of the rights that belong to individuality in the practical field has several times assumed and still assumes (in our time, more than in the past, owing to materialism and naturalism) a form, no longer symbolical and mystical, but wrong and irrational, that it is desirable to remark upon here, always in order to avoid possible equivoques. Indeed many look upon the respect due to their own beings as due to their caprice, that is to say, to what is on the contrary the negation of being: the right of the individual as the right to commit follies, or to a disaggregate individuality. The declared necessity of temperament for character is exchanged for admiration of temperament considered in itself, which, as such, is neither admirable nor blameworthy; but when separated from character becomes vice and folly. Hence the admiration that has even become a literary fashion, for the dissolute, for the violent, for homicides, for the criminals of the public prisons, illustrated by a few courageous and energetic souls among them, whereas they are as a rule weak, vile, and turbid. [Sidenote: _False doctrines as to the connection of virtues and vices._]