Therefore, since we have never denied faith to thought, nor broken in pieces the unity of Philosophy, we have no secret to reveal at this point; not even a poor secret, like the exponents of discontinuous Philosophy, who solemnly make known at the end what they have assumed from the beginning. Our formal ethical principle is never empty form that must only now be filled with a content. It is full form, form in the philosophical and universal sense, which is also content and therefore universal content. We have not restricted ourselves to defining the ethical form as universal form, which would have resulted in tautologism; but we have defined it _volition of the universal,_ thus distinguishing it from the economic form, which is simply volition of the individual. And if we now ask ourselves what is the universal, we must reply that the answer has already been given, and that whoever has not yet understood, whoever indeed has not understood it for some time, will never understand it. The universal has been the object of all our Philosophy of the Spirit, and we have always had to keep it before our eyes, in studying, not only the practical function, but any other function of the spirit; just as we cannot have the idea of the branch of a tree without the idea of the trunk from which it springs and without which there would not be the branch of a tree. That concept, then, is not a _deus ex machina_ to appear unexpectedly at the end of the play and hastily bring it to a conclusion, but the force that has animated it from the first to the last scene. [Sidenote: _The universal as the Spirit (Reality, Liberty, etc.)._] What is the universal? It is the Spirit, it is Reality, in so far as it is truly real, that is, in so far as it is unity of thought and willing; it is Life, in so far as realized in its profundity as this unity itself; it is Freedom, if a reality so conceived be perpetual development, creation, progress. Outside the Spirit nothing is thinkable in a truly universal form. Æsthetic, Logic, Historic, this very Philosophy of the practical, have demonstrated and confirmed this truth in every way. Every other concept brought forward reveals itself (and has revealed itself beneath our analysis), either as a feigned universal, or as something contingent that has been abstracted and generalized, or as the hypostasis of certain of our particular spiritual products, such as mathematical formulæ, or as the negation of the Spirit, on which is conferred positive value (first with metaphor and then with metaphysic).