And the moral individual who wills the universal, or that which transcends him as an individual, turns precisely to the Spirit, to real Reality, to true Life, to Liberty. The universal is in concrete the universal individualized, and the individual is real in so far as he is also universal. He is not able to assert one part of himself without asserting the other (under the penalty of stopping half-way, _dimidiatus vir,_ and so of again becoming nothing). But in order to assert them both, he must first posit the one as explicit and the other as implicit, and then make the other also explicit. Man as economic individual, at the first moment (so to speak) of his revealing himself to life and to existence, cannot will, save individually: will his own individual existence. There is no man, however moral he be, who does not begin in this way. How could he ever surpass and finally deny his own individual life, if he had not first affirmed it and did not reaffirm it at every instant? But he who should stop at that affirmation of the individual, regarding the first stage of development as the resting-place, would enter into profound contradiction with himself. He should will, not only his own self individualized, but also that self, which, being in all selves, is their common Father. Thus he promotes the realization of the Real, lives a full life and makes his heart beat in harmony with the universe: _cor cordium._ The moral individual has this consciousness of working for the Whole. Every action, however diverse, which conforms to ethical duty, conforms to Life; and if, instead of promoting Life, it should depress and mortify it, for that very reason it would be immoral. Where facts seem to demonstrate the contrary, the interpretation of facts is erroneous, since it affirms as a criterion of judgment a life which is not that true life, which, as we know, we serve even by dying--dying as an individual, as a collectivity, as a social class, or as a people. The most humble moral act can be resolved into this volition of the Spirit in universal. Thus it happens that the soul of a simple and ignorant man, altogether devoted to his rude duty, vibrates in unison with that of the philosopher, whose mind receives into it the universal Spirit: what the one thinks at that moment, the other does, thus attaining by his own path to that full satisfaction, that act of life, that fruitful conjunction with the Real, which the other has attained to by a different path. It may be said that the moral man is a _practical philosopher_ and the philosopher a _theoretic actor._ [Sidenote: _Moral acts as volitions of the Spirit._]