§ 396. Taking the soul as an individual, we find its diversities, as alterations in it, the one permanent subject, and as stages in its development. As they are at once physical and mental diversities, a more concrete definition or description of them would require us to anticipate an acquaintance with the formed and matured mind. The (1) first of these is the natural lapse of the ages in man’s life. He begins with _Childhood_—mind wrapt up in itself. His next step is the fully-developed antithesis, the strain and struggle of a universality which is still subjective (as seen in ideals, fancies, hopes, ambitions) against his immediate individuality. And that individuality marks both the world which, as it exists, fails to meet his ideal requirements, and the position of the individual himself, who is still short of independence and not fully equipped for the part he has to play (_Youth_). Thirdly, we see man in his true relation to his environment, recognising the objective necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it,—a world no longer incomplete, but able in the work which it collectively achieves to afford the individual a place and a security for his performance. By his share in this collective work he first is really _somebody_, gaining an effective existence and an objective value (_Manhood_). Last of all comes the finishing touch to this unity with objectivity: a unity which, while on its realist side it passes into the _inertia_ of deadening habit, on its idealist side gains freedom from the limited interests and entanglements of the outward present (_Old Age_). § 397. (2) Next we find the individual subject to a _real_ antithesis, leading it to seek and find _itself_ in _another_ individual. This—the _sexual relation_—on a physical basis, shows, on its one side, subjectivity remaining in an instinctive and emotional harmony of moral life and love, and not pushing these tendencies to an extreme _universal_ phase, in purposes political, scientific or artistic; and on the other, shows an active half, where the individual is the vehicle of a struggle of universal and objective interests with the given conditions (both of his own existence and of that of the external world), carrying out these universal principles into a unity with the world which is his own work. The sexual tie acquires its moral and spiritual significance and function in the _family_.