Here, again, as in the purely intellectual or cognitive sphere, it is evident that the spirit of man has its source of life neither in its abstract self-hood (in consciousness and conscience) nor in its mere natural environment and organic endowment (in sense-affections, and social law and usage), but in the unity of both,--a unity which transcends either. Both individual and society live and grow, because they are continuous and one: because they presuppose an ideal unity or a living Idea at the root of their being, as their inner and essential guiding-principle, at once constitutive and regulative of their action. The machinery of language supplies to the intellectual sphere a sort of sensible meeting-ground and common field in which the development of knowledge becomes possible: and the same purpose is subserved in the social sphere by the machinery of ethical and political forms and institutions. These are the field, the home of freedom, as the other are of knowledge. It is in these collective and objective structures that we get the expression of the law of human development: the visible sign, viz. of the essentially universal nature of the individual. The individual in these attains his relative truth: for they show the weakness of the individuality of the mere individual. They show that his exclusiveness, his quasi-originality, is only an appearance:--confronted, no doubt, by an appearance of an opposite character, as if the originality and the reality lay in the environment and the collective body. They point therefore beyond and behind both foci to a common centre or inclusive unity of life.