sphere of existence as individualized reality. And on this account it is that we are necessarily conscious, that rights and obligations in the mere bounds of civic existence, on the plane, that is to say, of merely this world's or temporal existence, do not discover the absolute satisfaction we are seeking. We require as rational beings a higher realization of their objective truth as private individuals, a fuller sanction of their imperative validity than they themselves, in such a sphere, can offer us. What mankind, pressed on all sides by the boundaries of his purely terrestrial life, in fact requires is that region of more essential reality, in which every opposition and contradiction is overcome, and freedom can finally claim to be wholly at peace with itself. And this is, of course, nothing other than absolute Truth itself, no merely relative truth. In the Truth, according to its highest notion, all must be brought home to one unity. In it there can be no more opposition between freedom and necessity, Spirit and Nature, knowledge and the object of knowledge, law and impulse, between whatever form, in fact, the opposition of these contradictory phenomena of human experience may assume. It is in virtue of such truth that proof is possible that neither a freedom which is essentially subjective and disparate from every element of necessity is true in the absolute sense; nor, on the other hand, is it admissible to predicate truth of a necessity conceived in absolute isolation from consciousness. Our ordinary conscious life fails to overcome this contradiction, and either plunges desperately into the same, or thrusts it on one side and makes its escape from it in some other way. Philosophy will, however, so address itself to the two determinating factors of the contradiction as to show that they are apprehended as isolate from each other in abstraction, not according to their concrete notion; and by the grasp of this latter it will demonstrate the one-sidedness in its relative character, placing these opposing aspects in the fuller union and harmony which is truth. It is the function of philosophy to grasp and formulate this notion of truth. Unquestionably philosophy recognizes the concrete notion throughout; and it is in virtue of this that it is Thought with full grasp of truth. But what we call the notion is something other than this, truth, that is, in its essential verity together with the existence which is either adequate to it or is not so. In all finite reality the determinations, which are essential to ideal truth, appear separable from each other, dividing the veil of that which in its absolute Truth is a complete totality. Take the case of a living being. Under such finite categories we are forced to regard it as a subject in opposition to the inorganic Nature which environs it. Both the points of view are no doubt present in the notion, but they are there reconciled. Finite existence, however, thrusts them apart.