and the objective act proceeding from himself as entirely his own, each person claims absolutely all that he may do, and refuses to surrender one jot or tittle of responsibility therefor. To an extent equally minute the heroic figure is separated from the ethical whole, to which he belongs, and his self-consciousness is bound up wholly in substantial unity with that whole. According to the views in vogue now we draw a line of distinction as private individuals between objects which are wholly personal and those which affect the community. The individual acts in all that he does from his own private personality as distinct from others, and views even his actions rather as relative to this than as part of all that is farmed out by the organic whole to which he belongs. We consequently make a distinction between individuals and their families. Such is unknown in the heroic age. The guilt of ancestors adheres to their descendants, and an entire family will suffer for the original defaulter. Men inherit the fatality of guilt and transgression. A condemnation such as this appears to us unjust as an irrational subjection to a blind fate. With us the achievements of ancestors reflect no more honour on children and descendants than the punishments and crimes of such contaminate those that follow after them, and least of all is their private character thus affected; nay, modern opinion is already close to the view that the confiscation of family property is a punishment which violates the profounder conception of liberty. But in the ancient and more plastic totality the individual is not so isolated, but rather a member of his family and race. For this reason the character, action, and fortunes of the family continue to be the private affair of each member of it; and so far from denying the actions of his parents, each man voluntarily accepts them as his own; they live in him, and he is just that which his fathers were, suffered, or transgressed. This appears to us a hardship, but that which we replace it with, this standing alone on our own possessions[307], and the more subjective self-stability thus acquired is also from another point of view only the abstract self-sufficiency of each. The individuality of heroic times is none the less of a more ideal type, because it does not declare itself as satisfied with the mere form of freedom and infinity, but remains in unalterable and immediate unity with all that is most substantial in the relations of spirit which it of itself endows with living actuality. In such an individuality the substantial is immediately individual, and the individual thereby himself essentially substantive.