individual, its highest actuality; and every particular quality, into which honour is reflected and appropriates as its own is by virtue of this show exalted itself to an infinite worth. This type of honour constitutes a fundamental determinant in the romantic world, and presupposes that man has not merely passed beyond the limits of purely religious conception and inward life, but actually entered the arena of the great world and makes itself vital in the material of the same simply by virtue of the pure medium of its personal self-subsistence and absolute intension[246]. The _content_ of honour may be of the most varied kind. For everything that I am, do, or is done to me by others affects my honour. We may consequently reckon within its boundaries the out and out substantive itself, loyalty towards princes, fatherland, a man's profession, fulfilment of obligations, marital fidelity, integrity in business affairs and conscientiousness in scientific research. For the point of view of honour, however, all these essentially valid and veritable relations are neither sanctioned nor recognized in and through themselves, but only so far as the individual reposes in them his personal relation and makes them thereby matters affecting his honour. A man of honour consequently always thinks first of all about himself, and the question for him is not if anything is on principle right or not, but whether it is the right thing for him to do, whether it becomes him then as a man of honour to make himself master in it and to stand by it. And consequently he may also perpetrate the worst actions and still be a man of honour. He creates at the same time objects at will, imagines himself of a specific character, and appropriates to himself, both as he sees himself and is seen by others, that which in the natural order of things has nothing to do with him at all. Even then it is not the natural fact, but the personal view of it which places difficulties and devolutions in the path, because it has become an affair of honour to maintain that character. So, to take an example, Donna Diana conceives it to be derogatory to her honour to confess in any way the love she feels, because she has pledged herself not to listen to love. In general we may say, then, that the content of love is at the mercy of accident, because its validity depends purely on the personal attitude, and is not directed by that which is the essential mode of the inner life itself. For this reason we may observe that in romantic representations on the one hand that which is on principle justifiable is expressed as the _law_ of honour, the individual associating with the consciousness of right at the same time the infinite self-conscious unit of his personality. What is then expressed by the statement that honour makes such and such a demand, or forbids it, is this that the entire personal attitude of consciousness implants itself within the content of such a demand or