It is this sacrifice which constitutes the _motive_ principle of Love, the life and emotion of which is bound up wholly in a self-surrender. In consequence of this, if notwithstanding a man retains his consciousness of self in an act of such surrender, and just in this very annihilation of his personal independence attains to a truly positive self-subsistency, in that case he has left him at least in the feeling of this unity and its supreme happiness the negative aspect, the movement of Love's principle, not so much in a sense of sacrifice, as of a blessedness undeserved, which in despite of himself permits him still to feel his assured identity at unity with itself. The movement is the feeling of the dialectical contradiction, namely, to have surrendered personality and yet to remain in self-subsistent unity, a contradiction which is present in Love and eternally resolved in it. In so far, then, as the aspect of an individual _human_ state of soul-life is concerned in this universal condition we find that the unique Love, which blesses and discovers its heaven within it, tends to rise over all that is finite and the specific individuality of character, which lapses into a position of insignificance. Already we have observed that the divine ideals of sculpture pass into one another, always provided, however, that they are not wrested from the content and province of that original and immediate type of individuality; and yet it must be admitted that this individuality remains the essential form of the mode of presentment. In this later pure gleam of blessedness, however, particularity is on the contrary cancelled. Before God all men are equal, or rather piety makes them actually equal, so that the sole point of importance is the expression of love in the concentrated focus above depicted, and which has no further need of happiness, or this or that particular object. No doubt religious Love, too, requires definite individuals as a condition of its existence, which possess also, apart from this experience, other spheres of existence; for the reason, however, that this soul-possessed state of intimate life supplies the really ideal content, the expression and reality of such are not to be found in the isolated distinctions of character, its talents, conditions, and fortunes, but are rather lifted above the same. When consequently nowadays we hear people make a regard for distinctions in the soul-life of different persons a matter of first importance in education, and in that which is the essential requirement of each man individually, from which we deduce the fundamental thesis that every one will and indeed inevitably must act differently in a given case, such a position directly clashes with the fact of the love of religion, in which all such diversities of individual life fall into the background. Conversely, however, individual characterization now, precisely for the reason that it