and divine forces, such as duty, love to fatherland, parents, wife, relations, and the like. If, however, this essential content of human feeling and activity is to assert itself as dramatic it must in its specialization _confront_ us as distinct ends, so that in every case the action will inevitably meet with obstruction in its relation to other active individuals, and fall into subjection to changing conditions and contradictions, which alternately prejudice the success of their own particular fulfilment. The genuine content, the essential operative energy throughout may therefore very well be the eternal forces, the essentially explicit ethical State, the gods of vital reality, in a word the divine and the true, but it is not these in the might of their tranquillity, in that condition, so to speak, wherein the unmoved gods abide, saved from all action, as some serene figures of sculpture self-absorbed in a state of blessedness. What we have here is the divine in its community, as content, that is, and object of human personality, as concrete existence in its realization,[2] invited to act and charged with movement. If, however, as above described, the godlike presence constitutes the most vital objective truth in the external precipitate[3] of human action, then, _thirdly_, the deciding factor in the course and original departure of such an evolution and conflict cannot reside with particular individuals, which are placed in a relation of opposition to one another; it must be referred to the divine presence itself, regarded as essential totality: and for this reason, the drama, it matters not in what form it may be shaped, will have to propound to us the vital energy of a principle of Necessity which is essentially self-supporting, and capable of resolving every conflict and contradiction.