Broadly speaking, we may, therefore, affirm that the true theme of primitive tragedy is the godlike.[26] But by godlike we do not mean the Divine, as implied in the content of the religious consciousness simply as such, but rather as it enters into the world, into individual action, and enters in such a way that it does not forfeit its substantive character under this mode of realization, nor find itself converted into the contradiction of its own substance.[27] In this form the spiritual substance of volition and accomplishment is ethical life.[28] For what is ethical, if we grasp it, in its direct consistency--that is to say, not exclusively from the standpoint of personal reflection as formal morality--is the divine in its secular or world realization, the substantive as such, the particular no less than the essential features of which supply the changing content of truly human actions, and in such action itself render this their essence explicit and actual. (_ββ_) These ethical forces, as also the characters of the action, are _distinctively defined_ in respect to their content and their individual personality, in virtue of the principle of differentiation to which everything is subject, which forms part of the objective world of things. If, then, these particular forces, in the way presupposed by dramatic poetry, are attached to the external expression of human activity, and are realized as the determinate aim of a human pathos which passes into action, their concordancy is cancelled, and they are asserted _in contrast_ to each other in interchangeable succession. Individual action will then, under given conditions, realize an object or character, which, under such a presupposed state, inevitably stimulates the presence of a pathos[29] opposed to itself, because it occupies a position of unique isolation in virtue of its independently fixed definition, and, by doing so, brings in its train unavoidable conflicts. Primitive tragedy, then, consists in this, that within a collision of this kind both sides of the contradiction, if taken by themselves, are _justified_; yet, from a further point of view, they tend to carry into effect the true and positive content of their end and specific characterization merely as the negation and _violation_ of the other equally legitimate power, and consequently in their ethical purport and relatively to this so far fall under _condemnation._