The idea of a unit or a One is, to begin with, something wholly abstract; these units get a still deeper meaning when they are expressed in terms of Spirit since they are characterised as persons. Personality is something which is essentially based on freedom, freedom in its first, deepest, most inward form, but also in its most abstract form as the freedom which proclaims its presence in the subject by saying, I am a person, I exist for myself. This is isolation pure and simple, a condition of pure reserve.
When, therefore, these differences are defined thus, and each is taken as a unit, or in fact as a person, owing to the infinite form according to which each moment is regarded as a subject, the difficulty of satisfying the demand of the Idea that these differences should be regarded as differences which are not different, but are purely one, and that this difference should be abolished, appears to be still more insurmountable.
Two cannot be one; each person has a rigid, reserved, independent, self-centred existence. Logic shows that the category of the unit is a poor category, a wholly abstract unit. But when we are dealing with personality, the contradiction seems to be pushed so far as to be incapable of any solution; still the solution is contained in the fact that there is only one person, and this threefold personality, this personality which is consequently posited merely as a vanishing moment, expresses the truth that the antithesis is an absolute one, and is not to be taken as an inferior antithesis, and that it is just exactly when it has got to this point it abolishes itself. It is, in short, the nature or character of what we mean by person or subject to abolish its isolation, its separateness.
Morality, love, just mean the giving up of particularity or of the particular personality and its extension to universality, and so, too, is it with the family and friendship, for there you have the identity of the one with the other. Inasmuch as I act rightly towards another, I consider him as identical with myself. In friendship and
