--According to preconceived opinion, stubbornness and obstinacy claim that they are the foundation of character. But they may spring from weakness and indeterminateness, on which account one needs to be well on his guard. A gentle disposition, through enthusiasm for the Good, may attain to quite as great a firmness of will. Coarseness and meanness are on no account to be tolerated.--
§ 151. (3) We pass from the consideration of the culture of character to that of conscience. This is the relation which the moral agent makes between himself as manifestation and himself as idea. It compares itself, in its past or future, with its nature, and judges itself accordingly as good or bad. This independence of the ethical judgment is the soul proper of all morality, the negation of all self-deception and of all deception through another. The pedagogical maxim is: Be conscientious. Be in the last instance dependent only upon the conception which thou thyself hast of the idea of the Good!
--The self-criticism prompted by conscience hovers over all our historical actuality, and is the ground of all our rational progress. Fichte's stern words remain, therefore, eternally true: "He who has a bad character, must absolutely create for himself a better one."--
§ 152. Social culture contains the formal phase, moral culture the real phase, of the practical mind. Conscience forms the transition to religious culture. In its apodeictic nature, it is the absoluteness of spirit. The individual discerns in the depths of its own consciousness the determinations of universality and of necessity to which it has to subject itself. They appear to it as the voice of God. Religion makes its appearance as soon as the individual distinguishes the Absolute from himself as personal, as a subject existing for itself and therefore for him. The atheist remains at the stage of insight into the absoluteness of the logical and physical, æsthetic and practical categories. He may, therefore, be perfectly moral. He lacks religion, though he loves to characterize his uprightness by this name, and to transfer the dogmatic determinations of positive religion into the ethical sphere. It belongs to the province of religion that I demean myself towards the Absolute not only as toward that which is my own substance, and that in relation to it not I alone am the subject, but that to me also the substance in itself is a personal subject for itself. If I look upon myself as the only absolute, I make myself devoid of spiritual essence. I am only absolute self-consciousness, for which, because it as idea relates only to itself, there remains only the impulse to a persistent conflict with every self-consciousness not identical with it. Were this the case, such a self-consciousness would be only theoretical irony. In religion I know the Absolute as essence, when I am known by him. Everything else, myself included, is finite and transitory, however significant it may be, however relatively and momentarily the Infinite may exist in it. As existence even, it is transitory. The Absolute, positing itself, distinguishing itself from itself in unity with itself, is always like to itself, and takes up all the unrest of the phenomenal world back again into its simple essence.
