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This unity is individuality, but it is not a simple unit as is the individuality of imaginative thought, but a unit in terms of the conception (“Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences,” §§112–114). In other words, this individuality is properly nothing else than the conception. The first two elements of the will, that it can abstract itself from everything, and that it is definite through either its own activity or something else, are easily admitted and comprehended, because in their separation they are untrue, and characteristic of the mere understanding.

I am of a certain age, height, in this space, and so on. Thus a person is at one and the same time so exalted and so lowly a thing. In him is the unity of infinite and finite, of limit and unlimited. The dignity of personality can sustain a contradiction, which neither contains nor could tolerate anything natural. 36. (1) Personality implies, in general, a capacity to possess rights, and constitutes the conception and abstract basis of abstract right. This right, being abstract, must be formal also.

A man, who is implicitly rational, must create himself by working through and out of himself and by reconstructing himself within himself, before he can become also explicitly rational. 11. The will, which is at first only implicitly free, is the direct or natural will. The distinctive phases, which the self-determining conception sets up in the will, appear in the direct will, as a directly present content. They are impulses, appetites, inclinations, by which the will finds itself determined by nature.