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."--

THIRD CHAPTER.

_Religious Culture._

Sec. 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, aesthetic 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. I