heaven's first law. Self-assertion, however, is
nothing but the operation of communicated and committed animation, and
self-preservation nothing but the postponement of the day of surrender.
Self-preservation is impossible; self-assertion is a challenge to the
assertiveness of other selves, as well as a hastener of dissolution. The
self follows its native bent, and its native impulse is for expansion;
but it thus, as a fraction, leaves, on its centrifugal path, the course
of the great world spirit from which it separates; and as both a
separate entity and a member of a community it must, in its attempt at
self-realization, meet the constraint which the community, whose only
object is likewise self-realization and self-preservation, puts upon all
within its power. The law is negative and repressive, self-interest is
positive and assertive; between the two there is no possible
reconciliation--at most a compromise--so that in the last analysis it
appears that the assertion of individual will as such is immoral, that
is, contrary to the will of the community; and is sinful, for it is not
the will of God, but the will of a particularized individual, however
godly he may be. There are differences in degree, but not in kind, among
immoralities and sins, with corresponding degrees of punitive
repression; but the potential tragic conflict is constant, and there is
as little doubt about the eminent domain of the State as about the
supremacy of God.

The laws of God are changeless and eternal, but human morality is a
local and temporal development. As the character of an individual is the
product of disposition and experience, so his fate is humanly determined
by the particular forms of custom and law established in the community
in which his lot is cast. But these change from time to time, and in
periods of change the disparity between public and private interest is
most conspicuous: the progressive individual bears not only the burden
of proof but also the dead weight of public inertia. Only at infinity
can the parallel antithetical interests coincide. Nevertheless, the
world gradually effects self-correction by the evolution of new
syntheses from the thesis and antithesis ever and anon presented for
trial and judgment as between liberal and conservative forces.

Hebbel's drama, then, is the representation of a process, the process of
life, by which things come into being. It reveals the individual in the
making, and discusses