If abstraction rises to as great an eievation as possible, it arrives at two primary ideas, before which it is obliged to stop and to recognise its limits.  It distinguishes in man something that continues, and something that changes in cessantly.  That which continues it names his person; that which changes his position, his condition.

The person and the condition, I and my determinations, which we represent as one and the same thing in the neces sary being, are eternally distinct in the finite being.  Not withstanding all continuance in the person, the condition changes; in spite of all change of condition, the person remains.  We pass from rest to activity, from emotion to indifference, from assent to contradiction, but we are always we ourselves, and what immediately springs from ourselves remains.  It is only in the absolute subject that all his determinations continue with his personality.  All that Divinity is, it is because it is so; consequently it is eternally what it is, because it is eternal.

As the person and the condition are distinct in man, be cause he is a finite being, the condition cannot be founded on the person, nor the person on the condition.  Admitting the second case, the person would have to change; and in the former case, the condition would have to continue.  Thus in either supposition either the personality or the quality of a finite being would necessarily cease.  It is not because we think, feel, and will, that we are; it is not because we are that we think, feel, and will.  We are because we are.  We feel, think, and will, because there is out of us something that is not ourselves.

Consequently the person must have its principle of exist ence in itself because the permanent cannot be derived from the changeable, and thus we should be at once in possession of the idea of the absolute being, founded on itself; that is to say, of the idea of freedom.  The condition must have a foundation, and as it is not through the person, and is not therefore absolute, it must be a sequence and a result; and thus, in the second place, we should have arrived at the condition of every dependent being, of everything in the process of becoming something else:  that is, of the idea of time.  “Time is the necessary condition of all processes, of becoming (werden);” this is an indentical proposition, for it says nothing but this:  “That something may follow, there must be a succession.”

The person which manifests itself in the eternally continuing Ego, or I myself, and only in him, cannot become something or begin in time, because it is much rather time that must begin with him, because the permanent must serve as basis to the changeable.  That change may take place, something must change; this something cannot therefore be the change itself.  When we say the flower opens and fades, we make of this flower a permanent being in the midst of this transformation; we lend it, in some sort, a personality,