Reason

^'805' With absolute knowledge, Spirit has wound up the process of its embodiment, so far as the assumption of those various shapes or modes is affected with the insurmountable distinction which consciousness implies [i.e. the distinction of consciousness from its object or content].

Spirit has attained the pure element of its existence, the notion.

The content is, in view of the freedom of its own existence, the self that empties (externalizes) itself.

In other words, that content is the immediate unity of self-knowledge. The pure process of thus externalizing itself constitutes – when we consider this process in its content – the necessity of this content.

The diversity of content is, qua determinate, due to relation, and is not inherent; and its restless activity consists in cancelling and superseding itself, or is negativity.

Thus the necessity or diversity, like its free existence, is the self too.

• In this self-form, in which existence is immediately thought, the content is a notion.

Seeing, then, that Spirit has attained the notion, it unfolds its existence and develops its processes in this ether of its life and is (Philosophical) Science.(9)

The moments of its process are set forth therein no longer as determinate modes or shapes of consciousness, but – since the distinction, which consciousness implies, has reverted to and has become a distinction within the self – as determinate notions, and as the organic self-explaining and self-constituted process of these notions.

In the Phenomenology of Mind, each moment is the distinction of knowledge and truth. It is the process in which that distinction is canceled and transcended.

Absolute Knowledge does not contain this distinction and supersession of distinction. Rather, since each moment has the form of the notion, it unites the objective form of truth and the knowing self in an immediate unity.

Each individual moment does not appear as the process of passing back and forward from consciousness or figurative (imaginative) thought to self-consciousness and conversely.

On the contrary, the pure shape, liberated from the condition of being an appearance in mere consciousness, – the pure notion with its further development, – depends solely on its pure characteristic nature.

Conversely, again, there corresponds to every abstract moment of Absolute Knowledge a mode in which mind as a whole makes its appearance.

As the mind that actually exists is not richer than it,(10) so, too, mind in its actual content is not poorer.

To know the pure notions of knowledge in the form in which they are modes or shapes of consciousness – this constitutes the aspect of their reality, according to which their essential element, the notion, appearing there in its simple mediating activity as thinking, breaks up and separates the moments of this mediation and exhibits them to itself in accordance with their immanent opposition.

^'806' Absolute Knowledge contains within itself this necessity of relinquishing itself from notion, and necessarily involves the transition of the notion into consciousness.

For Spirit that knows itself is, just for the reason that it grasps its own notion, immediate identity with itself; and this, in the distinction that it implies, is the certainty of what is immediate or is sense-consciousness – the beginning from which we started. This process of releasing itself from the form of its self is the highest freedom and security of its knowledge of itself.

^'807' All the same, this relinquishment (externalization) of self is still incomplete. This process expresses the relation of the certainty of its self to the object, an object which, just by being in a relation, has not yet attained its full freedom. Knowledge is aware not only of itself, but also of the negative of itself, or its limit.

Knowing its limit means knowing how to sacrifice itself. This sacrifice is the self-abandonment, in which Spirit sets forth, in the form of free fortuitous happening, its process of becoming Spirit, intuitively apprehending outside it its pure self as Time, and likewise its existence as Space.(11)

This last form into which Spirit passes, Nature, is its living immediate process of development. Nature-Spirit divested of self (externalized) – is, in its actual existence, nothing but this eternal process of abandoning its (Nature’s) own independent subsistence, and the movement which reinstates Subject.

^'808' The other aspect, however, in which Spirit comes into being, History, is the process of becoming in terms of knowledge, a conscious self-mediating process – Spirit externalized and emptied into Time. But this form of abandonment is, similarly, the emptying of itself by itself; the negative is negative of itself.

This way of becoming presents a slow procession and succession of spiritual shapes (Geistern), a gallery of pictures, each of which is endowed with the entire wealth of Spirit, and moves so slowly just for the reason that the self has to permeate and assimilate all this wealth of its substance.

Since its accomplishment consists in Spirit knowing what it is, in fully comprehending its substance, this knowledge means its concentrating itself on itself (Insichgehen), a state in which Spirit leaves its external existence behind and gives its embodiment over to Recollection (Erinnerung).

In thus concentrating itself on itself, Spirit is engulfed in the night of its own self-consciousness; its vanished existence is, however, conserved therein; and this superseded existence – the previous state, but born anew from the womb of knowledge – is the new stage of existence, a new world, and a new embodiment or mode of Spirit.

Here it has to begin all over again at its immediacy,(12) as freshly as before, and thence rise once more to the measure of its stature, as if , for it, all that preceded were lost, and as if it had learned nothing from the experience of the spirits that preceded.

But re-collection (Er-innerung) has conserved that experience. and is the inner being, and, in fact, the higher form of the substance. While, then, this phase of Spirit begins all over again its formative development, apparently starting solely from itself, yet at the same time it commences at a higher level.

The realm of spirits developed in this way, and assuming definite shape in existence, constitutes a succession, where one detaches and sets loose the other, and each takes over from its predecessor the empire of the spiritual world.

The goal of the process is the revelation of the depth of spiritual life, and this is the Absolute Notion. This revelation consequently means superseding its “depth”, is its “extension” or spatial embodiment, the negation of this inwardly self-centred (insichseiend) ego – a negativity which is its self-relinquishment, its externalization, or its substance: and this revelation is also its temporal embodiment, in that this externalization in its very nature relinquishes (externalizes) itself, and so exists at once in its spatial extension” as well as in its “depth” or the self.

The goal, which is Absolute Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit, finds its pathway in the recollection of spiritual forms (Geister) as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom.

Their conservation, looked at from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History.

• Looked at from the side of their intellectually comprehended organization, it is the Science of the ways in which knowledge appears.(13)

Both together, or History (intellectually) comprehended (begriffen), form at once the recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit, the reality, the truth, the certainty of its throne, without which it were lifeless, solitary, and alone. Only