The spirit of revealed religion has not yet overcome its consciousness as such, or, what amounts to the same thing, its actual self-consciousness is not the object of its consciousness. Spirit itself and the moments differentiated in it generally belong to representational thinking and the form of objectivity. The content of the representational thinking is absolute spirit, and the sole remaining issue is that of sublating this mere form, or instead, because the form belongs to consciousness as such, its truth must have already resulted from the shapes consciousness has assumed. – The overcoming of the object of consciousness is not to be taken one-sidedly, as showing that the object is returning into the self, but rather, it is to be taken more determinately, both that the object as such exhibited itself to the self as vanishing, as well as being instead the self-relinquishing of self-consciousness that posits thinghood, and that this self-relinquishing does not only have a negative meaning but rather a positive one as well, and not only for us, or in itself, but also for self-consciousness itself. For self-consciousness, the negative of the object, or its self-sublating, has as a result a positive meaning. Self-consciousness knows this nullity of the object as a result, on the one hand, of self-consciousness relinquishing itself of itself – for in this self-relinquishing, it posits itself as object, or, on account of the inseparable unity of being-for-itself, it posits the object as itself. On the other hand, there is at the same time thereby this other moment, that self-consciousness has equally as well also sublated this self-relinquishing and this objectivity, and it has taken them back into itself; thus in its otherness as such, it is at one with itself.1 – This is the movement of consciousness, and in that movement, consciousness is the totality of its moments. – Consciousness must likewise conduct itself towards the object according to the totality of its determinations and have come to grips with the object according to each of those determinations. This totality of its determinations makes the object in itself into a spiritual essence, and for consciousness, it becomes this in truth through the grasping of each of its singular determinations as a determination of the self, or through the spiritual conduct mentioned above.
The object is therefore in part immediate being, or a thing per se, something which corresponds to immediate consciousness. In part, it is a coming-to-be-the-other of itself, its relation, or being for an other and being-for-itself, the determinateness – which corresponds to perception, – and, in part, it is essence, or the universal – which corresponds to the understanding. The object as a whole is the syllogism, or the movement of the universal into singular individuality by way of determination, as well as the converse movement from singular individuality to the universal by way of sublated singularity, or determination. – Consciousness must therefore know the object as itself according to these three determinations. However, we are not speaking here of knowing as a pure conceptual comprehension of the object; rather, this knowing is supposed to be shown only in its coming-to-be, or in its moments according to the aspects which belong to consciousness as such and according to the moments of the genuine concept, or of pure knowing in the form of the figurations of consciousness. For that reason, the object does not yet appear in consciousness as such as the spiritual essentiality in the way that we just expressed it, and the conduct of consciousness in regard to the object is neither that of considering it in this totality as such, nor that of considering it in its purely conceptual form. Rather, it is in part a shape of consciousness per se and in part a number of such shapes that we gather together, in which the totality of the moments of the object and of the conduct of consciousness can be pointed out only as having been dissolved in the totality's moments.
Consequently, for the grasp of the object as that grasp is in the shape of consciousness, one needs only to recall the previous shapes of consciousness which have already come before us. – Thus, with regard to the object, insofar as it is immediate and is an indifferent being, we saw observing reason seeking and finding itself in these indifferent things, i.e., as consciously aware of its doing as external doing as much as it is consciously aware of the object only as an immediate object. – We also saw its determination at its highest point expressed in the infinite judgment that the being of the I is a thing. – namely, as a sensuous immediate thing. If the I is called the soul, then it is also represented as a thing, but as an invisible, infallible, etc., thing and therefore in fact not represented as immediate being and not as what is understood to be a thing at all – Taken in that way, that former judgment is spiritless, or instead spiritlessness itself. However, according to its concept, it is in fact the richest in spirit, and this, its inner, which is not yet present in the concept, is what is expressed in the two other moments which are still to be examined.
The thing is I: In fact, in this infinite judgment, the thing is sublated. The thing is nothing in itself; it only has any meaning in relationships, only through the I and its relation to the I. – In fact, this moment emerged for consciousness in pure insight and Enlightenment. Things are purely and simply useful and are only to be considered according to their utility. – The culturally formed and educated self-consciousness, which traversed the world of self-alienated spirit, has through its self-relinquishing created the thing as itself. It thus still retains itself in the thing, and it knows the thing to have no self-sufficiency, or it knows that the thing is essentially only being for others. Or, because it knows that it has fully expressed the relationship, or what here solely constitutes the nature of the object, the thing thus counts, to the cultured consciousness, as a being-for-itself. It thus expresses sensuous-certainty as absolute truth, but it expresses this being-for-itself as itself a moment which only disappears and passes over into its opposite, into being for an other in the sense of being at the disposal of an other.
However, knowing the thing has not yet therein reached its completion. The thing must become known not only according to the immediacy of being and its determinateness, but also as the essence, or as the inner, as the self. This is present in moral self-consciousness. This knows its knowing as the absolute essentiality, or knows being utterly as the pure will or pure knowing. Moral self-consciousness is nothing but just this willing and this knowing; anything else corresponds to only inessential being, i.e., not being existing-in-itself but only its empty husk, inasmuch that in its representational thought of the world, moral consciousness unchains existence from the self, it just as much takes this existence back again into itself. As conscience, it finally no longer switches back and forth between taking a position, then hedging about its position, and then dissembling about existence and the self. Rather, it knows that its existence as such is this pure certainty of itself. The objective element into which it injects itself when it acts, is nothing but the self's pure knowing of itself.
These are the moments out of which the reconciliation of spirit with its own genuine consciousness composes itself. For themselves, those moments are singular, and it is their spiritual unity alone which constitutes the force of this reconciliation. However, the last of these moments is necessarily this unity itself, and, as it has become clear, it in fact combines them all into itself. Spirit certain of itself in its existence has as the element of its existence nothing but this knowing of itself: Nothing but its expression that what it does, it does out of the conviction of duty, and that this, its language, is what makes its acting count as valid. – Acting is both the first division existing-in-itself of the simplicity of the concept and the return from out of this division. This first movement rolls over into the second, while the element of recognition posits itself as simple knowing of duty in contrast to the difference and the estrangement which lie in action as such, and, in this manner, it forms an ironclad actuality confronting action. However, in forgiveness we saw how this hardness itself drains itself and then relinquishes itself. For self-consciousness, actuality as well as immediate existence therefore have here no other meaning than that they are pure knowing: – as determinate existence, or as a relation, is that which is standing over against itself partly a knowing of this purely singular self and partly a knowing of knowing as universal. At the same time, it is therein posited that the third moment, universality, or the essence, counts only as knowing for each of the two which are confronting the other. They finally sublate the empty opposition which still remains, and they are the knowing of the “I = I”: this singular individual self which is immediately pure knowing, or is the universal.
This reconciliation of consciousness with self-consciousness is thereby shown to have been brought about from two sides; at one time in the religious spirit and again in consciousness itself as such. They are differentiated from each other in that the former is this reconciliation in the form of being-in-itself, the latter in the form of being-for-itself. As they have been examined, they initially come undone from each other. In the order in which the shapes of consciousness came before us, consciousness had partly come around to the singular moments of that order and their unification long before religion had given its object the shape of actual self-consciousness. The unification of both aspects has not yet been shown; that unification wraps up this series of shapes of spirit, for in it spirit arrives at the point where it knows itself not only as it is in itself, or according to its absolute content, and not only as it is for itself according to its contentless form, or according to the aspect of self-consciousness. Rather, it knows itself as it is in and for itself.
However, this unification has in itself already come to pass, indeed in religion, in the return of representational thought into self-consciousness, but it has not come to pass according to its genuine form, for the religious aspect is the aspect of the in-itself which stands in contrast to that of self-consciousness. The unification thus belongs to this other aspect, which, in that opposition, is the aspect of the reflective turn into itself and is what contains both itself and its opposite not only in itself, or in a general way, but also for itself, or as developed and differentiated. Both the content, as well as the other aspect of self-conscious spirit to the extent that it is the other aspect, are now present in their completeness and have been pointed out. The unification that is still lacking is the simple unity of the concept. This concept is itself also already present in the aspect of self-consciousness, but, just as it previously came before us, it has, like all the other moments, the form of being a particular shape of consciousness. – It is that part of the shape of self-certain spirit which comes to a standstill in its concept and which was called the beautiful soul. The beautiful soul is its own knowing of itself in its pure and transparent unity – the self-consciousness that knows this pure knowing of pure inwardly-turned-being as spirit – not only the intuition of the divine but the divine's self-intuition. – While this concept steadfastly holds itself in opposition to its realization, it is the one-sided shape which we saw not only disappear into thin air but also positively relinquish itself and move forward. Through this realization, this steadfast-insistence-on-oneself on the part of that objectless self-consciousness, or the determinateness of the concept in contrast to its fulfillment, is sublated. Its self-consciousness achieves the form of universality and what remains for it is its genuinely true concept, the concept which has attained its realization. That self-consciousness is the concept in its truth, or in the unity with its self-relinquishing. – It is the knowing of pure knowing not as abstract essence, which is what duty is – but the knowing of this pure knowing as an essence which is this knowing, this pure self-consciousness, which is therefore at the same time the genuinely true object, for this concept is the self existing-for-itself.
This concept gave itself its fulfillment, on the one hand, in the acting spirit certain of itself, and, on the other hand, in religion. In the latter, it gained the absolute content as content, or in the form of representational thought, of otherness for consciousness. In the former shape, on the contrary, the form is the self itself, for it contains the acting spirit certain of itself, the self putting the life of absolute spirit into practice.2 As we see, this shape is that former simple concept, but one which surrenders its eternal essence and is the concept which is there,3 or acts. The concept has its estrangement, or its emerging from behind, in the purity of the concept, for this purity is the absolute abstraction, or negativity. The concept just as much finds the element of its actuality, or its being, in the concept, in pure knowing itself, for this pure knowing is the simple immediacy which is as much being and existence as it is essence. The former is negative thinking, the latter is positive thinking itself. This existence is finally just as much the being-reflected-into-itself either from out of pure knowing – whether as existence or as duty – or from out of being evil. This taking-the-inward-turn constitutes the opposition of the concept and is thereby the appearance on the scene of the non-acting, non-actual pure knowing of essence. However, its coming on the scene in this opposition is its participation in the opposition; the pure knowing of essence has in itself relinquished itself of its simplicity, for it is estrangement, or the negativity that is the concept. Inasmuch as this estrangement is the coming-to-be-for-itself, it is what is evil; insofar as it is the in-itself, it is what remains good. – Now, what initially occurs in itself is at the same time for consciousness and is equally itself doubled, equally as much for consciousness as its being-for-itself, or is its own doing. The same thing which is already posited in itself thus now repeats itself as the knowing of consciousness of it and as a conscious doing. For the other, each gives up the self-sufficiency of determinateness in which it comes on the scene vis-à-vis the other. This giving up of self-sufficiency is the same renunciation of the one-sidedness of the concept which in itself constituted the beginning, but it is henceforth its own renunciation, just as the concept which it renounces is its own concept. – As negativity, that former in-itself of the beginning is in truth just as much the mediated in-itself, and it therefore now posits itself as it is in truth; and as the determinateness which each has in itself and for the other, the negative is self-sublating. One of the two parts of the opposition is the inequality between inwardly-turned-being-in-its-singular-individuality4 and universality – the other is the inequality between its abstract universality and the self. The former dies unto its being-for-itself, relinquishes itself and confesses; the latter disavows the rigidity of its abstract universality and thereby dies unto its self devoid of liveliness and its unmoved universality. The result is that the former replenishes itself through the moment of universality which is the essence, and the latter replenishes itself through the universality which is the self. Through this movement of acting, spirit – which is only spirit because it is there,5 because it elevates its existence into thoughts and thereby into the absolute opposition, and because it then returns into itself just through and in that opposition – comes forth as the pure universality of knowing which is self-consciousness, as the self-consciousness which is the simple unity of knowing.
797. What in religion was content, or the form of representing an other, is here the self's own doing. The concept makes it binding that the content is that of the self's own doing. – For this concept is, as we see, the knowing of the self's doing within itself as all essentiality and all existence, the knowing of this subject as substance and of the substance as this knowing of its doing. – Our sole contribution here is partly to gather together the singular moments, each of which in its principle exhibits the life of the whole spirit, and partly to hold onto the concept in the form of the concept, whose content would already itself have yielded to these moments and to the form of a shape of consciousness.
This last shape of spirit is that of absolute knowing, the spirit which at the same time gives to its complete and true content the form of the self, and as a result realizes its concept as well as remaining within its concept in this realization. It is spirit knowing itself in the shape of spirit, or it is comprehending conceptual knowing.6 Here truth is not only in itself completely the same as certainty, but it also has the shape of certainty of itself, or it is in its existence, which is to say, for the knowing spirit, in the form of knowing itself. Truth is the content, which in religion is not as yet the same as its certainty. However, this equality consists in the content receiving the shape of the self. As a result, what has come to be the element of existence, or the form of objectivity, is for consciousness what the essence itself is, namely, the concept. Spirit, appearing to consciousness in this element, or, what amounts to the same thing here, what is therein engendered by it, is science.
The nature, moments, and movement of this knowing have thus turned out to be such that this knowing is the pure being-for-itself of self-consciousness; it is the I, which is this I and no other, and it is just as much the immediately mediated, or the sublated, universal I. – It has a content that it differentiates from itself, for it is pure negativity, or the self-estranging; it is consciousness. In its differences, this content is itself the I, for it is the movement of itself sublating itself, or the same pure negativity which is the I. The I is in that content as differentiated, as having taken a reflective turn into itself. The content is as a result only conceptually comprehended7 when, in its otherness, the I is at one with itself.8 More determinately stated, this content is nothing but the very movement just spoken of, for the content is the spirit that traverses through itself, indeed for itself as spirit in its having the shape of the concept in its objectivity.
800. However, with regards to the existence of this concept, science does not appear in time and in actuality until spirit has reached this consciousness about itself. As the spirit that knows what it is, it does not exist any earlier, nor does it even exist anywhere at all until after it has completed the labor of compelling its incomplete shapes to provide for its consciousness the shape of its essence, and in this manner to bring its self-consciousness in balance with its consciousness. – The spirit existing in and for itself differentiated into its moments is knowing existing-for-itself, is conceptually comprehending9 per se, which as such has not yet reached the substance, or is not in itself absolute knowing.
Now, in actuality the substance that is knowing is there earlier than the form, or the conceptual shape10 of the substance that is knowing. For the substance is the still undeveloped in-itself, or the ground and concept in its still unmoved simplicity, and it is therefore the inwardness, or the self of spirit which is not yet there.11 What is there is the still undeveloped simple and immediate, that is, the object of representational thinking consciousness per se. Cognizing, because it is spiritual consciousness, is that to which what is in itself is only to the extent that it is as being for the self and being of the self, or is concept. For this reason cognizing initially has only a meager object in contrast to which the substance and the consciousness of this substance are richer. The revealedness which the substance has in this consciousness is in fact concealment, for the substance is the still self-less being, and what is revealed is, to it, only the certainty of itself. Hence, initially it is only the abstract moments which belong to substance's self-consciousness. However, while as pure movements these moments impel themselves forward, self-consciousness enriches itself until it has wrested the entire substance from consciousness and has absorbed into itself the entire structure of the substance's essentialities, and – while this negative conduct towards objectivity is equally positive, is a positing – it has created these elements from out of itself and has thereby at the same time produced them for consciousness. In the concept which knows itself as the concept, the moments thereby come on the scene prior to the fulfilled whole, whose coming-to-be is the movement of those moments. In contrast, in consciousness the whole is prior to the moments, but not as conceptually comprehended.12 – Time is the concept itself that is there and is represented to consciousness as empty intuition. Consequently, spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time as long as it does not grasp its pure concept, which is to say, as long as it does not erase time. Time is the pure self externally intuited by the self but not grasped by the self; it is only the intuited concept. As this concept grasps itself, it sublates its temporal form, conceptually comprehends the intuiting, and is conceptually comprehended and conceptually comprehending intuiting.13 – Time thus appears as the destiny and necessity of the spirit that is not yet completed within itself. – It appears as the necessity to enrich the participation self-consciousness has in consciousness and to set into motion the immediacy of the in-itself – the form in which the substance is in consciousness – or, conversely, if the in-itself is taken as inwardness, it is to realize and to reveal what is at first inward, or vindicate it for spirit's certainty of itself.
For this reason, it must be said that nothing is known that is not in experience, or, as it can be otherwise expressed, nothing is known that is not available as felt truth, as the eternal which is inwardly revealed, as the holy which is the object of faith, or whatever expressions are otherwise put to use. For experience consists in precisely this, namely, that the content – and the content is spirit – is in itself, is substance and is therefore the object of consciousness. However, this substance, which is spirit, is its coming-to-be what it, the substance, is in itself; and it is as this coming-to-be which is taking a reflective turn into itself that spirit is truly in itself spirit. Spirit is in itself the movement which is cognition – the transformation of that former in-itself into for-itself, of substance into subject, of the object of consciousness into the object of self-consciousness, i.e., into an object that is just as much sublated, or into the concept. This transformation is the circle returning back into itself, which presupposes its beginning and reaches its beginning only at the end. – Inasmuch as spirit therefore is necessarily this differentiating within itself, its intuited whole confronts its simple self-consciousness, and since that whole is what is differentiated, it is thus differentiated into its intuited pure concept, into time, and into the content, or into the in-itself. Substance, as subject, has in it the initial inward necessity of exhibiting itself in its own self as what it is in itself,14 as spirit. The completed objective exhibition is at the same time only the reflection of substance, or substance becoming the self. – Hence, as long as spirit has not in itself brought itself to completion as the world-spirit, it cannot attain its completion as self-conscious spirit. For that reason, the content of religion expresses what spirit is earlier in time than science does, but it is science alone which is spirit's true knowing of itself.
803. The movement of propelling forward the form of its self-knowing is the work which spirit accomplishes as actual history. The religious community,15 inasmuch as it is initially the substance of absolute spirit, is the coarse consciousness which has an existence all the more harsh and barbaric as its inner spirit is deeper, and whose dull and expressionless self has an even more difficult labor in dealing with its essence, with the alien content of its consciousness. Not until it has abandoned the hope of sublating alienness in an external, i.e., alien, manner, does that consciousness in itself (because the sublated alien mode is the return into self-consciousness) appeal to its own world and present time, discover that world to be its own property, and thus will have taken the first step to climb down from the intellectual world, or, instead, to give spirit16 to the abstract element of the intellectual world with the actual self. On the one hand, through observation, it finds existence as thought, and it conceptually comprehends existence, and, conversely, it finds existence in its thinking. While it has itself initially and abstractly expressed the immediate unity of thought and being, of abstract essence and the self, and while it has expressed the luminous essence more purely, namely, as the unity of extension and being – for extension is a simplicity more equal to pure thought than is light – and has thereby again revived in thought the substance of the easterly dawn, then, at the same time, spirit recoils from this abstract unity, from this self-less substantiality, and affirms individuality against it. However, only after spirit in its cultural formation and education has emptied itself of this self-less substantiality and as a result has made it into existence and infused all existence with it – and after it has arrived at the thought of utility, and in absolute freedom, has it grasped existence as its will. At that point spirit thereby turns around the thoughts lying in its innermost depths and pronounces the essence as the “I = I.” However, this “I = I” is the self-reflecting movement, for while this equality as absolute negativity is the absolute difference, the self-equality of the I confronts this pure difference. This pure difference, which is at the same time as something objective to the self knowing itself, is to be expressed as time, so that just as the essence used to be expressed as the unity of thinking and extension, it could here be interpreted as the unity of thinking and time. However, the self-surrendered difference, namely, time that is unresting and unhalting, instead collapses into itself; it is the objective motionlessness of extension, but this extension is the pure equality with itself, is the I. – Or, the I is not only the self but rather is also the equality of the self with itself. However, this equality is the complete and immediate unity with itself, or this subject is just as much substance. Substance solely for itself would be intuition devoid of content, or the intuition of a content which, as determinate, would only be accidental, or devoid of any necessity. The substance would only count as the absolute insofar as the substance was to be thought of, or intuited as, absolute unity, and all content would according to its diversity have to fall outside of substance; it would fall into reflection, which would not belong to substance because substance would then not be subject, would not be itself what is taking a reflective turn into itself and reflecting about itself, or would not be conceived as spirit. However much one were nonetheless to speak of a content, such content would still be, on the one hand, spoken of only in order to cast it into the empty abyss of the absolute content, while on the other hand, it would be externally gathered up from out of sensuous perception. Knowing would seem to have arrived at things, at what is different from itself, and at the differences among multiple things without having conceptually grasped how it got there or from where it came.
However, spirit has shown itself to us to be neither the mere withdrawal of self-consciousness into its pure inwardness, nor the mere immersion of self-consciousness into substance and the non-being of its difference. Rather, it has shown itself to be this movement of the self which relinquishes itself of itself and immerses itself in its substance, and which likewise, as subject, has both taken the inward turn into itself from out of that substance and has made its substance into an object and a content, just as it has sublated this difference between objectivity and content. That first reflection from out of immediacy is the subject's differentiating itself from its substance, or it is the concept estranging itself, taking-the-inward-turn, and is the coming-to-be of the pure I. While this difference is the pure doing of the “I = I,” the concept is both the necessity and the sunrise of existence which has that substance for its essence and which stably is for itself. However, the stability of existence17 for itself is the concept posited into determinateness, and as a result is likewise the concept's movement in its own self, downwards into the simple substance, which, as this negativity and this movement, is initially subject. – Nor does the I have to obstinately hold onto itself in the form of self-consciousness against the form of substantiality and objectivity, as if it were afraid of its self-relinquishing; the force of spirit lies instead in remaining equal to itself in its self-relinquishing, and as what is existing-in and existing-for-itself, being-for-itself is equally as well only to be posited as a moment just like being-in-itself. – Nor is the I a mediating third, which tosses the differences back into the abyss of the absolute difference and in this abyss declares them all to be equal. On the contrary, knowing consists in this seeming inactivity which only examines how the differentiated in its own self moves itself and how it returns back into its unity.
Therefore, in this knowing, spirit has brought to a close the movement of giving shape to itself inasmuch as that movement is burdened with the insurmountable differences of consciousness. Spirit has won the pure element of its existence, the concept. According to the freedom of its being, the content is the self relinquishing itself of itself, or it is the immediate unity of self-knowing. Considered with regard to the content, the pure movement of this self-relinquishing constitutes the necessity of this content. The diversity of content is as determinate content in sets of relations, not in itself, and its restlessness consists in its sublating itself, or in negativity. Thus, necessity, or diversity, just like free-standing being, is equally the self, and in this self-like form in which existence is immediately thought, the content is the concept. While therefore spirit has attained the concept, it unfolds existence and movement in this ether of its life, and it is science. The moments of its movement no longer exhibit themselves in that movement as determinate shapes of consciousness; rather, as the difference in consciousness has returned into the self, the moments exhibit themselves as determinate concepts and as the organic self-grounded movement of these concepts. However much in the phenomenology of spirit, each moment is both the difference between knowing and truth and the movement in which that difference sublates itself, nonetheless science does not, in contrast, contain this difference and its sublation. Rather, as the moment has the form of the concept, it unites the objective form of truth and that of the knowing self into an immediate unity. The moment does not come on the scene as this movement of passing to and fro from consciousness, or from representational thought, into self-consciousness and then back again; rather, the pure shape liberated from its appearance in consciousness, the pure concept and its further forward movement, depend solely on its pure determinateness. Conversely, to every abstract moment of science, there corresponds a shape of appearing spirit per se. Just as existing spirit is not richer than science, so too spirit in its content is no poorer. To cognize the pure concepts of science in this form, namely, in which they are shapes of consciousness, is what constitutes the aspect of their reality. According to that reality, their essence, the concept, which is posited in that reality in its simple mediation as thinking, breaks up and separates the moments of this mediation and exhibits itself according to their inner opposition.
Science contains within itself this necessity to relinquish itself of the form of the pure concept and to make the transition from the concept into consciousness. For self-knowing spirit, just for the reason that it grasps its own concept, is an immediate equality with itself, which in its differences is the certainty of the immediate, or is sensuous consciousness – the beginning from which we started. This release of itself from the form of its own self is the highest freedom and the highest assurance of its knowing of itself.
Nonetheless, this relinquishing is still incomplete. It expresses the relation of self-certainty to the object, an object which, just by being in the relation, has not yet attained its full freedom. Knowing is acquainted not only with itself, but also with the negative of itself, or its limit. To know its limit means to know that it is to sacrifice itself. This sacrifice is the relinquishing in which spirit exhibits its coming-to-be spirit in the form of a free contingent event, and it intuits outside of itself its pure self as time and likewise intuits its being as space. This final coming-to-be, nature, is its living, immediate coming-to-be. Nature, or relinquished spirit, is in its existence nothing but this eternal relinquishing of its stable existence and the movement which produces the subject.
However, the other aspect of spirit's coming-to-be, history, is that knowing self-mediating coming-to-be – the spirit relinquished into time. However, this relinquishing is likewise the relinquishing of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. This coming-to-be exhibits a languid movement and succession of spirits, a gallery of pictures, of which each, endowed with the entire wealth of spirit, moves itself so slowly because the self has to take hold of and assimilate the whole of this wealth of its substance. While its consummation consists in spirit's completely knowing what it is, in spirit knowing its substance, this knowing is its taking-the-inward-turn in which spirit forsakes its existence and gives its shape over to recollection. In taking-the-inward-turn, spirit is absorbed into the night of its self-consciousness, but its vanished existence is preserved in that night, and this sublated existence – the existence which was prior but is now newborn from knowing – is the new existence, a new world, and a new shape of spirit. In that new shape of spirit, it likewise has to begin all over again without prejudice in its immediacy, and, from its immediacy, to rear itself again to maturity, as if all that had preceded it were lost to it and as if it were to have learned nothing from the experience of the preceding spirits. However, that inwardizing re-collection18 has preserved that experience; it is what is inner, and it is in fact the higher form of substance. However much therefore this spirit begins its cultural formation and education all over again and seems to start only from itself, still it is at the same time making its beginning at a higher level. The realm of spirits, having formed itself in this way in existence, constitutes a sequence in which one spirit replaced the other, and each succeeding spirit took over from the previous spirit the realm of that spirit's world. The goal of the movement is the revelation of depth itself, and this is the absolute concept. This revelation is thereby the sublation of its depth, or its extension, the negativity of this I existing-inwardly-in-itself,19 which is its self-relinquishing, or its substance – and is its time. In its own self, this self-relinquishing relinquishes itself and, in that way, is in its extension as well as in its depth, in the self. The aim, absolute knowing, or spirit knowing itself as spirit, has its path in the recollection of spirits as they are in themselves and are as they achieve the organization of their realm. Their preservation according to their free-standing existence appearing in the form of contingency is history, but according to their conceptually grasped organization, it is the science of phenomenal knowing. Both together are conceptually grasped history;20 they form the recollection and the Golgotha of absolute spirit, the actuality, the truth, the certainty of its throne, without which it would be lifeless and alone; only –