Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Absolute Knowledge 813 the whole comes into being. In consciousness, on the other hand, the whole — but not as comprehended conceptually— is prior to the moments. Time is just the notion definitely existent, and presented to consciousness in the form of empty pure intuition. Hence spirit necessarily appears in time, and it appears in time so long as it does not grasp its pure notion, i.e. so long as it does not annul time.

Time is the pure self in external form, apprehended in intuition, and not grasped and understood by the self, it is the notion directly apprehended through intuition. When this notion grasps itself, it supersedes the time character, conceptually comprehends intuition, and is intuition comprehended and comprehending through conceptions.

Time therefore appears as spirit's destiny and necessity, where spirit is not yet complete within itself ; it is the necessity compelling spirit to increase and enrich the share self-consciousness has in consciousness, to put into motion the immediacy of the inherent nature (which is the form in which the substance is present in consciousness) ; or, conversely, to reahse and make manifest what is inherent, regarded as inward and immanent, to make manifest that which is at first within — i.e. to vindicate and secure for it the certainty of self.

For this reason it must be said that nothing is consciously known which does not fall within experience, or (as it is also expressed) which is not felt to be true, which is not given as an inwardly revealed eternal verity, as a sacred object of behef, or whatever other expressions we care to employ. For experience just S'd'i" consists in this, that the content — and the content is spirit — in its inherent nature is substance and so object

814 Phenomenology of Mind of consciousness. But this substance in which spirit consists, is the development of itself exphcitly to what it is inherently and imphcitly ; and only by this process of reflecting itself into itself is it then essentially and in truth spirit.

It is inherently the movement which constitutes the process of knowledge — the transforming of that imphcit inherent nature into explicitness and objectivity, of Substance into Subject, of the object of consciousness into the object of self-consciousness, i.e. into an object that is at the same time superseded and transcended — in other words, into the notion.

This transforming process is a cycle that returns into itself, a cycle that presupposes its beginning, and reaches its beginning only at the end. So far as spirit, then, is of necessity this process of self-distinction, it appears as a single whole, intuitively apprehended, over against its simple self-consciousness.

And since that whole is the aspect distinguished, it is distinguished into the intuitively apprehended pure notion, Time, and the content, the inherent imphcit nature. Substance, qua subject, involves the necessity, at first an inner necessity, to set forth in itself what it inherently is, to show itself to be spirit.

The completed systematic expression in objective form becomes, then, at the same time the reflection of substance, the development of it into a self or subject. Consequently, until and unless spirit is inherently completed, completed as a world-spirit, it cannot reach its completion as self-conscious spirit.

The content of rehgion therefore expresses earher in time than speculative science what spirit is ; but science alone is the perfer3t form in which spirit truly knows itself. The process of carrying forward this form of know-

Absolute Knowledge 815 ledge of itself constitutes the task which spirit accomplishes in the concrete actual shape of History.

The rehgious communion, in so far as it is at the outset the substance of Absolute Spirit, is the crude form of consciousness, which has an existence all the harsher and more barbaric the deeper is its inner spirit ; and its inarticulate stohd self has all the harder task in deahng with its essence, the unconceived content ahen to its consciousness.

Not till it has surrendered the hope of s'^u cancelHng that foreignness by an external, i.e. alien ^S method, does it turn to itself, to its own pecuhar world in the actual present. It turns thither because to supersede that alien method means returning into self-consciousness.

It thus discovers this world in the Kving present to be its own property ; and so has taken the first step to descend from the ideal intelHgible world, the world of the intellect, or rather to endue the abstract element of the intellect with concrete self -hood.

Through " observation," on the one hand, it finds existence in the shape of thought, and comprehends existence ; and, conversely, it finds in its thought existence.* When, in the first instance, it has thus itself expressed in an abstract way the immediate unity of thought and existence, of abstract Being and Self ; and when it has expressed the primal principle of "Light'' in a purer form, viz. as unity of extension and existence — for " existence "is an ultimate simple term more akin to thought than " Light " — and in this way has revived again in thought the Substance of the Orient,! the Absolute Substance of Eastern Rehgions ; thereupon spirit at once recoils in horror from this abstract unity, from this * Descartes. t Spinoza.