Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Belief and Pure Insight 543 lation to the real world — so far as the real world is still present in positive shape, viz. in the form of a sense of vanity — and lastly in that relation to belief already mentioned. We have already seen what pure insight by itself is.

Belief is unperturbed pure consciousness of spirit as the ultimate Reality ; pure insight is the self-consciousness of spirit as the ultimately real ; it knows the essentially real, therefore, not qua essence but qua Absolute Self.

Its aim thus is to cancel every other kind of independence which falls without self-consciousness, whether that be the independence of the actually objective or of the inherently real, and to mould it into conceptual form. It is not merely the certainty of selfconscious reason assured of being all truth ; it knows that it is so. In the form, however, in which the notion of pure 2q% insight meets us first, it is not yet realised.

As a phase of consciousness it appears in consequence as something contingent, as something isolated and particular, and its inmost constitutive nature appears as some purpose that it has to carry out and reaHse.

It has to begin with the intention of making pure insight universal, i.e. of making everything that is actual into a notion, and a notion for every selfconsciousness.* The intention is pure, for its content is pure insight ; and this insight is similarly pure, for its content is merely the absolute notion, which finds no opposition in an object, and is not restricted in itself.

In the unrestricted notion there are found at once both the aspects — that everything objective is * " Kant's philosophy is the enlightenment adapted so as to become a philosophical method." — Hegel, W.W. 15, p. 502.

544 Phenomenology of Mind to signify the self-existent, self-consciousness, and that this is to signify something universal, that pure insight is to be the property of all self-consciousnesses.

This second feature of the intention is so far a result of culture, in that in culture the distinctions of objective spirit, the parts and express determinations of its world, have come to naught, as well as the distinctions, which appeared as originally determinate natures.

Genius, talent, special capacities in general, belong to the world of actuality, in so far as this world contains still the aspect of being a herd of self-conscious individuals, where, in confusion and mutual violence, individuals cheat and struggle with one another over the contents of the real world. The above distinctions doubtless have no place in it as genuine especes.

Individuality neither is contented with unreal " fact," nor has special content and purposes of its own. It signifies merely something universally acknowledged and accepted, viz. cultivated and developed ; and the question of distinction is reduced to a matter of less or more energy, a distinction of quantity, i.e. a non-essential distinction.

This last difference, however, has come to nothing, by the fact that the distinction in the state where consciousness was completely torn asunder, turned round into an absolutely qualitative distinction. What is there the other for the 3,0 J ego is merely the ego itself.

In this infinite judgment all the one-sidedness and peculiarity of the original self-existing self is extinguished; the self knows itself qua pure self to be its own object ; and this absolute identity of both sides is the element of pure insight. Pure insight, therefore, is the simple ultimate being undifferentiated within itself, and at the same time the

Belief and Pure Insight 545 universal achievement and production and a universal possession of all. In this simple spiritual substance self-consciousness gives itself and maintains for itself in every object the sense of this its own particularity or of action, just as conversely the individuality of selfconsciousness is there identical with itself and universal. This pure insight is, then, the spirit that calls to every consciousness : be for yourself what you are essentially in yourself — rational.

VOL. II.— K