Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

550 Phenomenology of Mind It knows belief to be opposed to insight, opposed to reason and truth. Just as, for it, behef is in general a tissue of superstitious prejudices and errors; so it further sees the consciousness embracing all this content organised into a realm of error, in which false insight is the general sphere of consciousness, immediate, naively unperturbed, and inherently unreflective.

Yet all the while this false insight does have within it the moment of self-reflection, the moment of self-consciousness, separated from its simple naivete, and keeps this reflection in the background as an insight remaining by itself, and as an evil intention by which that that former conscious state is befooled.

That mental sphere is the victim of the deception of a Priesthood, which carries out its envious vanity, jealous of being S«^^ alone in possession of insight, and carries out its other selfish ends as well.

At the same time this priesthood conspires with Despotism, which takes up the attitude of being the synthetic crude {begrifflos) unity of the real and this ideal kingdom — a singularly amorphous and inconsistent type of being, — and stands above the bad insight of the multitude, and the bad intention of the priests, and even combines both of these within itself.

As the result of the stupidity and confusion produced amongst the people by the agency of priestly deception, despotism despises both and draws for itself the advantage of undisturbed control and the fulfilment of its desires, its humours, and its whims. Yet at the same time it is itself in this same state of murky insight, is equally superstition and error. Enhghtenment does not attack these three forms of the enemy without distinction. For since its essential nature is pure insight, which is per se universal, its

The Struggle of EnligJitenment with Superstition 551 true relation to the other extreme is that in which it is concerned with the common and identical element in both. The aspect of individual existence isolating itself from the universal naive consciousness is the antithesis of it, and cannot be directly affected by it.

The will of a deceiving priesthood and an oppressive despot is, therefore, not primarily the object on which it directs its activity ; its object is the insight that is without will and without individualised isolated self-existence, the notion (Begriff) of rational self-consciousness, which has its existence in the total mental sphere, but is not yet there in the fullness of its true meaning (Begriff).

Since, however, pure insight rescues this genuinely honest form of insight, with its naive simphcity of nature, from prejudices and errors, it wrests from the hands of bad intention the effective reahsation of its powers of deception, for the exercise of which the incoherent and undeveloped (begrifßos) consciousness of the general sphere provides the basis and raw material, while isolated self-existence finds its substance in the simple consciousness as a whole.

The relation of pure insight to the naive consciousness of absolute Reahty has now a double aspect. On one side pure insight is inherently one and the same with it. On the other side, however, this naive consciousness lets absolute Reahty as well as its parts dispose " .? Y themselves at will in the simple element of its thought, and subsist there, and lets them hold only as its inherent nature and hence hold good in objective form.

In this immanent being it disowns, however, independent existence for its own sake. In so far as, according to the first aspect, this behef is for pure insight inherently and essentially pure self-consciousness, and has to

Bh2 Phenomenotogy of Mind become so expressly^ merely for itself, pure insight finds in this constitutive notion of behef the element in which, instead of false insight, it realises itself. Since, from this point of view, both are essentially the same, and the relation of pure insight takes effect through and in the same element, the communication between them is direct and immediate, and their give and take an unbroken interfusion.

Whatever pins and bolts may be otherwise driven into consciousness, it is in itself this simplicity of nature in which everything is resolved, forgotten and unconstrained, and which, therefore, is absolutely amenable to the activity of the notion. The communication of pure insight is on that account comparable to a silent extension or the expansion, say, of vapour in the unresisting atmosphere.

It is a penetrating infection, which did not previously make itself noticeable as something distinct from and opposed to the indifferent medium into which it insinuates its way, and hence cannot be averted. Only when the infection has become widespread is that consciousness alive to it, which unconcernedly yielded to its influence.

For what this consciousness received into itself was doubtless something simple, homogeneous, and uniform throughout it, but was at the same time the simplicity of selfreflected negativity, which later on also develops by its nature into something opposed, and thereby reminds consciousness of its previous state.

This simple uniformity is the notion, which is simple knowledge that knows both itself and its opposite, this opposite being, however, cancelled as opposite within the self-knowledge of the notion. In the condition, therefore, in which consciousness becomes aware of pure insight, this insight is already widespread. The struggle with