Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

580 Phenomenology of Mind belong, and in which they do not fall apart from one another ; for they belong to the same indivisible simple self into which belief has passed, and which constitutes its life.

Belief has by this means lost the content which furnished its fiUing, and collapses into an inarticulate state where the spirit works and weaves within itself.* Belief is banished from its own kingdom ; this kingdom is sacked and plundered, since every distinction and expansion of it has rent the waking consciousness in its innermost nature, and claimed every one of its parts for earth, and returned them to the earth that owns them.

Yet belief is not on that account satisfied, for this illumination has everywhere brought to light only what is individual, with the result that only insubstantial realities and finitude forsaken of spirit make any appeal to spirit.

Since belief is without content and cannot continue in this barren condition, or since, in getting beyond finitude, which is the sole content, it finds merely the empty void, it is a sheer longing : its truth is an empty beyond, for which there is no longer any appropriate content to be found, for everything is appropriated and connected in other ways.

BeHef in this manner has in fact become the same as enhghtenment — the conscious attitude of relating a finite that inherently exists to an unknown and unknowable Absolute without predicates ; the difference is merely that the one is enhghtenment satisfied, while belief is enlightenment unsatisfied.! It will yet be * i.e. the life of feeling. t i.e. the contrast between belief and enlightenment becomes a contrast inside enlightenment itself.

The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition 581 seen whether enlightenment can continue in its state of satisfaction ; that longing of the troubled, beshadowed spirit, mourning over the loss of its spiritual world, Hes in the background.

Enhghtenment has on it this stain of unsatisfied longing : — in its empty- Absolute Being we find this in the form of the pure object; in passing beyond its individual nature to an unfulfilled beyond, the fleck appears as an act and a process; in the selflessness of what is "useful" it is seen in the form of an object fulfilled.

Enhghtenment will remove this stain : by considering more closely the positive result which constitutes the truth in its case, we shall find that the stain is implicitly removed already.

The True Kesult of Enlightenment* The spirit that sullenly works and weaves without further distinctions within itself has thus passed into itself away beyond consciousness, which, again, has arrived at clearness as to itself.

The first moment of this clearness of mind is determined, in regard to its necessity and constitution, by the fact that pure insight, or insight that is imphcitly and fer se notion, actuahses itself ; it does so when it gives otherness or determinateness a place in its own nature.

In this manner it is negative pure insight, i.e. the negation of the notion; this negation is equally pure; and herewith has arisen the pure and simple " thing,"' the Absolute Being, that has no further determination of any sort.

If we define this more precisely, insight in the sense of absolute notion is a distinguishing of distinctions that are not so any longer, of abstractions or pure notions that no longer support themselves but find a fixed hold and a distinction only by means of the whole hfe of the process.

This distinguishing of what is not distinguished consists just in the fact that the absolute notion makes itself its object, and as against that process asserts itself to be the essence. The essence hereby dispenses with the aspect wherein abstrac- * The outcome is at once positive and negative — materialism and agnosticism : on the secular side, it is pure utilitarianism . 5S2