Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

688 Phenomenology of Mind into subjection, as also its idea * and its various specific conceptions ; t and is now self-consciousness at home with itself.

Here spirit, represented as an object, has the significance for itself of being Universal Spirit, which contains within itself all that is ultimate and essential and all that is concrete and actual ; yet is not in the form of freely subsisting actuality, or of the detached independence of external nature.

It has a shape, no doubt, the form of objective being, in that it is object of its own consciousness ; but because this being is put forward in rehgion with the essential character of being self-consciousness, the form or shape assumed is one perfectly transparent to itself ; and the reahty spirit contains is enclosed in it, or transcended in it, just in the same way as when we speak of " all reality " ; its reality is universal reahty in the sense of a product of thought.

Since, then, in rehgion, the pecuhar characteristic of what is properly consciousness of spirit does not have the form of detached and external otherness, the existence of spirit is distinct from its self-consciousness, and its actual reahty proper falls outside rehgion.

There is no doubt one spirit in both, but its consciousness does not embrace both together ; and rehgion appears as a part of existence, of acting, and of striving, whose other part is the hfe hved within its own actual world.

As we now know that spirit in its own world and spirit conscious of itself as spirit, i.e. spirit in the I cfi, sphere of rehgion, are the same, the completion of rehgion consists in the two forms becoming identical with one another : not merely in its reahty being grasped and embraced by rehgion, but conversely — it, as spirit * Vorstellung. t Begriff.

Religion 689 conscious of itself, becomes actual to itself, and real object of its own consciousness. So far as spirit in religion presents itself to itself, it is indeed consciousness, and the reality enclosed within it is the shape and garment in which it clothes its idea of itself.

The reahty, however, does not in this presentation get proper justice done to it, that is to say, it does not get to be an independent and free objective existence and not merely a garment. And conversely, because that reality lacks within itself its completion, it is a determinate shape or form, which does not attain to what it ought to reveal, viz. spirit conscious of itself.

That its form might express spirit itself, the form would have to be nothing else than spirit, and spirit would have to appear to itself, or to be actual, as it is in its own essential being. Only thereby, too, would be attained — what may seem to demand the opposite — that the object of its consciousness has, at the same time, the form of free and independent reality.

But only spirit which is object to itself in the shape of Absolute Spirit, is as much aware of being a free and independent reality as it remains therein conscious of itself.

Since in the first instance self-consciousness and consciousness simply, rehgion, and spirit as it is externally in its world, or the objective existence of spirit, are distinct, the latter consists in the totahty of spirit, so far as its moments are separated from each other and each is set forth by itself.

These moments, however, are consciousness, self -consciousness, reason, and spirit — spirit, that is, qua immediate spirit, which is not yet consciousness of spirit. Its totality, taken all together, constitutes the mundane existence of spirit as a whole ; VOL. II.— T

690 Phenomenology of Mind spirit as such contains the previous separate embodiments in the form of universal determinations of its own being, in those moments just named. Rehgion Lc,0> presupposes that these have completely run their course, and is their simple totahty, their absolute Self and soul. * The course which these traverse is, moreover, in relation to rehgion, not to be pictured as a temporal sequence.

It is only spirit in its entirety that is in time, and the shapes assumed, which are specific embodiments of the whole of spirit as such, present themselves in a sequence one after the other. For it is only the whole which properly has reality, and hence the form of pure freedom relatively to anything else, the form which takes expression as time.

But the moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, have, because they are moments, no existence separate from one another. Just as spirit was distinct from its moments, we have further, in the third place, to distinguish from these moments their specific individuated character.

Each of those moments, in itself, we saw broke up again in a process of development all its own, and took various shapes and forms : as e.g. in the case of consciousness, sensuous certainty and perception were distinct phases. These latter aspects fall apart in time from one another, and belong to a specific particular whole. For spirit descends from its universality to assume an individual form through specification, by determination.

This determination, or mediate element, is consciousness, self- * The two following paragraphs form a break in the analysis, and may be regarded as an explanatory note.