Phenomenology of Spirit — G. W. F. Hegel

Feligion 691 consciousness, and so on. Now the forms assumed by these moments constitute individuahty. Hence these exhibit and reveal spirit in its individuahty or concrete reahty, and are distinguished in time from one another, though in such a way that the succeeding retains within it the preceding.

While, therefore, rehgion is the completion of the life of spirit, its final and complete expression, into which, as being their ground, its individual moments, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, return and have returned, they, at the same time, together constitute the objectively existing reahsation of spirit in its totality ; as such spirit is real only as the moving process of these aspects which it possesses, a process of distinguishing them and returning back into itself.

In the process of these universal moments is contained the development of religion generally.

Since, however, each of these attributes was set forth and presented, not only in the way it in general determines itself, but as it is in and for itself, i.e. as, within its own being, running its course as a distinct whole — there has thus arisen not merely the development of rehgion generally ; those independently complete processes pursued by the individual phases and stages of spirit contain at the same time the determinate forms of rehgion itself.

Spirit in its entirety, spirit in rehgion, is once more the process from its immediacy to the attainment of a knowledge of what it imphcitly or immediately is ; and is the process of attaining the state where the shape and form, in which it appears as an object for its own consciousness, will be perfectly identical with and adequate to its essential nature, and where it will behold itself as it is.

692 Phenomenology of Mind In this development of religion, then, spirit itself assumes definite forms, which constitute the distinctions involved in this process : and at the same time a determinate or specific form of rehgion has hkewise an actual spirit of a specific character.

Thus, if consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit belong to selfknowing spirit in general, in a similar way the specific shapes, which self-knowing spirit assumes, appropriate and adopt the distinctive forms which were specially developed in the case of each of the stages — consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit.

The determinate shape, assumed in a given case by religion, appropriates, from among the forms belonging to each of its moments, the one adapted to it, and makes this its actual spirit. This one determinate attitude of* rehgion pervades and permeates all aspects of its actual existence, and stamps them with this common feature.

In this way the arrangement now assumed by the forms and shapes which have thus far appeared, is different from the way they appeared in their own order. On this point we may note shortly at the outset what is of chief importance. In the series we considered, each moment, exhaustively elaborating its entire content, evolved and formed itself into a single whole within its own peculiar principle.

And knowledge was the inner depth, or the spirit, wherein the elements, having no subsistence of their own, possessed their substance. This substance, however, has now at length made its appearance ; it is the deep hfe of spirit certain of itself ; it does not allow the principle belonging to each individual form to get isolated, and become a whole within itself : rather it collects all

Religion 693 these moments into its own content, keeps them together, and advances within this total wealth of its concrete actual spirit ; while all its particular moments take into themselves and receive together in common the hke determinate character of the whole. This spirit certain of itself and the process it goes through — this is their true reahty, the independent self -subsistence, which belongs to each individually. Thus while the previous linear series in its advance marked the retrogressive steps in it by knots, but thence went forward again in one hnear stretch, it is now, as it were, broken at these knots, these universal moments, and radiates into many hnes, which, being bound together into a single bimdle, combine at the same time symmetrically, so that the similar distmctions, in which each separately took shape within its own sphere, meet together. For the rest, it is self-evident from the whole argument, how this co-ordination of universal directions, just mentioned, is to be understood; so that it becomes superfluous to remark that these distinctions are to be taken to mean essentially and only moments of the process of development, not parts. In the case of actual concrete spirit they are attributes of its substance ; in rehgion, on the other hand, they are only predicates of the subject. In the same way, indeed, all forms in general are, in themselves or for us, contained in spirit and contained in every spirit. But the main point of importance, in deahng with its reahty, is solely what determinate character it has in its consciousness, in which specific character it has expressed its self, or in what shape it knows its essential nature.

'/■-• 7