VIII. Absolute Knowing

Revealed religion's spirit has not yet gotten beyond its consciousness as such, or equivalently, what stands as object for its consciousness is not its actual self-consciousness; spirit at large, together with the moments differentiating themselves within it, falls into representing and into the form of objectivity. Absolute spirit is the content of representing; what alone still needs doing is to sublate this mere form, or rather, seeing that consciousness as such is where this form is at home, the truth of the form must already have come out in consciousness's own shapings. — We must not take this getting-beyond of consciousness's object in the one-sided way that would make the object merely show up as returning into the self; more precisely, the object as such did exhibit itself to consciousness as something vanishing, and beyond that, thinghood gets put in place precisely by the externalization of self-consciousness, an externalization whose significance is positive and not merely negative, and positive not just for us or in itself but for consciousness itself. For consciousness, then, what is negative in the object, the object's sublating of its own self, acquires positive significance in the following way, or rather consciousness comes to know the object's nullity partly by externalizing itself — for in that externalization it makes itself into an object, or, since being-for-itself is an indivisible unity, makes the object into its own self. Yet the other moment lies here too: consciousness has no less sublated that externalization and that objectivity and drawn them back into itself, and so, within its own otherness as such, it stays at home with itself. — Such is consciousness's movement, wherein consciousness amounts to the totality of the moments belonging to it. — Equally, consciousness has to relate itself to the object according to the totality of the object's determinations, having grasped it under each determination in that way. It is that totality of determinations which makes the object, in itself, a spiritual essence, and the object truly becomes such for consciousness by way of apprehending every single determination as the self, that is, by way of the spiritual relating to them just named.

So the object is partly immediate being, a thing in general — the correlate of immediate consciousness; partly a becoming-other of itself, its relationship, that is, being-for-another plus being-for-itself, determinateness — the correlate of perception — and partly essence, or the object as universal — the correlate of the understanding. As a whole it is the syllogism: the universal moving by way of determination into singularity, and conversely singularity moving, by way of singularity as sublated, that is, determination, into the universal. — Under these three determinations, then, consciousness has to know the object as its own self. The knowledge under discussion, however, is not knowledge in the sense of pure comprehension of the object; rather what is to be exhibited is only this knowledge in its coming-to-be, or in its moments, and exhibited on that side which is proper to consciousness as such, while the moments of the concept proper, of pure knowledge, get exhibited under the guise of shapings of consciousness. That is why, within consciousness as such, the object does not yet show up as the spiritual essentiality we have just now put into words, and why consciousness's relating to it is not a consideration of the object in that totality as such, nor in the pure conceptual form of that totality, but is partly a shape of consciousness in general and partly a set of such shapes, taken together by us, wherein the totality both of the object's moments and of consciousness's relating can be exhibited only in dissolution into its moments.

For this side of the grasping of the object, grasping as it stands in the shape of consciousness , nothing more is needed than a reminder of the earlier shapes of consciousness that have already come up. — With regard to the object, then, insofar as it is immediate, an indifferent being, observing reason was seen by us to seek and to find its own self in this indifferent thing, that is, to be conscious of its own doing as something quite as external as the object it is conscious of merely as an immediate. — At its peak, too, we watched it put its determination into the infinite judgment which runs: the I's being is a thing. — A sensuous, immediate thing at that: calling the I a soul does indeed represent it as a thing as well, but as one that is invisible, intangible, and so on, hence in fact not as immediate being, nor as what people mean by a thing. — Taken as it immediately stands, that judgment lacks spirit, or rather is spiritlessness in person. By its concept, though, it is in truth the most spirited of judgments, and it is this inner dimension of it, not yet present in it, that the other two moments still to be considered put into words.

The thing is I; that infinite judgment does in fact sublate the thing; the thing is nothing in itself; significance accrues to it only within the relationship, only through the I and the I's relation to it. — For consciousness this moment came out in pure insight and in the Enlightenment. Things are simply useful, and are to be considered under no other aspect than their usefulness . — Self-consciousness that has been cultured, having traversed the world of spirit estranged from itself, has through its externalization brought the thing forth as its own self; it accordingly keeps itself within the thing and knows the thing's non-self-subsistence, knows that essentially the thing is nothing but being-for-another; or, to express the relationship in full, the relationship being the sole thing that makes up the object's nature at this stage, the thing counts with such self-consciousness as something being-for-itself: sense-certainty gets pronounced absolute truth, yet this being-for-itself gets pronounced a moment that does nothing but vanish and cross over into its opposite, into surrendered being-for-another.

Even here, though, knowledge of the thing has not reached completion; the thing has to be known not merely under the immediacy of being and under its determinateness, but as essence or inner too, as the self. Moral self-consciousness is where this is on hand; it knows its own knowledge to be the absolute essentiality, that is, knows being outright as pure will or knowledge; it is nothing beyond that will and that knowledge; whatever else there may be gets only unessential being, that is, being that is not being-in-itself, only the empty shell of such being. To the extent that moral consciousness, in its representation of the world, discharges existence out of the self, it just as much draws existence back into itself again. As conscience it is at last no longer this alternating placing and dissembling of existence and of the self; instead it knows its existence as such to be this pure certainty of its own self, and the objective element wherein it sets itself forth in acting is nothing else than the self's pure knowledge of itself.

Such are the moments composing spirit's reconciliation with its consciousness proper; taken on their own they are single, and what constitutes the force of the reconciliation is their spiritual unity alone. But the last of the moments is necessarily that unity itself and, as is plain, does in fact bind all of them together within itself. Spirit certain of its own self in its existence has, for the element of existence, nothing besides this knowledge of itself; its pronouncement that it acts, in all it does, from conviction about duty, this language of its own, is the validity of its acting. — Acting is the first separating of the concept's simplicity, a separating that is in itself, together with the return out of that separation. This first movement flips over into the second once the element of recognition, being simple knowledge of duty, posits itself over against the difference and the splitting-in-two residing in acting as such, thereby shaping an iron actuality opposed to acting. In forgiveness, however, we watched this hardness let go of its own self and externalize itself. Thus for self-consciousness actuality, taken as immediate existence, carries no significance here beyond that of being pure knowledge; — and taken equally as determinate existence, or as relationship, what confronts it is a knowledge, partly of this purely singular self, partly of knowledge as universal. Herein it is at the same time posited that for each of the two confronting sides the third moment, universality or essence, is valid only as knowledge; and the empty opposition still left over they finally sublate as well, being then the knowledge of I — I, this singular self that is immediately pure, that is, universal knowledge.

So the reconciliation between consciousness and self-consciousness shows itself as accomplished from a doubled side: once in religious spirit, once in consciousness itself as such. The two differ in this way: the first is that reconciliation under the form of being-in-itself, the second under the form of being-for-itself. In the way they have been considered they at first fall apart; following the order in which its shapes came before us, consciousness had long since reached both the single moments of that reconciliation and their unification, before religion for its part gave the shape of actual self-consciousness to its own object. What has not yet been exhibited is the unification of the two sides; that unification is what brings this series of spirit's shapings to a close, for in it spirit reaches the point of knowing itself neither merely as it is in itself, in respect of its absolute content, nor merely as it is for itself, in respect of its contentless form, that is, on the side belonging to self-consciousness, but rather as it is in and for itself.

Such unification has, however, already taken place in itself, in religion as well, admittedly, in representation's return into self-consciousness, though not according to the proper form, since the religious side is the side of the in-itself, a side that confronts the movement of self-consciousness. Hence the unification belongs to that other side, which within the opposition is the side of reflection into itself, and so the side containing both itself and its own opposite, containing them not merely in itself, in a universal fashion, but for itself, in developed and differentiated fashion. The content, and with it the other side of self-conscious spirit taken precisely as the other side, lies before us complete and has been exhibited; what is still missing by way of unification is the concept's simple unity. On the side of self-consciousness itself this unity is likewise already on hand; but in the way it turned up in what went before, it carries, as do all the other moments, the form belonging to a particular shape of consciousness. — Accordingly it is the part of the shape of spirit certain of itself which halts within its concept and which went by the name of the beautiful soul. For the beautiful soul is spirit's own knowledge of itself within its pure translucent unity — self-consciousness knowing this pure knowledge of pure being-within-itself as spirit — not simply intuition of what is divine, but the divine's intuition of its own self. — Since this concept clings to itself in opposition to its own realization, it is that one-sided shape whose dissolution into empty haze we witnessed, and whose positive externalization and onward movement we witnessed as well. By way of that realization, the persisting-upon-itself of this objectless self-consciousness, the determinateness of the concept over against its fulfillment, gets sublated; universality becomes the form its self-consciousness wins, and what is left over for it is its genuine concept, the concept that has won its realization; the concept stands in its truth, namely in unity with its own externalization; — knowledge of pure knowledge, taken not as an abstract essence, which is what duty amounts to, — but taken as an essence which is this knowledge, is this pure self-consciousness, and so is at the same time a genuine object too, for it is the self existing for itself.

This concept gave itself its fulfillment on one side in acting spirit certain of itself, on the other side in religion: religion won for it the absolute content as content, that is, under the form of representation, of otherness for consciousness; whereas in the former shape the form is the self itself, since that shape holds within it acting spirit certain of itself, and the self carries the life of absolute spirit through to its end. That shape, as we see, is the simple concept just named, which nonetheless gives up its eternal essence, is there, or acts. Its splitting-in-two, its stepping forth, it has in the purity of the concept, purity being absolute abstraction, or negativity. In the same way it has within itself the element of its actuality or of being, and has it in pure knowledge itself, since pure knowledge is the simple immediacy that counts as being and existence just as much as it counts as essence — the first being negative thinking, the second positive thinking itself. Lastly, this existence is just as much what issues out of pure knowledge, and, whether as existence or as duty, it is reflected into itself, that is, is evil. This going into itself constitutes the opposition belonging to the concept, and is thereby the entrance of that non-acting, non-actual pure knowledge of essence. Yet this entrance of it within that opposition amounts to its taking part in the opposition; pure knowledge of essence has in itself externalized its own simplicity, for it is the splitting-in-two, the negativity, which the concept is; so far as this splitting-in-two amounts to the becoming-for-itself, it is evil; taken as the in-itself, it is what stays good. — Now what first takes place in itself takes place simultaneously for consciousness, and it too is doubled, being for consciousness and equally being consciousness's own being-for-itself, its own doing. Whatever has already been posited in itself thus repeats itself now as consciousness's knowledge of it and as conscious doing. For the other's sake each gives up the self-subsistence of the determinateness in which it steps forward against the other. That giving-up is the very renunciation of the concept's one-sidedness which in itself made up the beginning, only now it is its own renunciation, as the concept renounced is its own concept. — Being negativity, the in-itself with which things began is in truth quite as much what is mediated; and so it now posits itself just as it truly is, while the negative , taken as the determinateness of each for the other and in itself, is what sublates its own self. Of the two parts of the opposition, one is the inequality between being-within-itself — within its singularity — and universality, the other the inequality of its abstract universality over against the self; the first dies away from its being-for-itself, externalizes itself, and confesses; the second forswears the hardness belonging to its abstract universality, dying thereby to its unliving self and its unmoved universality; so that the first has completed itself by means of the moment of universality that is essence, and the second by means of the universality that is self; and by this movement of acting, spirit — which is spirit only by being there, which raises its existence up into thought and so into absolute opposition, and which returns out of that opposition precisely through it and within it — has stepped forth as knowledge's pure universality, which is self-consciousness, as a self-consciousness that constitutes the simple unity of knowledge.

Whatever in religion was content, or the form under which an other gets represented, is here the self's own doing; the concept ties things together so that the content is the self's own doing; — for this concept, as we see, is the knowledge of the self's doing inside itself as the whole of essentiality and the whole of existence, the knowledge of this subject as the substance and of substance as this knowledge of its doing. — All that we have contributed here is, on the one hand, the assembling of the single moments, each of which within its own principle presents the life of spirit entire, and, on the other hand, the holding fast of the concept under the concept's own form, a concept whose content would already have yielded itself within those moments, and which would itself already have yielded itself under the form of a shape of consciousness.

This last shape of spirit, spirit which at once confers the form of the self upon its complete and true content, and which thereby realizes its concept while remaining, in that realization, within its concept, is absolute knowing; it is spirit knowing its own self in the shape of spirit, or comprehending knowledge. Truth is not merely, in itself, perfectly equal to certainty; it carries besides the shape of certainty of itself, or, in its existence, meaning for knowing spirit, it stands in the form of spirit's knowledge of its own self. Truth is that content which, in religion, remains unequal to its own certainty. The equality in question lies in the content's having taken on the shape of the self. Thereby what has turned into the element of existence, into the form of objectivity for consciousness, is that which essence itself is, the concept namely. Spirit appearing within this element to consciousness, or, what comes to the same here, brought forth within it by consciousness, is science.

Accordingly, the nature, the moments, and the movement of this knowledge have come out as follows: this knowledge is self-consciousness's pure being-for-itself ; it is the I, this I and no other, and equally an immediately mediated I, a sublated, universal one. — There is a content it differentiates from itself, since it is pure negativity, the splitting of itself in two; it is consciousness. Within its difference this content is itself the I, being the movement of self-sublating, the very negativity in its purity that the I is. In this content, differentiated as it is, the I stands reflected into itself; the content gets comprehended solely through the I's being at home with itself in its own otherness. Given more determinately, this content is nothing other than the very movement just now put into words; for it is spirit running through its own self, and running through it for itself as spirit, in virtue of possessing the concept's shape within its objectivity.

As regards this concept's existence, science does not make its appearance in time and actuality until spirit has attained this consciousness regarding itself. Taken as spirit knowing what it is, it existed neither earlier nor anywhere else than after completing the labor of mastering its own imperfect shaping, of procuring for its own consciousness the shape belonging to its essence, and in this fashion of equalizing its self-consciousness with its consciousness. — Spirit existing in and for itself, differentiated within its moments, is knowledge that is for itself, comprehension in general, which as such has still not arrived at substance, and is not absolute knowing in its own self.

In actuality, now, knowing substance is there before its form, before its conceptual shape. For substance is the in-itself still undeveloped, the ground and the concept in a simplicity still unmoved, and therefore spirit's inwardness or self, which is not yet there. Whatever is there is there in the guise of the simple and immediate not yet developed, in other words as the object of representing consciousness in general. Cognition, spiritual consciousness for which whatever is in itself exists only so far as it is being for the self, and is being of the self, that is, concept — has on that account at the outset only a poor object, over against which substance, and consciousness of substance, is the richer. The openness substance has in such consciousness is in fact hiddenness, for substance is still selfless being, and only certainty of one's own self is open to itself. So to begin with, what belongs to self-consciousness out of substance is only the abstract moments; but as these, being pure movements, drive themselves onward, self-consciousness grows richer, until it has wrested the whole of substance away from consciousness, has sucked into itself the whole edifice of substance's essentialities, and, this negative relating to objectivity being no less positive, a positing, — has generated substance out of itself and thereby restored it for consciousness at the same time. Within the concept that knows itself as concept , the moments accordingly step forward earlier than the fulfilled whole, whose coming-to-be consists in the movement of those moments. Within consciousness, by contrast, the whole, though the uncomprehended whole, comes before the moments. — Time is the concept itself in its being-there, presenting itself to consciousness as empty intuition; that is why spirit necessarily appears in time, and why it goes on appearing in time for just so long as it fails to grasp its pure concept, that is, fails to expunge time. Time is the external pure self, intuited and not grasped by the self, the concept merely intuited; once the concept grasps its own self, it sublates its time-form, comprehends intuiting, and is intuiting comprehended and comprehending. — Time appears, therefore, as the destiny and the necessity of spirit not yet completed within its own self — the necessity of enriching the share self-consciousness holds in consciousness, of setting in motion the immediacy that the in-itself has — that immediacy being the form under which substance stands within consciousness — or, conversely, taking the in-itself as the inward, the necessity of realizing and revealing what is at first only inward, — that is, of vindicating it for certainty of its own self.

On this ground one has to say that nothing gets known which is not there in experience — or, as the same point also gets expressed, which is not on hand as felt truth, as the inwardly revealed eternal, as the believed holy, or under whatever other expressions may be employed. For experience consists in just this, that the content — spirit being that content — is in itself substance and so object of consciousness. This substance, however, which is spirit, is the becoming of spirit toward that which in itself it is; and only as a becoming reflecting itself into itself is spirit in itself truly spirit. In itself spirit is the movement which cognition is — the transformation of that in-itself into the for-itself, of substance into the subject, of what is object for consciousness into object for self-consciousness, that is, into an object just as much sublated, into the concept. That movement is the circle returning into itself, a circle presupposing its own beginning and reaching it only in the end. — So far as spirit is thus of necessity this differentiating within itself, its whole, in intuited form, comes to stand opposite its simple self-consciousness; and since this whole is precisely what has been differentiated, it is differentiated into its pure concept as intuited, into time, and into the content, the in-itself; substance, as subject, bears within it the at first inner necessity of exhibiting what it is in itself on its own self, of exhibiting itself as spirit. It is the completed objective exhibition that is at the same time the reflection of that exhibition, its becoming-self. — Hence spirit cannot reach completion as self-conscious spirit before it has completed itself in itself, as world-spirit. That is why religion's content voices what spirit is at an earlier point in time than science does, while science alone is spirit's true knowledge of its own self.

The movement of driving forth the form of its knowledge of itself is the labor spirit carries out as actual history. The religious community, which at the outset is absolute spirit's substance, is raw consciousness, and the deeper its inner spirit runs, the more barbaric and harsh the existence such consciousness has, while its dull self has correspondingly harsher labor with its essence, with the content of its consciousness that stands alien to it. Only once it has surrendered the hope of sublating this alienness in an external, that is to say alien, manner does it turn, since the alien manner once sublated is the return into self-consciousness, to its own self, to its own world and present, discovering that world as its property; and with this it has taken the first step in climbing down from the intellectual world, or rather in inspiriting that world's abstract element with the actual self. Through observation, on one side, it finds existence as thought and comprehends existence, and conversely finds existence within its thinking. Having in this way first voiced, itself abstractly, the immediate unity of thinking and being, of abstract essence and of the self, and having voiced the first light-essence more purely, that is, as the unity of extension with being — extension being a simplicity nearer to pure thinking than light is — and having thereby roused again in thought the substance of the sunrise, spirit at the same time recoils in a shudder from this abstract unity, from this selfless substantiality, and asserts individuality against it. Yet only after spirit has externalized individuality in culture, thereby turning it into existence and driving it through all existence — after reaching the thought of usefulness and, within absolute freedom, seizing existence as its own will, does it thus turn outward the thought of its innermost depth and voice essence as I = I itself. This I = I, however, is the movement that reflects itself into itself; for inasmuch as this equality, being absolute negativity, is absolute difference, the I's self-equality confronts this pure difference, which, pure and at once objective for the self that knows itself, is to be voiced as time, so that, just as essence was voiced above as the unity of thinking with extension, it would here have to be grasped as thinking's unity with time; but difference left to its own devices, time without rest or stay, collapses instead into itself; time is the objective repose of extension, and extension is the I, pure equality with itself. — Or: the I is not the self alone, it is the self's equality with itself; and this equality is perfect and immediate unity with itself, which is to say that this subject is quite as much the substance. Substance taken by itself alone would be intuiting void of content, or the intuiting of a content which, as determinate, would possess mere accidentality and would lack necessity; substance would count as the absolute only so far as it were thought or intuited as the absolute unity, and every content, in its diversity, would have to fall outside substance into a reflection not belonging to it, substance not being subject, not being what reflects upon itself and into itself, not being comprehended as spirit. Were content nevertheless to be spoken of, that would be partly just so as to hurl it down into the absolute's empty abyss, while partly the content would have been scooped up externally out of sensuous perception; knowledge would seem to have come upon things, upon its difference from itself, and upon the difference among manifold things, with no one comprehending how or whence.

Spirit, though, has shown itself to be for us neither a mere drawing-back of self-consciousness into pure inwardness of its own, nor a mere submerging of self-consciousness in substance together with the non-being of its difference, but rather this movement of the self, which externalizes itself from its own self and sinks into its substance, and which, as subject, has equally gone out of substance into itself and makes substance into object and content, even while it sublates this difference of objectivity and of content. That first reflection out of immediacy consists in the subject's differentiating itself from its substance, the concept splitting itself in two, the going-into-itself and coming-to-be of the I in its purity. Since this difference amounts to the pure doing of I = I, the concept is the necessity and the springing-up of existence, existence that has substance for its essence and that subsists for itself. But existence subsisting for itself is the concept posited within determinateness, and hence just as much its own movement in its own self: the descent into that simple substance which becomes subject only as this negativity, this movement. — The I has no business clinging to itself under the form of self-consciousness over against the form that substantiality and objectivity have, as though it feared its own externalization; spirit's force lies rather in staying equal to its own self within its externalization, and, as what is in and for itself, in positing being-for-itself no less than being-in-itself as a mere moment; — nor is the I some third thing that flings the differences back into the absolute's abyss and pronounces their equality there; knowledge consists rather in this apparent inactivity, which does nothing but look on at how what is differentiated moves on its own self and comes back into its unity.

Within knowledge, then, spirit has concluded the movement of its own shaping, so far as that shaping is encumbered with the unovercome difference of consciousness. It has attained the concept, the pure element in which it exists. The content, taken according to the freedom that its being has, is the self externalizing itself, that is, the immediate unity of knowing oneself. The pure movement of this externalization, viewed on the content, makes up the content's necessity. Content that is diverse stands, as determinate, within the relationship, not in itself, and its unrest is to sublate its own self , or is negativity; hence necessity, or diversity, is quite as much the self, as free being is, and in this selflike form, wherein existence is thought immediately, the content is concept. Now that spirit has won the concept, it spreads out existence and movement within this ether of its own life, and is science. In science the moments of spirit's movement no longer present themselves as determinate shapes of consciousness but, consciousness's difference having withdrawn into the self, as determinate concepts, and as their organic movement grounded in its own self. If, in the phenomenology of spirit, every moment is the difference between knowledge and truth, along with the movement wherein that difference sublates itself, science by contrast holds neither this difference nor its sublating; rather, the moment, having the concept's form, brings the objective form of truth together with that of the knowing self in immediate unity. The moment does not step forward as this movement of crossing over and back, out of consciousness or representation into self-consciousness and the reverse; instead its pure shape, released from its appearance within consciousness, the pure concept, together with the onward movement of that concept, hangs solely upon its pure determinateness. Conversely, every abstract moment of science has answering to it a shape of appearing spirit in general. Just as spirit in its existence is no richer than science, so in its content it is no poorer either. Cognizing science's pure concepts in this form of shapes of consciousness makes up that side of their reality according to which their essence, the concept, posited within science in its simple mediation as thinking, knocks apart the moments of this mediation and presents itself according to the inner opposition.

Science holds within its own self this necessity of externalizing the pure concept's form, and holds the concept's transition into consciousness. For spirit knowing its own self, just because it grasps its concept, is immediate equality with itself, an equality that in its difference is certainty of the immediate, or sensuous consciousness — the beginning from which we set out; and this releasing of itself from the form its self has is the highest freedom and the security of its knowledge of itself.

Still, this externalization remains incomplete; what it expresses is the relation of certainty of itself to the object, and the object, precisely by standing within the relation, has not won its full freedom. Knowledge is acquainted with itself, but with the negative of itself as well, that is, with its limit. To know its limit is to know how to sacrifice itself. That sacrifice is the externalization wherein spirit presents its own becoming-spirit under the form of a free contingent happening, while intuiting its pure self as time lying outside it and, likewise, its being as space. This latter becoming, nature, is spirit's living immediate becoming; nature, spirit externalized, amounts in its existence to nothing beyond this eternal externalization of its subsistence and the movement that produces the subject.

The other side of spirit's becoming, however, history, is the knowing, self-mediating becoming — spirit externalized into time; yet this externalization is equally an externalization of its own self; the negative is what is negative of its own self. What this becoming presents is a sluggish movement, a succession of spirits, a picture gallery whose every image, furnished with spirit's complete wealth, moves just so sluggishly for that very reason: the self must work its way through this whole substantial wealth of its own and digest it. Since spirit's completion lies in knowing perfectly what it is, namely its substance, such knowledge is its going-into-itself, wherein it forsakes its existence and consigns its shape to recollection. In this going-into-itself spirit has sunk down into its self-consciousness's night, while its vanished existence is kept safe there, and that sublated existence — the former one, yet newborn out of knowledge — is a new existence, a new world and shape of spirit. Within that new world spirit has to begin all over again just as ingenuously at its immediacy, rearing itself up once more from there, as though everything foregoing were lost to it and as though nothing had been gained by it from what the earlier spirits went through. But inwardizing recollection has kept that experience safe and is the inner, and in point of fact the higher, form that substance takes. So when this spirit starts its culture afresh from the beginning, seemingly setting out from itself alone, it begins at the same time on a higher rung. The realm of spirits which has formed itself in existence in this manner makes up a sequence in which one spirit succeeded another, each of them taking over the world's realm from the one before. Their goal is that the depth be revealed, this depth being the absolute concept; such revelation is accordingly the sublating of spirit's depth, its extension, that is, the negativity of this I that is within itself, a negativity that is spirit's externalization, or substance — and it is spirit's time, in that this externalization externalizes itself on its own self and so, within its extension quite as much as within its depth, is for the self. The goal, absolute knowing, spirit knowing itself as spirit, has for its pathway a recollection of the spirits, as they stand in their own selves and as they bring the organization of their realm to completion; keeping them safe, on the side of their existence, free and appearing under the form of contingency, is history, whereas on the side of their organization as comprehended it is the science of appearing knowledge; the two taken together, comprehended history, form absolute spirit's recollection and place of the skull, its throne's actuality, truth, and certainty, apart from which it would be the lifeless solitary; only — out of the cup of this realm of spirits its own infinity foams up for it.