, we have a new attitude or mode of consciousness brought about. We have now a consciousness, which takes itself to be infinitude, or one whose essential nature is pure process of consciousness. It is one which thinlis or is free self-consciousness. For thinking does not consist in being an abstract ego, but in being an ego which has, at the same time, the significance of inherently existing in itself ; or which relates itself to objective reality in sucli a way that this signifies the self-existence of that consciousness for which it is an object. The object does not for thinking proceed by way of presentations or figures, but of notions, conceptions, i.e. of a differentiated reality or essence, which, being an immediate content of consciousness, is nothing distinct from it. What is presented, shaped and constructed, and existent as such, has the form of being something other than consciousness. A notion, however, is at the same time an existent, and this distinction, so far as it falls in consciousness itself, is its determinate content. But in that this content is, at the same time, a conceptually constituted, a comprehended content, consciousness remains immediately aware within itself of its unity with this determinate existent so distinguished ; not as in the case of a presentation, where consciousness from the first has to take special note that this is the idea of the object ; on the contrary, the notion is for me eo ipso and at once my notion. In thinking I am free, because I am not in an other, but remain simply and solely in touch with myself ; and the object which for me is my essential reality, is in undivided unity my self-existence ; and my procedure in dealing with notions is a process within myself. It is essential, however, in this determination of the above attitude of self-consciousness to keep hold of the fact that this attitude is thinking consciousness in general, that its object is immediate unity of the self's implicit, inherent existence, and of its existence explicitly for self. The self-same consciousness which repels itself from itself, becomes aware of being an element existing in itself. But to itself it is this element to begin with only as universal reality ia general, and not as this essential reality appears when developed in all the manifold details it contains, when the process of its being brings out all its fullness of content. This freedom of self-consciousness, as is well known, has been called Stoicism, in so far as it has appeared as a phenomenon conscious