to the highest experience of universal mind Keligioii. The immediately succeeding section may be taken as the keystone of t" e whole arch of experience traversed in the Phenomenology. Here it is pointed out that all the preceding phases of experience have not merely been preparing the way for what is to follow, but that the various aspects, hitherto treated as separate moments of experience, are in reality abstractions from the life of concrete spirit now to be discussed and analysed. It is noteworthy that from this point onwards the argument is less negative in its result either directly or indirectly, and is more systematic and constructive. This is no doubt largely because hitherto individual mind as such has been under review, and this is an abstraction from social mind or spiritual existence.] * The term " Spirit " seems better to render the word " Geist " used here, than the word " mind '' would do. Up to this stage of experience the word "mind" is sufficient to convey the meaning. But spirit is mind at a much higher level of existence. Reason is spirit, when its certainty of being all reality JL\ has been raised to the level of truth, and reason is consciously aware of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself. The development of spirit was indicated in the preceding movement of mind, where the object of consciousness, the category pure and simple, rose to be the notion of reason. When reason " observes/' this pure unity of ego and existence, the unity of subjectivity and objectivity, of for-itself-ness and in-itself-ness this unity is immanent, has the character of implicitness or of being ; and consciousness of reason finds itself. But the true nature of " observation " is rather the transcendence of this instinct of finding its object lying directly at hand, and passing beyond this unconscious state of existence. The directly perceived category, the thing simply "found," enters consciousness as the self-existence of the ego, ego, which now knows itself in the objective realit)', and knows itself there as the self. But this feature of the category, viz. of being for-itself as opposed to being immanent within itself, is equally one-sided, and a moment that cancels itself. The category therefore gets for consciousness the character which it possesses in its universal truth it is self-contained essential reality . This character, still abstract, which constitutes the nature of absolute fact, of "fact itself," is to begin with " spiritual reality " : and its mode of consciousness is here