, as also the separate fragments into which it falls, are shown to be what they inherently are, essential modes of spiritual life, absolutely restless processes or determinate moments which are at once cancelled in their opposite. Their essential nature, bare consciousness, is thus the bare simplicity of absolute distinction, distinction which as it stands is no distinction. Consequently it is pure self-existence not of a particular self, but essentially universal self, whose being consists in a restless process invading and pervading the stable existence of actual fact. In it is found the certainty that knows itself at once to be the truth ; there we have pure thought in the sense of absolute notion with all its power of negativity, which annihilates every objective existence that would claim to stand over against consciousness, and turns it into a form of conscious existence. This pure consciousness is at the same time simple and undifferentiated as well, just because its distinction is no distinction. Being this form of bare and simple reflection into self, however, it is the element of belief, in which spirit has the special feature of positive universality, of what is inherent and essential in contrast with that self-existence on the part of self-consciousness. Forced back upon itself away from this unsubstantial world whose being is mere dissolution, spirit in its undivided unity is, when we consider its true meaning, at once the absolute movement, the ceaseless process of negating its appearance, as well as the essential substance thereof satisfied within itself, and the positive stability of that appearance. But, bearing as they inherently do the characteristic of alienation, both these moments fall apart in the shape of a twofold consciousness. The former is pure Insight, the spiritual process concentrated and focussed in self-consciousness, a process which has over against it the consciousness of something positive, the form of objectivity or presentation, and which directs itself upon this presented object. The proper and peculiar object of this insight is, however, merely pure ego.* The bare consciousness of the positive element, of unbroken self-identity, finds its object, on the other hand, in the inner reality as such. Pure insight has, therefore, in the first instance, no content within it, because it exists for itself by negating everything in it ; to belief, on the other hand, belongs the content, but without insight. While the former does not get away from self-consciousness, the latter to be sure has its content as well in the element of pure self -consciousness, but only in presentation, not in conceptions in pure consciousness, not