in pure selfconsciousness. Belief is, as a fact, in this way pure consciousness of the essential reality, i.e. of the bare and simple inner nature, and is thus thought the primary factor in the nature of belief, which is generally overlooked.* The immediateness which characterises the presence of the essential reality within it is due to the fact that its object is essence, inner nature, i.e. pure thought, f This immediateness, however, so far as thinking enters consciousness, or pure consciousness enters into self-consciousness, maintains the significance of an objective being that lies beyond consciousness of self. It is because of the significance which immediacy and simplicity of pure thought thus retain in consciousness that the essential reality in the case of belief drops into being an objectively presented idea , instead of being the content of thought, and comes to be looked at as a supersensible world, which is essentially an " other " for self-consciousness. In the case of pure insight, on the other hand, the entrance of pure thought into consciousness has the opposite character : objectivity has the significance of a content that is merely negative, that cancels itself and returns into the self ; that is to say, only the self is properly object to self, or, to put it otherwise, the object only has truth so far as it has the form of self. As belief and pure insight fall in common within pure consciousness, they also in common involve the mind's return out of the concrete sphere of spiritual culture. There are three aspects, therefore, from which they show what they are. In one aspect each is outside every relation, and has a being all its own ; in another each takes up an attitude towards the concrete actual world standing in antithesis to pure consciousness ; while in the third form each is related to the other inside pure consciousness. In the case of belief the aspect of complete being, of being in-and-for-itself, is its absolute object, whose content and character we have already come to know. For it lies in the very notion of belief that this object is nothing else than the real world lifted into the universality of pure consciousness. The articulation of this world, therefore, constitutes the organisation belonging to pure universality also, except that the parts in the latter case do not alienate one another when spiritualised, but are complete realities all by themselves, are spirits* returned into themselves and self-contained. The process of their transition from one into the other is, therefore, only for us [who are analysing the