manner that it becomes the inner being of conscious life, or becomes an object which consciousness permeates, in which consciousness maintains itself, keeps within itself, and is present to itself, and, by its thus being the process of that object, brings the object into being. It is precisely this which enlightenment rightly declares belief to be, when enlightenment says that the Absolute Reality professed by belief is a being that comes from belief's own consciousness, is its own thought, something produced from and by consciousness.* Enlightenment, consequently, interprets and declares it to be error, to be a made-up invention about the very same thing as enlightenment itself is. Enlightenment that seeks to teach belief this new wisdom does not, in doing so, tell it anything new. For the object of belief itself is just this too, viz. a pure essential reality of its own peculiar consciousness ; so that this consciousness does not put itself down for lost and negated in that object, but rather puts trust in it ; and this just means that it finds itself there as this particular consciousness, finds itself therein to be self-consciousness. If I put my trust in any one, his certitude of himself is for me the certitude of myself; I know my self-existence in him, I know that he acknowledges it, and that it is for him both his purpose and his real nature. Trust, however, is belief, because its consciousness has a direct relation to its object, and thus sees at once that it is one with the object, and in the object. Further, since what is object for me is something in which I know myself, I am at the same time in that object really in the form of another self -consciousness, i.e. one which has become in that object alienated from its own particular individuation, from its natural and contingent existence, but which partly continues therein to be self-consciousness, and partly is there an essential consciousness just like pure insight. In the notion of insight there lies not merely this, that consciousness knows itself in the object it looks at, and finds itself directly there, without first quitting the thought element and then returning into itself ; the notion implies as well that consciousness is aware of itself as being also the mediating process, aware of itself as active, as the agency of production. Through this it gets the thought of this unity of self as self and object. This very consciousness is also belief. Obedience and action make a necessary moment, through which the certainty of existence in Absolute Keality