self-consciousness, and its actual reality proper falls outside religion. There is no doubt one spirit in both, but its consciousness does not embrace both together ; and religion appears as a part of existence, of acting, and of striving, whose other part is the life lived within its own actual world. As we now know that spirit in its own world and spirit conscious of itself as spirit, i.e. spirit in the sphere of religion, are the same, the completion of religion consists in the two forms becoming identical with one another : not merely in its reality being grasped and embraced by religion, but conversely it, as spirit conscious of itself, becomes actual to itself, and real object of its own consciousness. So far as spirit in religion presents itself to itself, it is indeed consciousness, and the reality enclosed within it is the shape and garment in which it clothes its idea of itself. The reality, however, does not in this presentation get proper justice done to it, that is to say, it does not get to be an independent and free objective existence and not merely a garment. And conversely, because that reality lacks within itself its completion, it is a determinate shape or form, which does not attain to what it ought to reveal, viz. spirit conscious of itself. That its form might express spirit itself, the form would have to be nothing else than spirit, and spirit would have to appear to itself, or to be actual, as it is in its own essential being. Only thereby, too, would be attained what may seem to demand the opposite that the object of its consciousness has, at the same time, the form of free and independent reality. But only spirit which is object to itself in the shape of Absolute Spirit, is as much aware of being a free and independent reality as it remains therein conscious of itself. Since in the first instance self-consciousness and consciousness simply, religion, and spirit as it is externally in its world, or the objective existence of spirit, are distinct, the latter consists in the totality of spirit, so far as its moments are separated from each other and each is set forth by itself. These moments, however, are consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit spirit, that is, qua immediate spirit, which is not yet consciousness of spirit. Its totality, taken all together, constitutes the mundane existence of spirit as a whole ; spirit as such contains the previous separate embodiments in the form of universal determinations of its own being, in