with its own shape ; spirit qua ultimate Reality is not in accord with its consciousness. It is actual only as Absolute Spirit, when it is also to itself in its truth as it is in its certainty of itself, or, when the extremes, into which spirit qua consciousness falls, exist for one another in spiritual shape. The embodiment adopted by spirit qua object of its own consciousness, remains filled by the certainty of spirit, and this self-certainty constitutes its substance. Through this content, the degrading of the object to bare objectivity, to the form of something that negates self-consciousness, disappears. The immediate unity of spirit with itself is the fundamental basis, or pure consciousness, inside which consciousness breaks up into its constituent elements [viz. an object with subject over against it]. In this way, shut up within its pure self-consciousness, spirit does not exist in religion as the creator of a nature in general; rather what it produces in the course of this process are its forms and shapes qua spirits, which together constitute all that it can reveal when it is completely manifested. And this process itself is the development of its perfect and complete actuality through the individual aspects thereof, i.e. through its imperfect modes of realisation. The first realisation of spirit is just the principle and notion of religion itself religion as immediate and thus Natural Religion. Here spirit knows itself as its object in a " natural " or immediate shape. The second realisation, is, however, necessarily that of knowing itself in the shape of transcended and superseded natural existence, i.e. in the form of self. This is the Religion of Art or productive activity. For the shape it adopts is raised to the form of self through the productive activity of consciousness, by which this consciousness beholds in its object its own action, i.e. sees the self. The third realisation, finally, cancels the one-sidedness of the first two : the self is as much an immediate self as the immediacy is a self. If spirit in the first is in the form of consciousness, and in the second in that of self-consciousness, it is in the third in the form of the unity of both ; it has then the shape of what is completely self-contained (An-und Fursicliseyns) ; and since it is thus presented as it is in and for itself, this is the sphere of Revealed Religion. Although spirit, however, here reaches its true shape, the very shape assumed and the conscious presentation are an aspect and phase still unsurmounted ;