is its self-existence or its own proper action. The same thing that is already inherently established, thus repeats itself now as knowledge thereof on the part of consciousness and as conscious action. Each finds the other lay aside the independence of character with which each appears confronting the other. This waiving of independence is the same renunciation of the one-sidedness of the notion as constituted implicitly the beginning ; but it is now its own act of renunciation, just as the notion renounced is its own notion. That implicit nature of the beginning is in truth as much mediated, because it is negativity; it now establishes itself as it is in its truth ; and the negative element exists as a determinate quality which each has for the other, and is inherently and essentially selfcancelling, self-transcending. The one of the two parts of the opposition is the disparity between existence within itself in its individuality and universality ; the other, disparity between its abstract universality and the self. The former lets its self-existence perish, and relinquishes itself, makes confession ; the latter renounces the rigidity of its abstract universality, and thereby puts away its lifeless self and its inert universality ; so that the former is completed through the moment of universality, which is the essence, and the latter through universality, which is self. By this process of action spirit has come to light in the form of pure universality of knowledge, which is self-consciousness as self-consciousness, which is simple unity of knowledge. It is through action that spirit is spirit so as definitely to exist ; it raises its existence into the sphere of thought and hence into absolute opposition, and returns out of it through and within this very opposition. Thus, then, what was in the case of religion objective content, or a way of ideally presenting an other, is here the action proper of the self. The notion is the connecting principle securing that the content is the action proper of the self. For this notion is, as we see, the knowledge that the action of the self within itself is all that is essential and all existence, the knowledge of this Subject as Substance and of the Substance as this knowledge of its action. What we have done here, in addition, is simply to gather together the particular moments, each of which in principle exhibits the life of spirit in its entirety, and again to fix and secure the notion in the form of the notion, whose content was disclosed in those moments and had already presented itself in the form of a mode or type of consciousness. This last embodiment of spirit