essentially to philosophy to get a grasp of what is, of what is actually real in itself. All that is true starts from the form of immediacy as it appears in its manifestation, i.e., in its Being. The notion or conception must therefore be implicitly present in the self-consciousness of men, in the Spirit; the World-Spirit must have conceived of itself after this fashion. This conception of itself, however, is necessity in the form of the process of Spirit, which was exhibited in the preceding stages of religion, and chiefly in the Jewish, the Greek, and the Roman religions, and had for its result the notion or conception of the absolute unity of the divine and human natures, the reality of God, i.e., God’s objectifying of Himself as representing His truth. Thus the history of the world is the setting forth of this truth as a result in the immediate consciousness of Spirit.
We have seen God as a God of free men, though at first as yet in the subjective, limited, national spirit of the various peoples, and in the accidental shape which belongs to imagination; next we had the sorrow of the world following on the crushing out of the national Spirit. This sorrow was the birthplace of the impulse felt by Spirit to know God as spiritual in a universal form and stripped of finitude. This need was created by the progress of history, by the gradual advance of the World-Spirit. This immediate impulse, this longing which wishes and craves for something definite, the instinct, as it were, of Spirit which is impelled to seek for this, demanded such an appearance in time, the manifestation of God as the infinite Spirit in the form of a real man.
“When the fulness of time was come, God sent His Son,” i.e., when Spirit had entered so deeply into itself as to know its infinitude, and to comprehend the Substantial in the subjectivity of immediate self-consciousness, in a subjectivity, however, which is at the same time infinite negativity, and is just, in consequence of this, absolutely universal.
