The stage next reached by self-consciousness is that it receives a consciousness respecting that which it has thus become, or its essential nature becomes its object. Self-consciousness is to itself simple essence; there is for it no longer any other reality than this, which its self-consciousness is. In Scepticism this reality is not yet an object to it, for to it its object is merely confusion. Because it is consciousness, something is for it; in this opposition only the vanishing content is for the sceptical consciousness, without its having been comprehended in its simple permanence. Its truth, however, is its immersion in self-consciousness, and the fact of self-consciousness becoming an object to itself. Thus reality has indeed the form of a universal in existence or in thought, but in this its self-consciousness is really not a foreign thing as it is in Scepticism. In the first place it is not simple as immediate and merely existent, a complete ‘other,’ as when we speak of the soul being simple; for this last is the simple negative that turns back out of movement, out of difference, as the universal, into itself. In the second place this universal power that expresses that “I am at home with myself,” has likewise the significance of the Being, which, as objective reality, has a permanence for consciousness, and does not merely, as with the Sceptics, disappear; for reason in it alone knows how to possess and to find itself. This inwardness of mind at home with itself has built in itself an ideal world, has laid the foundation and groundwork of the intellectual world, of a kingdom of God which has come down into actuality and is in unity with it, and this is the standpoint of the Alexandrian philosophy.
SINCE Scepticism is the annulling of the opposites which in Stoicism and Epicureanism were accepted as the universal principles from which all other opposites took their rise, it likewise is the unity in which these opposites are found as ideal determinations, so that the Idea must now come into consciousness as concrete in itself. With this third development, which is the concrete result of all that has gone before, an entirely new epoch begins. Philosophy is now on quite a different footing, since, with the rejection of the criterion for subjective knowledge, finite principles in general also disappear; for it is with these that the criterion has to do. This then is the form which Philosophy takes with the Neo-Platonists, and which is closely connected with the revolution which was caused in the world by Christianity. The last stage which we reached—that subjective contentment and return of self-consciousness into itself which is attained by the renunciation of all that is fixed and objective, by flight into the pure, infinite abstraction in itself, by the absolute dearth of all determinate content—this stage had come to perfection in Scepticism, although the Stoic and Epicurean systems have the same end in view. But with this complete entering into and abiding within itself of infinite subjectivity, Philosophy had reached the standpoint at which self-consciousness knew itself in its thought to be the Absolute (Vol. II. p. 372); and since Philosophy now rejected the subjective and finite attitude of self-consciousness, and its manner of distinguishing itself from an unmeaning external object, it comprehended in itself the difference, and perfected the truth into an intelligible world. The consciousness of this, expressing itself as it did in the spirit of the world, now constitutes the object of Philosophy; it was principally brought about by employing and reasoning from Platonic conceptions and expressions, but also by making use of those of the Aristotelians and Pythagoreans.