Sus-Section B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND. CONSCIOUSNESS. 413.] Consciousness constitutes the reflected or cor- relational grade of mind: thegrade of mind asappearance. Ego is infinite self-relation of mind, but as subjective or as self-certainty. The immediate identity of the natural soul has been raised to this pure ‘ideal’ self identity ; and what the former contained is for this self- subsistent reflection set forth as an object. The pure abstract freedom of mind lets go from it its specific qualities, —the soul’s natural life—to an equal freedom as an independent object. It is of this latter, as external to it, that the ego is in the first instance aware (conscious), and as such it is Consciousness. Ego, as this absolute negativity, is implicitly the identity in the otherness: the ego is itself that other and stretches over the object (as if that object were implicitly cancelled)—it is one side of the relationship and the whole relationship— the light, which manifests itself and something else too. 414.] The self-identity of the mind, thus first made48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. — [414, 415+ explicit as the Ego, is only its abstract formal identity. As soul it was under the phase of substantial univer- sality ; now, as subjective reflection in itself, it is referred to this substantiality as to its negative, something dark and beyond it. Hence consciousness, like reciprocal dependence in general, is the contradiction between the independence of the two sides and their identity in which they are merged into one. The mind as ego is _J° te, essence; but since reality, in the sphere of essence, is Lz, SPlrepresented as in immediate being and at the same time as ‘ideal,’ it is as consciousness only the appearance (phenomenon) of mind. 415.] As the ego is by itself only a formal identity, the dialectical movement of its intelligible unity, i.e. the successive steps in further specification of consciousness, does not to it seem to be its own activity, but is implicit, and to the ego it seems an alteration of the object. Consciousness consequently appears differently modi- fied according to the difference of the given object ; and the gradual specification of consciousness appears as a variation in the characteristics of its objects. Ego, the subject of consciousness, is thinking: the logical process of modifying the object is what is identical in subject and object, their absolute interdependence, what makes the object the subject’s own. The Kantian philosophy may be most accurately described as having viewed the mind as consciousness, and as containing the propositions only of a phenomeno- logy (not of a philosophy) of mind. The Ego Kant regards as reference to something away and beyond (which in its abstract description is termed the thing-at- itself) ; and it is only from this finite point of view that he treats both intellect and will. Though in the notion of a power of reflective judgment he touches upon the Idea of mind—a subject-objectivity, an intuitive intellect,415-417.) CONSCIOUSNESS. 49 &c,, and even the Idea of Nature, still this Idea is again deposed to an appearance, i.e. to a subjective maxim (§58). Reinhold may therefore be said to have correctly appreciated Kantism when he treated it as a theory of consciousness (under the name of ‘ faculty of ideation ’). Fichte kept to the same point of view : his non-ego is only something set over against the ego, only defined as in con- Sciousness: itis made no more than an infinite ‘ shock,’ i.e.athing-in-itself. Both systems therefore have clearly not reached the intelligible unity or the mind as it actually and essentially is, but only as it is in reference to something else. As against Spinozism, again, it is to be noted that the mind in the judgment by which it ‘constitutes’ itself an ego (a free subject contrasted with its qualitative affection) has emerged from substance, and that the philosophy, which gives this judgment as the absolute characteristic of mind, has emerged from Spinozism. 416.] The aim of conscious mind is to make its appearance identical with its essence, to raise its se/f- certainty to truth. The existence of mind in the stage of consciousness is finite, because it is merely a nominal self-relation, or mere certainty. The object is only abstractly characterised as its; in other words, in the object it is only as an abstract ego that the mind is reflected into itself: hence its existence there has still a content, which is not as its own. 417.] The grades of this elevation of certainty to truth are three in number: first (a) consciousness in general, with an object set against it ; (6) self-conscious- ness, for which ego is the object ; (c) unity of conscious- ness and self-consciousness, where the mind sees itself embodied in the object and sees itself as implicitly and explicitly determinate, as Reason, the notion of mind. E