ABSTRACT
In the forms of experience hitherto dealt with, which are distinguished broadly as consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit, religion also, the consciousness of absolute being in general, has no doubt made its appearance. But that was from the point of view of consciousness, when it has the absolute being for its object. Absolute being, however, in its own distinctive nature, the self-consciousness of spirit, has not appeared in those forms. The immediate existence of Reason, and the special shapes which reason assumes, has no form of religion, because self-consciousness in the case of reason knows itself or looks for itself in the direct and immediate present. In the religion of Morality it is at last reinstated that Absolute Reality is a positive content; but that content is bound up with the negativity characteristic of the enlightenment. Spirit knowing its self is in religion primarily and immediately its own pure self-consciousness.
