subjective being — its inner aim and life — and its actual being is removed; it has attained full
reality, has itself objectively present to it. But this having been attained, the activity played by the
Spirit of the people in question is no longer needed; it has its desire. The Nation can still
accomplish much in war and peace at home and abroad; but the living substantial soul itself may
be said to have ceased its activity. The essential, supreme interest has consequently vanished from
its life, for interest is present only where there is opposition. The nation lives the same kind of life
as the individual when passing from maturity to old age, — in the enjoyment of itself, — in the
satisfaction of being exactly what it desired and was able to attain. Although its imagination might
have transcended that limit, it nevertheless abandoned any such aspirations as objects of actual
endeavour, if the real world was less than favourable to their attainment — and restricted its aim
by the conditions thus imposed. This mere customary life (the watch wound up and going on of
itself) is that which brings on natural death. Custom is activity without opposition, for which there
remains only a formal duration; in which the fullness and zest that originally characterised the aim of
life is out of the questions merely external sensuous existence which has ceased to throw itself
enthusiastically into its object. Thus perish individuals, thus perish peoples by a natural death; and
though the latter may continue in being, it is an existence without intellect or vitality; having no need
of its institutions, because the need for them is satisfied, — a political nullity and tedium. In order
that a truly universal interest may arise, the Spirit of a People must advance to the adoption of
some new purpose: but whence can this new purpose originate? It would be a higher, more
comprehensive conception of itself — a transcending of its principle — but this very act would
involve a principle of a new order, a new National Spirit.
§ 86
Such a new principle does in fact enter into the Spirit of a people that has arrived at full
development and self-realisation; it dies not a simply natural death — for it is not a mere single
individual, but a spiritual, generic life; in its case natural death appears to imply destruction through
its own agency. The reason of this difference from the single natural individual is that the Spirit of a
people exists as a genus, and consequently carries within it its own negation, in the very generality
which characterises it. A people can only die a violent death when it has become naturally dead in
itself, as e.g., the German Imperial Cities, the German Imperial Constitution.
§ 87
It is not of the nature of the all-pervading Spirit to die this merely natural death; it does not simply
sink into the senile life of mere custom but — as being a National Spirit belonging to Universal
History — attains to the consciousness of what its work is; it attains to a conception of itself. In
fact it is world-historical only in so far as a universal principle has lain in its fundamental element,
— in its grand aim: only so far is the work which such a spirit produces, a moral, political
organisation. If it be mere desires that impel nations to activity, such deeds pass over without
leaving a trace; or their traces are only ruin and destruction. Thus, it was first Chronos — Time —
that ruled; the Golden Age, without moral products; and what was produced — the offspring of
that Chronos — was devoured by it. It was Jupiter — from whose head Minerva sprang, and to
whose circle of divinities belong Apollo and the Muses — that first put a constraint upon Time, and
set a bound to its principle of decadence. He is the Political god, who produced a moral work —
the State.
§ 88
In the very element of an achievement the quality of generality, of thought, is contained; without
thought it has no objectivity; that is its basis. The highest point in the development of a people is
this, — to have gained a conception of its life and condition, — to have reduced its laws, its ideas
of justice and morality to a science; for in this unity [of the objective and subjective] lies the most
intimate unity that Spirit can attain to in and with itself. In its work it is employed in rendering itself
an object of its own contemplation; but it cannot develop itself objectively in its essential nature,
except in thinking itself.
§ 89
At this point, then, Spirit is acquainted with its principles — the general character of its acts. But at
the same time, in virtue of its very generality, this work of thought is different in point of form from
the actual achievements of the national genius, and from the vital agency by which those
achievements have been performed. We have then before us a real and an ideal existence of the
Spirit of the Nation. If we wish to gain the general idea and conception of what the Greeks were,
we find it in Sophocles and Aristophanes, in Thucydides and Plato. In these individuals the Greek
spirit conceived and thought itself. This is the profounder kind of satisfaction which the Spirit of a
people attains; but it is “ideal,” and distinct from its “real” activity.
§ 90
At such a time, therefore, we are sure to see a people finding satisfaction in the idea of virtue;
putting talk about virtue partly side by side with actual virtue, but partly in the place of it. On the
other hand pure, universal thought, since its nature is universality, is apt to bring the Special and
Spontaneous — Belief, Trust, Customary Morality — to reflect upon itself, and its primitive
simplicity; to show up the limitation with which it is fettered, — partly suggesting reasons for
renouncing duties, partly itself demanding reasons, and the connection of such requirements with
Universal Thought; and not finding that connection, seeking to impeach the authority of duty
generally, as destitute of a sound foundation.
§ 91
At the same time the isolation of individuals from each other and from the Whole makes its
appearance; their aggressive selfishness and vanity; their seeking personal advantage and
consulting this at the expense of the State at large. That inward principle in transcending its
outward manifestations is subjective also in form — viz., selfishness and corruption in the unbound
passions and egotistic interests of men.
§ 92
Zeus, therefore, who is represented as having put a limit to the devouring agency of Time, and
staid this transience by having established something inherently and independently durable — Zeus
and his race are themselves swallowed up, and that by the very power that produced them — the
principle of thought, perception, reasoning, insight derived from rational grounds, and the
requirement of such grounds.
§ 93
Time is the negative element in the sensuous world. Thought is the same negativity, but it is the
deepest, the infinite form of it, in which therefore all existence generally is dissolved; first finite
existence, — determinate, limited form: but existence generally, in its objective character, is
limited; it appears therefore as a mere datum — something immediate — authority; — and is either
intrinsically finite and limited, or presents itself as a limit for the thinking subject, and its infinite
reflection on itself [unlimited abstraction].
§ 94
But first we must observe how the life which proceeds from death, is itself, on the other hand, only
individual life; so that, regarding the species as the real and substantial in this vicissitude, the
perishing of the individual is a regress of the species into individuality. The perpetuation of the race
is, therefore, none other than the monotonous repetition of the same kind of existence. Further, we
must remark how perception, — the comprehension of being by thought, — is the source and
birthplace of a new, and in fact higher form, in a principle which while it preserves, dignifies its
material. For Thought is that Universal - that Species which is immortal, which preserves identity
with itself. The particular form of Spirit not merely passes away in the world by natural causes in
Time, but is annulled in the automatic self-mirroring activity of consciousness. Because this
annulling is an activity of Thought, it is at the same time conservative and elevating in its operation.
While then, on the one side, Spirit annuls the reality, the permanence of that which it is, it gains on
the other side, the essence, the Thought, the Universal element of that which it only was [its
transient conditions]. Its principle is no longer that immediate import and aim which it was
previously, but the essence of that import and aim.
§ 95
The result of this process is then that Spirit, in rendering itself objective and making this its being an
object of thought, on the one hand destroys the determinate form of its being, on the other hand
gains a comprehension of the universal element which it involves, and thereby gives a new form to
its inherent principle. In virtue of this, the substantial character of the National Spirit has been
altered, — that is, its principle has risen into another, and in fact a higher principle.
§ 96
It is of the highest importance in apprehending and comprehending History to have and to
understand the thought involved in this transition. The individual traverses as a unity various grades
of development, and remains the same individual; in like manner also does a people, till the Spirit
which it embodies reaches the grade of universality. In this point lies the fundamental, the Ideal
necessity of transition. This is the soul — the essential consideration — of the philosophical
comprehension of History.
§ 97
Spirit is essentially the result of its own activity; its activity is the transcending of immediate, simple,
unreflected existence, — the negation of that existence, and the returning into itself. We may
compare it with the seed; for with this the plant begins, yet it is also the result of the plant's entire
life. But the weak side of life is exhibited in the fact that the commencement and the result are
disjoined from each other. Thus also is it in the life of individuals and peoples. The life of a people
ripens a certain fruit; its activity aims at the complete manifestation of the principle which it
embodies. But this fruit does not fall back into the bosom of the people that produced and
matured it; on the contrary, it becomes a poison-draught to it. That poison-draught it cannot let
alone, for it has an insatiable thirst for it: the taste of the draught is its annihilation., though at the
same time the rise of a new principle.
§ 98
We have already discussed the final aim of progression. The principles of the successive phases of
Spirit that animate the Nations in a necessitated gradation, are themselves only steps in the
development of the one universal Spirit, which through them elevates and completes itself to a
self-comprehending totality.
§ 99
While we are thus concerned exclusively with the Idea of Spirit, and in the History of the World
regard everything as only its manifestation, we have, in traversing the past, — however extensive its
periods, — only to do with what is present; for philosophy, as occupying itself with the True, has
to do with the eternally present. Nothing in the past is lost for it, for the Idea is ever present;
Spirit is immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now. This necessarily implies
that the present form of Spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps. These have indeed unfolded
themselves in succession independently; but what Spirit is it has always been essentially;
distinctions are only the development of this essential nature. The life of the ever present Spirit is a
circle of progressive embodiments, which looked at in one respect still exist beside each other,
and only as looked at from another point of view appear as past. The grades which Spirit seems
to have left behind it, it still possesses in the depths of its present.
The End
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