With the aid of this scheme Hegel can expound the course of history. From it he is also able to develop the basic principles of logic. Hence he is sure that from it it must be possible to make intelligible how the notional world which can be logically developed out of the notion of Being passes over into being the world of reality. He carries this fancy through to its conclusion in such magnificent fashion, that even we, who are proof against its charm, can understand how it was possible to become intoxicated with it. While Fichte seeks to give an ethical meaning to the expansion of pure Being into the world of reality, Hegel from the very outset takes his stand upon the assertion that in its ultimate analysis the meaning of the world can only be an intellectual one. The Absolute has no other object in bringing a world into existence than to become conscious of itself. It is infinitely creative spirit, but not, as in Fichte’s thought, with the object of endlessly working, but with that of returning into itself by the road of its own creations. In nature the Absolute comprehends itself only very dimly. It is first in man that it really experiences itself, and that in three ascending stages. In the man who is concerned merely with himself and nature it is still subjective spirit. In the communal spirit of men who cooperate for the legal and ethical organization of human society, it expands to objective spirit and at the same time, on a basis of notions provided within this spirit, shows itself capable of being creative. In art, in religion, and in philosophy it becomes conscious of itself as absolute spirit, existing in and for itself and having overcome the contradictions of subject and object, thought and Being. In art it contemplates itself as such; in religious devotion [pg 143] it presents itself as such; in philosophy, which is pure thought, it comprehends itself as such. With the world represented as thought, the Absolute experiences itself. Before the destiny to which Spinoza submits with a smile, against which Fichte and Schleiermacher rebel, Hegel bows in courageous reverence for truth. His world-view is supra-ethical mysticism. The ethical is to him only a phase in the development of intellectuality. Civilization he conceives not as something ethical, but only as something intellectual. For proof that the ethical is nothing in itself but only a phenomenon of the intellectual, Hegel appeals to French usage. “The moral,” he says, “must be taken in the wider sense in which it signifies not the morally good alone. ‘Le moral’ is in French opposed to the physical and means the spiritual, the intellectual, or the non-material in general.”_(_48_)_ The notion of the ethical with which Hegel works is extraordinarily wide. It consists in “the will having for its objects not subjective, _i.e._, selfish, interests, but a universal content.”_(_49_)_ It is the business of thought to define this universal content in particular instances.