§ 412. Implicitly the soul shows the untruth and unreality of matter; for the soul, in its concentrated self, cuts itself off from its immediate being, placing the latter over against it as a corporeity incapable of offering resistance to its moulding influence. The soul, thus setting in opposition its being to its (conscious) self, absorbing it, and making it its own, has lost the meaning of mere soul, or the “immediacy” of mind. The actual soul with its sensation and its concrete self-feeling turned into habit, has implicitly realised the ’ideality’ of its qualities; in this externality it has recollected and inwardised itself, and is infinite self-relation. This free universality thus made explicit shows the soul awaking to the higher stage of the ego, or abstract universality in so far as it is _for_ the abstract universality. In this way it gains the position of thinker and subject—specially a subject of the judgment in which the ego excludes from itself the sum total of its merely natural features as an object, a world external to it,—but with such respect to that object that in it it is immediately reflected into itself. Thus soul rises to become _Consciousness_. Sub-Section B. Phenomenology Of Mind. Consciousness. § 413. Consciousness constitutes the reflected or correlational grade of mind: the grade of mind as _appearance_. _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 explicit as the Ego, is only its abstract formal identity. As _soul_ it was under the phase of _substantial_ universality; 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 _essence_; but since reality, in the sphere of essence, is represented as in immediate being and at the same time as “ideal,” it is as consciousness only the _appearance_ (phenomenon) of mind.