disposed and secured. The triumph over this system was thus a triumph over that principle, and consequently the triumph of free, spontaneous thought. But another side of this triumph is the triumph of the commonplace point of view that broke free from the Notion and shook off the yoke of thought. Formerly, and even nowadays, enough has been heard of Aristotle’s scholastic subtleties; in using this name, men thought that they had a right to spare themselves from entering on abstraction, and, in place of the Notion, they thought that it justified them in seeing, hearing, and thus making their escape to what is called healthy human understanding. In science, too, in place of subtle thoughts, subtle sight has commenced; a beetle or a species of bird is distinguished with as great minuteness as were formerly conceptions and thoughts. Such subtleties as whether a species of bird is red or green in colour, or has a more or less perfect tail, are found more easy than the differences in thought; and in the meantime, until a people has educated itself up to the labour of thought, in order to be able thus to support the universal, the former is a useful preparation, or rather it is a moment in this course of culture. But inasmuch as the deficiency in the Aristotelian philosophy rests in the fact, that after the manifold of phenomena was through it raised into the Notion, though this last again fell asunder into a succession of determinate Notions, the unity of the absolute Notion which unites them was not emphasized, and this is what succeeding time had to accomplish. What now appears is that the unity of the Notion which is absolute existence, makes its appearance as necessity, and it presents itself first as the unity of self-consciousness and consciousness, as pure thought. The unity of existence as existence is objective unity, thought, as that which is thought. But unity, as Notion, the implicitly universal negative unity, time as absolutely fulfilled time, and in its fulfilment as being unity, is pure self-consciousness. Hence we see it come to pass, that pure self-consciousness makes itself reality, but, at the same time, it first of all does so with subjective significance as a self-consciousness that has taken up its position as such, and that separates itself from objective existence, and hence is first of all subject to a difference which it does not overcome.