The stage next reached by self-consciousness is that it receives a consciousness respecting that which it has thus become, or its essential nature becomes its object. Self-consciousness is to itself simple essence; there is for it no longer any other reality than this, which its self-consciousness is. In Scepticism this reality is not yet an object to it, for to it its object is merely confusion. Because it is consciousness, something is for it; in this opposition only the vanishing content is for the sceptical consciousness, without its having been comprehended in its simple permanence. Its truth, however, is its immersion in self-consciousness, and the fact of self-consciousness becoming an object to itself. Thus reality has indeed the form of a universal in existence or in thought, but in this its self-consciousness is really not a foreign thing as it is in Scepticism. In the first place it is not simple as immediate and merely existent, a complete ‘other,’ as when we speak of the soul being simple; for this last is the simple negative that turns back out of movement, out of difference, as the universal, into itself. In the second place this universal power that expresses that “I am at home with myself,” has likewise the significance of the Being, which, as objective reality, has a permanence for consciousness, and does not merely, as with the Sceptics, disappear; for reason in it alone knows how to possess and to find itself. This inwardness of mind at home with itself has built in itself an ideal world, has laid the foundation and groundwork of the intellectual world, of a kingdom of God which has come down into actuality and is in unity with it, and this is the standpoint of the Alexandrian philosophy. SECTION THREE THIRD PERIOD: THE NEO-PLATONISTS.