Thus, Man, beginning as a percipient consciousness, apprehending single
objects in space and time, and as an appetitive self bent upon single
gratifications, has ended as a rational being,—a consciousness purged of
its selfishness and isolation, looking forward openly and impartially on
the universe of things and beings. He has ceased to be a mere animal,
swallowed up in the moment and the individual, using his intelligence only
in selfish satisfactions. He is no longer bound down by the struggle for
existence, looking on everything as a mere thing, a mere means. He has
erected himself above himself and above his environment, but that because
he occupies a point of view at which he and his environment are no longer
purely antithetical and exclusive(91). He has reached what is really the
moral standpoint: the point i.e. at which he is inspired by a universal
self-consciousness, and lives in that peaceful world where the antitheses
of individualities and of outward and inward have ceased to trouble. “The
natural man,” says Hegel(92), “sees in the woman flesh of his flesh: the
moral and spiritual man sees spirit of his spirit in the moral and
spiritual being and by its means.” Hitherto we have been dealing with
something falling below the full truth of mind: the region of immediate
sensibility with its thorough immersion of mind in body, first of all, and
secondly its gradual progress to a general standpoint. It is only in the
third part of Subjective mind that we are dealing with the psychology of a
being who in the human sense knows and wills, i.e. apprehends general
truth, and carries out ideal purposes.