§ 442. The progress of mind is _development_, in so far as its existent phase, viz. knowledge, involves as its intrinsic purpose and burden that utter and complete autonomy which is rationality; in which case the action of translating this purpose into reality is strictly only a nominal passage over into manifestation, and is even there a return into itself. So far as knowledge which has not shaken off its original quality of _mere_ knowledge is only abstract or formal, the goal of mind is to give it objective fulfilment, and thus at the same time produce its freedom. The development here meant is not that of the individual (which has a certain _anthropological_ character), where faculties and forces are regarded as successively emerging and presenting themselves in external existence—a series of steps, on the ascertainment on which there was for a long time great stress laid (by the system of Condillac), as if a conjectural natural emergence could exhibit the origin of these faculties and _explain_ them. In Condillac’s method there is an unmistakable intention to show how the _several_ modes of mental activity could be made intelligible without losing sight of mental unity, and to exhibit their necessary interconnexion. But the categories employed in doing so are of a wretched sort. Their ruling principle is that the sensible is taken (and with justice) as the _prius_ or the initial basis, but that the later phases that follow this starting-point present themselves as emerging in a solely _affirmative_ manner, and the negative aspect of mental activity, by which this material is transmuted into mind and destroyed _as_ a sensible, is misconceived and overlooked. As the theory of Condillac states it, the sensible is not merely the empirical first, but is left as if it were the true and essential foundation. Similarly, if the activities of mind are treated as mere manifestations, forces, perhaps in terms stating their utility or suitability for some other interest of head or heart, there is no indication of the true final aim of the whole business. That can only be the intelligible unity of mind, and its activity can only have itself as aim; i.e. its aim can only be to get rid of the form of immediacy or subjectivity, to reach and get hold of itself, and to liberate itself to itself. In this way the so-called faculties of mind as thus distinguished are only to be treated as steps of this liberation. And this is the only _rational_ mode of studying the mind and its various activities.