(_β_) With regard to the further aspect of the content we have already pointed out that it is referable to the history of the Absolute under the mode that the same is deducible from the notion of Spirit itself; a history which makes objective in the real world bodily and spiritual singularity as infused with its own essential and universal nature. For the reconciliation of our individual consciousness with God does not immediately appear as an original harmony, but rather as a harmony which only is modulated from infinite pain, from resignation, sacrifice, and the mortification of the finite, sensuous, and particular. We see here the finite and the infinite brought into unity; and this reconciliation only asserts itself in its true profundity, intimacy, and power by means of the grossness and severity of the contradiction which yearns for resolution. We may therefore without fear assert that the entire asperity and dissonance of the suffering, torture, and agony, which such a contradiction brings in its train, is inseparable from the very nature of spiritual life, whose final consolation constitutes here the content. This process of Spirit is, if accepted frankly for all it implies and unfolds, the essence, the notion of Spirit absolutely. It consequently determines for conscious life that _universal history_[226] which is for ever repeated in every individual consciousness. For it is nothing less or more than this consciousness as the universal mind or Spirit is explicated in the multiplicity of individual life, reality and existence. In the first instance, however, for the reason that the essential significance of the spiritual process is concentrated in that mode of reality which is purely individual, this universal history comes before us itself merely in the form of _one_ person, to which it is conjoined as its own, as the history, that is, of his birth, his suffering, death, and return from death; at the same time there is the further significance attached to this personal history, namely, that it is the history of universal and absolute Spirit itself.