an indefinite and consequently vacuous and content-less universality. The substance of the Divine on the other hand persists through change of form, passage over and advance to a system of many Deities, and the abrogation of that system once more in the one highest form of God unalterably one and the same. It is not that conception of the one God, which itself essentially possesses, as this unity, the negative aspect as its own determination, both necessary and appropriate to its own essential notion. In an analogous way the destructive and hurtful element is placed according to the Parsee view of existence _outside_ the personality of Ormuzd in Ahriman, and consequently only makes a contradiction and conflict manifest belonging under no form of relation to Ormuzd, as a distinct phase of his own substance. The actual point in the advance which we have now to make consists, therefore, in this that, on the one hand, the negative aspect, fixed by consciousness in an independent relation as the Absolute, is, however, on the other, merely regarded as a phase of the Divine, as a phase, however, which is not only as outside the true Absolute incidental to another Godhead[56], but is to be so ascribed to the Absolute, that the true God appears as a process in which He negates _Himself_, and thereby contains this negative element as an inherent self-determination of His own substance. Through this enlarged conception the Absolute is for the first time essentially _concrete_, that is self-determination, and thereby essential unity, whose particular antitheses, as parts of a process, appear to consciousness as the different determinations of one and the same God. For the necessity of giving essential definition to the absolute significance is just that which at this stage it is felt to be of first importance to satisfy. All the significances up to this point persisted by virtue of their abstract character as absolutely undefined and consequently void of content, or were merged, when in a converse direction they tended to clear distinction, immediately in the Being of Nature, or fell into a conflict in respect to their configuration which gave them no repose and reconciliation. This twofold defect we have now to remove, both by showing the advance of Thought regarded as itself an ideal process, and by illustrating that advance by means of particular facts of the mind and institutions of nations on the objective plane of history.