1.  Customary ethical substance kept the opposition enclosed within its simple, integral consciousness and held this consciousness itself in immediate unity with its essence [VI.A.c. Legal status §5.5 M].  ²This gives the essence the simple definiteness of being for consciousness, which is immediately oriented to it as its custom.  Consciousness does not see itself as this exclusive self, nor does substance have the significance of an existence excluded from it, such that consciousness could only establish its identity with that existence by alienating itself while also having to produce the substance.  ³But that mindful spirit whose self is absolutely discrete has its content as just such a hard reality confronting it and the world here has the character of something external to it, self-consciousness' negative.  ⁴Nevertheless, this world is spiritual/mental essence.  It is in itself the interpenetration of being and individuality.  Its existence is the work of self-consciousness, but just as much an immediately present reality alien to self-consciousness with its own characteristic being in which self-consciousness does not recognize itself.  ⁵That reality is the external essence and the free content of law; but this external reality, including within it the lord of the world of law, is not only this elemental essence coincidentally present for the self.  It is its labour; not positive, its negative labour [VI.A.c. Legal status §5.5 M].  ⁶It acquires its existence through self-consciousness' own externalization and cleansing, which the external violence of the unbound elements appear to subject it to within the desolation reigning in the world of law.  ⁷Each of these elements is, for itself, only pure devastation and its own dissolution; but this dissolution, its negative essence, is precisely the self.  The desolation is the self of the element, its action and becoming, development, process.  ⁸But this activity and process that makes the substance actual is the alienation of the personality, for the immediate self, in and for itself valid without alienation, is bereft of substance, nothing more than the play of those unruly elements.  Its substance is thus its own alienation as such; the alienation is the substance, the spiritual and mental powers, ordering, and thereby sustaining, themselves into a world.

2.  This is what makes substance spirited mind, self-conscious unity of self and essence, in which, however, both have the significance of alienation for each other.  ²This spirited mind is consciousness of an objective reality free for itself.  But this consciousness confronts that unity of self and essence, while pure consciousness confronts the real kind.  ³Actual self-consciousness transits through its alienation into the actual world and vice versa; on the other hand, however, this actual reality, both the person and the objectivity, is overcome, eliminated; they are pure and universal.  ⁴This its alienation is pure consciousness, essence.  ⁵The present has its immediate antithesis in its own beyond, which is at once that present's mode of thinking and its state of having been thought; similarly, the beyond has its antithesis in that here and now, the actual reality alienated from it.

3.  This mindful spirit thus builds not only one world, but two, separate from and opposed to each other.

– ²The world of customary ethical spirit is its own present, so each power of that world lies in this unity and, to the extent that the two are distinguishable, in balance with the whole.  ³Nothing has the significance of the negative of self-consciousness.  Even the departed spirit remains in the blood of the relatives, present in the self of the family, and the universal power of the government is the WILL, the self of the people [VI.A.a. Customary ethical world §§2, 3, 6 and 7 M].  ⁴Here, however, being in the present means only the objective reality that has its consciousness beyond itself; every single moment as essence receives this and that means it receives its reality from another such that being actual means that its essence is distinct from its own actual reality.  ⁵Nothing has a spirit grounded within it and dwelling in it, for the spirit lies outside everything in an alien reality.  The balance of the whole is not the unity abiding by itself, the pacification returned into itself; it is based rather on the alienation of the opposites.  ⁶The whole is thus, like each single moment, a reality alienated from itself.  It breaks down into two: one realm in which self-consciousness is actually itself and its own object and another realm of pure consciousness, which has no actual presence beyond the first, but lies in faith.  ⁷The customary ethical world transited out of the separation of divine and human laws and their forms, while its consciousness transited out of the separation into knowledge and unconsciousness, both returning back into fate, into the self as the negative power of these antitheses [VI.A.b. Customary ethical action §10; VI.A.c. Legal status §1.6, 7 M].  Just so also do these two realms of the self-alienated spirit return back into the self.  However, where the former was the first immediately valid self, the single person, now this second self [VI.C.c. Conscience etc. §2], after having returned from out of its externalization back into itself, will be the universal self, the consciousness that grasps the concept [VI.B.III Absolute freedom and the Terror M].  These spiritual/mental worlds, that claim a fixed reality and spiritless, soulless persistence for all their moments, will dissolve into pure insight.  ⁸This insight, the self grasping itself, completes the process of education and culture.  It grasps nothing but the self and everything as the self, i.e. it comprehends everything, destroys all objectivity and transforms all being in itself into being for itself.  ⁹Turned against faith as the alien realm of essence in the beyond, it is the Enlightenment.  ¹⁰Enlightenment completes this alienation in this realm too where the alienated spirit goes to save itself as the consciousness of self-identical tranquillity.  Enlightenment confuses the housekeeping spirited mind conducts here by bringing the tools and technology of this world over into the other, tools spirited mind cannot deny as its property, because its consciousness similarly belongs to the world of the here and now.

– ¹¹In this negative activity, pure insight realizes itself too, producing its own object, the unknowable, absolute essence, along with utility [VI.B.II.b. Enlightenment's truth §3.1 ff. and §§7, 8 M].  ¹²Actual reality loses all sense of substance in this way and nothing is in itself there any more.  The real world collapses just like the realm of faith.  One consequence of this revolution is absolute freedom, which enables the previously alienated spirit to return completely back into itself, taking its leave of this land of education and culture [France] and passing over into the land of moral consciousness [Germany].