1.  Essence that is self-consciousness or the self-conscious essence that knows itself to be all truth and all reality, when confronted with the reality it gives itself in the motion of its consciousness, spirit is at first only its own concept.  This concept is, in comparison to the day of that unfolding, just the night of its own essence; and in contrast to the existence of its moments as independent patterns, spirit is the creative secret of its own birth.  ²This secret contains its revelation within itself; in this concept lies the necessity of the existence because this concept is the self-knowing spirit, which means that it has in its essence the moment of being consciousness and imagining itself in objective terms.

– ³It is the pure ego, I, that has the certainty of itself in its alienation, in itself as universal object, i.e. this object is for it the interpenetration of all thinking and all actual reality.

2.  In the first immediate division of self-knowing absolute spirit, its pattern has the definition appropriate to immediate consciousness or sense certainty.  ²It sees itself in the form of being, but not spiritless being filled with contingent terms of feeling belonging to sense certainty.  No, it is being filled with spirit.  ³It also includes the form within it that emerged in immediate self-consciousness, namely the form of the lord confronting the self-consciousness of spirit retreating from its object [IV.A. Lordship and bondage etc. §13 (2. Power syllogism) ff. M].

– ⁴This being filled with the concept of spirit is thus the pattern of the simple relation of spirit to itself, the pattern of patternlessness.  ⁵This is the term that makes it the pure light essence of sunrise at once containing and filling everything, sustaining all with its formless substantiality.  ⁶Its otherness is the equally simple negative, darkness.  The motions of its own alienation, externalization, its creations in the element of its resistance-free otherness, are bursts of light; they are in their simplicity at once its becoming for itself and return from out of its existence, the fire streams consuming all patterning.  ⁷The difference it gives itself proliferates in the substance of existence and structures itself into the forms of nature, but, without continuity or understanding, the essential simplicity of its thinking ranges around through them, exploding their limits completely and immersing their beauty, heightened to splendour, in its sublimity.

3.  The content developed by this pure being, its perception, is thus a byplay devoid of essence in this substance that only rises without descending into itself to become subject and to firmly establish its differences by means of the self.  ²Substance's terms here are only attributes that don't grow to independence and remain only names of the many-named one.  ³This one is attired with the various forces of existence and the patterns of actual reality as with a selfless jewelry; they are only messengers of its power with no will of their own, visions of its glory, voices singing its praise.

4.  Now, this teeming life must determine itself as being for itself and give its vanishing patterns persistence.  ²Immediate being, in which it sets itself up against its consciousness, is itself the negative power dissolving its own differences.  ³This immediate being is thus in truth the self and that's why spirit moves on to knowing itself in the form of the self.  ⁴Pure light explodes its simplicity into an infinity of forms and offers itself up as a sacrifice to being for itself so that the single individual acquires persistence in its substance.