1.  Self-conscious spirit has gone beyond patternless essence, elevating immediacy to the self as such, and now it determines its simplicity as a diversity of being for itself and is the religion of spiritual perception, where it breaks down into the uncountable multiplicity of weaker and stronger, richer and poorer spirits.  ²This pantheism, initially just the quiet persistence of these spirit atoms, eventually turns into a hostile motion within itself.  ³The innocence of the flower religion, which is only a selfless image of the self, turns into the seriousness of struggling life, into the guilt of animal religion, while the peace and impotence of contemplative individuality becomes destructive being for itself.

– ⁴Depriving the things of perception of the death of abstraction and elevating them to essences of spiritual perception didn't help at all.  That death is there in giving soul to this spirit kingdom, in its own determinateness and negativity, and it goes beyond their innocent indifference.  ⁵This is what turns the dissipation in the diversity of the peaceful plant forms into a warring motion grinding down the hatred of its being for itself.

– ⁶The actual self-consciousness of this scattered spirit is a mass of isolated, mutually hostile tribal spirits which, in their hatred, fight each other to the death and become aware of specific animal forms as their essence, for they are nothing other than animal spirits, isolating themselves, animal lives aware of themselves without universality.

2.  What is completely ground down in this hatred is the determinateness of pure, negative being for itself, a motion of the concept, through which spirit enters into another pattern.  ²Being for itself overcome is the form of the object generated by the self.  In fact, a better way to describe this is the generated self grinding itself down into a thing.  ³This is why the working spirit gains the upper hand over the mutually destructive animal spirits, for the action of labouring spirit is not only negative, but also pacified and positive.  ⁴The consciousness of spirit is from now on the motion that is already beyond immediate being in itself and beyond abstract being for itself.  ⁵The in itself is reduced to the determinateness of opposition, so it is no longer absolute mindful spirit's own form.  Now it is a reality that finds its consciousness pre-existing as a common existence confronting it, but it overcomes this determinateness.  It is not only being for itself accomplishing this overcoming; it also produces its image, the being for itself that is set out in the form of an object.  ⁶This generation is however not yet the complete kind, but a limited activity, just forming something pre-existing.