1.  Spirit appears here then as the craft master.  It generates itself as object through its own action, but, not having grasped the thought of itself, this action is an instinctual labouring like bees building the cells of their hives.

2.  The first, immediate form is the abstract form of the understanding and the work is not yet filled with spirit.  ²The crystals of the pyramids and obelisks, simple combinations of straight lines with plane surfaces and equally proportioned parts in which the incomensurability of the curve is abolished, these are the labours of this craft master of rigid form.  ³Form here is easily understood, so it is not its own significance within itself, not the spiritual/mental self.  ⁴Either the works merely receive an alien spirit cut off from them that has discarded its living symbiosis with reality, dead already as it enters these crystals, which themselves are devoid of life; or else they relate externally to spirit as something itself external to itself, that is not really there as spirit, like a rising light that throws its significance onto them.

3.  The separation labouring spirit starts from is that of being in itself becoming the material it works on and being for itself that is the side of labouring self-consciousness.  This has now become objective to it in its work.  ²His subsequent concern must then be to overcome this separation of soul and body so that the former clothes itself in itself and shapes itself while the latter must be ensouled.  ³Bringing them closer together keep both sides in that the contrasting definition of the imagined spirit and its enclosing shell, so that each's unity with itself contains this opposition of singularity and universality.  ⁴The work gets closer to itself in its sides, which also has the effect of bringing it closer to the labouring self-consciousness, which itself achieves knowledge of itself as it is in and for itself in the work.  ⁵We still have here only the abstract side of mindful spirit's activity that does not know itself in itself, nor in its content, but only in its work, which is a thing.  ⁶The craft master himself, the whole spirit, has not yet appeared and remains the still inner, hidden essence only present as a whole broken down into active self-consciousness and the object it produces.

4.  The craft master works up the surrounding housing, the external reality initially only elevated into the abstract form of the understanding, into a more soulful form.  ²He uses plant life to that end.  Plant life is no longer holy as in the previous impotent pantheism.  Grasping himself as the essence existing for itself, he takes plant life as something usable, downgraded to a decorative external surface.  ³It is not used unchanged; the worker of self-conscious form also destroys the transitoriness inherent to the immediate existence of this life and brings the rigid and universal forms of thought closer to the organic forms.  ⁴When organic form is set free it proliferates in particularity and is as form subjugated by the form of thought, while itself elevating these linear and flat shapes into soulful curves.  This mixture provides the roots of free architecture.

5.  This housing, the side of the universal element, the inorganic nature of mindful spirit, now encloses a pattern of singularity within it, which brings the spirited mind formerly cut off from existence, whether internal or external to that, closer to reality, thereby making the work and active self-consciousness correspond more closely.  ²The worker starts by taking up the form of being for itself as such in the shape of animal life.  ³He proves that his consciousness of himself in animal life is no longer immediate by asserting himself in opposition to that as the generating force, so that he knows himself in animal life as his own work; which makes that animal form also one overcome, the hieroglyph of another meaning, of a thought.  ⁴This is why animal form is no longer used alone and as a whole by the labourer, but mixed with the pattern of thought, with human form.  ⁵The work, however, still lacks the shape and existence in which the self exists as self; it also has not yet expressed in itself that it includes an inner meaning within it; it lacks the language, the element in which the filling sense itself is present.  ⁶Even after completely cleansing itself of animal associations and when it bears only the pattern of self-consciousness within it, the work is still the soundless pattern that requires the rays of the rising sun to give it tone, which, generated by light is as yet but noise not language, revealing only an external self, not the internal one.

6.  This external self of the pattern stands opposed to the other that shows it has an inside to it.  ²The nature going back into its essence downgrades its living diversity, individualizing and confusing in its motion, to an inessential housing that forms the lid on the inside; and this inside is initially still the simple darkness, the unmoved, the black, formless stone [the black stone of the Kaaba at Mecca, Miller].

7.  Both descriptions contain interiority and existence, the two moments of mindful spirit; both descriptions simultaneously contain both in antithetical relations, the self as inner as well as outer.  ²The two have to be united.

– ³The soul of the statue in human form still does not come from out of the inside; it is not yet language, inherently internal existence – and the inside of diversely formed existence is still the soundless existence that does not differentiate itself within itself and is still separated from its outside to which all differences belong.

– ⁴The craft master thus unites the two by mixing natural and self-conscious patterns, ambiguous, bisemantic essences, riddles to themselves, as the conscious struggles with the unconscious, and in marrying the simple inner with the variformed outer, the darkness of thought with the clarity of expression, profound, inscrutable wisdom breaks out into language.

8.  In this instinctual labour ceases that in confrontation with self-consciousness generates the unconscious work; for in that the activity of the craft master, which constitutes self-consciousness, stands an equally self-conscious, self-expressive inside.  ²In this it has worked its way up to the division of its consciousness in which spirit meets spirit.  ³In this unity of self-conscious spirit with itself, to the extent that it is pattern and object of its own consciousness, its mixtures with the unconscious modes of immediate natural form cleanse themselves.  ⁴These monsters of form, speech and act dissolve into spiritual/mental patterning; to an outside that has gone back into itself and to an inside externalizing itself from out of itself and on itself; to the thought that is the existence that gives birth to itself, the clear existence maintaining its pattern appropriate to itself.  ⁵Spirit is now the artist.