1.  Spirit has elevated its pattern in which it exists for its consciousness into the form of consciousness itself, the kind that generates itself.  ²The craft master has abandoned synthetic labour, the mixing of thought and natural things, which are alien to each other; now that the pattern has acquired the form of self-conscious activity, he has become a spiritual/mental labourer.

2.  If we ask now what the actual mindful spirit is that has a consciousness of its absolute essence in art religion, turns out it's the customary ethical, the true spirit.  ²Universal substance of all single individuals, this one is also much more.  Substance here has the pattern of consciousness for actual consciousness, so being universal in all single individuals means substance features the individualization of being known by them as their own essence and work.  ³Substance is not this for them as the light essence, the light god, in whose unity the being for itself of self-consciousness is only negative, only transient within it, with that being for itself merely watching the lord of its actual reality.  Neither is it the restless destruction of tribes in mutual hatred, nor their subjugation into castes, which together offer the semblance of the organisation of a completed whole, but which lacks the general freedom of the individuals.  ⁴No, mindful spirit here is the free people in which custom constitutes the substance of all, in which all of them, every single one knows the actual reality and existence of custom to be its own will and action.

3.  The process of returning from out of its own truth into the pure knowledge of itself, the religion of customary ethical spirit is its own elevation above its actual reality.  ²The custom-bound people lives in immediate unity with its substance, but it does not have the principle of the pure singularity of self-consciousness within it, so its religion first emerges in its completion when it cuts itself off from its persistence.  ³For the actual reality of customary ethical substance rests partly on its peaceful, unchangeable character with respect to the absolute motion of self-consciousness and hence on the fact that self-consciousness has not yet moved beyond its settled customs and firm trust in itself.  Partly also, it rests on its organisation into a multitude of rights and duties and division into the masses of orders, classes, and their particular activities combining together to contribute towards the whole.  Thus, a vital condition here is that the single individual is satisfied with the limitation of his existence and has not yet grasped the limitless thought of his free self.  ⁴Now, that peaceful, immediate trust in substance returns back into the trust in and certainty of itself; the plurality of rights and duties, like the limited action, is the same dialectical motion of the customary ethical order as the plurality of things and their determinate properties [II. Perception etc. §1 ff. and §13 ff.; VI.A.a. Customary ethical world etc. §1.1-2 M].  This is a motion that only finds its rest and firmness in the simplicity of self-certain spirit.

– ⁵The completion of the customary ethical order to free self-consciousnes and the destiny of the customary ethical world is thus the individuality that has gone into itself, the absolute frivolity of the customary ethical spirit that dissolves all the fixed differences of its persistence and the masses of its organic articulation within itself and, completely sure of itself, arrives at unbounded joy and the freest enjoyment of itself.  ⁶This simple certainty of mindful spirit within itself has the double meaning of peaceful persistence and fixed truth as well as absolute unrest and the passing away of the customary ethical order.  ⁷That simple certainty of spirit, however, turns into the latter, for the truth of the customary ethical spirit has only just become this substantial essence and trust, in which the self does not know itself as free singularity, and hence suffers its destruction in this inwardness, in the self's release, its development into freedom.  ⁸The trust is broken, the substance of the people is broken within itself, so the mindful spirit, which was the midpoint of empty extremes, has now moved out into the extreme of the self-consciousness that grasps itself as essence [VI.A.a. Customary ethical world etc. §18 and VI.A.b. Customary ethical action etc. §12 M].  ⁹This self-consciousness is the spirited mind certain in itself which, while mourning the loss of its world, generates its essence, elevated above actual reality, from out of the purity of the self.

4.  It is in such epochs that absolute art emerges.  Before, art is the instinctual labour [VI.A.c. Craft master §1 M] immersing itself in existence and coming out of it again to work its way into existence; but it does not have its substance in the free customary ethical order and hence does not have free spiritual activity for its labouring self.  ²After, mindful spirit is over art [VII.C. Revealed religion §2, §8.5-§10. M] seeking its higher representation, which means not only the substance born of the self, but, in its representation as object, this self; not only giving birth to itself from its own concept, but taking its own concept for its pattern, so that the concept and the artwork produced know each other as one and the same.

5.  Customary ethical substance has thus taken itself out of its existence back into its pure self-consciousness, so this is the side of the concept or of the activity with which mindful spirit generates itself as object.  ²This activity is pure form because the single individual in customary ethical obedience and service has worked off all unconscious existence and fixed definition so that substance itself has turned into this fluid essence.  ³This form is the night in which substance was betrayed [Matthew 26.20 ff. M] and made itself into subject.  It is out of this night of pure self-certainty that the customary ethical spirit is resurrected as the pattern free of nature and its immediate existence.

6.  The existence of the pure concept into which spirit has fled out of its body is an individual spirit chooses as the vessel for its pain.  ²Spirit is in this as its universal and its power, which does violence to this vessel – it is its pathos, succumbing to which its self-consciousness loses freedom.  ³But that positive power of universality is subjugated by the pure self of the individual, the negative power.  ⁴This pure activity, conscious of its force which it cannot lose, struggles with the unformed essence.  Becoming master of that, this activity has made the pathos into its material, has given itself its content, the unity that emerges as the work, presented as individualized universal spirit.