1.  This consciousness, which regards being as its own, we observe passing again into the meaning of sense-certainty as well as into perception, but not into a certainty in something merely other, now with the certainty of being that other itself.  ²Perceiving and experiencing this and that in things just happened to consciousness then; here consciousness initiates the observations and the experience itself [Vorrede §8.1 – 4].  ³We were the ones who overcame that meaning and perception before [II. Perception §1.4; III. Force and Understanding §1.5 M], but here consciousness does it for itself.  Reason is now determined to know the truth, to find the concept instead of what for meaning, intention and for perception is just a thing; i.e. to have consciousness only of itself within thinghood [Preface §26.1, §54.8].  ⁴This gives reason a general interest in the world, for it is the certainty of being present in the world, certain that this presence is rational.  ⁵It seeks its other knowing in that it possesses nothing other than itself.  Reason is only seeking its own infinity.

2.  Only dimly aware of itself in the real world at first, knowing this world only as its own in principle, reason follows this lead towards general acquisition of the property assured to it, planting the flag of its sovereignty on all peaks and in all valleys.  ²But this superficial mine is not its ultimate interest.  The joy in this general appropriation is sullied by finding in its property the alien other that is not included within abstract reason.  ³Reason senses that, as essence, it is deeper than that, for the pure ego, I, is and must demand that difference, multifarious being become its own, that it observe itself as the actual world and find itself present as pattern and thing.  ⁴Reason can rummage through the entrails of things all it wants, opening every vein in the hope that what squirts back out at it is itself, but it will still not have that satisfaction, for it must first perfect itself within itself in order to be able to experience its own perfection.

3.  Consciousness observes, i.e. reason wants to find and possess itself as a given object in the full sense of something actual, sensuous and present.  ²The consciousness of this observation means and indeed says that it wants to experience not itself, but, on the contrary, the essence of things in the things themselves.  ³This consciousness means and says this because, while it is reason, it does not yet regard reason as such as an object.  ⁴If it knew reason to be the same essence of things and of its self and that it can only be present in consciousness in its own characteristic pattern, then consciousness would get down into its own depths and look for reason there rather than in things.  ⁵And should it find reason in those depths, reason itself would then be directed back out into the actual world so that consciousness could observe its sensuous expression, which indeed consciousness would not hesitate to accept as essentially concept.  ⁶When reason first emerges as consciousness' certainty of being all reality, reason's reality is just the immediacy of being.  Similarly, reason takes the unity of ego with this objective essence in the sense of an immediate unity.  In that unity the moments of being and ego have not yet been separated and then reunited, which means that reason does not yet know this unity.  ⁷As observing consciousness then, reason addresses things with the opinion that it receives them in truth as sensuous things opposed to the ego.  In fact, what reason actually does contradicts this opinion, for it actually comes to know the things, transforming their sensuousness into concepts, i.e. precisely into the kind of being that is also ego.  This, in turn, renders thinking thinking in the mode of being or being being in the mode of thought.  Now reason really does claim that things only have truth as concepts.  ⁸In all this, only what the things are emerges for observing consciousness; while what it is itself only emerges for us.  Ultimately, the result of its motion will be to become for itself what it is in itself.

4.  Observing reason's action will now be considered in the moments of its motion in which it grasps nature, spirit/mind, and finally the relation between the two in terms of sensuous being, seeking itself as given, actual reality.