It is universal because all limitation and particular singularity are sublated within it – limitation and singularity which consist solely in the difference between the concept and its object or content, or, in another form, in the difference between its subjective being-for-itself and its being-in-itself, between its exclusive and resolving singularity, and its universality itself.

The various determinations of universality emerge in the Logic (see Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §§ 118–126). At this expression, representational thought first hits upon the abstract and external kind; but with the universality that is in and for itself, as it has been determined here, one must think neither of the universality of reflection – commonality or allness – nor of the abstract universality that stands over against the individual on the other side, the abstract identity of the understanding (§ 6, Remark). It is the universality that is concrete within itself and thus is for itself, which is the substance, the immanent genus or immanent Idea of self-consciousness – the concept of the free will as the universal that encompasses its object, that runs through its own determination, and that in this determination is identical with itself. – The universal that is in and for itself is, in general, what is called the rational, and what can be grasped only in this speculative way.