World history, furthermore, is not the mere court of judgement of power — that is, the abstract and non-rational necessity of a blind fate — but, because spirit is in and for itself reason, and reason’s being-for-itself in spirit is knowledge, world history is the development, necessary solely out of the concept of its freedom, of the moments of reason and hence of its self-consciousness and its freedom — the exposition and actualization of the universal spirit.
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817), § 449:
§ 449. This movement is the liberation of the ethical substance from the particularities in which it is actual in the individual peoples – the deed whereby spirit becomes the universal, the world spirit. Since it is the development of its self-consciousness in time, its individual moments and stages are the national spirits, each of which, however, as an individual and natural being, can fill only one stage and accomplish only one task of the whole deed.
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