The history of spirit is its deed, for spirit is only what it does, and its deed is to make itself — here, precisely as spirit — the object of its own consciousness, to comprehend itself by expounding itself to itself. This comprehension is its being and its principle, and the completion of an act of comprehension is at the same time its self-externalization and its transition. The spirit that, to put it formally, comprehends this comprehension anew — which is to say, the spirit that returns into itself out of its self-externalization — is spirit at a higher stage in relation to itself, compared with how it stood in that earlier act of comprehension.

The question of the perfectibility and education of the human race belongs here. Those who have asserted this perfectibility have had an intimation of something of the nature of spirit — of its nature to have Γνωϑι σεαυτόν as the law of its being, and, in that it comprehends what it is, to be a higher shape than that which merely constituted its being. But for those who reject this thought, spirit has remained an empty word, just as history has remained a superficial play of contingent, so-called merely human endeavours and passions. And even if, in doing so, they express in the terms providence and the plan of providence a belief in a higher governance, these remain unfulfilled representations, since they also expressly declare the plan of providence to be something unknowable and incomprehensible to them.