The concrete Ideas, the spirits of nations, have their truth and destination in the concrete Idea as absolute universality — the world spirit, around whose throne they stand as the accomplishers of its actualization and as witnesses and ornaments of its splendor. Since, as spirit, it is nothing but the movement of its activity to know itself absolutely, and thereby to free its consciousness from the form of natural immediacy and to come to itself, the principles of the shapes of this self-consciousness in the course of its liberation — the world-historical realms — are four in number.