Conscience as the freedom of the self within itself

The reality of duty: conviction

2. The universality of conscience

3. Evil and forgiveness

(CC) RELIGION

VII. Religion in General

A. Natural Religion

a. God as Light

b. Plants and animals as religious objects

c. The artificer

B. Religion in the form of Art

a. The abstract work of art

1. The representation of the gods

2. The hymn

3. The cult

b. The living work of art: the human form as embodiment of beauty

c. The spiritual work of art: art expressive of social life

1. Epic

2. Tragedy

3. Comedy

C. Revealed Religion

1. The presuppositions requisite for the notion of revealed religion

2. The ultimate content of revealed religion:

the reality of the incarnation of God

(a) in an individual:

(b) in a religious communion

3. Development of the notion of revealed religion. The Absolute as a trinity: the Absolute as externalized in the world: the Absolute as fulfilled in a spiritual kingdom

(DD) ABSOLUTE KNOWLEDGE

VIII. Absolute Knowledge

1. The ultimate content of the Self which knows itself as all existence

2. Philosophical Science as the self-comprehension of Spirit

3. The return of Spirit so comprehended to immediate existence


PREFACE

On scientific knowledge

In the case of a philosophical work it seems not only superfluous, but, in view of the nature of philosophy, even inappropriate and misleading to begin, as writers usually do in a preface, by explaining the end the author had in mind, the circumstances which gave rise to the work, and the relation in which the writer takes it to stand to other treatises on the same subject, written by his predecessors or his contemporaries. For whatever it might be suitable to state about philosophy in a preface—say, an historical sketch of the main drift and point of view, the general content and results, a string of desultory assertions and assurances about the truth—this cannot be accepted as the form and manner in which to expound philosophical truth.

Moreover, because philosophy has its being essentially in the element of that universality which encloses the particular within it, the end or final result seems, in the case of philosophy more than in that of other sciences, to have absolutely expressed the complete fact itself in its very nature; contrasted with that the mere process of bringing it to light would seem, properly speaking, to have no essential significance. On the other hand, in the general idea of e.g. anatomy—the knowledge of the parts of the body regarded as lifeless—we are quite sure we do not possess the objective concrete fact, the actual content of the science, but must, over and above, be concerned with particulars.