§ 388. Spirit (Mind) _came into_ being as the truth of Nature. But not merely is it, as such a result, to be held the true and real first of what went before: this becoming or transition bears in the sphere of the notion the special meaning of "_free judgment_." Mind, thus come into being, means therefore that Nature in its own self realises its untruth and sets itself aside: it means that Mind presupposes itself no longer as the universality which in corporal individuality is always self-externalised, but as a universality which in its concretion and totality is one and simple. At such a stage it is not yet mind, but _soul_.
§ 389. The soul is no separate immaterial entity. Wherever there is Nature, the soul is its universal immaterialism, its simple "ideal" life. Soul is the _substance_ or "absolute" basis of all the particularising and individualising of mind: it is in the soul that mind finds the material on which its character is wrought, and the soul remains the pervading, identical ideality of it all. But as it is still conceived thus abstractly, the soul is only the _sleep_ of mind--the passive { ~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON WITH PERISPOMENI~}{ ~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} of Aristotle, which is potentially all things.
The question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except where, on the one hand, matter is regarded as something _true_, and mind conceived as a _thing_, on the other. But in modern times even the physicists have found matters grow thinner in their hands: they have come upon _imponderable_ matters, like heat, light, &c., to which they might perhaps add space and time. These "imponderables," which have lost the property (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the capacity of offering resistance, have still, however, a sensible existence and outness of part to part; whereas the "vital"_ matter_, which may also be found enumerated among them, not merely lacks gravity, but even every other aspect of existence which might lead us to treat it as material. The fact is that in the Idea of Life the self-externalism of nature is _implicitly_ at an end: subjectivity is the very substance and conception of life--with this proviso, however, that its existence or objectivity is still at the same time forfeited to the sway of self-externalism. It is otherwise with Mind. There, in the intelligible unity which exists as freedom, as absolute negativity, and not as the immediate or natural individual, the object or the reality of the intelligible unity is the unity itself; and so the self-externalism, which is the fundamental feature of matter, has been completely dissipated and transmuted into universality, or the subjective ideality of the conceptual unity. Mind is the existent truth of matter--the truth that matter itself has no truth.