§ 385. The development of Mind (Spirit) is in three stages:--
(1) In the form of self-relation: within it it has the _ideal_ totality of the Idea--i.e. it has before it all that its notion contains: its being is to be self-contained and free. This is _Mind Subjective_.
(2) In the form of _reality_: realised, i.e. in a _world_ produced and to be produced by it: in this world freedom presents itself under the shape of necessity. This is _Mind Objective_.
(3) In that unity of mind as objectivity and, of mind as ideality and concept, which essentially and actually is and for ever produces itself, mind in its absolute truth. This is _Mind Absolute_.
§ 386. The two first parts of the doctrine of Mind embrace the finite mind. Mind is the infinite Idea; thus finitude here means the disproportion between the concept and the reality--but with the qualification that it is a shadow cast by the mind's own light--a show or illusion which the mind implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself, in order, by its removal, actually to realise and become conscious of freedom as _its_ very being, i.e. to be fully _manifested_. The several steps of this activity, on each of which, with their semblance of being, it is the function of the finite mind to linger, and through which it has to pass, are steps in its liberation. In the full truth of that liberation is given the identification of the three stages--finding a world presupposed before us, generating a world as our own creation, and gaining freedom from it and in it. To the infinite form of this truth the show purifies itself till it becomes a consciousness of it.
A rigid application of the category of finitude by the abstract logician is chiefly seen in dealing with Mind and reason: it is held not a mere matter of strict logic, but treated also as a moral and religious concern, to adhere to the point of view of finitude, and the wish to go further is reckoned a mark of audacity, if not of insanity, of thought. Whereas in fact such a _modesty_ of thought, as treats the finite as something altogether fixed and _absolute_, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to a post which has no sound ground in itself is the most unsound sort of theory. The category of finitude was at a much earlier period elucidated and explained at its place in the Logic: an elucidation which, as in logic for the more specific though still simple thought-forms of finitude, so in the rest of philosophy for the concrete forms, has merely to show that the finite _is not_, i.e. is not the truth, but merely a transition and an emergence to something higher. This finitude of the spheres so far examined is the dialectic that makes a thing have its cessation by another and in another: but Spirit, the intelligent unity and the _implicit_ Eternal, is itself just the consummation of that internal act by which nullity is nullified and vanity is made vain. And so, the modesty alluded to is a retention of this vanity--the finite--in opposition to the true: it is itself therefore vanity. In the course of the mind's development we shall see this vanity appear as _wickedness_ at that turning-point at which mind has reached its extreme immersion in its subjectivity and its most central contradiction.