§ 382. For this reason the essential, but formally essential, feature of mind is Liberty: i.e. it is the notion's absolute negativity or self-identity. Considered as this formal aspect, it _may_ withdraw itself from everything external and from its own externality, its very existence; it can thus submit to infinite _pain_, the negation of its individual immediacy: in other words, it can keep itself affirmative in this negativity and possess its own identity. All this is possible so long as it is considered in its abstract self-contained universality.
§ 383. This universality is also its determinate sphere of being. Having a being of its own, the universal is self-particularising, whilst it still remains self-identical. Hence the special mode of mental being is "_manifestation_." The spirit is not some one mode or meaning which finds utterance or externality only in a form distinct from itself: it does not manifest or reveal _something_, but its very mode and meaning is this revelation. And thus in its mere possibility Mind is at the same moment an infinite, "absolute," _actuality_.
§ 384. _Revelation_, taken to mean the revelation of the _abstract_ Idea, is an unmediated transition to Nature which _comes_ to be. As Mind is free, its manifestation is to _set forth_ Nature as _its_ world; but because it is reflection, it, in thus setting forth its world, at the same time _presupposes_ the world as a nature independently existing. In the intellectual sphere to reveal is thus to create a world as its being--a being in which the mind procures the _affirmation_ and _truth_ of its freedom.
_The Absolute is Mind_ (Spirit)--this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burthen was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science: and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world. The word "Mind" (Spirit)--and some glimpse of its meaning--was found at an early period: and the spirituality of God is the lesson of Christianity. It remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimate reality: and that problem is not genuinely, and by rational methods, solved so long as liberty and intelligible unity is not the theme and the soul of philosophy.