What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they mig… - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Consciousness knows something; this something is the essence or is per se. This object, however, is also the per se, the inherent reality, for consciousness. Hence comes ambiguity of this truth. Consciousness, as we see, has now two objects: one is the first per se, the second is the existence for consciousness of this per se. The last object appears at first sight to be merely the reflection of consciousness into itself, i.e. an idea not of an object, but solely of its knowledge of that first object. But, as was already indicated, by that very process the first object is altered; it ceases to be what is per se, and becomes consciously something which is per se only for consciousness. Consequently, then, what this real per se is for consciousness is truth: which, however, means that this is the essential reality, or the object which consciousness has. This new object contains the nothingness of the first; the new object is the experience concerning that first object.

It belongs to the absolute freedom of God that in its act of determining and dividing, it releases the Other to exist as a free and independent being...This other released as something free and independent is the world as such.” The world lacks genuine actuality. Its being is only posited. For the world, to be is to have being only for an instant, but also to sublate this separation from God and return to its origin in God, to enter into relationship of spirit, of love, to be this relationship of spirit, of love, which is the holy spirit.

In a state which is really articulated rationally all the laws and organizations are nothing but a realization of freedom in its essential characteristics. When this is the case, the individual’s reason finds in these institutions, only the actuality of his own essence, and if he obeys these laws, he coincides, not with something alien to himself, but simply with what is his own. Freedom of choice, of course, is often equally called ‘freedom’; but freedom of choice is only non-rational freedom, choice and self-determination issuing not from the rationality of the will but from fortuitous impulses and their dependence on sense and the external world.