... the Absolute—of the all-embracing totality of reality—considered “as Subject and not merely as Substance” (i.e., as a conscious agent or Spirit and not merely as a real being). This Absolute, Hegel held, first puts forth (or posits) itself in the immediacy of its own inner consciousness and then negates this positing—expressing itself now in the particularity and determinateness of the factual elements of life and culture—and finally regains itself, through the negation of the former negation that had constituted the finite world.