"But the other side of spirit’s becoming, history, is a knowing, self-mediating becoming—spirit estranged into time; but this estrangement is equally an estrangement of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. This becoming presents a slow movement and succession of spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of spirit, moves so slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. As the fulfilment of spirit consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is its withdrawal-into-itself in which it abandons its Being-there and hands its shape over to recollection. In its withdrawal-into-itself spirit is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness, but in that night its vanished Being-there is preserved; and this sublated Being-there—the former one, but now reborn of knowledge—is the new Being-there, a new world and a new shape of spirit. In this new shape the spirit has to make a new beginning with its immediacy, as naively as before, and expand to maturity again, as if, for it, all that preceded were lost and it had learned nothing from the experience of the earlier spirits. But re-collection has preserved them and is the interior and in fact the higher form of the substance. So although this spirit begins its cultivation afresh, seeming to set out only from itself, it is nonetheless at a higher stage that it begins. The realm of spirits which has formed itself in this way in Being-there constitutes a succession in which one spirit superseded another and each took over the realm of the world from its predecessor. The goal of this succession is the revelation of the depth, and this is the absolute concept; this revelation is thereby the sublation of the depth of the concept, or the expansion of it, the negativity of this I withdrawn-into-itself, a negativity which is its estrangement or substance,—and this revelation is also the time of the concept, the time in which this estrangement estranges itself within itself, and so in its expansion it is equally in its depth, in the Self. The goal, absolute knowledge, or spirit that knows itself as spirit, has for its path the recollection of the spirits as they are within themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their realm. Their preservation, on the side of their free Being-there appearing in the form of contingency, is history, while on the side of their conceptually comprehended organization, it is the science of appearing knowledge; the two together, comprehended history, form the recollection and the calvary of absolute spirit, the actuality, truth, and certainty of its throne, without which it would be lifeless solitude; only—"