Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God

The foregoing Lectures have dealt with the dialectical element, with the absolute fluidity, of the characteristics that enter into the movement which represents this first form of the elevation of the spirit to God. We have now further to deal with the result in itself as defined in accordance with the standpoint adopted.

This result is the absolutely necessary Essence. The meaning of a result is known to consist simply in this, that in it the determination of the mediation, and consequently of the result, has been absorbed in something higher. The mediation was the self-annulling of the mediation. Essence means what is as yet absolutely abstract self-identity; it is not subject, and still less is it Spirit. The entire determination is found in absolute necessity, which in its character as Being is at the same time what has immediate Being, and which, as a matter of fact, implicitly determines itself as subject, but at first in the purely superficial form of something having Being, in the form of the Absolutely-necessary.