as distinct from Him. The assumption of form makes its appearance in the aspect of determinate Being as independent totality, but as a totality which is retained within love; here, for the first time, we have Spirit in and for itself. The self-consciousness of the Son regarding Himself is at the same time His knowledge of the Father; in the Father the Son has knowledge of His own self, of Himself. At our present stage, on the contrary, the determinate existence of God as God is not existence posited by Himself, but by what is Other. Here Spirit has stopped short half way. The importance of 'love' within the formulation of the Absolute has also been cited by Hegel throughout his works: The life of God — the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things — may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things. Yet Hegel did not see Christianity per se as the route through which one reaches the Absolute, but used its religious system as an historical exemplar of Absolute Spirit. Arriving at such an Absolute was the domain of philosophy and theoretical inquiry. For Hegel speculative philosophy presented the religious content in an elevated, self-aware form. Thus the play between opposites, totalizing all 'difference' not just 'similarity' or identity results in a system of the Absolute, one not so much transcendental from these differences and similarities but arising therefrom, an Absolute 'whole'. To put it another way, Absolute Knowledge or Consciousness is the passing through of different consciousnesses, the historical experience of difference, of the Other, to get to a total Oneness (Universe) of multiplicity and self-consciousness. This is a variation, if not a transformation, of Hegel's German Idealist predecessor Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854), who argued for a philosophy of Identity: ‘Absolute identity’ is, then, the link of the two aspects of being, which, on the one hand, is the universe, and, on the other, is the changing multiplicity which the knowable universe also is. Schelling insists now that “The I think, I am, is, since Descartes, the basic mistake of all knowledge; thinking is not my thinking,