It announces an intuitive certainty, to which there stand in contrast other equally intuitive certainties that have been lost just along that very pathway. Hence the assurances of these other certainties are equally entitled to a place alongside the assurance of that certainty. But since it rests on this appeal, it sanctions the truth of the other certainty, viz. Its appearing directly and immediately is the abstract form of its actual presence, the essential nature and inherent reality of which is an absolute notion, i.e. the process of its own development. How the world-spirit immediately finds and determines itself and its object at any given time, or how it appears to itself, depends on what it has already come to be, or on what it already implicitly and inherently is.
Reason is the certainty of being all reality.
This its inherent nature, this reality, is still, however, through and through a universal, the pure abstraction of reality. It is the first positive character which self-consciousness per se is aware of being, and ego is, therefore, merely the pure, inner essence of existence, in other words, is the Category bare and simple. To put it otherwise, the category means this, that existence and self-consciousness are the same being, the same not as a matter of comparison, but really and truly in and for themselves. It is only a onesided, unsound idealism which lets this unity again appear on one side as consciousness, with a reality per se over against it on the other. Difference therefore is, but completely transparent, a difference that is at the same time none.