WITH the thought which consciousness has laid hold of, that the individual consciousness is inherently absolute reality, consciousness turns back into itself. From the fact that self-consciousness is Reason, its hitherto negative attitude towards otherness turns round into a positive attitude. To it, looking at itself in this way, it seems as if now, for the first time, the world had come into being. Here, for the first time, after the grave of its truth is lost, after the annihilation of its concrete actuality is itself done away with, and the individuality of consciousness is seen to be in itself absolute reality, it discovers the world as its own new and real world, which in its permanence possesses an interest for it, just as previously the interest lay only in its transitoriness.
Reason is the conscious certainty of being all reality.
This is how Idealism expresses the principle of Reason. Just as consciousness assuming the form of reason immediately and inherently contains that certainty within it, in the same way idealism also directly proclaims and expresses that certainty. I am I in the sense that the I which is object for me is sole and only object, is all reality and all that is present. In the present instance, the object-ego is object which is consciously known to exclude the existence of any other whatsoever. And just on that account any one who has not taken this route finds the assertion unintelligible, when he hears it expressed in this abstract form although as a matter of concrete experience he makes indeed the same assertion himself.