actuality, that the vanished particularity qua vanished is not true particularity, it will give up looking for the unchangeable particular existence as something actual, or will cease trying to hold on to what has thus vanished. Only so is it capable of finding particularity in a true form, a form that is universal.
In the first instance, however, the withdrawal of the emotional life into itself is to be taken in such a way that this life of feeling, in its own regard, has actuality qua particular existence. It is pure emotion which, for us or per se has found itself and satiated itself, for although it is, no doubt, aware in feeling that the ultimate reality is cut off from it, yet in itself this feeling is self-feeling; it has felt the object of its own pure feeling, and this object is its own self. It thus comes forward here as self-feeling, or as something actual on its own account. In this return into self, we find appearing its second attitude, the condition of desire and labour, which ensures for consciousness the inner certainty of its own self (which, as we saw, it has obtained,) by the process of cancelling and enjoying the alien external reality,—existence in the form of independent things. The unhappy consciousness, however, finds itself merely desiring and toiling; it is not consciously and directly aware that so to find itself rests upon the inner certainty of its self, and that its feeling of real being is this self-feeling. Since it does not in its own view have that certainty, its inner life really remains still a shattered certainty of itself; that confirmation of its own existence which it would receive through work and enjoyment, is, therefore, just as tottering and insecure; in other words, it must consciously nullify this certification of its own being, so as
