The interest lies in the entire movement

The interest lies in the entire movement

1. In this respect, the absolute idea is  comparable to the old man who says the same religious sentences as the child does, but for the old man they have the meaning of his entire life.

2. Even if the child understands the religious content, what validity that content has for him is still of the sort that lies outside his entire life and world.

3. --The same holds then also for human life in general and the occurrences that make up the content of it. All work is only aimed at the goal, and if this is attained, then one is astonished at finding nothing else than precisely this, what one wanted.

4. The interest lies in the entire movement. If a human being pursues his life, the the end can appear to him as quite limited, but it is the entire decursus vitae [ course of a life] that is encompassed in it. -- Thus, too, then the content of the absolute idea is the entire expanse of what we had before us up until now.

5. The final [ point ] is the insight that the entire unfolding makes up the content and interest. -- This is, furthermore, the philosophical view that everything that appears limited, taken for itself, acquires its worth through inhering in the whole and being a moment of the idea.

6. Thus it is that we have had the content and what we still have the knowledge [ Wissen ] that the content is the living development of the idea and this simple retrospective is contained in the form.

7. Each of the stages considered up to this point is an image of the absolute, albeit in a limited manner at first, and so it drives itself on to the whole, the unfolding of which is precisely what we have designated the method.