Consciousness (n.) negates the very life it depends on: to think clearly, man must divide himself from his own impulses.
Consciousness (n.) needs an object over against it, so a cosmic spirit could only become aware of itself through limited, finite minds like ours.
Consciousness (n.) carries its own yardstick: its idea of what true knowledge is, against which its actual knowing can be measured without any outside judge.
Consciousness (n.) of an object turns out to be self-consciousness: behind the curtain there is nothing to see unless we step behind it ourselves.
Consciousness (n.) cannot be put in a causal relation to being, as a simplified Marxism does: for Hegel changes in a way of life and changes in ideas are parts of one totality.
Consciousness (n.) is the higher form of which death is the lower: the death of the merely immediate living individual is the coming to be of spirit, the real immortality.