G.W.F. Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) is an extensive and wide-ranging investigation of how knowledge is obtained of absolute truth, and of how spirit reveals itself as absolute reality. Hegel maintains that knowledge is not separated from, or external to, absolute reality, but that knowledge is itself reality, and that reality is mental and spiritual. For Hegel, reality is rational and logical. Reality is the conceptual totality of absolute mind and spirit. Knowledge reaches its goal when it arrives at the Absolute, and when it no longer has to search beyond itself, because in the Absolute it finds itself.
