A present that lies beyond: Words of wisdom

"Turning away from the husks it has to feed on, and confessing that it lies in wickedness and sin, [self-consciousness] now desires from philosophy not so much to bring it to a knowledge of what it is, as to obtain once again through philosophy the restoration of a sense of solidity and subtantiality of exisitence it has lost. [...]

The beautiful, the holy, the eternal, religion, love -- these are the bait required to awaken the desire to bite: not the notion, but ecstasy, not the march of cold necessity in the subject-matter, but ferment and enthusiasm -- these are to be the ways by which wealth of concrete substance is to be stored and increasingly extended.

With this demand there goes the strenuous effort, almost perfervidly zealous in its activity, to rescue mankind from being sunken in what is sensuous, vulgar, and of fleeting importance, and to raise men's eyes to the stars; as if men had quite forgotten the divine, and were on the verge of finding satisfaction, like worms, in mud and water. Time was when man had a heaven, decked and fitted out with endless wealth of thoughts and pictures. The significance of all that is, lay in the thread of light by which it was attached to heaven; instead of dwelling in the present as it is here and now, the eye glanced away over the present to the Divine; away, so as to say, to a present that lies beyond. The mind's gaze had to be directed under compulsion to what is earthly, and kept fixed there; and it needed a long time to introduce that clearness, which only celestial realities had, into the crassness and confusion shrouding the sense of things, earthly, and to make attention to the immediate present as such, which was called Experience, of interest and of value."

-Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit