Infinite self-consciousness demands that individuals acquire the discipline of universality,repudiating their attachments to alienated, merely given forms of life and achieving clarity about the intellectual bases of their opposition. Access to universality is not an immediate fact of consciousness or psychological datum but the result of intellectual labour that moulds the self according to universal purposes or a general will, as disclosed by critical reflection upon history. Under these conditions, the finite consciousness becomes the existence-form of the rational idea.