History, is a conscious, self-meditating process — Spirit emptied out into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself.... Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is perserved, and this transformed existence — the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit's knowledge — is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit.

The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)