To think of what we nowadays call the culture, what might have once been called the spirit or the collective spirit, as something like a very large but essentially solitary mind or brain, in no doubt a grossly misleading metaphor but it does raise the question or questions of what does it do?, what exactly it is up to?, what does it want?; and in asking this it points up a certain almost startlingly obvious consistency across its very diverse manifestations. To put it simply, everything behaves as if such a mind does not know who it is and is on the endless futile quest to find out. What is a mind but just such a question? Whether it is through religion, art or science, or ethics - the proliferation of faiths, of modes of expression, of sinuous distinctions between modes of opinion, of desires and restraints, adoptions and surrenders of ideals - through splittings apart or comings together, the activity of the spirit is spiritual activity and that means action with reference to the ultimate criteria of identity. In another sense it is the striving to know and be known by God, as absolute and unshakeable guarantor of identity, or to become God in fulfilled self-knowing. Everybody seems to already understand this without having to be told, they enact their roles perfectly, they understand the general context and hence well-enough where everything fits in. Their art is always about it. They move with the uncanny synchrony of brain cells processing a thought, unaware of but trusting in the motive behind their motives.  One suspects that it was from the general ripening of such an insight, verging on pure tautology, that Hegel evolved his system.