World history is made up of the histories of particular peoples within which spirit assumes some “particular principle on the lines of which it must run through a development of its consciousness and its actuality” (PM: §548). Just the same dialectic that we have first seen operative among shapes of consciousness in the Phenomenology and among categories or thought-determinations in the Logic can be observed here. An historical community acts on the principle that informs its social life, the experience and memory of this action and the consequences it brings—a memory encoded in the stories that circulate in the community—results in this principle becoming available for the self-consciousness of the community, thus breaking the immediacy of its operation. This loss of immediacy brings about the decline of that community but gives rise to the principle of a new community: