It is thus that “the analysis of the successive grades [of universal history] in their abstract form belongs to logic” (PWH: 56), but once more, it must be stressed that, as with philosophy of nature, philosophy of history is not meant to somehow magically deduce actual empirical historical phenomena, like Krug’s pen; rather, it takes the results of actual empirical history as its material and attempts to find exemplified within this material the sorts of categorial progressions of the logic. Thus the activity of the philosophical historian presupposes that of “original” and “reflective” historians (PWH: 1–8). The actual world is full of contingencies from which empirical historians will have already abstracted in constructing their narratives, for example, when writing from particular national perspectives. To grasp history philosophically, however, will be to grasp it from the perspective of world-history itself, and this provides the transition to absolute spirit, as world history will understood in terms of the manifestation of what from a religious perspective is called “God”, or from a philosophical perspective, “reason”. Hegel clearly thinks that there is a way of cognitively relating to history in a way that goes beyond the standpoint of consciousness and the understanding—the standpoint of what we now think of as informing scientific history. From the perspective of consciousness history is something that stands over against me qua something known, but from the standpoint of self-consciousness I grasp this history as the history of that which contributes to me, qua rational and free being.