No, Hegel was attempting to figure out the problematic of the gap between universal knowledge (of specific categories) and individual substance (of particular things) by recasting the resolution of this problematic in social development, that the way in which Science resolved the “truth” of our own understanding of the gap between our individual experience and our place in the world (most basically, perhaps, between our beliefs and so-called “objective reality”), was a historical process that could be observed in both the development of the Idea and its concretization in society, and this process is called “Spirit.” That the resolution of this problem would lead to absolute knowledge, because the individual would then be identified with the universal, means that social development is dependent on the assumption of such knowledge, but one which is always missing something extra or excessive to it, some exception to the universal which also expands and deepens it. Hegel claims that this has always been happening, but what is unique about our era is that we are actually consciously aware of this process—-but he was the first person to demonstrate it explicitly, whereas, for him, it was only implicit before in thinker such as Kant.