Preface

A prefatory explanation of the kind habitually set before a book — about the purpose the author has set himself in it, and about the occasions that prompted it and the relation he takes it to bear to other treatments, earlier or contemporary, of the same subject — seems, with a philosophical work, not only superfluous but, given what such a work is by nature, actually unfitting and counter to its own purpose. For whatever it would be fitting to say of philosophy in a preface, and in whatever way one might say it — a historical statement, say, of the tendency and standpoint, of the general content and the results, a stringing together of assertions and assurances about the true that run back and forth — none of this can pass for the way in which philosophical truth is to be set out. — Moreover, since philosophy essentially inhabits the element of universality, which encloses the particular within itself, there arises here, more than in other sciences, the semblance that the purpose or the final results already express the matter at hand, and express it even in its complete essence, over against which the working-out would be what is really inessential. In the case of a general representation, by contrast, for example of what anatomy is, roughly an acquaintance with the parts of the body regarded in their lifeless existence, one remains convinced that one does not yet have the matter at hand, the content of this science, in one's possession, and that beyond such a representation one must take trouble over the particular. — Furthermore, in an aggregate of items of acquaintance of this kind, which does not rightly bear the name of science, talk about the purpose and about universalities of that sort differs in no way from the historical and conceptless manner in which the content itself is spoken of, these nerves, these muscles, and so on. With philosophy, by contrast, an inconsistency would arise: such a manner would be put to use, and yet philosophy itself would be exhibiting that manner as incapable of grasping truth.

In the same way, determining the relation that a philosophical work takes itself to have to other efforts on the same subject drags in an alien interest and obscures what really matters in the cognition of truth. The more rigidly opinion fixes the opposition of the true and the false, the more it also expects either agreement with or contradiction of an existing philosophical system, and sees in a statement about such a system nothing but the one or the other. It comprehends the diversity of philosophical systems not so much as the progressive development of truth as it sees in that diversity nothing but contradiction. The bud vanishes when the blossom bursts forth, and one might say that the blossom refutes the bud; in the same way the fruit pronounces the blossom a false existence of the plant, and steps in as the plant's truth in place of it. These forms are not merely distinguished from one another; they also displace one another as mutually incompatible. Yet their fluid nature makes them, at the same time, moments of an organic unity, within which they are so far from clashing that one is needed no less than another, and only such parity of necessity constitutes the life of the whole. But contradiction of a philosophical system, for one thing, seldom comprehends itself along these lines, and for another, the apprehending consciousness is as a rule at a loss to release it from its one-sidedness, or to preserve it in such release, and to recognize, under the guise of what looks quarrelsome and self-opposed, moments that are necessary to each other.

The demand for explanations of this kind, and the satisfying of that demand, may perhaps seem to be pursuing what is essential. In what could the inner life of a philosophical work be more fully expressed than in its purposes and results, and by what could these be cognized more determinately than by their difference from whatever else the age produces in the same sphere? But if such an activity is to count for more than the beginning of cognition, if it is to count as actual cognition, then it must in fact be reckoned among the devices for evading the matter at hand while combining two things: the show of seriousness and effort about it, and the actual sparing of oneself both. — For what exhausts the matter at hand is not its purpose but its working-out; neither does the result constitute the actual whole, which is instead the result taken together with its becoming; purpose on its own amounts to the lifeless universal, as tendency amounts to a mere driving that still wants its actuality, and the naked result is a corpse, with that tendency left lying behind it. — Likewise, difference is rather the limit of the matter at hand; it is where the matter stops, or it is what the matter is not. Exertions of this sort over the purpose or the results, and over the differences and appraisals of the one and the other, are therefore easier work than they may seem. For instead of engaging with the matter at hand, such activity is always beyond it; instead of lingering in it and forgetting itself in it, such knowledge is always reaching for something else, and stays with itself rather than being with the matter and giving itself over to it. — The easiest thing is to appraise what has substance and solidity, harder to grasp it, and hardest of all, uniting both, to bring forth its presentation.

The beginning of culture, of the work of emerging from the immediacy of substantial life, will always have to be made by acquiring an acquaintance with universal principles and points of view, by first working one's way up to the thought of the matter at hand in general, and no less by supporting it with reasons or refuting it, by apprehending its concrete and rich fullness in terms of determinatenesses, and by knowing how to deliver a proper report and a serious judgment upon it. But this beginning of culture will soon give way to the seriousness of a life that has been filled out, a seriousness that leads into the experience of the matter at hand, and once it is further added that the seriousness of the concept descends into the depths of that matter, such acquaintance and appraisal will keep their fitting place in conversation.

The shape that is truly truth's own, the shape in which it exists, can be nothing but its scientific system. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of science — closer to the goal at which it can drop its name as love of knowledge and be actual knowledge — is what I have taken as my own undertaking. That knowledge should be science is an inner necessity grounded in the nature of knowledge, and nothing explains this satisfactorily except the presentation of philosophy itself. The outer necessity, however, insofar as it is grasped in a universal way, apart from the contingency of the person and of individual occasions, is the same as the inner, in the shape in which time represents the existence of its moments. Attempts with this purpose could be justified truly in only one way, namely by exhibiting that the time has come for philosophy to be raised to science, since such a demonstration would establish the necessity of that purpose and indeed would carry the purpose out along the way.

To locate the true shape of truth in scientific character — which amounts to claiming that truth possesses the element of its existence in the concept alone — is, I am well aware, apparently at odds with a representation, and with the consequences of that representation, that is as presumptuous as it is widespread in the convictions of the age. An explanation regarding this contradiction therefore does not seem superfluous, even if here it can be nothing more than an assurance, just like the thing it is directed against. For if the true has its existence only in that, or rather only as that, which goes now by the name of intuition, now by immediate knowledge of the absolute, religion, being — not being at the center of divine love, but the being of that center itself — then from that standpoint what gets demanded for the presentation of philosophy is precisely the reverse of the conceptual form. What is wanted is that the absolute be felt and intuited rather than comprehended, and that feeling and intuition of it, not its concept, should hold the floor and be given utterance.

Apprehend the appearance of such a demand in its wider connection, and look at the stage at which self-conscious spirit now stands, and it turns out that spirit has left behind the substantial life it formerly led in the element of thought — left behind that immediacy of its faith, and left behind the contentment and safety of that certainty which consciousness possessed regarding its reconciliation with essence and with essence's universal presence, inner as well as outer. It has not only gone beyond that, into the other extreme of a substanceless reflection of itself into itself, but beyond this extreme as well. Not only has spirit lost its essential life; it is aware as well of that loss, and aware of the finitude that constitutes its content. Turning from the husks, admitting that it lies in wickedness and heaping abuse on itself for that, spirit now asks of philosophy less that it supply knowledge of what spirit is than that philosophy be the road by which it may regain that substantiality and the solidity of being. What this need asks of philosophy, then, is less that it unlock the closedness of substance and lift substance into self-consciousness, — less that it lead substance's chaotic consciousness back to an order that has been thought through, back to the concept's simplicity, than that it pour the separations of thought together again, stifle the differentiating concept and restore the feeling of essence, providing edification rather than insight. Beauty, holiness, eternity, religion and love are the bait held out to arouse an appetite for biting; and what is to sustain the wealth of substance and carry its spread forward is not the concept but ecstasy, not the coldly advancing necessity of the matter but a fermenting enthusiasm.

Answering to this demand is the strenuous effort, showing itself as almost zealous and irritable, to tear human beings out of their absorption in the sensuous, the common and the singular, and to direct their gaze upward to the stars, as though, forgetting the divine altogether, they were on the point of contenting themselves with dust and water, like the worm. In earlier days they had fitted out a heaven with thoughts and images in sprawling abundance. Everything that is took its meaning from the filament of light that bound it to that heaven; instead of dwelling in this present, the gaze ran up along that filament out past the present, to the divine essence, to a present that belongs, if one may put it so, to the beyond. Spirit's eye had to be forced around onto what is earthly and pinned there; and a long stretch of time was required before that clarity which only the supraterrestrial had possessed could be worked into the torpor and muddle where the sense of the here below was lying, and before attention to what is present as such, the attention that came to be called experience, could be made interesting and given validity. — Now the opposite need seems to be at hand: sense is so firmly rooted in the earthly that it takes an equal power to raise it above that. So poor does spirit show itself that, like the wanderer in a sandy waste who craves one plain draught of water, all it appears to long for by way of refreshment is the scanty feeling of the divine in general. By this, by what suffices for spirit, the magnitude of its loss can be measured.

This frugality in receiving, or parsimony in giving, is nevertheless unbecoming to science. Anyone who is after edification only, who wants his earthly manifoldness of existence and of thought wrapped in fog and demands the indeterminate enjoyment of an equally indeterminate divinity, is welcome to search out wherever such things may be had; he will have no trouble finding the means to work himself into some rapture and to strut about with it. Philosophy, however, must beware of wanting to be edifying.

Even less may this frugality, having renounced science, lay claim to the position that enthusiasm and murk of that sort stand higher than science does. Such prophetic speech takes itself to be residing exactly at the midpoint and in the depths, regards determinateness (the horos) with disdain, and holds itself away on purpose from the concept and from necessity, treating these as a reflection whose only home is finitude. Emptiness of breadth, however, has its counterpart in emptiness of depth; substance may be extended, spilling out into a finite manifoldness with no force to hold that manifoldness together — and here, correspondingly, we have an intensity void of content which, maintaining itself as sheer force without any spread, comes to the same thing as superficiality. Spirit's force reaches exactly as far as its expression, and its depth exactly as far as spirit ventures, in laying itself out, to spread abroad and to lose itself. — At the same time, when this conceptless substantial knowledge pretends to have sunk the self's own peculiarity into essence and to be philosophizing truly and in holiness, it conceals from itself that its disdain for measure and determination leaves it not devoted to God at all, but merely indulging, now the contingency of content within itself, now its own arbitrariness within that content. — In abandoning themselves to the untamed fermenting of substance, they suppose that by veiling self-consciousness and surrendering the understanding they are his own, to whom God gives wisdom in their sleep ; and so what they in fact conceive and bring to birth in sleep is dreams.

One can see easily enough, besides, that ours is an age of birth, an age passing over into a new period. With the world of its existence and its representing as that world has stood hitherto, spirit has made a break, and it is now on the verge of letting that world sink away into the past, and is engaged in the labor of its own transformation. Never, admittedly, is spirit at rest; it is caught up rather in a movement that presses ever onward. But just as with a child, after a long quiet nourishment, the first breath breaks off that gradualness of a merely additive advance — a qualitative leap — and now the child is born, so too the spirit that is forming itself ripens slowly and quietly toward its new shape, dissolving one little piece after another of the structure of its preceding world, whose tottering is indicated only by isolated symptoms; the frivolity and the boredom that spread through what still stands, the indeterminate presentiment of something unknown, are harbingers that something else is on the way. Such gradual crumbling left the physiognomy of the whole unaltered; what breaks it off is the sunrise, which, as a bolt of lightning, sets the formation of the new world in place at a single stroke.

Yet this new thing has as little a complete actuality as the newborn child does, and it is essential not to lose sight of this. Its first appearance is only its immediacy, or its concept. Laying a foundation leaves a building unfinished, and in just the same way the concept of the whole, once reached, is still not that whole. Where what we want to look upon is an oak, sturdy in its trunk, wide in its branches, massed in its foliage, it does not content us to have an acorn held up instead. Science likewise, crowning as it does a world of spirit, has not reached completion in its beginning. What the new spirit begins with is a product of sweeping upheaval among manifold forms of culture, the price paid for a road much twisted and for exertion and effort just as manifold. It is the whole that has returned into itself out of succession as well as out of its own extension, the simple concept of that whole that has come to be. What makes this simple whole actual, however, is that the configurations which have turned into moments develop and take shape once more, only now within their new element, within the sense that has come to be.

On one side the new world, in its first appearance, amounts so far to no more than the whole shrouded in its simplicity, that is, to the universal ground of the whole; on the other side, consciousness still holds the wealth of the preceding existence present in recollection. In the newly appearing shape it misses the spread and particularization of the content; still more, however, it misses that development of form by which the distinctions are determined with assurance and ordered into their fixed relations. Lacking such development, science is without universal intelligibility and carries the semblance of being an esoteric possession held by a few singular individuals; — an esoteric possession, since science so far is present only in its concept, only as its inner side; held by a few singular individuals, since its unspread appearance renders its existence something singular. Not until something is determinate through and through is it also exoteric, open to comprehension, and able to be learned and made everyone's property. Science in the form that belongs to the understanding is the path to science laid open to everyone and leveled for everyone, and consciousness approaching science makes a just demand when it asks to reach rational knowledge by way of the understanding; for thinking, the pure I in general, is what the understanding is; and whatever belongs to the understanding is already familiar, is what science shares with unscientific consciousness, and by way of it the latter can step immediately into the former.

Science that is only beginning, and has therefore brought neither its detail to completeness nor its form to perfection, is exposed to censure on that account. But if such censure is meant to strike its essence, it would be as unjust as it is inadmissible to refuse to acknowledge the demand for that development. The chief knot at which scientific culture currently exhausts itself, and about which it has yet to reach a proper understanding of itself, appears to be this opposition. One side bangs the drum for a wealth of material and for intelligibility; the other side spurns intelligibility, at any rate, and bangs the drum for rationality and divinity that are immediate. Suppose the former side has been silenced, whether by truth's force alone or by the other's impetuosity, and suppose that as regards the ground of the matter it felt itself overwhelmed : it is still not satisfied as regards those demands of its own, since they are just and yet remain unmet. Its silence belongs only half to victory; the other half belongs to the boredom and indifference that usually follow when expectation is constantly aroused and the promises are never fulfilled.

With respect to content, the others sometimes make it easy enough for themselves to have a great range. They haul a mass of material onto their own ground, namely what is already familiar and already ordered, and since they occupy themselves chiefly with oddities and curiosities, they seem all the more to have in hand the remainder, with which knowledge in its own fashion had long since finished, and at the same time to have mastered whatever is still unregulated, and thus to bring everything under the absolute idea, which accordingly looks to have been cognized in every last thing and to have ripened into a science of wide extent. Examine this extension more closely, though, and it turns out not to have come about because some one and the same thing had shaped itself diversely; it is instead a repetition, devoid of shape, of that one same thing, which is merely applied from without to varied material and so takes on a tedious semblance of diversity. The idea, true enough taken by itself, in fact never gets past its own beginning if the development consists in nothing but such a repetition of the same formula. The one unmoved form led around by the knowing subject over whatever is at hand, the material dipped from outside into this motionless element, all of this is no more the fulfillment of what is demanded, namely a wealth springing from itself and a self-determining difference of shapes, than arbitrary notions about the content are. It is rather a monochrome formalism, which arrives at a difference of material only because that material has already been prepared and is already familiar.

All the while this formalism maintains that its monotony and abstract universality are the absolute; it assures us that dissatisfaction with that universality is an incapacity to take possession of the absolute standpoint and to hold fast to it. Where once the empty possibility of representing something in another manner was enough to refute a representation, and that same bare possibility, the universal thought, likewise carried the entire positive worth of actual cognition, so here in the same way the universal idea, in this form of unactuality, has every value ascribed to it, while the dissolving of what is distinguished and determinate, or rather the hurling of it down into the abyss of the void, a hurling neither developed further nor justified in itself, passes for the speculative manner of consideration. To consider some existence or other as it is in the absolute here consists in nothing more than saying of it that, although it has just been spoken of as a something, in the absolute, in A = A, there is no such thing at all, since there everything is one. Pitting this single item of knowledge, that within the absolute all is equal, against a cognition that distinguishes and is filled out, or that seeks and demands such filling, — or passing off one's absolute as the night wherein, so people are wont to say, all cows are black; such is the naivety of an emptiness in cognition. — The formalism that the philosophy of recent times denounces and reviles, and that has generated itself anew within that very philosophy, will not disappear from science, however well its inadequacy is known and felt, until the cognition of absolute actuality has become completely clear to itself about its own nature. — Considering that a general representation, when it precedes the attempt to carry it out, makes the grasp of that attempt easier, it is useful to indicate here in rough outline what that representation is, with the further intention of using the occasion to clear away certain forms whose habitual use is an obstacle to philosophical cognition.

As I see it, and this insight of mine has to justify itself by the presentation of the system, everything comes down to apprehending and expressing the true not merely as substance but every bit as much as subject. One should note at once that what substantiality encloses within itself is the universal, or the immediacy of knowledge, no less than that immediacy which counts as being, or as immediacy for knowledge. — The age in which the determination was pronounced took offense at grasping God as the one substance, and one ground of that offense lay in an instinct that self-consciousness merely goes under there rather than being preserved; but then the opposite position, which holds fast to thinking as thinking, universality, is that very same simplicity, that undifferentiated and unmoved substantiality; and if, in the third place, thinking unites the being of substance as such with itself and apprehends immediacy, or intuiting, as thinking, then the question still remains whether this intellectual intuiting does not lapse back into inert simplicity and present actuality itself in an unactual fashion.

Living substance, further, counts as being that is subject in truth, or, what says the same, as being that is actual in truth, only to the degree that it constitutes the movement whereby it posits itself, the mediation between its becoming-other and itself. In its character as subject it is pure simple negativity, precisely thereby the splitting-in-two of the simple, the doubling that sets up an opposition, which in turn negates this indifferent diversity along with its opposition; the true is only this equality that restores itself, this reflection into itself within otherness — and not an original unity as such, nor an immediate one as such. It is the becoming of itself, a circle whose end is presupposed as its purpose and taken for its beginning, and which is actual only through the working-out and through its end.

God's life and divine cognition may well, then, be pronounced a play of love with itself; yet this idea sinks to edification, indeed to insipidity, where seriousness, pain, patience and the negative's labor are absent from it. In itself that life is doubtless an untroubled equality and unity with itself, a life for which otherness and estrangement, and the overcoming of that estrangement too, are no serious matter. But this in itself is the abstract universality in which its nature, namely to be for itself, and with that the self-movement of form as such, is left out of account. When form is pronounced equal to essence, it is precisely for that reason a misunderstanding to hold that cognition might rest content with the in-itself or with essence while sparing itself the form; — that the absolute fundamental proposition, or absolute intuition, might render the working-out of the one or the development of the other superfluous. Just because form is as essential to essence as essence is to itself, essence must be apprehended and expressed not simply as essence, that is, as immediate substance or as the divine's pure self-intuition, but every bit as much as form and in the full wealth of form developed; only so does it come to be apprehended and expressed as something actual.

The true is the whole. Yet what the whole is, is just the essence completing itself by way of its own development. Of the absolute one has to say that it is essentially result, and that what it in truth is, it is only at the end; its nature consists in precisely this, in being something actual, a subject, or a self-becoming. However contradictory it may look to say that comprehending the absolute means comprehending it essentially as a result, a little reflection sets this semblance of contradiction straight. Pronounced first and immediately, the beginning or principle or absolute amounts to no more than the universal. Just as little as the word all animals, when I use it, can pass for a zoology, just so plainly do the words divine, absolute, eternal and so on fail to pronounce what is contained in them; — and words of that sort do in fact express nothing more than intuition as the immediate. Anything exceeding such a word, the passage to a mere proposition included, constitutes a becoming-other which must be withdrawn again, constitutes a mediation. But mediation is just what is held in horror, as if absolute cognition were surrendered the moment more is made of it than the claim that it is nothing absolute and has no place at all in the absolute.

This horror in fact stems from an unfamiliarity with the nature of mediation and with absolute cognition itself. For mediation is nothing other than self-equality in motion; it is reflection into itself, the moment of the I that is for itself, pure negativity, or simple becoming. The I, or becoming as such, this mediating, is by virtue of its very simplicity nothing other than immediacy in the making and the immediate itself. — To shut reflection out of the true, and to fail to apprehend it as a positive moment of the absolute, therefore amounts to a misrecognition of reason. Reflection it is that turns the true into a result, and yet reflection equally sublates this opposition to the true's becoming, since that becoming is just as simple and hence in no way distinct from the form of the true, the form of showing itself as simple in the result; rather, that becoming is precisely this having gone back into simplicity. — Granted that the embryo is a human being in itself, it is nonetheless not one for itself; it counts as one for itself only as reason cultivated, reason that has made of itself what in itself it is. Only this is its actuality. Yet simple immediacy is what this result itself is, since it amounts to self-conscious freedom resting within itself, freedom that has not pushed the opposition off to one side and left it lying there, but has reconciled itself with it.

What has been said can also be put by saying that reason is purposive activity. Elevating a supposed nature above a misjudged thinking, and above all the banishment of external purposiveness, has discredited the form of purpose altogether. Yet, as even Aristotle determines nature to be purposive activity, purpose is the immediate, what is at rest, which is nonetheless itself what moves, or subject. Being-for-itself, that is, pure negativity, is purpose's abstract force to move. Only because the beginning is purpose does the result turn out to be that same beginning; — or, only because the immediate, being purpose, holds the self, that is, pure actuality, within it does what is actual turn out to be the same as its concept. Purpose carried out, or the actual as existing, is movement and unfolded becoming; and this very restlessness is the self; and the self is equal to the beginning's immediacy and simplicity for the reason that the self is the result, what has gone back into itself — while what has gone back into itself is just the self, and the self is that equality and simplicity which relates to itself.

The need for representing the absolute as subject availed itself of propositions such as these: God is the eternal, or the moral world order, or love, and so forth. Within propositions of that kind the true gets posited as subject flatly and no more, without being set out as the movement in which it reflects itself into itself. A proposition of this sort begins with the word God. By itself this is a senseless sound, a bare name; not until the predicate do we learn what he is, and the predicate is the name's fulfillment and meaning; only in this end does the empty beginning turn into actual knowledge. So far as that goes, there is no seeing why one should not talk exclusively about what constitutes the meaning, namely the eternal, the moral world order and the like, or, as the ancients did, pure concepts, being, the one and so forth, without appending the senseless sound at all. But that word is precisely what indicates that what has been posited is not a being or an essence or a universal in general, but something reflected into itself, a subject. At the same time, however, this is merely anticipated. The subject is assumed to be a fixed point to which the predicates are fastened as to their support, by a movement that belongs to whoever knows about that point and that is not taken to belong to the point itself; yet only through such a movement would the content be presented as subject. Constituted as this movement is, it cannot belong to the subject; but given the presupposition of that fixed point, it cannot be constituted otherwise either, and can only be external. Anticipating in this way that the absolute is subject accordingly fails to be the actuality of this concept and does worse: it renders that actuality impossible, since the anticipation posits the concept as a point at rest, while the actuality is self-movement.

Of the several conclusions flowing from what has been said, one may be picked out: that knowledge is actual, and admits of presentation, only as science or as system. And a further one: that a so-called fundamental proposition or principle of philosophy, supposing it true, is on that very account false as well, precisely by being a fundamental proposition or principle. — Refuting it is easy, then. The refutation lies in exhibiting the deficiency of such a proposition; and deficient it is, seeing that it amounts only to the universal, only to the principle, the beginning. A thorough refutation will have been taken from the proposition itself and developed out of it, — not managed from outside by way of opposed assurances and stray notions. It would thus properly be the principle's own development, and so the completion of what is deficient in it, if only it did not mistake itself by attending solely to its own negative side and failing to become conscious of its advance and its result on their positive side as well. — The properly positive working-out of the beginning is conversely, and to the same degree, a negative relating to that beginning, that is, toward its one-sided form of being as yet merely immediate, merely purpose. It may accordingly be taken just as well for a refutation of whatever makes up the ground of the system, though better taken as an exhibiting that this ground, or principle, of the system amounts in truth to nothing but the system's beginning.

The representation that pronounces the absolute to be spirit gives expression to this: that the true has actuality only as system, or that substance is subject essentially — and this is the loftiest concept of all, one belonging to the modern age and to the religion of that age. Only what is spiritual is the actual; the spiritual is essence, or what has being in itself, — what relates itself, or the determinate, otherness and being-for-itself — and what, in this determinateness or in its being outside itself, stays within its own self; — or, it is in and for itself. — This being in and for itself, however, is something it so far is for us only, or in itself; which is to say, it is spiritual substance. It has to be this for its own self too, — has to be knowledge of the spiritual and knowledge of itself as spirit; that is, it has to be an object to itself, and just as immediately a mediated, which is to say a sublated object, an object reflected into itself. So long as its spiritual content is produced by spirit itself, spirit is for itself merely for us; but so far as it is for itself for its own self as well, this self-producing, the pure concept, is at the same time the element of objectivity in which spirit has its existence, and thus, within its existence, spirit is for its own self an object reflected into itself. — Spirit that knows itself in this way as spirit is science. Science is spirit's actuality and the realm that spirit builds for itself in its own element.

Science has its ground and soil in pure self-cognition within absolute otherness, in this ether as such, which is to say, in knowledge in general. That consciousness already find itself within this element is what philosophy, at its beginning, presupposes and demands. Yet only by the movement through which it comes to be does this element itself arrive at completeness and transparency. It is pure spirituality, or the universal in the manner of simple immediacy. Substance is the transfigured essentiality: reflection that is itself simple, reflection that is immediacy, being which is its own reflection into itself; and this because the element in question is spirit's immediacy, because substance at large is spirit. Science for its part demands of self-consciousness that it have raised itself into this ether, so that it can live with science and in science, and does so live. Conversely, the individual is entitled to demand that science extend to it at least the ladder reaching this standpoint. This right of the individual is grounded in its absolute self-subsistence, a self-subsistence it knows to be its own in each shape its knowledge takes; for in each such shape, recognized by science or not and whatever its content, the individual is likewise the absolute form, that is, it possesses the immediate certainty of itself, or, if one prefers that way of putting it, possesses thereby unconditioned being. Should science count as the other that standpoint of consciousness which knows objective things over against itself and knows itself over against them — and count what consciousness is at home in as rather the forfeiture of spirit — then consciousness in return finds science's element a distant beyond where it is no longer in possession of its own self. To each side the other presents itself as truth inverted. That natural consciousness should immediately commit itself to science is an attempt it makes, drawn on by something it cannot name, to walk for once on its head; the constraint of taking up so unfamiliar a posture and of moving about in it is a violence at once unprepared for and to all appearances needless, one that consciousness is expected to visit upon itself. — Whatever science may be in its own right, in its relationship to immediate self-consciousness science exhibits itself as something inverted over against it; or, since the principle of actuality lies in immediate self-consciousness, science wears the form of unactuality for as long as that self-consciousness stands outside it, on its own. Science, then, must bring that element into unity with itself, or rather must show that it belongs to science itself, and how. Devoid of actuality, science amounts merely to the in itself, to the purpose, which is still only something inner, not yet spirit but as yet spiritual substance alone. Expressing itself and becoming for its own self: this means nothing other than that self-consciousness must be posited by science as one with itself.

What the present Phenomenology of spirit sets forth, itself the opening part of the system of that science, is this becoming of science as such, or of knowledge. Knowledge as it first is, or immediate spirit, is what is devoid of spirit, that is, sensuous consciousness. Spirit has a long road to labor through before it can become knowledge in the proper sense, before it can bring forth science's element, that is, science's pure concept. — Set out as it is in its content and in the shapes that display themselves in the course of it, this becoming appears as something other than a guiding of unscientific consciousness toward science; other, too, than a grounding of science; — and other in any case than that enthusiasm which begins straight away with absolute knowing, as though shot from a pistol, and which settles with all other standpoints simply by declaring that it pays them no heed.

But the task of bringing the individual up to knowledge from its uncultured standpoint was one to be taken in a universal sense, with the world-spirit, the universal individual, examined in respect of its culture. — As for the relation between the two, in the universal individual every moment shows itself as it wins its concrete form and its own configuration. Spirit in its incompleteness, however, is what the particular individual is: a concrete shape the whole of whose existence devolves upon a single determinateness, while the remaining determinacies are there only in smudged outline. Within a spirit ranking above another, the concrete existence that ranks lower has sunk into an inconspicuous moment; what was once the matter itself survives as no more than a trace; its shape lies wrapped over and has turned into a plain shading. An individual whose substance is the higher-ranking spirit traverses this past much as a person embarking on some higher science reviews the preparatory acquaintance long since in his possession, so as to make its content present to himself; he summons back the recollection of it without taking any interest in it or lingering there. In the same way each singular individual runs through the stages of the universal spirit's culture, but as shapes that spirit has already laid aside, as stages of a road that has been worked out and leveled; just as, with regard to what we are acquainted with, we see what in earlier ages occupied the mature spirit of grown men sink into the acquaintance, the exercises, and even the games of boyhood, and just as we shall recognize in the pedagogical sequence the history of the world's culture traced out as if in silhouette. Such past existence has already been acquired as the property of the universal spirit, and it is this spirit that makes up the individual's substance, its inorganic nature. — In this respect, and viewed from the individual's own side, its culture consists in acquiring what lies there at hand, consuming its inorganic nature into itself, and taking possession of it for itself. But this is just as much nothing other than the universal spirit, or substance, giving itself its self-consciousness, that is, its own becoming and reflection into itself.

This movement of culture is what science presents: it presents the movement in its full elaboration and its necessity, and presents too, in its configuration, whatever has by now sunk to the rank of a moment and of spirit's own property. Spirit's insight into what knowledge is: that is the goal. Impatience demands the impossible, namely to reach the goal without the means. For one thing, there is the length of this road to be borne with, every moment of it being necessary, — for another, one must linger at each moment, since each is in itself a whole individual shape, and is regarded absolutely only to the extent that its determinateness is regarded as a whole, as something concrete, or that the whole is regarded in the distinctive character of this determination. — The individual, to be sure, can comprehend its substance with nothing less, since the substance of the individual, since the world-spirit, was patient enough to work its way through these forms over time's long extension and to shoulder the monstrous toil of world history, there being no smaller toil by which it could arrive at consciousness of itself. Meanwhile the individual has less trouble of it all the same, because in itself this has been accomplished — the content is already actuality extinguished into possibility, and immediacy subdued. Being already something thought, the content is the property of individuality; it is no longer a matter of converting existence into being-in-itself, but only of converting the in-itself into the form of being-for-itself, and the manner of this is to be determined more closely.

What the individual is spared in this movement is the sublating of existence; what still remains, however, is the representation of the forms and familiarity with them. Existence taken back into substance has, through that first negation, been transposed only immediately into the element of the self; hence it still bears the same character of immediacy ungrasped by the concept, of unmoved indifference, that existence itself has, or it has merely passed over into representation. — At the same time it thereby becomes something familiar, something spirit has finished with, and in which, therefore, spirit's activity and hence its interest no longer reside. Where the activity that has done with existence is mediation of the immediate or existing sort, and so is the movement merely of particular spirit, spirit that fails to comprehend itself, knowledge stands by contrast directed against the representation thus brought about, against this being-familiar; it is what the universal self does, and it is where thinking's interest lies.

What is familiar in general, just because it is familiar, is not cognized. It is the commonest self-deception, and deception of others too, when cognizing to presuppose something as familiar and to let it pass on that footing; for all the talking back and forth, such knowledge never budges from the spot, and never learns what is happening to it. The subject and object, and so on. God, nature, the understanding, sensibility, and so on, are laid down at the foundation, unexamined, as familiar and as valid, and they make up fixed points of departure as much as of return. The movement runs back and forth between them while they stay unmoved, and so it takes place only on their surface. Apprehending and examining likewise amount to just this: checking whether each person also comes upon what has been said of them within his own representation, whether this strikes him so and is familiar to him or not.

The analysis of a representation, as it used to be carried on, was already nothing other than the sublating of the form in which that representation was familiar. When one takes a representation apart into the elements it originally comprises, one is going back to its moments, moments which, whatever else, no longer carry the form the representation had when it was come upon, and which make up instead what the self immediately owns. Admittedly such analysis gets no further than thoughts, and these are themselves determinations of the familiar, fixed, quiescent kind. Yet this severed, unactual item counts as an essential moment in its own right; the concrete is what moves itself solely on the ground that it severs itself and renders itself unactual. Severing, as an activity, is the force and the labor of the understanding, of that most wondrous and greatest of powers, or rather of absolute power. A circle at rest, closed in upon itself, holding its moments as substance holds them, amounts to an immediate relationship and hence to nothing wondrous. But when the accidental as such, cut loose from the compass it belonged to, when what is bound and actual only in its interconnection with something else, gains an existence of its own and a freedom set apart, the negative shows its monstrous power there; there lies thinking's energy, the energy of the I in its purity. Death, if we choose to call that unactuality by such a name, is what is most fearful, and holding the dead fast is what calls for the greatest force. Beauty that lacks force hates the understanding, because the understanding expects of it what it is unable to do. It is not the life that shies away from death and keeps itself clean of devastation, but the life that bears death and holds itself fast within it, that is the life of spirit. Spirit wins its truth only insofar as it finds its own self in the state of being absolutely torn apart . Spirit does not hold this power in the manner of the positive that averts its eyes from the negative, the way we pronounce something to be null or false and then, having finished with it, pass on from it to something else; the power is spirit's only insofar as spirit gazes into the face of the negative and lingers there. Such lingering is the magic force by which the negative is converted into being. — This force is the same as what was called the subject above, which, in giving existence to determinateness within its own element, sublates abstract immediacy, that is, immediacy which merely is, and thereby is the true substance, being, or the immediacy that does not have mediation outside it but is this mediation itself.

That what is represented should become the property of pure self-consciousness, this elevation to universality as such, is only the one side, and not yet culture completed. — The manner of study in ancient times differs from that of modern times in this, that the ancient manner was the thorough culturing of natural consciousness. By trying itself out in particular against each portion of its own existence, and by philosophizing over whatever turned up, it brought itself forth as a universality that was thoroughly put into practice. In modern times, by contrast, the individual finds the abstract form already prepared; the exertion of seizing it and making it its own is more an unmediated driving forth of the inner and a truncated generating of the universal than an emergence of the universal out of the concrete and out of the manifoldness of existence. Now, then, the labor lies less in cleansing the individual of its immediate sensuous manner and turning it into a substance thought and thinking, than in the reverse: in actualizing and inspiriting the universal by sublating fixed, determinate thoughts. Rendering fixed thoughts fluid, however, is a far harder business than doing the same with sensuous existence. The reason has been given just above; those determinations have as substance and as element of their existence the I, pure actuality, the power of the negative, whereas the sensuous determinations have only that powerless, abstract immediacy which is being as such. Fluidity comes to thoughts when pure thinking, that inner immediacy, cognizes itself as a moment, or when pure self-certainty abstracts from itself — not by discarding itself or laying itself aside, but by giving up the fixity belonging to its self-positing: the fixity of the pure concrete, which is the I itself as against differentiated content, — and equally the fixity of the differentiated items that, once posited within the element of pure thinking, take part in the I's unconditionedness. It is by this movement that pure thoughts turn into concepts, and only so do they become what in truth they are: self-movements, circles, spiritual essentialities, that being what their substance is.

This movement of the pure essentialities constitutes the nature of scientificity as such. Regarded as the interconnection of its content, this movement is the necessity of that content and its expansion into an organic whole. Through this movement the road by which the concept of knowledge is reached likewise becomes a necessary and complete becoming, so that such preparation no longer amounts to a philosophizing left to chance, one that hitches itself to this or that object, relationship, or thought of imperfect consciousness just as contingency happens to supply them, or that tries to establish the true by ratiocinating to and fro, by inference and deduction from determinate thoughts; the road will rather, by the concept's own movement, take in the entire worldliness of consciousness in its necessity.

Furthermore, what makes an exposition of this kind the first part of science is that spirit's existence, taken as what comes first, is nothing but the immediate, the beginning, while the beginning is not yet spirit's return into itself. What marks this part of science off from the others is accordingly a determinateness, namely the element of immediate existence. — Stating this difference leads to the discussion of certain fixed thoughts that are apt to come up in this connection.

Two moments belong to consciousness, spirit's immediate existence: knowledge, and an objectivity that is negative toward knowledge. As spirit unfolds within this element and lays its moments out, that opposition accrues to them, so that every one of them makes its appearance as a shape that consciousness takes. Science of this road is science of the experience that consciousness undergoes; substance comes under consideration according as it, along with its movement, forms consciousness's object. Beyond what falls within its experience, consciousness neither knows nor comprehends anything; for what falls within experience is spiritual substance and nothing else, and this precisely as the object of its own self. Spirit does become an object, though, since spirit just is this movement of becoming something other to itself, that is, of becoming the object of its own self, and of sublating that otherness. And it is just this movement that goes by the name of experience: the movement in which the immediate, the unexperienced, that is, the abstract, whether the abstract of sensuous being or of the merely thought simple, grows estranged from itself, then comes back to itself out of that estrangement, and only now stands exhibited in its actuality and truth, and is likewise the property of consciousness.

Inequality obtains in consciousness between the I and the substance that is consciousness's object, and this inequality constitutes their difference, the negative as such. One may look upon it as the defect in both, and yet it is their soul, the moving principle in them; hence certain of the ancients comprehended the void as what moves, for while they did grasp the moving principle as the negative, they did not yet grasp this negative as the self. — Granted that this negative shows itself first of all as the I's inequality with the object, it is no less substance's inequality with itself. Whatever seems to proceed outside substance, to be an activity aimed against it, is substance's own doing, and in it substance reveals itself to be essentially subject. With substance having shown this to the full, spirit has brought its existence into equality with its essence; spirit is object to itself as it stands, and the abstract element, that of immediacy and of the severance of knowledge from truth, is overcome. Being is mediated absolutely; — it is substantial content which belongs, with the same immediacy, to the I as its own, content that is self-like, or the concept. With this the phenomenology of spirit closes. The element of knowledge is what spirit makes ready for itself therein. Within that element the moments of spirit now unfold in the form of simplicity, a form that knows its object to be its own self. They no longer come apart into the opposition between being and knowledge, but abide within the simplicity of knowledge; there they are the true, and in the form of the true, their diversity being one of content and nothing more. That movement of theirs, which within this element organizes itself into the whole, is logic, or speculative philosophy.

Now since that system of spirit's experience embraces only spirit's appearance, the step onward from it to the science of the true, of the true as it stands in the shape of the true, looks to be purely negative, and one might prefer to be let off the negative, off the false, asking to be brought to truth directly; why have any dealings with what is false? — The point already spoken of above, that one ought to begin straight away with science, is to be answered here from the side of what the character of the negative as the false actually is. The representations current about this are the chief obstacle to entering into truth. That will provide occasion for discussing mathematical cognition, in which unphilosophical knowledge sees the ideal philosophy would have to aspire to reach, though thus far, it holds, philosophy has aspired in vain.

The true and the false belong among those determinate thoughts which, motionless, pass for essences in their own right, one of them standing over there and the other over here, each isolated and fixed, with nothing in common with the other. The contrary has to be insisted on: truth is no struck coin, ready to be handed over and raked in just as it comes. Neither is there a false, as little as there is an evil. Not that evil and the false are as bad as the devil, since in the devil's guise they have actually been turned into a particular subject; taken as false and as evil they are merely universals, though they do retain an essentiality of their own, each against the other. — What the false would be, since the false alone is at issue here, is the other, that is, the negative of substance, and substance, being the content of knowledge, is what is true. The negative, however, is essentially what substance itself is, in part as the differentiation and determination of content, in part as a simple differentiating, that is, as self and as knowledge in general. One can indeed know falsely. To say that something is falsely known means that knowledge stands in inequality with its substance. Yet just this inequality is differentiating as such, which is an essential moment. Their equality does of course emerge from this differentiation, and equality so arrived at is what truth is. It is not truth, though, as if inequality had been discarded the way slag is discarded from refined metal, nor even as the tool is left behind once the vessel stands finished; rather, inequality remains immediately at hand within the true as such, at hand as the negative, as the self. It cannot be said on that account, however, that the false makes up a moment, still less a component part, of the true. That there is something true in every false thing, — in this expression the two count as oil and water do, which cannot mix and are joined only externally. For the very reason that their significance lies in marking the moment of complete otherness, their terms have to be dropped once that otherness of theirs stands sublated. There is an awkwardness in speaking of the unity of subject with object, of the finite with the infinite, of being with thinking, and so on: the awkwardness that object, subject, and the rest signify what they are outside their unity, so that within the unity they are not meant as their own terms state; and in the same way the false, qua false, has ceased to be a moment of truth.

What dogmatism amounts to, as a cast of thought within knowledge and within the study of philosophy, is simply this opinion: that the true has its place in some proposition, one that is a fixed result, or else one known immediately. To questions of the sort: when Caesar was born, how many toises made up a stadium and which stadium was in question, and so on, a tidy answer is supposed to be forthcoming, in exactly the way it holds determinately true that the hypotenuse squared equals the summed squares of the right triangle's two remaining sides. Truths of that so-called kind are different in nature, however, from truths of philosophy.

As regards historical truths, to mention them briefly, insofar, that is, as what is purely historical in them is considered, it is readily conceded that they concern singular existence, a content on the side of its contingency and arbitrariness, determinations of it that are not necessary. — Yet even bare truths such as the one adduced above as an example do not occur apart from the movement of self-consciousness. Coming to be acquainted with one of them calls for much comparing, for looking things up in books, or for investigation in some manner or other; and even where there is immediate intuition, it is only acquaintance with the fact together with its grounds that counts as having genuine worth, though strictly the bare result alone is supposed to be what is at stake.

As for mathematical truths, still less would anyone be taken for a geometer who knew Euclid's theorems outwardly, by rote, without their proofs, without knowing them, as one might say by way of contrast, inwardly. In the same way, the acquaintance someone might gain by measuring many right triangles, namely that their sides stand to one another in the familiar ratio, would be regarded as unsatisfying. In mathematical cognition, though, the proof's essentiality does not yet carry the sense and character of belonging to the result as one of its moments; within the result the proof is rather past and gone. Qua result the theorem is indeed something insight has seen to be true. That supervening circumstance, however, bears not on the theorem's content but merely on its relationship to the subject; the movement belonging to a mathematical proof is no part of what constitutes the object, but is a doing external to the matter. Thus the right triangle's nature does not of itself break down in the way the construction presents it, that construction being required for proving the proposition which expresses the triangle's relationship; the whole production of the result is a procedure and an instrument of cognition. — Philosophical cognition too distinguishes the becoming of existence as existence from the becoming of essence, that is, of the matter's inner nature. In the first place, though, philosophical cognition holds both together, whereas mathematical cognition sets out only the becoming of existence, that is, of the being that the nature of the matter has within cognition as such . In the second place, the former brings these two particular movements into union as well. The inner arising, or the becoming of substance, is inseparably a passing over into the outer, into existence, being for another; and conversely the becoming of existence is the taking of itself back into essence. The movement is thus the doubled process and becoming of the whole, such that each of the two at the same time posits the other, and each therefore also has both in it as two aspects; together they make up the whole in that they dissolve themselves and make themselves into its moments.

Within mathematical cognition insight is a doing external to the matter, from which it follows that the true matter is thereby altered. The means, construction and proof, does of course contain true propositions; but one must say with equal justice that the content is false. Torn apart in the example given above, the triangle has its parts assigned to other figures which the construction lets arise upon it. Only at the end is the triangle restored, the triangle that the business was really about, which in the course of the proof was lost from view and turned up only in pieces belonging to other wholes. — So here too we watch a negativity of the content set in, and it would deserve the name of a falsity of that content quite as much as does the vanishing of thoughts held to be fixed within the concept's movement.

The real deficiency of this cognition, however, concerns both the cognition itself and its material as such. — As regards the cognition, in the first place the necessity of the construction is not grasped by insight. It does not emerge from the theorem's concept but is laid down as a command, and one must obey the prescription blindly, drawing precisely those lines out of infinitely many that might have been drawn instead, knowing nothing further, having only the good faith that this will prove serviceable to the purpose of conducting the proof. Afterward this purposiveness does indeed show itself, a purposiveness that is merely external precisely because it shows itself only afterward, in the course of the proof. — Likewise the proof takes a road that begins somewhere, and one does not yet know in what relation this beginning stands to the result that is supposed to come out. Its advance takes up these determinations and relations and leaves others lying, without one's seeing immediately by what necessity; an external purpose governs this movement.

What mathematics takes pride in, and boasts of against philosophy besides, is the self-evidence of this deficient cognition; and that self-evidence has no other basis than the poverty of mathematics' purpose and the deficiency of its material, which makes it of a sort philosophy is bound to scorn. — Its purpose, or concept, is magnitude. This is precisely the unessential, conceptless relationship. The movement of knowledge therefore goes on at the surface; it does not touch the matter itself, nor the essence or the concept, and for that reason it is no comprehending. — Space and the one make up the material over which mathematics grants its gratifying treasury of truths. Space is that existence into which the concept writes its differences, an empty and dead element where they are quite as motionless and lifeless as it is. Nothing spatial in the sense mathematics considers it is what the actual is; with unactuality of the kind that mathematical things are, neither concrete sensuous intuiting nor philosophy concerns itself. An element so unactual accordingly yields nothing but unactual truth, that is, propositions that are fixed and dead; any of them may serve as a stopping place; the one that follows begins afresh on its own account, the first never moving itself onward into the second, so that no necessary interconnection arises in this way out of the nature of the matter itself. — On account of that principle and element, moreover — and this is where the formal side of mathematical self-evidence lies — knowledge proceeds along the line of equality. Since the dead does not move itself, it arrives at no differences of essence, at no essential opposition or inequality, and hence at no transition of one opposite into the other, at nothing qualitative, nothing immanent, at no self-movement. For it is magnitude, the unessential difference, that mathematics alone considers. From the fact that it is the concept which splits space apart into its dimensions and fixes their combinations, both among them and within them, mathematics abstracts; it takes no account, for example, of the relationship of the line to the surface; and where it sets the circle's diameter beside its circumference, it strikes upon their incommensurability, that is, upon a relationship of the concept, an infinite that escapes its determining.

Immanent, so-called pure mathematics does not set time as time over against space either, as the second material of its consideration. Applied mathematics does deal with time, as with motion and with actual things generally, but it draws from experience the synthetic propositions, that is, propositions about the relationships of such things as determined by their concept, and does no more than apply its formulas to these presupposed data. When the so-called proofs it frequently supplies for propositions like the one on the equilibrium of the lever, or on how space and time stand to one another in falling motion, and so on, are offered and taken as proofs, that is itself nothing but a proof of how large a need cognition has for proving, since where cognition possesses no more than that, it honors even the empty semblance of proof and derives a satisfaction from it. To criticize those proofs would be as remarkable a task as an instructive one, serving in part to strip mathematics of this false ornament, in part to exhibit its limit and thereby the necessity of a different knowledge. — Time, which one would suppose to furnish, as space's counterpart, the material for pure mathematics' remaining part, is itself the concept in its existence. Neither the principle of magnitude, of conceptless difference, nor the principle of equality, of abstract unliving unity, is able to take up that pure restlessness of life and absolute differentiation. This negativity therefore becomes the second material of such cognition only in paralyzed form, namely as the one, cognition being an external doing that degrades what moves itself into mere material, so as to have in it an indifferent, external, lifeless content.

Philosophy, on the other side, has no regard for unessential determination, but regards determination insofar as it is essential; what philosophy has for its element and its content is not the abstract, not the unactual, but the actual, which posits itself and has its life within itself: existence within its own concept. This is the process that generates its own moments and traverses them, and the positive, together with the truth of the positive, is constituted by the whole of that movement. Truth accordingly encloses the negative within itself no less, encloses that which one would name the false, supposing it could be viewed as a something to be abstracted from. What vanishes must rather be viewed as itself essential, not under the determination of something fixed that is to be severed from the true and left outside it, no one knows where, just as the true, for its part, is not to be viewed as the dead positive that rests on the far side. Appearance is that arising and perishing which does not itself arise or perish; it is in itself, and it constitutes the actuality of truth's life and the movement of that life. So understood, the true is that bacchanalian reel in which no member fails to be drunk, and since each member, in setting itself apart, dissolves with the same immediacy, — the reel is equally a transparent and simple repose. Before the tribunal of that movement the singular shapes of spirit do not subsist, any more than determinate thoughts do, yet they are just as much positive, necessary moments as they are negative and vanishing. — Take the whole of the movement as repose, and whatever within it differentiates itself and gives itself a particular existence is kept there as something that recollects itself, something whose existence consists in knowledge of itself, this knowledge being with equal immediacy existence.

Concerning the method of this movement, or of science, it might seem necessary to state a good deal in advance. Yet the concept of that method is already given in the foregoing, and its genuine exposition falls to logic, or is rather nothing but logic. For the method is nothing other than the structure of the whole set out in its pure essentiality. About what has hitherto passed as method here, however, we must be aware that the whole system of representations bearing on what philosophical method is belongs to a culture that has vanished. — Should this happen to sound like braggadocio or like revolutionary talk, a tone I know myself to be far removed from, then let it be considered that the scientific pageantry which mathematics has lent — explanations, divisions, axioms, chains of theorems, their proofs, principles, and the inferring and concluding drawn from them — has in general opinion itself already become at least obsolete. Even if its unfitness is not clearly seen through, still little or no use is made of it any longer, and even if it is not disapproved of in itself, it is at any rate not loved. And we must hold the prejudice in favor of what is excellent that it will put itself to use and make itself liked. It is not hard to see, however, that truth cannot make its entrance in the manner of setting up a proposition, adducing grounds for it, and refuting the opposing proposition by grounds in just the same way. Truth is the movement of itself within its own self, whereas that method is a cognition external to the material. For that reason the method is proper to mathematics, which, as was noted, has for its principle the conceptless relation of magnitude and for its material dead space along with the equally dead One, and it must be left to mathematics. It may also survive in a freer manner, that is, mixed with more arbitrariness and contingency, in ordinary life, in a conversation, or in historical instruction that serves curiosity rather than cognition — roughly the sort of thing that a preface is as well. The content that consciousness carries in ordinary life is made up of acquaintances, experiences, sensuous concretions, and thoughts and principles as well, in short whatever counts as something on hand, or as a fixed and resting being or essence. In part it runs along this content, in part it interrupts the connection by exercising a free arbitrariness over such content, and it relates itself as an external determining and handling of it. It traces the content back to something certain, be this only the feeling of the moment, and conviction is satisfied once it has arrived at a resting point familiar to it.

But if the necessity of the concept banishes the looser gait of ratiocinative conversation as well as the stiffer gait of scientific pomp, it has already been recalled above that its place is not to be taken by the unmethod of presentiment and enthusiasm, nor by the arbitrariness of prophetic speech, which despises not merely that particular scientificity but scientific rigor as such.

Just as little, once the Kantian triplicity — so far merely rediscovered by instinct, still dead, still without concept — has been elevated to the absolute meaning belonging to it, so that the genuine form has thereby been established together with its genuine content and the concept of science has come forth, is there any warrant for treating as scientific that employment of the form in which we watch the form dragged down into a lifeless schema, into a mere specter, and scientific organization dragged down into a table. — This formalism, already discussed above in a general way, whose manner we now want to set out more closely, supposes that it has comprehended and pronounced the nature and the life of a shape the moment it has asserted of that shape one determination of the schema as predicate — let it be subjectivity, or objectivity, or again magnetism, electricity and so on, contraction or expansion, the east or the west and suchlike, a series admitting of infinite multiplication, since by this procedure any determination or shape may be reused alongside another as form or moment of the schema, and each may gratefully do the other the very same service — a circle of reciprocity from which nothing is learned about the matter at hand, nor about what the one or the other of them is. Part of what gets taken up here consists of sensuous determinations drawn from common intuition, which are admittedly meant to signify something other than what they state; and part consists of what signifies in its own right, the pure determinations of thought — subject, object, substance, cause, the universal, and so on — employed just as unexamined and uncritically as they are in ordinary life, and just as strengths and weaknesses, expansion and contraction are; so that this metaphysics turns out to be as unscientific as those sensuous representations.

What now gets pronounced, in place of the inner life and the self-movement of its existence, is a simple determinateness of that sort, pronounced by intuition — here meaning sensuous knowledge — on the basis of some shallow analogy, and the name construction is given to this outward, empty application of the formula. — With such formalism it is the same case as with any other. How obtuse would a head have to be that could not, within a quarter of an hour, be taught the theory of asthenic, sthenic, and indirectly asthenic illnesses, with as many plans of cure to match, and could not in that brief span be converted from a mere routinist into a theoretical physician, seeing that until quite recently instruction of just that sort sufficed for it? Should the formalism of nature-philosophy come out with the lesson that the understanding is electricity, that the animal is nitrogen, or that it is equal to south or north and so on, or represents it — stated as nakedly as it is stated here, or else concocted with a greater apparatus of terminology — then inexperience may well be thrown into admiring astonishment before such a force, which clamps together what seemed to lie far apart, and before the violence that the resting sensuous item undergoes in that linkage, a linkage which thereby lends it the semblance of a concept while sparing itself the chief thing, the pronouncing of the concept itself or of the meaning of the sensuous representation; inexperience may worship a profound genius there, may likewise be tickled by the cheerfulness these determinations have, seeing that they put something intuitable in place of the abstract concept and so render it more gratifying, and may congratulate itself on the affinity of soul it divines with such magnificent doings. The knack of such wisdom is learned as quickly as it is easy to practice; its repetition, once it is known, becomes as unbearable as the repetition of a conjuring trick one has seen through. The instrument of this monotone formalism is no harder to handle than a painter's palette on which only two colors were to be found, say red and green, the one for coloring a surface when a historical piece was called for, the other when a landscape was. — Which of the two is greater would be difficult to settle: the cozy ease with which everything in heaven, on earth, and under the earth gets whitewashed with such a broth of colors, or the self-conceit over the excellence of this universal remedy; each props up the other. The yield of this method — which glues the handful of determinations of the universal schema onto everything heavenly and earthly, onto every natural and spiritual shape, and thereby files everything into its slot — amounts to nothing less than a crystal-clear account of the organism of the universe, that is, to a table resembling a skeleton with little tickets glued onto it, or the rows of closed canisters with their labels pasted on in a spice-dealer's booth, a table as plain as either of them, and one which, just as there the flesh and blood have been taken from the bones while here the equally unalive matter lies concealed in the canisters, has for its part left out or concealed the living essence of the matter. — That this manner at the same time perfects itself into a monochrome absolute painting, in that, ashamed of the differences of the schema, it sinks them, as belonging to reflection, into the emptiness of the absolute, so that pure identity, the formless white, may be produced — this has already been remarked above. That uniformity of coloring in the schema and its lifeless determinations, and this absolute identity, and the passing over from the one to the other, are each as dead an understanding as the other, and equally external cognition.

What is excellent, however, is unable to evade the fate of being drained in this way of life and of spirit, and of seeing its skin, flayed in that way, wrapped around lifeless knowledge and the vanity of such knowledge; nor is that the whole of it. Rather, in that very fate there is still to be cognized the power which what is excellent exerts upon hearts, if not upon spirits, and likewise the working-out into universality and determinateness of form wherein its completion lies, the working-out which by itself is what allows such universality to be turned to superficial use.

Science may organize itself only through the concept's own life; in science the determinateness which the schema pastes externally onto existence is instead the self-moving soul of the fulfilled content. The movement of what is consists, on the one side, in becoming another to itself and so becoming its own immanent content; on the other side it takes this unfolding, this existence of its own, back into itself, that is, it makes itself into a moment and simplifies itself into determinateness. In the first movement negativity is the differentiating and the positing of existence; in this return into itself it is the becoming of determinate simplicity. In this way it comes about that the content does not exhibit its determinateness as received from something else and pinned onto it, but gives it to itself and ranges itself, out of itself, into a moment and a place within the whole. The tabulating understanding reserves for itself the content's necessity and its concept, everything that makes up the concrete, the actuality and living movement of the matter it files into order — or rather, there is no reserving here at all, since it has no acquaintance with these things, and had it that insight it would surely have shown it. It is not even acquainted with the need for such insight; otherwise it would refrain from its schematizing, or at least would take no more credit for it than for a table of contents; it gives only the table of contents, but the content itself it does not deliver. — Even when the determinateness is one that is concrete or actual in itself, magnetism for example, it has nonetheless sunk to something dead, since it is merely predicated of another existence and is not cognized as the immanent life of that existence, or in the way it has within that existence its own native and proper self-generation and exhibition. This main thing the formal understanding leaves to others to add. — Rather than going into the matter's immanent content, it perpetually surveys the whole from above and positions itself over the singular existence it speaks of, which amounts to saying that it does not see that existence at all. Scientific cognition demands the opposite: that one give oneself over to the object's life, or equivalently that one hold the object's inner necessity before oneself and pronounce it. Immersing itself in its object in this way, it forgets that survey from above, which is only the reflection of knowledge out of the content back into itself. But once it is submerged in the material and moves on with the material's own movement, it does return into itself, though not before the point at which the fulfillment, or the content, withdraws into itself, reduces itself to the simplicity of determinateness, demotes itself to being one side of an existence, and crosses over into a higher truth of its own. By that means the simple whole that has itself in view emerges from the very riches in which its reflection had seemed to go astray.

Because substance, as the point was put above, is subject in its own self, every content whatever is a reflection of itself into itself. The subsistence, or substance, of an existence lies in self-equality; for inequality with itself would be its dissolution. Self-equality, however, is pure abstraction; and abstraction of that kind is thinking. To pronounce the word quality is to pronounce simple determinateness; by quality an existence stands differentiated from some other, or else is an existence at all; it is for itself, or subsists by way of this simplicity with itself. But thereby it is essentially thought. — Herein lies the comprehension that being is thinking; here belongs the insight that is usually missing from the ordinary, conceptless talk about the identity of thinking and being. — Since, then, what existence subsists in is self-equality, that is, pure abstraction, existence abstracts itself away from itself, or is itself the inequality it has with itself, and is its own dissolution — is its own inwardness and its taking of itself back into itself — is its becoming. — Given this nature of what is, and to the extent that what is bears this nature for knowledge, knowledge is not an activity that manipulates the content as something alien to it, not a reflection that goes out of the content back into itself; science is not the idealism that took over the place of asserting dogmatism in the guise of an assuring dogmatism or the dogmatism of the certainty of itself — rather, watching the content go back into an inwardness of its own, knowledge finds its activity submerged in that content, since the activity is the content's immanent self, and at the same moment come back into itself, since the activity is pure self-equality within otherness; and so the activity is the cunning that appears to hold itself back from all activity while it watches how determinateness and its concrete life, in the very supposition that they are pursuing self-preservation and a particular interest, turn out to be the inverted doing, a doing that dissolves itself and makes of itself a moment of the whole.

If above the significance of understanding was given from the side of substance's self-consciousness, then from what has been said here its significance becomes clear from the side of substance's determination as being. — Existence is quality: a determinateness equal to itself, that is, simplicity that has been determined, thought that has been determined; and this constitutes the understanding proper to existence. Thereby it is Nous, as which Anaxagoras first cognized essence. His successors comprehended more determinately what the nature of existence is, calling it Eidos or Idea, that is, determinate universality, species. The expression species may seem rather too common and too slight for the Ideas, for the beautiful and the holy and the eternal, that are rampant at this time. In fact, though, what the Idea says is no more and no less than species. Yet nowadays we often see an expression that designates a concept determinately scorned in favor of another which, if only because it belongs to a foreign language, wraps the concept in fog and thereby sounds more edifying. — Existence, just insofar as it stands determined as species, is simple thought; and Nous, that is, simplicity, is substance. For the sake of that simplicity, that self-equality, substance makes its appearance as something fixed and enduring. Yet negativity belongs to this self-equality no less; and by that route the fixed existence in question crosses over into its own dissolution. Determinateness looks at first as though it were determinateness only by virtue of a relation to something other, and as though its movement were worked upon it by a power foreign to it; but the fact that it carries its own otherness within it and is self-movement is precisely what that simplicity of thinking already contains, since such simplicity is thought moving and differentiating itself, and is inwardness of its own, the pure concept. Intelligibility, then, amounts to a becoming, and in being that becoming it amounts to rationality.

Logical necessity has its whole subsistence in this nature of whatever is, the nature of being its own concept in its being; nothing else is the rational, nothing else the rhythm belonging to the organic whole; it is knowledge of the content in exactly the measure that the content is concept and essence — or, put otherwise, it alone is the speculative. — By moving itself, the concrete shape turns itself into simple determinateness; in doing so it rises into logical form and stands in its essentiality; the concrete existence it has is nothing but this movement, and such existence is immediately logical. There is accordingly no need to lay formalism onto the concrete content from outside; that content is, in its own self, the crossing over into formalism, which then stops being this external formalism, because form is the native becoming of the concrete content itself.

This nature of scientific method — to be in part inseparable from the content, in part to determine its own rhythm through itself — has, as was already recalled, its proper exposition in speculative philosophy. — What has been said here does indeed express the concept, but can count for no more than an anticipated assurance. An exposition that is in part merely narrative does not house that truth; and just as little, therefore, is the truth refuted when someone gives the contrary assurance that this is not how things stand but that they stand thus and so, when habitual representations are called to mind and recited as settled and familiar truths, or when something new is served up and vouched for out of the shrine of inner divine intuition. — Such a reception tends to be the first reaction of a knowledge to which something was unknown, a reaction meant to rescue freedom and one's own insight, one's own authority against the alien authority — for it is in this shape that what has just now been taken in for the first time appears — and also to get rid of the semblance and the kind of disgrace supposedly involved in having learned something, just as, in the applauding acceptance of the unknown, the reaction of the same kind consists in what in another sphere was ultrarevolutionary speech and action.

What therefore matters in the study of science is to take upon oneself the exertion of the concept. What it demands is attention to the concept as such, to simple determinations like those of being-in-itself, of being-for-itself, of self-equality, and the like, determinations that are pure self-movements of a kind one might well name souls, were their concept not the designation of something higher than a soul. To the habit of running along representations, the interruption of that habit by the concept is just as irksome as it is to formal thinking, which ratiocinates back and forth in unactual thoughts. That habit is to be called a material thinking, a contingent consciousness that is merely sunk into the stuff and therefore finds it hard going to lift its self purely out of the matter while at the same time remaining with itself. The other, ratiocination, is by contrast freedom from the content and vanity over it; the exertion asked of this vanity is that it surrender such freedom and, rather than acting as the principle that moves the content at will, submerge that freedom in the content, let the content set itself moving by its own nature, that is, by the self belonging to the content, and observe this movement. To refrain from breaking in with one's own notions upon the immanent rhythm of the concepts, not to interfere with it through arbitrariness and wisdom acquired elsewhere: this abstinence is itself an essential moment of attention to the concept.

In ratiocinative relating two sides are to be brought out more clearly, the sides in respect of which comprehending thought is opposed to it. — In part, ratiocination relates itself negatively toward the content it has taken up: it knows how to refute that content and reduce it to nothing. The insight that such is not the case is the merely negative; it is the terminus, and of itself it never presses past itself toward some new content; for a content to be had once more, something else has to be fetched in from elsewhere. It amounts to reflection into the I left empty, the vanity of that I's knowledge. — What such vanity states, however, is not merely the vanity of this content but equally the vanity of the insight itself; for the insight is a negative that fails to descry the positive inside itself. Since such reflection never wins its own negativity for a content, it never gets inside the matter, remaining forever outside and past it; hence its fancy that, by asserting emptiness, it stands further ahead than any insight rich in content. In comprehending thought, by contrast, as was shown a moment ago, the negative is something the content itself owns, and it is the positive in two respects: as the content's immanent movement and determination, and as the whole that these make up. Apprehended as a result, the negative is what issues from that movement, the determinate negative, and with that it is just as much a positive content.

Yet so far as such thinking possesses a content, whether representations, or thoughts, or some blend of the two, it exhibits another side, one that puts obstacles in the path of its comprehension. That side has a curious nature, tied closely to the essence of the Idea as this was set out above; or rather it gives voice to that essence in the way the essence appears when it appears as the movement which thinking apprehension is. — In its negative relating, just discussed, ratiocinative thinking is itself that self back into which the content goes; correspondingly, in its positive cognition the self takes the form of a represented subject, and the content bears upon that subject as accident and as predicate. Such a subject furnishes the base onto which the content gets fastened, and along which the movement travels this way and that. In comprehending thought matters stand otherwise. Because the concept is the object's own self, a self exhibiting itself as the object's becoming, what stands there is not a subject at rest bearing accidents without motion, but the self-moving concept, the concept that draws its determinations back into itself. Within that movement the subject at rest goes under; it passes into the differences and into content, and instead of standing opposed to the movement it makes up the determinateness, that is, the differentiated content together with its movement. So the solid footing which ratiocination found in the subject at rest starts to give way, and the object is now nothing but this movement. A subject that fills its content out no longer reaches past it, and can take on no additional predicates or accidents. Conversely, the dispersal of the content is thereby bound under the self; the content is not the universal that, free of the subject, would belong to several. So the content has in truth stopped being a predicate of the subject: it is the substance, it is the essence and the concept of whatever is under discussion. Representational thinking, whose nature it is to run along the accidents or predicates and rightly to go beyond them because they are no more than predicates and accidents, is checked in this running along, since what has the form of a predicate in the proposition is the substance itself. It suffers, so to represent it, a counterthrust. Setting out from the subject, on the assumption that the subject will stay in place as the ground, it discovers instead — the predicate being the substance — that the subject has gone over into the predicate and been sublated in the process; and once what looks like the predicate has thus turned into the entire self-subsistent mass, thinking is unable to wander freely and is arrested by this heaviness. — In other cases the subject is first laid down as the objective, fixed self; from there the necessary movement runs on to the manifold of determinations or predicates; and at this point the knowing I itself takes over the place of that subject, being both the linking of the predicates and the subject in which they are held. Yet because the first subject passes into those very determinations and is the soul animating them, the second subject, namely the knowing one, comes upon the first still there in the predicate, precisely where it expects to have done with it and to withdraw from it into itself; and rather than getting to be the agent in the predicate's movement, ratiocinating over whether this predicate or that should be attached to the first subject, it finds it still has business with the self of the content, and is required to be not on its own but in company with that self.

Put in formal terms, the point may be stated thus: the speculative proposition destroys the nature that judgment or proposition has in general, a nature that encloses within itself the difference between subject and predicate, while the identical proposition into which the former turns holds the counterthrust against that relation. — Between the form of a proposition in general and the unity of the concept that destroys that form there is a conflict resembling the one that occurs in rhythm between the meter and the accent. Rhythm issues from the hovering middle between the two and from their unification. In the philosophical proposition, likewise, the identity that subject and predicate have ought not to annihilate the difference between them which the proposition's form expresses; their unity ought instead to come forth as a harmony. The proposition's form is the appearance of determinate sense, the accent marking off what fills that sense out; but the unity in which such accent fades away consists in the predicate's expressing the substance and in the subject's own falling into the universal.

To make the foregoing clear by examples: take the proposition God is being; here the being is the predicate, and it carries substantial meaning, meaning into which the subject melts away. Being is here supposed to be not a predicate but the essence, and thereby God seems to cease to be what he is through his position in the proposition, namely the fixed subject. — Thinking, rather than making headway in the transition from subject to predicate, feels itself checked instead, the subject having been lost, and is thrown back upon the thought of the subject because it misses it; or else, the predicate having itself been pronounced as a subject, as the being, as the essence that uses up the whole nature of the subject, thinking comes upon the subject immediately in the predicate too; and now, in place of having gone into itself within the predicate and won the free standing of ratiocination, thinking remains sunk in the content, or at any rate the demand stands that it be sunk in it. — The same happens when one says that the actual is the universal: as subject, the actual passes away within its predicate. The universal is meant to carry more than the meaning of a predicate, as though the proposition were stating that the actual is universal; what the universal is meant to do is voice the essence of the actual. — Thinking thus forfeits the firm objective footing it possessed in the subject, just as much as it is flung back onto that footing in the predicate and, within the predicate, returns not into itself but into the content's own subject.

On this unaccustomed checking rest, in large part, the complaints about the unintelligibility of philosophical writings, at any rate where the other conditions of culture needed to understand them are present in the individual. In what has been said we see the ground of the quite specific reproach so often made against them, that a good deal has to be read over repeatedly before it can be understood — a reproach supposed to contain something improper and final, such that, if it is well founded, it admits of no further reply. — It is clear from the above how matters really stand with this. Being a proposition, the philosophical proposition rouses the opinion one ordinarily holds about the relation of subject and predicate, and about the customary way knowledge relates. That way of relating, together with the opinion belonging to it, is destroyed by the philosophical content of the proposition; the opinion learns that the meaning intended is other than the one it took, and having its opinion corrected in this way forces knowledge to return to the proposition and construe it differently now.

A difficulty that ought to be avoided is constituted by the mixing of the speculative and the ratiocinative manner, when what is said of the subject has at one time the significance of its concept and at another only the significance of its predicate or accident. — The one manner disturbs the other, and only that philosophical exposition would succeed in being plastic which strictly excluded the ordinary kind of relation among the parts of a proposition.

In fact non-speculative thinking too has its right, a right that is valid but is not heeded in the manner of the speculative proposition. The sublating of the proposition's form must not take place merely in an immediate fashion, by way of the proposition's content alone. This opposed movement has to be pronounced; not only that inner checking, but the concept's return into itself must be exhibited. What proof was otherwise supposed to deliver is accomplished by this movement, which is the proposition's own dialectical movement. That movement alone is the actual speculative, and speculative exposition consists in nothing but the pronouncing of it. Taken as a proposition, the speculative amounts merely to the inner checking and to the non-existent return of essence into itself. We therefore often find ourselves referred by philosophical expositions to this inner intuiting, and thereby spared the exhibition of the dialectical movement of the proposition that we were demanding. — What the proposition is supposed to state is what the true is; yet the true is subject in its essence, and as such it is nothing but the dialectical movement, that course which generates itself, leads itself onward, and goes back into itself. — In cognition of other kinds, proof constitutes this side of pronounced inwardness. But once dialectic had been divorced from proof, the very concept of philosophical proving was in fact lost.

One may recall in this connection that propositions serve equally as the parts or elements of the dialectical movement; and so the difficulty just pointed out seems to come back perpetually, and to be a difficulty inherent in the matter itself. — This is similar to what occurs with ordinary proof, where the grounds it employs themselves require further grounding, and so on without end. This form of grounding and conditioning, however, belongs to that proving from which the dialectical movement differs, and thus to external cognition, whereas as far as the dialectical movement itself is concerned, its element is the pure concept, and with this it has a content that is through and through subject in its own self. No content occurs, then, that would behave as an underlying subject with its meaning accruing to it as a predicate; the proposition, taken immediately, is an empty form and nothing else. — Leaving aside a self given in sensuous intuition or in representation, what chiefly designates the pure subject, that empty conceptless One, is the name taken as name. That is why it can serve a purpose, for example, to steer clear of the name God: this word is not at once a concept as well, but is the proper name, the fixed repose of the underlying subject. Whereas being, for example, or the One, singularity, the subject itself as well, and so on, immediately indicate concepts. — Even where speculative truths get stated of such a subject, their content is still destitute of the immanent concept, since it is on hand merely as a subject at rest, and that circumstance readily gives such truths the form of bare edification. — Seen from this side, therefore, the obstacle residing in one's habit of construing the speculative predicate by the proposition's form instead of as concept and essence is something that the fault of philosophical delivery can itself both aggravate and lessen. Presentation must, true to the insight into the nature of the speculative, retain the dialectical form and take in nothing except insofar as it is comprehended and is the concept.

Just as much as ratiocinative relating, the non-ratiocinative conceit about settled truths is a hindrance to the study of philosophy — truths to which their possessor thinks he has no need to return, but which he lays down as the foundation and believes he can simply pronounce, and by means of which he can judge and pass sentence. From this side it is especially needful that philosophizing again be made into a serious business. Of all sciences, arts, skills, and crafts the conviction holds that possessing them requires manifold effort in learning and practicing them. With philosophy, by contrast, the prejudice now seems to reign that although everyone has eyes and fingers, and yet is not thereby able to make shoes when handed leather and tools, everyone all the same understands straight off how to philosophize and how to pass judgment on philosophy, since natural reason supplies him with the standard for it — as though his own foot did not supply him, equally, with the standard of a shoe. — The possession of philosophy seems to get located precisely in the want of acquaintance and of study, philosophy seeming to break off just where these begin. It is frequently taken for a formal knowledge empty of content, and there is a great want of the insight that whatever counts as truth in any acquaintance or science, its content included, can merit that name only when philosophy has produced it; that the other sciences, however much they may try it with ratiocination and without philosophy, are unable without philosophy to have life, spirit, or truth within them.

With regard to philosophy proper, we see immediate revelation of the divine and sound common sense — which has neither troubled itself with other knowledge nor cultivated itself through philosophizing proper — regard themselves straight off as a complete equivalent for, and as good a substitute for, the long path of culture, the movement as rich as it is deep by which spirit arrives at knowledge, as chicory is said to be a substitute for coffee. It is not a pleasant thing to observe that ignorance, and a crudeness as formless as it is tasteless, incapable of holding its thinking to a single abstract proposition and still less to the connection of several, assures us that it is now the freedom and tolerance of thought and now genius. The latter was once, as everyone knows, quite as rampant in poetry as philosophy finds it today; but what the productions of this genius yielded, when they yielded any sense at all, was trivial prose in place of poetry, or, where they overshot that, deranged talk. Just so today a natural philosophizing, which holds the concept beneath it and, for want of the concept, holds itself to be an intuiting and poetic thinking, carries to market whatever arbitrary combinations an imagination merely disorganized by thought throws up — structures that are neither fish nor meat, neither poetry nor philosophy.

Meanwhile natural philosophizing, drifting along in the quieter riverbed of sound common sense, regales us with a rhetoric of trivial truths. When it is taxed with how little these truths amount to, it answers with the assurance that their sense and their fulfillment are present in its own heart, and must be present in that way in others too, since with the innocence of the heart, the purity of conscience, and suchlike it takes itself to have uttered ultimate things, against which no objection holds and beyond which nothing further can be demanded. But the whole point was that what is best should not stay behind within, but be hauled up out of that shaft into the light of day. As for bringing forward ultimate truths of that sort, the trouble could have been spared long ago, for they have long been available in the catechism, in the proverbs of the people, and so forth. — It is not hard to catch such truths in their indeterminateness or their skewness, and often to exhibit to the consciousness that holds them the flatly opposite truth lying within that same consciousness. Struggling to pull itself out of the confusion stirred up inside it, this consciousness will only fall into fresh confusion, and will very likely burst out with the declaration that it is settled beyond dispute that matters stand thus and so, and that the rest is sophistries; — a catchword that ordinary common sense keeps ready against cultivated reason, just as ignorance of philosophy has noted down the expression reveries once and for all as its word for philosophy. — Once ordinary common sense appeals to feeling, its inward oracle, it is finished with anyone who does not agree; it has to declare that it has nothing more to say to whoever does not find and feel the same within himself; — in other words, it tramples the root of humanity underfoot. For the nature of humanity is to press toward agreement with others, and it exists only in the commonality of consciousnesses once that has been brought about. What is anti-human, what is animal, consists in stopping short at feeling and being able to communicate only by way of it.

If someone were to ask after a royal road to science, no more comfortable one could be named than to rely on sound common sense and, in order to keep pace with the times and with philosophy besides, to read reviews of philosophical writings, or even their prefaces and opening paragraphs, since the latter supply the universal principles on which everything turns, while the former add to their historical report an assessment which, precisely because it is an assessment, already stands beyond what it assesses. This ordinary road is traveled in a dressing gown, whereas in the vestments of a high priest the exalted feeling of the eternal, the holy, the infinite strides along — a road that is rather itself already immediate being at the center, the genius of deep original ideas and lofty flashes of thought. Yet just as such depth does not yet disclose the wellspring of essence, so these skyrockets are not yet the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insight are to be won only in the labor of the concept. The concept alone can bring forth the universality of knowledge, which is neither the ordinary indeterminateness and meagerness of ordinary common sense but rather cultivated and complete cognition, — nor the extraordinary universality of an endowment of reason that spoils itself through indolence and the conceit of genius, but rather the truth ripened into its own native form, a truth capable of being the property of all self-conscious reason.

Since I place that whereby science exists in the self-movement of the concept, the reflection that the external aspects of our age's representations of the nature and shape of truth — those cited above and others besides — diverge from this, indeed run wholly counter to it, seems to promise no favorable reception for an attempt to present the system of science under that determination. In the meantime I can bear in mind that, if for example the excellence of Plato's philosophy is sometimes located in his scientifically worthless myths, there have also been times — times even called times of rapturous enthusiasm — in which Aristotelian philosophy was held in esteem for its speculative depth and Plato's Parmenides, surely the greatest artwork of ancient dialectic, was regarded as the true unveiling and the positive expression of divine life, and in which, for all the murkiness of what ecstasy produced, this misunderstood ecstasy was in truth supposed to be nothing other than the pure concept, — and further, that the excellence of the philosophy of our own time sets its worth precisely in its scientific character, and, even if others take it otherwise, in fact wins its validity only through that character. So I may also hope that this attempt to vindicate science for the concept and to present it in this, its own proper element, will know how to gain admittance through the inner truth of the matter. We must be convinced that the true has it in its nature to break through when its time has come, and that it appears only once that time has come, and for that reason never appears too early nor finds a public that is unripe; and also that the individual needs this effect in order to corroborate against it what is still his solitary matter, and to experience as something universal the conviction that as yet belongs only to particularity. Here, however, the public must often be distinguished from those who conduct themselves as its representatives and spokesmen. In several respects the former behaves otherwise than the latter, indeed in the opposite way. Where the public good-naturedly takes upon itself the blame for finding a philosophical work uncongenial, these others, secure in their competence, shove the whole blame onto the writer. The effect within the public is quieter than the doings of these dead when they bury their dead. If general insight is now on the whole more cultivated, its curiosity more alert and its judgment more quickly settled, so that the feet of those who will carry you out already stand at the door, one must often distinguish from this the slower effect which corrects the attention that imposing assurances have extorted, and corrects the dismissive censure as well, and which grants one sort of work a world of contemporaries only after some time, while another, once that time has passed, has no posterity left.

Since, moreover, in an age in which the universality of spirit has grown so much stronger and singularity has become, as is fitting, so much more a matter of indifference, that universality also holds to its full compass and cultivated wealth and demands them, so that the share of the total work of spirit falling to the activity of the individual can only be slight, the individual — as the very nature of science already brings with it — must forget itself all the more, must indeed become and do what it can, but just as surely less must be demanded of it, since it may itself expect less of itself and claim less for itself.

First Part. Science of the Experience of Consciousness

Introduction

It is a natural representation that philosophy, before it takes up the matter itself, namely the actual cognition of what is in truth, must first come to terms with cognition, which is taken to be the tool whereby one seizes the absolute, or the means through which one glimpses it. The worry seems warranted: partly, that there might be various kinds of cognition, and among them one more adept than another at reaching this final purpose, so that one would choose wrongly among them, — partly, too, that since cognition is a capacity of a determinate kind and compass, one grasps clouds of error rather than the sky of truth so long as its nature and its limit go without closer determination. Indeed this worry is bound to change into the conviction that the entire enterprise of gaining for consciousness, through cognition, whatever is in-itself is by its own concept preposterous, and that a boundary falls between cognition and the absolute which parts them utterly. For should cognition be the tool for taking possession of the absolute essence, it strikes one at once that applying a tool to a matter, far from leaving it as it is for itself, undertakes a shaping and an alteration of it. Or should cognition not be a tool of our activity but, in a manner of speaking, a passive medium across which the light of truth travels to reach us, then even so we do not obtain truth as it is in itself, but as it stands by way of and within this medium. Either way what we employ is a means that immediately yields the opposite of its purpose; or rather, what is preposterous is that we should resort to a means at all. Admittedly this defect looks remediable through an acquaintance with how the tool operates, since such acquaintance allows us to deduct from the result that share of the representation we get of the absolute through the tool which belongs to the tool itself, and so to keep the true unadulterated. Yet this improvement would in fact deposit us just where we already were. Strip from a shaped thing whatever the tool has wrought upon it, and the thing, — here the absolute — stands to us again at exactly what it was worth before an exertion thereby shown superfluous. Were the absolute merely to be brought nearer to us by the tool, without anything in it being altered, as a bird is by a limed twig, then, if it were not already in and for itself with us and willing to be so, it would surely mock this ruse; for in that case cognition would be a ruse, since through its manifold exertions it gives itself the air of doing something quite other than producing a merely immediate and hence effortless relation. Or if testing the cognition that we represent to ourselves as a medium teaches us the law by which it refracts rays, it is likewise of no use to subtract that refraction from the result; for cognition is not the bending of the ray but the ray itself by which truth touches us, and with this subtracted, all that would have been indicated to us is the bare direction, or the empty place.

Meanwhile, once the worry about lapsing into error has planted a mistrust of science, which sets about the work itself without scruples of this sort and actually cognizes, there is no seeing why the reverse should not hold: why a mistrust of that mistrust should not be planted, and the worry raised that this fear of erring is itself already the error. For it does presuppose something as truth, a good deal in fact, and props its scruples and its conclusions on what would itself first have to be tested for whether it is truth. What it presupposes is this: representations of cognition as a tool and as a medium, along with a difference of ourselves from this cognition; and chiefly this, that the absolute is stationed on one side while cognition on the other side, on its own and cut off from the absolute, is nonetheless something real, which is to say that cognition, standing as it does outside the absolute and therefore surely outside truth as well, is nevertheless truthful; a supposition by which whatever names itself fear of error rather betrays itself as fear of the truth.

This consequence arises because only the absolute is true, or only the true is absolute. It can be rejected by way of the distinction that a cognition which does not, as science would have it, cognize the absolute may still be true, and that cognition in general, though incapable of grasping the absolute, might still be capable of some other truth. But by now we can see that talk going back and forth like this comes down to a murky distinction between an absolute true and some other true, and that words like the absolute and cognition and the rest presuppose a meaning that it is our first business to attain.

Instead of bothering with such useless representations and turns of phrase about cognition as a tool with which to master the absolute, or as a medium letting us glimpse the truth and so on, — relationships that all these representations of a cognition cut off from the absolute and an absolute cut off from cognition no doubt amount to, — instead of the excuses that the incapacity of science draws from presupposing such relationships, so as at once to free itself from the labor of science and to lend itself the look of a serious and zealous effort, — as well as instead of wrangling with answers to all of this, these representations could be thrown out straightaway as contingent and arbitrary, and the use of words that goes with them, such as the absolute, cognition, also the objective and the subjective, and countless others whose meaning is presupposed as commonly familiar, could even be viewed as a fraud. For the pretense, partly that their meaning is commonly familiar, partly also that one is oneself in possession of their concept, looks rather like a way of sparing oneself the main task, namely that of supplying this concept. With better right, by contrast, the effort of paying any attention whatever to such representations and turns of phrase, which are meant to ward science off, could be dispensed with, since they constitute nothing but an empty appearance of knowledge, one that disappears the moment science steps forward. But in the very fact that it steps forward, science is itself an appearance; its stepping forward is not yet science carried through and spread out in its truth. It makes no difference here whether one represents it as being the appearance because it steps forward alongside something else, or calls that other, untrue knowledge its appearing. Science, however, must rid itself of this semblance; and its only way of doing so is to turn against it. For science can neither merely reject a knowledge that is not truthful as a common view of things, assuring us that it is itself a wholly different cognition and that such knowledge is nothing at all for it, nor can it appeal to an intimation of something better within that knowledge itself. By that assurance science would be declaring its being to be its force; but untrue knowledge makes the very same appeal, that it is, while assuring us that science is nothing to it; and one dry assurance is worth precisely as much as the next. Still less can science appeal to the better intimation supposedly at hand within untruthful cognition, as the pointer within that cognition toward science itself; for on one side it would once more be appealing to a being, and on the other to itself as it stands within untruthful cognition, that is, to a bad manner of its being, and so to its appearance instead of to its being in and for itself. For this reason the exposition of appearing knowledge is to be undertaken here.

Since this exposition has only appearing knowledge for its object, it does not itself seem to be science moving freely in its own peculiar shape; from this standpoint it may instead be taken as the road of natural consciousness pressing on toward true knowledge , or as the road of the soul journeying through the whole series of its configurations, stations that its own nature has staked out for it in advance, so that it may purify itself into spirit by attaining, through the complete experience of itself, acquaintance with what it is in its own self.

Natural consciousness will prove to be merely the concept of knowledge, or knowledge that is not real. But because it takes itself immediately for real knowledge instead, this road bears a negative meaning for it, and what amounts to the realization of the concept counts with it rather as a loss of its own self; for along this road it loses its truth. It may accordingly be viewed as the road of doubt, or, more properly, as the road of despair; for what happens along it is not what people usually mean by doubting, a jostling of this or that presumed truth, after which the doubt duly vanishes again and one comes back to the truth in question, so that at the end the matter is taken as it was before. It is instead the conscious insight into the untruth of appearing knowledge, for which what is most real is in truth only the unrealized concept. This skepticism that carries itself out to completion is therefore also not what a serious zeal for truth and science imagines it has made itself ready and equipped with for science; namely the resolve not to surrender oneself in science to the authority of other people's thoughts, but to test everything for oneself and to go by one's own conviction alone, or better yet, to bring forth everything oneself and hold only one's own deed to be the true. The series of configurations which consciousness runs through on this road is rather the detailed history of the cultivation of consciousness itself up to science. That resolve represents cultivation, in the simple manner of a resolve, as immediately settled and done with; this road, however, is the actual carrying out of it, over against that untruth. Following one's own conviction is admittedly more than submitting to authority; but the inversion of holding something to be so on authority into holding it to be so out of one's own conviction does not necessarily change the content of what is held, nor has truth thereby taken the place of error. Being stuck in the system of opining and of prejudice, whether on the authority of others or out of one's own conviction, differs only through the vanity that attaches to the latter way. Skepticism directed at the whole range of appearing consciousness, by contrast, is what first makes spirit competent to test what truth is, in that it brings about a despair over the so-called natural representations, thoughts, and opinions, which it makes no difference to call one's own or another's, and with which the consciousness that sets about testing straight away is still filled and burdened, thereby being in fact incapable of what it means to undertake.

The completeness of the forms of consciousness that is not real will emerge of itself through the necessity of the progression and of the interconnection. To make this comprehensible, one may note beforehand, in general terms, that when untruthful consciousness is exhibited in its untruth, the movement involved is not a merely negative one. Natural consciousness, to be sure, holds just such a one-sided view of the exposition; and a knowledge that makes this one-sidedness into its essence ranks among the shapes of incomplete consciousness, a shape falling within the course of the road itself, where it will present itself. This one-sidedness is skepticism, which in the result never sees more than pure nothing, and leaves out of account that this nothing is the determinate nothing of that out of which it results. The nothing, though, is in fact the truthful result only when it is grasped as the nothing of whatever it issues from; and so it is itself something determinate and possesses a content. The skepticism that ends with the abstraction of nothing, or of emptiness, cannot advance any further from it but must wait to see whether and what novelty presents itself to it, so as to cast that novelty into the same empty abyss. If, on the other hand, one apprehends the result as it is in truth, namely as determinate negation, then a new form has at once sprung up out of it, and within the negation the transition has been effected by which the progression through the full series of shapes comes about of itself.

The goal, however, is staked out for knowledge with the same necessity as the series of the progression; it lies at the point where knowledge has no further need to pass out beyond its own self, where it comes upon itself, and where concept corresponds to object, object to concept. The progression toward this goal is on that account unstoppable as well, nor is satisfaction to be found at any station short of it. Anything confined to a natural life cannot of its own power pass out beyond its immediate existence; something else drives it out past that existence, and this being torn away is its death. Consciousness, however, is for its own self its concept, and is thereby immediately the going beyond what is restricted and, since this restricted thing belongs to it, beyond its own self; along with the singular, the beyond is posited for it at the same time, even if only, as in spatial intuition, alongside what is restricted. Consciousness thus suffers this violence at its own hands, spoiling for itself its restricted satisfaction. Feeling this violence, anxiety in the face of truth may well draw back and struggle to preserve what is threatened with loss. But it can find no rest; it may want to stand still in thoughtless inertia, yet thought cripples thoughtlessness and the restlessness of thought disturbs the inertia; or it may dig itself in as sentimentality, whose assurance is that everything is good in its kind; and that assurance suffers violence from reason just as much, since reason finds a thing not good precisely insofar as it is a kind. Or the fear of truth may screen itself, from its own eyes as much as from other people's, behind the semblance that it is precisely the burning zeal for truth itself which makes it so hard, indeed impossible, for it to come upon any truth other than the sole truth of vanity: that of being ever more clever than any thoughts one may have, whether one's own or another's; and this vanity, which knows how to foil every truth so as to withdraw out of it into itself, and which gorges on this understanding of its own, an understanding that can always dissolve every thought and, in place of all content, come up with nothing but the dry I, is a satisfaction that has to be left to its own devices, since it shuns the universal and pursues being-for-itself alone.

Since so much has now been said provisionally and in general about how the progression goes and why it is necessary, it may still be useful to recall something concerning the method of carrying it out. Once this exposition is represented as a relating of science to appearing knowledge, and as an investigation and a testing of cognition's reality, it seems unable to proceed without laying down some presupposition or other as its standard. For testing consists in applying an assumed standard, and, in the equality or inequality with that standard which then results for whatever is being tested, lies the decision that it is either correct or incorrect; and the standard as such, and science too if science were the standard, is in all this assumed to be the essence or the in itself. Here, however, where science is only first stepping forward, neither science itself nor anything else has vindicated itself as being the essence or the in itself; and lacking any such thing, no testing seems possible at all.

This contradiction and its removal will emerge more determinately if we first recall the abstract determinations of knowledge and of truth as they occur in consciousness. Consciousness, namely, distinguishes from itself something to which it at the same time relates itself; or, as the point is put, something is for it; and the determinate side of this relating, of the being that something has for a consciousness, is knowledge. From this being for another, however, we distinguish being in itself; what is related to knowledge is equally distinguished from knowledge and posited as being outside this relation as well; the side of this in itself is called truth. What these determinations amount to in their own right need not occupy us any further at this point, for since appearing knowledge is our object, its determinations too are taken up at first just as they immediately offer themselves; and it is surely as they have been grasped here that they do offer themselves.

Now if we investigate the truth of knowledge, we seem to be investigating what knowledge is in itself. But in an investigation of this sort knowledge is our object, something for us; hence the in itself of it that would come out would rather be its being for us, and what we asserted to be its essence would be not its truth but only our knowledge of it. On such a showing the essence, or the standard, would lie within us, and whatever was to be measured against it, and to be decided about by that comparison, would be under no necessity to acknowledge it.

But the object we are investigating is of such a nature that it relieves us of this separation, or of this semblance of separation and presupposition. Consciousness supplies its standard from within its own self, so that the investigation turns into consciousness comparing itself with itself; for the distinction just now drawn falls inside consciousness. Within consciousness one thing is for an other, or consciousness carries in it the determinateness of the moment of knowledge at all events; at the same time this other is for consciousness not merely for it but also outside that relation, that is, in itself; the moment of truth. In whatever, then, consciousness within its own self declares the in itself or the true to be, we have the standard that consciousness itself sets up for measuring its knowledge against. If we call knowledge the concept, and the essence or the true what has being, the object, then the testing lies in watching whether concept corresponds to object. But if we instead call the essence, that is, the in itself, the concept of the object, while by the object we understand the object as object, namely as it is for another, then the testing lies in watching whether the object, for its part, corresponds to its concept. It is plain enough that the two come to the same; what matters, though, is to hold this fast for the whole investigation, that both these moments, concept and object, being for another, and being in its own self, fall within the very knowledge we are investigating, so that we have no need to bring standards along with us or to apply our notions and thoughts in the course of the investigation; dropping these is how we manage to consider the matter as it is in and for itself.

Now an addition on our part is rendered superfluous not merely in this respect, that consciousness itself already harbors concept and object, standard and what gets tested; we are also spared the labor of comparing the two and the testing proper, so that, since consciousness tests its own self, here too nothing is left to us but sheer watching. For consciousness is, on one side, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of its own self: consciousness of what for it is the true, and consciousness of its knowledge of that. Since both are for it, consciousness is their comparison itself; it comes to be for it whether or not its knowledge of the object stands in correspondence with the object. Admittedly the object seems to be for consciousness only in the way consciousness knows it; consciousness seems, as it were, unable to get round behind the object to see how it is not for consciousness but rather how it is in itself, and hence unable as well to test its knowledge against the object. Yet in the very fact that consciousness knows of an object at all, the difference is already at hand that for it one thing is the in itself, while another moment is knowledge, the object's being for consciousness. The testing rests on this distinction, which is present. If in this comparison the two fail to correspond, consciousness seems bound to alter its knowledge so as to make it conform to the object; but when the knowledge alters, the object itself in fact alters for consciousness too, since the knowledge at hand was essentially knowledge of that object; with the knowledge the object likewise becomes another, for it belonged essentially to this knowledge. In this way it dawns on consciousness that what previously was for it the in itself is not in itself at all, or that it was only for it in itself. So when consciousness finds, in the case of its object, that its knowledge does not correspond to that object, the object itself gives way as well; or the standard of the testing shifts once whatever it was meant to serve as standard for fails to hold up in the testing; and what gets tested is not knowledge alone but its standard along with it.

This dialectical movement, which consciousness carries out on its own self, on its knowledge no less than on its object, insofar as the new true object thereby springs up for it, is precisely what goes by the name of experience. In this connection one further moment in the course just mentioned is to be brought out more closely, a moment that will shed new light on the scientific side of the exposition that follows. Consciousness knows something, and what it has there as the essence, as the in itself, is this object; but the object is the in itself for consciousness as well, and thereby the ambiguity of this true enters in. Two objects, we see, are now before consciousness: the one is the first in itself, the other the being-for-consciousness of this in itself. This second one looks at the outset like nothing but consciousness's reflection into its own self, a representing not of an object but merely of its knowledge of that first object. But as was shown a moment ago, in the course of this the first object alters for consciousness; it stops being the in itself and turns into something that is only the in itself for consciousness; and so what is then the true is this: the being-for-consciousness of this in itself, which is to say that here we have the essence, or consciousness's object. This new object contains the nullity of the first; it is the experience made about that first object.

One moment attaches to this exposition of how experience runs its course on account of which the exposition seems not to square with what experience is ordinarily taken to mean. The transition, namely, which starts from the first object together with the knowledge of it and arrives at the other object about which experience is said to have been made, was specified thus: that the knowledge of the first object, or what the first in itself is for consciousness, is itself to become the second object. Whereas it otherwise seems that we make the experience of the untruth of our first concept on another object, one we happen to come upon contingently and externally, so that what falls within us is nothing but the pure apprehending of what is in and for itself. On the view just given, though, the new object exhibits itself as having come to be through a reversal of consciousness itself. Our own addition is this way of regarding the matter, through which the series of consciousness's experiences is raised into a scientific course; and it is an addition not present for the consciousness we are observing. But this is in fact the very circumstance already discussed above when the relationship of the present exposition to skepticism came up, namely that the result reached in each case on an untruthful knowledge must not collapse into an empty nothing, but has necessarily to be apprehended as the nothing of that whose result it is; a result which holds within it whatever of truth the preceding knowledge has. This presents itself here in the following way: since what at first appeared as the object descends, for consciousness, into a knowledge of it, and the in itself turns into a being of the in itself for consciousness, this is the new object, with which a new shape of consciousness also steps forward, one for which something other is the essence than was for the preceding shape. It is this circumstance that guides the whole succession of the shapes of consciousness in their necessity. What goes on for us, as it were, behind consciousness's back is only this necessity itself, the emergence of that new object as it offers itself to consciousness, which has no idea what is happening to it. There thereby enters into its movement a moment of the in itself, that is, of being-for-us, a moment that does not present itself to the consciousness caught up in the experience itself; the content, however, of what emerges for us is for it, and we comprehend only the formal side of it, its pure emerging; for it what has emerged is only an object, while for us it is at the same time a movement and a becoming.

Through this necessity, this road to science is itself already science, and, in respect of its content, therefore the science of the experience of consciousness.

The experience that consciousness undergoes concerning itself can, by its concept, comprehend within itself nothing short of the whole system of consciousness, the whole kingdom of spirit's truth, in such a way that the moments of that truth exhibit themselves under this peculiar determinateness, not as abstract, pure moments, but as they stand for consciousness, or as consciousness comes forward itself in its relating to them, so that the moments of the whole amount to shapes of consciousness. As consciousness drives itself onward to its true existence, it will reach a point at which it lays aside the semblance of being burdened with something alien that is only for it and is there as another, or where appearance becomes equal to essence, so that its exposition coincides at just this point with the proper science of spirit, and finally, in grasping this its own essence, consciousness will designate the nature of absolute knowing itself.

I. Sense-Certainty; or the This and Meaning

Whatever knowledge comes first, that is, whatever is our object immediately, can only be a knowledge that is itself immediate: knowledge of the immediate, of what has being. Our own bearing has to be equally immediate or receptive: we are to alter nothing in it as it offers itself, and to keep comprehension away from our apprehending.

The concrete content of sense-certainty immediately makes it look like the richest cognition, indeed like a cognition of infinite wealth — a wealth for which no boundary can be found, whether we go out into the space and time in which it spreads itself, or whether we take a piece from this abundance and go into it by dividing it. Besides this, it appears as the truest, for it has so far discarded nothing of the object, but has it before itself in its full completeness. Yet this certainty in fact puts itself forward as the most abstract and poorest truth. About what it knows, its whole statement runs: it is; the being of the matter is all that its truth holds; consciousness, on its side, figures in this certainty as nothing but a pure I, and I am there as nothing but a pure this one, the object as nothing but a pure this. I, this one, am certain of this matter, and not because I as consciousness developed myself in the process and set thought moving in manifold ways. Nor because the matter of which I am certain would have, in virtue of a host of differing characteristics, a rich relation within itself, or a manifold bearing upon others. Both of those points fall outside the truth of sense-certainty; within it, the significance of a manifold mediation attaches neither to I nor to the matter; to I there attaches no significance of a manifold representing or thinking, nor to the matter any significance of manifold characteristics; the matter simply is, and it is for no other reason than that it is; it is, and precisely this is the essential thing for sensuous knowledge, while its truth is constituted by this pure being, by this simple immediacy. In the same way, certainty taken as immediate relation is pure relation: consciousness is I and nothing further, a pure this one; the singular one knows what is a pure this, or the singular.

Yet a good deal else plays alongside the pure being that makes up this certainty's essence and that it announces as its truth, as we can see if we watch. A sense-certainty that is actual is not this pure immediacy alone, but rather an example of it. Among the countless differences that turn up here we find everywhere the one main disparity: namely that in sense-certainty there drop out of pure being, right away, the two Thises already named, a This one as I and a This as object. Let us reflect on this difference, and what emerges is that the one no more than the other stands in sense-certainty immediately alone: each stands there at the same time as something mediated; I possess the certainty through another, namely the matter, and the matter is in the certainty just as much through another, that is, through I.

This difference between essence and example, between immediacy and mediation, is not one that we alone draw; sense-certainty exhibits it in its own right, and what must be taken up is the difference in the shape it wears there, not in the shape we have just now given it. Within it, one side gets posited as the simple, immediately existing side, that is, as the essence, namely the object; the other side gets posited as the unessential and mediated one, which within it is not in itself but only through another, namely I, a knowledge whose knowing of the object rests solely on the fact that it is, and which is able to be, or equally not to be. The object, for its part, is, the true and the essence; it is, and whether it gets known or not makes no difference; it stays even when it goes unknown; knowledge, on the other hand, is not, unless the object is.

The object, then, calls for examination as to whether it really is, within sense-certainty itself, the essence sense-certainty passes it off as, and whether this concept of it, that of being essence, squares with the way it is on hand there. To that end our task is not to reflect on the object and ponder what it might in truth be, but merely to look at it as sense-certainty has it within itself.

It is therefore itself the one we must question: What is the This? Suppose we take it in the doubled shape that its being wears, as the Now and as the Here; then the dialectic it carries within itself will assume a form no less intelligible than the This itself is. And so, asked what is the Now?, we answer, say: The Now is the night. To put the truth of this sense-certainty to the test, one simple experiment is enough. So we set this truth down in writing; writing a truth out cannot cost it anything, and neither can our storing it away. Looking at the written-down truth again Now, this midday, we will find ourselves obliged to grant that it has gone stale.

The Now that is night gets preserved, that is, gets handled as the thing it was passed off as, as something that has being; and yet what it turns out to be is something without being. The Now itself does maintain itself, yet as one that is not night; equally, over against the day which it now is, it maintains itself as one that is not day either, or as something negative in general. This self-maintaining Now is therefore not an immediate one but a mediated one, for as something that endures and maintains itself it is determined by this, that another, namely day and night, is not. Through all this it remains just as simple as before, Now, and in that simplicity indifferent toward whatever else keeps playing about it; night and day are not what its being consists in, and just as much it is also day and night; this otherness of its own leaves it wholly unaffected. A simple item of that kind, one which is by way of negation, which is not this and not that, a not-this, and which is likewise indifferent as to being this or that, we call a universal; the universal, then, is what in fact holds as the true in sense-certainty.

The sensuous, too, is something we utter as a universal; what we say is This, meaning the universal This; or it is, meaning being in general. Admittedly we do not represent the universal This to ourselves in doing so, or being in general, and yet the universal is what we utter; or rather, we simply do not speak in the way we mean things in this sense-certainty. Language, however, as we see, is the truer of the two; in it we ourselves refute our own opinion straight off, and since the universal is what is true in sense-certainty, and language expresses only this truth, it is not at all possible for us ever to say a sensuous being that we mean.

Matters will stand the same way with the This in its other form, with the Here. The Here is, for example, the tree. I turn myself around, and this truth has vanished, having inverted itself into its opposite: the Here is no tree at all, but rather a house. What does not vanish is the Here itself; rather it is what abides through the vanishing of house, tree, and so on, indifferent as to being house or tree. The This, then, shows itself once more to be mediated simplicity, or universality.

For this sense-certainty, which on its own shows the universal to be its object's truth, what stays behind as its essence is thus pure being, though not immediate being, but rather a being for which negation and mediation are indispensable; hence not the being that we mean by being, but being carrying the determination that it is abstraction, the purely universal; and what alone remains standing over against this empty, indifferent Now and Here is our opinion, for which the true in sense-certainty is not the universal.

Set the relationship in which knowledge and the object first stepped forward beside the relationship the two occupy in this result, and the relationship has inverted itself. What was to have been the essential side, the object, is now the unessential side of sense-certainty, for the universal that it has become is no longer of the kind in which the object was to be essential for that certainty; sense-certainty is instead on hand now in the opposite one, in the knowledge that formerly ranked as the unessential one. Its truth resides in the object taken as my object, that is, in meaning: the object is because I know of it. Sense-certainty has indeed been driven out of the object, yet not thereby sublated, only forced back into the I; what experience has to show about this reality of its own is what we now have to see.

So the force of its truth now rests with the I, with how immediately my seeing, hearing, and the rest go on; what stops the vanishing of the singular Now and Here we mean is that I hold them fast. The Now is day, and this because I see it; the Here a tree, for that same reason. In this relationship, though, sense-certainty undergoes the same dialectic on itself as it did in the earlier one. I, this one, see the tree, and I assert of the tree that it is the Here; but the house is what another I sees, and his assertion is that the Here is no tree but a house. Both truths carry the same credentials, namely the immediacy of seeing, together with the assuredness and assurance of both parties about their knowledge; but the one vanishes in the other.

What survives all this is I as something universal, and its seeing is not the seeing of a tree, nor the seeing of this house, but a simple seeing, one that the negation of this house and the rest has mediated, and in that very mediation just as simple, just as indifferent toward whatever else plays about it, toward the house, toward the tree. I is nothing but a universal, on a par with Now, Here, or This in general; true enough, what I mean is a singular I, but saying what I mean is beyond me with Now and Here, and with I it is no less beyond me. In saying this Here, Now or a singular, what I say is all thises, all Heres, Nows, singulars; and in the same way, in saying I, this singular I, my utterance is quite generally all I's; each one is what I say, namely I, this one, this singular one. Where science has this demand laid before it as the touchstone it could simply never survive, the demand that a so-called this thing or a this human being be deduced, constructed, found à priori, or however one cares to put it, it is only fair that the demand itself say what this thing, or what this I, it means; but that is impossible to say.

What sense-certainty learns by experience, then, is that its essence lies in the object as little as in the I, and that immediacy belongs to the one as little as to the other, since in both of them what I mean amounts rather to something unessential, while object and I alike are universals, and the Now, the Here, the I that I mean keep no subsistence within them, nor are they at all. This brings us to positing sense-certainty in its whole extent as its own essence, rather than merely one moment of it, which is what happened in the two previous cases, where the reality of sense-certainty was supposed to lie first in the object standing opposed to the I, and then in the I itself. It is therefore only the whole of sense-certainty itself that holds fast within itself to immediacy, and thereby shuts out from itself all the opposition that occurred previously.

None of this concerns that pure immediacy any longer: not the Here's otherness as tree, an otherness that goes over into a Here which is not-tree; not the Now's otherness as day, going over into a Now which is night; nor any other I with something else for its object. Its truth keeps itself as a relation that stays equal to itself, one that makes no distinction of essentiality and unessentiality where the I and the object are concerned, and which therefore admits no difference at all into itself. So I, this one, assert the Here as tree, and I do not turn around, which would turn the Here into a not-tree for me; nor do I pay any heed when some other I sees the Here as not-tree, or when I myself, on some other occasion, take the Here for not-tree and the Now for not-day; instead I am pure intuiting; for my own part I stick to it that the Now is day, or else to this, that the Here is tree; and I do not set the Here and the Now side by side with each other either, but hold to one single immediate relation: the Now is day.

Since this certainty now refuses to step forward whenever we point it toward a Now that happens to be night, or toward an I for whom it is night, we go over to it ourselves and have it point out to us the Now that it asserts. We have to let it point the thing out, since what is true in this immediate relation is what is true of this I here, the one who confines himself to a single Now or a single Here. Should we take this truth up only afterwards, or place ourselves at a distance from it, then it would carry no significance whatever, since we would then be sublating an immediacy that belongs to it essentially. We have to step, therefore, into the very same point of time or of space, have the truth pointed out to us, that is, let ourselves be turned into that same this I, the one that does the knowing with certainty. So let us see how the immediate is constituted that gets pointed out to us.

The Now gets pointed out; this Now. Now; by the time it is pointed out it has already stopped being; the Now which is differs from the one pointed out, and we see this to be just what the Now amounts to: in being, to be already no more. As pointed out to us, the Now is something that has been; therein lies its truth; the truth of being is not what it has. Even so, this much holds true, that it has been. Yet whatever has been is indeed no essence at all; it is not, and being was the point at issue.

What we see in this pointing-out is thus nothing but a movement, running its course as follows: 1) I point the Now out; it stands asserted as the true; but I point it out as something that has been, as something sublated, and so I sublate the first truth; and 2) now, as the second truth, my assertion is that it has been, that it stands sublated. 3) But what has been has no being; the second truth, its having-been or its being-sublated, I now sublate in turn, negating thereby the Now's negation, and so coming back to the first assertion: that Now is. The Now, together with the pointing-out of it, is accordingly so constituted that an immediate simple is what neither of them is; each is instead a movement with various moments in it: this gets posited, but what gets posited is rather another, or the this gets sublated; and that otherness, that sublating of the first, is itself sublated once more, whereby a return to the first comes about. But this first, once reflected into itself, is not quite what it was at the outset, namely something immediate; it is precisely what stands reflected into itself, or a simple that stays what it is throughout an otherness: a Now that amounts to absolutely many Nows; and there we have the true Now, the Now as a single day holding many Nows within it, hours; and such a Now, an hour, is likewise so many minutes, and these Nows in turn many more Nows, and so on. — So the pointing-out is itself the movement that expresses what the Now in truth is: a result, that is, a plurality of Nows gathered into one; and the pointing-out is the experiencing of the Now as something universal.

The Here that gets pointed out, the one I hold fast, is in the same way a this Here which in truth turns out to be not this Here, but a front and a back, an above and a below, a right and a left. And the above, taken by itself, is in the same way this manifold otherness within above, below, and so on. The Here that was to be pointed out disappears into other Heres, and these disappear in their turn; what gets pointed out, held fast, and left standing is a negative This, one that only is on condition that the Heres are taken in the way they are meant to be taken, only to sublate themselves in that very taking; it is a simple complexion of many Heres. The point would be the Here that is meant; but the point is not; rather, when it gets pointed out as something with being, the pointing-out proves to be no immediate knowledge at all, but a movement that runs from the meant Here by way of many Heres to the universal Here, and just as the day is one simple plurality of Nows, so this universal Here is one simple plurality of Heres.

Clearly the dialectic of sense-certainty amounts to nothing beyond the simple history of its own movement, its own experience, and sense-certainty itself amounts to nothing beyond just this history. That is also why natural consciousness keeps advancing of its own accord to this result, to what in sense-certainty is the true, and undergoes the experience of it; only it just as constantly forgets it again and starts the movement over from the beginning. It must therefore be a matter for astonishment that, against this experience, the claim is set up, as universal experience, as a philosophical assertion too, and even as a result of skepticism, that external things, in their reality or their being as these, as sensuous things, possess absolute truth for consciousness; an assertion of that kind has no idea what it is saying, no idea that it says the reverse of what it intends. For consciousness, the truth of the sensuous This is supposed to amount to universal experience; but universal experience is rather the opposite; every consciousness itself sublates such a truth again, for instance the Here is a tree or the Now is midday, and pronounces the contrary: the Here is not a tree, it is rather a house; and whatever in this assertion, the one sublating the first, is once again just such an assertion about a sensuous This, that too it goes on sublating in the same way; so that throughout sense-certainty what really gets experienced is nothing but what we have seen, namely this as a universal, the contrary of what that assertion assures us is universal experience. — Given this appeal to universal experience, it may be permissible to anticipate a regard for the practical side. With the practical in view, those who assert that truth and that certainty about the reality of sensuous objects can be told that they belong back in the lowest class of the school of wisdom, the old Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and of Bacchus, where the secret of eating bread and of drinking wine still awaits their learning; for anyone initiated into those secrets reaches not merely doubt about the being of sensuous things but despair over it, and in dealing with them he partly accomplishes their nullity himself, partly watches it accomplished. The animals are not excluded from this wisdom either; on the contrary, they show themselves initiated into it most deeply of all, for they do not stop short before sensuous things as things that are in themselves; despairing of that reality and wholly certain of its nullity, they help themselves without further ado and devour them; and the whole of nature, along with them, celebrates these revealed mysteries, which teach what the truth of sensuous things is.

Those, however, who set up such an assertion also say, in keeping with the remarks just made, the immediate opposite of what they mean; and this appearance is perhaps the one best able to provoke reflection on the nature of sense-certainty. What they talk about is the existence of external objects, determinable still more precisely as actual things that are absolutely singular, entirely personal, individual, no one of which has anything absolutely like it any longer; and this existence, they hold, carries absolute certainty and truth. What they mean is this piece of paper, the one I am writing this on, or rather have written on already; but what they mean, they do not say. Suppose they really did want to say this piece of paper that they mean, and suppose the wanting to say it were serious: it cannot be done, since the sensuous This that is meant lies beyond the reach of language, and language belongs to consciousness, to what is in itself universal. The paper would therefore molder away under any actual attempt to say it; those who had started its description could not bring it to completion, but would have to hand it over to others, who would in the end have to concede of their own accord that they were speaking of a thing which is not. No doubt, then, what they mean is this piece of paper, which here is quite another one than the paper above; but what they speak of are actual things, external ones or sensuous objects, absolutely singular essences, and so on, which is to say that of these they utter only the universal; and hence whatever gets called the unsayable is nothing else than what is untrue, irrational, merely meant. — Where of something nothing more gets said than this, that it is an actual thing, that it is an external object, then it stands uttered merely as what is most universal of all, and thereby its equality with everything is what gets expressed rather than its differentiatedness. If I say a singular thing, I say it just as much as something wholly universal, for all things are a singular thing; and in the same way this thing is anything one likes. Designated with more precision, as this piece of paper, it makes no difference: all paper, every sheet of it, is a this piece of paper, so that all along I have said nothing but the universal. But suppose I try to come to the aid of speech, which has the divine nature of inverting what is meant on the spot, of turning it into something else, and so of never letting it reach the word at all, by pointing out this piece of paper: then I undergo an experience of what in fact the truth of sense-certainty is; I point the paper out as a Here that is a Here belonging to other Heres, or, taken on its own, a simple togetherness of many Heres, that is, a universal; so I take it up as it truly is, and rather than knowing something immediate, I perceive.

II. Perception; or the Thing, and Deception

Immediate certainty does not take what is true for itself, since the universal is its truth, whereas what it wants to take is the This. Perception, on the other hand, takes what has being for it as something universal. Universality being its principle throughout, the moments that immediately set themselves apart within perception are likewise universal: the I is universal, the object universal. That principle has come about for us, and therefore our taking-in of perception is not, like that of sense-certainty, one that merely appears, but one that is necessary. With this coming-about of the principle the two moments have likewise arisen, the moments that in their appearing merely drop out of it: the one is the movement of pointing-out, the other that same movement but taken as something simple; the first is perceiving, the second the object. The object is, in essence, the same as what the movement is: the movement is the unfolding and differentiating of the moments, the object is their being gathered together. The universal as principle is, for us or in itself, the essence of perception, while over against this abstraction the two distinguished terms, the perceiving and the perceived, are the unessential. In fact, though, both of them are essential, since each is itself the universal, that is, the essence; but because their relation to one another is that of opposites, within that relation only one can hold the rank of the essential, and so the difference between essential and unessential must get distributed across them. The one that is determined as the simple, namely the object, is the essence, indifferent to whether it is perceived or not; perceiving, however, as the movement, is what is unstable, what may be or may not be, and is the unessential.

This object must now be determined more closely, and this determination developed briefly out of the result that has come about; the fuller development does not belong here. Since its principle, the universal, is in its simplicity something mediated, the object must express this at itself as its nature; it thereby shows itself to be the thing that has many properties. It is to perception, and not to immediate certainty, that the wealth of sensuous knowledge belongs, since in immediate certainty that wealth was merely what played alongside; for perception alone has negation, difference, or manifoldness in its essence.

The This is accordingly posited as being not this, or as sublated; and with that it is not nothing but a determinate nothing, that is, a nothing possessed of a content, namely the This. Through this the sensuous is itself still there, yet not as immediate certainty required it to be, namely as the singular that is meant, but as something universal, or as what is going to determine itself as property. Sublating displays here its true doubled meaning, the one we already noticed in the negative: it is at one and the same time a negating and a keeping; the nothing, being the nothing of the This, holds onto immediacy and is sensuous itself, though an immediacy that is universal. — Being, though, is universal because it carries mediation, the negative, at itself; and where it expresses this at its own immediacy, it amounts to a differentiated, determinate property. With that, many such properties are posited at once, each the negative of the others. Since they find expression in the universal's simplicity, these determinatenesses, which properly become properties only once a further determination is added, relate to themselves, stand indifferent toward one another, each by itself, free of the rest. The simple self-equal universality, however, is once more distinguished from these determinatenesses of its own, and free of them; it is the pure self-relating, the medium in which all of these determinatenesses have their place and thus interpenetrate within it as within a simple unity, yet without touching one another; for it is precisely their share in this universality that leaves them indifferent on their own account. — This abstract universal medium, which one may call thinghood at large or the pure essence, is nothing but the Here and the Now as they have turned out to be, namely a simple together of many; yet the many, in their determinateness, are simply universal themselves. This salt is a simple Here, and manifold at once; it is white, also pungent, also cubical in shape, also of a determinate heaviness, and so on. All of these many properties sit in one and the same simple Here, and there they interpenetrate; no one of them occupies a Here of its own apart from the rest, each is instead everywhere present, at the very spot where the others are; and although no distinct Heres divide them, they still leave one another unaffected in this interpenetration; the white neither affects nor alters the cubical, and neither of the two affects the pungent, and so on; rather, each being simply a relating of itself to itself, it lets the others be and reaches them only by way of the indifferent Also. This Also, then, is the pure universal in its own right, the medium, the thinghood that gathers them together in just this way.

In the relationship that has resulted, what has so far been observed and worked out is only the character of positive universality; a further side, though, offers itself, and it too has to be taken in. For if the many determinate properties were flatly indifferent and related to nothing but themselves, they would be nothing determinate; they are determinate only to the extent that they differentiate themselves and relate to others as opposites. Given this opposition, however, the simple unity of the medium they share, a unity no less essential to them than negation is, cannot hold them together; their differentiation, insofar as it is not indifferent but exclusive, negating what is other, therefore falls outside this simple medium; and the medium is on that account not an Also, an indifferent unity, alone, but equally a One, an exclusive unity. — The One is that moment of negation which relates itself to itself in a simple manner and shuts out what is other, and through which thinghood gets determined as thing. At the property, negation stands as determinateness immediately at one with the immediacy of being, and that immediacy, through being united with negation, is universality; as One, on the other hand, negation stands as it is once released from this unity with its opposite, in and for itself.

Taken together in these moments, the thing is completed as what is true in perception, to the extent that developing it here is needed. It is α) indifferent passive universality, the Also belonging to the many properties, or rather to the many matters, β) negation, likewise as something simple, or the One, which shuts out properties that stand opposed, and γ) the many properties in their own right, the relation between the first two moments: negation as it bears upon the indifferent element and spreads itself out there into a multitude of differences; the point of singularity radiating into plurality within the medium of subsistence. Regarded from the side on which these differences fall under the indifferent medium, they are universal themselves, refer to nothing but themselves, and leave one another untouched; regarded from the side on which they fall under the negative unity, they are simultaneously exclusive, and they necessarily hold this opposed relation toward properties kept out of their Also. Sensuous universality, that is, the immediate unity that being forms with the negative, becomes property only on these terms, insofar as the One and pure universality have been developed out of it and marked off from each other and it locks the two of them together; only this relation of sensuous universality to the pure essential moments brings the thing to completion.

Such, then, is how the thing of perception is constituted; and consciousness is determined as something perceiving so long as this thing counts as its object; consciousness has merely to take the object and to relate as pure apprehending; whatever results for it in that way is what is true. Were consciousness itself to do something in this taking, it would alter the truth by any such adding or omitting. Because the object is what is true and universal, self-equal, while consciousness is to itself the changeable and unessential one, consciousness may well come to apprehend the object wrongly and so deceive itself. What perceives has the consciousness of the possibility of deception; for within the universality that is the principle, otherness itself is immediately there for it, though as what is null, as something sublated. Its criterion of truth is therefore self-equality, and its relating consists in apprehending what it takes as self-equal. Since what is diverse is there for it at the same time, its relating amounts to bringing the diverse moments of its apprehending into relation with one another; should an inequality show itself in that comparison, however, what it registers is no untruth on the part of the object, which is self-equal, but an untruth on the part of perceiving.

We must now see what experience consciousness undergoes in the course of its actual perceiving. For us that experience already lies within the development just laid out of the object and of the relating of consciousness toward it, and it will amount to nothing more than an unfolding of the contradictions lodged there. — Whatever object I take in offers itself as purely one; and I likewise become aware at it of the property, which is universal and on that score reaches past singularity. So the initial being of the objective essence, its being as a One, was not the being it truly has; and because the object is what is true, it is into me that the untruth falls, and my apprehending was faulty. What the universality of the property requires is that I take the objective essence rather as a community at large. Going on, I now perceive the property as something determinate, as opposed to what is other and as shutting it out. In fact, then, my apprehending of the objective essence went wrong when I determined it to be a community shared with others, or continuity; what the determinateness of the property requires instead is that I break the continuity apart and posit the essence as an exclusive One. At the One thus broken off I come upon many such properties, which leave one another unaffected and stand indifferent toward each other; so my perceiving of the object went wrong when I apprehended it as something exclusive; the object is rather, having been mere continuity at large before, a universal shared medium now, one in which many properties each exist on their own as sensuous universalities and, being determinate, shut the others out. But with this, what is simple and true in what I perceive turns out not to be a universal medium either, but the singular property standing on its own, which, so taken, is no property at all and no determinate being either, since it now stands neither at a One nor in relation to others. Yet it is a property only at the One, and determinate only in relation to others. Being this pure self-relation and nothing else, it stays merely sensuous being at large, for the character of negativity no longer attaches to it; and consciousness, which now has a sensuous being before it, is nothing but a meaning, that is to say, it has gone right out of perceiving and back into itself. Sensuous being and meaning, however, themselves pass over into perceiving; I am hurled back to where I started and dragged once more into the very same cycle, which sublates itself at every moment and as a whole.

Consciousness therefore has to traverse the cycle once more, yet not in the same manner as on the first pass. For it has had the experience about perceiving that the result of perceiving, and what is true in it, is its own dissolution, or the reflection into itself out of what is true. With this there has become determinate, for consciousness, the essential constitution of its perceiving: not a simple pure apprehending, but rather being, in its apprehending, at the same time reflected out of the true and into itself. This going-back of consciousness into itself, which mixes into pure apprehending immediately — for it has shown itself to be essential to perceiving — alters what is true. Consciousness at the same time recognizes this side as its own and takes it upon itself, whereby it will keep the true object pure. — So now, as happened with sense-certainty, there is present in perceiving the side according to which consciousness is pushed back into itself, but at first not in the sense in which this was the case there, as though the truth of perceiving fell within consciousness; rather, consciousness recognizes that the untruth occurring in perceiving is what falls within it. Through this cognition, however, it is at the same time capable of sublating that untruth; it distinguishes its apprehending of what is true from the untruth of its perceiving, corrects the latter, and insofar as it undertakes this correction itself, truth does indeed fall, as the truth of perceiving, within perceiving. The relating of consciousness that now falls to be considered is accordingly constituted in such a way that consciousness does not perceive alone, but is aware of its own reflection into itself as well, and it detaches that reflection from simple apprehension proper.

So what I first grow aware of is the thing as a One, and this true determination is what I have to hold onto; should anything contradicting it turn up while perceiving runs its course, that is to be recognized as my own reflection. Now diverse properties turn up in perception too, properties that look as though they were the thing's; the thing, however, is One, and about this diversity, which would put an end to its being One, we are conscious that it falls within us. This thing is thus in fact only white when brought before our eye, also pungent for our tongue, also cubical for our touch, and so on. We take the complete diversity of these sides not from the thing but from ourselves; they fall apart for us in this way at our eye, which is entirely distinct from our tongue, and so on. We ourselves, then, are the universal medium in which moments of this kind get set apart and are for themselves. Since it is as our own reflection that we regard the determinateness of being a universal medium, we keep intact the thing's self-equality and truth, its being One.

These diverse sides, however, which consciousness takes upon itself, are each determinate when considered on its own as situated within the universal medium; white exists only in opposition to black, and so forth, while the thing is One precisely by setting itself in opposition to others. It does not, though, shut others out from itself by virtue of being One; for being One is the universal self-relating, and in being One it is on the contrary like all the rest; but rather by virtue of its determinateness. Things themselves, then, are in and for themselves determinate; what they possess are properties that mark them off from others. Because the property is the thing's own property, a determinateness at the thing itself, the thing has several properties. For in the first place the thing is what is true, it is at itself; and whatever is at it is at it as the thing's own essence, not on account of anything else; hence, in the second place, the determinate properties exist not merely for the sake of other things and on their behalf, but at the thing itself; they are determinate properties at it, however, only in being several that mark themselves off from one another; and in the third place, standing in thinghood in this manner, they are in and for themselves and indifferent toward each other. In truth, then, what is white and also cubical, also pungent, and so forth is the thing itself; or the thing is the Also, the universal medium within which the many properties subsist apart from one another without touching or sublating each other; and taken so, it is taken as what is true.

In the course of this perceiving, consciousness is aware simultaneously that it also performs a reflection into itself, and that within perceiving there occurs the moment standing opposed to the Also. This moment, though, is the thing's unity with itself, which shuts difference out of itself. It is this unity, accordingly, that consciousness has to shoulder, since the thing itself amounts to the subsistence belonging to the many diverse and independent properties. So it is said of the thing that it is white, also cubical, and also pungent, and so on. But it is not cubical insofar as it is white, and, insofar as it is at once cubical and white, it is not pungent, and so on. The positing into one of these properties falls to consciousness alone, which for that reason must not let them collapse into a One at the thing. To that end it brings in the Insofar, by which it keeps them apart and preserves the thing as the Also. Strictly speaking, being one is first taken upon itself by consciousness only in that what was called property is represented as free matter. In this way the thing is raised to the genuine Also, in that it turns into a collection of matters and, in place of being One, into a merely enclosing surface.

If we look back on what consciousness took upon itself earlier and takes upon itself now, on what it earlier ascribed to the thing and now ascribes to it, then it turns out that, by turns, it makes both itself and the thing into both, into the pure One without multiplicity as well as into an Also dissolved into self-subsistent matters. Through this comparison, then, consciousness finds that not only does its taking of what is true have at itself the diversity of apprehending and of going back into itself, but rather that what is true itself, the thing, shows itself in this twofold way. So the experience is now on hand that the thing presents itself in a determinate way to the apprehending consciousness, but at the same time stands reflected out of the manner in which it proffers itself and back into itself, or has at its own self a truth that runs counter to that.

Consciousness has thus stepped out of this second way of relating in perceiving as well, namely of taking the thing as what is truly self-equal while taking itself as what is unequal, as what goes back out of equality into itself, and the object is for it now this entire movement, which was formerly parcelled out between object and consciousness. One is what the thing is, reflected into itself; it has being for itself; yet it has being for an other as well; and indeed what it is for itself is other than what it is for another. On this showing the thing has being for itself and also being for another, a doubled diverse being; but it is also One; and being one contradicts this diversity of its own; consciousness would on this showing have to shoulder the positing-into-one once again and hold it off from the thing. So it would have to declare that the thing, insofar as it has being for itself, does not have being for another. Yet being one belongs to the thing itself too, as consciousness has learned by experience; the thing is reflected into itself essentially. The Also, or indifferent difference, thus falls in the thing just as much as being one does; but since the two are diverse, they fall not in the same thing but in diverse things; the contradiction that attaches to the objective essence in general distributes itself between two objects. The thing, then, is indeed self-equal in and for itself; but other things throw this unity of its with itself into disorder; and so the thing's unity is retained, while otherness at the same time lies outside it, as it lies outside consciousness.

Even though the contradiction belonging to the objective essence gets parcelled out in this way among diverse things, difference will come to the isolated singular thing itself all the same. The diverse things are thus posited for themselves; and the conflict falls into them reciprocally, so that each is diverse not from its own self but only from the other. With this, however, each is determined itself as something differentiated and carries the essential difference from the others at it; but not, at the same time, so as to make this an opposition at its own self; on its own account it is rather simple determinateness, which makes up the essential character distinguishing it from others. In fact, indeed, since diversity is at the thing, that diversity is necessarily at it as an actual difference of manifold constitution. But since it is determinateness that makes up the thing's essence, whereby the thing marks itself off from others and has being for itself, this further manifold constitution is the unessential. So the thing does carry the doubled Insofar at it within its unity, though with unequal worth; which is why this being-opposed never becomes the thing's own actual opposition; rather, so far as the thing does enter into opposition by way of its absolute difference, the opposition it has is against another thing outside it. The remaining manifoldness, though, is also necessarily at the thing, so that it cannot be absent from it, but it is unessential to it.

The determinateness that makes up the thing's essential character and sets it apart from all others is now determined thus: through it the thing stands in opposition to others, yet is supposed to maintain itself for itself therein. But a thing, or a One having being for itself, is what it is only so long as it does not stand within this relation to others; for within that relation what gets posited is rather connection with another, and connection with another spells the end of being-for-itself. It is precisely by its absolute character and the opposition this brings that it relates to others, and essentially it is nothing but this relating; the relationship, though, negates its self-subsistence, and so the thing perishes by way of its essential property.

The necessity of the experience for consciousness that the thing perishes precisely through the determinateness which constitutes its essence and its being-for-itself can be considered briefly, according to the simple concept, as follows. What the thing is posited as is being for itself, that is, negation that is absolute over against all otherness, and hence absolute negation relating to nothing but itself; but negation that relates to itself is the sublating of itself, or having its essence in another.

In fact the determination of the object as it has come about contains nothing else; it is supposed to have an essential property that constitutes its simple being-for-itself, yet alongside this simplicity to have diversity at itself as well, a diversity that is supposed to be necessary but not to constitute the essential determinateness. But this is a distinction that lies only in the words; the unessential, which is nevertheless supposed to be necessary at the same time, sublates itself, or is what was just now called the negation of itself.

With this the last Insofar falls away, the one that kept being-for-itself apart from being for another; the object is rather, in one and the same respect, its own opposite: for itself insofar as it is for an other, and for another insofar as it is for itself. The object has being for itself, is reflected into itself, is One; but this being for itself, reflected into itself, One, stands in a single unity with its opposite, being for an other, and is therefore posited only as sublated; or being-for-itself in this sense is every bit as unessential as what was meant to be the unessential all on its own, namely the relationship to another.

With this the object is sublated in its pure determinatenesses, the determinatenesses that were meant to make up its essentiality, just as it became something sublated in its sensuous being. Out of sensuous being the object turns into something universal; but this universal, stemming as it does from the sensuous, is essentially conditioned by the sensuous, and so is not genuinely self-equal universality at all but universality affected by an opposition, and it therefore splits apart, into singularity and universality as its extremes, the properties' One and the free matters' Also. What these pure determinatenesses look like they express is essentiality itself, but they amount only to a being-for-itself saddled with being for an other; since the two of them are essentially in one unity, however, unconditioned absolute universality is now on hand, and it is here that consciousness genuinely steps into the realm of the understanding for the first time.

Sensuous singularity, then, vanishes, to be sure, in immediate certainty's dialectical movement, and turns into universality, but only sensuous universality. Meaning has disappeared, and perceiving takes the object the way it is in itself, that is, as universal at large; singularity accordingly comes forward at the object as true singularity, namely as the being-in-itself belonging to the One, in other words as being reflected into itself. It remains, though, a conditioned being-for-itself, beside which another being-for-itself turns up, the universality opposed to singularity and conditioned by it; but these two extremes, contradicting each other, are not merely side by side, but in one unity, or, what comes to the same, what the two have in common, being-for-itself, is saddled with opposition at large, which is to say that it is at once not a being-for-itself. These moments the sophistry of perceiving tries to rescue from their contradiction, holding them fast through a distinction of respects, through the Also and the Insofar, and finally trying to seize what is true through a distinction between the unessential and an essence set against it. But these makeshifts, far from keeping deception out of apprehending, prove null themselves, and what is true, the truth that this logic of perceiving is meant to win, proves in one and the same respect to be its opposite, and thus to have for its essence a universality without distinction and without determination.

These empty abstractions, of singularity, of the universality set against it, of the essence that is tied to something unessential, of an unessential that is nevertheless necessary at the same time, are the powers whose play the perceiving understanding, often called sound common sense, amounts to; taking itself for solid, real consciousness, in perceiving it is nothing but the play of these abstractions; generally speaking, it is always at its poorest just where it fancies itself richest. Driven about by these null essences, thrown by the one into the arms of the other, and struggling through its sophistry to hold fast and assert now the one and then its very opposite by turns, thereby setting itself against truth, it imagines that philosophy has to do only with things of thought. Philosophy does have to do with them as well, in fact, and cognizes them as the pure essences, as the absolute elements and powers; yet in cognizing them it cognizes them at the same time in their determinateness, and is master over them on that account, whereas that perceiving understanding takes them for what is true and gets sent by them out of one error into another. It never comes to the consciousness that what holds sway within it are simple essentialities of this sort; it takes itself, rather, to be occupied throughout with thoroughly solid stuff and content, much as sense-certainty is unaware that pure being's empty abstraction is its essence; but in fact these essentialities are what it runs along, back and forth, through every bit of stuff and content; they are what holds that stuff together and rules it, and they alone constitute what the sensuous as essence is for consciousness, what determines consciousness's relationships to it, and along which the movement of perceiving and of its truth plays out. This course, a constantly alternating determining of what is true and sublating of that determining, is what actually makes up the daily and constant life and activity of the consciousness that perceives and supposes itself to be moving within truth. In this it presses on unstoppably toward the result, the like sublation of all these essential essentialities or determinations, yet at each individual moment what it is conscious of is only this one determinateness as what is true, and then again the opposite one. It does catch a scent of their unessentiality; to save them from the threatening danger it resorts to sophistry, now asserting to be true what it had itself just been asserting to be not true. This understanding is really being driven by the nature of these untrue essences toward the thoughts of that universality and of singularity, of the Also along with the One, of that essentiality which is necessarily bound up with an unessentiality, and of an unessential that is nevertheless necessary — driven to bring together the thoughts of these unessences and so sublate them; and against just that it braces itself with the props of the Insofar and the various respects, or by taking the one thought upon itself in order to keep the other separate and preserve it as the true one. But the nature of these abstractions brings them together in and for itself; sound common sense is their prey, driven about by them in their whirling circle. In wanting to give them truth by now taking their untruth upon itself, now calling the deception a semblance belonging to unreliable things, and by separating the essential from something that is necessary to them and yet is supposed to be unessential, holding fast to the former as their truth against the latter, it does not preserve their truth for them but rather gives untruth to itself.

III. Force and the Understanding, Appearance and Supersensible World

Sense-certainty's dialectic robbed consciousness of hearing, of sight, and of the rest, and in perceiving it arrived at thoughts, though only in the unconditioned universal does it first gather these thoughts into one. Taken as a quiescent simple essence, this unconditioned would once again amount to nothing but the extreme of being-for-itself that steps off to one side, since the unessential would then confront it; and standing in that relation it would rank as unessential itself, leaving consciousness inside perceiving's deception after all; what has emerged, however, is something that has withdrawn into itself out of precisely such a conditioned being-for-itself. — True object of consciousness though it now is, this unconditioned universal still stands there merely as consciousness's object; of its concept as concept consciousness has as yet taken no hold. The two call for an essential distinction; out of the relation to another the object has, for consciousness, withdrawn into itself, and become thereby concept in itself; yet consciousness is not the concept for its own self, which is why what it fails to find in that reflected object is itself. For us, the coming-to-be of this object out of consciousness's movement took a form in which consciousness is woven into that coming-to-be, so that one and the same reflection, a single reflection, occurs on either side. Since, though, what filled this movement as consciousness's content was the objective essence alone and never consciousness as such, the result has to be posited for consciousness with an objective significance, consciousness meanwhile still drawing back from what has arisen, so that this, in its objectivity, counts for it as the essence.

With this the understanding has of course sublated both untruths, the object's and its own; and what has arisen for it in consequence is the concept of the true; a true that is in itself, one that is not yet concept, or that goes without the being-for-itself belonging to consciousness, and that the understanding, not knowing itself within it, simply allows to proceed. On its own account this true drives its essence forward, so that consciousness plays no part in the free realization of it but watches from outside and apprehends it purely. We therefore have for the time being to step into consciousness's place and to be the concept that develops what is contained in the result; only on this developed object, which offers itself to consciousness as something that is, does consciousness become for itself a comprehending consciousness.

What resulted was the unconditioned universal, to begin with in a negative, abstract sense, inasmuch as consciousness denied its own one-sided concepts and drew away from them, that is, surrendered them. In itself, though, the result carries a positive significance: within it the unity of being-for-itself and of being-for-an-other, the absolute opposition, stands posited straightaway as one and the same essence. To begin with, the point looks as if it bore merely on how the moments stand to one another in respect of form; yet being-for-itself and being-for-another equally make up the content itself, seeing that the opposition, truly taken, admits of no nature besides the one the result brought out, namely that whatever perceiving held to be true as content belongs in fact to form alone and dissolves into the unity of form. At the same time this content is universal; no content whatever could, by virtue of its particular constitution, exempt itself from returning into this unconditioned universality. Such a content would be some determinate way of being for itself and of relating to another. But being for itself and relating to another as such make up its nature and essence, whose truth is to be an unconditioned universal; and the result is universal without qualification.

Since, though, consciousness has this unconditioned universal before it as an object, form and content come apart within it, and under the guise of content the moments wear the very aspect in which they presented themselves at the start: on one side a universal medium of many subsisting matters, on the other a One reflected into itself, where the self-subsistence of those matters is wiped out. The former is the dissolution of the thing's self-subsistence, or the passivity that is a being for another, whereas the latter is being-for-itself. We have to see how these moments present themselves within the unconditioned universality that is their essence. It is clear at once that, precisely because they are only within this universality, they no longer lie apart from one another at all, but are essentially sides that sublate themselves in their own right, so that only their passing over into each other is posited.

One moment, then, makes its appearance as the essence that has stepped aside, as a universal medium, or as that wherein self-subsistent matters subsist. But the self-subsistence of these matters is nothing other than this medium; that is, this universal is through and through the multiplicity of such diverse universals. To say that in its own self the universal stands in undivided unity with this multiplicity means that each of these matters is where the other is, that they run through one another — yet never touch, since conversely the many differentiated items are equally self-subsistent. With this their pure porosity or their being sublated is posited at the same time. This being sublated once more, or the drawing back of such diversity into pure being-for-itself, comes to nothing but the medium, and the medium is what the self-subsistence of the differences amounts to. Or: what is posited as self-subsistent passes over immediately into its unity, and its unity immediately into the unfolding, and this back again into the reduction. This movement, however, is what is called force; the one moment of it, namely force as the spreading out of the self-subsistent matters in their being, is force's expression; force as the having-vanished of those matters is force pressed back into itself out of its expression, or force proper. But, in the first place, force pressed back into itself must come to expression; and in the second, within that expression it is no less force existing within itself than, in this being-within-itself, it is expression. — Since we thus hold both moments in their immediate unity, it is really the understanding, to which the concept of force belongs, that is the concept carrying the differentiated moments as differentiated; for in force itself they are not supposed to be differentiated; the difference is thus only in thought. — Or: in what precedes only the concept of force has so far been posited, not its reality. Force, in truth, is the unconditioned universal, being in its own self exactly what it is for an other; or, put differently, it carries the difference — difference being nothing else than the being for an other — within its own self. If force is to be in its truth, thought must let it go entirely and posit it as the substance of these differences, meaning at the one point, force, as this whole force, abiding essentially in and for itself, and then its differences as substantial, as moments that subsist for themselves. Force as such, or force pressed back into itself, is thus for itself an excluding One, and to it the unfolding of the matters counts as another subsisting essence; so two differentiated self-subsistent sides stand posited. But force is the whole as well, or it abides as what its concept makes it, namely: these differences persist as pure forms, superficial vanishing moments. The differences separating force proper, pressed back into itself, from the unfolding of the self-subsistent matters would at the same time be nothing at all had they no subsistence, just as force would fail to be unless it existed in this opposed manner; but that it exists in this opposed manner says nothing beyond this, that both moments are themselves at once self-subsistent. — This movement, then, in which the two moments continually make themselves self-subsistent and again sublate themselves, is what has to be considered. — Broadly it is evident that this movement is none other than perceiving's own movement, where both sides, the perceiving one and the perceived, are at once one and undifferentiated in the apprehending of the true, while each side is nonetheless reflected into itself, existing for itself. In the present case these two sides are moments of force; they stand within a unity no less than that unity, which shows up as the middle set against the extremes that are for themselves, keeps decomposing into precisely those extremes, which owe their being to nothing else. — The movement that earlier showed itself as the self-annihilation of contradictory concepts accordingly wears the objective form here, being force's movement, and its result is the emergence of the unconditioned universal as something non-objective, or as the inner of things.

Force, as it has been determined, is, insofar as it is represented as force as such or as reflected into itself, the one side of its concept; but it is so as a substantiated extreme, and indeed as the one posited under the determinateness of the One. The subsistence of the unfolded matters is thereby shut out of force, and is other than force. Given the necessity that force itself should be this subsistence, that is, that it should express itself, the way its expression represents itself is that the other in question comes up to it and solicits it. But in fact, since it necessarily expresses itself, it has within its own self what was posited as another essence. What has to be withdrawn is the positing of force as a One and of its essence, expressing itself, as something else that approaches it from outside; force is instead itself the universal medium wherein the moments have their subsistence as matters; or it has expressed itself, and the supposed other, the soliciting one, is rather force itself. So force exists at present as the medium of matters unfolded. But equally essentially it wears the form of the subsisting matters' sublatedness, or it is essentially One; this being-One is thus now, given that force has been posited as the matters' medium, other than force, and force keeps this essence of its own outside itself. But since necessity requires it to be what it has not yet been posited as, this other comes up and solicits it toward reflection into itself, or sublates its expression. In truth, however, force itself is this being-reflected-into-itself, this sublatedness of the expression; being-One disappears just as it showed up, that is, as another; force is that itself, force is force pressed back into itself.

Whatever steps forward as other, soliciting force toward expression as well as toward its return into itself, proves immediately to be force itself; for that other exhibits itself no less as universal medium than as One, each of these shapes stepping forward only ever as a moment that vanishes. So force, in having another for itself and in being for another, has by no means yet stepped outside its concept. But at the same time two forces are present; the concept of both is indeed the same, but it has gone out of its unity into duality. Instead of the opposition remaining throughout essentially only a moment, it seems, through this splitting in two, to have withdrawn into wholly self-subsistent forces beyond the dominion of unity. What this self-subsistence amounts to is to be looked at more closely. To begin with, the second force steps forward as the soliciting one, and, as regards its content, as universal medium, set against the force determined as solicited; but the former, being essentially the alternation of these two moments and being force in its own right, is in fact universal medium only first through being solicited to it, and equally is negative unity, that which solicits force to go back into itself, only in that it is solicited. So this difference too, which obtained between the pair, that one of them should be the soliciting one and the other the solicited, converts into that same mutual exchange of determinatenesses.

So the play of the two forces consists in their being determined in this opposed way, in their being for one another under that determination, and in the absolutely immediate interchange of the determinations — a transition, and only by it do there exist those determinations under which the forces look as though they came forward as self-subsistent. The soliciting one, for example, is posited as universal medium, and against it the solicited one as force pressed back into itself; but the former is universal medium only because the other is force pressed back into itself; or rather the latter is what solicits the former, and only thereby makes it the medium. The former owes its determinateness wholly to the other, and it solicits only to the extent that the other solicits it into soliciting; and just as immediately it loses the determinateness thus conferred on it, since that determinateness crosses over to the other, or rather has crossed over to it already; the alien thing soliciting force steps forward as universal medium, yet only because force has solicited it into this; which means, however, that force posits it so, and is rather itself essentially universal medium; force posits the soliciting one so for the reason that this second determination belongs essentially to it, that is, because it is rather itself this other.

For the sake of rounding out our grasp of this movement's concept, one may point out in addition that the differences themselves turn up within a doubled difference: first as differences of content, the one extreme being force reflected into itself and the other the medium of the matters; second as differences of form, the one soliciting, the other solicited, that one active and this one passive. By the content-difference they are differentiated at all, that is, for us; by the form-difference, though, they are self-subsistent, cutting themselves off from one another in their relation and set in opposition. That in respect of both these sides the extremes are thus nothing in themselves, but that these sides, in which their differentiated essence was supposed to consist, are only vanishing moments, an immediate passing over of each into its opposite, all this comes about for consciousness in the perception of the movement of force. For us, though, as was recalled above, there was this further point: that in themselves the differences, taken as differences of content and of form, vanished, and that where form is concerned the active, soliciting, or being-for-itself coincided in essence with what, where content is concerned, was force pressed back into itself; while the passive, solicited, or being-for-an-other belonging to form coincided with what, on content's side, showed up as the universal medium of the many matters.

What follows from this is that, by doubling into two forces, the concept of force turns actual, and it follows how this comes about. These two forces exist as essences that are for themselves; but their existence is a movement against each other of such a kind that their being is rather a pure being posited through an other, that is, that their being has rather the pure significance of vanishing. They do not stand as extremes that would hold on to something firm on their own account and dispatch merely an external property into the middle and into their mutual contact; on the contrary, whatever they are, they are so exclusively within that middle and that contact. In it there is immediately just as much force's being pressed back into itself, or being-for-itself, as the expression, the soliciting as much as the being solicited; these moments are thus not distributed between two self-subsistent extremes that would offer each other only an opposed tip; rather, their essence is simply this, that each is only through the other and immediately ceases to be what it thus is through the other, in the very act of being it. They therefore in fact have no substances of their own that would bear and sustain them. Rather it is the concept of force that keeps itself intact as the essence within force's own actuality; force as actual lies wholly in the expression alone, which is at once nothing but a self-sublating. Represented as free of its expression and as being for itself, this actual force is force pressed back into itself; but this determinateness is in fact, as has emerged, itself only a moment of the expression. So the truth of force stays nothing more than the thought of force; and with no support to sustain them, its actuality's moments, its substances along with its movement, come crashing together into an undifferentiated unity, a unity that is not force pressed back into itself, that being itself only such a moment, but rather its concept, as concept. Force's realization accordingly amounts at once to a forfeiting of reality; therein force has turned into something wholly other, namely this universality, which the understanding cognizes at the outset, immediately, as force's essence, and which likewise establishes itself as force's essence in the reality force was supposed to have, in the actual substances.

So long as we take the first universal to be the understanding's concept, wherein force has not yet come to be for itself, the second now counts as force's essence in the way that essence displays itself in and for itself. Or, turning it around: should the first universal be taken as the immediate, which was to serve consciousness as an actual object, then this second stands determined as the negative of sensuously objective force; it is force as force, in its genuine essence, exists solely as object of the understanding; the former would be force pressed back into itself, force as substance; whereas this second is the inner of things, taken as inner, and that coincides with the concept as concept.

The true essence of things has by now determined itself so as not to be there immediately for consciousness; consciousness instead relates to the inner by way of mediation and, being understanding, peers through this middle formed by the play of forces into the genuine background of things. That middle which locks together understanding and inner, the two extremes, is force's developed being, and for the understanding this being has by now become a vanishing. It is therefore called appearance; for we call shine that being which immediately in its own self is a non-being. But it is not merely a shine; it is appearance, a whole of shine. It is this whole, taken as whole or as universal, that makes up the inner, the play of forces in its reflection into itself. Within it the essences of perception stand posited for consciousness objectively just as they are in themselves, that is, as moments changing straightaway into their opposite, restless and without being: the One straightaway into the universal, the essential straightaway into the unessential, and the other way round. This play of forces is thus the developed negative, whereas the truth of it lies on the positive side, in the universal, in the object having being in itself. — That this object has being for consciousness comes about by mediation, through the movement of appearance, where the being of perception and whatever is sensuously objective carries a merely negative significance, so that out of it consciousness reflects into itself as into the true, yet, as consciousness, turns this true once more into an objective inner, holding apart the reflection of things from the reflection into its own self; just as the mediating movement remains for it an objective one too. To consciousness, then, this inner is an extreme standing over against it; and it counts as the true for consciousness just because within it, as within the in-itself, consciousness possesses at the same time its own certainty, the moment of its being-for-itself; of this ground, however, consciousness is as yet unaware, since the being-for-itself the inner was to have in its own self could only be the negative movement, and that movement is for consciousness still the objective appearance that vanishes, not yet a being-for-itself of its own; so the inner is indeed concept for consciousness, only the nature of the concept is something consciousness does not yet know.

Within the inner true, that absolutely universal which has been cleansed of the opposition between universal and singular and has come about for the understanding, a supersensible world as the true world first discloses itself over the sensuous world as the world of appearance, the enduring beyond over the vanishing here below; an in-itself that constitutes reason's initial and hence still imperfect appearance, or merely the pure element wherein truth holds its essence.

Our object from here on is accordingly the syllogism whose extremes are the inner of things and the understanding, with appearance serving as its middle; the movement of that syllogism, though, delivers a closer determination both of what the understanding catches sight of within the inner across the middle, and of the experience it undergoes regarding this relation of being joined together.

For consciousness the inner remains a pure beyond, since consciousness has not yet found itself within it; the inner is empty, being nothing but appearance's nothing and, on the positive side, the simple universal. That the inner should be in this way concedes the point at once to whoever claims that things' inner admits of no cognition; the ground for saying so, however, would have to be conceived otherwise. Of this inner, in its immediate state here, we do indeed have no acquaintance, though not because reason sees too little a way, or is confined, or bears whatever other name one likes to give it; of which nothing is known at this stage, our penetration not having gone so deep; but rather on account of the plain nature of the matter itself, namely that in the empty nothing gets cognized, or, put from the opposite side, that the inner has been determined precisely as consciousness's beyond. — Naturally it comes to the same thing whether a blind man is set down amid the riches of the supersensible world, — assuming it has any, whether their content belongs to that world itself or consciousness is that content, — or a sighted man is set down in pure darkness, or, if one prefers, in pure light, assuming the world is only that; in his pure light the sighted man sees as little as in his pure darkness, and precisely as much as the blind man sees amid the profusion of riches that might lie spread before him. If there were nothing more to the inner and to being joined with it through appearance, nothing would be left but to keep to appearance, that is, to take as true something we know is not true; or else, so that there may after all be something in the empty, which has indeed first arisen as an emptiness of objective things, but which, as emptiness in itself, must also be taken for the emptiness of all spiritual relations and of the differences of consciousness as consciousness, — so that there may after all be something in this wholly empty, which is also called the holy, to fill it with reveries, with appearances that consciousness generates for itself; consciousness would have to accept such shabby handling, deserving nothing finer, given that reveries at least outrank its emptiness.

The inner, though, the supersensible beyond, has arisen; it comes out of appearance, which is its mediation; or its essence is appearance, which in fact fills it out. What the supersensible amounts to is the sensuous and perceived posited according to its truth; and the truth of what is sensuous and perceived consists in being appearance. So the supersensible amounts to appearance taken as appearance. — Should one suppose at this point that the supersensible is thus the sensuous world, the world such as it stands for immediate sense-certainty and perception, the understanding of it is inverted; for appearance is rather not the world of sensuous knowledge and perceiving as a world that is, but that same world posited as sublated, that is, in truth as inner. People are in the habit of saying that the supersensible is not appearance; yet what they understand by appearance is not appearance at all, but instead the sensuous world regarded as real actuality in its own right.

Our object, the understanding, stands at precisely this point: the inner has become for it no more than the universal, the as yet unfilled in-itself; the play of forces bears just this negative significance of not being in itself, and only the positive one of being what mediates, though outside the understanding. Its relation to the inner through the mediation, however, is its movement, through which the inner will become filled for it. — The play of forces is what is immediate for it; the true, however, is for it the simple inner; the movement of force is therefore likewise the true only as something simple in general. Regarding this play of forces, however, we have seen it to be so constituted that whichever force gets solicited by another is equally the one soliciting that other, which for its part turns into a soliciting force only in that way. Present here, likewise, is nothing but the immediate switching, the absolute exchange, of that determinateness which constitutes the whole content of whatever steps forward: to be either universal medium or negative unity. In its determinate coming forward it immediately ceases of itself to be what it comes forward as; by its determinate coming forward it solicits the other side, which thereby expresses itself; that is, this other side is immediately now what the first was supposed to be. Both of these sides, the relation of soliciting and the relation of determinate opposed content, are, each on its own, the absolute inversion and exchange. But those two relations are in turn one and the same, and the form-difference, between being solicited and being soliciting, coincides with the content-difference: the solicited as such being the passive medium, while the soliciting one is the active, the negative unity, or the One. With this, any difference at all between the particular forces said to be at work in this movement drops away; for such differences rested on nothing but the ones just named; and the difference between the forces sinks, along with those two, into a single one. Thus force, along with soliciting and being solicited, along with the determinateness of being a subsisting medium and a unity reflected into itself, amounts to nothing when taken singly, nor do these make up a variety of oppositions; what is at hand in this absolute alternation is solely the difference as universal, difference as that into which the many oppositions have reduced themselves. This difference as universal is accordingly what is simple within the play of force itself, and that play's true; it is the law of force.

By relating to what is simple in the inner, that is, in the understanding, appearance in its absolute alternation turns into the simple difference. To begin with, the inner is nothing but the universal in itself; yet this universal, simple in itself, is no less essentially and absolutely the universal difference; for alternation itself is what yields it, or alternation is its essence; and alternation, once posited within the inner in the way it truly is, gets taken up into the inner as a difference no less absolutely universal, tranquil, and self-consistent. Put otherwise: the universal has negation as an essential moment of it, so that negation, or mediation, within the universal counts as universal difference. It is expressed in the law, as the constant image of unsteady appearance. The supersensible world is thus a tranquil realm of laws, beyond the perceived world, to be sure, since the latter exhibits the law only through constant change, yet just as much present in that world and its immediate still likeness.

Granted, this realm of laws constitutes the understanding's truth, a truth whose content lies in the difference the law contains; but the realm is also no more than the understanding's first truth, and it leaves appearance unfilled. The law is present in appearance, but it is not appearance's entire presence; under ever different circumstances it has an ever different actuality. So a side remains over to appearance, for itself, one that does not lie within the inner; in other words, appearance has not truly been posited yet as appearance, as a being-for-itself that is sublated. This defect of the law is bound to come out on the law's own face as well. The lack apparent in it seems to be this: difference itself is present in it, but only as universal, indeterminate difference. But insofar as it is not the law in general but a law, it has determinateness in it; and thus there are indeterminately many laws. Yet such multiplicity is rather a defect in its own right; it runs counter to the understanding's principle, since for the understanding, as consciousness of the simple inner, the true lies in the unity that is universal in itself. So the understanding is obliged rather to make the many laws coincide in one law. Just as, for example, the falling of a stone and the motion of the celestial spheres have had their laws comprehended as one law. With this coinciding, however, determinateness slips away from the laws; law grows steadily shallower, and what gets found is in fact no unity of these determinate laws but a law that drops their determinateness; much as the one law uniting in itself the laws of terrestrial falling bodies and of celestial motion in fact fails to express the two of them. Gathering all laws into universal attraction gives voice to no content beyond the bare concept of law itself, posited therein as something that is. Universal attraction says only this, that everything has a constant difference from something else. The understanding imagines it has hit on a universal law here, one voicing universal actuality as such; what it has hit on, in fact, is merely the concept of law itself, albeit in a manner that also states this much, that all actuality is law-governed in its own self. The expression universal attraction carries great weight, then, insofar as it takes aim at thoughtless representation, to which everything presents itself in contingency's shape and for which determinateness wears the form of sensuous self-subsistence.

Set against the determinate laws, then, stands universal attraction, the pure concept of law. So far as one takes this pure concept for the essence, for the true inner, the determinateness of a determinate law still counts as belonging to appearance, or rather to sensuous being. Yet the pure concept of law reaches past not only that law which is itself a determinate one over against other determinate laws; it reaches beyond law as such. The determinateness in question is really nothing more than a moment that vanishes, one that can no longer figure here as an essentiality; for the law alone is at hand as the true; and yet the concept of law turns against law itself. For within the law difference itself is apprehended immediately and received into the universal, and along with that comes a subsistence belonging to the moments whose relation the law voices, taken as essentialities that are indifferent and in themselves. But those portions of the difference within the law are at once determinate sides themselves; the pure concept of law, as universal attraction, has to be apprehended in its true meaning thus: within it, as within something absolutely simple, the differences that belong to law as such in their turn go back into the inner as into a simple unity; that unity is law's inner necessity.

Law is on hand, then, in two ways at once: once as law whose differences find expression as self-subsistent moments; once in the form of a simple having-gone-back-into-itself, which may once more be named force, though not as force pressed back into itself; force in general instead, force as the concept of force, an abstraction drawing into itself even those differences of attracting and being attracted. Thus simple electricity, for instance, is the force; expressing the difference, however, falls to the law; and the difference in question is electricity positive and negative. With falling motion the force is the simple, namely gravity, whose law runs that the magnitudes of the motion's differentiated moments, the time that has passed and the space covered, relate as root to square. Electricity as such is not difference in itself, nor in its essence the doubled essence made of positive and negative electricity; which is why people habitually say it has the law of being so, indeed that it has the property of so expressing itself. Admittedly that property is the sole and essential one this force has, or is necessary for it. But necessity is here an empty word; force simply must double itself in this way because it must. Certainly, once positive electricity is posited, negative electricity is necessary in itself as well; for the positive exists only by relating to a negative, or the positive constitutes in its own self its difference from itself, and so does the negative. But that electricity as such should divide so is not what is necessary in itself; electricity as simple force stands indifferent to its law, the law of being positive and negative; and naming the one its concept and the other its being, we get a concept indifferent to that being; electricity merely has this property, and this says just that the property is not necessary to it in itself. — The indifference assumes a different shape when one says that being positive and negative goes into the definition of electricity, or that this is quite simply its concept and essence. Its being would then signify its existence at large; yet what such a definition does not contain is the necessity of its existence; either electricity is because one comes across it, in which case it is in no way necessary, or its existence stems from other forces, in which case the necessity attaching to it is external. But in placing necessity in the determinateness of being through another, we fall back into the multiplicity of determinate laws that we have just left in order to consider law as law; only with law as law is its concept as concept, or its necessity, to be compared, a necessity which, however, has so far shown itself in all these forms to be no more than an empty word.

Beyond the way just pointed out, there is still another in which law and force, or concept and being, stand indifferent to one another. In the law of motion, for example, motion must of necessity divide itself into time and space, or again into distance and velocity. Since motion is only the relationship of those moments, motion, the universal, is here indeed divided in its very self; but nothing in these parts, in time and space, or in distance and velocity, expresses this derivation from a One; each stands indifferent to the other, for space gets represented as capable of being without time, time as capable of being without space, and distance at least as capable of being without velocity, — much as their magnitudes too are indifferent toward one another; since they do not relate to one another as positive and negative, they are for that reason not connected by their essence. So the necessity of the division is indeed at hand here, though not a necessity of the parts for one another as such. But just for that reason the first necessity too is itself merely a false necessity held up before us; motion, namely, is not itself represented as something simple or as pure essence, but already as divided; time and space count as its self-subsistent parts, as essences in their very selves, and distance and velocity as ways of being or of being represented, of which the one may well be without the other, so that motion amounts merely to their superficial relation and not to their essence. Taken as simple essence, that is, represented as force, motion is of course gravity, which for its part harbors none of these differences within it at all.

In both cases, then, the difference is not a difference in its very self; either the universal, force, is indifferent toward the division that the law contains, or else it is the parts of the law, the differences, that are indifferent toward one another. Yet the understanding does have the concept of this difference in itself, and has it precisely in this: that the law, for one part of it, is the inner as what has being in itself, while within it the law is at the same time differentiated; and that the difference in question is thereby inner shows itself in the law's being simple force, or being as the concept of that force, hence a difference of the concept. But this inner difference still falls, as yet, only within the understanding; it is not yet posited on the matter itself. What the understanding utters, then, is only its own necessity: a difference it makes only by declaring, in the same breath, that the difference is no difference of the matter itself. Such a necessity, residing as it does merely in the word, thus amounts to a recital of the moments that make up the circle of that necessity; the moments do get distinguished, but their difference is at the same time declared to be no difference of the matter itself, and hence is at once sublated again; this movement goes by the name of explaining. A law is uttered, and from it there is distinguished what is universal in it in itself, its ground, as force; but of this difference it is then said that it is no difference at all, and that the ground has exactly the constitution the law has. The singular event of lightning, for example, is apprehended as something universal, and this universal is uttered as the law of electricity; whereupon the explanation gathers the law together into force, taken as the essence of the law. Force is then given such a constitution that in expressing itself it brings out opposed electricities, which vanish back into one another, that is, force has precisely the constitution that the law has; the two, it is said, are not distinguished in the least. The differences here are the pure universal expression, that is, the law, and pure force; yet the content of both is the same, their constitution the same; difference taken as a difference of content, that is, of the matter, is thus withdrawn once more.

In this tautological movement the understanding, as it turns out, keeps to the tranquil unity that its object has, and the movement belongs only to the understanding, not to the object; it is an explaining that not merely explains nothing, but is so transparent that, in making as if to say something distinct from what has already been stated, it says nothing at all and merely repeats the same thing. On the matter itself this movement brings nothing new into being; it comes into view instead as the understanding's own movement. Within it, however, we now cognize just what the law was found to lack, namely absolute alternation itself; for this movement, considered up close, is immediately its own opposite. For it posits a difference which is not only no difference for us, but which the movement itself sublates as difference. This is the very alternation that exhibited itself as the play of forces; in it lay the difference between soliciting force and solicited, between force expressing itself and force driven back into itself; but these were differences that in truth were none, and for just that reason sublated themselves again immediately. What lies before us is not mere unity, in which case no difference would be posited, but rather this movement, in which a difference is indeed made but, being none, is sublated again. — With explaining, then, the changing and alternating that formerly stood outside the inner and attached only to appearance has forced its way into the supersensible itself; our consciousness, however, has passed over from the inner as its object to the opposite side, into the understanding, and possesses the alternation there.

So understood, this alternation is not yet an alternation of the matter itself; it exhibits itself as pure alternation precisely because the content of the alternation's moments stays the same. But since the concept, being the understanding's own concept, coincides with what the inner of things is, there arises for the understanding this alternation as the law of the inner. The understanding therefore experiences this: that differences come to be which are no differences is a law of appearance itself; or that the like-named repels itself from itself; and likewise that the differences are only such as are in truth none and sublate themselves; or that the unlike-named attracts itself. — A second law, then, whose content stands opposed to what was earlier called law, namely to difference that abides constantly the same; for what this new law expresses is rather the becoming-unequal of what is equal and the becoming-equal of what is unequal. The concept expects of thoughtlessness that it hold the two laws together and become conscious of the opposition between them. — The second is admittedly a law as well, an inner self-equal being, though a self-equality rather of inequality, a constancy of what is inconstant. — In the play of forces it was precisely this law that emerged as just this absolute transition, as pure alternation; the like-named, force, breaks up into an opposition that at first looks like a self-subsistent difference, though it turns out in fact to be none; for what repels itself from itself is the like-named, so that what has been repelled essentially attracts itself, being the same; the difference that was made, since it is no difference, thereby sublates itself once more. With this it exhibits itself as a difference of the matter itself, that is, as absolute difference; and that difference of the matter is accordingly nothing but the like-named which has repelled itself away from itself and so posits an opposition that is none.

By this principle the first supersensible, that tranquil realm of laws, the immediate replica of the world we perceive, gets turned around into its opposite; law as such was what stays equal to itself, and so were its differences; now, however, it is posited that both are rather the opposite of themselves; what is equal to itself repels itself away from itself, while what is unequal to itself is what posits itself as equal to itself. Only with this determination, in fact, is the difference the inner one, difference in its very self, since the equal is unequal to itself and the unequal equal to itself. — This second supersensible world is in this way the inverted world, and since one of its sides is already there in the first supersensible world, it is the inverted counterpart of that first one. With this the inner stands completed as appearance. For that first supersensible world amounted to nothing more than the immediate raising of the world we perceive into the universal element; its necessary counter-image lay in that perceived world, which as yet kept for itself the principle of alternation and of change; the first realm of laws went without this, but receives it as the inverted world.

By the law of this inverted world, then, the like-named of the first world is what is unequal to itself, and the unlike of that world is just as much unequal to itself, or comes to be equal to itself. At determinate moments this turns out as follows: whatever is sweet under the law of the first is sour in this inverted in-itself, and whatever is black in the one is white in the other. Whatever counts as the north pole of a magnet by the law of the former is, within its other supersensible in-itself (in the earth, that is), the south pole; and whatever is the south pole there is the north pole here. So too whatever counts as the oxygen pole in the first law of electricity turns into the hydrogen pole within its other supersensible essence; and conversely, whatever is the hydrogen pole there turns here into the oxygen pole. Within another sphere, revenge upon one's enemy counts, by the immediate law, as the supreme satisfaction of an individuality that has been injured. But this law, the law that toward anyone who does not treat me as a self-essence I show myself as essence and rather sublate him as essence, is inverted by the other world's principle into its opposite: the restoring of myself as the essence by sublating the alien essence becomes self-destruction. Now once this inversion, the one exhibited in the punishment of crime, has been turned into a law, it too is again merely the law of the one world, which has an inverted supersensible world standing over against it, one where whatever is held in contempt in the former comes to honor, and whatever stands in honor there falls into contempt. The punishment that by the law of the first world disgraces and destroys a human being changes, within its inverted world, into a pardon that preserves his essence and brings him into honor.

Seen superficially, this inverted world is opposed to the first in such a way that it has the first outside of itself and thrusts it away as an actuality that is inverted, with the one being appearance and the other the in-itself, the one being what it is for an other, and the other, by contrast, what it is for itself; so that, taking up the earlier examples again, what tastes sweet would properly, or inwardly in the thing, be sour, and what on the actual magnet of appearance is the north pole would, in the inner or essential being, be the south pole, while what presents itself as the oxygen pole on electricity as it appears would be the hydrogen pole on electricity as it does not appear. Or an action that is a crime in appearance ought to be able to be really good in the inner (a bad action could have a good intention), while punishment would be punishment only in appearance and would, in itself, or in some other world, be a boon to the criminal. But oppositions of this kind, between inner and outer, between appearance and the supersensible, as between two sorts of actuality, are no longer to be found here. The repelled differences do not distribute themselves afresh over two such substances as would carry them and grant them a subsistence apart, whereby the understanding would drop back out of the inner into its earlier position. The one side, or substance, would once more be the world of perception, where one of the two laws would carry on its essential business, and facing it an inner world, just such a sensuous world as the first, only in representation; it could not be pointed to as a sensuous world, nor seen, nor heard, nor tasted, and would nonetheless be represented as just such a sensuous world. But in fact, if the one that is posited is something perceived, and its in-itself, as the inversion of it, is likewise something sensuously represented, then the sour that the sweet thing would be in itself is a thing just as actual as the sweet thing, a sour thing; the black that the white would be in itself is actual black; the north pole that the south pole is in itself is the north pole present on that very magnet; and the oxygen pole that the hydrogen pole is in itself is the present oxygen pole of the same pile. Actual crime, however, has its inversion, has its in-itself as possibility, in intention as such, though not in a good one; for an intention has its truth only in the deed itself. Crime according to its content, though, has its reflection into itself, its inversion, in actual punishment; and punishment reconciles the law with the actuality that stands opposed to the law in crime. Actual punishment, finally, carries its inverted actuality within it in this sense, that it is an actualizing of the law by which the activity the law has as punishment sublates itself, so that from an active law it turns back into a tranquil and valid law, and the movement of individuality against the law, and of the law against individuality, has died away.

From the representation of inversion, then, which makes up the essence of the one side of the supersensible world, one must clear away the sensuous representation that fixes the differences in a distinct element of subsistence, and must exhibit and apprehend purely this absolute concept of difference as inner difference, as the repelling of the like-named as like-named from itself, and as the equality of the unequal as unequal. It is pure alternation, or the opposition within itself, the contradiction, that has to be thought. For in a difference that is inner, what is opposed is not merely one of two; — otherwise it would be a being and not something opposed; — rather, it is what is opposed to something that is itself opposed, or the other is itself immediately there within it. True enough, I place the opposite here and over there that other thing whose opposite it is, putting the opposite thus on one side, in and for itself, apart from the other. But precisely on that account, since what I have here is the opposite in and for itself, this opposite is the opposite of its own self, or in fact it holds the other immediately within itself. — The supersensible world, being the inverted one, has thereby reached across the other world and has it within its own self; for itself it is what is inverted, that is, the inversion of its own self; it is at once itself and what is opposed to it in a single unity. Only in this fashion is it the difference that is inner, or difference in its very self, or is it as infinity.

Through infinity we see the law brought to completion as necessity within its own self, and all the moments of appearance taken up into the inner. To say that what is simple in the law is infinity means, in light of what has emerged, α) that it is something self-equal which is nevertheless difference in itself; or that it is a like-named which repels itself away from itself, which splits itself in two. What went by the name of simple force doubles itself, and it is by virtue of its infinity that it is the law. β) What has been split in two, making up the parts represented in the law, presents itself as something that subsists; and taken apart from the concept of inner difference, these parts are space and time, or else distance and velocity, which come on the scene as moments of gravity, indifferent toward one another and toward gravity itself and without necessity for either, just as simple gravity is indifferent toward them, or simple electricity toward the positive and the negative. γ) Through the concept of inner difference, however, this unequal and indifferent stuff, space and time and so forth, is a difference that is no difference, only a difference of the like-named, and unity is its essence; as positive and negative they stand inspirited toward one another, and their being consists rather in this, that they posit themselves as non-being and sublate themselves in the unity. The two distinguished terms both subsist, they are in themselves, they are in themselves as opposites, that is, the opposite of themselves, they have their other within them and are but one unity.

This simple infinity, the absolute concept, may be named life's simple essence, the world's soul, the universal blood, which, omnipresent, is neither dimmed nor broken by any difference, which is rather itself all the differences together with their being sublated, and which therefore pulses within itself without stirring, trembles within itself without being disquieted. It is self-equal, for its differences are tautological, differences that are none. This self-equal essence therefore relates solely to itself; to itself: then what the relation goes out toward is another, and the relating to itself is rather the splitting-in-two, or that very self-equality is inner difference; those thus split in two are accordingly in and for their own selves, each one an opposite — of another: then the other is already uttered in it along with it; or, again, it is the opposite not of an other but only the pure opposite: then it is within its own self the opposite of itself; or it is no opposite whatever, but is purely for itself, a pure essence equal to itself with no difference in it: then we have no need to ask, still less to take the torment of such a question for philosophy's business, or even to hold it unanswerable for philosophy — how difference or otherness arises out of this pure essence, how it comes out of it; for the splitting-in-two has already happened, difference has been excluded from what is self-equal and placed at its side; and so what was meant to be the self-equal is already one of the terms split in two rather than the absolute essence. To say that the self-equal splits itself in two therefore means just as much that it sublates itself as something already split in two, that it sublates itself as otherness. The unity of which it is customarily said that difference can never emerge from it is in truth itself only the one moment of the splitting-in-two; it is the abstraction of simplicity, an abstraction that stands over against difference. But in being the abstraction, in being only one of the opposites, it has thereby already been said of it that it is the splitting-in-two; for if unity is something negative, something opposed, then it is posited precisely as that which has opposition within it. The differences between splitting-in-two and becoming self-equal are for that reason equally nothing but this movement of self-sublating; for since what is self-equal, which is first supposed to split itself in two or turn into its opposite, is an abstraction, is already itself something split in two, its splitting-in-two is a sublating of what it is, and hence the sublating of its being-split-in-two. Becoming self-equal is equally a splitting-in-two; whatever becomes self-equal thereby steps over against the splitting-in-two, that is, it thereby places itself to one side, or rather it becomes something split in two.

Infinity, this absolute unrest belonging to pure self-movement, whereby whatever is determined in any manner whatever, for example as being, is rather the opposite of that determinateness, has admittedly been the soul of everything up to now, but only in the inner has it stepped forth freely on its own. Appearance, or the play of forces, exhibits infinity already, yet infinity first steps forth freely as explaining; and when at last it is an object for consciousness as what it is, then consciousness is self-consciousness. The understanding's explaining at first does no more than describe what self-consciousness is. It sublates those differences that the law contains, differences already made pure yet still indifferent, and posits them within one unity, force. But this becoming-equal is just as immediately a splitting-in-two, for the only way the differences get sublated and the One of force posited is that the understanding makes a new difference, between law and force, which at the same time is none at all; and toward this, that the difference is likewise no difference, the understanding goes on itself to sublate this difference again, letting force be constituted exactly as the law is. — This movement, this necessity, is still, so far, the understanding's own necessity and movement, or as such it is not the understanding's object; what the understanding has for objects within it are positive and negative electricity, distance, velocity, attractive force, and a thousand other things, which make up what the moments of the movement contain. Explaining carries so much self-satisfaction precisely because consciousness in it, if one may put it so, stands in immediate conversation with itself and enjoys only itself, seeming all the while to be busy with something else, whereas in fact it is only busying itself with itself.

Within the opposed law, taken as the inversion of the first, that is, within inner difference, infinity does indeed become an object for the understanding, but the understanding misses infinity as such once again, in that it parcels out difference in itself, the self-repelling of the like-named and the unequals that attract each other, once more between two worlds, between two substantial elements; the movement as experience has it counts for the understanding here as an occurrence, while the like-named and the unequal count as predicates whose essence is a substrate that has being. What is an object for it under a sensuous covering is an object for us in its essential shape, as pure concept. This apprehending of difference such as it in truth is, this apprehending of infinity as such, occurs for us, or in itself. Setting out the concept of infinity is the business of science; consciousness, however, holding that concept as it does immediately, comes forward once again as a form of its own, as a new shape of consciousness which fails to recognize its essence in what went before and takes that essence for something wholly different. — Since this concept of infinity is its object, consciousness is accordingly consciousness of a difference that is just as immediately sublated; it is for its own self, it is the distinguishing of the undistinguished, or self-consciousness. I draw a distinction between myself and myself, and in doing so it is immediately there for me that what has been distinguished is not distinguished. I, as the like-named, repel myself away from myself; but this distinguished term, posited as unequal, is immediately, in the very act of being distinguished, no difference so far as I am concerned. Consciousness of something other, of an object at all, is of course itself necessarily self-consciousness, reflectedness into itself, consciousness of its own self in its otherness. The necessary advance beyond the shapes of consciousness dealt with so far, shapes for which what was true was a thing, something other than themselves, expresses precisely this: that consciousness of the thing is possible only for a self-consciousness, and moreover that self-consciousness is the sole truth of those shapes. But this truth is at hand for us alone, not yet for consciousness. Self-consciousness, though, has so far come to be only for itself, not yet as unity with consciousness as such.

We see that within the inner of appearance the understanding in truth experiences nothing else than appearance itself, though not appearance as it is in the play of forces, but appearance in its absolutely universal moments and in their movement, and that in fact it experiences nothing but itself. Having risen above perception, consciousness presents itself as closed together with the supersensible by way of the middle term of appearance, and through that middle it gazes into this background. The two extremes, the one being the pure inner, the other the inner that gazes into this pure inner, have now coincided, and just as they have vanished as extremes, so too has the middle vanished as anything other than they. The curtain, then, has been pulled away from before the inner, and what is at hand is the inner's gazing into the inner: the gazing of the undistinguished like-named, which repels itself, posits itself as an inner that is distinguished, but for which the undistinguishedness of the two is there just as immediately, self-consciousness. It shows itself that behind the so-called curtain, which is supposed to cover over the inner, there is nothing to be seen unless we ourselves go behind it, as much in order that seeing may occur as that there may be something behind it which can be seen. Yet it emerges at the same time that one cannot go straight behind it without ceremony; for this knowledge of what the representation of appearance and of its inner has as its truth is itself only the result of a movement full of circumstance, one whereby the modes consciousness takes, namely meaning, perceiving, and understanding, disappear; and it will emerge likewise that cognizing what consciousness knows in the act of knowing itself calls for still further circumstances, the unfolding of which is what follows.

IV. The Truth of Self-Certainty

In the modes of certainty treated up to this point, the true stands over against consciousness as something other than consciousness itself. Yet the concept of this true vanishes in the experience we have of it; just as the object immediately was in itself, namely the being of sense-certainty, the concrete thing of perception, the force of the understanding, so it turns out rather not to be that in truth, for this in-itself shows up instead as a way in which the object merely is for another; the concept of it is sublated on the actual object, or rather the first immediate representation is sublated within the experience, and certainty was lost in truth. Now, however, something has arisen that never came off in those earlier relationships, namely a certainty equal to its own truth, since here certainty has itself as its object, and what is true for consciousness is consciousness itself. Admittedly there is otherness in this too; consciousness does draw a distinction, but it distinguishes something that at the same time is, for it, not distinguished. If we call the movement of knowledge the concept, and call knowledge as motionless unity, or as I, the object, then what we see is that the object answers to the concept, and not merely for us but for knowledge itself. — Or, to put it the other way round: if we call concept what the object is in itself, and call object what it is as object, that is, for an other, then it becomes plain that being-in-itself is one and the same as being for another; for the in-itself just is consciousness; yet it is no less that for which there is another (namely the in-itself); and it holds for consciousness that the object's in-itself and its being for another are the same; I is at once the content of this relation and the relating itself; over against another it is itself, and simultaneously it overreaches this other, which for it is likewise nothing but itself.

With self-consciousness we have thus now entered the realm where truth is at home. We have still to see in what way the shape of self-consciousness first steps forward. Should we set this new shape of knowledge, knowledge of oneself, alongside its predecessor, the knowledge of another, then that predecessor has indeed disappeared; but its moments have equally been kept safe at the same time; and what has been lost lies in this: that here those moments are on hand just as they are in themselves. Meaning's being, the singularity and the opposed universality of perception, together with the understanding's empty inner, count no longer as essences but as moments of self-consciousness, that is, as abstractions or distinctions which, for consciousness itself, are at the same time null, or are no distinctions at all and essences that purely vanish. So it looks as though what has gone missing is only the chief moment itself, namely the simple self-subsistent subsistence for consciousness. In truth, though, self-consciousness is the reflection that comes out of the sensuous and perceived world's being, and essentially it is the return out of otherness. Movement is what it is as self-consciousness; yet in distinguishing from itself only itself as itself, the distinction is for it immediately sublated as an otherness; the distinction is not, and it is merely the tautology, devoid of movement: I am I; insofar as the distinction does not also take on for it the shape of being, it is not self-consciousness. Otherness is thereby there for it as a being, that is, as a distinguished moment; but equally there is for it the unity of itself with this distinction, as a second distinguished moment. Through that first moment self-consciousness is preserved as consciousness, and the sensuous world in its entire extension is retained for it; yet only in so far as it is related to the second moment, namely the unity that self-consciousness has with itself; and that world is accordingly for it a subsistence which is nevertheless mere appearance, or a distinction that has no being in itself. But the essence of this opposition of its appearance to its truth is nothing other than the truth itself, that is, the unity self-consciousness has with itself; this unity must become essential to it; in other words, it is desire in general. As self-consciousness, consciousness now has a doubled object: one of them immediate, the object of sense-certainty and of perceiving, which for it bears, however, the character of the negative; and the second of them, namely itself, which constitutes the true essence and which at first is present only over against the first. In this, self-consciousness presents itself as that movement wherein the opposition just named is sublated and its equality with its own self comes to be for it.

The object that counts as the negative for self-consciousness has, for its part, for us or in itself, likewise withdrawn into itself, just as consciousness has on its side. Through this reflection into itself it has become life. Whatever self-consciousness sets apart from itself as a being carries about it, insofar as it is posited as a being, not merely the mode belonging to sense-certainty and to perception; it is rather a being reflected into itself, and what immediate desire has for its object is something living. For the in-itself, the universal result, that is, of how the understanding stands to the inner of things, consists in distinguishing what admits of no distinction, or in the unity of what has been distinguished. This unity, however, is, as we have seen, just as much its own repelling of itself, and this concept splits in two into the opposition between self-consciousness and life, the former of the two being the unity for which there is the infinite unity of the distinctions; the latter, though, merely is this unity itself, so that it is not simultaneously for its own self. Consciousness, then, is self-subsistent, and its object is in itself self-subsistent to just the same degree. Self-consciousness, which is for itself pure and simple and which stamps its object right away with the character of what is negative, or which to begin with is desire, will therefore undergo rather the experience of that object's self-subsistence.

The determination of life, as it issues from the concept, or from the universal result with which we enter this sphere, suffices to designate life without our having to develop its nature any further from that result; its circle closes itself within the moments that follow. The essence is infinity, taken as the being-sublated of all distinctions, the pure movement rotating on its axis, the repose of itself as an infinity that is absolutely restless; self-subsistence itself, in which the distinctions of the movement are dissolved; time's simple essence, which in this self-equality possesses the solid shape of space. The distinctions are nonetheless present in this simple universal medium just as much as distinctions; for the negative nature of this universal fluidity belongs to it only insofar as it is a sublating of those distinctions; yet it cannot sublate the distinct ones if they have no subsistence. This very fluidity, as self-equal self-subsistence, is itself their subsistence, or their substance, in which they accordingly are as distinct members and as parts that are for themselves. Being no longer carries the meaning of the abstraction of being, nor does their pure essentiality carry that of the abstraction of universality; instead, their being consists in just that simple fluid substance which is pure movement within its own self. But the distinction of these members from one another, as distinction, rests on no determinateness whatever apart from that of the moments of infinity, in other words of pure movement itself.

The self-subsistent members are for themselves; this being-for-itself, however, is quite as immediately their reflection into unity as this unity is the splitting-in-two into self-subsistent shapes. The unity is split in two for the reason that it is unity that is absolutely negative, or infinite; and since it is the subsistence, the distinction too has self-subsistence only in it. The shape's self-subsistence shows itself as a determinate something, for an other, since the shape is something split in two; and to that extent the sublating of the splitting-in-two happens through another. Yet it lies just as much in the shape itself; for that very fluidity is the substance of the self-subsistent shapes; this substance, however, is infinite; and so the shape, in its very subsistence, is itself the splitting-in-two, that is, the sublating of its own being-for-itself.

Distinguishing more closely the moments contained in this, we find that what we have for the first moment is the subsistence of the self-subsistent shapes, or the suppression of that which distinguishing is in itself, namely of not being in itself and of having no subsistence. The second moment, by contrast, subjects that subsistence to the infinity of the distinction. In the first moment there is the subsisting shape; as being-for-itself, or as substance that is infinite in its determinateness, it steps forth against the universal substance, denies this fluidity and its continuity with it, and asserts itself as not dissolved in this universal, but rather as maintaining itself through separation from this inorganic nature of its own and through consuming that nature. Life in the universal fluid medium, a tranquil laying-out of the shapes side by side, becomes by this very fact the movement of those shapes, or life as process. The in-itself is the simple universal fluidity, while the distinction of the shapes is the other. But through this distinction the fluidity itself becomes the other; for it now is for the distinction, which is in and for itself and therefore is the infinite movement by which that tranquil medium is consumed, life as something living. — This inversion, however, is for that very reason once more the invertedness in its own self; the essence is what gets consumed; the individuality that keeps itself in being at the universal's cost, and that confers on itself the feeling of being one with itself, sublates precisely thereby its opposition to the other, by means of which it is for itself; and the unity with itself which it confers on itself is precisely the fluidity of the distinctions, or the universal dissolution. But conversely, the sublating of individual subsistence is equally the producing of it. For since the individual shape's essence, universal life and likewise what is for itself, is in itself simple substance, then in positing the other within itself it sublates this its own simplicity, or its essence; that is, it splits that simplicity in two, and this splitting-in-two of the undifferentiated fluidity is precisely the way individuality is posited. So the simple substance of life is its own splitting-in-two into shapes, and simultaneously the dissolving of these subsisting distinctions; and the dissolution of the splitting-in-two is just as much a splitting-in-two, or an articulating into members. Both sides of the whole movement that were distinguished, namely the forming of shapes laid out tranquilly in the universal medium of self-subsistence, and the process of life, thereby fall into each other; the latter is no less a forming of shapes than it is the sublating of shape ; and the first, the forming of shapes, is no less a sublating than it is the articulating into members. This fluid element is nothing but the abstraction of the essence, or else it is actual solely as shape; and its articulating itself into members is once again a splitting-in-two of what has been articulated, or a dissolving of it. Life is constituted by this entire cycle: not by what is stated first, the immediate continuity and solidity of its essence, nor by the subsisting shape and the discrete that is for itself, nor by their pure process, nor even by the simple gathering-together of these moments, but by the whole that develops itself, dissolves its own development, and in this movement maintains itself simply.

Since the starting point is the first immediate unity, and since the path runs through the moments of shape-formation and process to the unity of both these moments, thereby returning again to the simple substance we began with, this reflected unity differs from the first one. As against that immediate unity, the one stated as a being, this second unity is the universal one, which has all these moments within it as sublated. It is the simple genus, one that within the movement of life itself has no existence for itself as that simple thing; rather, in this result life refers beyond itself to something other than it is, namely to consciousness, for which life is there as this unity, that is, as genus.

That other life, though, namely self-consciousness, for which the genus as such has being and which for its own self is genus, is at first only this simple essence to itself and has pure I for its object; in its experience, which is now to be considered, this abstract object will grow richer for it and will take on the unfolding we have witnessed in life.

This genus, or the simple universal, one for which there are no distinctions, is what the simple I amounts to only in being the negative essence of those moments that are shaped and self-subsistent; and self-consciousness is accordingly certain of itself only by sublating this other, which presents itself to it as self-subsistent life; it is desire. Being certain that this other is null, it posits that nullity for itself as its truth, annihilates the self-subsistent object, and in that way gives itself certainty of itself as a certainty that is true, as one that has come to be for it in an objective manner.

In this satisfaction, however, it comes to experience the self-subsistence of its object. Desire, together with the self-certainty reached in desire's satisfaction, is conditioned by the object, for it comes about by sublating this other; and if such sublating is to be, this other must be. Self-consciousness is thus unable, by its negative relation, to sublate the object; it therefore produces the object again instead, and desire along with it. In fact the essence of desire is something other than self-consciousness; and by way of this experience that very truth has come to be for self-consciousness itself. Yet at the same time it is quite as absolutely for itself, which it is only by sublating the object, and its satisfaction must come to be for it, since it is the truth. Because the object is self-subsistent, then, satisfaction can be reached only if the object itself carries out the negation upon itself; and the object must carry out this negation of itself on itself, for in itself it is what is negative, and it must be for the other that which it is. In being the negation upon its own self, and in being therein at the same time self-subsistent, the object is consciousness. In the case of life, which desire has for its object, the negation falls either upon an other, namely upon desire, or it is there as determinateness over against some other indifferent shape, or as life's inorganic universal nature. But this universal self-subsistent nature, on which the negation obtains absolutely, is the genus as such, that is, as self-consciousness. Only in another self-consciousness does self-consciousness attain its satisfaction.

Only in these three moments is the concept of self-consciousness brought to completion; a) pure undifferentiated I is the first immediate object it has. b) This immediacy, however, is absolute mediation in its own right; it consists only in the sublating of the self-subsistent object, in other words it is desire. The satisfaction that desire gets is indeed self-consciousness reflected into its own self, or certainty that has turned into truth. c) The truth of that certainty, however, is rather the doubled reflection, the redoubling of self-consciousness. It is an object for consciousness which in its own self posits its otherness, or the distinction, as something null, and which is therein self-subsistent. The distinct shape that is merely living does indeed sublate its self-subsistence as well within the process of life itself, but along with its distinction it ceases to be what it is; whereas the object of self-consciousness is just as self-subsistent in this negativity of its own; and thereby it is genus for its own self, universal fluidity within the ownness of its separating off; it is living self-consciousness.

What is present here is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness. Only through this is it in fact what it is; for only herein does its unity with itself in its otherness come to be for it; the I that is the object of its own concept is in fact no object; the object of desire, by contrast, is merely self-subsistent, for it is the universal, indestructible substance, the fluid self-equal essence. Since a self-consciousness is the object, that object is I just as much as it is object. — With this the concept of spirit is already present for us. What comes to be for consciousness from here on is its experience of what spirit is, namely this absolute substance which, in the complete freedom and self-subsistence of its opposite, that is, of distinct self-consciousnesses that are for themselves, constitutes their unity; an I that is We, and a We that is I as well. It is only in self-consciousness, taken as the concept of spirit, that consciousness has its turning point, the point at which it steps out of the colorful semblance of the sensuous here below, and out of the empty night of the supersensible beyond, into the spiritual day of the present.

A. Self-Subsistence and Non-Self-Subsistence of Self-Consciousness; Mastery and Servitude

Self-consciousness is in and for itself insofar as, and because, it is for another something in and for itself; that is, its being lies wholly in being recognized. The concept of this its unity in its doubling, the concept of the infinity that realizes itself within self-consciousness, is an intertwining of many sides and many senses, so that its moments must partly be held rigorously apart, and partly, within this very distinguishing, be grasped and cognized as at once undistinguished as well, or always in the significance opposed to their own. That what is distinguished carries a double sense has its ground in the essence of self-consciousness, which is to be infinite, that is, immediately the contrary of whatever determinateness it gets posited in. What sets the movement of recognition before us is the unfolding of this spiritual unity's concept in its doubling.

Another self-consciousness is there for self-consciousness; it has come to be outside itself. This carries a doubled meaning: first, it has lost its own self, since what it finds itself to be is an other essence; second, the other has thereby been sublated by it, for what it sees as essence is not the other either, but its own self in the other.

It must sublate this, its otherness; that is the sublating of the first double sense and hence a second double sense in its own right: first, it must aim at sublating the other self-subsistent essence, thereby gaining certainty of itself as the essence; second, its aim in this is to sublate its own self, since this other is itself.

This double-sensed sublating of its double-sensed otherness is just as much a double-sensed return into itself; for first, by the sublating it recovers its own self, becoming equal to itself once more through the sublating of its otherness; but second, the other self-consciousness is in the same way restored to itself by it, for it was present to itself in the other, and in sublating this, its being in the other, it releases the other back into freedom.

This movement whereby self-consciousness relates itself to another self-consciousness has, however, been depicted in this fashion, as the doing of the one; but that doing of the one itself carries the doubled meaning of being its own doing quite as much as the doing of the other; for the other is equally self-subsistent, sealed within itself, and nothing is in it that is not there through itself. The first does not have the object before it in the way the object at first is merely for desire, but rather has a self-subsistent object that is for itself, and over that object it can by itself accomplish nothing unless the object does to its own self what the first does to it. The movement is thus, plainly and simply, the doubled movement of both self-consciousnesses. What each sees the other doing is the very same thing that it does itself; each does on its own part what it requires of the other; and hence does what it does only to the extent that the other does the same; a doing that stayed one-sided would be pointless, since what is to happen can be brought off by the two alone.

The doing, then, is double-sensed not only in that it is a doing directed just as much upon itself as upon the other, but also in that, undivided, it is just as much the doing of the one as of the other.

In this movement we watch the process that displayed itself as the play of forces recur, but now within consciousness. What there held only for us holds here for the extremes themselves. Self-consciousness is the middle, and it decomposes into the extremes; each extreme, for its part, consists in this exchange of its own determinateness, this absolute transition into its opposite. As consciousness, though, it certainly does get outside itself, and yet in this being-outside-itself it is at the same time held back within itself, for itself, and its outside-itself is for it. For it there is this: that it immediately is another consciousness and is not; and likewise that this other is only for itself insofar as it sublates itself as something that is for itself, and is for itself only inside the other's being-for-itself. To the other, each is the middle by means of which each mediates and joins together with itself, and each is, both to itself and to the other, an essence that immediately is for itself, an essence which at once is so for itself only by way of this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.

We must now consider this pure concept of recognition, of the doubling of self-consciousness within its unity, in respect of the way its process makes its appearance for self-consciousness. It will first set forth the two in the aspect of their inequality, or the stepping-out of the middle into the extremes, which as extremes are opposed to each other, the one being merely something recognized, the other merely something recognizing.

To begin with, self-consciousness is simple being-for-itself, self-equal by excluding all that is other from itself; what counts for it as essence and absolute object is I; and it is a singular in this immediacy, or in this being that belongs to its being-for-itself. Whatever is other for it stands there as an unessential object, one stamped with the character of the negative. The other, however, is a self-consciousness too; one individual steps forth confronting another individual. Stepping forth thus immediately, they are for one another after the manner of ordinary objects; self-subsistent shapes, consciousnesses submerged in the being of life — for it is as life that the object with being has determined itself here — consciousnesses which, for one another, have not yet carried through the movement of absolute abstraction, the movement of wiping out every immediate being and of being nothing but the pure negative being which self-equal consciousness is, and which have not yet set themselves before one another as pure being-for-itself, that is, as self-consciousness. Each is indeed certain of its own self, though not of the other, so that the certainty it has of itself possesses as yet no truth; for its truth would lie solely in this, that its own being-for-itself had presented itself to it as a self-subsistent object, or, what amounts to the same, that the object had presented itself as this pure certainty of its own self. By the concept of recognition, however, this is possible only in the following way: that just as the other is for it, so it is for the other, and each in its own self, through its own doing and once again through the doing of the other, brings this pure abstraction of being-for-itself to completion.

What the presentation of itself, taken as self-consciousness's pure abstraction, amounts to, however, is showing itself to be the pure negation of its own objective manner, or showing that it is tied to no determinate existence, not tied to the universal singularity of existence at all, not tied to life. This presentation is the doubled doing: the doing of the other, and the doing through one's own self. Insofar as it is the doing of the other, each therefore aims at the death of the other. But therein the second is also present, the doing through one's own self, since the former includes within itself the staking of one's own life. The relationship of the two self-consciousnesses is accordingly determined thus: that through a struggle of life and death they corroborate themselves and each other. — They must enter this struggle, for they have to raise the certainty of their own selves, of being for themselves, into truth in the other and in themselves. And the staking of life is the sole thing by which freedom, by which it is corroborated, that for self-consciousness the essence is neither being, nor the immediate manner in which it steps forth, nor its submersion in the spread of life, — but rather that nothing is to be found in it which would not be for it a moment that vanishes, that it is nothing but pure being-for-itself. The individual who has not risked life can no doubt be recognized as a person; but it has not attained the truth of being thus recognized as a self-subsistent self-consciousness. Equally, each must go for the death of the other just as it stakes its own life; for the other counts to it as no more than its own self; its essence presents itself to it as another, it is outside itself; it must sublate its being-outside-itself; the other is a consciousness with being, entangled in manifold ways; it must intuit its otherness as pure being-for-itself, or as absolute negation.

This corroboration by way of death, however, sublates the truth that was meant to issue from it, and with that truth it sublates the certainty of one's own self altogether; for if life is the natural position of consciousness, self-subsistence lacking absolute negativity, then death is its natural negation, a negation lacking self-subsistence, and one that therefore remains without the significance recognition calls for. Death has indeed produced the certainty that both risked their lives and held life in contempt, in themselves and in the other; yet not for those who survived this struggle, who sublate their consciousness as posited in that alien essentiality, natural existence, or who sublate themselves and are sublated as the extremes that wanted to be for themselves. With this, though, the essential moment disappears from the play of exchange, namely the decomposing of itself into extremes of opposed determinatenesses; the middle collapses into a dead unity, one decomposed into dead extremes that merely have being and are not opposed; and the two do not give and receive each other back mutually through consciousness, but only release each other indifferently, as things. What they have done is abstract negation, not the negation of consciousness, which sublates in such a way that it stores up and preserves what has been sublated, and so survives its own being sublated.

In this experience self-consciousness comes to find that life matters to it just as essentially as pure self-consciousness does. Within immediate self-consciousness the absolute object is the simple I, which for us, or in itself, is nevertheless absolute mediation and has subsisting self-subsistence for its essential moment. That simple unity dissolves, and this dissolution is what the first experience results in; through it a pure self-consciousness is posited, alongside a consciousness that is not purely for itself but rather for another, that is, a consciousness that has being, or consciousness having the shape of thinghood. Both of these moments are essential; — inasmuch as they are at first unequal and opposed, with no reflection of theirs into unity having yet come about, they stand as two opposed shapes of consciousness: the self-subsistent one, whose essence is being-for-itself, and the non-self-subsistent one, whose essence is life, or being for another; the first of these is the master, the second the servant.

The master is consciousness that is for itself, no longer the mere concept of such consciousness but consciousness being for itself whose mediation with itself runs through an other consciousness, one whose essence involves its being synthesized with self-subsistent being, or with thinghood as such. Two moments are what the master relates to: a thing as such, which is the object of desire, and the consciousness for which what is essential is thinghood; and since a) he is, as the concept of self-consciousness, an immediate relation of being-for-itself, while b) he is now at the same time mediation, a being-for-itself that is for itself only through another, he relates a) in an immediate way to both, and b) in a mediated way to each of them through the other. The master relates to the servant in a mediated way, through self-subsistent being; for this is exactly what holds the servant bound; it is the chain he could not abstract from during the struggle, which is why he proved to be non-self-subsistent, proved to have his self-subsistence in thinghood. The master, by contrast, holds power over this being, since in the struggle he proved that it is valid for him merely as something negative; and as he is the power over it while this being is the power over the other, he keeps that other beneath him in this syllogism. In the same way the master relates to the thing in a mediated way, through the servant; being self-consciousness as such, the servant likewise relates negatively to the thing and sublates it; but for him the thing is self-subsistent at the same time, so that his negating cannot finish it off to the point of annihilation, and he merely works on it. For the master, on the other hand, this mediation yields the immediate relation as the pure negation of the thing, that is, enjoyment; what desire did not manage, he manages: to have done with the thing and to satisfy himself in enjoyment. Desire did not manage this, on account of the thing's self-subsistence; but the master, having pushed the servant in between himself and the thing, thereby joins together only with the thing's non-self-subsistence and enjoys it purely; the side of self-subsistence he leaves to the servant, who works on it.

In these two moments the master comes to be recognized by another consciousness; for in them the other consciousness posits itself as the unessential one, first in working on the thing, then in its dependence on a determinate existence; in neither can it become master over being and reach absolute negation. Present here, then, is this moment of recognition: the other consciousness sublates its own being-for-itself and in doing so does itself what the first does to it. So too the other moment, that this doing of the second is the first one's doing of its own; for what the servant does is in truth the master's doing; to the master, being-for-itself alone is essence; he is pure negative power, to which the thing is Nothing, and hence the pure essential doing within this relationship; the servant's doing, however, is not pure but unessential. But recognition proper lacks the moment in which the master would also do to himself what he does to the other, and the servant would also do to the other what he does to himself. What has thereby come about is a one-sided and unequal recognition.

Here the unessential consciousness is, for the master, the object in which the truth of his certainty of his own self consists. But it comes to light that this object fails to answer to its concept, and that in the very place where the master has brought himself to completion, what has come to be for him is something else entirely than a self-subsistent consciousness. It is not such a consciousness that is there for him, but a non-self-subsistent one; so he has no certainty of being-for-itself as the truth; on the contrary, his truth is the unessential consciousness and the unessential doing that belongs to it.

Accordingly, the truth of the self-subsistent consciousness is the servile consciousness. The latter does indeed appear at first to be outside itself, and appears not to be self-consciousness's truth. Yet mastery showed its essence to be the inverted form of what it wills to be, and likewise servitude, once it reaches its completion, will surely turn into the contrary of what it immediately is; being a consciousness pressed back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and reverse itself into true self-subsistence.

We have seen only what servitude is within the relationship of mastery. But it is self-consciousness, and what it accordingly is in and for its own self is what we must now consider. At first the master is the essence for servitude; hence the self-subsistent consciousness that is for itself counts for it as the truth, a truth that, for it, is nevertheless not yet in it. Yet this truth of negativity in its purity and of being-for-itself it does in fact have in its own self; for it has experienced this essence within itself. For this consciousness has been anxious not over this or that, nor for this or that moment, but over its whole essence; since what it has felt is the fear of death, of the absolute master. Therein it was inwardly dissolved, it shook through and through within its own self, and everything fixed quaked inside it. But this pure universal movement, the absolute becoming-fluid of all subsistence, is what constitutes the simple essence of self-consciousness, namely absolute negativity, pure being-for-itself, which is thereby in this consciousness. Pure being-for-itself as this moment is for it too, since in the master it is its object. Furthermore, it is not merely this universal dissolution in general, for in serving it brings that dissolution about actually; therein it sublates, across all the singular moments, its attachment to natural existence, and works that existence away.

The feeling of absolute power, however, whether taken in general or in the singular details of service, amounts only to dissolution in itself, and even granted that fear of the master makes the start of wisdom, consciousness in that fear is for its own self, not being-for-itself. Through work, though, it arrives at its own self. At the moment that answers to desire in the master's consciousness, it did look as though the side of the unessential relation to the thing had fallen to the serving consciousness, since there the thing retains its self-subsistence. Desire had kept back for itself the pure negating of its object and, along with that, the unmixed feeling of self. For just that reason, however, the satisfaction is itself nothing but a vanishing, since it lacks the objective side, or subsistence. Work, by contrast, is inhibited desire, a vanishing held up, or, to put it otherwise, it shapes. What relates negatively to the object turns into that object's form, and into something enduring; precisely because for the one who works the object possesses self-subsistence. This negative middle, the forming doing, is at once singularity, the pure being-for-itself of consciousness, which in work now steps outside consciousness into the element of what endures; by this route, then, the working consciousness arrives at the intuition of self-subsistent being as its own self.

Forming, however, carries not merely that positive significance whereby the serving consciousness, within it, becomes for itself, as pure being-for-itself, something that has being; it carries a negative significance as well, directed against its first moment, fear. For in shaping the thing, its own negativity, its being-for-itself, becomes an object to it only through its sublating the opposed form that has being. But that alien essence, the one it trembled before, is exactly this objective negative. Now, however, it destroys this alien negative and posits itself as such a negative in the element of what endures; and thereby it becomes, for its own self, something that is for itself. In the master, being-for-itself is for it another, or is only for it; under fear, being-for-itself lies in its own self; in shaping, being-for-itself comes to be for it as its own, and it becomes conscious that it is itself in and for itself. Being posited outward does not make the form into something other than it; for this very form is its pure being-for-itself, which therein becomes truth for it. Through this rediscovery of itself by its own means, then, it becomes a mind of its own, and precisely in the work in which it had seemed to be only a mind belonging to another. — For this reflection both moments are necessary, fear and service in general as well as shaping, and both at once in a universal manner. Lacking the discipline of service and obedience, fear stops short at the merely formal and does not spread over the conscious actuality of existence. Lacking shaping, fear stays inward and mute, and consciousness does not come to be for its own self. Should consciousness form without that first absolute fear, it is nothing but a vain mind of its own; for the form or negativity belonging to it is not negativity in itself; and its forming can therefore not give it consciousness of itself as the essence. If what it has endured is not absolute fear but only some anxiety, the negative essence has stayed something external to it, and its substance has not been infected by that essence through and through. Since not every filling of its natural consciousness has been set tottering, it still belongs in itself to determinate being; the mind of its own is obstinacy, a freedom that still remains standing inside servitude. Just as the pure form cannot become essence for it, so too, viewed as a spreading beyond the singular case, that form is no universal shaping, no absolute concept, but a skill holding sway over some things only, and not over that power which is universal, nor over the objective essence as a whole.

B. Freedom of Self-Consciousness; Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness

In the self-subsistent self-consciousness the essence is, for one thing, merely the pure abstraction of the I, while for another, once that abstraction elaborates itself and supplies itself with differences, the act of differentiating fails to become for it an objective essence that has being-in-itself; so the I this self-consciousness arrives at is not one that genuinely differentiates itself in its own simplicity, nor one that stays equal to itself in that absolute act of differentiating. The consciousness that has been pressed back into itself, by contrast, comes to be an object for itself in shaping, namely as the form of the things it shapes, and in the master it looks upon being-for-itself as consciousness at the same time. For the serving consciousness as such, however, these two moments fall apart — itself as a self-subsistent object, and this object as a consciousness, and with that its own essence. Since, however, the form and being-for-itself amount, for us or in itself, to the same, and since within the concept of self-subsistent consciousness it is consciousness that constitutes being-in-itself, the side of being-in-itself, or of thinghood, which took on form in labor, is no substance apart from consciousness, and we have arrived at a new shape of self-consciousness: a consciousness that is the essence to itself as infinity, or as consciousness's pure movement; one that thinks, that is to say, one that is free self-consciousness. For to think means being an object to oneself not as the abstract I but as an I that carries at once the significance of being-in-itself, or relating to the objective essence so that this essence carries the significance of the being-for-itself belonging to that consciousness for which it is. — For thinking, the object's movement takes place not in representations or in shapes but in concepts, that is to say, in a being-in-itself that is differentiated yet is, immediately, for consciousness nothing differentiated from consciousness. What is represented, shaped, existent, taken as such, bears the form of being other than consciousness; a concept, though, is at the same time something existent, — and this difference, so far as it belongs to the concept itself, makes up the concept's determinate content, — but because that content is at once a content grasped in a concept, consciousness stays immediately conscious of being one with this determinate, differentiated existent; matters do not stand as with representation, where consciousness has first to recall separately that the representation is its own; the concept, rather, is straightaway my concept. Within thinking I am free, since I do not stand within another but stay purely alongside myself, and since the object that counts as the essence for me is, in unsevered unity, my being-for-myself; and the movement I make in concepts is a movement inside myself. — In determining this shape of self-consciousness, though, one point must be kept firmly in view: that the shape is thinking consciousness as such, or that what stands before it is being-in-itself together with being-for-itself in immediate unity. Consciousness that is like-named with itself, and that repels itself away from itself, becomes for itself an element having being-in-itself; but so far it is this element to itself only as universal essence in general, and not yet as that objective essence within the unfolding and the movement of its own manifold being.

This freedom of self-consciousness, as is well known, has been called Stoicism, in that it came forward in the history of spirit as an appearance conscious of itself. Its principle is that consciousness is a thinking essence, and that something has essentiality for it, or is true and good for it, only insofar as consciousness relates itself therein as a thinking essence.

The manifold expansion of life, differentiating itself within itself, its singularization and entanglement, is the object against which desire and labor are active. This manifold doing has now contracted into the simple differentiation that lies in the pure movement of thinking. Essentiality no longer belongs to the difference that establishes itself in the guise of a determinate thing, or of consciousness of a determinate natural existence, of a feeling, or of desire and of purpose for that desire, whether it be posited through one's own consciousness or through an alien consciousness; essentiality belongs solely to the difference that is a thought one, immediately not differentiated from Me. This consciousness therefore stands negatively toward the relationship of mastery and servitude; what it does is to find its truth neither in the servant, when it holds mastery, nor, as servant, in the master's will and in serving him, but to be free in fetters exactly as on the throne, free throughout every dependence of its singular existence, and to preserve in itself that lifelessness which perpetually withdraws, out of the movement of existence, out of acting as much as out of suffering, into thought's simple essentiality. Stubbornness is a freedom that attaches itself to a singularity and keeps its stand inside servitude, whereas Stoicism is the freedom that steps immediately and always out of servitude and back into thought's pure universality; as a universal form taken by the world-spirit it could make its appearance only at a time of universal fear and servitude, though also of a universal culture that had heightened formative activity into thinking.

Now granted that what counts as the essence for this self-consciousness is neither another over against it nor yet the I's pure abstraction, but an I that has otherness within it, yet has it as a thought difference, so that within its otherness the I has immediately gone back into itself; even so, that essence of its remains at the same time merely an abstract essence. Toward natural existence this freedom of self-consciousness is indifferent, and has for that reason let natural existence go free in equal measure, so that the reflection here is a doubled one. Freedom within thought possesses as its truth nothing but pure thought, a truth that lacks the fulfillment of life; hence it is likewise no more than the concept of freedom, and not living freedom itself; for so far its essence is only thinking at large, the form as such, which has turned back into itself away from the self-subsistence of things. But if individuality, as acting, were to exhibit itself as living, or, as thinking, were to take in the living world under the form of a thought-system, then thought itself would have to contain, for the former unfolding, a content of what is good, and for the latter, of what is true; so that throughout, in whatever is for consciousness, no ingredient would occur besides the concept that constitutes the essence. Yet in the very way the concept here severs itself, as abstraction, from the manifoldness of things, it holds no content of its own, but only a given content. Consciousness does indeed wipe out the content as an alien being when it thinks that content; but the concept is a determinate concept, and just this determinateness of the concept is the alien element carried within it. Stoicism was accordingly thrown into difficulty once it was asked, as the phrase ran, after the criterion of truth in general, that is, after a content belonging to thought itself, properly speaking. Asked what the good and the true are, it answered once again with contentless thinking itself; rationality is where the true and the good are supposed to reside. But this self-equality of thinking is once more only the pure form in which nothing determines itself; the universal words about the true and the good, about wisdom and virtue, at which it must come to a halt, are therefore no doubt in a general way uplifting, but since in fact they can never arrive at any expansion of content, they soon begin to be tedious.

This thinking consciousness, in the way it has determined itself, namely as abstract freedom, therefore amounts to no more than an unfinished negation of otherness; having merely drawn back into itself out of existence, it has not carried itself out upon existence as the absolute negation of it. Content is valid for it, to be sure, only as thought, yet along with that as determinate thought, and so determinateness as such is valid for it too.

Skepticism realizes what Stoicism supplies only the concept of, — and it is the experience, in actuality, of what freedom of thought amounts to; such freedom is in itself the negative, and has to exhibit itself accordingly. Once self-consciousness has reflected itself into the simple thought of itself, self-subsistent existence, or enduring determinateness, has in fact fallen out of infinity and confronts that freedom; in skepticism this other's complete unessentiality and non-self-subsistence now arises for consciousness; thought turns into the thinking that wholly annihilates the being of the manifoldly determined world, and free self-consciousness's negativity turns, upon this manifold formation of life, into real negativity. — Clearly, then, Stoicism answers to the concept of that self-subsistent consciousness which appeared as the relationship of mastery and servitude, while skepticism answers to the realization of that same consciousness, namely to the negative directedness upon otherness, to desire and to labor. But if desire and labor proved unable to execute the negation for self-consciousness, this polemical directedness against the manifold self-subsistence of things will succeed instead, since what turns upon those things is a free self-consciousness already completed within itself; more precisely, since it has thinking, or infinity, within it, and since therein the self-subsistent things, taken in their difference, count for it as nothing but magnitudes in the course of vanishing. Differences that within self-consciousness's pure thinking of itself amount only to the abstraction of difference here become every difference, and differentiated being in its entirety becomes one difference within self-consciousness.

With this, the doing of skepticism in general, and its manner, has been determined. It points out that dialectical movement which sense-certainty is, and perception, and the understanding; and it points out likewise the unessentiality of whatever passes for something determinate within the relationship of ruling and serving, and of whatever so passes for abstract thinking itself. That relationship comprises at the same time a determinate manner within which ethical laws, too, occur as commands issued by mastery; the determinations in abstract thinking, on the other hand, are concepts of science, into which contentless thinking spreads out, hanging the concept, in a way that is in fact merely external, onto the being that stands self-subsistent over against it and makes up its content, and holding as valid only determinate concepts, granted that these are pure abstractions as well.

As negative movement in the way it immediately is, the dialectical appears to consciousness at first as something to which consciousness has been abandoned, something that is not there through consciousness itself. As skepticism, by contrast, that movement is a moment of self-consciousness, and it is not something that merely befalls self-consciousness, that its true and its real vanish without its knowing how; rather, in the certainty of its freedom, self-consciousness itself lets this other, which passes itself off as real, vanish; not the objective alone, taken as such, but its own relating to the objective, wherein the objective is valid and is made valid as objective, and hence its perceiving as well, together with its securing of what stands in danger of being lost, its sophistry, and the truth it has determined out of itself and fixed; by which self-conscious negation it procures the certainty of its freedom for its own self, brings forth the experience of that certainty, and so raises it to truth. The determinate is what vanishes, that is, the difference which, in whatever manner and from whatever quarter, sets itself up as fixed and unchangeable. Nothing enduring belongs to it, and it must vanish for thinking, since precisely this is what the differentiated is: not being in its own self, but holding its essentiality in another alone; thinking, however, is the insight into that nature which the differentiated has, it is the negative essence taken as simple.

Amid the changing of everything that would make itself fixed for it, skeptical self-consciousness thus undergoes the experience of its own freedom as something it gives to itself and preserves by itself; to itself it is that ataraxy of thinking that thinks itself, the unchangeable and genuine certainty of itself. This certainty does not emerge out of anything alien whose manifold development would have collapsed together within it, emerging as a result with its own becoming left behind it; on the contrary, what constitutes the absolute dialectical unrest is consciousness itself, this mixture of sensuous and thought representations whose differences coincide, and whose equality likewise, — for equality is itself the determinateness over against the unequal — dissolves once more. Yet precisely in this, rather than being a self-equal consciousness, this consciousness is in fact nothing but a wholly contingent confusion, the vertigo of a disorder that keeps generating itself. It is this for its own self; for it is itself what maintains this self-moving confusion and brings it forth. It owns up to this as well: it owns up to being an entirely contingent, singular consciousness, — a consciousness that is empirical, that takes its lead from what possesses no reality for it, that obeys what for it is no essence, that does and brings into actuality what for it holds no truth. But just as in this manner it is valid to itself as a singular, contingent and in truth animal life, and as a lost self-consciousness, so conversely it makes itself once more into the universal, self-equal one; for negativity of every singularity and of every difference is what it is. Out of this self-equality, or rather within it, it drops back into that contingency and confusion, for this self-moving negativity has dealings with nothing but the singular and knocks about among contingent things. So this consciousness is that unconscious drivel of passing back and forth from the one extreme, self-equal self-consciousness, over to the other, the contingent, confused, and confusing consciousness. These two thoughts of itself it does not itself bring together; on the one occasion it cognizes its freedom as an elevation above all confusion and all contingency of existence, and on the other occasion it just as much owns up to being a relapse into unessentiality and a drifting about within it. In its thinking it lets the unessential content vanish, but just therein it is a consciousness of something unessential; it utters absolute vanishing, and yet the uttering is, and what has been uttered as vanishing is this consciousness itself; it utters the nullity of seeing, of hearing, and so on, and it sees, hears, and so on, itself; it utters the nullity of the ethical essentialities, and itself makes them into the powers of its acting. What it does and what it says stand perpetually in contradiction, and it likewise carries within itself the doubled and contradictory consciousness of unchangeableness together with equality, and of utter contingency together with inequality with itself. But it keeps this contradiction of its own apart; and it relates to that contradiction as it does within its purely negative movement generally. Point out equality to it, and it will point out inequality; and when that inequality, which it has just uttered, is now held up before it, it passes over to pointing out equality; its chatter is in fact the wrangling of stubborn boys, where the first says A whenever the second says B, and says B again whenever the second says A, and where, at the price of contradicting themselves, they buy the pleasure of staying in contradiction with each other.

Within skepticism consciousness comes to know itself, in truth, as a consciousness that contradicts itself inwardly; from this experience a new shape proceeds, one that draws together the two thoughts which skepticism holds apart. Skepticism's thoughtlessness regarding itself has to vanish, since what carries these two modes within it is in truth one consciousness. This new shape is thereby one that for itself has a doubled consciousness of itself: consciousness of itself as what liberates itself, as unchangeable and self-equal, and consciousness of itself as what absolutely confuses and inverts itself, — and that is the consciousness it has of this contradiction of its own. — Under Stoicism self-consciousness amounts to the simple freedom of itself; under skepticism that freedom realizes itself, annihilates the other side, determinate existence, but rather doubles itself, and is now twofold to itself. By this means the doubling that formerly spread itself over two singular individuals, over master and over servant, has entered into one; self-consciousness's doubling within itself, which belongs essentially to the concept of spirit, is thereby at hand, though not yet the unity of that doubling, and the unhappy consciousness amounts to the consciousness it has of itself as a doubled essence that merely contradicts itself.

This unhappy, inwardly divided consciousness must therefore, because this contradiction of its essence is for itself one consciousness, always have the other consciousness also within the one, and so must be immediately driven out again from each, just when it supposes it has attained the victory and the repose of unity. Its true return into itself, however, or its reconciliation with itself, will exhibit the concept of spirit that has come alive and stepped into existence, since it already carries this within it, that as one undivided consciousness it is a doubled one; it itself is the beholding of one self-consciousness within another, and it itself is the two of them, and the unity of the two counts for it as the essence as well, yet it for itself is not yet this essence itself, not yet the two in their unity.

Being to begin with no more than the immediate unity of the two, while for it the two are not the same but opposed, it takes the one, namely the simple unchangeable, for the essence; the other, however, the manifold changeable, it takes for the unessential. For it the two are essences alien to one another; being itself the consciousness of this contradiction, it ranges itself alongside the changeable consciousness and is to itself the unessential one; but qua consciousness of unchangeableness, that is, of the essence in its simplicity, it must at once aim at liberating itself from the unessential, which is to say, at liberating itself from itself. For although for itself it is only the changeable, the unchangeable being something alien to it, it is itself simple and hence unchangeable consciousness, conscious of that consciousness as its own essence, yet in such a way that it itself is once again, for itself, not this essence. The standing it grants to the two cannot, then, be an indifference of the one toward the other, that is, not an indifference of itself toward the unchangeable; rather, immediately, it is both of them itself, and the relation of the two is for it a relation of essence to unessence, so that the latter is what must be sublated; but since the two are for it equally essential and equally contradictory, it is only that contradictory movement wherein one opposite finds no rest within its opposite, but instead generates itself there anew precisely as opposite.

There is thus at hand a struggle against an enemy over whom victory is rather a defeat, where to have attained the one is rather the loss of it in its opposite. The consciousness of life, of its existence and doing, is only pain over this existence and doing, for in it consciousness has only the consciousness of its opposite as the essence, and of its own nullity. Out of this it passes over into the elevation toward the unchangeable. But that elevation is itself this very consciousness; hence it is immediately a consciousness of the opposite, that is, of itself as singularity. The unchangeable that steps into consciousness is for just that reason touched at the same time by singularity, and is present only in company with it; far from singularity having been wiped out within the consciousness of the unchangeable, it does nothing there but keep coming forth.

Within this movement, however, what it experiences is precisely this coming-forth of singularity in the unchangeable, together with that of the unchangeable in singularity. There arises for it singularity in general in the unchangeable essence, and along with that its own singularity there. For the truth of this movement is precisely the being-one of this doubled consciousness. This unity comes to be for it, but at first as itself one in which the diversity of the two is still what dominates. Thereby a threefold manner in which singularity is bound up with the unchangeable is at hand for it; on the first occasion it comes forth to itself once more as standing in opposition to the unchangeable essence, and it finds itself flung back to where the struggle began, a struggle that stays the element of the relationship throughout. On the second occasion, however, the unchangeable itself has within it the singularity for consciousness; so that singularity is a shape of the unchangeable, to which the whole manner of existence thereby passes over. On the third occasion, it finds itself as this singular one within the unchangeable. The first unchangeable counts for it merely as the alien essence that passes sentence upon singularity; since the second is a shape of singularity such as consciousness itself is, consciousness becomes, thirdly, spirit, takes joy in finding itself there, and grows conscious that its singularity stands reconciled with the universal.

What presents itself here as the manner and relation of the unchangeable emerged as the experience which the divided self-consciousness undergoes in its unhappiness. Admittedly this experience is not a movement that is one-sidedly its own, for it is itself unchangeable consciousness, and the latter is therewith singular consciousness as well, so that the movement belongs no less to the unchangeable consciousness, which enters into it quite as much as the other does; for the movement runs through these moments: being at first unchangeable over against the singular in general, then being itself singular over against the other singular, and finally being one with it. But this consideration, so far as it belongs to us, comes too early here, for what has so far arisen for us is only unchangeableness taken as consciousness's unchangeableness, which on that account is not the true one but is still saddled with an opposition, and not the unchangeable taken in and for itself; so we do not know how the latter will relate. What has emerged here is only this, that to the consciousness which is our object here these indicated determinations appear in the unchangeable.

For this reason the unchangeable consciousness too retains, even in its own formation, the character and the basis of being divided and of being-for-itself over against the singular consciousness. For the singular consciousness, then, that the unchangeable takes on the shape of singularity is simply an occurrence; and in the same way it merely finds itself standing opposed to the unchangeable, so that it holds this relationship through nature; that in the end it finds itself within the unchangeable appears to it in part, to be sure, as produced through itself, or as taking place because it is itself singular; yet one part of this unity appears as belonging to the unchangeable, both as regards how the unity arose and in so far as it is; and the opposition persists inside this unity itself. In point of fact the formation of the unchangeable has not merely left the moment of the beyond standing but has fortified it still further; for while on one side the shape of singular actuality seems to have brought that moment nearer to consciousness, on the other side it now confronts consciousness as an opaque sensuous One, with all the brittleness that belongs to something actual; the hope of coming to be one with it is bound to stay hope, which is to say, to stay without fulfillment and without presence, since what stands between the hope and its fulfillment is precisely that absolute contingency, or unmoving indifference, residing in the formation itself, in what grounds the hope. Through the nature of the existent One, through the actuality it has put on, it necessarily comes about that it has vanished in time, and has been somewhere in space and far away, and simply remains far away.

Whereas at first the mere concept of the divided consciousness determined itself as aiming at the sublation of itself as singular and at becoming unchangeable consciousness, its striving now has this determination, that it rather sublates its relation to the pure unshaped unchangeable and gives itself only the relation to the shaped unchangeable. For what now counts for it as essence and as object is the being-one of the singular with the unchangeable, whereas within the concept the essential object had been the shapeless, abstract unchangeable alone; and the relationship constituted by that absolute dividedness of the concept is now the thing from which it must turn away. Its relation to the shaped unchangeable, at first an external one that takes that unchangeable as something alien and actual, it has to raise into an absolute becoming-one.

The movement by which the unessential consciousness strives after this being-one is itself threefold, answering to the threefold relationship it will bear to its shaped beyond; first as pure consciousness; secondly as a singular essence relating to actuality as desire and labor; and thirdly as consciousness of its being-for-itself. — In what way these three modes of its being stand and are determined within that universal relationship is what must now be seen.

Taking it first, then, as pure consciousness: the shaped unchangeable, in being for pure consciousness, seems to get posited just as it is in and for its own self. Only what it is in and for its own self has not yet arisen, as was already recalled. For it to be in consciousness just as it is in and for its own self would have to proceed from it rather than from consciousness; as it stands, though, this presence of its is so far at hand only one-sidedly, through consciousness, and for that very reason is neither complete nor genuine, but stays weighed down with incompleteness, or with an opposition.

Although the unhappy consciousness therefore lacks this presence, it has at the same time gone past pure thinking, so far as pure thinking is Stoicism's abstract thinking, which looks away from singularity altogether, and skepticism's merely restless thinking, — which is in fact only singularity as the unconscious contradiction and its unresting movement; — it lies beyond the two of them, it brings pure thinking and singularity together and holds them so, and yet it has not risen to that thinking for which consciousness's singularity has been reconciled with pure thinking itself. It stands rather at this middle point, where abstract thinking touches the singularity of consciousness qua singularity. It itself is this touching; it is pure thinking and singularity in their unity; and for it too there is this thinking singularity, or pure thinking, and the unchangeable itself essentially as singularity. But it is not for it that this its object, the unchangeable, which for it essentially has the shape of singularity, is it itself, it itself which is the singularity of consciousness.

In this first mode, accordingly, the mode in which it stands before us as pure consciousness, it does not relate to its object by thinking; rather, since it is indeed in itself pure thinking singularity and its object is just that too, while their relation to one another is not itself pure thinking, it goes, so to speak, no further than up to thinking, and is devotion. Its thinking as such remains the shapeless droning of a peal of bells or a warm suffusion of mist, a musical thinking that never arrives at the concept, which would be the only immanent objective mode. Its object does indeed come to be for this infinite pure inner feeling; but it makes its entry so as not to enter as something grasped in a concept, and therefore enters as something alien. What is thereby at hand is the inner movement belonging to the pure heart, a heart that feels itself, but feels itself painfully as dividedness; the movement of an infinite longing which carries the certainty that its own essence is just such a pure heart, pure thinking that thinks itself as singularity; and the certainty that, precisely because this object thinks itself as singularity, the longing is cognized and recognized by it. This essence, however, is at the same time the unattainable beyond, which flees in the very grasping, or rather has fled already. It has fled already; for it is on one side the unchangeable that thinks itself as singularity, so that consciousness reaches its own self in it immediately, reaches itself, but as that which is opposed to the unchangeable; rather than grasping the essence it merely feels, and has dropped back into itself; unable, in reaching, to hold off itself as this opposed one, it has grasped, in place of the essence, only unessentiality. Just as on the one side, in striving to reach itself in the essence, it grasps only its own separated actuality, so on the other side it cannot grasp the other as singular, or as actual. Search where one will, it is not to be found, for it is meant to be precisely a beyond, the sort of thing that admits of no finding. Sought as something singular, it is not a universal, thought singularity, not a concept, but something singular as object, or something actual; an object of immediate sense-certainty; and precisely for that reason only something that has vanished. For consciousness, therefore, only the grave of its life can come to presence. But because the grave is itself an actuality, and it runs counter to the nature of actuality to grant any enduring possession, this presence of the grave too is only the struggle of an effort that is bound to be lost. Yet once it has undergone the experience that the grave belonging to its actual unchangeable essence possesses no actuality, that the vanished singularity, qua vanished, is not the true singularity, it will abandon the search for the unchangeable singularity as something actual and abandon holding fast to it as something vanished, and only thereby does it become capable of finding singularity as the most genuine, or as the universal.

To begin with, however, the heart's return into itself must be understood thus, that the heart has itself as singular actuality. It is the pure heart which has found itself, for us or in itself, and is sated within itself, for although for it the essence severs itself from it in its feeling, in itself that feeling is self-feeling: what it has felt is the object of its own pure feeling, and that object is the heart itself; so it comes forward out of this as self-feeling, or as something actual having being for itself. Within this return into itself there has come to be, for us, its second relationship, that of desire and labor, which corroborates for consciousness the inner certainty of itself that it has attained for us, doing so by sublating and enjoying the alien essence, namely that essence in the form of self-subsistent things. The unhappy consciousness, though, finds itself merely as desiring and laboring, and it is not at hand for it that what underlies finding itself in this way is the inner certainty it has of itself, and that what it feels as the essence is this self-feeling. Since it does not possess that certainty for its own self, its inner being remains rather a broken certainty of itself; the corroboration it would obtain through labor and enjoyment is for that reason equally a broken one; or rather it must itself annihilate this corroboration, so that within it it does find corroboration, yet only corroboration of what it is for itself, namely of its dividedness.

For this consciousness the actuality against which desire and labor turn is no longer something null in itself, to be merely sublated and consumed by it, but something of the same sort as consciousness itself, an actuality broken in two, which on one side alone is null in itself while on the other side is also a hallowed world; it constitutes a shape of the unchangeable, since the unchangeable has preserved singularity within itself, and since, being universal qua unchangeable, its singularity carries the significance of all actuality whatsoever.

If consciousness were for itself a self-subsistent consciousness, and if actuality were for it null in and for itself, then in labor and in enjoyment it would arrive at the feeling of its self-subsistence, in that it would itself be the one which sublated actuality . Yet since actuality is for it a shape of the unchangeable, it is unable to sublate that actuality through itself. Rather, although it does arrive at the annihilation of actuality and at enjoyment, this happens for it essentially through the unchangeable itself surrendering its own shape and handing it over to consciousness for enjoyment. — Here consciousness on its own part steps forward likewise as something actual, but equally as inwardly broken, and this dividedness exhibits itself in its laboring and enjoying as a breaking apart into a relationship to actuality, that is, into being-for-itself, and into a being-in-itself. The former relationship to actuality is altering, or doing, the being-for-itself that belongs to the singular consciousness as such. But therein it is also in itself; this side belongs to the unchangeable beyond; the side in question consists of capacities and forces, an alien gift that the unchangeable likewise leaves to consciousness for its use.

In its doing, accordingly, consciousness stands at first within the relationship of two extremes; on one side it stands as the active here below, and facing it stands passive actuality, the two of them related to one another and yet the two of them also withdrawn into the unchangeable and holding fast to themselves. From either side, therefore, only a surface comes loose toward the other, a surface that enters the play of movement directed against the other side. — The active extreme sublates the extreme of actuality; actuality on its side, however, admits of being sublated only because its own unchangeable essence sublates it, repels it away from itself, and surrenders what has been repelled to the activity. Active force makes its appearance as the power within which actuality dissolves; but for that reason, for this consciousness, whose in-itself or essence is another over against it, this power, in the guise of which it steps forward in its activity, is the beyond of its own self. So instead of returning into itself out of its doing and having corroborated itself for its own self, it reflects this movement of doing back into the other extreme, which is thereby exhibited as purely universal, as the absolute power out of which the movement issued in every direction, and which is said to be the essence alike of the extremes as they first stepped forward, now breaking up, and of the alternation itself.

The unchangeable consciousness makes renunciation of its shape and surrenders it, whereas the singular consciousness renders thanks, that is, refuses itself the satisfaction of the consciousness of its self-subsistence and consigns the essence of the doing away from itself over to the beyond; and through these two moments in which both parties reciprocally give themselves up, consciousness does after all come to have its unity with the unchangeable. But this unity is simultaneously afflicted with separation, broken within itself anew, and from it the opposition of the universal and the singular steps forth once more. For consciousness forswears the satisfaction of its self-feeling only ostensibly, whereas what it obtains is the actual satisfaction of that feeling; after all, desire, work, and enjoyment are what it has been; as consciousness, it is the one that has willed, done, and enjoyed. Its giving of thanks is no different: in it consciousness acknowledges the essence in the other extreme and sublates itself, and yet this thanking is its very own doing, one that offsets the doing of the other extreme and confronts the self-abandoning benefaction with a doing of equal weight; if the other leaves it nothing but its surface, consciousness thanks all the same, and therein, by surrendering its own doing, that is, its essence, it accomplishes rather more than the other does, which merely sheds a surface of itself. So the entire movement bends back into the extreme of singularity, and it does so not merely in the course of actual desiring, working, and enjoying, but even within the thanking, where the reverse appears to be taking place. In this consciousness feels itself to be this singular, and the semblance of its renouncing does not take it in, for the truth of that renouncing is that it has surrendered nothing of itself; what has been brought about is merely a reflection redoubled into the two extremes, and what results is a cleavage repeated once more: on one side the counterposed consciousness of the unchangeable, on the other the consciousness of the willing, accomplishing, and enjoying that stands over against it, and of the renouncing of self as such, or of singularity that exists for itself in general.

What has now entered is the third relationship belonging to the movement of this consciousness, a relationship issuing from the second inasmuch as consciousness has there put itself to the test, through its willing and accomplishing, and shown itself in truth to be self-subsistent. In the first relationship consciousness was merely the concept of actual consciousness, that is, the inward heart, which in doing and enjoyment is not yet actual; the second relationship is this actualization, in the form of outward doing and enjoying; but on returning from that, consciousness is one that has experienced itself as actual and effective consciousness, or one for which its being in and for itself is true. Here, however, the enemy has now been found out in his most proper shape. Within the struggle of the heart the singular consciousness exists merely as a musical and abstract moment; and where that essenceless being gets realized, namely in work and in enjoyment, consciousness can straightaway forget itself, while the conscious ownness that has arisen in this actuality is beaten down by the recognition that thanks. Yet this beating down amounts, truly considered, to consciousness returning into itself, and indeed into itself as the actuality that is genuine for it.

In this third relationship the one extreme is that genuine actuality, and what the relationship consists in is this actuality's relation, as a nullity, to the universal essence; the movement of that relation still remains to be considered.

As regards, first, the opposed relation of consciousness, in which its reality is immediately the null for it, its actual doing accordingly becomes a doing of nothing, and its enjoyment becomes the feeling of its unhappiness. With this, doing and enjoyment lose all universal content and significance, for through such content they would have a being in and for itself, and both withdraw into the singularity upon which consciousness is directed in order to sublate it. Consciousness is conscious of itself as this actual singular in the animal functions. Instead of being performed without further ado, as something that is in and for itself null and can acquire no importance or essentiality for spirit, these functions, since they are the ones in which the enemy shows himself in his peculiar shape, are rather the object of earnest exertion and become precisely what matters most. But since this enemy engenders himself in his very defeat, and consciousness, in fixing him for itself, far from becoming free of him, always lingers with him and always sees itself defiled, while at the same time this content of its striving is, instead of something essential, the lowest thing, and instead of something universal, the most singular, we see only a personality confined to itself and to its petty doing, brooding over itself, as unhappy as it is impoverished.

But to both of these, the feeling of its unhappiness and the impoverishment of its doing, there attaches itself no less the consciousness of its own unity with the unchangeable. For it is the thought of the unchangeable that mediates the annihilation which consciousness attempts immediately upon its actual being, and this occurs within this very relation. The mediated relation is what makes up the essence of the negative movement wherein consciousness sets itself against its own singularity, a movement that is nonetheless positive as well, being a relation in itself, and that will bring this unity of its into being for consciousness itself.

This mediated relation, accordingly, has the form of a syllogism: the singularity that initially fixes itself in opposition to the in-itself is conjoined with that other extreme only by way of a third term. It is through this middle that the extreme of unchangeable consciousness exists for the unessential consciousness, and contained in that at the same time is this, that the latter likewise exists for the former only through this middle; the middle is accordingly one that presents each of the two extremes to the other and acts as the reciprocal servant of each before the other. The middle is a conscious essence in its own right, for it is a doing through which consciousness as such gets mediated; and what this doing has for its content is the extirpation that consciousness performs upon its own singularity.

In this extirpation, then, consciousness sets itself free from doing and from enjoyment as its own; being the extreme that exists for itself, it pushes the essence of its will away from itself and unloads onto the middle, onto the servant, the ownness and the freedom of the decision, and along with these the guilt attaching to its doing. This mediator, standing in immediate relation to the unchangeable essence, serves by giving his counsel as to what is right. The action, being the carrying out of a decision that is alien, ceases on the side of the doing or of the will to be its own. But its objective side still remains to the unessential consciousness, namely the fruit of its work and the enjoyment. So it thrusts these away from itself as well, making renunciation of the actuality that accrued to it in work and enjoyment just as it did of its will; renunciation of that actuality in part as the achieved truth of its self-conscious self-subsistence — inasmuch as it goes about representing and voicing something entirely foreign to it and senseless; — in part as external property — inasmuch as it parts with a portion of what work had earned it in the way of possessions; in part renunciation of the enjoyment it has had — inasmuch as by fasting and mortification it once again refuses it to itself altogether.

By these moments, the giving up of its own decision, then of property and enjoyment, and finally the positive moment of pursuing a business that it does not understand, consciousness genuinely and entirely strips itself of the consciousness of inner and of outer freedom, of actuality as its being-for-itself; it possesses the certainty of having truly externalized its I, and of having made a thing of its immediate self-consciousness, an objective being. — Only through this actual sacrifice was consciousness able to corroborate its renunciation of itself; for it is there and nowhere else that the fraud disappears which resides in the inward recognition given by thanking with heart, disposition, and mouth, a recognition that does indeed shove all the power of being-for-itself off itself and credit it to a bestowal from above, but that in this very shoving-off retains the outer ownness for itself in the possession which it does not surrender, while retaining the inner ownness in the consciousness of a decision it has itself arrived at, and in the consciousness of a content of its own determining, which it has not exchanged for an alien content that fills it senselessly.

But in the sacrifice that has actually been carried out, just as consciousness has sublated the doing as its own, so too, in itself, its unhappiness has let go of it. That this letting-go has taken place in itself is, however, something done by the syllogism's other extreme, the extreme that is the in-itself-existing essence. Yet that sacrifice on the part of the unessential extreme was at once no one-sided doing; it held within itself the doing of the other as well. For the surrender of one's own will is negative on one side only, namely according to its concept or in itself, while being positive at the same time: it posits the will as an other, and determinately as a will that is not singular but universal. For this consciousness the positive significance carried by the negatively posited singular will is nothing other than the will belonging to the other extreme, a will that accrues to it, precisely because it is another for it, not by its own agency but by way of the third, the mediator in the form of counsel. Hence for it its will does indeed become the universal will, the will that is in itself, but it itself is not for itself this in-itself; the giving up of its own will as singular is not for it, according to the concept, the positive of the universal will. Likewise its giving up of possession and enjoyment has only the same negative significance, and the universal that comes to be for it thereby is not for it its own doing. This unity of the objective and of being-for-itself, a unity residing in the concept of doing and on that account becoming for consciousness the essence and object, — since this unity is not for consciousness the concept of its own doing, neither is it the case that the unity comes to be object for it immediately and by its own agency; instead, consciousness has the mediating servant articulate for it this certainty, itself still broken, that only in itself is its unhappiness the inverted, namely a doing self-satisfying in its own doing, or blessed enjoyment; that its impoverished doing is likewise in itself the inverted, namely absolute doing; and that according to the concept, doing is doing at all only as the doing of the singular. But for it itself, doing, and its actual doing, remains an impoverished one, and its enjoyment remains pain, and their having-been-sublated, taken in the positive significance, remains a beyond. But in this object, wherein its doing and being as this singular consciousness is being and doing in itself for it, there has arisen for it the representation of reason, of the certainty of consciousness that in its singularity it is absolutely in itself, or is all reality.

V. Certainty and Truth of Reason

Consciousness goes back into itself within the thought it has laid hold of, the thought that the singular consciousness is in itself absolute essence. Being-in-itself, for the unhappy consciousness, amounts to the beyond of itself. Yet its movement has already carried this out on it: singularity in its full development, or singularity as actual consciousness, has been posited as the negative of itself, namely as the objective extreme, and its being-for-itself has been wrestled outward from it and turned into being; in that, its unity with this universal has likewise come to be for it, a unity which, for us, no longer falls outside it, since the singular that has been sublated is the universal; and because consciousness preserves itself within this negativity of its own, its essence lies in it as such. Its truth is what shows itself as the middle in that syllogism where the extremes had stepped forth absolutely held apart, the middle which announces to the unchangeable consciousness that the singular has renounced itself, and announces to the singular that the unchangeable is for it no longer an extreme, but is instead reconciled with the singular itself. This middle is that unity which has immediate knowledge of both and relates them to one another, and it is the consciousness of their unity, which it announces to consciousness and thereby to its own self, namely as the certainty that it is all truth.

Since self-consciousness is reason, the relationship it has had to otherness, negative up to this point, swings over into a positive one. What has mattered to it hitherto was solely its self-subsistence and its freedom: to salvage and hold on to itself, for its own sake, at the cost of the world or of the actuality belonging to it, both of which it had seen as the negative of its own essence. But as reason that is assured of its own self, it has received calm in the face of them and is able to bear them; for it has certainty of its own self as the reality, or rather certainty that all actuality is nothing other than it; its thinking is immediately the actuality itself; and so it relates itself to actuality as idealism. In grasping itself in this way, it seems to it as if the world were only now coming to be for it; earlier it does not understand the world; it desires it and works on it; it withdraws out of it into itself, and annihilates it for itself, and annihilates itself as consciousness, as consciousness of the world as the essence, and equally as consciousness of the world's nullity. It is at this point and no earlier, once the grave of its truth has been lost, once the annihilating of its actuality has itself been annihilated, and once the singularity of consciousness is for it in itself absolute essence, that it discovers the world to be its own new actual world, a world that holds interest for it now in its remaining, as earlier only in its vanishing; for the subsistence of that world becomes for it the truth and presence that are its own; and it is certain that what it experiences there is nothing but itself.

Reason is consciousness's certainty of being all reality: in these terms idealism states reason's concept. Just as the consciousness that steps forth as reason possesses that certainty immediately in itself, so too does idealism enunciate it immediately: I am I, and the sense of this is that the I which is my object is not, as it is in self-consciousness generally, nor as in free self-consciousness, in the former case merely an empty object in general, in the latter merely an object that pulls back from the others which are still valid alongside it, but is rather an object accompanied by the consciousness of the non-being of any other whatever, the one and only object, all reality and presence. But self-consciousness is all reality not only for itself but also in itself, and it is so only by becoming this reality, or rather by proving itself to be such. It proves itself so along the path on which, first, in the dialectical movement of meaning, perceiving, and the understanding, otherness as in itself vanishes, and then, in the movement through the self-subsistence of consciousness in mastery and servitude, through the thought of freedom, the skeptical liberation, and the struggle for the absolute liberation of the consciousness split in two within itself, otherness, insofar as it is only for it, vanishes for it itself. Two sides came forward in succession: on the one, the determinateness of being belonged, for consciousness, to the essence or the true; on the other, the essence had merely to be for it. Yet the two of them came down to a single truth: that whatever is, or the in-itself, has being only to the extent that it is for consciousness, while whatever is for it is likewise in itself. In stepping forth immediately as reason, the consciousness which is this truth has that path behind its back and has let it fall into forgetting; or, otherwise put, reason in its immediate stepping forth arises solely as the certainty belonging to that truth. So it merely gives assurance of being all reality, without itself comprehending what it says; for the comprehension of this immediately expressed assertion is precisely that forgotten path. And likewise, for anyone who has not traveled it, this assertion — heard in this pure form, since in a concrete shape he no doubt makes it himself — is incomprehensible.

Idealism, which does not exhibit that path but begins with this assertion, is therefore likewise pure assurance, one that neither comprehends itself nor can make itself comprehensible to others. It pronounces an immediate certainty that faces other immediate certainties standing over against it, certainties which were lost on that path alone. By the same right, then, the assurances belonging to these other certainties set themselves alongside the assurance given for that certainty. Reason invokes the self-consciousness present in each consciousness: I am I; what is object and essence to me is I; and none will deny reason this truth. But by founding it upon this appeal, reason gives its sanction to the truth of that other certainty as well, namely to this one: there is something other for me; what is other than I counts as object and essence for me, or, when I am my own object and essence, I am so only insofar as I draw back from the other in general and take my place as an actuality alongside it. — Only when reason steps forth as reflection out of this opposed certainty does its assertion about itself step forth not merely as certainty and assurance but as truth; and not alongside others, but as the sole one. The immediate stepping forth is the abstraction of its being-at-hand, whose essence and being-in-itself is the absolute concept, that is, the movement of its having-become. — How consciousness determines its relationship to otherness, that is, to its object, will vary with the particular stage of the world-spirit's becoming conscious of itself at which consciousness happens to stand. The manner in which, on each occasion, it immediately comes upon itself and its object and gives them their determination, or the manner in which it is for itself, turns on this: what it has by now become, or what it in itself already is.

Reason is the certainty of being all of reality. This in-itself, however, or this reality, remains something wholly universal as yet, reality in its pure abstraction. What we have here is the first positivity that self-consciousness has in its own self, for itself, so that the I amounts to nothing more than the pure essentiality of what is, in other words the simple category. Formerly the category signified the essentiality of what is, indeterminately the essentiality of what is in general or of what is as set over against consciousness; now it is the essentiality, or the simple unity, that what is has only as thinking actuality; that is to say, it is this: that being and self-consciousness are one and the same essence; and they are the same not through any comparison, but in and for itself. Only the one-sided, bad idealism lets this unity step forth once more as consciousness on the one side, with an in-itself over against it. — This category, though, this simple unity of being and of self-consciousness, has difference in it all the same; for its essence consists in just this, in being immediately equal to itself within otherness, within absolute difference. Difference therefore is; but it is completely transparent, and is a difference that at the same time is none. It makes its appearance as a multiplicity of categories. When idealism pronounces self-consciousness's simple unity to be all reality, and when it makes that unity the essence immediately, without having comprehended it as absolutely negative essence — only such an essence has negation, determinateness, or difference in itself — then this second point, that within the category there are differences or species, proves still more incomprehensible than the first. This assurance in general, as well as the assurance of any determinate number of the category's species, is a new assurance, though one that contains in itself the point that it no longer needs to be put up with as an assurance. For since difference begins within the pure I, within the pure understanding itself, it is thereby posited that here immediacy, the assuring and the finding, are to be given up, and that comprehending is to begin. But to pick up the multiplicity of categories once again in one way or another as something found, from the judgments, for example, and simply to acquiesce in them, is in truth to be counted a disgrace for science; where else could the understanding show a necessity, if it cannot show one in its own case, the case of pure necessity itself.

Since the pure essentiality that things have, along with their difference, now belongs to reason, strictly speaking there could no longer be any talk at all of things, that is, of anything that for consciousness would be nothing but the negative of itself. For if the pure category has the many categories as its species, this says that it remains their genus or essence and is not set over against them. But they are already the ambiguous, which at the same time has in itself the otherness against the pure category in its multiplicity. By this multiplicity they do in fact contradict it, and the pure unity is bound to sublate them within itself, whereby it constitutes itself as the differences' negative unity. In its character as negative unity, however, it shuts out from itself the differences taken as such no less than it shuts out that first pure unity, the immediate one, taken as such; and so it is singularity, a new category, one that is excluding consciousness, that is, one that consists in there being something other for it. Singularity is the transition the category makes out of its concept toward an external reality: the pure schema that is consciousness quite as much as, in being singularity and an excluding One, it is the pointing toward something other. But what counts as this other of this category is nothing but the other first categories, namely pure essentiality together with pure difference; and within this category, that is, precisely within the being-posited of the other, or within that other itself, consciousness is just as much its own self. Every one of these distinct moments points to another; yet within them it never comes to any otherness. It is to the species that the pure category points, and they in turn make their transition into the negative category, or singularity; the latter, though, points back to the former; the latter is itself pure consciousness, which in each of them remains for itself this clear unity with itself, though a unity that is likewise directed toward something other, toward what has vanished in the very act of being and is generated once more in the very act of having vanished.

We see pure consciousness posited here in a doubled way: at one time as the restless going back and forth that runs through all its moments, with otherness hovering before it in them, an otherness that sublates itself in the act of grasping; at another time rather as the calm unity which has certainty of its truth. That movement counts as the other where this unity is concerned, while this calm unity counts as the other where the movement is concerned; and consciousness and object take turns in these reciprocal determinations. So at one time consciousness is for itself the searching that goes back and forth, having as its object the pure in-itself and essence; at another time it is for itself the simple category, and the object is then the differences in their movement. But consciousness as essence is this whole course itself: passing over out of itself as simple category into singularity and into the object, intuiting this course in the object, sublating it as something distinct, appropriating it, and giving voice to itself as this certainty: that it is all reality, both it itself and its object.

What it pronounces first is nothing but this abstract, empty word: that everything is its own. This is because the certainty that it is all reality is as yet nothing more than the pure category. Empty idealism gives expression to this first reason that cognizes itself in the object, an idealism which apprehends reason only as reason at first is for itself, and which, by exhibiting within all being this pure Mine belonging to consciousness and by pronouncing things to be sensations or representations, imagines it has shown that Mine to be completed reality. It must therefore be absolute empiricism at the same time, for in order to fill out the empty Mine, that is, for difference and for all development and shaping of that Mine, its reason requires an alien impetus, in which alone the manifoldness of sensing or representing is supposed to reside. This idealism therefore becomes the same sort of self-contradicting ambiguity as skepticism, except that skepticism expresses itself negatively and idealism positively, though it just as little brings together its contradictory thoughts, pure consciousness as all reality, and equally the alien impetus, or sensuous sensing and representing, as an equal reality, but instead flings itself back and forth from the one to the other and has lapsed into the bad, namely the sensuous, infinity. Inasmuch as all reality, for reason, has the significance of the abstract Mine, while the other is to it an indifferent alien, what gets posited in this is precisely the knowledge reason has of another, the very knowledge that showed up earlier as meaning, perceiving, and as the understanding that apprehends what is meant and what is perceived. At the same time it is the concept of this idealism itself that asserts such knowledge not to be true knowledge, since the truth of knowledge lies in the unity of apperception and nowhere else. So the pure reason of this idealism, in order to arrive at this other which is essential to it, that is to say, which is the in-itself, and which it nevertheless does not possess within its own self, is sent back by its own doing to a knowledge that is no knowledge of the true; knowingly and willingly it thus sentences itself to an untrue knowledge, and it proves unable to give up meaning and perceiving, though these hold no truth for it. It stands in an immediate contradiction, asserting as the essence a doubled and flatly opposed pair, the unity of apperception and equally the thing, which, whether one calls it an alien impetus, or an empirical essence, or sensuousness, or the thing in itself, stays in its concept just what it was, something alien to that unity.

What holds this idealism inside the contradiction is its asserting reason's abstract concept to be the true; hence reality arises for it immediately, and arises just as much as a reality that is precisely not reason's reality, whereas reason was meant at the same time to be all reality; and so it stays a restless searching, one that in the very searching declares the satisfaction of finding to be flatly impossible. — Actual reason, however, is not so inconsistent as that; rather, being as yet no more than the certainty that it is all reality, it is aware within this concept that as certainty, as I, it is not yet the reality in truth, and it is driven on to lift its certainty into truth and to fill out the empty Mine.

A. Observing Reason

This consciousness, for which being carries the significance of what is its own, we now see entering once more into meaning and perceiving, yet not as entering the certainty of something merely other, but with the certainty of itself being this other. Formerly it had merely befallen this consciousness to perceive and to experience this or that about the thing; here it sets up the observations and the experience on its own. Meaning and perceiving, which earlier sublated themselves for us, consciousness now sublates for itself; reason's aim is to know the truth, to locate as concept whatever counts as a thing for meaning and perceiving, which amounts to having within thinghood nothing but the consciousness of itself. Reason's interest in the world is therefore now universal, for reason is the certainty that it has presence there, or that presence is rational. It searches for its other while knowing that in it there is nothing to possess but itself; what it searches for is only its own infinity.

At first merely sensing itself in actuality, or knowing actuality only as its own in a general way, reason advances in this sense to a universal taking-possession of the property guaranteed to it, and upon every height and in every depth it plants the emblem of its sovereignty. But this superficial "mine" is not reason's ultimate interest; the joy of this universal taking-possession still finds within its property another that stays alien to it, another abstract reason does not have in its own self. Reason senses itself to be an essence deeper than the pure I is, and it has to demand that difference, manifold being, become for it its own, that it intuit itself as actuality, and that it find itself present as shape and thing. But though reason burrow through all the innards of things and lay open all their veins so that it might leap forth to meet itself out of them, it will not arrive at this good fortune; rather, it must beforehand have brought itself to completion in itself, so as then to be capable of experiencing its completion.

Consciousness observes; that is, reason wants to discover itself and to have itself as an object that has being, as an actual, sensuously present mode. This observing consciousness does, to be sure, mean and say that it wants to experience not itself but, on the contrary, the essence that things have as things. This consciousness means and says so because it is reason while reason is not yet an object for it as such. If it knew reason to be the same essence in things as in itself, and knew that only within consciousness can reason be present in the shape proper to it, then it would descend into its own depth and look for reason there rather than in things. Had it found reason in that depth, reason would be sent back out from there to actuality, so as to intuit within actuality its sensuous expression, yet would at once take that expression essentially as concept. Reason, in the way it comes forward immediately as consciousness's certainty of being all reality, understands its reality to mean the immediacy of being, and likewise understands the I's unity with this objective essence to mean an immediate unity, a unity in which it has not yet held the moments of being and I apart and then joined them again, or which it has not yet cognized. As observing consciousness it therefore goes at things under the opinion that it is taking them in truth as sensuous things set over against the I; yet its actual doing runs counter to that opinion, for it cognizes things, it transforms their sensuousness into concepts, that is, precisely into a being that is simultaneously I, and thereby transforms thinking into a thinking that has being, or being into a being that is thought, and in fact it asserts that only as concepts do things have truth. What emerges in this for this observing consciousness is only what the things are, while for us it is what it itself is; the result of its movement, though, will be that it comes to be for itself what it is in itself.

The doing of observing reason has to be examined through the moments belonging to its movement, in which it takes up nature, spirit, and finally the relation between the two as sensuous being, and searches for itself as an actuality that has being.

a. Observation of Nature

Should thoughtless consciousness pronounce observation and experience to be the source of truth, its words may indeed sound as if everything turned on nothing but taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight; so eager is it to commend taste, smell, and so on, that it neglects to add that it has in fact, and quite as essentially, already determined for itself the object of such sensing, and that this determination weighs with it at least as much as that sensing does. It will also concede at once that it is not simply perceiving as such that concerns it, and it will not let the perception that this penknife is lying next to this snuffbox count as an observation. What is perceived must at least stand for a universal, not for a sensuous this.

Thus far this universal is only what remains the same as itself; its movement, nothing but the unvarying return of one and the same doing. To the extent that consciousness meets with nothing in the object but universality or the abstract mine, it has to assume the object's proper movement onto itself; not yet being the understanding of that object, it has at least to be its memory, giving universal expression to what, in actuality, is on hand only in singular fashion. Such shallow extraction from singularity, together with a no less shallow form of universality that merely receives the sensuous without the sensuous having itself become universal, in short the describing of things, still lacks the movement within the object itself; the movement lies instead solely in the describing. Once described, the object has thereby forfeited all interest; with one of them finished, another must be taken in hand and the searching must go on without end, so that the describing does not run dry. Once new whole things become hard to come by, recourse must be had to the ones already in hand, dividing them up further, laying them apart, and ferreting out yet more sides of thinghood in them. This restless, unquiet instinct can never run short of material; to find a new and distinguished genus, or indeed a new planet, which, though it is an individual, still has the nature of a universal belonging to it, can fall only to the lucky few. But the boundaries of what, like the elephant, the oak, gold, is distinguished, of what is genus and species, pass through many gradations into the endless particularization of the chaotic animals and plants, of the kinds of rock, or of the metals, earths and so on that must first be produced by force and art. In that realm where the universal is indeterminate, a realm in which particularization draws close once more to singularization and here and there sinks entirely back into it, an inexhaustible supply stands open for observing and describing. Yet here, at the boundary of the universal, where a field defying all survey opens before it, what it may rather have come upon is not an immeasurable wealth but only the barrier set by nature and by its own doing; knowing whether that which appears to be in itself is not instead a contingency is now beyond it; and anything carrying the mark of a muddled or unripe formation, feeble and hardly working its way out of elemental indeterminateness, cannot claim even to be described.

Even if the things alone appear to be what such seeking and describing is after, what we actually see is that it does not run its course along sensuous perceiving; instead it attaches more weight to whatever it is by which things are cognized than to the rest of the compass of sensuous properties, properties the thing itself certainly cannot spare, though consciousness relieves itself of them. By drawing this distinction between the essential and the inessential, the concept lifts itself clear of sensuous dispersion, and cognition thereby avows that its concern is at least as essentially with itself as it is with the things. Faced with this doubled essentiality it begins to waver over whether that which cognition finds essential and necessary belongs likewise to the things. In one respect the marks are to serve cognition alone, as the means by which it tells things apart; in another respect, though, what is to be cognized is not the inessential in things but that whereby they tear themselves free of being's universal continuity as such, sever themselves from the other, and are for themselves. Not only are the marks to stand in an essential relation to cognition; they are also to be the things' essential determinatenesses, and the artificial system is to accord with nature's own system and give expression to nothing but that. This follows necessarily from the concept of reason, and reason's instinct — for in this observing reason behaves merely as instinct — has in its systems indeed attained such unity, namely wherever the constitution of its own objects is such that they carry an essentiality or a being-for-itself about them and are not simply the accident of this moment or this Here. For animals, say, the distinguishing marks are drawn from claws and teeth; for in fact cognition is not alone in using them to distinguish one animal from another; the animal itself thereby sets itself apart; by these weapons it maintains itself for itself and in separation from the universal. The plant, by contrast, does not attain being-for-itself but only touches the boundary of individuality; at this boundary, where it displays the shine of a splitting-in-two into sexes, it has therefore been taken up and distinguished. But what stands lower down can no longer distinguish itself from another and is instead lost as soon as it enters into opposition. Being at rest and being in relation come into conflict with each other; in the latter the thing is something other than it is according to the former, whereas the individual is precisely this, to preserve itself in relation to another. Whatever is incapable of this, however, and chemically becomes something other than what it empirically is, throws cognition into confusion and lands it in that same conflict about which of the two sides to cleave to, seeing that the thing is itself nothing that stays constant and that in it the sides come apart.

In such systems of the universal that remains the same as itself, then, this universal has the significance of being what remains the same as itself in cognition just as much as in the things themselves. Yet this spreading out of the determinatenesses that stay the same, each of which quietly traces the series of its own advance and is allowed room to hold good for itself, essentially passes over no less into its opposite, into the confusion of those very determinatenesses; for what the mark is, the universal determinateness, is a unity of opposites, of the determinate together with what is universal in itself; hence it must step apart into that opposition. If on one side, then, determinateness gets the better of that universal wherein its essence lies, on the other side the universal preserves its mastery over determinateness just as well, pressing it out to its limit and there blending its differences and essentialities together. Observing, which had kept them tidily apart and supposed it possessed something firm in them, watches one principle overreach the others, watches transitions and confusions take shape, and watches what it had first taken as utterly separate become joined here, and what it had reckoned together become separated; so that this holding fast to a calm being that remains the same as itself must, in its most universal determinations of all, for instance as to what essential marks belong to the animal or to the plant, find itself mocked by instances that strip it of every determination, reduce to silence the universality it had risen to, and throw it back upon thoughtless observing and describing.

Observing of this kind, which confines itself to the simple or curbs sensuous dispersion by means of the universal, accordingly comes upon the confusion of its own principle in its object, since by its very nature the determinate is bound to lose itself in what is opposed to it; reason must for that reason press on from the sluggish determinateness, which had the semblance of permanence, to the observing of that determinateness as it truly is, namely as standing in relation to its opposite. The so-called essential marks are resting determinatenesses which, expressed and apprehended as simple in the way they are, fail to exhibit what their nature really consists in, namely being vanishing moments of the movement that withdraws into itself. Now that the instinct of reason sets about seeking out determinateness in keeping with its nature, essentially not to be for itself but to go over into what is opposed to it, it looks for the law of determinateness and for its concept; it looks for these, admittedly, as an actuality that equally is, yet that actuality is in truth going to disappear for it, while the law's sides turn into sheer moments, or abstractions, with the result that the law steps forth within the nature of a concept that has annihilated in itself the indifferent subsistence of sensuous actuality.

Observing consciousness locates the truth of the law in experience, that is, in the mode whereby sensuous being is for it; the law's truth does not lie in and for itself. Should the law, however, fail to possess its truth in the concept, it is then something contingent rather than a necessity, indeed not a law at all. Yet that it essentially is as concept not only fails to conflict with its being present for observation; rather, for that very reason it has necessary existence and is there for observation. What is universal in the sense of reason's universality is universal too in the sense that observation attaches to it, namely that for consciousness it presents itself as what is present and actual, or that the concept exhibits itself after the manner of thinghood and sensuous being; — yet without thereby forfeiting its nature and having sunk into sluggish subsistence or indifferent succession. What is universally valid also holds universally; what ought to be, is in fact also, and what merely ought to be without being has no truth. To this the instinct of reason rightly holds fast for its part, and refuses to be led astray by the thought-things that merely ought to be and are supposed to have truth as an ought even though they are met with in no experience — as little by hypotheses as by all the other invisibilities of a perennial ought; for reason is precisely this certainty of having reality, and whatever is not there for consciousness as an essence that is a self, that is, whatever does not appear, is for it nothing at all.

That the truth of the law is essentially reality does indeed become, for this consciousness that stays with observing, once more an opposition to the concept and to what is universal in itself; or something such as its law is is for it not an essence of reason; it supposes that in this it receives something alien. Yet it refutes this supposition of its own by what it does, since it does not itself take the law's universality in the sense that all singular sensuous things would have to have shown it the appearance of the law before it could assert the law's truth. For stones to fall when lifted from the earth and let go, it by no means demands that the experiment be carried out on every stone; it may indeed say that a great many at least must have been tried, and that from these one could then draw a conclusion about the remainder, with the highest probability or with full warrant by analogy. Yet analogy not only gives no full right; by its very nature it refutes itself so often that, to infer by analogy itself, analogy rather permits no inference to be drawn at all. The probability to which its result would reduce loses, over against truth, every difference between lesser and greater probability; however great it may be, it is nothing against truth. In fact, though, the instinct of reason accepts such laws as truth, and it is only with respect to their necessity, which it does not cognize, that it lapses into this distinction and demotes the truth of the matter itself to probability, so as to designate the defective mode in which truth is on hand for a consciousness that has not yet reached insight into the pure concept; universality, after all, is on hand merely as simple, immediate universality. Yet it is on account of that same universality that the law holds truth for consciousness; that the stone falls is true for consciousness because for it the stone is heavy, that is, because in virtue of its heaviness the stone bears in and for itself the essential relation to the earth, a relation that expresses itself as falling. So in experience it has the law's being, but equally has the law as concept, and the law is true for it only because both circumstances hold together; the law counts as a law on the ground that it exhibits itself in appearance while being in its own self concept.

Since the law is at once concept in itself, the instinct of reason belonging to this consciousness necessarily aims, albeit unaware that this is its own aim, at purifying into the concept both the law and the law's moments. It conducts experiments on the law. In its first appearing the law presents itself impurely, shrouded in singular sensuous being, the concept that makes up its nature lying sunk in empirical material. What the instinct of reason aims at in its experiments is to find out what ensues under these circumstances and those. By this the law seems only to be dipped all the more into sensuous being; yet it is rather sensuous being that gets lost in the process. The inner significance of such research is to find pure conditions of the law; and that says neither more nor less, however much the consciousness which so expresses itself may fancy it is saying something else, than that the law is to be raised entirely into the shape of the concept and that every bond of its moments to determinate being is to be erased. Take negative electricity, which announces itself at first perhaps as resinous electricity, as the positive announces itself as vitreous electricity: through the experiments it forfeits that significance altogether and becomes electricity that is simply positive and simply negative, with neither of the two belonging any more to some particular sort of things; and one can no longer say that some bodies are positively electric and others negatively so. In the same way the relation of acid and base and their movement against each other makes up a law in which these opposites appear as bodies. These separated-off things, however, possess no actuality; the violence by which they are torn apart is powerless to keep them from re-entering a process straightaway, for this relation is all that they are. Unlike a tooth or a claw, they cannot persist for themselves and be pointed out in that fashion. Their essence being just this, to go over without mediation into a neutral product, their being is thereby made into a being sublated in itself, that is, into a universal one, and acid and base possess truth solely as universals. Hence, just as glass and resin admit of being electric positively no less than negatively, acid and base are not tied down as a property to one actuality or another; every thing is instead acid or basic only relatively; and whatever looks to be a decided base or acid acquires, in the so-called synsomaties, the reverse significance with respect to something else. — The upshot of the experiments thus sublates the moments, or inspiritings, in their character as properties of determinate things, and it liberates the predicates from their subjects. Such predicates, taken as they are in truth, turn up only as universals; for the sake of this self-subsistence they accordingly acquire the name of matters, being neither bodies nor properties. And one takes good care not to call oxygen and so on, positive and negative electricity, heat and so on, bodies.

Matter, on the other hand, is no thing that is, but rather being taken as universal, being after the manner of the concept. Reason, still instinct as it is, makes this distinction correctly, yet without the consciousness that when it tries the law out upon everything sensuous in being, it is precisely there sublating the law's merely sensuous being, and that when it apprehends the law's moments as matters, their essentiality has become universal for it and is pronounced in that very expression as a sensuous that is non-sensuous, as a being both bodiless and objective.

We must now see how its result turns out for it, and which new shape of its observing thereby comes on the scene. As the truth of this experimenting consciousness we see the pure law that frees itself from sensuous being; we see it as concept, which is present in sensuous being yet moves within it self-subsistently and unbound, submerged in it yet free of it and a simple concept. What in truth is the result and the essence now comes on the scene for this consciousness in its own right, yet as an object, and, precisely because for consciousness it is not a result at all and lacks any bearing on the movement that preceded, it comes on the scene as an object of a particular kind, its relation to which is another kind of observing.

The organic is such an object, one that carries the process about it in the simplicity of the concept. It is that absolute fluidity wherein whatever determinateness would make it merely something for another has been dissolved. If the inorganic thing has determinateness for its essence, and for that reason constitutes the full complement of the concept's moments only in company with some other thing, and is therefore lost once it enters into movement, in the organic essence, by contrast, every determinateness through which it stands open to another is tied beneath the simple unity of the organism; not one of them steps forward as essential in a manner that would relate freely to another; and so the organic maintains itself in its very relating.

As follows from this determination, the sides of the law that the instinct of reason here sets out to observe are, to begin with, organic nature together with inorganic nature, each as related to the other. The latter is, for organic nature, precisely that freedom of untied determinatenesses which stands opposed to organic nature's simple concept, determinatenesses in which individual nature is at once dissolved, and from whose continuity it at once marks itself off so as to be for itself. Universal elements of this sort are air, water, earth, zones and climate; they constitute the indeterminate simple essence of individualities, within which those individualities are at once reflected into themselves. Individuality is not simply in and for itself, nor is the elemental; rather, within the self-subsistent freedom in which the two come forward against one another for observation, they relate themselves at the same time as essential relations, though in such fashion that what predominates is the self-subsistence and mutual indifference of both, which passes over into abstraction only in part. Law is present here, then, in the guise of an element's relation to the formation of the organic, an organic that at one moment has elemental being confronting it and at another exhibits that being in its own organic reflection. Yet laws of this sort, that animals belonging to the air are of the constitution of birds, those belonging to water of the constitution of fish, that northern animals have a thickly haired pelt, and so forth, immediately betray a poverty unequal to the manifoldness of the organic. Besides the fact that organic freedom knows how to withdraw its forms from such determinations once more, and necessarily presents exceptions everywhere to laws or rules of that kind, whatever one may care to call them, even in the very instances that do fall under them the determination stays so superficial that the expression of their necessity cannot be otherwise either and gets no further than great influence, with no one knowing what actually pertains to such influence and what does not. Such relations of the organic to the elemental are therefore not in truth to be called laws, since on the one hand, as was recalled, a relation of this kind by no means exhausts, by its content, the compass of the organic, while on the other hand the relation's own moments stay indifferent toward one another and give voice to no necessity. The concept of base lies within the concept of acid, as negative electricity lies within the concept of positive electricity; but however often a thickly haired pelt may be met with alongside the north, or the build of fish alongside water, or the build of birds alongside air, the concept of the north contains no concept of thick hair, that of the sea none of the build of fish, that of the air none of the build of birds. Owing to this freedom of both sides toward each other, there are also land animals bearing the essential characters of a bird, or of the fish, and so on. Because necessity admits of no comprehension as anything inner to the essence, it likewise ceases to possess sensuous existence and is no longer observable in actuality; it has instead stepped out of actuality. Failing thus to be found in the real essence itself, necessity is that which goes by the name of teleological relation, a relation external to the terms it relates and hence the very reverse of a law. It is thought entirely freed from necessary nature, thought that abandons nature and moves for itself above it.

If the relation of the organic to elemental nature touched on above does not express the organic's essence, that essence is by contrast contained in the concept of purpose. For this observing consciousness, to be sure, the concept of purpose is not the organic's own essence but falls outside it, and is then only that external, teleological relation. Yet on the determination of the organic given a moment ago, the organic is really the real purpose itself; for since in its relation to another it is itself that it keeps in being, it is just that natural essence wherein nature bends back into the concept, drawing into one the moments that necessity had laid apart, those of a cause and an effect, of an agent and a patient; so that what comes forward here is not merely a result of necessity; rather, since it has withdrawn into itself, what is last, the result, is equally the first that begins the movement, and is its own purpose, which it brings to actuality. The organic does not bring something forth; it only preserves itself, or what is brought forth is already just as much present as it is brought forth.

We must look more closely at this determination, in its being in itself no less than in its being for the instinct of reason, so as to see how that instinct finds itself therein and yet fails to recognize itself in its own find. The concept of purpose, then, to which observing reason lifts itself, being reason's conscious concept, is on hand quite as much as something actual; nor is it a mere external relation of that actual, but the actual's essence. To say that this actual, itself a purpose, relates purposively to another is to say that its relating is contingent in respect of what the two immediately are; immediately, the two are self-subsistent and indifferent toward each other. The essence of their relating is nevertheless other than what they seem thus to be, and their doing carries a different sense from the one it has immediately for sensuous perceiving; necessity lies hidden in what takes place and comes to light only at the end, though in such manner that the end itself reveals necessity to have been the first as well. And the end demonstrates this priority of its own by the circumstance that the alteration which the doing has undertaken yields nothing other than what already was. Or, beginning from the first, we find that at its end, in the result of its doing, it merely returns to itself; and just thereby it proves to be something having itself for its end, something therefore that as first has already returned into itself, something that is in and for itself. What it attains through the movement of its doing is thus itself; and that it attains only itself is its self-feeling. Herewith a difference is indeed on hand, the difference of what it is from what it seeks, yet this amounts only to the semblance of a difference, and by this it is concept in its own self.

But self-consciousness is constituted in just this way, to distinguish itself from itself in a manner in which at the same time no difference comes out. Observing organic nature, it accordingly comes upon nothing but this essence; it comes upon its own self as a thing, as a life, while still drawing a difference between what it is itself and what it has found, a difference that is none. As the animal's instinct hunts for fodder and consumes it, thereby bringing forth nothing but itself, the instinct of reason likewise comes upon nothing but reason itself in its own hunting. The animal ends with self-feeling. The instinct of reason, on the contrary, is self-consciousness as well; but being merely instinct, it is placed off to the side over against consciousness and has its opposite in consciousness. Its satisfaction is therefore split in two by this opposite; it does indeed find itself, namely the purpose, and likewise finds this purpose as a thing. But in the first place the purpose falls for it outside the thing that presents itself as purpose. Secondly, this purpose qua purpose is at once objective, and hence it too does not fall for the instinct within itself as consciousness, but into some other understanding.

Looked at more closely, this determination lies no less within the thing's own concept, namely that the thing is purpose in its own self. For it maintains itself; that is, at the same time, concealing necessity and exhibiting it under the form of a contingent relation belongs to the thing's nature; for its freedom, its being-for-itself, consists precisely in this, that it relates itself indifferently toward what is necessary to it; and so it exhibits itself as something whose concept would fall outside its being. In the same way reason has the necessity of intuiting its own concept as falling outside it, and hence as a thing, as something toward which it is indifferent and which reciprocally is indifferent toward reason and toward its own concept. As instinct, reason too halts within this being, this indifference, and the thing giving expression to the concept remains for reason distinct from that concept, the concept distinct from the thing. For reason, accordingly, the organic thing is purpose in its own self only in the sense that the necessity presenting itself as concealed within the thing's doing, given that in that doing the agent relates itself as something indifferent and being for itself, falls outside the organic itself. — But since the organic as purpose in its own self cannot relate itself otherwise than as such, the fact that it is purpose in its own self is also apparent and sensuously present, and it is observed as such. The organic shows itself as something preserving itself and returning into itself and having returned. But in this being the observing consciousness does not cognize the concept of purpose, or does not cognize that the concept of purpose exists not somewhere else in an understanding but precisely here, and is as a thing. It draws a difference, one that is none, between the concept of purpose on the one hand and, on the other, being-for-itself together with self-preservation. That it is none is not there for it; what is there for it is rather a doing that appears contingent and indifferent toward what comes about through it, and the unity that nevertheless ties the two together, — that doing and this purpose, falls apart for it.

What on this view belongs to the organic itself is the doing that lies in the middle between its first and its last, insofar as that doing has the character of singularity in it. But doing insofar as it bears the character of universality, and with the agent set equal to whatever is thereby brought forth, purposive doing as such, would not belong to the organic. That singular doing, which is only a means, falls through its singularity under the determination of a thoroughly singular or contingent necessity. Whatever the organic does to maintain itself as an individual, or itself as genus, is therefore, by this immediate content, wholly lawless, since the universal and the concept fall outside it. Its doing would on that showing be an empty efficacy, contentless in its own self; nor would it so much as amount to the efficacy of a machine, since a machine does have a purpose, and its efficacy has thereby a determinate content. So forsaken by the universal, its activity would be that merely of something that is, as something that is, that is to say an activity not reflected into itself at the same time, such as the activity of an acid or of a base; an efficacy incapable of detaching itself from its immediate existence, and incapable too of surrendering that existence, which is forfeited in relating to its opposite, while yet maintaining itself. The being whose efficacy is under consideration here, however, is posited as a thing maintaining itself throughout its relation to what is opposed to it; activity as such amounts to nothing more than the pure, essenceless form of that being's being-for-itself, and the substance of this activity, which is not mere determinate being but the universal, its purpose, does not lie outside it; the activity is one that in its own self goes back into itself, not one directed back into itself by anything alien.

For the observing consciousness, however, this unity of universality with activity is not there, for the reason that such unity is in essence the organic's inward movement and admits of apprehension only as concept; observing, on the other hand, looks for the moments under the form of being and abiding; and since the organic whole is in essence such that it does not have the moments in it that way and does not let them be found in it, consciousness in its view converts the opposition into one that suits that view.

What arises for it in this way is the organic essence as a relation between two moments that are and are fixed, — an opposition of which the two sides appear to it, in one respect, to be given in observation, while in another respect, by their content, they give voice to the opposition between the organic concept of purpose and actuality; but since the concept as such has been erased in them, they do so obscurely and shallowly, in a manner where thinking has slid down into representing. The former, then, we see roughly meant under the heading inner, the latter under outer, and their relation begets the law that the outer is what expresses the inner.

When this inner is considered more closely along with its opposite and their relation to each other, it emerges that, first, the two sides of the law no longer read as they did in earlier laws, where they appeared as self-subsistent things, each as a particular body, nor, second, in such a way that the universal should have its concrete existence somewhere else outside what is. Instead the organic essence is laid at the base undivided throughout, as the content of inner and of outer alike, one and the same for both; thereby the opposition is no more than a formal one, its real sides having the same in-itself for their essence, while at once, inner and outer being also opposed reality and a being that differs for observation, each of them seems to observation to possess a content peculiar to itself. Being the very same substance, the very same organic unity, this peculiar content can in truth amount to no more than a differing form of that substance; and observing consciousness hints as much when it says that the outer amounts only to the expression of the inner. — These same determinations of the relationship, namely the indifferent self-subsistence of the differing terms, and within it their unity wherein they vanish, are what we saw in the concept of purpose.

What shape inner and outer have in their being is what must now be seen. No less than the outer as such, the inner as such is bound to possess an outer being and a shape, for it is object, or is itself posited as something that is and as on hand for observation.

As inner, organic substance is the simple soul, that is, the pure concept of purpose, the universal which in dividing itself stays universal fluidity all the same and hence shows up in its being as the doing or the movement of an actuality that is vanishing; the outer, by contrast, set over against that inner which is, consists in the organic's being at rest. Law, being the way that inner bears on this outer, accordingly gives its content expression at one time by presenting universal moments or simple essentialities, at another by presenting the actualized essentiality, that is, the shape. The first simple organic properties, if we may so name them, are sensibility, irritability and reproduction. Now these properties, or at any rate the first two of them, do seem to bear not on the organism at large but on the animal organism alone. And indeed the vegetable organism gives expression merely to the organism's simple concept, one that does not develop its moments; with respect to those properties, therefore, insofar as they are to be there for observation, we have to keep to the organism which exhibits their developed existence.

As for the properties themselves, they follow immediately from the concept of what is its own purpose. For sensibility gives expression generally to the simple concept of organic reflection into itself, that is, to the universal fluidity of the organic; irritability, on the other hand, gives expression to organic elasticity, to relating itself within that reflection as at the same time reacting, and to the actualization opposed to the first quiescent being-within-itself, an actualization wherein that abstract being for itself amounts to a being for another. Reproduction, though, is the action of the whole organism as reflected into itself, the organism's activity as purpose in itself or as genus, wherein the individual thrusts itself away from itself, reproducing in its generating either its own organic parts or the whole individual. Understood in the sense of self-preservation as such, reproduction gives expression to the formal concept of the organic, to sensibility; properly, however, it is the real organic concept, the whole that returns into itself either as individual, by bringing forth the singular parts of itself, or as genus, by bringing forth individuals.

Their other significance, that of these organic elements taken as the outer, is the shaped mode in which they are on hand as actual and yet at once as universal parts, or organic systems: sensibility, say, as the nervous system, irritability as the muscular system, reproduction as the viscera serving preservation of the individual and of the genus.

Laws proper to the organic thus have to do with how the organic moments stand to one another under their twofold meaning: to be, on the one hand, a part of the organic formation, and on the other a universal fluid determinateness running through every one of those systems. In the wording of such a law, then, a determinate sensibility, taken as a moment of the whole organism, would be expressed by a nervous system formed in a determinate way, or else it would be bound up with a determinate reproduction of the individual's organic parts, or with the whole's propagation, and so on. — The two sides of such a law can each be observed. The outer, by its concept, is being for another; sensibility, for example, possesses its immediately actualized mode within the sensible system; and taken as a universal property it is, within its expressions, no less objective. The side termed the inner possesses its own outer side, distinct from what is termed the outer within the whole.

So the two sides of an organic law would indeed be open to observation, only not laws of their relation; and observation falls short, not on the ground that as observation it would be too shortsighted, and that one ought to have started out from the Idea rather than proceed empirically; for laws like that, if they were anything real, would in fact have to be actually on hand and therefore open to observation ; but because the thought of laws of this sort turns out to possess no truth.

The relation that emerged for a law was this: that the universal organic property turns itself into a thing within an organic system and has in it its shaped imprint, so that the two would be the same essence, present now as a universal moment, now as a thing. But beyond that, the side of the inner is for itself likewise a relation among several sides, and so what first suggests itself is the thought of a law as a relation in which the universal organic activities, or properties, are referred to one another. Whether such a law is possible must be settled by the nature of a property of this kind. As a universal fluidity, however, it is, for one thing, not something bounded after the manner of a thing and holding itself within the difference of an existence that was supposed to make up its shape; sensibility instead passes out beyond the nervous system and on through all the other systems of the organism, — for another, it is a universal moment that is essentially undivided and undetachable from reaction, or irritability, and from reproduction. For being reflection into itself, it simply carries reaction within it. Being merely reflected into itself is passivity, or dead being, not a sensibility, exactly as action, that being the same thing as reaction, fails to be irritability apart from a being-reflected-into-itself. It is reflection within action or reaction, together with action or reaction within reflection, that constitutes the very thing whose unity makes up the organic, a unity that means the same as organic reproduction. From this it follows that in every mode of actuality the same magnitude of sensibility — if we look first at how sensibility and irritability stand to each other — must be on hand as of irritability, and that any organic appearance may be apprehended and determined, or explained if one prefers, just as much by the one as by the other. The very thing that one person takes, say, for high sensibility can with equal justice be viewed by another as high irritability, and as irritability at the same level. Once one calls them factors, and does not mean by that an empty word, just this much is thereby stated: that they are moments of the concept, so that the real object whose essence this concept makes up carries them both alike, and that if the object is determined by the one as highly sensible, it is equally to be pronounced by the other as irritable to just that degree.

When they are drawn apart, as they must be, the distinction lies in the concept, and their opposition is qualitative. But if, over and above this genuine difference, they are further posited as differing in the mode of being, and for representation, as sides of the law might differ, then they show up in a quantitative diversity. Their own qualitative opposition thus passes over into magnitude, and laws arise of the sort that sensibility and irritability, for instance, stand to each other inversely in respect of their magnitude, so that the growth of the one goes with the shrinking of the other; or, better, with magnitude itself taken straight off as the content, that something's magnitude grows as its smallness dwindles. — But give this law a determinate content, say in this fashion, that a hole's magnitude grows the more what fills it dwindles, and the inverse ratio can just as readily be turned into a direct one and stated thus, that the hole's magnitude grows in direct ratio to the amount removed; — a tautological proposition, whether it be put as a direct or as an inverse ratio, one that in its own peculiar wording says nothing but this, that a magnitude grows as this magnitude grows. Just as the hole and what fills it and gets removed stand qualitatively opposed, while the real element in them, and the determinate magnitude of that element in both, is one and the same, and just as a growth in magnitude and a dwindling of smallness come to the same thing, so that their empty opposing of the two runs out into a tautology, so too the organic moments are equally undetachable, both in what is real in them and in the magnitude of that real element; the one dwindles only along with the other and grows only along with it, since either has any sense at all only so far as the other is on hand; — or rather, it makes no difference whether an organic appearance is taken as irritability or as sensibility, this quite generally to begin with, and no less when the talk turns to its magnitude. It makes just as little difference whether the growth of a hole is put as an enlarging of it as emptiness or as an enlarging of the fullness taken out of it. Or a number, three for instance, stays just as large whether I take it as positive or as negative; and if I enlarge the three into four, then positive and negative alike have become four; — just as, in a magnet, the south pole has exactly the strength the north pole has, or as positive electricity, or an acid, has exactly the strength of its negative counterpart, or of the base upon which it acts. — A magnitude of that sort, like those three, or a magnet and so on, is an organic existence; it is what gets enlarged and lessened, and when it is enlarged, both its factors are enlarged, just to the degree that both poles of a magnet, or the two electricities, grow when a magnet and so on is strengthened. — That the two can just as little differ in respect of intensity and extension, the one being unable to fall off in extension while growing instead in intensity, while the other conversely was to lessen its intensity and grow instead in extension, comes under the same concept of empty opposing; real intensity is quite as unqualifiedly great as extension, and the reverse.

As now becomes clear, what actually happens in this law-giving is that irritability and sensibility at first make up the determinate organic opposition; but this content slips away, and the opposition runs off into the formalities of magnitude's waxing and waning, or of differing intensity and extension; — an opposition that no longer touches the nature of sensibility and of irritability at all, and no longer gives them expression. Hence an empty game of law-giving like this is in no way tied to the organic moments; it can be played anywhere and with anything, and rests throughout on a want of acquaintance with the logical nature of these oppositions.

If finally reproduction, rather than sensibility and irritability, is set in relation to the one or the other of them, then the very occasion for this law-giving drops away; for reproduction does not stand to those moments in the opposition in which they stand to each other; and since this law-giving rests on that opposition, here too the semblance of its taking place drops away.

The law-giving we have just been examining takes the organism's differences in the sense of moments of its concept, and ought strictly to be an a priori law-giving. Yet essentially bound up with it is the thought that these differences have the sense of things at hand, and in any case a merely observing consciousness has to stick to nothing but their existence. Organic actuality does necessarily carry within it an opposition of the kind its concept states, one determinable as irritability and sensibility, and these two in turn do appear as different from reproduction. — That externality in which the organic concept's moments come under consideration here is the inner's own immediate externality, and not the outer that counts as outer within the whole and is shape, the one to which the inner will later be considered in relation.

But take the opposition of the moments as it stands in existence, and sensibility, irritability, reproduction come down to the level of ordinary properties, universalities as mutually indifferent as specific gravity, color, hardness, and so on. In that sense one may well observe that one organic thing is more sensible, or more irritable, or of greater reproductive power than another; — likewise that the sensibility and so on of one thing differs in kind from another's, that one responds to determinate stimuli otherwise than a second does, as a horse responds otherwise to oats than to hay, and a dog otherwise again to both, and so on, just as much as one may observe that a body is harder than some other, and so on. — Yet these sensuous properties, hardness, color, and so on, together with the appearances of receptivity to the stimulus of oats, of irritability toward burdens, or of how many young are borne and of what kind, once brought into relation with one another and compared, are essentially in conflict with any lawfulness. For their sensuous being has its determinateness precisely in this, that they exist in complete indifference toward one another, and that they display nature's freedom released from the concept rather than the unity of a relation, that they display nature's unreasoning play back and forth on the ladder of contingent magnitude among the concept's moments rather than those moments themselves.

The other side, that on which the organic concept's simple moments are set beside the moments of formation, would be the first to yield a law properly so called, one that would state the true outer as an imprint of the inner. — Since those simple moments are pervading fluid properties, however, they do not possess in the organic thing any separated-out real expression such as what is called a single system of the shape. Or if the organism's abstract Idea finds its true expression in those three moments only because they are nothing fixed but merely moments belonging to the concept and to movement, then the organism as formation is by contrast not comprised within three such determinate systems as anatomy sets out separately. So far as systems of that sort are to be discovered in their actuality and legitimated by that discovery, it must also be recalled that anatomy exhibits not merely three such systems but a good many more. — And then, quite apart from this, the sensible system must mean something altogether different from what goes by the name of nervous system, the irritable system something other than what is called the muscular system, the reproductive system something other than the viscera of reproduction. Within the systems of shape as such, what is apprehended of the organism is its abstract side of dead concrete existence; its moments, taken up in that way, are matter for anatomy and the cadaver, not for cognition and the living organism. As parts of that sort they have rather ceased to be, since they cease to be processes. Because the organism's being is essentially universality, or reflection into its own self, the being of its whole, and of its moments too, can have no subsistence in an anatomical system; the real expression, their externality, is rather on hand only as a movement that runs through the various parts of the formation, a movement in which whatever gets torn loose and fixed as a single system shows itself essentially to be a flowing moment, so that what may count as their reality is not the actuality anatomy comes upon, but only that actuality as process, wherein even the anatomical parts have any sense at all.

The upshot, then, is that the organic inner's moments, taken by themselves, are incapable of furnishing sides of a law of being; for in such a law they would be predicated of an existence, held apart from one another, and it would have to be impossible to name any one of them indifferently in place of another; nor, when set on the one side, do they find their realization on the other in some fixed system; for this last is as little something possessing organic truth at all as it is what gives those inner moments expression. What is essential to the organic, since in itself it is the universal, is rather quite generally this: to have its moments in actuality just as universally, that is to say, as processes running throughout, and not to furnish in some isolated thing a picture of the universal.

In this way the representation of a law gets lost altogether where the organic is concerned. A law means to apprehend and state the opposition as sides at rest, and in them the determinateness that consists in how they relate to each other. The inner, the side to which the universality that appears belongs, and the outer, to which belong the parts of the shape at rest, were meant to constitute the mutually answering sides of the law, but held apart in this way they forfeit their organic sense; and just this is what the representation of law takes as its ground, that its two sides would have an indifferent subsistence that is for itself, and that the relation would be distributed over them as a doubled, mutually answering determinateness. Each side of the organic is rather, in its own self, this: to be simple universality with all determinations dissolved in it, and to be the movement of that dissolving.

What this law-giving amounts to will become fully clear from insight into how it differs from earlier forms. — For if we look back at the movement of perceiving, and at the understanding that within perceiving reflects into itself and so determines its object, then what this understanding has before it in its object is not the relation of those abstract determinations, of the universal and the singular, of the essential and the external, but rather it is itself the transition, a transition that does not become objective for it. Here, by contrast, what is itself the object is the organic unity, that is, precisely the relation of those opposites, and this relation is pure transition. In its simplicity this transition is immediately universality, and inasmuch as universality enters the difference whose relation is what the law is to state, the law's moments are objects for this consciousness as universal, and the law reads: the outer is expression of the inner. Here the understanding has laid hold of the thought of law itself, whereas before it merely sought laws in general, and law's moments floated before it as a determinate content, not as the thoughts of law. — As regards content, the laws to be won here are not to be laws that merely take purely existent differences up quietly into the form of universality, but laws that carry, immediately in those differences, the concept's restlessness as well, and with it the necessity of the relation of the sides. Yet since this object, the organic unity, immediately unites infinite sublating, or the absolute negation of being, with being at rest, and since the moments are essentially nothing but pure transition, no such existent sides emerge as a law requires.

To get such sides the understanding has to hold on to the other moment of the organic relationship, namely to the being-reflected of organic existence into its own self. This being, however, is reflected into itself so completely that nothing is left to it by way of a determinateness over against another. Immediate sensuous being is immediately at one with determinateness as such, and for that reason gives voice in itself to a qualitative difference, as blue does over against red, or the acidic over against the alkaline, and so on. Organic being that has returned into itself, by contrast, is entirely indifferent toward another; its existence is a simple universality, one refusing observation every lasting sensuous difference, or, what amounts to the same, showing its essential determinateness only as the alternation of existent determinatenesses. The way, then, in which the difference gives itself expression as existent is just this, that it is an indifferent difference, that is, expresses itself as magnitude. In this, however, the concept is wiped out and necessity has disappeared. — But the content and filling of this indifferent being, the alternation of sensuous determinations, gathered into the simplicity of one organic determination, then states at the same time that it precisely lacks that determinateness — the determinateness of an immediate property — and the qualitative falls into magnitude alone, as we saw above.

Granted, then, that the objective element apprehended as organic determinateness does carry the concept within itself, and is on that account something other than what stands before an understanding which behaves as merely perceiving when it apprehends the content of its laws, still that apprehending drops back wholly into the principle and the manner of the merely perceiving understanding, and for this reason: that what has been apprehended is pressed into service as moments of a law; for by this it acquires the character of a fixed determinateness, the shape of a property that is immediate, or of an appearance at rest, is drawn besides into the determining of magnitude, and the concept's nature is smothered. — The swapping of something merely perceived for what is reflected into itself, and of a determinateness that is merely sensuous for one that is organic, thus forfeits its value once more, and this because the understanding has not yet sublated law-giving.

To draw the comparison bearing on this swap by way of a few examples: what for perception is an animal with strong muscles gets determined, say, — as an animal organism possessing high irritability; or what for perception is a state of great weakness, — as a state of heightened sensibility, or, if one would rather, as an abnormal affection and indeed a potentiation of it (expressions that render the sensuous not into the concept but into a German-Latin patois). That the animal has strong muscles may equally be put by the understanding thus, that the animal is possessed of great muscular force, — as the great weakness is put as a slight force. Determination by irritability has this over determination as force, that the latter expresses the indeterminate reflection into itself while the former expresses the determinate one, for the muscle's peculiar force is precisely irritability; — and it has this over determination as strong muscles, that, as already in force, reflection into itself is at the same time contained in it. Just as weakness, or slight force, that is, organic passivity, gets expressed by way of sensibility. But with this sensibility taken and pinned down in that way for itself, and further coupled with the determination of magnitude, and set as a greater or lesser sensibility against a greater or lesser irritability, each of them is dragged down entirely into the sensuous element and into the common form of a property, while what relates them is not the concept but on the contrary magnitude, into which the opposition now falls and turns into a thoughtless difference. If what was indeterminate in the expressions force and strength and weakness has here been cleared away, what springs up now is a drifting about just as empty and indeterminate in the oppositions of a higher and a lower sensibility, of an irritability rising and falling in itself and against the other. Just as much as strength and weakness are wholly sensuous, thoughtless determinations, so too the greater or lesser sensibility, irritability, is a sensuous appearance thoughtlessly apprehended and just as thoughtlessly pronounced. The concept has not stepped into the place of those conceptless expressions; rather, strength and weakness have been filled out by a determination that, considered on its own, does rest on the concept and has the concept for its content, but that loses this origin and character entirely. — Owing, then, to the form of simplicity and of immediacy under which this content is turned into one side of a law, and owing to magnitude, which makes up the element of difference among determinations of this sort, the essence that originally was and was posited as concept keeps the manner of sensuous perceiving, and stays as remote from cognition as it was under determination by strength and weakness of force, or by immediate sensuous properties.

It still remains to consider on its own account that which constitutes the outer of the organic, and how within it the opposition of its inner and outer is determined; just as the inner of the whole was first considered in relation to its own outer.

Considered for itself, the outer is formation at large, life's system as it articulates itself within the element of being, and no less essentially the being of the organic essence for an other, — objective essence within its being for itself. — At first this other appears as the organic essence's external inorganic nature. If the two of them are viewed with an eye to a law, then inorganic nature, as we saw above, cannot make up one side of a law over against the organic essence, since the latter is at once simply for itself and holds a universal and free relation toward it.

But determine the relationship of these two sides more closely on the organic shape itself, and the shape turns on the one side toward inorganic nature, while on the other side it is for itself and is reflected into itself. What forms the middle joining life's being for itself together with the outer at large, or with being-in-itself, is the actual organic essence. — The extreme of being-for-itself, however, is the inner as infinite One, which draws the very moments of the shape out of their subsistence and their connection with the outer back into itself, the contentless which gives itself its content in the shape and appears in it as its process. The organic has its absolute freedom within this extreme, as simple negativity or pure singularity, and by that freedom it is indifferent toward, and secured against, being for another and the determinateness of the shape's moments. This freedom is at once a freedom of the moments themselves, their possibility of appearing and being apprehended as existing things, and just as they are freed from what is external, so within it they are freed from and indifferent toward one another as well, since this freedom's simplicity is being, or their simple substance. One and the same life is this concept, or pure freedom, however manifold the play in which the shape, or being for another, may roam; this stream of life is indifferent to what sort of mills it drives. — The first thing to note now is that this concept is not to be apprehended here, as it was earlier in the consideration of the inner proper, in its form of process, or of the development of its moments, but rather in its form as simple inner, which makes up the purely universal side over against the actual living essence, or as the element of the subsistence of the existent members of the shape; for it is the shape we are considering here, and in the shape the essence of life is the simplicity of subsistence. And then being for another, or the determinateness of the actual formation, once received into this simple universality that is its essence, is a determinateness equally simple, universal and nonsensuous, and can be none other than the one expressed as number. — It is the middle of the shape, tying indeterminate life to actual life, as simple as the one and as determinate as the other. Whatever in that first, in the inner, would be number, the outer would have to express after its own fashion as multiform actuality, mode of life, color, and so on, in general as the whole crowd of differences that unfold in appearance.

Compare the two sides of the organic whole — the one being the inner, the other the outer, each of them in turn having within itself an inner and an outer — with respect to the inner of each, and the inner of the first turned out to be the concept in the restlessness of abstraction, whereas the second has for its own inner the universality at rest, and in that the determinateness at rest as well, number. If the first, then, because in it the concept develops its moments, held out a deceptive promise of laws through the semblance of a necessity in their relation, the second renounces that at once, since number shows up as the determination of one side of its laws. Number, after all, is precisely the determinateness that is wholly quiescent, dead and indifferent, one in which all movement and relation has died out, and which has broken off the bridge to the living element of the drives, of the mode of life, and of the remaining sensuous existence.

Yet to consider the organic's shape as such, and the inner as an inner belonging merely to the shape, is in truth to be considering the organic no longer. For the two sides that were to be brought into relation are merely posited as indifferent toward each other, and with that the reflection into itself which makes up the essence of the organic is sublated. What happens here is rather that the comparison attempted between inner and outer gets transferred onto inorganic nature; here the infinite concept is nothing but the essence that lies hidden within, or falls outside into self-consciousness, and it no longer has the objective presence it had in the case of the organic. This relation of inner and outer is therefore still to be considered within its own proper sphere.

To begin with, that inner of the shape is specific gravity, the simple singularity belonging to an inorganic thing. As simple being it lends itself to observation quite as much as does the determinateness of number, the only one of which it is capable, or rather it is found by comparing observations, and in that way it appears to give the one side of the law . Shape, color, hardness, toughness, and an innumerable host of further properties would jointly make up the outer side, and would have to express the inner's determinateness, number, so that each would have its counter-image in the other.

Since negativity is apprehended here not as the movement of the process but as a pacified unity, or simple being for itself, it shows up rather as that by which the thing sets itself against the process, holding itself within itself and indifferent toward it. But since this simple being-for-itself is a quiescent indifference toward another, specific gravity comes on the scene as one property beside others; and thereupon all necessary relation of it to this multiplicity, or all lawfulness, ceases. — As this simple inner, specific gravity carries no difference in its own self, or carries only the unessential one; for its pure simplicity is precisely what sublates all essential differentiation. This unessential difference, magnitude, would therefore have to have its counter-image, or its other, on the other side, which is the multiplicity of properties, since only thereby is it a difference at all. If this multiplicity is itself gathered into the simplicity of the opposition and determined, say, as cohesion, so that cohesion is the for-itself in otherness as specific gravity is pure being-for-itself, then this cohesion is in the first instance the determinateness posited purely in the concept over against that other determinateness, and the manner of law-giving would be the one gone through above where sensibility was related to irritability. — And then, further, cohesion, taken as the concept of a being-for-itself in otherness, is only the abstraction of the side standing opposite specific gravity, and as such it has no concrete existence. For being-for-itself in an otherness is the process wherein the inorganic would have to give expression to its being-for-itself in the form of a self-preservation that would keep it from stepping out of the process as the moment of a product. But precisely this goes against its nature, which does not have purpose or universality in its own self. Its process is rather only the determinate way of relating in which its being-for-itself, its specific gravity, sublates itself. But this determinate way of relating, in which its cohesion would consist according to cohesion's true concept, and the determinate magnitude belonging to its specific gravity, are concepts wholly indifferent to each other. If the kind of relating were left wholly out of account and one restricted oneself to the representation of magnitude, then this determination might perhaps be thought: that the greater specific weight, as a higher being-within-itself, would put up more resistance to entering the process than the lesser. But conversely, the freedom of being-for-itself corroborates itself only in the readiness with which it engages with everything and preserves itself amid this manifoldness. That intensity without extension of the relations is an abstraction void of content, for extension makes up the existence of intensity. But the inorganic's self-preservation in its relation falls, as was recalled, outside the nature of that relation, since the inorganic does not carry within itself the principle of movement, or since its being is neither absolute negativity nor concept.

Take this other side of the inorganic, by contrast, not as process but as being at rest, and it is common cohesion, a sensuous property that is simple, one that has stepped over to one side against the moment of otherness set free, a moment lying spread out in many indifferent properties and itself falling, like specific gravity, among them; the crowd of properties taken together then makes up the side other than it. In it, however, as in the others, number is the sole determinateness, and number not merely fails to express a relation and transition of these properties into one another, but is essentially just this, to have no necessary relation and to present the annihilation of all lawfulness; for number is what expresses determinateness as something unessential. So that a series of bodies expressing difference as a difference in number among their specific gravities in no way runs parallel to a series of the difference of the other properties, even if, to make matters easier, only one of them or a few are taken. For in fact it could only be the whole bundle of them that would have to make up the other side in this parallel. For ordering this bundle within itself and combining it into a whole, the magnitude-determinatenesses of these various properties are on the one hand available to observation, but on the other hand their differences come in as qualitative ones. What in this heap would have to be designated as positive or negative and would cancel out reciprocally, in short the formula's inner configuration and exposition, which would be highly composite, would belong to the concept, and the concept is excluded precisely by the way in which the properties lie there and are to be taken up as existent; within this being none of them shows the character of a negative over against another, rather, the one is every bit as much as the other, and neither does it indicate its place in the whole's ordering in any other way. — With a series running in parallel differences — the relation might be meant as rising on both sides at once, or as rising on the one and falling on the other — all that matters is the final simple expression of this whole gathered together, which was to constitute the law's one side as against specific gravity; but that side, taken as an existent result, is nothing other than what has already been mentioned, namely a single property, such as common cohesion, alongside which the others, and among them specific gravity too, are indifferently present, and any other of them can with the same right, that is, with the same lack of right, be chosen as representative of the whole other side; the one as much as the other would only represent the essence, in plain German stand in for it, but would not be the matter at hand itself. So that any effort to hunt out series of bodies that would run along the simple parallel of two sides, and would state what the bodies essentially are according to a law of those sides, has to be taken for a thought ignorant both of its task and of the means by which the task was to be carried out.

Just now the relation of outer and inner, taken in the shape that ought to display itself for observation, was carried straightaway over into the inorganic sphere; what determination drags it there can now be stated more precisely, and from that a further form and relation of this relationship comes to light. For with the organic, whatever it is in the inorganic that appears to make inner and outer comparable in that way drops away altogether. In the inorganic the inner is something simple, an inner presenting itself to perception as an existent property; what its determinateness comes to is therefore essentially magnitude, and as an existent property it shows itself indifferent to the outer, or to the many other sensuous properties. The being-for-itself of the organically living, however, does not stand off to one side against its outer in this way; rather, the principle of otherness lies within it. Should we determine being-for-itself as a simple relation to itself that maintains itself, its otherness will be simple negativity, and the unity that is organic will be a unity of self-equal self-relating together with pure negativity. This unity, taken as unity, is what is inner in the organic; the inner is on this account universal in itself, or it is genus. But the genus is free over against its actuality in a different way than specific gravity is free over against shape. The latter's freedom is an existent freedom, or it amounts to gravity's stepping to one side as a particular property. Yet just because it is existent freedom, it also amounts to no more than One determinateness, one belonging essentially to this shape, or one through which this shape, as essence, is a determinate one. The genus, on the other hand, is free in a universal way, and is indifferent toward this shape or toward its actuality. In the organic, then, the determinateness that the inorganic's being-for-itself possesses as such comes to stand beneath its being-for-itself, whereas in the inorganic it comes to stand only beneath the latter's being; and so, even though in the inorganic it is at the same time no more than a property , the dignity of essence still falls to it, since as the simple negative it confronts existence, which is being for something else; and this simple negative, in its last singular determinateness, is a number. Being itself pure negativity, the organic is a singularity that wipes out within itself the fixed determinateness of number which attaches to indifferent being. Insofar as the organic does have about it the moment of indifferent being, and therein number, number can be taken only as a play upon it, not as the essence of its vitality.

Granted, now, that the principle of the process, pure negativity, does not lie outside the organic; granted too that the organic therefore does not carry it as a determinateness within its essence, singularity being rather universal in itself; still, in its moments, taken as themselves abstract or universal, this pure singularity attains neither development nor actuality in the organic. Instead, this expression steps outside that universality which falls back into inwardness, positioning itself between actuality or shape, that is, singularity in the course of developing, and the organic universal, or the genus, the determinate universal, the species. Nothing but the worked-out movement of a process, one that plays itself out upon the parts of the existent shape, makes up the concrete existence at which the negativity of the universal, that is, of the genus, arrives. Suppose the genus, as a simplicity at rest, had the differentiated parts within it, so that its simple negativity would as such be at the same time movement, a movement running through parts that are just as simple and, immediately in them, universal, parts which as such moments would here be actual; then the organic genus would be consciousness. As it is, though, the simple determinateness, being the determinateness of the species, is there in the genus spiritlessly; actuality takes its start from that determinateness, or rather what enters actuality is not genus as such, that is, not thought at all. As something actually organic, the genus has only a representative to stand in for it. This representative, however, namely number, which seems to mark the transition out of the genus into individual formation and to hand observation the two sides of necessity, once as simple determinateness and the other time as the shape developed and born out into manifoldness, marks rather the indifference and mutual freedom of the universal and the singular, the singular being surrendered by the genus to the inessential difference of magnitude while, as something living, it proves just as free of that difference itself. True universality, in the sense determined above, is nothing here but inner essence; taken as determinateness of the species it amounts to formal universality, and against that formal universality true universality moves over to the side of singularity, a singularity that is thereby living and that, by means of its inner, overrides its determinateness as species. Yet this singularity fails to be at once a universal individual as well, that is, one in which universality would have outer actuality too; that individual lies instead outside the organically living. This universal individual, however, in the way it immediately is the individual of the natural formations, is not consciousness itself; were it supposed to be consciousness, its existence as a singular organic and living individual could not be allowed to fall outside it.

We therefore see a syllogism in which the one extreme is universal life as universal, or as genus, while the other extreme is the same life as singular, or as universal individual; the middle, however, is put together out of both, the first appearing to dispatch itself into the middle in the form of determinate universality, or as species, the second in the form of proper, that is, singular singularity. — And since this syllogism belongs on the whole to the side of formation, what is distinguished as inorganic nature is comprised under it as well.

Now inasmuch as universal life, being the simple essence of the genus, develops for its own part the differences of the concept and must lay them out in a series of simple determinatenesses, that series constitutes a system of differences posited as indifferent, or a numerical series. If earlier the organic, under the form of singularity, was placed over against this inessential difference, a difference that neither gives voice to nor holds within it their living nature — and if the very same must be said of the inorganic, with regard to its whole existence as developed in the multitude of its properties, — then it is by now the universal individual that has to be regarded not simply as free of each articulation of the genus, but as the genus's power as well. The genus, which breaks itself up into species by the universal determinateness of number, or which may equally take singular determinatenesses of its existence, for example figure, color, and so on, as the ground of its division, suffers violence in this quiet business at the hands of the universal individual, that is, of the earth, which, being universal negativity, brings to bear against the genus's systematizing those differences that it has in itself, differences whose nature, on account of the substance they belong to, is other than the nature of the genus's own. This doing of the genus becomes a wholly restricted business, one it is permitted to carry on only within those mighty elements, and one that their unbridled violence interrupts on all sides, leaving it full of gaps and stunted.

The upshot is that in shaped existence what can come to observation is reason only as life in general, a life which, however, in its differentiating does not actually have in its own self any rational seriation or articulation, and which is no system of shapes with a ground in itself. — Were the middle in the syllogism of organic formation, the middle into which the species and its actuality as singular individuality fall, to have within it both extremes, inner universality and universal individuality, then this middle would carry in the movement of its actuality universality's expression and nature, and would be the development that systematizes itself. Consciousness, in this way, standing between universal spirit and its own singularity or sensuous consciousness, has for its middle the system of the formations of consciousness, spirit's life as it orders itself into a whole, — the very system under consideration here, which possesses its objective existence as world history. Organic nature, though, has no history at all; from its universal, life, it sinks straight down into the singularity of existence, and the moments united in this actuality, simple determinateness and singular vitality, bring becoming forth only as the contingent movement wherein each is at work on its own portion while the whole is maintained; but this stirring is, for itself, held within its own point alone, since the whole is not there in it, and the whole is not there in it because here it does not exist as a whole for itself.

So, over and above the fact that observing reason in organic nature comes only to the intuition of itself as universal life in general, the intuition of that life's development and realization is granted to it only according to systems distinguished in a quite general way, systems whose determination has its essence not in what is organic as such, but rather in the universal individual; and within these differences of the earth, according to seriations that the genus attempts.

Since, then, the universality of organic life in its actuality lets itself sink straight into the extreme of singularity, dispensing with the genuine mediation that is for itself, observing consciousness has nothing before it but meaning as a thing; and should reason be able to muster the idle interest of observing this meaning, it is confined to describing and rehearsing nature's opinions and stray notions; this spiritless freedom of meaning will, to be sure, everywhere hold out rudiments of laws, traces of necessity, hints at order and seriation, witty and plausible-looking relations. But where the organic is related to the existent differences of the inorganic, that is, the elements, the zones and the climates, observation, so far as law and necessity go, gets no further than great influence. The same holds on the other side, where individuality carries not the earth's significance but that of the One immanent in organic life, an One that, united immediately with the universal, does indeed make up the genus , though its simple unity determines itself for that very reason only as number and hence leaves qualitative appearance free, — observation cannot get beyond polite remarks, interesting relations, an obliging friendliness toward the concept. But polite remarks are no knowledge of necessity, the interesting relations get no further than the interest, and interest is as yet nothing more than opinion about reason; and the friendliness of the individual, the friendliness with which it alludes to a concept, is a childlike friendliness that turns childish once it wants, or is meant, to have validity in and for itself.

b. The Observation of Self-Consciousness in its Purity and its Relation to External Actuality; Logical and Psychological Laws

In inorganic nature the observation of nature comes upon the concept as realized — laws whose moments are things which at the same time relate as abstractions; this concept, however, is not a simplicity reflected within itself. Organic nature's life, by contrast, is nothing but this simplicity reflected within itself; its opposition to itself, as the universal and as the singular, does not break apart within the essence of this life itself; and the essence is not a genus that would divide and move itself within its own element free of difference and that, in its own opposition, would at the same time remain undifferentiated for its own self. Observation finds this free concept — whose universality holds developed singularity just as absolutely within itself — only in the concept that itself exists as concept, that is, in self-consciousness.

Now, in turning back into itself and directing itself upon the concept that is actual as free concept, observation first finds the laws of thought. This singularity, which thinking is in its very self, is the movement of the negative in its abstraction, taken wholly back into simplicity, and the laws lie outside reality. — That they have no reality says nothing else whatever than that they are without truth. They are supposed, admittedly, to be not the whole truth, but still a formal truth. Yet the purely formal without reality is a thought-thing, or the empty abstraction lacking the splitting-in-two within it, which would be nothing other than the content. — On the other side, however, since they are laws of pure thinking, while this thinking is what is universal in itself and hence a knowledge that immediately has being, and therein all reality, within it, these laws are absolute concepts and are, undivided, the essentialities of the form as much as of things. Because the universality that moves within itself is the simple concept split in two, it thereby possesses content in itself, a content that is every content, save only a sensuous being. This is a content which stands neither in contradiction to the form nor separated from it in any way, but is rather essentially the form itself, since the form is nothing but the universal as it divides itself into its own pure moments.

But in the way this form or content is for the observation qua observation, it takes on the determination of a content that is found, given, that is, of one that merely is. It turns into a placid being of relations, a host of necessities set apart from one another, which as a fixed content in and for itself are supposed to possess truth in their determinateness, and which are thereby in fact removed from the form. — Such an absolute truth belonging to fixed determinatenesses, or to a plurality of different laws, contradicts, however, the unity of self-consciousness, that is, of thinking and of form as such. Whatever gets stated as a fixed law that abides in itself can be no more than a moment of the unity reflecting itself within itself, and can come on the scene only as a vanishing magnitude. But when they are torn by consideration out of this context of the movement and set down in isolation, what they lack is not content — for they do have a determinate content — rather, what they are deprived of is the form, which is their essence. In fact these laws fail to be the truth of thinking not on the ground that they are meant to be merely formal and devoid of content, but on the opposite ground: that in their determinateness, or precisely as a content stripped of its form, they are meant to count as something absolute. Taken in their truth, as moments that vanish within the unity of thinking, they would need to be understood as knowledge, or as thinking movement, and not as laws of knowledge. Observing, however, is not knowledge itself and has no acquaintance with it; it rather inverts the nature of knowledge into the shape of being, that is, it apprehends its negativity only as laws of being. — Here it suffices to have shown, out of the general nature of the matter, that the so-called laws of thought have no validity. Their more detailed development belongs to speculative philosophy, where they exhibit themselves as that which in truth they are: singular moments that vanish, whose truth is nothing but the whole of the thinking movement, knowledge itself.

This negative unity of thinking is for its own self, or rather it amounts to being-for-its-own-self, that is, to the principle of individuality, and it is doing consciousness in its reality. It is to this consciousness, as the reality of those laws, that observing consciousness is thereby led on by the nature of the matter. Because this connection does not exist for it, it takes thinking, in its laws, to remain standing on the one side for it, while on the other side it obtains a further being in what is now its object, namely the doing consciousness, a consciousness that is for itself in the sense that it sublates otherness, its actuality lying in this intuiting of itself as the negative.

For observation, then, a new field opens up in the acting actuality of consciousness. In psychology there is that mass of laws by which spirit relates in differing ways to the differing modes of its own actuality, taken as an otherness found already present; in part by receiving these modes into itself and becoming conformable to the habits, the customs, and the way of thinking it has found already there, wherein it is object to itself as actuality — in part by knowing itself as self-active over against them, by seizing out of them, with inclination and passion, only what is particular for itself, and by making what is objective conformable to itself; in the one case relating negatively toward itself as singularity, in the other toward itself as universal being. — Taken on the first side, self-subsistence lends to what it has found already there nothing beyond the form of conscious individuality in general, and as regards content it halts within the universal actuality it has come upon; taken on the other side, however, it lends that actuality at least a modification peculiar to itself, one that does not run counter to the actuality's essential content, or else a modification through which the individual, as a particular actuality and as a content peculiar to itself, sets itself in opposition to that actuality — and becomes a crime, in that it sublates that actuality in a merely singular manner, or, doing so in a universal manner and thereby for all, puts another world, another right, other law and customs in the place of those now present.

Observational psychology, whose first move is to state its perceptions of the universal modes that turn up for it in active consciousness, comes upon a diversity of faculties, inclinations, and passions, and since the recollection of the unity of self-consciousness will not let itself be suppressed while this collection is being reeled off, such psychology has to proceed at least as far as astonishment that so many things, so heterogeneous and so contingent to one another, can be together in spirit as though in a sack, all the more so as they display themselves not as dead things at rest but as restless movements.

While reciting these various faculties, observation stands on the universal side; the side opposed to this universality, the actual individuality, is the unity of these multiple capacities. — Yet apprehending the distinct actual individualities in turn and recounting them so as to say that this person has more inclination toward one thing, that person more toward another, that one has more understanding than the next, holds something far duller in it than even a listing of the kinds of insects, mosses, and the like; for the latter give observation the right to take them in so singular and conceptless a fashion, since they belong essentially to the element of contingent isolation. To take conscious individuality, by contrast, spiritlessly as a singular appearance that merely is, has this contradictory feature, that its essence is the universal of spirit. But because this apprehending at the same time lets individuality step into the form of universality, it discovers its law, and now seems to be pursuing a rational purpose and carrying on a necessary business.

What makes up the content of the law are, as moments, individuality itself on the one hand and, on the other, that individuality's universal inorganic nature, namely, the circumstances found already present, the situation, habits, customs, religion, and so on; out of these the determinate individuality is to be comprehended. They contain what is determinate no less than what is universal, and they are at once something present, which offers itself to observation and which, on the other side, gives expression to itself in the form of individuality.

Now the law of this relationship between the two sides would have to state which effect and which influence these determinate circumstances exercise upon individuality. But this individuality is precisely this: just as much to be the universal, and therefore to flow together in a placid, immediate way with the present universal, with customs, habits, and so on, and to become conformable to them, as to relate to them in opposition and rather to invert them — and likewise to relate to them in its singularity with complete indifference, neither letting them work upon it nor being active against them. What is to have an influence upon individuality and which influence it is to have — which actually amounts to the same thing — therefore depends solely upon individuality itself; to say that through this the individuality has become this determinate one means nothing else than that it has already been this. Circumstances, situation, customs, and so on, which on the one side are exhibited as present and on the other within this determinate individuality, express only the indeterminate essence of that individuality, which is not what is at issue. If these circumstances, this way of thinking, these customs, this condition of the world had not existed at all, then the individual would indeed not have become what it is; for all who find themselves in this condition of the world are this universal substance. — But in the way this condition has particularized itself in this individual — and such an individual is what is to be comprehended — it would have to have particularized itself in and for its own self and, in this determinateness it had given itself, to have worked upon an individual; only so would it have made that individual into the determinate one it is. If the external had constituted itself in and for itself just as it appears in the individuality, then the individuality would be comprehended out of the external. We would then have a twofold gallery of images, the first of them a reflected shine of the second: the first being the gallery of the complete determinateness and delimitation of external circumstances, the second that same gallery rendered into the mode in which those circumstances are within the conscious essence; the former the spherical surface, the latter the center point that represents that surface within itself.

But the surface of the sphere, the world of the individual, immediately carries the ambiguous sense of being a world and situation existing in and for itself, and of being the world of the individual, either insofar as the individual had merely flowed together with it, had let it pass into itself just as it is and had related to it only as formal consciousness; — or else of being the world of the individual in the way that what is present has been inverted by the individual. — Because actuality, for the sake of this freedom, admits of this doubled sense, only out of the individual itself can the individual's world be comprehended, and the influence upon the individual exercised by an actuality that is represented as being in and for itself takes on, through the individual, the absolutely opposite sense, that the individual either lets the stream of inflowing actuality run its course within itself, or breaks it off and inverts it. By this, however, psychological necessity becomes so empty a word that, with regard to whatever is supposed to have had this influence, there is the absolute possibility that it might just as well not have had it.

With this there drops away the being that would be in and for itself, the being that was to constitute the one and indeed the universal side of a law. Individuality is whatever its world amounts to as its own; individuality is itself the circle of its doing, wherein it has exhibited itself as actuality, and it is nothing whatever but the unity of the being that is present and the being that is made; a unity in which the sides do not come apart, as they do in the representation of the psychological law, as a world present in itself and as an individuality that is for itself; or, if each side is taken by itself in that way, then there is no necessity present, and no law of how the two relate to each other.

c. Observation of the Relation of Self-Consciousness to its Immediate Actuality; Physiognomy and Phrenology

Observation in psychology discovers no law for the relationship in which self-consciousness stands to actuality, that is, to the world set over against it, and, since the two are indifferent toward each other, it is driven back to the peculiar determinateness that belongs to real individuality, an individuality that is in and for itself, one that holds the opposition of being-for-itself to being-in-itself extinguished within their absolute mediation. It is the object that has now become the object of observation, or to which observation passes over.

The individual is in and for its own self: it is for itself, or it is a free doing; but it is also in itself; or it itself has a determinate being that is original — a determinateness which, by its concept, is the same as what psychology wanted to find outside it. At the individual itself, then, the opposition emerges: to be this doubled thing, consciousness in its movement and the fixed being of an actuality that appears, an actuality immediately its own at the individual. This being, namely the body belonging to the determinate individuality, is the originality of that individuality, its not-having-done-anything. Yet inasmuch as the individual is at the same time only what it has done, its body is also the expression of itself that it has brought forth; it is at once a sign, one that has not stayed an immediate matter but through which the individual only indicates what it is, in the sense that it puts its original nature into effect.

Looking at the moments present here in their relation to the view that preceded, we find here a human shape that is universal, or at any rate the universal shape of a climate, a region of the world, a people, in the way that earlier there were the same universal customs and culture. Added to this are the particular circumstances and the particular situation within universal actuality; here, this particular actuality is the particular formation of the individual's shape. — Seen from the other side, just as earlier the free doing of the individual and the actuality that counted as its own were set over against the actuality already at hand, so here the shape stands as the expression of its actualization posited through the individual itself, the features and forms of its self-active essence. But the actuality, both universal and particular, which observation earlier came upon outside the individual, is here the individual's own actuality, its innate body, and it is precisely into this body that the expression pertaining to its doing falls. In the psychological consideration, the actuality that has being in and for itself and the determinate individuality were supposed to be related to each other; here, by contrast, it is the whole determinate individuality that observation has for its object; and each side of the opposition within it is itself this whole. What belongs to the outer whole, then, is not only the original being, the innate body, but equally the formation of that body, a formation that is the work of the inner's activity; the body is a unity of uncultivated and cultivated being, and it is the individual's actuality permeated by being-for-itself. This whole, which gathers into itself the determinate, original, fixed parts along with the features that come about solely through doing, is; and this being constitutes the expression of the inner, that is, of the individual which has been posited as both consciousness and movement. — This inner, equally, is no longer the formal, contentless or indeterminate self-activity whose content and determinateness would lie, as they did earlier, in outer circumstances; it is instead an original character already determinate in itself, and activity is merely its form. It is the relationship between these two sides, then, that comes under consideration here: how it is to be determined, and what this expression of the inner within the outer is supposed to mean.

In the first place, this outer does not make the inner visible in the manner of an organ, nor make it a being for another at all; for so far as the inner lies within the organ, it is the activity itself. Mouth in speech, hand at work, and, if one likes, the legs as well, are the organs that actualize and bring to completion; in them the doing is present as doing, or the inner taken as such; but the externality which the inner gains through them is the deed, an actuality cut off from the individual. Speech and labor count as expressions in which the individual, instead of holding on to itself and retaining itself within itself, lets the inner come entirely outside itself and hands it over to what is other. One may therefore say with equal justice that these expressions say too much of the inner and that they say too little of it; too much, — since the inner itself breaks out in them, no opposition is left standing between them and it, and what they give is not only an expression of the inner but that inner itself, immediately; too little, — since in speech and in action the inner turns itself into something other, it thereby delivers itself over to the element of transformation, which inverts the word once spoken and the deed once accomplished and turns them into something different from what, in and for themselves, they are as actions of this determinate individual. Not only do the works of actions, through this externality, lose the character of being something enduring over against other individualities, on account of the influence of others; but also, since they relate to the inner they contain as a separated, indifferent outer, they can, as inner, be something other through the individual itself than they appear to be, — either because the individual deliberately makes them, for appearance's sake, into something other than they are in truth, — or because it is too inept to give itself the outer side it actually wanted and to fix that side so firmly that its work cannot be inverted by others. Doing, then, as a completed work, carries a doubled and opposed significance: it is either the inner individuality and not that individuality's expression, or else, as something outer, an actuality free of the inner, an actuality wholly other than the inner is. — Because of this ambiguity we have to look around for the inner in the way it still is, yet visibly or outwardly, at the individual itself. In the organ, however, it is only as the immediate doing itself, which attains its externality in the deed, and the deed either represents the inner or does not. The organ, considered in terms of this opposition, therefore does not afford the expression that is being sought.

Suppose now that the outer shape were able to give expression to inner individuality only in so far as it is not organ and not doing, and so is a whole at rest: then it would relate as a subsisting thing that quietly received the inner into its passive existence as something alien and so became that inner's sign; — an outer, contingent expression whose actual side is on its own account without significance, — a language whose tones and combinations of tones are not the matter at hand itself but are attached to it by free arbitrary choice and are contingent for it.

A connection as arbitrary as this, between terms that are an outer for one another, gives no law. Physiognomy, however, is meant to set itself apart from other bad arts and hopeless studies in this: that it takes the determinate individuality within the necessary opposition between an inner and an outer, between character as a conscious essence and that same character as shape in its being, and that it puts these moments into the relation to one another in which their concept places them, so that they must accordingly make up the content of a law. Astrology, chiromancy, and sciences of that sort, by contrast, seem to relate only an outer to an outer, something or other to what is alien to it. This constellation at birth, and, if this outer is brought in closer to the body itself, these lines of the hand, are outer moments bearing on whether life is long or short, and on the destiny of the singular human being in general. As externalities they relate indifferently to one another and lack the necessity for each other that is supposed to reside in the relation between an outer and an inner.

The hand, to be sure, seems not so much to be something outer for destiny as rather to relate to destiny as an inner. For destiny, in its turn, is nothing but the appearance of that which the determinate individuality is in itself as inner original determinateness. — Now, in order to know what that individuality is in itself, the chiromancer, like the physiognomist, arrives at it by a shorter route than, for example, Solon, who held that this could be known only from and after the course of a whole life; he considered the appearance, whereas they consider the in-itself. That the hand must present the in-itself of individuality with regard to its destiny can readily be seen from this, that after the organ of speech it is above all the hand through which the human being brings himself into appearance and actualization. It is the ensouled master builder of his fortune; the hand, one may say, is what the human being does, for in the hand, as the active organ by which he brings himself to completion, he is present as the one giving soul, and since he is originally his own destiny, the hand will express this in-itself.

From this determination, that in the organ of activity a being is found just as much as the doing is within it, or that the inner being-in-itself is itself present at the organ and has a being for others, there follows a view of the organ different from the previous one. For if the organs in general proved incapable of counting as expressions of the inner, on the ground that in them the doing is present as doing, while the doing as deed is merely something outer, so that inner and outer come apart in this manner and are, or may be, foreign to one another, then, on the determination just examined, the organ must once again be taken as the middle of the two, since the very fact that the doing is present at the organ at the same time makes up an externality of that doing, and indeed an externality other than the deed is, for the former stays with the individual and at it. — This middle, this unity of inner and outer, is at first itself something outer as well; but then this externality is simultaneously drawn into the inner; being a simple externality, it confronts the dispersed one, which is either only a singular work or state, contingent as regards the individuality taken as a whole, or else, as whole externality, is destiny shattered into a multiplicity of works and states. The hand's simple lines, then, and likewise the sound and range of the voice, taken as the individual determinateness of speech, — and speech once more as it acquires through the hand a more fixed existence than it does through the voice, namely writing, and writing in its particularity as handwriting — all of this is expression of the inner, so that, as the simple externality, it in turn relates over against the manifold externality of acting and of destiny, relating to it as an inner. — So if the determinate nature and inborn peculiarity of the individual, along with whatever these have turned into through culture, are taken first as the inner, that is, as the essence of acting and of destiny, then this inner has its appearance and externality first in mouth, hand, voice, handwriting, as in the remaining organs too and their abiding determinatenesses; and only then does it express itself further outward, in its actuality in the world.

Now since this middle determines itself as that expression which is at once withdrawn into the inner again, its existence is not confined to the immediate organ of doing; it is rather the movement and form of the face and of bodily shaping in general, a movement that accomplishes nothing. These features and their movement are, according to this concept, the doing that is held back and remains at the individual, and, in accordance with the individual's relation to actual doing, they are the individual's own supervision and observation of that doing, expression as reflection upon the actual expression. — The individual is not mute toward its outer doing or in the midst of it, and this is because it is therein at the same time reflected into its own self, and it expresses this being-reflected-into-itself; this theoretical doing, or the individual's speech with itself about that doing, can be heard by others as well, for it is itself an expression.

In this inner, then, which remains inner within its expression, what gets observed is the being-reflected of the individual out of its actuality, and the question is how things stand with the necessity posited in this unity. — This being-reflected is at first different from the deed itself, and so can be, and can be taken to be, something other than the deed is; one can tell from a person's face whether he is serious about what he says or does. — Conversely, however, what is meant to serve as expression of the inner is at once an expression that has being, and with that it sinks itself into the determination of being, which for the self-conscious essence is utterly contingent. It is thus indeed an expression, yet at the same time only like a sign, so that the makeup of that by which the content is expressed is entirely a matter of indifference to the content expressed. Within this appearance the inner is indeed something invisible made visible, but without being tied to that appearance; it can just as well be in another appearance as another inner can be in this same one. — Lichtenberg therefore rightly says: Suppose the physiognomist were once to catch hold of a human being; then all it would take would be a stout resolution to make oneself incomprehensible again for thousands of years. — Just as, in the relationship that preceded, the circumstances lying to hand were something with being, out of which individuality took what it had the power and the will to take, either surrendering to them or inverting them, for which reason they did not contain the necessity and the essence of individuality, — so here too the appearing immediate being of individuality is of such a kind that it either expresses individuality's being-reflected out of actuality and its being-within-itself, or else is for individuality merely a sign, one indifferent toward what is signified and hence in truth signifying nothing; it is for individuality its face and equally its mask, one that individuality can put off. — Individuality pervades its shape, moves within it and speaks in it; yet this entire existence likewise passes over into being a being indifferent toward the will and the action; individuality wipes out in it the significance it had before, that of holding individuality's being-reflected into itself or its true essence, and places that significance instead in the will and in the deed.

Individuality gives up that being-reflected into itself which is expressed in the features, and places its essence in the work. In this it contradicts the relationship laid down by the instinct of reason, which devotes itself to observing self-conscious individuality, with respect to what is supposed to be individuality's inner and outer. From this vantage point we arrive at the thought properly underlying the physiognomic — if one cares to call it that — science. The opposition into which this observing has fallen is, as regards its form, the opposition of the practical and the theoretical, both of them posited within the practical itself, — the opposition between individuality actualizing itself in action, taken in the most general sense, — and the same individuality as it is, in this very action, at the same time out of the action, reflected into itself, with the action as its object. Observing picks this opposition up in the same inverted relationship in which the opposition determines itself in appearance. For the inessential outer it takes the deed itself and the work, whether of speech or of a more firmly established actuality, — but for the essential inner, the being-within-itself of individuality. Between the two sides that practical consciousness has at it, intending and the deed, — the meaning it has about its action and the action itself, — observation picks the former side as the true inner; and this inner, it holds, has an expression at the deed that is more or less inessential, but its true expression at its shape. The expression last named is the immediate sensuous presence of individual spirit; the inwardness that is claimed to be the true one is the ownness of the intention together with the singularity of being-for-itself; the two of them are spirit as meant. What observing has for its objects, then, is meant existence, and it is among such objects that it searches out laws.

Immediate meaning concerning the meant presence of spirit is natural physiognomy: the rash judgment passed, at the first sight of a shape, upon the inner nature and the character that the shape has. This opinion has an object of such a kind that it lies in the object's essence to be in truth something other than merely sensuous immediate being. Admittedly what is present, and what is the object of observing, is indeed just this being-reflected-into-itself within the sensuous and out of it, visibility as the visibility of the invisible. Yet this sensuous immediate presence is the actuality of spirit only as spirit is for opinion; and on this side observing knocks about with its meant existence, with physiognomy, handwriting, the tone of the voice, and so on. — It relates such existence to just such a meant inner. What is to be cognized is not the murderer or the thief but the capacity for being one; with that, fixed abstract determinateness dissolves into the concrete infinite determinateness belonging to the singular individual, which now calls for more artful depictions than those qualifications are. Such artful depictions do say more than qualification as murderers, thieves, or as good-hearted, unspoiled, and the like, but for their purpose of articulating meant being, or the singular individuality, they are by far not enough; just as little are the depictions of the shape that go beyond the flat forehead, the long nose, and the like. For the singular shape, like the singular self-consciousness, is inexpressible as meant being. The science of acquaintance with human beings, which goes after the human being as merely supposed, and likewise physiognomy, which goes after his supposed actuality and would elevate the unconscious judging of natural physiognomy into a knowledge, is therefore something without end or ground, something that can never get so far as to say what it means, since it only means, and its content is only something meant.

The laws that this science goes out in search of are relations holding between these two meant sides, and so can themselves be nothing but an empty meaning. Moreover, since this supposed knowledge, which busies itself with the actuality of spirit, has precisely this for its object, namely that spirit reflects itself out of its sensuous existence into itself, and that determinate existence is for spirit an indifferent contingency, then it must know immediately, in the case of the laws it has discovered, that nothing is said by them, but that what is really going on is pure chatter, or that merely an opinion of one's own is being given; an expression that has the truth of stating this as one and the same, — of saying one's opinion and thereby bringing forward not the matter at hand but only an opinion of one's own. As far as their content goes, however, these observations cannot differ from ones of this sort: "It always rains when we have the annual fair, says the shopkeeper; and always too when I dry the laundry, says the housewife."

Lichtenberg, who characterizes physiognomic observing in this way, also says the following: "if someone were to say: your conduct is indeed that of an honest man, but your figure shows me that you force yourself and are a rogue at heart; truly, to the end of the world such an address will be answered by every decent fellow with a box on the ear." — The reply is telling for this reason, that it overturns what such a science of meaning presupposes first of all, namely that the actuality of the human being is his face and so on. — The true being of the human being is rather his deed; in the deed individuality is actual, and the deed is what sublates the meant in both of its sides. First, the meant as a bodily being at rest; in action, rather, individuality presents itself as the negative essence, which is only in so far as it sublates being. Then the deed likewise sublates the inexpressibility of opinion in respect of the self-conscious individuality, which in opinion is something infinitely determinate and determinable. In the accomplished deed this bad infinity is annihilated. The deed is something simply determinate, universal, something to be grasped in a single abstraction; it is murder, theft, or a benefaction, a brave deed, and so forth, and of it there can be said what it is. The deed is this, and this being of it is not a mere sign but the matter at hand itself. It is this, and what the deed is, that the individual human being is; in the simplicity belonging to this being he is a universal essence with being for others, and he ceases to be merely something meant. He is indeed not thereby posited as spirit; but since it is a question of his being as being, and since on the one hand the doubled being, that of shape and that of deed, stands opposed to itself, and both the one and the other are supposed to be his actuality, it is rather the deed alone that is to be asserted as his genuine being, — not his figure, which was supposed to express what he means with respect to his deeds, or what one supposed he might merely be able to do. Likewise, when on the other hand his work is set over against his inner possibility, capacity, or intention, it is the work by itself that counts as his true actuality, even should he deceive himself on the point and, turned inward out of his action, take himself in this inner to be something other than he is in the deed. Individuality that entrusts itself to the objective element, in becoming a work, does indeed thereby expose itself to being altered and inverted. But it is precisely this that constitutes the character of the deed, whether it is an actual being that holds up, or whether it is only a meant work that, null within itself, passes away. Objectivity does not alter the deed itself; it only shows what the deed is, that is, whether it is at all, or whether it is nothing. — The dissection of this being into intentions and refinements of that sort, by which the actual human being, that is, his deed, is to be explained back into a merely meant being, just as he himself may well fabricate particular intentions about his own actuality, must be left to the idleness of opinion, which, if it wants to set its deedless wisdom to work, to deny the character of reason in the agent, and in this way to maltreat him by declaring, instead of the deed, rather the figure and the features to be his being, has to expect the above reply, which proves to it that the figure is not the in-itself but can rather be an object of handling.

If we now survey the whole compass of relations in which self-conscious individuality admits of being observed as standing toward its outer, one of them will be left over that observation has still to make its object. In psychology it is the outer actuality of things, which is to have at spirit its own self-conscious counter-image and to render spirit comprehensible. In physiognomy, by contrast, it is in its own outer, in a being which is speech — the visible invisibility of its essence — that spirit is to be cognized. There still remains the determination of the side of actuality, that individuality articulates its essence in its immediate, fixed, purely existent actuality. — This last relation is therefore distinguished from the physiognomic in that the latter is the speaking presence of the individual, which in its acting expression at the same time presents itself as reflecting into itself and as contemplating itself, an expression which is itself movement, features at rest which are themselves in essence a mediated being. In the determination still to be considered, however, the outer is at last an actuality wholly at rest, one that is no sign speaking at its own self; separated from self-conscious movement, it presents itself for itself and is as a mere thing.

What first becomes clear about how the inner is related to this outer of its own is that this seems to have to be comprehended as the relationship of causal connection, since the relation of something with being in itself to something else with being in itself, taken as a necessary relation, just is that relationship.

If spiritual individuality is to have an effect upon the body, then as cause it must itself be bodily. But the bodily in which it is present as cause is the organ, not, however, the organ of a doing directed at outer actuality, but of the self-conscious essence's doing within itself, turned outward only toward its own body; which organs these might be is not at once evident. Were one to think merely of organs in general, the organ of labor in general would lie ready to hand, and likewise the organ of the sexual drive, and so forth. Yet organs of that sort must be viewed as tools, or as parts, which spirit, being the one extreme, has as its middle over against the other extreme, an outer object. Here, however, what is understood is an organ in which the self-conscious individual, being an extreme, holds itself for itself over against its own actuality opposed to it, an organ not turned outward at the same time but reflected in its action, and one at which the side of being does not amount to a being for another. In the physiognomic relation the organ is indeed also considered as an existence that is reflected into itself and that speaks about the doing; but this being is an objective one, and physiognomic observation yields the result that self-consciousness confronts just this actuality of its own as something indifferent. This indifference vanishes once this being-reflected-into-itself is itself efficacious; through that, the existence in question acquires a necessary relation to it; but if it is to be efficacious upon existence, it must itself have a being that is nevertheless not properly objective, and it is as this organ that it is to be exhibited.

In ordinary life anger, for example, as such an inner doing, is located in the liver; Plato even grants the liver something still higher, which according to some is even the highest of all, namely prophecy, or the gift of articulating the holy and the eternal in a non-rational way. But the movement that the individual has in liver, heart, and so forth may not count as that individual's movement wholly reflected into itself; in these organs it is rather such that it has already struck inward into the body and has an animal existence turning outward against externality.

The nervous system, by contrast, is the immediate repose of the organic in its movement. The nerves themselves are, to be sure, once again the organs of a consciousness already sunk into its outward direction; but brain and spinal cord may be taken as the abiding-within-itself — the non-objective, and likewise non-outgoing — immediate presence of self-consciousness. So far as the moment of being which belongs to this organ is a being for another, an existence, it is dead being, no longer the presence of self-consciousness. This being within its own self, however, is by its concept a fluidity in which whatever circles are cast into it dissolve immediately, and in which no difference expresses itself as one that has being. Meanwhile, just as spirit itself is not something abstract and simple but rather a system of movements within which it differentiates itself into moments while staying free in this very differentiating, and just as it articulates its body at large for various functions and assigns a singular part of it to one function alone, so too the fluid being of its being-within-itself can be represented as something articulated; and it seems that it has to be so represented, because the being of spirit reflected into itself in the brain is once more only a middle between spirit's pure essence and the articulation of its body, a middle that must accordingly, taking after the nature of both and so from the side of the latter, in turn have at it the articulation that has being.

Spiritually organic being has, along with this, the necessary side of an existence that is at rest and subsisting; the former must withdraw as the extreme of being-for-itself and have the latter facing it as the other extreme, which is then the object upon which the former acts as cause. If, then, brain and spinal cord constitute that bodily being-for-itself of spirit, skull and spinal column come in as the other extreme, the one set apart, namely the fixed thing at rest. — But since it is not the back but only the head that occurs to anyone who thinks of the proper place where spirit exists, we may, in examining a knowledge such as the one before us, content ourselves with this ground — not too poor a one for such a knowledge — in order to restrict this existence to the skull. Should the back occur to someone, on the ground that knowledge and doing are at times driven partly in and partly out through it, this would still prove nothing for taking the spinal cord as belonging to the indwelling place of spirit, and its column as the counter-image existence, since it would prove too much; for one may equally recall that other outer paths of approaching the activity of spirit, so as to rouse it or hold it back, are likewise resorted to. — The spinal column, then, if one likes, falls away with justice; and the claim that the skull by itself does not indeed contain the organs of spirit is constructed quite as well as many another doctrine of natural philosophy. For this was excluded earlier from the concept of this relation, and for that reason the skull was taken as belonging to the side of existence; or, if one may not be reminded of the concept of the matter, then experience surely teaches that, whereas one sees with the eye as an organ, one does not murder, steal, or write poetry with the skull, and so on. — For this reason one should also keep clear of the word organ when it comes to that significance of the skull which has still to be discussed. For although one is accustomed to say that for rational human beings it is not the word but the matter that counts, this gives no permission to designate a matter with a word that does not belong to it, for this is at once ineptitude and deception, which merely supposes and pretends that it does not have the right word, and conceals from itself that in fact it lacks the matter, that is, the concept; if the concept were present, it would also have its right word. — For now only this much has been determined here: that the brain is the living head and the skull the caput mortuum.

In this dead being, then, the brain's spiritual movements and determinate modes would have to give themselves a presentation as outer actuality, which is nevertheless still at the individual itself. For their relationship to the skull, which, being dead, has no spirit dwelling inside it, what offers itself first is the outer, mechanical relationship fixed above, so that the organs properly so called — and they are at the brain — press it out round in one place, beat it broad or push it flat in another, or however else one may care to present this influence. Being itself a part of the organism, the skull must indeed be thought, like every bone, to have a living self-formation, so that, considered in this light, it is rather the skull that presses the brain from its side and sets the brain's outer limit; and being the harder of the two, it has the greater capacity for this. In that case, however, the same relationship would still remain in the determination of the activity of the two toward each other; for whether it is the skull that determines or the skull that is determined alters nothing in the causal connection as such, save that the skull would in that case be made into the immediate organ of self-consciousness, since the side of being-for-itself would then be found in it as cause. But since being-for-itself, as organic vitality in both, falls to each in the same manner, the causal connection between the two in fact falls away. This continued formation of both would, however, hang together inwardly and would amount to a pre-established harmony of an organic kind, one that leaves the two mutually relating sides free toward each other and leaves each its own shape, which need not correspond to the shape of the other; and still more it leaves shape and quality free toward each other, — as the grape's form and the wine's taste are free toward each other. — But since the determination of being-for-itself falls on the side of the brain, while the determination of existence falls on the side of the skull, a causal connection between them is also to be posited within the organic unity; a necessary relation of the two as outer for each other, that is, a relation itself outer, through which their shape would be determined by each other.

There is room, however, for talk back and forth in a variety of ways about the determination under which the organ belonging to self-consciousness would be the cause active upon the side that faces it; for what is under discussion is how a cause is constituted when it is regarded in respect of its indifferent existence, its shape and its magnitude, a cause whose interior and being-for-itself is precisely supposed to be such that immediate existence has no bearing on it. To begin with, the skull's organic self-formation is indifferent to mechanical action upon it, and since that formation consists in relating itself to itself, the relationship of these two relationships is precisely this indeterminateness and boundlessness itself. Suppose next that the brain did receive into itself the differences of spirit as differences that have being, and were a multiplicity of inner organs each taking up a space of its own — which contradicts nature, for nature grants the moments of the concept an existence proper to them and accordingly places the fluid simplicity of organic life purely on the one side, while placing that life's articulation and division in its differences on the other side just as much, so that, on the construal intended here, they show themselves as separate anatomical things — even so it would be left undetermined whether a moment of spirit, depending on whether it was originally the stronger or the weaker, would have to possess in the one case a more expanded and in the other a more contracted brain organ, or whether just the reverse holds. — Likewise whether its development enlarged the organ or shrank it, whether it made it clumsier and thicker, or finer. Because the constitution of the cause is left undetermined, it is equally undetermined in what way the action on the skull comes about, whether by widening, or by constricting and letting collapse. Should this action be determined, more genteelly perhaps, as a stimulating, it stays undetermined whether it happens after the manner of a cantharides plaster, swelling things up, or after that of vinegar, shrivelling them. — Plausible grounds can be adduced for every view of this kind, for the organic relation, which intervenes just as much, lets the one pass as readily as the other and is indifferent to all this understanding.

Observing consciousness, however, has no interest in wanting to pin down this relation. For what occupies the one side is at all events not the brain as an animal part, but the brain qua being of self-conscious individuality. — Individuality, as a standing character and as conscious activity in motion, is for itself and within itself; confronting this being-for-itself and being-within-itself stands its actuality, its existence for another; and it is being-for-itself and being-within-itself that constitutes the essence, the subject, which possesses in the brain a being subsumed under it, one that acquires its worth solely from the significance dwelling within. The other side of self-conscious individuality, however, the side of its existence, is being in the character of something self-subsistent, of a subject, or of a thing, namely a bone; the human being's actuality and existence is his skull-bone. — Such is the relationship, and such the understanding of it, which the two sides of this relation possess in the consciousness that observes them.

What now concerns this consciousness is the more determinate relation between these sides; broadly speaking, the skull-bone does signify the immediate actuality of spirit. But spirit, being many-sided, endows its existence with a correspondingly manifold significance; what has to be won is the determinateness of significance belonging to the several spots into which this existence is divided, and one must see how those spots bear in themselves the pointing toward it.

The bone of the skull is neither an organ of activity nor a movement that speaks; nothing is stolen or murdered and so forth with the skull-bone, nor does it so much as twist its expression at such deeds so as to become a speaking gesture. — Nor does this existent carry the value of a sign. A facial expression and a gesture, a tone, and likewise a column, or a stake driven into the ground on a desert island, announce themselves at once as intending something other than what they immediately and merely are. They give themselves out straightaway as signs, since they bear on themselves a determinateness which points to something else by virtue of not belonging to them as their own. Faced with a skull one may, like Hamlet before Yorick's, let all manner of things come to mind; yet the skull-bone on its own is so indifferent and ingenuous a thing that nothing else is immediately to be seen in it or meant by it than just the bone itself; it may recall the brain and the brain's determinateness, and skulls of a different formation, but it recalls no conscious movement, since it possesses neither facial expression nor gesture, nor anything stamped upon it that would give notice of having come from a conscious deed; for it is that actuality which was to exhibit, on individuality, an other side of such a kind as to be no longer a being that reflects itself into itself, but purely immediate being.

Since, moreover, the bone does not itself feel, a more determinate significance for it might still seem obtainable in roughly this way: that determinate sensations in the neighborhood would make recognizable what is meant by it; and given that some conscious mode of spirit locates its feeling at a determinate spot of the skull, that place might, through its shape, hint at the mode and at what is particular to it. For instance, just as many people complain of a painful tension felt somewhere in the head when they think strenuously, or indeed merely when they think at all, so too stealing, murdering, writing poetry, and so on could each be attended by a sensation of its own, one that would additionally have to occupy its own particular spot. That spot of the brain, being in this way more agitated and more active, would probably also develop the adjacent spot of the bone more strongly; or that spot of bone, out of sympathy or consensus, would for its part not be sluggish either, but would enlarge or diminish itself, or form itself in whatever manner. — What renders this hypothesis improbable, however, is that feeling in general is an indeterminate affair, and that the head, being the center, would have as its feeling the universal fellow-feeling with all suffering, so that the thief's, murderer's, or poet's head-tickling or head-pain would have others mixed in with it, and these could be told apart from one another, and from those that may be called merely bodily, as little as the disease admits of being determined out of the symptom of a headache, supposing we restrict the symptom's significance to the bodily alone.

In fact, no matter which side one considers the matter from, every necessary reciprocal relation drops away, along with any indication of one that would speak for itself. Should the relation be supposed to hold all the same, what remains, and remains as a necessity, is a conceptless, free, pre-established harmony between the corresponding determination on either side; for the one side is to be spiritless actuality, a mere thing. — Thus on the one side there stand a host of skull-spots at rest, on the other a host of spirit-properties whose multiplicity and determination will hang on whatever state psychology happens to be in. The more paltry the representation of spirit, the more this side of the business is made easy; for the properties grow fewer, and at the same time more segregated, harder and bonier, and by that very token more like determinations of bone and more readily compared with them. Still, though the paltriness of the representation of spirit makes much of it easier, a very great host always remains on either side; and what remains for observation is the utter contingency of their relation. Were each of the children of Israel to pick out for himself, from the sand by the sea to which they are said to correspond, the grain whose sign he is, the indifference and arbitrariness that gave each his own would be quite as strong as the indifference and arbitrariness that assigns skull-sites and bone-shapes to each soul-faculty, to each passion, and, what would have to be brought in here no less, to those shadings of character which a more refined psychology and acquaintance with human beings likes to talk about. — The murderer's skull has this — not organ, and not sign either, but this bump; yet this murderer has a whole crowd of other properties besides, as well as other bumps, and along with the bumps hollows too; one has one's pick among bumps and hollows. And conversely his murderous bent may be referred to any bump or hollow you please, and these in turn to any property you please; for the murderer is not just this abstract murderer, any more than he has but one protuberance and one hollow. The observations that are set up about this must therefore come out exactly as well as the shopkeeper's and the housewife's rain at the annual fair and on washday. Shopkeeper and housewife might just as well have observed that it always rains whenever this particular neighbor goes by, or whenever roast pork is served. Just as the rain is indifferent to those circumstances, so, for observation, is this determinateness of spirit indifferent to this determinate being of the skull. For among the two objects that this observing has, the one is a dry being-for-itself, a bony property of spirit, while the other is a dry being-in-itself; a thing as bony as either of them is completely indifferent to everything else; it is all one to the high bump whether a murderer happens to be its neighbor, and all one to the murderer whether flatness is close by him.

To be sure, the possibility that a bump at some spot or other is bound up with some property, passion, and so forth remains left over, insuperably. One can represent the murderer to oneself as bearing a high bump right here at this spot on the skull, the thief as bearing one over there. On this side skull-science admits of great further extension; for to begin with it seems to restrict itself merely to the joining of a bump to a property within the same individual, so that both belong to this one individual. But even natural skull-science — for such a thing must exist just as surely as a natural physiognomy does — passes beyond this limit; it does not merely judge that a cunning man carries a fist-thick bump behind his ears, it also forms the representation that the bumps on the forehead belong not to the unfaithful wife herself but to the other marital individual. — In the same way one can equally well represent to oneself the man who lodges under one roof with the murderer, or his neighbor as well, and further afield his fellow townsmen and so on, as carrying high bumps at some spot or other of the skull, quite as well as the flying cow that was first fondled by the crab that rode the donkey and then, and so on. — But take the possibility in the sense not of what can be represented but of inner possibility, of the concept, and the object turns out to be an actuality that is, and is meant to be, a pure thing devoid of any such significance, one that can therefore carry such significance only in representation.

Yet suppose the observer, heedless of how indifferent the two sides are, does set about determining relations, kept in good heart partly by the general ground of reason that the outer is the expression of the inner, partly leaning on an analogy drawn from animal skulls — animals whose character may indeed be simpler than that of human beings, though for that very reason it grows correspondingly harder to say what character they have, since it cannot be easy for just anybody's representation to project itself properly into the nature of an animal — then, in vouching for the laws he claims to have discovered, the observer finds an excellent aid in a distinction that must necessarily occur to us here too. — The being of spirit at least cannot be taken as anything simply immovable and unshiftable. The human being is free; it is conceded that original being consists only in predispositions, over which he has much power, or which require favorable circumstances in order to be developed, that is, an original being of spirit is just as much to be pronounced a being that does not exist as being. So if observations were to contradict whatever anyone takes it into his head to vouch for as a law, — were the weather fine at the annual fair or on washday, shopkeeper and housewife could say that properly it ought to be raining, and that the predisposition to rain is present all the same; and skull-observing says the like, — that this individual properly ought to be as the skull declares it to be by the law, and does have an original predisposition which, however, was never developed; the quality is not there, yet it ought to be there. — Law and ought rest on the observing of rain that actually falls and of a disposition that is actual given this determinateness of the skull; but where the actuality is missing, empty possibility passes for just as much. — This possibility, that is, the non-actuality of the law as set up, and with it the observations that run counter to it, are bound to enter in precisely because an individual's freedom, together with the circumstances that develop him, stands indifferent toward being altogether, indifferent toward it as original and inner no less than as outer and bony, and because the individual can also be something other than what it inwardly and originally is, and other still than what a bone is.

We thus obtain the possibility that this bump or hollow of the skull designates both something actual and also merely a predisposition, indeterminately so, toward something or other, hence that it designates something non-actual; we see a bad excuse fare as it always fares, namely that it stands available for use against the very thing it is supposed to help out. We see the act of meaning brought by the nature of the matter to the point of itself saying, and saying thoughtlessly, the opposite of what it holds fast to — of saying that something or other is indicated by this bone, but equally well is not.

What hovers before opinion itself in this evasion is the true thought that wipes opinion out, the thought that being as such is in no way the truth of spirit. The predisposition already counts as an original being having no part in spirit's activity, and the bone is, on its side, a being of just that kind. What has being apart from spiritual activity is for consciousness a thing, and so far from being consciousness's essence that it is rather the reverse of it, consciousness being actual to itself only through the negation and obliteration of such being. — Seen from this side, passing a bone off for the actual existence of consciousness has to be counted a total repudiation of reason; and passed off for it the bone is, once it is regarded as spirit's outer, since the outer is precisely actuality in the mode of being. It is no use to say that from this outer one only draws an inference to the inner, which is something else, and that the outer, far from being the inner itself, is merely the inner's expression. For within the relationship of the two to each other, what falls to the side of the inner is precisely the determination of what thinks itself and is thought, while to the side of the outer falls the determination of actuality in the mode of being. — So when someone is told: you (your inner) are this, because your bone is constituted thus, that means nothing other than: I take a bone to be your actuality. The riposte to such a judgment by a box on the ear, mentioned in connection with physiognomy, in the first place dislodges the soft parts from their appearance and their situation, and shows no more than that these are no genuine in-itself, not the actuality of spirit; — here the riposte would properly have to go the length of smashing the skull of anyone who judges so, in order to demonstrate, quite as palpably as his wisdom deserves, that for a human being a bone amounts to no in-itself whatever, still less to his true actuality. —

Such a science of the skull will be thrown out unexamined by the crude instinct of self-conscious reason — thrown out along with that other, observing instinct of the same reason, which, having ripened into an inkling of cognition, has laid hold of cognition in the spiritless manner of supposing the outer to be an expression of the inner. But the worse a thought is, the less it sometimes stands out just where its badness lies, and the harder it is to lay that badness out. For a thought is called worse in proportion as the abstraction that counts for it as the essence is purer and emptier. But the opposition that matters here has as its members individuality conscious of its own self, together with the abstraction of an externality grown wholly into a thing, — spirit's inner being, that is, apprehended as fixed, spiritless being and set over against a being of exactly the same sort. — With this, however, observing reason does seem in fact to have reached its apex, from which it must abandon itself and turn head over heels; for only what is wholly bad carries in itself the immediate necessity of inverting itself. — It is as with the Jewish people, of whom one may say that its standing immediately before the gateway of salvation is precisely why it is, and has been, the most reprobate of peoples; the self-essentiality that it was to be in and for itself it is not for itself, but relocates beyond itself; through this externalization it makes a higher existence possible for itself, supposing it could take its object back into itself once more, than would have been open to it had it stayed put inside the immediacy of being; for spirit's greatness grows with the greatness of the opposition out of which it comes back into itself; and this opposition it creates for itself in sublating its immediate unity and in externalizing its being-for-itself. Yet where such a consciousness fails to reflect itself, the middle in which it stands is a hapless emptiness, since what was to have filled that middle has hardened into a fixed extreme. And so observing reason's final stage is at the same time its worst, and for that very reason its reversal is necessary.

For if we survey the series of relationships considered up to now, the series that makes up what observation has for content and object, it emerges that already in observation's first mode, in the observing of the relationships of inorganic nature, sensuous being vanishes from view; the moments of that relationship come forward as pure abstractions, as simple concepts that were to have been tied fast to the existence of things, an existence which is nevertheless lost, so that the moment proves to be pure movement and something universal. This process, free and complete within itself, keeps the significance of something objective, yet it now steps forward as a One; within the process of what is inorganic, the One is the inner that does not exist; but existing as One, the process is the organic. — Confronting the universal, the One stands there as being-for-itself or negative essence, withdraws from the universal and stays free on its own account, so that the concept, realized solely in the element of absolute singularization, fails to find in organic existence its genuine expression, namely that of being there as universal, and stays instead an outer or, what comes to the same, an inner of organic nature. — Only in itself is the organic process free; for its own self it is not; in purpose the being-for-itself of its freedom sets in, and exists as another essence, as a wisdom conscious of its own self and lying outside that process. Observing reason accordingly turns to that wisdom, to spirit, to the concept that exists as universality, or the purpose that exists as purpose, and from this point on its own essence is what stands before it as object.

It turns first to spirit's purity; but since it is an apprehending of its object, which moves in its differences, as something that has being, what it arrives at are laws of thinking, relations of what endures to what endures; and since the content of these laws consists of nothing but moments, the laws run off into self-consciousness's One. — Taken in the same way as something that has being, this new object is the singular, contingent self-consciousness; observing thus keeps within the compass of spirit as merely meant, and of the contingent relationship between actuality that is conscious and actuality that is not. Only in its own self is spirit the necessity of that relation; observation accordingly closes in on spirit bodily, setting its willing and acting actuality alongside the actuality in which it is reflected into itself and contemplative, an actuality which is itself objective. This outer, though it is a language of the individual which the individual possesses on its own self, is at the same time, being a sign, indifferent toward the content it was to designate, just as whatever sets up the sign for itself is indifferent toward the sign.

Away from this shifting language, then, observation retreats at last to fixed being, and declares, in keeping with its concept, that externality is spirit's outer and immediate actuality neither as organ nor as language and sign, but as a dead thing. The very earliest observation of inorganic nature sublated the demand that the concept be present as a thing; this last mode restores that demand, and does so by making spirit's own actuality into a thing, or, put the other way round, by conferring on dead being the significance of spirit. — With this, what our concept of observation was has come to be pronounced by observation itself: that reason's certainty is in search of its own self as objective actuality. — Admittedly one does not thereby mean that spirit, in being represented by a skull, is being pronounced a thing; no materialism, as people call it, is supposed to lie in this thought, spirit being rather something else again than these bones; yet to say of spirit that it is comes to nothing else than calling it a thing. So when being as such, or thinghood, gets predicated of spirit, the truthful expression of that is that spirit is something of the sort that a bone is. Hence it has to count as a matter of the highest importance that we have hit upon the true expression for what is said of spirit when it is said, quite baldly, that it is. When elsewhere it is said of spirit, it is, has a being, is a thing, a singular actuality, then what is thereby meant is not something one could see, or take into one's hand, or bump against, and so on; yet something of just that kind is what is said, and what in truth is said accordingly expresses itself thus: that spirit's being is a bone.

This result now carries a twofold significance, first the true one, insofar as it completes the result of the movement that self-consciousness went through before. Self-consciousness in its unhappiness externalized its self-subsistence and wrung its being-for-itself out into a thing. By that it went back out of self-consciousness into consciousness, that is, into the consciousness whose object is a being, a thing; — but this, which is a thing, is self-consciousness itself; so it is the unity of the I with being, the category. Since the object is for consciousness determined in this way, it has reason. Consciousness, like self-consciousness, is in itself reason properly speaking; but only that consciousness for which the object has determined itself as the category can be said to have reason; — and distinct from this again is knowing what reason is. — The category is the immediate unity of being with what is its own, so it must run through both forms, and observing consciousness is precisely the consciousness before which the category sets itself out in the form of being. Consciousness, in its result, utters as a proposition what it is unconsciously certain of — the proposition lying in reason's concept. It is the infinite judgment to the effect that the self is a thing — and it is a judgment that sublates its own self. — What this result has thus added to the category, in a determinate way, is that the category is this self-sublating opposition. In the form of being or of immediacy the pure category is there for consciousness as an object still unmediated, merely present at hand, and consciousness is a relating just as unmediated. That infinite judgment has for its moment immediacy's transition into mediation, or negativity. Accordingly the object present at hand is determined as a negative one, while consciousness over against it is determined as self-consciousness; or the category, which in observing ran through the form of being, is posited now under the form of being-for-itself; no longer will consciousness find itself immediately, but it will bring itself forth through its own activity. It itself is for itself the purpose of its doing, whereas in observing it had to do only with things.

The result's other significance is that of conceptless observing, which we have already looked at. This observing knows no other way to grasp and pronounce itself than by ingenuously declaring the bone, as it is found to be a sensuous thing that does not at the same time lose its objectivity for consciousness, to be the actuality of self-consciousness. Yet it has no clear consciousness that it is saying this, and it does not grasp its proposition in the determinateness of subject and predicate and of their relation, much less in the sense of the concept and of that judgment which is infinite and dissolves its own self. — Rather, out of a deeper-lying self-consciousness belonging to spirit, which shows up here as a natural decency, it conceals from itself how disgraceful the conceptless, naked thought is of taking a bone for the actuality of self-consciousness, and it whitewashes that thought by means of thoughtlessness itself, mixing in a variety of relationships that have no sense here, those of cause and effect, of sign, of organ, and so on, and hiding the glaring character of the proposition behind distinctions borrowed from them.

Brain fever and the like, regarded as spirit's being, already amount to an actuality merely thought and merely hypothetical, — not one that exists, not felt, not seen, not the true actuality; once they are there, once they come into view, they are dead objects, and at that point they no longer pass for spirit's being. Genuine objectivity, however, has to be an immediate, sensuous one, so that spirit, in this objectivity taken as dead — for the bone is the dead element insofar as it occurs on the living being itself — gets posited as actual. — The concept of this representation is that reason is to itself all thinghood, including thinghood that is purely objective; but reason is so in the concept, or rather the concept alone is its truth, and the purer that concept, the more foolish is the representation into which it sinks when its content is present not as concept but as representation, — when the self-sublating judgment is taken without any consciousness of this its infinity, and taken instead as an abiding proposition whose subject and predicate each hold good on their own, the self fixed as self and the thing as thing, and yet the one is supposed to be the other. — Reason, being essentially the concept, is immediately split into its own self and its opposite, an opposition which for that very reason is just as immediately sublated. But when reason, thus presenting itself as its own self and as its opposite, is held fast in the wholly singular moment of this stepping apart, it has been apprehended unreasonably; and the purer the moments of that stepping apart are, the more garish is the appearance of this content, which alone either is there for consciousness or is alone pronounced by it ingenuously. — The depth which spirit drives out from inside, yet only so far as its representing consciousness, leaving it to stand there — and the ignorance of this consciousness as to what it is that it says, is the very same linking of high and low that nature naively expresses in the living creature when it links the organ of its highest completion, the organ of procreation, — with the organ of pissing. — The infinite judgment, taken as infinite, would be the completion of life that grasps its own self, whereas the consciousness of that life which remains within representation relates itself as pissing.

B. The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness through Itself

Self-consciousness came upon the thing as being itself, and upon its own self as being a thing; that is, it is for it that in itself it is objective actuality. It has ceased to be that immediate certainty which consists in being all reality; it is instead a certainty for which everything immediate has taken on the form of the sublated, so that its objectivity now ranks only as a surface, the inner core and essence of which is itself. — The object to which it relates itself positively is therefore a self-consciousness; that object stands in the form of thinghood, that is, it is self-subsistent; yet self-consciousness carries the certainty that this self-subsistent object is nothing alien to it; it thereby knows that in itself it is recognized by that object; it is spirit, which has the certainty of possessing its unity with itself within the doubling of its self-consciousness and within the self-subsistence of the two. This certainty must now raise itself for spirit to the level of truth; what has validity for it, namely what it is in itself and in the inner certainty it holds, is to step into its consciousness and become for it.

Which general stations this actualization will pass through is already indicated in a broad way by comparison with the path traveled so far. For just as observing reason, taking the category as its element, went back over the movement made by consciousness, namely sense-certainty, perceiving, and the understanding, so too will this reason travel a second time through the doubled movement of self-consciousness, passing over out of self-subsistence into its freedom. At the outset this active reason is aware of itself as nothing more than an individual, and as such it must demand its actuality in the other and bring it forth there — but then, as its consciousness raises itself to universality, it turns into universal reason and knows itself as reason, as that which in and for itself has already been recognized and which gathers all self-consciousness into its pure consciousness; it is the spiritual essence in its simplicity, which, in that it likewise arrives at consciousness, is the real substance, the ground into which the earlier forms go back, so that measured against this ground they are only single moments of its becoming, moments that do indeed break loose and show themselves as shapes in their own right, though in fact they are borne by it alone and have existence and actuality, while they have their truth only to the extent that they are and remain within it.

Suppose we take up in its reality this goal, the concept that has arisen for us already, namely the self-consciousness that is recognized, which in the other free self-consciousness has the certainty of its own self and precisely therein has its truth — or suppose we lift out this still inward spirit as the substance that has by now matured into its existence: then what unfolds within this concept is the realm of ethical life. For ethical life is nothing other than the absolute spiritual unity that the essence of individuals has within their self-subsistent actuality; it is a self-consciousness universal in itself, one that is actual to itself within a second consciousness in such fashion that this second consciousness possesses complete self-subsistence, or is a thing for it, and that just therein it knows its unity with that other, and only in this unity with the objective essence is it self-consciousness at all. This ethical substance, when it is held in the abstraction of universality, amounts to no more than the law as thought; but it is quite as much self-consciousness actual in an immediate way, or it is custom. Conversely, the singular consciousness is this existent One only insofar as it is conscious, in its singularity, of the universal consciousness as its own being, and insofar as its doing and its existence are the universal custom.

Within a people's life the concept of self-conscious reason's actualization, the concept of intuiting one's complete unity with the other in the very self-subsistence of that other, or of having as one's object this free thinghood of another, which I find before me and which is the negative of my own self, as being mine for me — that concept has in fact its consummated reality. Reason is on hand as the universal substance in its fluidity, as the simple unalterable thinghood, which shatters into many wholly self-subsistent beings much as light shatters into the stars, into countless points shining for themselves, beings that in their absolute being-for-itself are dissolved in the simple self-subsistent substance not merely in themselves but for their own selves; they know themselves to be these singular self-subsistent beings by the very fact that they sacrifice their singularity and that this universal substance is their soul and their essence; and this universal is conversely the doing of them as singular beings, or the work that they have brought forth.

The purely singular doings and dealings of the individual bear upon the needs it has as a natural being, that is, as existent singularity. The fact that even these, its most ordinary functions, are not brought to nothing but instead possess actuality, is due to the universal medium that preserves them, to the power of the people taken as a whole. — Yet it is not only this form of the subsistence of its doing in general that the individual has in the universal substance, but just as much its content; what it does is the universal skill and custom of all. This content, insofar as it individuates itself completely, is in its actuality interlaced with the doing of everyone. The individual's labor for its own needs satisfies the needs of others no less than its own, and it attains satisfaction of its own only by way of the labor of others. — Just as the single individual, in its singular labor, already carries out a universal labor unconsciously, so it carries out the universal labor once more as an object of which it is conscious; the whole, precisely as a whole, turns into its work, and for that work it sacrifices itself, receiving itself back from it by that very act. — Nothing is present here that would not be mutual, nothing in which the self-subsistence of the individual would fail to confer on itself its positive significance of being for itself, and to confer it precisely where its being-for-itself dissolves, in the negation of that self-subsistence. It is within the customs and the laws of its people that this universal substance, this unity of being-for-another, or of making oneself into a thing, with being-for-itself, utters its universal language; but this existent unalterable essence is nothing other than the expression of the very singular individuality that appears to stand opposed to it; the laws declare what each single individual is and does; the individual cognizes them not only as its universal objective thinghood but equally cognizes itself within them, or cognizes them as individuated in its own individuality and in every one of its fellow citizens. Each one, then, possesses within the universal spirit nothing but the certainty of his own self, the certainty of finding in existent actuality nothing other than himself; of the others he is as certain as he is of himself. — In all of them I intuit that for their own selves they are just these self-subsistent beings, as I too am; and the free unity with the others I intuit in them in such a way that it exists through the Others themselves just as it exists through Me. They as Me, Me as Them.

In a free people, therefore, reason is actualized in truth; it is living spirit at hand in the present, and within it the individual does not merely find its determination, that is, its universal and singular essence, pronounced and available as thinghood, but is itself this essence and has attained its determination as well. This is why the wisest men of antiquity issued the dictum that wisdom and virtue lie in living in keeping with the customs of one's people.

But self-consciousness, which to begin with is spirit only in an immediate way and according to the concept, has stepped out of this happiness of having attained its determination and of living within it, or else, — it has not yet reached that happiness; for either statement holds equally well.

Reason must step out of this happiness; for a free people's life is real ethical life only in itself or immediately, or rather it is an ethical life that merely is, and with that this universal spirit is itself a singular one as well, the totality of customs and laws, a determinate ethical substance which strips off its restriction only at the higher moment, namely in the consciousness about its own essence, and whose absolute truth lies in that cognition alone and not immediately in its being; within that being it is in part something restricted, and in part the absolute restriction consists in just this, that spirit stands in the form of being.

Further, then, the singular consciousness, taken as it exists immediately within real ethical life, that is, within the people, is a solid trust, one for which spirit has not resolved itself into its abstract moments, and which therefore does not know itself as pure singularity that is for itself. But once it has come to this thought, as come it must, what is lost is its trust, that is, its immediate unity with spirit and its being therein; isolated for itself, it is now the essence to itself, and the universal spirit is that essence no longer. This moment of singularity belonging to self-consciousness does indeed lie within the universal spirit itself, yet only as a vanishing quantity which, in stepping forth for itself, dissolves within that spirit just as immediately and reaches consciousness only in the form of trust. In fixing itself in this manner — and each moment, since it is a moment of the essence, must itself come to exhibit itself as essence — the individual has taken up a position over against the laws and customs; these count for no more than a thought lacking absolute essentiality, an abstract theory lacking actuality, while the individual, as this I, is the living truth to itself.

Or else self-consciousness has not yet attained this happiness, namely that of being the spirit of a people, of being ethical substance. For spirit, on its return from observation, is at the start not yet actualized as such by its own doing; it is posited only as inner essence, or as the abstraction. — Or spirit as yet only is, and immediately so; but existing immediately, it is singular; it is that practical consciousness which steps into the world it finds before it with the purpose of doubling itself in this determinateness of a single individual, of producing itself as This One, its own existent counterpart, and of arriving at consciousness of the unity between its actuality and the objective essence. This unity it possesses as a certainty; what counts for it is that the unity holds in itself, that this agreement between itself and thinghood is already on hand and has merely still to come about for it through its own doing, or that its making is equally the finding of that agreement. Since this unity goes by the name of happiness, the individual is hereby sent out by its spirit into the world to seek its happiness.

Since for us, then, the ethical substance is what this rational self-consciousness truly is, what begins here for self-consciousness itself is its ethical experience of the world. Insofar as it has not yet become that substance, this movement presses toward it, and what gets sublated in the movement are the singular moments that hold for self-consciousness in isolation. These moments take the shape of an immediate willing, or of a natural drive, which reaches its satisfaction, and that satisfaction is in turn the content of a further drive. — But insofar as self-consciousness has forfeited the happiness of being within the substance, these natural drives are joined with a consciousness of their purpose as the true determination and essentiality; the ethical substance has sunk into a selfless predicate whose living subjects are the individuals, who must fill out their universality by their own means and must see to their determination out of themselves. — Taken in that first significance, then, those shapes constitute the becoming of the ethical substance and run ahead of it; taken in the second, they come after it and unravel for self-consciousness what its determination is; on the first side, within the movement in which their truth is experienced, the immediacy or rawness of the drives is what falls away, and the content of the drives crosses over into a higher content; on the second side, what falls away is the false representation of a consciousness that places its determination in those drives. On the first side the goal they reach is the immediate ethical substance; on the second, however, it is the consciousness of that substance, a consciousness that knows the substance as the essence belonging to itself; and to this extent the movement would be the becoming of morality, a shape standing higher than the first. These shapes, however, make up at the same time only One side of that becoming, namely the side falling within being-for-itself, the side in which consciousness sublates the purposes that are its own; not the side along which morality proceeds out of the substance itself. These moments are not yet able to carry the significance of being turned into purposes in opposition to an ethical life now lost, and so they do indeed hold good here according to their unprejudiced content, and the goal toward which they press is the ethical substance. But since the form these moments take once consciousness has forfeited its ethical life and, in searching for it, repeats those very forms, lies nearer to our own age, they may better be presented in the idiom of this latter manner.

Self-consciousness, which as yet is only the concept of spirit, sets out upon this path with the determinateness of being the essence to itself as a singular spirit, and its purpose is accordingly to give itself actualization as something singular and, as this singular, to enjoy itself within that actualization.

In the determination of being the essence to itself as something being for itself, it is the negativity of the other; within its consciousness it therefore steps forth as the positive over against something that indeed is, but that for it has the significance of not being in itself; consciousness appears split in two, into this actuality it finds before it and into the purpose that it carries out by sublating that actuality and that it makes actual in place of it. Its first purpose, however, is the abstract being-for-itself that belongs to it immediately, that is, to intuit itself as this singular individual within another, or to intuit another self-consciousness as being itself. What it experiences as the truth of this purpose sets self-consciousness higher, and it is now a purpose to itself insofar as it is universal as well and carries the law immediately upon it. It learns, however, in fulfilling this law of its heart, that the singular essence cannot maintain itself in the process, and that the good can be carried out only by sacrificing that essence, and so it becomes virtue. The experience that virtue undergoes can be none other than this: that its purpose is in itself already executed, that happiness is found immediately within the doing itself, and that the doing itself is the good. Within the movement of this whole sphere its concept, namely that thinghood is spirit's own being-for-itself, comes to be for self-consciousness. Having found this concept, self-consciousness is thus reality to itself as an individuality that expresses itself immediately, one that no longer meets any resistance in an opposed actuality, and for which this expressing alone is object and purpose.

a. Pleasure and Necessity

Self-consciousness, which quite generally is reality to itself, has its object in itself, yet has it as an object that so far it holds only for itself and that is not yet in being; over against it stands being as an actuality different from the one it is itself; and it now aims, by carrying out its being-for-itself, to intuit itself as another self-subsistent essence. Its first purpose is this: that it should become conscious, within the other self-consciousness, of itself as a singular essence, or, to put it otherwise, that it should turn this other into itself; and it proceeds with the certainty that in itself the other is already it itself. — To the extent that it has lifted itself out of the ethical substance and out of the settled being of thought and up into its being-for-itself, the law of custom and of existence, the acquaintances gathered by observation, and theory all lie behind it like a gray shade just now fading away, since what these amount to is instead a knowledge whose object has a being-for-itself and an actuality different from those belonging to self-consciousness. The earth-spirit has entered into it, displacing the seemingly heavenly spirit that belonged to universality in knowledge and in doing, a universality in which the sensation and the enjoyment of singularity fall mute; and to the earth-spirit only the being that constitutes the actuality of the singular consciousness counts as the true actuality.

| It scorns understanding and science, | the human being's very highest gifts — | it has surrendered itself to the devil | and must go to ruin.

It therefore hurls itself into life and carries out the pure individuality in which it makes its appearance. It is less a matter of its making its happiness than of its taking that happiness immediately and enjoying it. The shades of science, of laws and of principles, which are all that intervenes between it and an actuality of its own, vanish like a lifeless fog that cannot contend with the certainty of its reality; it takes life for itself as a ripe fruit is plucked, a fruit that comes toward the hand quite as much as it is taken.

Only according to one moment is its doing a doing of desire; it is directed not at the extermination of the whole objective essence, but solely at the form of that essence's otherness, or of its self-subsistence, which is an essenceless shine; for in itself this essence counts for it as the same essence, or as the selfhood belonging to it. Living existence is the element within which desire and desire's object have their subsistence, self-subsistent and indifferent toward each other; and the enjoyment of desire sublates that element in so far as it accrues to desire's object. Here, however, this element, which gives each of the two its separated actuality, is rather the category, a being that is essentially a represented one; it is therefore the consciousness of self-subsistence; — whether it be the natural consciousness, or the consciousness elaborated into a system of laws, which maintains the individuals each for itself. For a self-consciousness that knows the other to be its own selfhood, this separation has no being in itself. And so it attains the enjoyment of pleasure: consciousness of its own actualization within a consciousness that has the appearance of self-subsistence, or intuition of the unity of the two self-subsistent self-consciousnesses. It does reach its purpose, but in doing so it undergoes the experience of what the purpose truly is. What it comprehends itself to be is this singular, for-itself-existing essence, yet actualizing that purpose amounts to sublating it, since it becomes an object to itself not as this singular but instead as the unity that it forms together with the other self-consciousness, and hence as a sublated singular or as a universal.

Pleasure once enjoyed does bear the positive significance of having become itself in the form of objective self-consciousness, but it bears no less the negative significance of having sublated itself; and because it grasped its actualization under the former significance alone, what it has undergone makes its way into its consciousness as a contradiction, one in which the actuality that its singularity had reached sees itself annihilated by the negative essence, which, itself void of actuality, confronts that actuality as an emptiness and is nevertheless the power that devours it. This essence amounts to nothing other than the concept of what, in itself, this individuality is. Yet among the shapes of the spirit that actualizes itself, this individuality still remains the poorest; for as yet it is to itself no more than the abstraction of reason, or the immediacy belonging to the unity of the for-itself and of being-in-itself; hence its essence is merely the abstract category. The form of immediate, simple being, however, is no longer what it has, as it did for observing spirit, where it is abstract being, or, when posited as something alien, thinghood as such. What has now entered into this thinghood is being-for-itself along with mediation. Accordingly it steps forward as a circle, and its content is the pure relation of the simple essentialities in developed form. Hence the actualization this individuality has achieved consists in nothing beyond this: that it has flung the circle of abstractions out of the closed confines of simple self-consciousness and into the element of being-for-it, the element of objective spreading-out. So what becomes the object for self-consciousness, as its essence, in the pleasure it enjoys, is the spreading-out of those empty essentialities: pure unity, pure difference, and the relation between them; apart from that, the object that individuality undergoes as its essence possesses no content at all. This object is what one calls necessity; for necessity, along with fate and similar names, is just that of which one cannot say what it does, what determinate laws and positive content belong to it, because it is itself the absolute pure concept intuited as being, the relation that is simple and empty yet unstoppable and undisturbable, whose work is merely the nothingness of singularity. Necessity is this firm interconnection because what hangs together in it are the pure essentialities, the empty abstractions; unity, difference and their relation are categories of which each, in and for itself, is nothing and has being only in relation to its opposite, so that they can never fall apart from one another. What relates them to each other is their concept, since they are the pure concepts themselves; and necessity is constituted by this absolute relation, this abstract movement. The merely singular individuality, whose content so far is nothing but the pure concept of reason, has therefore not hurled itself out of dead theory and into life; what it has hurled itself into is rather the consciousness of a lifelessness that is its own, and it falls to its own lot only as the empty and alien necessity, as dead actuality.

The transition takes place out of the form of the One and over into the form of universality, out of one absolute abstraction and over into another; out of a purpose that is pure being-for-itself, one that has thrown off community with others, and over into the pure opposite, into the being-in-itself that is thereby just as abstract. Thus the matter appears as though the individual has merely gone to ruin, and as though the absolute brittleness of singularity has been pulverized against an actuality that is just as hard but continuous. — Because, as consciousness, it constitutes the unity of itself with its own opposite, this downfall is still there for it: there for it are its purpose and the actualization of that purpose, together with the contradiction between what counted for it as the essence and what in itself is the essence; — it undergoes the double sense residing in what it did, namely in having taken its own life; life is what it took, but what it thereby seized was death instead.

This transition, whereby its living being passes into lifeless necessity, therefore strikes it as an inversion for which nothing at all supplies the mediation. A mediating term would have to be something in which the two sides were one, so that consciousness could cognize each moment within the other: its purpose and its doing within fate, its fate within its purpose and its doing, and its own essence within this necessity. For this consciousness, however, that unity is precisely pleasure itself, that is, the simple, singular feeling, and when it passes from the moment constituted by this purpose of its own over to the moment of its true essence, this is for it a bare leap into the opposite; for feeling neither contains these moments nor links them together; they are contained and linked solely within the pure self, a self that is something universal, or thinking. By way of its experience, in which its truth was to have come to it, consciousness has therefore turned into a riddle for itself instead: the consequences of its deeds do not count for it as its own deeds; what happens to it is not, for it, an experiencing of what it in itself is; and the transition is not a mere change of form in one and the same content and essence, represented at one time as the content and essence of consciousness, at another as its object or as its own essence intuited. Abstract necessity therefore counts as the merely negative and uncomprehended power of universality, against which individuality is dashed to pieces.

The appearance that this shape of self-consciousness makes reaches just this far; the final moment of its existence lies in thinking its own loss within necessity, or in thinking itself to be an essence that is absolutely alien to itself. In itself, however, self-consciousness has outlived this loss, for its own essence is precisely this necessity, or pure universality. Consciousness reflected into itself in this way, knowing necessity as itself, constitutes a new shape of consciousness.

b. The Law of the Heart, and the Madness of Self-Conceit

Necessity, as it is in truth in self-consciousness, is precisely what it is for the latter's new shape, wherein self-consciousness stands to itself as the necessary; immediately it takes itself to have the universal, or the law, within it, and this law, given the determination that it lies immediately within the being-for-itself of consciousness, goes by the name of the law of the heart. This shape is, for itself, essence as singularity, just as the previous shape was, yet it is richer by one determination, namely that this being-for-itself is valid for it as something necessary or universal.

The law, then, which is immediately self-consciousness's own, or a heart which nonetheless has a law within it, is the purpose that self-consciousness sets out to actualize. It remains to be seen whether the actualization will correspond to this concept, and whether in it self-consciousness will experience this law of its own as the essence.

This heart has an actuality standing over against it; for within the heart the law is as yet only for itself, not actualized, and therefore at the same time an other than what the concept is. By that very fact this other is determined as an actuality standing opposed to whatever is to be actualized, and so as the contradiction between the law and singu larity. So it is, for one thing, a law that weighs down upon singular individuality, an ordering of the world grounded in violence, standing in contradiction with the law of the heart itself; — and, for another, a humanity suffering beneath such an ordering, a humanity subject to an alien necessity rather than following the law of the heart. — That actuality, showing itself over against the present shape of consciousness, is plainly nothing else than the relationship already gone through, the relationship split in two between individuality and its truth, a relationship of merciless necessity under which individuality is crushed. For us the preceding movement comes to stand over against the new shape, since that shape has in itself issued from the movement, so that the moment from which it derives is necessary to it; to the shape, however, the movement appears as something already found on hand, for it possesses no consciousness of its own origin, and its essence lies rather in being for itself, that is, in being the negative over against this positive in-itself.

This individuality, then, is bent upon sublating the necessity that contradicts the law of the heart, together with the suffering that necessity brings with it. It is therefore no longer the frivolity of the earlier shape, which wanted nothing but singular pleasure; it is instead the seriousness of a lofty purpose, seeking its pleasure in the display of its own excellent essence and in producing the welfare of humanity. That which it brings into actuality is the law itself, so that its pleasure is at once the pleasure universal to all hearts. The two are for it undivided: pleasure on its part is what conforms to law, while actualizing the law of humanity at large prepares its own singular pleasure. For within this individuality itself, the necessary and individuality are immediately one and the same; the law of the heart is precisely this law. Nothing has as yet displaced individuality from its position, and the unity of the two has come about neither through any mediating movement between them nor through discipline. The actualization of the immediate, undisciplined essence passes for the display of an excellence and for the producing of the welfare of humanity.

The law which stands over against the law of the heart, by contrast, is severed from the heart and free for itself. Humanity as it belongs to that law has no life in the happy unity of law with heart; its life is one either of cruel separation and suffering, or at the very least of a privation, the privation of enjoying itself while complying with the law, and the lack of any consciousness of its own excellence while transgressing it. Since that divine and human ordering, which has power on its side, stands severed from the heart, the heart takes it for a mere semblance, one destined to lose what still attends it, namely its power and its actuality. In its content this ordering may of course chance to fall in with the law of the heart; where it does, the heart can put up with it; yet what counts as essence for the heart is not lawfulness purely as such, but rather that within the ordering it possesses consciousness of itself, that it has been satisfied there. But wherever universal necessity has a content out of accord with the heart, that necessity, in respect of its content as well, is nothing in itself and has to yield before the law of the heart.

So the individual carries out the law of its heart; that law becomes a universal ordering, and pleasure becomes an actuality lawful in and for itself. But the law, in becoming actual, has in fact escaped the individual; what it immediately becomes is nothing but the very relationship that was to have been sublated. The law of the heart ceases, precisely by being actualized, to be the law of the heart. For in the process it acquires the form of being and has become a universal power to which this particular heart is indifferent, with the result that the individual, in the very act of setting up what is its own ordering, no longer finds that ordering to be its own. By actualizing its law, therefore, it does not bring forth its law; since the actual ordering is in itself its own but for it something alien, all it brings forth is its own entanglement in that actual ordering, and indeed in an ordering that confronts it as a superior power, not merely alien but hostile. — Through its deed the individual posits itself in, or rather as, the universal element of the actuality that has being, and by its own reckoning its deed is to carry the worth of a universal ordering. But with that it has let the deed go free of itself; the deed grows on as universality for itself and purges itself of singularity; the individual, which wants to cognize universality only in the form of its immediate being-for-itself, thus does not cognize itself in this free universality, even though it belongs to that universality all the same, for the universality is its own doing. This doing therefore takes on the inverted meaning of contradicting the universal ordering, since the individual's deed is meant to be the deed of its singular heart and not a free universal actuality; and yet at the same time the individual has in fact recognized that ordering, for its doing amounts to positing its essence as free actuality, that is, to recognizing actuality as its essence.

By the concept of what it does, the individual has itself settled the closer manner in which actual universality, the universality to which it has made itself belong, turns against it. Its deed, as actuality, belongs to the universal; the content of the deed, however, is its own individuality, which wills to maintain itself as this singular individuality opposed to the universal. No determinate law is at issue whose setting up would be under discussion; what is at issue is that universality and the singular heart stand in immediate unity, a thought elevated into law and claiming to be valid, the thought that in whatever counts as law each heart must cognize itself. Yet it is this individual's heart alone that has posited its actuality in its own deed, a deed expressing for it its being-for-itself, or its pleasure. This deed is to be valid immediately as something universal; that is, in truth it is particular and wears universality only as a form, its particular content being supposed to count as such for universal. In this content, accordingly, the others find carried out not the law of their own heart but instead that of someone else, and by the very universal law which says that each is to find its heart in whatever is law, they turn against the actuality which this individual set up, exactly as it had turned against theirs. Where at first it found only the rigid law, the individual now finds the very hearts of human beings ranged against its excellent intentions, and finds them detestable.

Since this consciousness knows universality as yet only in its immediate form, and knows necessity only as a necessity of the heart, it has no acquaintance with what actualization and efficacy are by nature, namely that, as what has being, they are in their truth the universal in itself, wherein the singularity of consciousness, which entrusts itself to them so as to be as this immediate singularity, instead goes under; and so, in place of its own being, what it gains within being is estrangement from itself. What it fails to cognize itself in, however, is not dead necessity any more, but necessity enlivened by universal individuality. It had taken this divine and human ordering, which it found already in force, for a dead actuality in which those who belong to it would have no consciousness of themselves, any more than the individual has, fixing its heart as it does as this heart that has being for itself and stands opposed to the universal; what it finds instead is that the ordering is enlivened by the consciousness of all, and that it constitutes the law of all hearts. It undergoes the experience that actuality is an enlivened ordering, and it does so, indeed, by the very act of actualizing the law of its heart; for this means nothing other than that individuality makes itself into an object as something universal, an object in which, however, it does not cognize itself.

What emerges as the true for this shape of self-consciousness out of its experience contradicts what the shape is for itself. Yet what the shape is for itself has, in its own eyes, the form of absolute universality, namely the law of the heart, immediately at one with self-consciousness. The subsisting, living ordering is at the same time no less its own essence and its own work; it produces nothing else than this ordering; and it stands united with self-consciousness with equal immediacy. Self-consciousness, then, belonging in this manner to a doubled and mutually opposed essentiality, is in contradiction with its own self and shattered at its very core. The law of this heart is the sole thing in which self-consciousness cognizes itself; but through the actualizing of that law the ordering valid for all has equally become for it its very own essence and its very own actuality; what contradicts itself within its consciousness therefore confronts it in both cases under the form of essence and of an actuality belonging to it.

As it gives voice to this moment of a downfall of which it is conscious, and thereby to what its experience has resulted in, it exhibits itself as just this inward inverting of itself, as the derangement of a consciousness whose essence is immediately un-essence and whose actuality is immediately unactuality. — Derangement must not be taken to lie in this, that something essenceless gets held for essential and something unactual for actual at all, such that whatever is essential or actual for one person would fail to be so for someone else, with the consciousness of actuality and of unactuality, or of essentiality and unessentiality, drifting apart from one another. — Suppose something really does count as actual and essential for consciousness at large, yet not for me: then, together with my consciousness of its nullity, I also have, being myself consciousness at large, a consciousness of its actuality, — and when both are held fast the result is a unity, and that unity is what madness amounts to in general. In madness, though, what is deranged is merely an object for consciousness, and not consciousness itself in and for itself. In the result of the experience that has come out here, by contrast, consciousness within its law is conscious of itself as this actual consciousness; and since at the same time that very essentiality, that very actuality, is estranged from it, then, being self-consciousness, being absolute actuality, it is conscious of its own unactuality; or rather, the two sides, in their contradiction, hold immediately for it as its essence, which is therefore deranged in its inmost depths.

The heart's throbbing on behalf of the welfare of humanity therefore passes over into the rampaging of deranged self-conceit, into the fury of a consciousness bent on preserving itself against its own destruction, and doing so by hurling out of itself the invertedness which it is, and straining to view and to pronounce that invertedness as another. So what it pronounces the universal ordering to be is something devised by fanatical priests, by despots wallowing in luxury and by servants of theirs who make up for their own debasement by debasing and crushing those beneath them, and then wielded to the nameless misery of a deceived humanity: an inversion, that is, of the law of the heart together with the heart's happiness. — In this derangement of its own, consciousness pronounces individuality to be what does the deranging and the inverting, though an alien and contingent individuality. But the heart, or the immediate, wanting-to-be-universal singularity of consciousness, is itself this deranging and inverted element, and its doing merely brings it about that this contradiction becomes a contradiction for its own consciousness. For the truth, in its eyes, is the law of the heart — a thing merely meant, which, unlike the subsisting ordering, has not withstood the daylight, but rather goes to ruin the moment it shows itself to that daylight. This law of its own was supposed to have actuality; in that respect the law as actuality, as a valid ordering, is for it purpose and essence, yet just as immediately actuality, precisely the law as a valid ordering, is for it rather what is null. — In the same way its own actuality, it itself as singularity of consciousness, is essence to itself; but its purpose is to posit that actuality as having being, so that immediately it is rather its self as non-singular that is essence for it, or the purpose as law, and therein as a universality which it is to be for its own consciousness. — This concept of its own becomes its object through its doing; hence it experiences its self rather as the unactual, and unactuality as its actuality. It is therefore no contingent, alien individuality that is at work here, but precisely this heart, which on every side within itself is what is inverted and what inverts.

But since immediately universal individuality is what is inverted and what inverts, this universal ordering, itself the law of all hearts, that is, of what is inverted, is no less in itself inverted, exactly as raving derangement declared; in the first place, the ordering proves to be the law of all hearts through the resistance that one heart's law meets in the other singular individuals. When the subsisting laws are upheld against one individual's law, this is because they are no dead, empty, unconscious necessity, but rather spiritual universality and substance, a substance in which those who give it its actuality live as individuals and possess consciousness of themselves; hence, however much such people may complain of this ordering as though it ran counter to the inner law, and may set the heart's opinions against it, they cling to it in their hearts as to their own essence, and were the ordering taken from them, or were they to put themselves outside of it, all would be lost to them. Because just here lie the actuality and the power of the public ordering, this ordering appears as the self-equal essence enlivened throughout, with individuality as the form it takes. — But this ordering is just as much what is inverted.

For since this ordering is the law of all hearts, since every individual is immediately this universal, it constitutes an actuality that is nothing but the actuality of individuality that has being for itself, or of the heart. A consciousness that sets up the law of its own heart accordingly runs into resistance from the others, since it contradicts the no less singular laws belonging to their own hearts, and in resisting these others do nothing but set up their own law and press its validity. The universal that is on hand comes therefore to no more than a universal resisting and a mutual combat, everyone against everyone, in which each presses the validity of its own singularity and yet never arrives at it, since that singularity runs into the same resistance and is reciprocally dissolved by the others. So what passes for a public ordering is this universal state of feud, in which everyone snatches for himself what he can, exercises justice upon the singularity of the others and secures his own, which just as surely vanishes at the hands of others. This is the way of the world, a semblance of some abiding course, which is really only a merely meant universality, while its content is in truth the essenceless play in which singularities are fixed and dissolved again.

If we set the two sides of the universal ordering against each other, the content of this last universality turns out to be restless individuality, individuality for which opinion, or singularity, counts as law, for which the actual is unactual and the unactual actual. And yet this same individuality constitutes the ordering's side of actuality, since to it belongs the being-for-itself of individuality. — On the other side stands the universal as quiescent essence, but for just that reason only as something inner, which is not nothing at all and yet is no actuality either, and which can attain actuality itself only when the individuality that has arrogated actuality to itself is sublated. This shape of consciousness, becoming, within the law, within what is true and good in itself, not singularity but only essence, while knowing individuality as what is inverted and what inverts, and therefore obliged to sacrifice the singularity of consciousness, is virtue.

c. Virtue and the Way of the World

Within the first shape that active reason took, self-consciousness was pure individuality to itself, and standing over against it was empty universality. In the second, each of the two parts of the opposition had both moments in it, law and individuality; but the one part, the heart, constituted their immediate unity, while the other constituted their being set in opposition. In the present relationship, that of virtue to the way of the world, each of the two members is at once a unity and an opposition of these moments, or a movement of law and of individuality against one another, though one that runs oppositely. To the consciousness of virtue, law counts as what is essential and individuality as what must be sublated, and that holds within its own consciousness no less than in the way of the world. Within the former, one's own individuality has to be taken under discipline beneath the universal, beneath what is true and good in itself; yet even there a personal consciousness still remains; the only true discipline is the sacrifice of the entire personality, serving as the corroboration that consciousness has in fact not gone on clinging to singularities. In this singular sacrifice individuality is at the same time extinguished in the way of the world, since it too is a simple moment that the two have in common. — In the latter, individuality relates itself in the manner inverse to the way it is posited in the virtuous consciousness, namely by making itself into the essence and, in turn, subordinating to itself what is good and true in itself. — Moreover, what the way of the world amounts to for virtue is not merely this universal inverted by individuality; absolute order is just as much a moment the two have in common, one that is on hand within the way of the world not as an actuality that has being for consciousness, but as its inner essence. Order, therefore, is not something virtue would first have to produce in any proper sense, for producing is, as doing, the consciousness of individuality, and individuality is precisely what is to be sublated; by this sublating, though, all that happens is that space is cleared for what the way of the world is in itself, so that it may enter existence in and for itself.

What the actual way of the world holds as its universal content has already come out; examined more closely, it is once more nothing but the two movements of self-consciousness that went before. Out of them the shape of virtue has arisen; being its origin, they lie before it; what virtue is bent on, however, is sublating its origin and realizing itself, that is, becoming for itself. So the way of the world is, on the one hand, the singular individuality that goes after its pleasure and enjoyment, that admittedly meets its ruin in doing so, and that thereby gives the universal satisfaction. But this satisfaction itself, and likewise the remaining moments of this relationship, is an inverted movement and shape of the universal. Here actuality is nothing but the singularity of pleasure and of enjoyment, with the universal set over against it; a necessity that amounts to no more than the empty shape of that universal, a reaction that is merely negative and a doing void of content. — As its other moment the way of the world has individuality, which wills to be law in and for itself and which, in this delusion, disrupts the order that subsists; against such self-conceit the universal law does indeed hold itself, and it now comes forward no longer as something empty and set over against consciousness, no longer as a dead necessity, but as necessity within consciousness itself. But taken as it exists in the shape of the conscious relation of an actuality that contradicts itself absolutely, it is derangement; taken as it is in the shape of objective actuality, it is invertedness in general. So in both sides the universal does present itself as the power behind their movement, but the existence of that power is nothing but inversion become universal.

Now it is from virtue that the universal is to receive its genuine actuality, by way of the sublating of individuality, the principle of inversion; virtue's purpose is, in this way, to invert the inverted way of the world back again and to bring its true essence forth. As it stands in the way of the world, this true essence is as yet only its in-itself, not yet anything actual; virtue accordingly does no more than believe in it. What virtue sets out to do is to raise this faith into beholding, though without enjoying the fruits of its labor and its sacrifice. For insofar as virtue is individuality, it is the doing of the struggle that it takes up against the way of the world; its purpose and its true essence, however, lie in defeating what is actual in the way of the world; and so the existence of the good that this brings about is the cessation of virtue's doing, that is, of the consciousness of individuality. — In what way this struggle is actually withstood, what virtue comes to experience in it, whether the sacrifice it takes upon itself makes the way of the world succumb and virtue prevail — that has to be settled by the nature of the living weapons that the two fighters wield. For those weapons are nothing else than the fighters' own essence, which comes forth only for each of them in relation to the other. Their weapons have thereby already resulted from what is on hand in itself within this struggle.

To the virtuous consciousness the universal is what is true in faith, or in itself; it is a universality that is not yet actual but still abstract; within this consciousness itself the universal stands as purpose, within the way of the world as what is inner. It is in precisely this determination that the universal exhibits itself, in virtue, for the way of the world as well; for virtue as yet only wills to carry out the good and does not itself yet give it out as actuality. This determinateness admits of being viewed in another way too: the good, by entering the struggle against the way of the world, thereby exhibits itself as having being for another; as a something which is not in and for itself, since otherwise it would not be looking to acquire its truth only through the subjugation of its opposite. To say that it is as yet only for an other amounts to the same thing that emerged about it earlier under the opposite consideration, namely that it is as yet no more than an abstraction, one whose reality lies solely in the relationship and not in and for itself.

The good, or the universal, in the form in which it here comes on the scene, is what one calls gifts, capacities, forces. It is one way for the spiritual to be, a way in which the spiritual is represented as a universal requiring the principle of individuality for its animation and its movement, and having its actuality in that principle. Where that principle lies in the consciousness of virtue, this universal is put to good use by it; where the principle lies in the way of the world, the same universal is misused; — a passive tool which, ruled by the hand of free individuality and indifferent toward whatever use that individuality makes of it, can also be misused to bring forth an actuality that spells its destruction; a lifeless matter, devoid of any self-subsistence of its own, which can be shaped one way or another, and even shaped to its own ruin.

Since this universal is equally at the command of the consciousness of virtue and of the way of the world, one cannot foresee whether virtue, thus equipped, will get the better of vice. The weapons on either side are identical; they are these capacities and forces. Virtue, to be sure, has placed in ambush its faith that its own purpose and the essence belonging to the way of the world were originally one, a faith that is to strike the enemy from behind during the struggle and to accomplish that purpose in itself; so that in truth the knight of virtue finds his own doing and fighting to be nothing but shadow-boxing, which he cannot take seriously, since he stakes his genuine strength on the good's being in and for itself, that is, on its accomplishing itself — shadow-boxing which he moreover may not let become serious. For whatever he directs at the enemy, and finds directed back at himself, and whatever wearing-down and damage he risks in himself no less than in his enemy, is not meant to be the good as such; for it is for the good's preservation and execution that he fights; rather, what gets risked in this are merely the indifferent gifts and capacities. These, however, are in fact nothing but that same universal without individuality which the struggle is supposed to preserve and actualize. — Yet through the concept of the struggle itself it is at the same time immediately already actualized; it is the in-itself, that is, the universal; and its actualization signifies nothing more than that it should be at the same time for an other. The two sides specified above, on each of which it became an abstraction, are no longer separated; rather, by means of the struggle and within it the good is posited in both manners at once. — The virtuous consciousness, though, enters the struggle against the way of the world as against something set over against the good; and what the way of the world holds out to it in this is the universal, and not the abstract universal alone but one quickened by individuality and having being for another, that is, the actual good. So wherever virtue takes hold of the way of the world, it always hits upon places that are themselves the existence of the good, a good inseparably interwoven with every appearance of the way of the world, as its in-itself, and having its existence within that way's actuality as well; the way of the world is therefore invulnerable to virtue. Existences of the good of just this kind, and hence inviolable relationships, are all the moments that virtue was to stake and sacrifice in its own case. The fighting can accordingly amount to no more than a vacillation between preserving and sacrificing; or rather, neither a sacrifice of what is one's own nor an injury to what is another's can occur at all. Virtue is like that fighter whose one concern in combat is to keep his sword unstained; but more than that, the very reason it took up the fight was to keep the weapons intact; and it is not merely unable to employ its own weapons, it must also keep the enemy's from harm and shield them against itself, since all of them are noble portions of the good on whose behalf it went into combat.

To this enemy, by contrast, the essence is not the in-itself but individuality; its force is therefore the negative principle, for which nothing is subsistent and absolutely sacred, a principle able to stake and to bear the loss of anything and everything. On this basis victory is as certain for it in its own right as it is by virtue of the contradiction into which its adversary entangles itself. Whatever counts for virtue as being in itself counts for the way of the world merely as something for it; the way of the world is free of every moment that virtue holds fixed and is bound to. It holds such a moment in its power for the very reason that the moment is valid for it only as something it can just as readily sublate as leave subsisting; and with the moment it holds the virtuous knight who is fastened to it. The knight cannot extricate himself from it the way one slips out of a cloak flung over one from outside, becoming free by abandoning it; for to him this moment is the essence that cannot be surrendered.

As for the ambush, finally, from which the good in-itself is supposed to fall cunningly upon the way of the world from behind, that hope is null in itself. The way of the world amounts to the alert consciousness that is certain of itself, one that does not let itself be approached from the rear but presents its brow on all sides; for what it consists in is just this, that everything is for it, that everything stands before it. As for the good in-itself: if it is for its enemy, then it stands within the struggle we have watched; but insofar as it is not for it and is instead in itself, it is that passive tool made of gifts and capacities, the matter lacking actuality; represented as existence, it would be a consciousness asleep and lingering somewhere at the rear, one knows not where.

Virtue is therefore defeated by the way of the world, since what it actually has for its purpose is the abstract, non-actual essence, and since, where actuality is concerned, its doing rests on distinctions that reside in words alone. Virtue was to have consisted in this, that through the sacrifice of individuality the good should be brought to actuality; yet the side of actuality is itself nothing other than that very side of individuality. The good was meant to be what is in itself and stands opposed to what is, but the in-itself, when one takes it in its reality and its truth, is instead being itself. In the first instance the in-itself is the abstraction of essence as against actuality; but abstraction is just that which is not something true and is only for consciousness; and this means that abstraction is itself the very thing one calls actual; for what is actual is that which essentially has being for an other, or it simply is being. The consciousness of virtue, however, is founded on just this difference of the in-itself from being, a difference that possesses no truth whatever. — The way of the world, having individuality for its principle, was meant to count as the inversion of the good; but individuality is the very principle of actuality; for it is precisely the consciousness by which what has being in itself is just as much for an other; and the way of the world does indeed invert the unalterable, but the inversion it actually accomplishes leads away from the nothingness of abstraction and over into the being of reality.

The way of the world thus wins out over whatever constitutes virtue in its opposition to it; it wins out over a virtue for which the essenceless abstraction counts as the essence. What it wins out over, though, is nothing real; it is the fabrication of differences that are none, that grandiloquent talk about the good of humanity and about humanity's oppression, about sacrifice for the good and the misuse of gifts; — ideal essences and purposes of this kind sink together into empty words that lift up the heart while leaving reason empty; that edify without building anything up; declamations whose one definite content is that the individual who pretends to act for such noble purposes, and who deals in such superb phrases, takes himself to count as a superb being; — a swelling-up that enlarges its own head and other people's, but enlarges them with a hollow bloatedness. — The virtue of antiquity had a determinate, secure significance, for its ground filled with content lay in the substance of a people, and its purpose was a good that was actual and already in existence; and so it was not directed against actuality as a universal invertedness or against a way of the world. The virtue under consideration here, by contrast, has stepped outside the substance; it is an essenceless virtue, a virtue belonging merely to representation and to words, both of which go without that content. — The emptiness of this oratory that battles the way of the world would uncover itself immediately if one were required to state what its phrases mean; — hence they are presupposed as familiar. The demand to state what is thus familiar would be met either by a fresh flood of phrases, or else countered by an appeal to the heart, which is said to say inwardly what they mean, that is, an inability to state it in fact would be conceded. — The nullity of that oratory seems to have won a kind of unconscious certainty for the culture of our own age as well, inasmuch as all interest has drained away from the entire mass of those phrases and from the manner of puffing oneself up with them; a loss that finds its expression in their producing nothing but boredom.

The result issuing from this opposition, then, is that consciousness drops, as an empty cloak, the representation of something good in itself that would as yet have no actuality. In its struggle it has undergone the experience: the way of the world is nowhere near as bad as it seemed; for the actuality it has is the universal's own actuality. Along with this experience there falls away the means of bringing the good forth through the sacrifice of individuality; for individuality is precisely the actualization of what has being in itself; and inversion ceases to be looked upon as an inversion of the good, since it is rather nothing else than the inverting of the good, taken as a mere purpose, into actuality; individuality in its movement is the very reality of the universal.

In fact, however, what confronted the consciousness of what has being in itself as the way of the world has thereby been defeated and has disappeared as well. In it the being-for-itself of individuality stood opposed to the essence, or to the universal, and made its appearance as an actuality cut off from being-in-itself. But since it has now shown itself that actuality and the universal stand in unseparated unity, the being-for-itself belonging to the way of the world proves to be gone as well, exactly as the in-itself of virtue proves to be nothing more than a view. Individuality within the way of the world might well suppose that its acting is merely for itself or self-interested; it is better than it supposes, for its doing is at once a doing that has being in itself, a universal doing. When it acts out of self-interest, it merely fails to know what it is doing, and when it assures us that all human beings act out of self-interest, it is only claiming that no human being has any consciousness of what doing is. — When it acts for itself, this is precisely the bringing forth into actuality of what so far only has being in itself; the purpose of being-for-itself, then, which supposes itself opposed to the in-itself, — its hollow craftiness, as well as its subtle explanations that manage to point out self-interest everywhere, have vanished quite as much as has the purpose of the in-itself together with its oratory.

And so the doing and driving of individuality is purpose in itself; the use of forces, the play of their expressions, is what gives life to them, which apart from this would be nothing but the dead in-itself, and the in-itself is not an uncompleted, existenceless, abstract universal, but is itself immediately this presence and actuality of the process of individuality.

C. Individuality, Which to Itself Is Real In and For Itself

Self-consciousness has now seized upon the concept of itself which to begin with was merely our concept of it, namely, that in the certainty of its own self it is all reality; and what now stands to it as purpose and as essence is the self-moving interpenetration of the universal — endowments and abilities — with individuality. — The purposes considered up to this point are the singular moments of that fulfillment and interpenetration, taken before the unity in which they came together. They have disappeared as abstractions and chimeras belonging to those first vapid shapes of spiritual self-consciousness, shapes whose truth lies solely in the being merely meant by the heart, by imagination, and by talk, and not in reason, which, now certain in and for itself of its reality, no longer strives to bring itself forth first as purpose set in opposition to the actuality that immediately is, but rather takes the category as such to be the object of its consciousness. — For what has been sublated is the determination of the self-consciousness that is for itself or is negative, the determination in which reason made its entrance; it found an actuality on hand that would be the negative of itself, and only by sublating that actuality did it make its purpose real. But now that purpose and being-in-itself have shown themselves to be one and the same with what being for an other and the actuality found on hand are, truth no longer separates itself from certainty; it is now indifferent whether one takes the posited purpose for the certainty of itself and its realizing for the truth, or instead the purpose for the truth and actuality for certainty; rather, what essence and purpose are in and for themselves is immediate reality's own certainty, the interpenetration of the in-itself with being-for-itself, and of the universal with individuality; in the doing itself lie its truth and its actuality, and the presentation or the uttering of individuality is for it a purpose in and for itself.

With this concept, then, self-consciousness has returned into itself out of the opposed determinations which the category had for it and which its relating to the category had, first as observing and then as active. The pure category itself is now its object, or rather it is the category that has become conscious of itself. Its reckoning with its previous shapes is thereby closed; they lie behind it, forgotten, and they do not confront it as a world it finds on hand, but develop only inside it as transparent moments. Still, within its consciousness they do come apart as a movement of differentiated moments, one that has not yet drawn itself together into its substantial unity. Yet in all of them it holds firmly to the simple unity of being and of the self, which is their genus. —

Consciousness has herewith thrown off all opposition and every condition of its doing; it starts out freshly from itself, directed not at another but at its own self. Because individuality is, in its own self, actuality, both the material that is worked upon and the purpose of the doing lie within the doing itself. The doing therefore takes on the appearance of a circle in motion, one that moves within its own self freely in the void, now widening and now narrowing without hindrance, and playing, wholly content, only in and with its own self. Whatever element individuality presents its shape in has the significance of a pure receiving of that shape; it is the day in general, to which consciousness wants to show itself. This doing changes nothing and is turned against nothing; it is the pure form of translation out of not being seen into being seen, and the content that is brought to light and presents itself is nothing else than what this doing already is in itself. It is in itself — such is its form qua unity that is thought; and it is actual — such is its form qua unity that is; it is itself content only under this determination of simplicity, in contrast to the determination in which it transitions and moves.

a. The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deceit, or the Matter at Hand

This individuality real in itself is at first once more a singular and determinate one; hence absolute reality, which is what it knows itself to be, has for it, in the manner in which it grows conscious of that reality, the form of the abstract universal, and this form, void of fulfillment and of content, amounts to no more than this category thought emptily. — What remains to be seen is how this concept of individuality real in itself gains determination in its moments, and how individuality's own concept of itself steps into consciousness for it.

The concept of this individuality, as being, as such, all reality for itself, is at first a result; it has not yet exhibited its movement and its reality, and is here posited immediately as simple being-in-itself. Negativity, however, being nothing other than what shows itself as movement, attaches to the simple in-itself in the guise of determinateness; and so being, the simple in-itself, takes on a determinate compass. Individuality accordingly makes its entrance as a nature originally determinate, — as an original nature, since it is in itself, — as originally — determinate, since the negative attaches to the in-itself, which is thereby a quality. Yet this restriction upon being leaves the doing of consciousness unrestricted, since that doing is here a consummated self-to-self relating; what has been sublated is precisely the relation to something other, which would have restricted it. Nature's original determinateness thus amounts to no more than a simple principle, — to an element at once universal and transparent, in which individuality stays every bit as free and equal to itself as it unfolds its distinctions there unimpeded, and in which, throughout its actualization, it is pure interplay with itself. Just as indeterminate animal life breathes its breath into, say, the element of water, of air, or of earth, and within these into further determinate principles, immerses all its moments in them, yet, that limitation of the element notwithstanding, keeps them in its power and keeps itself in its own oneness, and as this particular organization remains the same universal animal life.

This determinate original nature of a consciousness that stays free and entire within it shows up as the sole and directly given content of whatever counts as the individual's purpose; it is determinate content, granted, yet it is content at all only so long as we isolate being-in-itself for consideration; in truth, though, this content is reality shot through with individuality, the actuality which consciousness, as a singular, has upon itself, and which stands posited to begin with as being, not yet as doing. For doing, on one side, that determinateness is no barrier that doing would seek to overstep, since, taken as a quality that simply is, it supplies the plain coloring of the element within which doing moves; on the other side, negativity is determinateness only where being is concerned, whereas doing is itself nothing but negativity; in the individuality that acts, then, determinateness has been dissolved into negativity as such, into the epitome of every determinateness.

Now, in doing and in the consciousness of doing, this simple original nature passes over into the difference proper to doing. It is present first as an object, and indeed as an object such as still belongs to consciousness, as a purpose, and so as opposed to an actuality present at hand. The other moment is the movement of that purpose which had been represented as at rest, namely actualization, purpose set in relation to actuality taken as wholly formal, and with this the representation of transition as such, or the means. Lastly, the third is the object no longer as purpose, of which the doer is immediately conscious as its own, but as it stands outside the doer and is, for it, an other. — These various sides must now, though, be held to in keeping with the concept of this sphere, so that one and the same content persists throughout them and no difference creeps in: not between individuality and being as such, nor of purpose as against individuality qua original nature, nor as against the actuality present at hand, nor again of the means as against individuality qua absolute purpose, nor of the actuality brought about as against purpose, or original nature, or means.

To begin with, then, individuality's originally determinate nature, its immediate essence, has not yet been posited as something that does, and under that description it goes by the name of a particular aptitude, talent, character, and so on. Such a peculiar tincture of spirit must be viewed as the one and only content of the purpose itself, and as reality and nothing besides. Were one to represent consciousness as passing beyond this tincture, bent on bringing some further content into actuality, one would be representing it as a nothing that labors into nothingness. — This original essence furnishes more than the purpose's content; in itself it is also that actuality which otherwise shows up as the given stuff on which doing works, as an actuality already found there and awaiting formation in the doing. For doing is only the pure translating of being out of the form of the not-yet-exhibited into that of the exhibited; the being-in-itself of that actuality opposed to consciousness has sunk to a mere empty semblance. This consciousness, in resolving upon action, is accordingly not thrown off course by the semblance that the actuality present at hand puts up, and it has likewise to gather itself, out of any drifting among empty thoughts and purposes, back onto the original content of its essence. — This original content is admittedly only for consciousness once consciousness has actualized it; but the difference between something that for consciousness is only within consciousness, and an actuality that is in itself outside it has fallen away. — Only that there may be for it what it is in itself must consciousness act; acting, in other words, is precisely spirit's becoming as consciousness. It comes to know from its actuality, then, what it is in itself. The individual cannot, therefore, know what it is before it has brought itself to actuality through doing. — But it seems on this account unable to determine the purpose of its doing before it has done; yet at the same time, being consciousness, it must have the action before it beforehand as wholly its own, that is, as purpose. The individual setting about action therefore looks to be caught in a circle where either moment presupposes the other in advance, and so to be without any starting point, since it learns what its original essence is, the essence that has to serve as its purpose, only out of the deed, and yet, in order to do anything, must have the purpose beforehand. For just that reason, however, it must make a start immediately and, in whatever circumstances it finds itself, move on into activity without further pondering over beginning, means, and end; for its essence, its nature as it is in itself, is all of these at once: beginning, means, and end. As beginning, that nature lies ready in the circumstances of acting, and whatever interest the individual takes in something is already the answer given to the question whether there is anything to do here and what it is. For what looks like an actuality already found there is in itself the individual's own original nature, which carries only the semblance of a being — a semblance grounded in the concept of a doing that splits itself in two — but which, being its nature originally, gives voice to itself in the interest the individual takes in it. — The how, that is, the means, is in the same way determined in and for itself. Nor is talent anything else than determinate original individuality regarded as the inner means, or as the purpose's transition into actuality. What forms the actual means, though, the real transition, is talent taken in unity with the nature of the matter as that nature is present in the interest; talent supplies, within the means, the side of doing, the nature of the matter the side of content, and both are individuality itself, as the interpenetration of being and doing. What is present at hand, then, is circumstances found already there, which in themselves are the original nature of the individual; then the interest, which posits them precisely as its own or as purpose; finally the linking and sublation of this opposition in the means. This linkage still falls inside consciousness itself, and the whole just surveyed forms but one term of an opposition. What still lingers of this semblance of opposedness gets sublated by the transition itself, by the means; — for the means constitutes the unity of outer and inner, the reverse of that determinateness which belongs to it qua inner means, so that it sublates that determinateness and posits this unity of doing and being as outer as well, as individuality itself grown actual, individuality, that is, posited for its own self as what is. In this way the whole action steps outside itself neither as the circumstances, nor as purpose, nor means, nor as work.

With the work, though, a difference among the original natures appears to set in; the work is something determinate, exactly as the original nature it voices is determinate, for, released from doing as actuality that is, it carries negativity upon it as quality. Consciousness, however, determines itself over against the work as that which bears determinateness upon itself as negativity as such, as doing; over against that determinateness of the work it is thus the universal, so that it can compare the work with others and on that basis take the individualities themselves to be various; the individual whose work reaches out further is taken as an energy of will more powerful, or as a nature of greater wealth, one, that is, whose original determinateness is less confined; — another, by contrast, as a nature weaker [and] more scanty. Set against this inessential difference of magnitude, the pair good and bad would state a difference that is absolute; here, however, no such difference occurs. Take it the one way or the other, what we have is equally a doing and a bustling about, an individuality exhibiting and voicing itself, and hence everything is good, and there would strictly be no saying what the bad might be. What one would call a bad work is nothing but the individual living of a determinate nature that actualizes itself therein; only the comparing thought would spoil it into a bad work, and that thought is an empty affair, since it reaches past what the work essentially is, an individuality voicing itself, and searches in it, and demands of it, one knows not what besides. — That thought could bear only on the difference cited a moment ago; but such a difference, being one of magnitude, is in itself inessential, and it counts as inessential here because what would stand compared would be individualities, or works, that differ; and these have nothing to do with one another; each relates solely to itself. The original nature alone is the in-itself, the one thing that could be laid down as a standard for judging the work and the work for judging it; yet the two answer to each other exactly: nothing is for individuality that is not also through it, or, put otherwise, no actuality exists that is not individuality's nature and its doing, and no doing or in-itself of individuality exists that is not actual, and it is these moments alone that admit of comparison.

Hence there is in general neither exaltation, nor lament, nor remorse; for all such things come from the thought that imagines to itself another content and another in-itself than the original nature of the individual and its execution present in actuality are. Whatever it does and whatever befalls it, this it has done, and this it is itself; all it can have is the consciousness of purely translating its own self out of the night of possibility into the daylight of the present, translating the abstract in-itself over into the sense that belongs to actual being, together with the certainty that what meets it in the daylight is none other than what lay asleep in that night. Being conscious of this unity is admittedly a comparing too, yet what gets compared bears no more than the semblance of opposition; a semblance belonging to form, one which, for reason's self-consciousness, that individuality is on its own account actuality, counts as nothing more than semblance. Since the individual knows that in its actuality it can find nothing other than actuality's unity with itself, or only the certainty of itself in actuality's truth, and that it therefore always attains its purpose, it can only experience joy in itself.

Such is the concept that consciousness forms of itself when it is certain of itself as the absolute interpenetration of individuality with being; the question now is whether experience bears that concept out for it, and whether its reality tallies with the concept. Reality as consciousness confers it upon itself is the work; in the work the individual is, for itself, what it is in itself, and does so in a way such that the consciousness for which the individual thus comes about is, within the work, not particular consciousness but the universal one; in the work consciousness has set itself out into the element of universality at large, into the space of being that is void of determinateness. Consciousness as it withdraws from its work really is the universal, — since within this opposition it becomes the absolute negativity, or the doing, — set over against its work, which is the determinate one; consciousness therefore reaches out past itself qua work, and is itself that space void of determinateness which finds no filling in its work. If a moment ago their unity did maintain itself within the concept, that happened precisely through the work's being sublated qua work that is. Yet the work is to be, and it must be seen how, within the work's being, individuality will keep the work's universality intact and will find its way to satisfaction. — First of all the work that has come to be is to be considered for itself. Along with everything else it has taken up individuality's whole nature; its being is on that account itself a doing, one in which all differences penetrate one another and dissolve; the work is thus flung out into a subsistence where the original nature's determinateness does indeed turn outward against other determinate natures, encroaches upon them as they encroach upon it, and loses itself as a vanishing moment within this universal movement. While within the concept of individuality real in and for itself all the moments, namely circumstances, purpose, means, and actualization, stand equal to one another, and the original determinate nature holds good merely as a universal element, once that element turns into objective being its determinateness qua determinateness breaks into daylight in the work, and wins its truth in being dissolved. Looked at more closely, that dissolution presents itself thus: within this determinateness the individual has made itself actual as this one; but determinateness furnishes not merely actuality's content, it furnishes actuality's form as well, or rather actuality at large just is this determinateness of standing opposed to self-consciousness. From this side actuality shows itself as that which has vanished out of the concept, as a merely alien actuality found already there. The work is, that is, it exists for other individualities, and for these it is an actuality that is alien, one in whose room they have to install their own if they are to give themselves, by way of their doing, the consciousness of their unity with actuality; or else their interest in that work, posited through their own original nature, differs from the interest peculiar to this work, which is thereby made into something else. The work, then, is on the whole a perishable thing, snuffed out by the counterplay of other forces and interests, and it exhibits individuality's reality as vanishing rather than as brought to completion.

So it is that in its work consciousness sees the opposition of doing and being arise, an opposition that in consciousness's earlier shapes served at once as the beginning of doing, whereas here it is merely a result. In fact, however, it likewise lay at the ground when consciousness, as individuality real in itself, set about acting; for the determinate original nature was presupposed to the acting as the in-itself, and pure accomplishing for the sake of accomplishing had that nature as its content. But pure doing is the form equal to itself, and to that form the original nature's determinateness is on this account unequal. Here as elsewhere nothing hangs on which of the two we name concept and which reality; the original nature is what is thought, the in-itself, as against the doing wherein it first acquires reality; or, put the other way, the original nature constitutes the being both of individuality as such and of individuality as work, while doing is the original concept, absolute transition, or becoming. This inadequacy between concept and reality, an inadequacy lodged in the concept's own essence, is what consciousness undergoes in its work; there, accordingly, it becomes for itself what it truly is, while the empty concept it had of itself disappears.

Within this basic contradiction of the work, in which the truth of this individuality real in itself consists, every side of that individuality steps forward once more as contradictory; or rather the work, being the whole individuality's content as brought out of the doing that is the negative unity and holds all the moments captive, and set forth into being, now releases them; and in the element of subsistence they grow indifferent to one another. Concept and reality thus part company, the one as purpose, the other as what constitutes the original essentiality. Whether the purpose has a true essence, or whether the in-itself gets made into purpose, is a matter of contingency. In the same way concept and reality once again step apart, the one as transition into actuality, the other as purpose; or, what comes to the same, whether the means that voices the purpose gets chosen is contingent. And finally, taking these inner moments together, whether or not they possess a unity among themselves, the individual's doing is once more contingent as against actuality at large; luck decides, and it decides in favor of an ill-determined purpose and ill-chosen means quite as readily as against them.

If, then, what thus arises for consciousness on its work is the opposition between willing and accomplishing, between purpose and means, and again between these inner ones taken together and actuality itself, everything covered by the phrase the contingency of its doing taken in itself, all the same its unity and its necessity are no less at hand; this latter side overreaches the former, and the experience of doing's contingency is itself no more than a contingent experience. What the necessity of doing consists in is this, that purpose stands related without qualification to actuality, and that unity is the very concept of doing; one acts because doing, in and for itself, is what actuality essentially is. In the work, admittedly, there shows itself the contingency that being-accomplished has as against willing and accomplishing, and this experience, which seems bound to count as the truth, stands in contradiction with the concept of action just given. Should we take this experience's content in its full compass, however, that content is the vanishing work; what maintains itself is not the vanishing, for the vanishing is itself actual and bound up with the work, and vanishes along with it; the negative perishes together with the positive of which it is the negation, and perishes in its own right.

That the vanishing should itself vanish is something already contained in the concept of individuality real in itself; for whatever it is that the work vanishes into, or whatever on the work vanishes, and whatever was to lend what has been called experience its ascendancy over the concept individuality holds of itself, is objective actuality; but that actuality is a moment which, even within this consciousness itself, retains no truth of its own, that truth lying solely in the unity of actuality with doing, and the true work consists in nothing else than that unity of doing and being, of willing and accomplishing. For consciousness, then, on the strength of the certainty underlying its acting, the actuality opposed to that certainty is itself something which is merely for it; to consciousness as a self-consciousness gone back into itself, for which every opposition has fallen away, no opposition can arise any longer in this shape of its being-for-itself as against actuality; instead, the opposition and the negativity that surface on the work bear not just on the work's content, or on the content of consciousness, but on actuality as such, and with that on the opposition which exists only through actuality and upon it, and on the work's vanishing. Consciousness accordingly reflects itself, out of its perishable work, back into itself, and holds fast to its concept and its certainty as what is and what abides, in the face of the experience of doing's contingency; what it undergoes is in truth its own concept, wherein actuality figures only as a moment, as something for it, not as the in-and-for-itself; it undergoes actuality as a moment that vanishes, so that actuality is valid for it merely as being at large, whose universality is one and the same with doing. That unity is what the work truly is; it is the matter at hand, which asserts itself without qualification and is experienced as what abides, independently of the matter that consists in the contingency of individual doing as such, of circumstances, of means, and of actuality.

The matter at hand is opposed to these moments only insofar as they are supposed to count in isolation, but essentially, as the interpenetration of actuality and individuality, it is their unity; it is just as much a doing, and as doing pure doing as such, and thereby just as much the doing of this individual, and this doing, as still belonging to the individual in opposition to actuality, is purpose; likewise it is the transition out of this determinateness into the opposed one; and finally an actuality which is present for consciousness. What the matter at hand voices, accordingly, is that spiritual essentiality wherein all these moments stand sublated so far as they were valid on their own account, and are therefore valid only as universal ones, and wherein consciousness finds its certainty of itself to be an objective essence, a matter; an object to which self-consciousness has given birth as to what is its own, and which does not thereby stop being a free object in its own right. — The thing of sense-certainty and of perceiving now has its significance for self-consciousness solely through self-consciousness; on this rests the difference between a thing and a matter. — A movement corresponding to that of sense-certainty and perception will be run through on the matter.

In the matter at hand, then, as the interpenetration of individuality and objectivity itself that has become objective, self-consciousness has arrived at its true concept of itself, or has come to the consciousness of its substance. As it stands here, this consciousness of substance has only just come about and is on that account an immediate one, and that is the determinate way in which spiritual essence is on hand at this stage, not yet having ripened into substance truly real. Within this immediate consciousness of it, the matter at hand takes the form of simple essence, an essence that, being universal, holds all its various moments inside itself and belongs to them, yet is also once more indifferent toward them qua determinate moments and free on its own account, and that, as this free, simple, abstract matter at hand, is valid as the essence. Taken singly, the moments belonging to the original determinateness, that is, to the matter of this individual, to its purpose, to the means, to the doing itself, and to actuality, count for such a consciousness on one side as singular moments which it may forsake and surrender for the sake of the matter at hand; on the other side, all of them have the matter at hand for their essence only in this sense, that the matter at hand, as their abstract universal, is to be found upon each one of these several moments and can serve as their predicate. The matter at hand is not itself the subject as yet; those moments are what counts as subject, since it is on the side of singularity at large that they fall, whereas the matter at hand as yet amounts only to what is simply universal. It is the genus that discovers itself throughout all these moments as so many species of it, and is just as free of them.

We call a consciousness honest when it has, for one thing, reached the idealism voiced by the matter at hand, and, for another, possesses what is true in that matter taken as this formal universality; a consciousness whose sole concern is always the matter at hand, which therefore knocks about among the matter's various moments or species, and which, failing to reach the matter in one of them or under one signification, gets hold of it precisely thereby under another, so that it does in fact always win the satisfaction that, by its own concept, was to be its portion. Let matters turn out as they may, it has accomplished and attained the matter at hand, since the matter, being that universal genus of those moments, is predicate of them all.

Should it fail to bring some purpose to actuality, it has at least willed that purpose, which is to say that it turns purpose qua purpose, that pure doing which accomplishes nothing, into the matter at hand; and it can accordingly put the case to itself, and take comfort, by saying that something at any rate got done and bustled about. Since the universal has the negative, or vanishing, under it, the work's annihilating itself is likewise its own doing; it goaded the others into that, and it still finds satisfaction in the vanishing of its actuality, much as naughty boys enjoy their own selves in the box on the ear they receive, namely as the cause of it. Or if it has not even tried to carry out the matter at hand and has done nothing at all, then it did not want to; the matter at hand is for it precisely the unity of its resolve and of reality; it asserts that actuality would be nothing other than its own wanting. — Finally, if something interesting to it has come about without any doing on its part, then this actuality is for it the matter at hand precisely in the interest it finds in it, even though the actuality was not brought forth by it; if it is a piece of luck that has befallen it personally, it insists on this as its deed and merit; if it is some world event that otherwise does not concern it, it makes that event just as much its own, and deedless interest counts for it as the party it has taken for or against the event, and as having fought it or upheld it.

As is plain, the honesty of this consciousness, and equally the satisfaction it meets with on every side, in fact rests on this: that it fails to bring the thoughts it entertains about the matter at hand into connection. The matter at hand is for it quite as much its own matter as it is no work at all, or the pure doing and the empty purpose, or else an actuality without deed; each signification in turn is made subject of this predicate, and each in turn is forgotten. Now, in the mere having-willed, or else in the not-having-wanted, the matter at hand carries the signification of the empty purpose and of the merely thought unity of willing with accomplishing. Consolation over the purpose's annihilation, on the score of having at least willed it or at least done something pure, together with the satisfaction of having handed the others a task, elevates pure doing, or the utterly bad work, into the essence; for what deserves to be called bad is what is no work whatever. And in the lucky event of coming upon actuality ready-made, this being-without-deed becomes the matter at hand.

The truth of this honesty, however, is that it is not so honest as it looks. For it cannot be thoughtless enough actually to leave these several moments lying apart in this fashion; it must rather be immediately conscious of the opposition between them, seeing that they are related to one another without qualification. Pure doing is essentially the doing of this individual, and this doing is just as essentially an actuality, or a matter. Conversely, actuality is essentially only as its doing, just as it is only as doing as such; and its doing, just as it is doing as such, is at the same time also actuality. So while it looks as though its concern were only with the matter at hand qua abstract actuality, there is present in this the further fact that its concern is with the matter as its own doing. But equally, while it is concerned only with doing and bustling about, it is not in earnest about that either; rather, it is concerned with a matter, and with the matter as its own. And finally, while it seems to want only its own matter and its own doing, it is again concerned with the matter as such, or with the actuality that endures in and for itself.

Just as the matter at hand and its moments appear here as content, so too they are just as necessarily present as forms on consciousness. They make their entrance as content solely so as to disappear again, each yielding its place to the next. Their presence, then, must have the determinateness of the sublated; and so present, they are sides of consciousness itself. The matter at hand is there as the in-itself, or as consciousness's reflection into itself, whereas the way the moments crowd one another out finds expression upon consciousness in this, that they are posited upon it not in themselves but only for another. Consciousness exposes one moment of the content to the daylight and represents it for others; yet consciousness stands at the same time reflected out of that moment into itself, and the opposed moment is no less present within it; this latter it holds back for itself, as its own. Nor, for that matter, is there any particular one of them that would be solely put outside while another would be kept purely within; consciousness rather alternates between them, since it has to make the one no less than the other into what is essential both for itself and for the other party. The whole is individuality and the universal interpenetrating in movement; but since for this consciousness the whole is on hand merely as the simple essence, and hence as the abstraction of the matter at hand, its moments fall, in their separateness, outside the matter and away from one another; and as a whole it gets exhausted and exhibited only through the separating alternation of putting on show and holding back for itself. Given that in this alternation consciousness holds one moment as its own and as essential within its reflection, while it holds another only outwardly upon itself or for the others, what sets in is a game individualities play with each other, in which they find themselves and one another alike deceiving and deceived.

An individuality, then, sets about carrying something out; it thereby seems to have made something into a matter; it acts, in acting comes to be for others, and it seems to be concerned with actuality. The others therefore take its doing for an interest in the matter as such, and for the purpose that the matter be carried out in itself; indifferently whether by the first individuality or by them. So when they either exhibit this matter as one they have already brought off, or, failing that, offer their help and give it, that first consciousness has in fact already moved on from where they take it to stand; what interests it in the matter is its own doing and bustling about, and once they notice that this was the matter at hand, they find themselves fooled. — Yet their hurrying up to lend a hand was in truth nothing but a wish to see and display their doing rather than the matter at hand; that is, they meant to deceive the other exactly as they now protest at having been deceived themselves. — Now that it has come out into the open that one's own doing and bustling about, the play of one's own forces, counts as the matter at hand, consciousness seems to be pursuing its essence for itself and not for the others, and, concerned only with the doing as its own and not as a doing of the others, to be leaving the others just as free in their matter. But they are mistaken again; consciousness is already out of the place where they supposed it to be. It is not concerned with the matter as this singular matter of its own, but with the matter as matter, as something universal that is for all. It meddles, then, in their doing and their work, and where the work can no longer be taken out of their hands, it makes itself a party to it at least by busying itself with passing judgment; should it set upon the work the stamp of its approval and praise, what is meant is that in praising the work it praises along with it its own magnanimity and restraint in having spoiled the work neither as work nor by its censure. In taking an interest in the work, what it enjoys therein is its own self; and by the same token the work that it censures is welcome to it, precisely because that same enjoyment of its own doing is thereby procured for it. Those, however, who take themselves to be deceived by such meddling, or who give themselves out as deceived, were rather bent on deceiving in just the same fashion. They pass off their doing and bustling about as something existing only for themselves, wherein they had as their purpose nothing but themselves and their own essence. Yet in doing something, and so exhibiting themselves and bringing themselves before the daylight, they give their pretension the lie by the very deed, the pretension of meaning to shut out daylight itself, universal consciousness, and everyone's participation; actualization is on the contrary a putting of what is one's own on display within the universal element, whereby it becomes, and is meant to become, the matter of all.

It is therefore just as much a deceit of itself and of the others if what is supposedly at issue is only the pure matter; a consciousness that opens up some matter rather learns from experience that the others come rushing up, like flies to milk just set out, and want to know themselves busy with it; and they learn from it that what concerns it is likewise not the matter as an object, but the matter as its own. If, on the other hand, the essential element is supposed to be only the doing itself, the employment of forces and capacities, or this individuality's giving utterance to itself, then reciprocally the same experience arises: all bestir themselves and reckon that the invitation extends to them, and what gets opened up, rather than a pure doing or a singular doing peculiar to one person, proves to be something that holds just as much for others, that is, a matter at hand. What occurs is the same in either case; it merely carries a different sense from the one assumed in it and meant to be valid. Both sides come to be experienced by consciousness as moments of equal essentiality, and therein it experiences what the nature of the matter at hand is: neither a mere matter, one that would stand over against doing in general and against singular doing, nor a doing standing over against subsistence, one that would be the genus free of these moments as its species, but rather an essence, the being of which is the doing of the singular individual as well as of all individuals, and the doing of which is immediately for others, hence a matter, and which is a matter only as the doing of All and of Each; the essence, namely, which is the essence of every essence, the spiritual essence. Consciousness experiences that none of those moments is subject, but that each rather dissolves in the universal matter at hand; the moments of individuality, which for the thoughtlessness of this consciousness counted one after another as the subject, gather themselves together into the simple individuality that, as this one, is just as immediately universal. With this the matter at hand loses the relationship of predicate as well as the determinateness of a lifeless, abstract universality; it is instead substance shot through with individuality, the subject in which individuality is present just as much as itself, or as this individual, as it is present as all individuals, and the universal that has being only as this doing of All and of Each, having its actuality in the fact that this consciousness knows it to be at once its own singular actuality and the actuality of All. That pure matter at hand is precisely what was determined earlier on as the category, where being is the I and the I is being, though as thinking that still holds itself apart from actual self-consciousness; here, by contrast, the moments belonging to actual self-consciousness, whether we name them its content, its purpose, its doing and its actuality, or name them its form, being-for-itself and being for another, are posited together with the simple category itself as being one, and it is for that reason all content at the same time.