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.