A. The Idea of the True

To begin with, the subjective idea is drive. For it is that contradiction in the concept whereby the concept has its own self for subject matter and is its own reality, and yet the subject matter is no other, nothing self-subsistent as against it, nor does the concept's difference from its own self carry at the same time the essential determination of diversity and of indifferent existence. The drive accordingly has the determinateness of sublating its own subjectivity, of turning its at first abstract reality into a concrete one, and of filling this reality with the content that the world which its subjectivity presupposes affords. – Regarded from the other side, the drive determines itself hereby thus: the concept is indeed the absolute certainty of its own self; confronting its being-for-itself, however, is the presupposition it makes of a world that is in itself, a world whose indifferent otherness has for that certainty of itself the worth only of something unessential; the concept is so far the drive to sublate this otherness and to intuit within the object identity with its own self. Insofar as this reflection-into-itself amounts to the opposition sublated and to the posited singularity that has been effected for the subject, one which shows itself at first as the presupposed being-in-itself, it is form's identity with its own self as brought forth out of the opposition, – an identity determined thereby as indifferent towards form in form's differentiatedness, and hence as content.

Accordingly this drive is the drive towards truth, so far as truth lies in cognition, and hence towards truth as theoretical idea in the term's strict sense. – Granted that objective truth is the idea itself, namely the reality that answers to the concept, so that a subject matter may or may not possess truth in it, the more determinate sense of truth is by contrast this: that truth be such for the subjective concept or in it, in knowledge. Truth is the relation belonging to the judgment of the concept, which showed itself to be the formal judgment of truth; for there the predicate is not the objectivity of the concept merely, but a comparison that holds together the concept of the fact with that fact's actuality. – This realization of the concept is theoretical so far as the concept, being form, still carries the determination of something subjective, that is, the determination of belonging to the subject as the subject's own. Because cognition is the idea as purpose or as something subjective, the first negation is that of the world which has been presupposed as being in itself; hence the conclusion, one that puts the objective into the subjective, likewise carries at first only the meaning that whatever is in itself is only as something subjective, or is posited merely within the determination of the concept, and just for that reason is not so in and for itself. So far the conclusion attains no more than a neutral unity, a synthesis, that is to say, the unity of terms which, separated in their origin, are joined only from without. – Since the concept, in the cognition here at issue, posits the object as its own, what the idea gives itself at first is merely a content whose groundwork is given and upon which nothing has been sublated except the form of externality. So far, in the purpose it has carried out, this cognition keeps its finitude still; within that very purpose it has at the same time not reached the purpose, and in its truth it has not yet arrived at truth. For so far as the content in the result keeps the determination of something given, the being-in-itself presupposed as against the concept stands unsublated; and thus the unity of concept and reality, which is truth, is equally not contained in the result. – Oddly enough, recent times have clung to this side of finitude, assuming it to be the relation of cognition that is absolute; – as though the finite as such ought to count for what is absolute! Such a standpoint ascribes to the object an unknown thinghood-in-itself lying behind cognition, and takes that thinghood, and truth along with it, for an absolute beyond so far as cognition is concerned. Determinations of thought at large, categories, determinations of reflection, and likewise the formal concept with its moments, are therein assigned a place where they rank as finite determinations, not in and for themselves, but only insofar as they are something subjective as against that empty thinghood-in-itself; and to take this relation of cognition's untruth for the genuine one is the error that has grown into the common opinion of recent times.

This determination of finite cognition makes it at once evident that finite cognition is a contradiction sublating its own self; – the contradiction of a truth which is at once meant to be no truth; – of a cognition of that which is, a cognition that all the same does not cognize the thing-in-itself. As this contradiction falls in upon itself, so does what constitutes its content, namely subjective cognition together with the thing-in-itself, which is to say that this content shows itself to be something untrue. Cognition, however, has to dissolve its finitude, and with that its contradiction, by the course it runs itself; the consideration we bring to bear upon it is an external reflection; cognition is itself the concept that is purpose to itself, and so accomplishes itself by realizing itself, and in just this accomplishment sublates both its subjectivity and the presupposed being-in-itself. – Cognition is therefore to be looked at on its own account, in its positive activity. Because this idea is, as has been shown, the concept's drive to give itself realization for its own self, the concept's activity consists in determining the object and, by such determining, in referring itself within the object to itself identically. The object is, quite generally, that which is utterly determinable, and within the idea there belongs to it the essential aspect of lacking any being in and for itself as against the concept. Since the cognition in question is still finite and not speculative, the objectivity it presupposes has not yet taken on for it the shape of being purely and simply the concept in its own self, containing nothing of its own, nothing particular, as against the concept. Yet just because it passes for a beyond that is in itself, that objectivity has the determination of determinability by the concept essentially, and it has it because the idea is the concept existing for itself, the utterly infinite within itself, in which the object stands sublated in itself, so that nothing remains as purpose but to sublate it for itself; the idea of cognition does indeed presuppose the object as being in itself, yet essentially in such a relation that the idea, sure of its own self and of the nothingness of this opposition, arrives within the object at the realization of its concept.

In the syllogism by which the subjective idea now joins itself together with objectivity, what the first premise presents is that same form of immediate mastery over the object, and of the concept's reference to it, which we saw in the reference of purpose. What the concept does in determining the object is an immediate imparting of itself to the object, an unresisted spreading of itself over it. Herein the concept stays in pure identity with its own self; but this its immediate reflection-into-itself equally bears the determination of objective immediacy; whatever is for it its own determination is just as much a being, since it constitutes the presupposition's first negation. Hence the determination that has been posited counts equally as a presupposition merely found, as an apprehending of something given, in which the concept's activity would rather amount to nothing but being negative towards its own self, holding itself back and rendering itself passive before what is at hand, so that this latter, instead of being determined by the subject, may show itself as it is within its own self.

In this premise, then, the cognition at issue does not even look like an application of the logical determinations; it looks rather like a receiving and apprehending of them as determinations already come upon, and its activity looks to be confined to clearing away from the subject matter a merely subjective obstacle, an outer shell. Such cognition is the analytic one.

a. Analytic Cognition

One sometimes finds the difference of analytic from synthetic cognition stated in this way, that the one advances from what is known to what is unknown, the other from what is unknown to what is known. Look at this difference more nearly, however, and it will prove hard to find in it any determinate thought at all, still less a concept. It may be said that cognition sets out quite generally from what one is unacquainted with, since nobody comes to know a thing he is acquainted with already. Conversely, it sets out just as well from what is known; this is a tautological proposition; – that with which it sets out, and which it therefore actually does cognize, is a known thing precisely on that account; whatever has not been cognized yet, and is to be cognized only afterwards, remains an unknown. So far one has to say that cognition, once it has made a start, advances always from what is known to what is unknown.

What marks analytic cognition off has already determined itself to this: that, being the first premise of the entire syllogism, it does not yet have mediation belonging to it, but is the concept's immediate imparting of itself, an imparting that as yet holds no otherness within it, and wherein activity divests itself of its negativity. That immediacy of the reference is nevertheless for just that reason itself a mediation, for it is the concept's negative reference to the object, one that annihilates its own self and thereby renders itself simple and identical. This reflection-into-itself is something merely subjective, since within its mediation the difference is still on hand only as the presupposed difference that is in itself, as a diversity of the object within the object. The determination brought about by this reference is accordingly the form of simple identity, of abstract universality. Analytic cognition therefore takes this identity quite generally for its principle, and transition into an other, the tying together of what is diverse, is shut out from it and from its activity.

Taking analytic cognition now more nearly, the start is made from a presupposed subject matter, one therefore singular and concrete, be it a subject matter already finished for representation or else a problem, given, that is, only in its circumstances and conditions, not yet lifted out of them on its own and set forth in simple self-subsistence. The analysis of such a subject matter cannot consist in its being merely dissolved into the particular representations that it may hold; a dissolution of that kind, and the apprehending of what it yields, would be a business falling outside cognition, one touching only a closer acquaintance, a determining inside the sphere of representing. Analysis, having the concept for its ground, has essentially the determinations of the concept for its products, and these as such as are immediately contained in the subject matter. From the nature of the idea of cognition it has emerged that the activity of the subjective concept must, on the one side, be looked upon as nothing but a developing of what is already in the object, seeing that the object is itself nothing other than the totality of the concept. It is one-sided in just the same measure to represent analysis as though the subject matter held nothing that had not been put into it, as it is one-sided to suppose that the determinations which result are merely drawn out of it. The first representation is voiced, as everyone knows, by subjective idealism, which takes cognition's activity in analysis to be a one-sided positing and nothing besides, beyond which the thing-in-itself stays concealed; the second belongs to so-called realism, which grasps the subjective concept as an empty identity that takes up into itself the determinations of thought from without. – Analytic cognition, which converts given material into logical determinations, has shown itself to be both at once, a positing that just as immediately determines itself to be a presupposing; hence the logical may, on account of the latter, appear as something already finished in the subject matter, and on account of the former as the product of a merely subjective activity. The two moments, however, do not admit of being sundered; in that abstract form into which analysis lifts it out, the logical is on hand indeed only within cognition, just as, conversely, the logical is not a posited thing merely but a thing that is in itself.

So far as analytic cognition is the transformation just exhibited, it runs through no further middle terms; the determination is rather to that extent immediate and carries just this sense, of being proper to the subject matter and belonging to it in itself, hence of having been apprehended out of it with no subjective mediation. – Cognition, however, is further supposed to be a progression as well, a development of differences. But since, on the determination it carries here, it is without concept and undialectical, the only difference it possesses is a given difference, and its progression takes place solely along the determinations of the material. An immanent progression it seems to have only so far as the derived determinations of thought admit of being analysed over again, so far, that is, as they are still something concrete; what stands highest and last in such analysing is the abstract highest essence, – or abstract subjective identity, with diversity confronting it. Such progression, however, is nothing but the repeating of the one original deed of analysis, namely a redetermining, as something concrete, of what was already taken up into the abstract form of the concept, then an analysis of that, then over again the determining of the abstract issuing from it as something concrete, and so on. – The determinations of thought seem all the same to hold a transition within their own selves. Once the subject matter has been determined as whole, one does indeed pass on from that to the other determination, that of part; from cause to the other determination, that of effect, and so forth. Yet no progression takes place here, inasmuch as whole and parts, cause and effect, are relations, and for this formal cognition relations so finished that the one determination gets found tied essentially to the other. A subject matter determined as cause or as part is thereby determined by the whole relation, by both its sides at once. Something synthetic though this may be in itself, the connection counts for analytic cognition just as much as something merely given as does any other connection within its material, and hence has no place in the business peculiar to it. Whether such a connection be otherwise determined as something a priori or a posteriori makes no difference here, so long as it is grasped as something found already there, or, in the phrase that has also been used, as a fact of consciousness that with the determination: whole, the determination: part is bound up, and so on. Though Kant put forward the profound observation of synthetic principles a priori and discerned as their root the unity of self-consciousness, and so the concept's identity with itself, he nonetheless takes over the determinate connection, the concepts of relation and the synthetic principles themselves, as given by formal logic; a deduction of them would have had to be an exhibition of how that simple unity of self-consciousness passes over into these its determinations and differences; but the showing of this genuinely synthetic progression, of the concept producing its own self, Kant spared himself the trouble of supplying.

It is well known that arithmetic, along with the more general sciences of discrete magnitude, goes by preference under the name of analytic science and of analysis. Their way of cognizing is in fact analytic in the most immanent fashion, and it is worth considering briefly on what this rests. – Analytic cognition elsewhere starts out from a concrete material carrying a contingent manifoldness in it; every difference of content, and the progression to further content, hangs upon that material. Arithmetical and algebraic material, by contrast, is something rendered wholly abstract and indeterminate beforehand, on which every peculiarity of relation has been wiped out, so that every determination and every linking is now external to it. Of this sort is the principle of discrete magnitude, the one. This relationless atom admits of being multiplied into a plurality and of being determined and gathered from outside into an amount; such multiplying and bounding is an empty progression and determining that stays put at this same principle of the abstract one. In what way the numbers are further gathered together and parted rests solely on the positing done by the one who cognizes. Magnitude is quite generally the category inside which these determinations get made; – it is determinateness turned indifferent, so that the subject matter possesses no determinateness immanent to it and therefore none given to cognition. So far as cognition has to begin with given itself a contingent diversity of numbers, these now constitute the material for further working and for manifold ratios. Ratios of that kind, their invention and their working out, look indeed to be nothing immanent to analytic cognition but rather something contingent and given; and in keeping with that these ratios, with the operations bearing upon them, are commonly presented one after the other, as diverse, with no remark upon any inner connection. Yet a guiding principle is easy to make out, and it is the immanent one of analytic identity, which upon the diverse shows itself as equality; the advance consists in reducing the unequal to an ever greater equality. To take an example from the first elements: addition is a gathering together of numbers wholly contingently unequal, multiplication of equal ones, upon which there follows further the ratio of equality between amount and unit, and the ratio of powers sets in.

Since the determinateness both of the subject matter and of the ratios is a posited one, the further operating with them is likewise wholly analytic, and analytic science accordingly has not so much theorems as it has problems. An analytic theorem holds the problem within it as already solved for its own self, and the entirely external difference attaching to the two sides which it sets as equal is so unessential that a theorem of the kind would look like a trivial identity. Kant did, to be sure, pronounce the proposition 5+7=12 a synthetic proposition, on the ground that one side sets out the same thing in the shape of several, of 5 and 7, and the other in the shape of a single one, of 12. But if the analytic is not to signify the utterly abstract identical and tautological 12=12, and if there is to be any advance within it at all, then some difference must be at hand, though a difference resting on no quality, no determinateness of reflection, and less still on any determinateness of the concept. 5+7 and 12 are throughout one and the same content; on the first side there is expressed besides the demand that 5 and 7 be gathered into one expression, which is to say: as five is something counted together, the breaking off having been quite arbitrary and the counting able just as well to run on, so the counting shall now run on in the same manner, with the determination that the units to be added shall number seven. So the 12 is a result yielded by 5 and 7 and by an operation which, being already posited, is by its nature a doing entirely external and thoughtless, such that a machine can carry it out as well. Here there is not the slightest transition into an other; there is a mere carrying on, that is, a repeating, of the very operation through which 5 and 7 arose.

The proof of such a theorem, – and one would be required if it were a synthetic proposition – would lie merely in the operation of counting on from 5 as 7 determines, and in recognizing that what is thus counted on agrees with what one otherwise calls 12, which again is nothing further than just that determinate counting on itself. In place of the form of theorems one therefore takes up at once the form of the problem, of the demand for the operation, that is, the pronouncing of only the one side of the equation that would make up the theorem, the other side of which is now to be found. The problem holds the content and names the determinate operation to be carried out upon it. No brittle material endowed with specific relations restricts the operation; it is an external, subjective doing, and the material on which its determinations get posited takes them up indifferently. The whole difference separating the conditions set up in the problem from the result reached in the resolution comes to this alone, that in the result the uniting or separating has actually been carried out in the determinate manner which the problem stated.

It is therefore a most superfluous piece of scaffolding to bring in here the form of the geometrical method, which has to do with synthetic propositions, and to let a proof follow the problem over and above the resolution. Such a proof can voice nothing but the tautology that the resolution is correct because one has operated as the problem directed. If the problem runs that several numbers are to be added, then the resolution runs: add them; and the proof shows the resolution correct on the ground that adding was what the problem called for and adding is what has been done. Where the problem holds more composite determinations and operations, for instance the multiplying of decimal numbers, and the resolution states nothing beyond the mechanical procedure, a proof does become necessary; but it can be nothing further than an analysis of those determinations and of the operation, out of which the resolution follows of itself. By thus separating off the resolution as a mechanical procedure and the proof as a recalling of the nature of the subject matter to be handled and of the operation itself, precisely the advantage of the analytic problem gets lost, namely that the construction can be derived immediately from the problem and so set out as intelligible in and for itself; taken the other way, the construction is expressly saddled with a defect proper to the synthetic method. – In the higher analysis, where, chiefly with the ratio of powers, ratios of discrete magnitudes come in that are qualitative and hang upon determinacies of the concept, the problems and theorems do certainly hold synthetic determinations; there other determinations and ratios have to be taken as middle terms than those immediately stated by the problem or the theorem. For the rest, these determinations called in to help must also be of a kind that finds its ground in the consideration and development of one side of the problem or the theorem; the synthetic look arises solely from the problem or the theorem not itself naming that side already. – Take the problem, for instance, of finding what the powers of an equation's roots add up to: it is solved by considering, and then linking, those functions of the roots which the equation's coefficients are. The determination called in to help here, that of the functions of the coefficients and of their linking, the problem does not already express; the development, for the rest, is itself wholly analytic. Thus the resolution of the equation xᵐ−1=0 by means of the sines, and likewise the immanent algebraic resolution which Gauss, as is well known, found by means of considering the residuum of xᵐ⁻¹−1 when divided by m, and the primitive roots so called, – one among the weightiest extensions that analysis has received in recent times, – is a synthetic resolution, because the determinations called in to help, the sines or the consideration of the residues, are not a determination of the problem itself.

The nature of that analysis which considers so-called infinite differences of variable magnitudes, of the differential and integral calculus, has been treated more at length in the first part of this logic. It was shown there that what lies at the base here is a qualitative determination of magnitude, and one graspable through the concept alone. The transition to it from magnitude as such is analytic no longer; and this is why mathematics has to this day been unable to justify by its own means, that is, mathematically, the operations resting on that transition, the transition not being of a mathematical nature. Leibnitz, to whom the credit is given of having shaped the reckoning with infinite differences into a calcul, effected the transition, as was cited in that same place, in a manner that is the most inadequate of all, as utterly devoid of concept as it is unmathematical; grant the transition once, however, – and in the present state of the science it amounts to no more than a presupposition, – and what follows is certainly nothing but a series of ordinary analytic operations.

It has been recalled that analysis turns synthetic so far as it comes upon determinations no longer posited by the problems themselves. The general transition from analytic to synthetic cognition, however, lies in the transition that is necessary out of the form of immediacy into mediation, out of abstract identity into difference. In its activity the analytic stops at the determinations taken generally, so far as these refer to their own selves; through their determinateness, however, they are essentially of this nature besides, that they refer to an other. It has been recalled already that even where analytic cognition advances along relations which are not an externally given material but determinations of thought, it stays analytic all the same, so far as these relations too are for it something given. But since the abstract identity which this cognition alone knows as its own is essentially identity of what is differentiated, that identity must be its own as such as well, and for the subjective concept the connection too must come to be something posited by the concept and identical with it.

b. Synthetic Cognition

Within the syllogism taken as a whole, analytic cognition constitutes the first premise, – the concept's immediate reference to the object; hence the determination which such cognizing recognizes as belonging to itself is identity, and all that it does is to apprehend what is. What synthetic cognition is after, by contrast, is the comprehending of what is — that is, a grasp of the manifoldness of determinations within the unity that they have. In the syllogism it accordingly forms the second premise, the one where the diverse, taken as diverse, is set into reference. For this reason what it aims at is necessity in general. – Whatever diverse terms have been bound together are bound partly within a relation, and in a relation they stand referred to each other quite as much as they stand indifferent and self-subsistent over against each other; but partly they are knit together in the concept, which is their unity, simple and yet determinate. Now insofar as synthetic cognition moves, to begin with, out of abstract identity over into relation, or out of being over into reflection, what the concept cognizes in its subject matter is not the concept's absolute reflection; the reality it confers upon itself stands at the stage lying nearest, namely at the identity of diverse terms as such that was noted above, an identity for that very reason still inner and still necessity merely, not the subjective necessity that exists for its own sake, and so not yet the concept in its proper sense. Synthetic cognition too, then, does have the concept's determinations for its content, and the object gets posited within those determinations; yet as things stand these merely occupy a relation towards each other, or are held in an immediate unity, which is precisely not the unity whereby the concept has the standing of subject.

This constitutes the finitude of this cognition; because in it the real side of the idea still has identity as something inner, the determinations of that side are still external to one another; since it is not there as subjectivity, what the concept has as its own in its subject matter still lacks singularity, and it is indeed no longer the abstract but the determinate form, hence the particular of the concept, that corresponds to it in the object, but the singular of the concept is still a given content. This cognition therefore does indeed transform the objective world into concepts, but it gives that world only the form in accordance with the determinations of the concept, and must find the object according to its singularity, the determinate determinateness; it is not yet itself determining. In the same way it finds propositions and laws, and proves their necessity, yet not as a necessity of the fact in and for itself, that is, from the concept, but as a necessity of cognition, which proceeds along the given determinations, the differences of appearance, and for itself cognizes the proposition as unity and relation, or from the appearance cognizes its ground.

The more proximate moments of synthetic cognition are now to be examined.

1. Definition

What comes first is this: objectivity, still given as it is, undergoes transformation into the simple form, the form that comes first, and therewith into the form of the concept; the moments belonging to this act of apprehension are consequently no others than those belonging to the concept itself, universality, particularity and singularity. – As singular we have the object itself under the guise of immediate representation, the thing awaiting definition. Its universal, the universal of the object, emerged already when the objective judgment, the judgment of necessity, was being determined: it emerged there as the genus, and more exactly as the proximate one, that is, as the universal carrying a determinateness that serves at once as principle for the difference of the particular. The subject matter possesses this difference in its specific difference, the difference that renders it the determinate species and that furnishes the ground of its disjunction against the species remaining.

By leading the subject matter back in this manner to its concept, definition sheds those externalities which concrete existence requires; it leaves aside whatever accrues to the concept when the concept is realized, through which realization the concept emerges, first as idea and then as external concrete existence. Description, which addresses itself to representation, does take in this further content, the content belonging to reality. Definition, on the contrary, cuts this wealth of determinations — the determinations, manifold as they are, of intuited existence — down to the simplest moments; and what form these simple elements have, and how each is determined against the rest, is something the concept contains. So the subject matter comes to be grasped, as was said, as a universal which at once is essentially something determinate. As for the subject matter itself, it makes the third, the singular, wherein genus and particularizing are set down as one, and it is an immediate that is set down outside the concept, seeing that the concept has not yet reached self-determination.

In those determinations, in definition's difference of form, the concept comes upon itself, and there it possesses the reality answering to it. But since singularity — the reflecting of the concept's moments back into themselves — is not yet included in that reality, and since accordingly the object, so far as it stands within cognition, has not yet been determined as something subjective, it is cognition instead that is subjective and begins from without; or rather, because it begins from without with the singular, it is subjective. Hence what the concept has for content is given and contingent. The concrete concept is thereby itself contingent in a doubled respect: once as regards its content at large, and then again as regards which of the content's determinations — chosen out of the manifold qualities the subject matter carries in external existence — are to be picked out for the concept and to make up its moments.

The latter respect calls for closer scrutiny. For, given that singularity, as being-determined in and for itself, falls outside the conceptual determination proper to synthetic cognition, no principle is available for deciding which sides of a subject matter ought to be reckoned part of its conceptual determination and which belong only to external reality. Here lies a difficulty attaching to definitions, one that this cognition has no way of clearing away. A distinction must nonetheless be drawn. – First of all, with products of self-conscious purposiveness the definition is readily found, since the purpose they are meant to serve is a determination born of a subjective resolve, and it is this that makes up the essential particularizing, the form of the thing that concretely exists, which is all that counts here. Whatever else belongs to the nature of its material, or any other outward properties, fall within its determination just so far as they answer to the purpose; the rest are inessential to it.

Secondly, the subject matters of geometry are abstract determinations of space; the abstraction underlying them, absolute space so called, has forfeited every further concrete determination, and from here on has only such shapes and figurations as get posited within it; they are accordingly, in essence, nothing but what they ought to be; their conceptual determination at large, and more nearly the specific difference, finds in them a reality simple and unimpeded; to that extent they stand on a par with the products of external purposiveness, agreeing likewise in this respect with the subject matters of arithmetic, where too nothing underlies them but the determination that has been posited in them. – Space, to be sure, carries further determinations still — the threefoldness of its dimensions, its continuity, its divisibility — which are not something first posited in it by outward determination. These, however, count as part of the material taken up, and are immediate presuppositions; only when those subjective determinations get linked and interwoven with this peculiar nature of the soil into which they have been entered do synthetic relations and laws arise. – With determinations of number, since the simple principle of the one underlies them, the linking and the further determining are through and through merely posited, whereas determinations in space — space being for itself a continuous outside-one-another — spread out yet further and possess a reality other than their concept, one that no longer falls under immediate definition.

Thirdly, though, the case of definitions of concrete objects, in nature as much as in spirit, looks altogether different. For representation, such subject matters are quite generally things of many properties. The task here is first to take in what their proximate genus may be, and next what their specific difference. It has therefore to be settled which among the many properties accrue to the subject matter as genus and which accrue to it as species, and beyond that which of these properties counts as the essential one; and part of the latter task is to recognize how they hang together, whether the one is already posited along with another. Yet no criterion for this is so far available beyond existence itself. – What makes a property essential, for a definition where it is supposed to have the standing of a simple determinateness, still undeveloped, is its universality. In existence, however, this universality is merely the empirical one; – universality in time, that is, whether the property lasts while others show themselves to be perishable within the subsistence of the whole; – or else a universality arising out of comparison with other concrete wholes, and to that extent never getting beyond what is held in common. Should comparison then offer the total habitus, as it empirically presents itself, as the common ground, reflection must gather that habitus into a single determination of thought and take in the simple character of such a totality. But to authenticate that a determination of thought, or some one of the immediate properties by itself, made up the simple and determinate essence of the subject matter, one would need nothing less than a derivation of such a determination out of the concrete constitution. That, however, would call for an analysis converting the immediate constitutions into thoughts and leading their concreteness back to something simple; an analysis of a higher order than the one under consideration, since it would have to be non-abstractive, preserving within the universal the determinate character of the concrete, unifying it, and displaying it as dependent upon the simple determination of thought.

The references borne by immediate existence's manifold determinations to the simple concept would, though, be theorems standing in need of proof. Definition, however, being the first and as yet undeveloped concept, and being meant to take in the subject matter's simple determinateness in an act of apprehension that is itself immediate, has nothing available to it but one of that subject matter's immediate so-called properties, – a determination of sensible existence or of representation; the singling out of such a property by abstraction is then what its simplicity comes to, whereas for its universality and its essentiality the concept is thrown back upon empirical universality, upon persistence through changed circumstances, and upon that reflection which hunts for the concept's determination out in external existence and in representation, that is, hunts for it where it cannot be found. – Defining thus of its own accord gives up any genuine determinations of the concept, determinations that would be, in essence, the principles of the subject matters, and settles instead for marks, that is, for determinations whose essentiality is a matter of indifference to the subject matter itself and whose sole purpose is rather to serve an external reflection as distinguishing signs. – A single external determinateness of that sort is far too ill-suited both to the concrete totality and to that totality's own concept for it to be picked out on its own and treated as though a concrete whole had in it its true expression and determination. – On Blumenbach's remark, for instance, the earlobe is something wanting in every other animal, so that, going by the customary talk of shared and differentiating marks, it could with full justice be pressed into service as the distinctive character in the definition of the physical human being. But how ill-suited such an entirely external determination at once proves to be when set beside what we represent to ourselves as the total habitus of the physical human being, and beside the demand that a determination of the concept be something essential! Whether the marks taken up into a definition are nothing but such bare makeshifts, or whether instead they come nearer to the nature of a principle, is wholly a matter of chance. Their very externality lets one see, too, that cognition by concepts did not start out from them; rather, an obscure feeling, an indeterminate but deeper sense, an intimation of the essential, went ahead of the discovery of genera in nature and in spirit, and only afterwards was a determinate externality sought out for the understanding. – Having stepped forth into externality within existence, the concept is unfolded into its differences and cannot be tied down without qualification to any one such property. Properties, being the thing's externality, are external to their own selves; it was shown, in the sphere of appearance, when the thing of many properties came up, that for just this reason they turn essentially into self-subsistent matters; spirit likewise, viewed from that same standpoint of appearance, turns into an aggregate of many self-subsistent forces. By this very standpoint, on which the single property or force is posited as indifferent towards the others, that property or force ceases to be a characterizing principle, and with this determinateness as determinateness of the concept disappears altogether.

Besides the diversity of properties from one another, concrete things exhibit in addition the difference between concept and the concept's actualization. In nature and in spirit the concept has an external exhibition, and there its determinateness shows up as dependence on what lies outside, as perishability and want of fit. Something actual does accordingly show in itself what it ought to be, but by the negative judgment of the concept it may equally show that its actuality answers only incompletely to that concept, that it is bad. Now since definition is meant to state the determinateness of the concept by way of an immediate property, no property exists against which some instance could not be brought forward — an instance whose whole habitus indeed lets the concrete thing to be defined be recognized, while the property taken as its character turns out immature or stunted. In a bad plant, a bad animal genus, a despicable human being, a bad state, there are sides of concrete existence defective or altogether obliterated which in other cases could have been taken, for the definition, as what differentiates and as the essential determinateness in such a concrete thing's concrete existence. A bad plant, animal, and so forth still remains for all that a plant, animal, and so forth. Should the bad too, then, be taken up into the definition, empirical casting about loses every property it wanted to regard as essential, losing them through the instances of monstrous births in which the property is absent: the essentiality of the brain for the physical human being, for instance, through the instance of the acephalous; the essentiality of protection for life and property in the case of the state, through instances of despotic states and tyrannical governments. – When the concept is asserted against the instance, and the instance, measured by the concept, is pronounced a bad specimen, the concept no longer holds its authentication from appearance. But the concept's self-subsistence runs against the very sense of definition, which ought to be the immediate concept, and can therefore draw the determinations of its subject matters out of nothing but the immediacy of existence, vindicating itself only on what it finds already at hand. – Whether the content of a definition holds truth or contingency in and for itself lies beyond its sphere; formal truth, though — the concurrence of a concept subjectively posited in definition with a subject matter actual outside it — cannot be settled, for the very reason that a single subject matter may also be bad.

Definition draws its content, generally speaking, from immediate existence, and since that content is immediate no justification attaches to it; why it should be necessary is a question its origin has already set aside; in pronouncing the concept as something merely immediate, definition has already given up comprehending the concept itself. What it presents, accordingly, is nothing more than the form-determination of the concept upon a given content, lacking the concept's reflection into itself, that is, lacking its being-for-itself.

Immediacy at large, however, comes forth only out of mediation, and so must make its transition into mediation. Or: the determinateness of content that a definition holds is, just because it is determinateness, not merely something immediate but something mediated by its other; definition can therefore lay hold of its subject matter only by way of the opposed determination, and must accordingly pass over into division.

2. Division

The universal must particularize itself; to that extent the necessity of division lies in the universal. But since the definition already begins of itself with the particular, its necessity of passing over into division lies in the particular, which of itself points to another particular. Conversely, it is precisely therein that the particular separates itself off from the universal, inasmuch as the determinateness is held fast in the need of its difference from the determinateness other to it; the latter is thereby presupposed for the division. The course is therefore indeed this, that the singular content of the definition ascends through particularity to the extreme of universality, but this universality must now be taken as the objective foundation, and starting out from it the division presents itself as the disjunction of the universal, of the universal as the first.

A transition has hereby set in, and, taking place as it does from universality to particularity, it is determined through the form belonging to the concept. The definition taken for itself is something singular; a multiplicity of definitions belongs to the multiplicity of subject matters. That progression out of the universal into the particular which pertains to the concept is what grounds and makes possible a synthetic science, a system, and systematic cognition.

What is required first of all here, as was shown, is that one begin with the subject matter under the form of a universal. If in actuality, be it that of nature or that of spirit, it is concrete singularity that is given as the first thing to subjective, natural cognition, then by contrast in that cognition which is a comprehending at least insofar as it has the form of the concept for its foundation, the simple, that which has been separated out from the concrete, must be the first, for only under this form does the subject matter carry the form of the self-referring universal and of what is immediate in accordance with the concept. Against this course within the scientific sphere one might perhaps hold that, since intuiting is easier than cognizing, the intuitable, that is, concrete actuality, ought likewise to be made the beginning of science, and that this course is more in conformity with nature than the one which begins from the subject matter in its abstraction and from there proceeds in the reverse direction to the subject matter's particularization and concrete singularization. – But inasmuch as what is to happen is cognizing, the comparison with intuition has already been decided and given up; and the question can only be what is to be the first within cognition and how the sequence is to be constituted; what is demanded is no longer a path in conformity with nature but one in conformity with cognition. – If the question is merely one of ease, then it is in any case self-evident that it is easier for cognition to grasp the abstract simple determination of thought than the concrete, which is a manifold interlinking of such determinations of thought and of their relations; and the concrete is to be apprehended in this way, and no longer as it stands within intuition. In and for itself the universal is the concept's first moment, since it is the simple one, whereas the particular comes only afterwards, since it is what is mediated; and conversely the simple is the more universal, while the concrete, as what is differentiated within itself and thereby mediated, is what already has behind it a transition out of some first. – This remark concerns not only the order of the course within the determinate forms of definitions, divisions, and propositions, but also the order of cognition in general, and merely with respect to the difference of abstract and concrete as such. – Hence also, for instance, in learning to read one reasonably begins not with the reading of whole words or even of syllables, but rather with the elements out of which words and syllables are built, and with the signs for the abstract sounds; in alphabetic writing the concrete word has already been analysed into its abstract sounds together with their signs, and just for that reason learning to read becomes a first occupation with abstract subject matters. In geometry one is to begin not with some concrete spatial shape but with point and line, going on from there to plane figures, and among these not with polygons but with the triangle, and among curved lines with the circle. In physics the individual natural properties or matters are to be freed from the manifold entanglements in which they find themselves within concrete actuality, and are to be exhibited along with their simple, necessary conditions; they too, like the figures of space, are something intuitable, but their intuition must be so prepared that they first come into view and are held fast as released from all modifications by circumstances external to their own determinateness. Magnetism, electricity, the varieties of gas, and so forth are subject matters of such a kind that the cognition of them attains determinateness only in this way, that they are taken out of the concrete states in which they show themselves within actuality, and are apprehended so. The experiment does indeed present them to intuition in a concrete case; but partly it must, in order to be scientific, take up only the conditions necessary for this, and partly it must multiply itself so as to exhibit the inseparable concreteness of these conditions as unessential, by letting them appear in one concrete shape and then again in another, so that nothing but their abstract form is left over for cognition. – To mention yet one further example, it could well seem to be in conformity with nature and ingenious to consider colour first within the concrete appearing of the animal subjective sense, then outside the subject as a spectral, floating appearance, and finally as fixed upon objects in external actuality. For cognition, however, the universal and hence genuinely first form is the middle one among those just named, where colour, still without any entanglement in subjective and objective circumstances, hovers between subjectivity and objectivity as the familiar spectrum. The latter are at first merely disturbing when it is a matter of considering purely the nature of this subject matter, for they conduct themselves as efficient causes and thus leave it undecided whether the determinate alterations, transitions, and relations of colour have their ground in colour's own specific nature, or are rather to be attributed to the diseased specific constitution of those circumstances, to the healthy and diseased particular affections and effects of the subject's organs, or to the chemical, vegetable, and animal forces of the objects. – Examples both more numerous and of other kinds might be adduced out of the cognition of organic nature and of the spiritual world; in every domain it is the abstract that must constitute the beginning and the element within which and out of which the particularities and the rich configurations of the concrete spread themselves out.

It is with division, or with the particular, that the particular's difference from the universal properly comes on the scene, but this universal is itself already something determinate, and hence itself only one member of a division. There is therefore a higher universal for it; but for this a higher one once again, and so at first onwards into infinity. The cognition considered here has no immanent limit, since it proceeds from the given, and since the form of abstract universality is what is peculiar to its first term. Any subject matter whatever, then, that appears to have an elementary universality gets made into the subject matter of a determinate science, and it is an absolute beginning to this extent, that acquaintance of representation with it is presupposed and that it is taken, for itself, as needing no derivation. Definition takes it as an immediate.

The further advance from it is in the first instance the division. For this advance nothing would be required but an immanent principle, that is, a beginning out of the universal and out of the concept; the cognition considered here, however, lacks any such principle, since it pursues merely the form-determination of the concept without the concept's reflection-into-itself, and hence draws the determinateness of content from the given. For the particular that steps forth in the division there is no ground of its own at hand, neither with respect to what is to make up the ground of division, nor with respect to the determinate relation in which the members of the disjunction are supposed to stand to one another. In this respect, then, the business of cognition can consist only, on the one hand, in ordering the particular that is come upon in the empirical material, and, on the other, in also finding universal determinations of that particular by way of comparison. These last then hold as grounds of division; of such grounds there may be many, and accordingly the divisions too are just as manifold. The relation of the members of a division to one another, that is, of the species, has only this universal determination, that they be determined over against one another according to the assumed ground of division; were their diversity to rest upon some other respect, they would not be coordinate with one another on the same line.

Since the principle of being-determined-through-oneself is wanting, the laws for this business of division can consist only in formal, empty rules that lead to nothing. – Thus we see it set up as a rule that a division ought to exhaust the concept; in fact, however, it is every individual member of the division that must exhaust the concept. What is properly meant, though, is the determinateness of the concept, and this is what is to be exhausted; but with the empirical manifoldness of the species, a manifoldness devoid of determination within itself, nothing is contributed to the exhaustion of the concept by whether more or fewer of them are come upon; whether, for instance, a further dozen are turned up alongside the 67 species of parrot is a matter of indifference for the exhaustion of the genus. The demand for exhaustion can signify nothing but the tautological proposition that all species are to be listed completely. – As empirical acquaintance widens, it may now very well come about that species turn up which do not fit under the assumed determination of the genus, because the genus is frequently assumed on the strength of a dim representation of the total habitus rather than on the strength of the more or less individual mark that is expressly supposed to serve for its determination. – The genus would in such a case have to be altered, and it would have to be justified that some other number of species are to be viewed as species of One new genus; that is to say, the genus would determine itself out of whatever one puts together under some respect or other that one chooses to take as the unity, and this respect would itself thereby become the ground of division. Conversely, if one holds fast to the determinateness first assumed as being what is peculiar to the genus, then the material that one wanted to bring together into one with the earlier species would exclude itself. This carrying on without the concept, which at one time assumes some determinateness as the essential moment of the genus and accordingly places the particulars under it or shuts them out of it, and at another time starts from the particular and, in putting the particulars together, lets itself be guided once more by a different determinateness, yields the appearance of a play of arbitrariness that is left to settle for itself which portion or which aspect of the concrete it wishes to hold fast to and to order things by. – Physical nature offers such a contingency in the principles of division of its own accord; in virtue of its dependent, external actuality it stands within the manifold interconnection that is likewise given for it; hence a multitude of principles is come upon to which it must accommodate itself, so that in one series of its forms it follows the one while in other series it follows others, and it just as much brings forth mixed hybrid beings that run off towards the different sides at once. It thereby comes about that in one series of natural things marks stand out as highly indicative and essential which in others turn inconspicuous and purposeless, so that adherence to a principle of division of this kind becomes impossible.

The universal determinateness of empirical species can only be that they are, quite generally, diverse from each other, without standing in opposition. Earlier, the disjunction of the concept was exhibited in its determinateness; if particularity is taken up without the negative unity of the concept, as something immediate and given, then difference remains merely at that form of reflection considered earlier, diversity in general. The externality in which the concept preeminently is within nature brings with it the complete indifference of difference; a determination for division is therefore frequently borrowed from number.

Contingent as the particular is here over against the universal, and hence division in general, it may still be ascribed to an instinct of reason when, within this cognition, one lights upon grounds of division and divisions which, so far as sensible properties allow, prove more conformable to the concept. For instance, in the case of animals the organs of feeding, teeth and claws, are used in the systems as a widely reaching ground of division; at first these are taken merely as sides on which the marks can be picked out more easily for cognition's subjective convenience. In fact, however, there lies in those organs not merely a distinguishing that falls to an external reflection; they are rather the vital point of animal individuality, at which the animal posits itself, over against the other of the nature external to it, as a singularity that refers itself to itself and severs itself from continuity with an other. – With the plant the parts of fructification make up that supreme point of vegetable life through which the plant points ahead to the transition into sexual difference, and thereby into individual singularity. The system has therefore rightly turned to this point for a ground of division that is admittedly not all-sufficing yet reaches far, and has thereby laid down as basis a determinateness which is not merely a determinateness serving external reflection for comparison, but is the highest of which the plant is in and for itself capable.

3. The Theorem

1. The third stage of this cognition, as it advances along the determinations of the concept, is particularity's transition into singularity; and singularity is what constitutes the content of the theorem. What falls to be considered here, accordingly, is the determinateness which refers itself to itself, the subject matter's difference within its own self, and the way the differentiated determinatenesses refer to one another. Only One determinateness is contained in the definition, and in the division the determinateness against others; with singularization the subject matter has fallen apart within its own self. Whereas the definition comes to a halt at the universal concept, in the theorems, by contrast, the subject matter is cognized as it is in its reality, within the conditions and the forms which its real existence has. Taken together with the definition it therefore exhibits the idea, that is, the unity of concept and reality. The cognition under consideration here, however, still engaged in searching as it is, does not get so far as this exhibition, since with it reality does not issue from the concept, so that reality's dependence upon the concept, and therewith the unity itself, goes uncognized.

By the determination just given, then, the theorem is the properly synthetic element in a subject matter, so far as the relations among its determinatenesses are necessary, that is, have their ground in the inner identity that belongs to the concept. What is synthetic in definition and in division is a linkage picked up from outside; what has been come upon gets brought under the form of the concept, yet precisely as come upon the entire content is no more than monstrated; the theorem, by contrast, is to be demonstrated. Inasmuch as the content of its definitions and of its determinations of division is not deduced by this cognition, one might suppose that it could spare itself the proving of the very relations the theorems enunciate, and here too rest satisfied with perception. Yet what sets cognition apart from bare perception and from representation is precisely the form of the concept as such, which cognition confers upon the content; definition and division accomplish this; but seeing that the theorem draws its content from singularity as a moment of the concept, that content consists in determinations of reality which no longer have for their relation the merely simple and immediate determinations of the concept; with singularity the concept has gone over into otherness, into reality, and by that becomes idea. Hence the synthesis which the theorem harbours no longer has the concept's form to justify it; it is a linking of terms taken as diverse; the unity not yet posited along with them has accordingly still to be pointed out, and thus proving becomes a necessity for this cognition itself.

The first difficulty to arise here is that of distinguishing with precision which among the determinations of the subject matter admit of being taken up into the definitions, and which, on the other hand, are to be assigned to the theorems. No principle can be at hand for this; one might appear to lie in the thought that whatever accrues to a subject matter immediately belongs in the definition, while for the remainder, as something mediated, the mediation has first to be pointed out. But a definition's content is a determinate content at all events, and just for that reason itself essentially a mediated one; the immediacy it possesses is merely subjective, which is to say that the subject makes an arbitrary start and lets some subject matter pass as presupposition. Now since what is thus taken is a subject matter concrete within itself and one that has besides to be divided, a whole crowd of determinations results, mediated by their very nature, which are accepted as immediate and unproven on no principle whatever, but merely by subjective decision. – Even in Euclid, who has always and rightly been recognized as the master of this synthetic mode of cognition, there stands, under the title of an axiom, a presupposition regarding the parallel lines, one that has been thought to require proof and whose deficiency people have tried in sundry ways to supply. In a good many further theorems presuppositions have been thought to be detectable which ought not to have been taken up immediately but should rather have been proved. As to that axiom about the parallel lines, one may observe that it is just there that Euclid's sound judgement makes itself known, he having weighed exactly both the element and the character of the science he pursued; a proof of the axiom would have had to be drawn out of the concept of parallel lines; but proof of that kind has no more place in his science than has the deduction of his definitions, of his axioms, and indeed of his subject matter altogether, of space itself and of the nearest determinations of space, the dimensions; – seeing that a deduction of this sort can be carried out only from the concept, while the concept lies beyond what is peculiar to the Euclidean sciences, they must for that science be presuppositions, relative firsts.

To the same class belong the axioms, which this occasion invites us to mention. It is usual, and unjustly so, that they are wont [to] be taken for absolute firsts, as if of themselves, in and for themselves, they called for no proof at all. Were that truly so, they would amount to nothing more than tautologies, for it is only in abstract identity that diversity fails to occur and hence that no mediation is called for. Should the axioms be something more than tautologies, however, then they are propositions belonging to some other science, for within whichever science takes them as its axioms they are supposed to count as presuppositions. Properly speaking they are therefore theorems, and for the most part they come out of logic. Lemmas of just this kind are the axioms of geometry, logical propositions which do, it is true, approach tautology, in that magnitude alone is their concern and qualitative differences are consequently extinguished within them; the purely quantitative syllogism, which is the chief axiom, was discussed above. – Taken in and for themselves the axioms therefore call for proof no less than definitions and divisions do, and the sole reason they are not turned into theorems is that, as relative firsts, they are accepted as presuppositions from a particular standpoint.

Turning to the content of the theorems, a closer distinction has now to be drawn: since that content consists in a reference among determinatenesses of the concept's reality, these references may be relations of the subject matter that are more or less incomplete and singular, or else a relation of the kind that takes in the whole content of the reality and gives expression to its determinate reference. But the unity of the complete determinatenesses of content is one with the concept; a proposition holding that unity is therefore itself once more a definition, though a definition expressing the concept not just as immediately taken up but as unfolded into its determinate, real differences, or expressing the concept's complete existence. Both together therefore exhibit the idea.

Compare somewhat more closely the theorems of a synthetic science, and especially of geometry, and this difference will come out, that a number of its theorems hold nothing but singular relations of the subject matter, while others hold relations of a kind wherein the subject matter's complete determinateness finds expression. To count all the propositions of equal worth, on the ground that every one of them holds a truth and that within the formal course, within the connectedness of the proving, every one is equally essential, is a very superficial view. How the content of the theorems differs is bound up in the closest way with that course itself; a few additional observations upon the course will help to throw further light both on the difference in question and on the nature of synthetic cognition. From of old, praise has been bestowed on Euclidean geometry, which, as the representative of the synthetic method and as supplying that method's most accomplished model, is to serve us here as the example, for the arrangement in the succession of its theorems, by which, for each theorem, the propositions its construction and proof call for are always to be found already proved beforehand. What this circumstance concerns is formal consistency; and important though that is, it concerns rather the external arrangement of expediency, and taken by itself has no bearing upon the essential difference of concept and idea, in which a higher principle for the necessity of the progression is to be sought. – For the definitions with which the start is made take up the sensible subject matter as immediately given and determine it by its nearest genus and its specific difference, and these are likewise the simple, immediate determinatenesses of the concept, universality and particularity, the relation between which is carried no further. The theorems that come first can accordingly cling to nothing but immediate determinations of the sort that the definitions hold; in like manner their reciprocal dependence can at first bear only upon this universal point, that the one is determined at all through the other. Thus what Euclid's first propositions about triangles bear upon is nothing but congruence, that is, how many pieces in a triangle must be determined if the remaining pieces of one and the same triangle, or the whole of it, is to be determined at all. That two triangles get compared with each other, and that congruence is made to turn upon coincidence, is a roundabout way which the method cannot do without, obliged as it is to make use of sensible coincidence in place of the thought: being-determined. Looked at otherwise, on their own, those theorems hold two parts within them, one of which may be viewed as the concept and the other as the reality, as that which brings the former to completion in reality. For that which determines completely, namely, for instance, the pair of sides along with the angle they enclose, counts already for the understanding as the entire triangle; to determine the triangle completely nothing beyond this is wanted; the two angles left over and the third side make up reality's surplus beyond the determinateness of the concept. Accordingly, what those theorems really do is this, that they cut the sensible triangle, which admittedly calls for three sides and three angles, down to the simplest conditions; mention had been made in the definition only of three lines at large which shut in the plane figure and make of it a triangle; it is a theorem that first states expressly the being-determined of the angles by way of the being-determined of the sides, as the theorems that follow state the dependence of three further pieces upon three such pieces. – What holds the magnitude of the triangle wholly determined according to its sides within itself, though, is the Pythagorean theorem; here for the first time we have the equation of the triangle's sides, whereas the preceding sides carry it, quite generally, no further than a determinateness of its pieces over against each other, and not as far as an equation. With this proposition, then, we have the consummate, real definition of the triangle, in the first place of the right-angled triangle, the one whose differences are simplest and which is therefore the most regular. – It is with this proposition that Euclid brings the first book to a close, and rightly, since a consummate determinateness has in fact been reached in it. The second book he brings to a close in the same fashion, having first led the triangles that carry a greater inequality about them, the ones that are not right-angled, back to the uniform kind, namely with the reduction of the rectangle to the square, – an equation between what is self-equal, the square, and what is unequal within itself, the rectangle; in the same way, within the Pythagorean theorem, the hypotenuse answering to the right angle, to what is self-equal, forms the one side of the equation, and the other side is formed by what is unequal to itself, namely the two legs. That equation between square and rectangle underlies the second definition of the circle, – which is once more the Pythagorean theorem, save that the legs are here taken as variable magnitudes; and the first equation of the circle stands in just that same relation of sensible determinateness to equation in which the two differing definitions of conic sections at large stand to each other.

This genuine synthetic progression is a transition out of the universal into singularity, that is to say, into what is determined in and for itself, or into the subject matter's unity within itself, so far as the subject matter has fallen apart into its essential real determinatenesses and been differentiated. In other sciences, though, the customary progression, wholly imperfect as it is, tends to run thus: a start is indeed made from something universal, but the singularization and concretion of the universal amounts only to an application of it to material entering from elsewhere; the idea's properly singular element is on this showing an empirical ingredient.

Be the theorem's content the more imperfect or the more perfect sort, it has in either case to be proved. What it states is a relation among real determinations which do not stand in the relation of determinations of the concept; where they do stand in it, as can be pointed out in the propositions we have termed the second or real definitions, these are on that very account definitions on the one hand, but since their content lies at the same time in relations among real determinations and not merely in the relation of a universal and the simple determinateness, they, unlike a first definition of that sort, both require proof and admit of it. Being real determinatenesses, they carry the form of what indifferently subsists and is diverse; they are consequently not one immediately; and so their mediation has to be pointed out. In the first definition the immediate unity is the one whereby the particular lies within the universal.

2. The mediation that now comes up for closer consideration can be a simple one, or it can run through a plurality of mediations. What mediates hangs together with what is to be mediated; but since in this cognition, to which passing over into the opposite is wholly alien, it is not out of the concept that the mediation and the theorem are traced back, the mediating determinations have to be fetched in from somewhere or other, minus the concept of the connectedness, to serve as a provisional material for the proof's scaffolding. Such preparation is the construction.

Out of the references belonging to the theorem's content, which may be manifold indeed, only those are now to be cited and brought before representation which are of service to the proof. Not until the proof does this fetching in of the material acquire its sense; on its own showing it looks blind and devoid of concept. Afterwards, in the course of the proof, one certainly grasps that it was to the purpose to draw upon the geometrical figure, for instance, just those additional lines that the construction prescribes; but at the construction itself obedience has to be blind; taken on its own the operation is therefore without understanding, the purpose guiding it not having been declared as yet. – Whether it be a theorem proper or a problem on whose behalf the construction is undertaken makes no difference; in the shape in which it first shows itself before the proof, it is nothing derived from the determination that theorem or problem has given, and hence, for one who does not yet know the purpose, a senseless business, though always a business steered by nothing but a purpose external to it.

What was at first still a secret comes out in the proof. The proof holds, as was stated, the mediation of whatever the theorem enunciates as conjoined; only by way of this mediation does the linkage appear as a necessary one. As the construction on its own lacks the concept's subjectivity, so the proof is a subjective business lacking objectivity. For inasmuch as the theorem's determinations of content are posited not simultaneously as determinations of the concept but rather as given indifferent parts that stand to one another in manifold external relations, the necessity yields itself only in the formal, external concept. No genesis of the relation that constitutes the theorem's content is what the proof provides; the necessity exists only for insight, and the proof as a whole exists for the subjective behoof of cognition. For that reason it is throughout an external reflection, one proceeding from without inwards, that is, one that infers the relation's inner constitution from external circumstances. The circumstances which the construction has set out are a consequence flowing from the subject matter's nature; here they get turned round into the ground and into the mediating relations. The Medius Terminus, the third thing in which the terms conjoined within the theorem exhibit themselves in their unity, and which supplies the proof with its nerve, is on that account nothing but something at which the linkage appears and is external. Since the sequence this proving pursues runs the other way round from the nature of the fact, whatever within it counts as ground is a subjective ground, from which the fact's nature issues for cognition alone.

The foregoing makes plain the necessary limit of this cognition, a limit which has been misjudged very often. The geometrical science is the dazzling instance of the synthetic method, – but the method has been carried over, unfittingly, to other sciences as well, and even to philosophy. Magnitude being geometry's concern, formal syllogizing is what suits it best of all; and since it is the merely quantitative determination that gets considered there, abstraction being made from the qualitative, geometry can hold itself inside the formal identity, inside that conceptless unity which is equality and belongs to external, abstracting reflection. Its subject matter, the determinations of space, are already abstract subject matters of the sort got ready for the purpose of possessing a perfect finite, external determinateness. Owing to this abstract subject matter the science has, on the one side, the sublime feature that within these empty, still spaces colour has been extinguished and the remaining sensible properties have vanished as well, and that furthermore every other interest which speaks more nearly to living individuality is silenced there. On the other side, that abstract subject matter is still space, – a non-sensible sensible; intuition has been lifted into its own abstraction, space being a form of intuition and yet intuition still, – something sensible, sensibility's very outside-one-another, its sheer conceptlessness. – One has heard talk enough in recent times of geometry's excellence from this side; – the fact that it has sensible intuition at its base has been proclaimed its supreme merit, and its lofty scientific standing has even been supposed to rest on that, its proofs being said to repose upon intuition. Against such shallowness the shallow reminder must be issued that intuiting brings no science into being, that this comes about solely through thinking. The intuitability that belongs to geometry through its still sensible material lends it no more than the side of self-evidence which whatever is sensible possesses generally for spirit devoid of thought. Pitiably, then, this sensuousness of its material has been put down to geometry's credit, though it rather stamps the lowliness of geometry's standpoint. It is to the abstraction of its sensible subject matter alone that geometry owes its aptitude for a higher scientific standing, and its great superiority over those collections of items of knowledge which people are equally pleased to call sciences, which have something concretely sensible and perceptible for their content, and which display but a distant intimation of and allusion to the demands of the concept through the order they attempt to introduce into it.

Because geometrical space is the abstraction and vacancy of being-outside-one-another, it becomes possible for the figurations to be inscribed into its indeterminateness in such a way that their determinations stay outside one another in settled repose and harbour within themselves no transition into the opposite. Geometry's science is thereby the simple science of the finite, of what gets compared as to magnitude and whose unity is the external one, equality. Yet since in this figuring the start is made at the same time from various sides and principles, and the various figures come about each on its own, comparing them nonetheless brings to light qualitative inequality too, and incommensurability. By that, geometry gets driven past the finitude within which its advance was so orderly and secure, out into infinity, – into the equating of things that are qualitatively diverse. Its self-evidence gives out at this point, so far as fixed finitude otherwise underlies it and so far as it has nothing to do with the concept and with the concept's appearing, with that transition. Finite science has reached its limit here, since what is synthetic now has its necessity and mediation grounded no longer in positive identity merely, but in the negative.

If geometry, like algebra, runs up against its limit soon enough with objects that are abstract and belong merely to the understanding, the synthetic method proves from the outset that much less adequate for other sciences, and least adequate of all for philosophy. For definition and division what is fitting has already emerged; here only theorem and proof would remain to be spoken of, but besides the presupposing of definition and division, which already requires the proof and presupposes it, there is a further inadequacy in the position these occupy generally with regard to the theorems. That position is chiefly striking in the sciences of experience, physics for instance, whenever these mean to give themselves the shape of synthetic sciences. The route taken is then this, that the determinations of reflection belonging to particular forces, or to other inner and essential forms, which issue from the manner of analysing experience and can vindicate themselves only as results, must be put at the head, so that in them one may possess the universal foundation afterwards applied to the singular and pointed out within it. Because these universal foundations have nothing to hold them up on their own, one is expected to put up with them meanwhile; but it is only from the conclusions derived that one comes to notice how these constitute the real ground of those foundations. The so-called explanation, and the proof of the concrete once it has been cast into theorems, turns out partly to be a tautology, partly a muddling of the true relation, and partly, too, to be a muddling that served to hide the self-deception of a cognition which took experiences up one-sidedly, that being the only way it could arrive at its simple definitions and principles, and which parries any refutation drawn from experience by taking up and admitting experiences not in their concrete totality but as an example, and moreover on whichever side is serviceable to hypothesis and theory. With concrete experience thus subordinated to the presupposed determinations, the theory's foundation is darkened and displayed only on the side that squares with the theory; and generally it is thereby made very hard to look at the concrete perceptions without prejudice, for their own sake. Only when the whole procedure is stood upon its head does the whole acquire the right relation, in which the connectedness of ground and consequence, and the correctness of recasting perception into thoughts, can be surveyed. One of the principal difficulties in studying sciences of this sort is therefore to get inside them; and that can come about only by blindly putting up with the presuppositions and, without being able to make for oneself any concept of them, often hardly even a determinate representation, at best a muddled picture of the fancy, imprinting on the memory for the present the determinations of the forces and matters assumed, along with their hypothetical shapes, directions, and rotations. Demand the necessity and the concept of the presuppositions before accepting them and letting them pass, and there is no getting past the beginning.

Occasion has been taken above to speak of how unfitting it is to apply the synthetic method to the strictly analytic science. Wolf stretched this application over every possible sort of item of knowledge that he drew into philosophy and mathematics, – items of knowledge partly quite analytic in nature, partly of a contingent and merely workaday sort. The contrast between such readily grasped material, by its nature incapable of any strict and scientific handling, and the stiff scientific circuit and veneer laid over it, has of itself displayed the ineptness of such an application and destroyed its credit.¹⁷ What that abuse could not do away with, however, was the faith in this method's suitability and indispensability for scientific strictness in philosophy; Spinoza's example in presenting his philosophy went on passing for a model long afterwards. In fact, though, it is by Kant and Jacobi that the entire manner of the former metaphysics, and with it its method, has been thrown over. Kant showed, in his own fashion, concerning the content of that metaphysics, that strict demonstration carries it into antinomies, whose remaining constitution has been elucidated in the proper places; but upon the nature of this demonstrating itself, tied as it is to a finite content, he did not reflect; the one, however, has to fall along with the other. In his Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft he furnished an example himself, handling as a science of reflection, and by that science's method, a science he meant in this way to claim for philosophy. – While Kant assailed the former metaphysics rather on the score of its matter, Jacobi assailed it above all on the score of its way of demonstrating, and lifted out, with the utmost lucidity and depth, the point that really matters, namely that a method of demonstration of that kind is tied down without qualification inside the circle of the finite's rigid necessity, while freedom, that is, the concept, and along with it everything that truly is, lies on the far side of that circle, beyond its reach. – On the Kantian result, it is the peculiar material of metaphysics that carries metaphysics into contradictions, and the deficiency of cognition consists in cognition's subjectivity; on the Jacobian result, it is the method and the entire nature of cognition itself, which lays hold of nothing but an interconnection of conditionedness and dependence, and therefore shows itself unequal to what is in and for itself and is the absolutely true. In truth, the principle of philosophy being the infinite free concept, upon which alone the whole of philosophy's content rests, the method of conceptless finitude does not fit that concept. The synthesis and mediation belonging to this method, proving, gets no further than a necessity set over against freedom, – an identity, namely, of what is dependent, an identity that only is in itself, whether it be taken as inner or as outer, and within which whatever constitutes the reality in it, the differentiated and what has entered concrete existence, stays through and through a self-subsistently-diverse and hence finite thing. In it, accordingly, this identity does not itself come to concrete existence and stays the merely inner one, or else it is the merely outer one, its determinate content being given to it; – on either view it is an abstract thing, does not have the real side upon itself, and is not posited as an identity determined in and for itself; the concept, which alone is what matters and which is the infinite in and for itself, is thus shut out of this cognition.

Within synthetic cognition, then, the idea reaches its purpose only so far as this, that the concept, in respect of its moments of identity and the real determinations, or in respect of the universality and the particular differences, – and further as identity as well, an identity which is interconnection and dependence of what is diverse, – comes to be for the concept. This subject matter of its own, however, is not adequate to it; for the concept does not come to be as the unity of itself with itself in its own subject matter, or in its reality; within necessity the concept's identity is for the concept, yet the determinateness does not itself lie within that identity, standing there instead as a material external to it, a material, that is, undetermined by the concept, in which accordingly the concept does not cognize itself. Generally speaking, then, the concept is not for itself, nor, in respect of its unity, is it at the same time determined in and for itself. That is why the idea does not as yet attain truth in this cognition, the subject matter being unequal to the subjective concept. – But the sphere of necessity is the topmost summit of being and of reflection; of itself, in and for itself, it goes over into the concept's freedom, and the inner identity goes over into the manifestation of itself that the concept as concept is. That this transition out of the sphere of necessity into the concept happens in itself was shown when the former sphere was under consideration, just as it also presented itself as the genesis of the concept at this book's beginning. Here the position held by necessity is that of being the concept's reality or subject matter, just as the concept into which necessity goes over now stands as the subject matter of the same. But the transition itself is the same one. Here too it is as yet only in itself, lying still outside cognition, in our reflection, that is, being cognition's own inner necessity as yet. Only the result is there for it. So far as the concept is now for itself what is determined in and for itself, the idea is the practical idea, action.

B. The Idea of the Good

Inasmuch as the concept, being the object of its own self, is determined in and for itself, the subject stands determined for itself as a singular. In its subjective character it once again has the presupposition of an otherness that is in itself; it is the drive toward its own realization, the purpose that wills to procure objectivity for itself in the objective world through its own self and so to carry itself out. Within the theoretical idea the subjective concept confronts the objective world as the universal, as what is in and for itself without determination, and from that world it draws the determinate content and the fulfillment it needs. Within the practical idea, by contrast, the concept confronts the actual as itself something actual; yet the certainty of its own self that belongs to the subject in being determined in and for itself is a certainty both that the subject is actual and that the world is unactual; not merely the world's otherness as abstract universality counts for the subject as null, but equally the world's singularity together with the determinations of that singularity. Here the subject has laid claim to objectivity for its own self; the determinateness it has within itself is the objective, since this is a universality no less absolutely determined; whereas the world that formerly counted as objective is now nothing but something posited, something determined immediately in manifold ways, which, precisely because its determination is only immediate, lacks the concept's unity within itself and is null for itself.

This determinateness, held within the concept, congruent with it, and enclosing within itself the demand for a singular external actuality, is the good. It steps forward laying claim to the dignity of the absolute, since it harbors the concept's totality and is the objective under the form of free unity and subjectivity alike. This idea ranks higher than the idea of the cognition we have considered, for the dignity belonging to it is not only that of the universal but that of what is actual without qualification. – It is drive to the extent that this actual remains subjective and self-positing and does not yet carry the form of immediate presupposition along with it; its drive toward realizing itself is strictly speaking not a drive to procure objectivity, which it possesses in its own self already, but only to procure this empty form of immediacy. – Hence the purpose's activity is not turned back upon itself in order to receive some given determination and appropriate it, but is directed rather toward positing the determination proper to itself and, by sublating whatever determinations the external world carries, toward giving itself reality under the shape of external actuality. – Being self-determining for itself, the idea of will holds the content within its own self. Now this content is admittedly a determinate one, and to that degree something finite and limited; self-determination amounts essentially to particularization, for the will's reflection into itself, as negative unity in general, is also singularity in the sense of excluding an other and presupposing one. Yet the content's particularity is at first infinite through the form of the concept, whose own determinateness that content is, and which possesses in the content the negative identity of itself with itself, and so not merely something particular but its own infinite singularity. The finitude of the content in the practical idea just spoken of is one and the same thing with the idea's being at first an idea not yet carried out; for the content the concept counts as what is in and for itself; the concept is here the idea under the form of an objectivity that is for its own self; on one side, therefore, the subjective is no longer something merely posited, arbitrary or contingent, but something absolute; on the other side, however, this form of concrete existence, being-for-itself, does not yet possess the form of being-in-itself as well. What in respect of form as such shows itself as opposition shows itself, on the concept's form as reflected into simple identity, that is, on the content, as the content's simple determinateness; and so the good, though valid in and for itself, is thereby some particular purpose or other, one that is nevertheless not to acquire its truth only by being realized, since for itself it is the true already.

The syllogism of immediate realization calls for no closer treatment here; it is wholly and simply the syllogism of external purposiveness examined earlier, and only the content constitutes the difference. In external purposiveness, that is, in the formal kind, the content was an indeterminate finite content in general; here it is finite too, and yet as such carries absolute validity at once. With respect to the conclusion, however, to the purpose as carried out, a further difference sets in. In its realization the finite purpose likewise gets no further than the means; because at its outset it is not yet a purpose determined in and for itself, it likewise remains, even when carried out, something not in and for itself. Should the good too be fixed once more as something finite, and be essentially such, then for all its inward infinity it likewise cannot elude the destiny of finitude; – a destiny that shows itself in several shapes. The good as carried out is good by virtue of what it already is within the subjective purpose, within its idea; the carrying out furnishes it with an external existence; but since that existence is determined merely as externality null in and for itself, the good has in it nothing beyond a contingent, destructible existence and has not reached a carrying out that corresponds to its idea. – Moreover, since in respect of its content it is something limited, there are also goods of many kinds; the good that concretely exists lies open to destruction not only through external contingency and through evil, but through the good's own collision and antagonism with itself. On the part of the objective world it presupposes, in the presupposing of which the good's subjectivity and finitude consist, and which, as an other, pursues its own course, even the carrying out of the good is exposed to hindrances, indeed to sheer impossibility. Thus the good remains an ought; it is in and for itself, while being, in the character of that final abstract immediacy, persists over against it as determined also into a non-being. The idea of a good brought to completion is indeed an absolute postulate, though nothing beyond a postulate, that is, an absolute still saddled with the determinateness of subjectivity. Two worlds still stand opposed: the one a kingdom of subjectivity in the pure expanses of thought that is transparent, the other a kingdom of objectivity in the element of an actuality outwardly manifold, a kingdom of darkness that stands unopened. The complete elaboration of this unresolved contradiction, of that absolute purpose over against which the restriction of such actuality stands insuperable, has been treated more closely in the Phenomenology of Spirit p. 323ff. – Since the idea holds within it the moment of perfect determinateness, that other concept to which the concept relates itself within the idea carries along with its subjectivity the moment of an object as well; here, therefore, the idea enters the shape of self-consciousness, and on this one side coincides with the exposition given of self-consciousness.

What the practical idea is still short of, however, is the moment of actual consciousness as such, namely that within the concept the moment of actuality should for itself have reached the determination of external being. – One may also regard this deficiency thus, that the practical idea is still short of the moment belonging to the theoretical one. For in the latter the side of the subjective concept, the concept as intuited within itself by the concept, carries only the determination of universality; cognition knows itself merely as apprehension, as the concept's identity with itself which for its own self is undetermined; the fulfillment, that is, objectivity determined in and for itself, is for cognition something given, and what truly is is the actuality at hand apart from all subjective positing. For the practical idea, conversely, that same actuality, which likewise stands before it as a restriction it cannot surmount, counts as null in and for itself, as what has yet to obtain its genuine determination and its sole worth from the purposes of the good. It is thus the will alone that blocks its own attainment of its goal, in that it severs itself from cognition and external actuality thereby fails to acquire for it the form of what truly is; hence the idea of the good can find what completes it nowhere but in the idea of the true.

This transition, however, the idea accomplishes through its own self. In the syllogism of action the one premise is the immediate reference of the good purpose to actuality, an actuality of which the purpose takes hold and which in the second premise it turns, as an external means, against external actuality. For the subjective concept the good is the objective; actuality in its existence stands over against the good as a restriction not to be surmounted only so far as actuality still bears the determination of immediate existence rather than that of an objective in the sense of what is in and for itself; actuality is instead either the evil or the indifferent, something merely determinable that does not carry its worth within its own self. But this abstract being that faces the good in the second premise the practical idea has already sublated on its own; the first premise of its action is the concept's immediate objectivity, whereby the purpose imparts itself to actuality without meeting any resistance and stands in simple, identical reference with it. To that extent, then, nothing more is required than to bring together the thoughts of its two premises. To what the objective concept has already immediately brought about in the first, the second at first adds only this, that it comes to be posited by way of mediation and hence for it. Now as in the purpose-reference generally the purpose carried out is once again only a means, while conversely the means is likewise the purpose carried out, so too in the syllogism of the good the first premise already harbors the second immediately and in itself; only this immediacy does not suffice, and the second is postulated for the first already; – the carrying out of the good against another actuality that stands opposed to it is the mediation essentially required for the immediate reference and for the good's being actualized. For that premise constitutes merely the concept's first negation, its otherness, an objectivity in which the concept would lie sunk in externality; the second is the sublating of this otherness, and by it the immediate carrying out of the purpose first becomes the actuality of the good as the concept that is for itself, since therein the concept is posited as identical with its own self and not with an other, and so posited as free and nothing else. If, then, the purpose of the good should for all that still not be carried out, this is a relapse of the concept into the standpoint it occupies before its activity, – the standpoint of an actuality determined as null and yet presupposed as real; – a relapse that turns into the progress into bad infinity, and that has its ground in nothing but this, that in the sublating of that abstract reality the sublating is just as immediately forgotten, or that it is forgotten how this reality has rather been presupposed already as the actuality that is null in and for itself and not objective. Hence this repetition of the presupposition of the purpose not carried out, coming after the purpose has actually been carried out, determines itself also in this way, that the subjective stance of the objective concept is reproduced and rendered perennial, whereby the finitude of the good, in respect of its content no less than of its form, shows itself as the truth that abides, and its actualization shows itself without qualification as never more than a singular deed and not a universal one. – In fact this determinateness has sublated itself in the actualization of the good; what continues to bound the objective concept is the view it takes of itself, a view that disappears through reflection upon what its actualization is in itself; by that view it obstructs its own self alone, and on that score it has to turn not against an external actuality but against its own self.

For the activity in the second premise, which brings forth only a one-sided being-for-itself and lets the product appear as something subjective and singular, so that the first presupposition is repeated in it, – is in truth no less the positing of that identity of the objective concept and immediate actuality which is in itself. This latter is determined by the presupposition to possess merely the reality of appearance, to be null in and for itself, and to be determinable throughout by the objective concept. Since the objective concept's activity alters the external actuality and thereby sublates the determination it had, that very act strips from it the merely apparent reality, the external determinability and the nullity, and so it comes to be posited as being in and for itself. Therein the presupposition as such is sublated: the good's determination as a purpose merely subjective and limited in its content, the necessity of first having to realize it by subjective activity, and that activity itself. Within the result the mediation sublates its own self; what stands there is an immediacy that does not reinstate the presupposition but is rather the presupposition's sublatedness. So the idea of the concept determined in and for itself is now posited, no longer in the acting subject alone but equally as an immediate actuality; and this actuality, conversely, is posited in the shape it has within cognition, as objectivity that genuinely is. The subject's singularity, which clung to it by reason of its presupposition, has vanished along with that presupposition; the subject now stands as free, universal identity with its own self, for which the objectivity of the concept is just as much something given, immediately present for it, as it knows itself to be the concept determined in and for itself. In this result, then, cognition has been restored and joined with the practical idea; the actuality found before us is at once determined as the absolute purpose carried out, yet not, as in cognition that searches, as a merely objective world devoid of the concept's subjectivity, but as an objective world in which the concept is the inner ground and the actual subsistence. This is the absolute idea.

Chapter 3. The Absolute Idea

As it has now resulted, the absolute idea is the identity of the theoretical with the practical idea; each of those, taken alone, stays one-sided and carries the idea itself within it merely as a beyond still being looked for, a goal never reached; – each is on that account a synthesis of striving, at once possessing the idea and not possessing it, crossing over from the one to the other without ever holding the two thoughts together, so that it comes to a halt in their contradiction. Being the rational concept, which inside its own reality unites with nothing but itself, the absolute idea is, on one side and just because its objective identity is thus immediate, a going back to life; and yet that very form of immediacy it has equally sublated, harbouring within itself the sharpest opposition of all. Here the concept is no longer merely soul: it is the free subjective concept, existing for itself and owning on that account personality – the practical concept, determined in and for itself, objective, and as person an impenetrable, atomic subjectivity – which nonetheless is no exclusionary singularity but is, for itself, universality and cognition, having for its subject matter, in its other, its own objectivity. All else is error, cloudiness, mere opinion, striving, caprice and transience; the absolute idea by itself is being, life that does not perish, truth knowing itself, and it is all truth.

Philosophy has no other subject matter and no other content. Since all determinateness is held within it, and since its essence lies in coming back to itself by way of its own self-determination or particularizing, it takes on a variety of configurations, and philosophy's task is to know it in them. Nature and spirit are, broadly, two distinct ways of setting out its existence; art and religion are its differing ways of laying hold of itself and of providing itself an existence that fits it; what philosophy contains and aims at is the same as with art and religion, yet philosophy lays hold of the absolute idea in the highest way, since the way proper to it, the concept, is the highest. Those configurations of finitude, real and ideal alike, along with those of infinity and of holiness, philosophy accordingly gathers into itself, comprehending them and comprehending itself. To derive and to know these particular ways falls now to the several philosophical sciences as their further task. What is logical about the absolute idea may itself be called one mode of it; but a mode designates a particular sort, a determinateness of form, whereas the logical is the universal mode within which every particular one lies sublated and wrapped up. In its pure essence the logical idea is that idea itself, shut up within its concept in plain identity, not yet having entered upon shining in some determinateness of form. For this reason logic sets out the self-movement of the absolute idea only as the primal word – a word which is an utterance, yet an utterance that, being outward, has vanished again the instant it is; so the idea exists only in this self-determining of apprehending itself, exists in the pure thought where difference is not yet any otherness but stays and remains wholly translucent to itself. – What the logical idea has for its content is accordingly itself as the infinite form; – the form stands opposed to content just to the degree that content is the form-determination gone back into itself and sublated in identity, such that this concrete identity confronts the identity spelled out as form; over against form, content wears the look of something other and given, while form as such stands out and out in reference and has its determinateness posited at the same time as shine. – Looked at more closely, the absolute idea itself has for content nothing but this: that the form-determination is its own totality brought to completion, the pure concept. It was the determinateness of the idea, together with the entire course this determinateness ran, that made up what the science of logic dealt with, and from that course the absolute idea has emerged for itself; for itself, though, what it has shown itself to be is this, that determinateness wears no shape of content at all but stands purely as form, so that on this footing the idea is the purely universal idea. Hence what remains for consideration here is no content as such, but the universal belonging to its form – in other words, the method.

To begin with, the method can look like nothing more than the manner and way in which cognition proceeds, and such indeed is its nature. Yet as method that manner and way is not just a modality of being determined in and for itself; being a modality of cognition, it is posited as something the concept determines, and as the form — to the degree that form is the soul of everything objective, while any content otherwise determined holds its truth nowhere but in the form. Should content once again be assumed as given to the method and as having a peculiar nature of its own, then method, so determined, turns into a merely external form, as does the logical altogether. But one need not appeal merely to the basic concept of the logical: its whole course, throughout which every shape of a given content and of objects has come up, has displayed the transition and the untruth of those shapes, and rather than some given object serving as the substrate to which absolute form would stand only as an outward, accidental determination, it is this form that has turned out to be the absolute substrate and the last truth. Out of that, method has come forth as the concept knowing itself, holding itself — the absolute, subjective and objective alike — for its subject matter, and so as the sheer correspondence between concept and its reality, as a concrete existence that the concept itself is.

Method, then, as it comes up for treatment here, is nothing but the movement of the concept itself, whose nature has already been made out, only that firstly it now carries the significance that the concept is everything and its movement the universal absolute activity, the movement that determines and realizes itself. Method is therefore to be acknowledged as the unrestrictedly universal mode, inward and outward at once, and as the utterly infinite might, against which nothing objective — however much it may present itself as something outward, far from reason and independent of it — could hold out, could possess a nature of its own over against it, or could stay unpervaded by it. That is why it is soul and substance: nothing whatever is comprehended, nothing known in its truth, except as it stands wholly under the method; and it is the method belonging to each fact in its own right, since what the fact does is the concept. This too is the truer sense of its universality: on the universality of reflection method passes merely for the method applicable to everything; on the universality of the idea, though, it is at once the manner and way of cognition — of the concept that knows itself subjectively — and the objective manner and way, or rather the substantiality of things, which is to say of concepts, so far as these at first look to representation and to reflection like others. Reason therefore finds in it not only its highest might, or rather its one absolute might, but likewise its highest and only drive: through itself to find and know itself in everything. – With this, secondly, we have stated the difference between method and the concept as such, that is, the particular side of method. Where the concept came under review on its own, it showed itself in its immediacy; the reflection upon it, the concept that reviews it, fell to our knowing. Method is that knowing itself: for it the concept counts not merely as its subject matter but as its own subjective doing, as the instrument and means of cognizing activity, marked off from that activity yet constituting its very essentiality. Where cognition searches, method is likewise set up as a tool, a means lying on the subjective side by which that side refers itself to the object. In that syllogism subject makes one extreme and object the other; the former closes with the latter by way of its method, yet in doing so does not for itself close together with itself. Because subject, method and object are not posited as the one identical concept, the extremes stay diverse and the syllogism stays a formal one throughout; the premise in which the subject puts form on its own side as its method is an immediate determination and consequently holds the determinations of form — those of definition, division and so on, as we saw — as so many facts already found in the subject. In genuine cognition, by contrast, method is no mere aggregate of certain determinations but the concept's being-determined in and for itself; the concept is the middle only because it carries the meaning of the objective just as much, so that in the conclusion the objective picks up not just an outward determinateness through method but stands posited in its identity with the subjective concept.

1. What constitutes the method, then, are the determinations of the concept itself along with their references, and these must now be looked at in their significance as determinations of method. – Here one has to start, firstly, from the beginning. About the beginning enough was said both where logic itself began and a moment ago under subjective cognition, and it was shown there that, provided it is not undertaken arbitrarily and with a categorical want of awareness, it can indeed look like a source of many difficulties while being in fact of the utmost simplicity. Its content, since it is the beginning, is something immediate, though an immediate carrying the sense and the form of abstract universality. Whether its content otherwise belongs to being, to essence or to the concept, it counts as something picked up, come upon, assertoric, precisely so far as it is something immediate. In the first place, though, what it is immediate is not of sensuous intuition nor of representation, but of thinking, which for the sake of its immediacy may be styled a supersensuous, inward intuiting as well. Whatever is immediate in sensuous intuition is a manifold and something singular. Cognition, however, is comprehending thought, so that where it starts lies solely inside the element of thinking; it is something simple, something universal. – That form already came up earlier under definition. Finite cognition, at its start, likewise grants universality the rank of an essential determination, but grants it only as a determination of thought and of concept set against being. This first universality is in truth an immediate one, and for that very reason carries the meaning of being no less; for being is precisely that abstract self-reference. No further derivation is needed for being, as though it fell to the abstractum of the definition only on the ground of having been fetched out of sensuous intuition or out of somewhere else and to that extent pointed out. Such pointing out and deducing has to do with a mediation that amounts to more than a bare beginning, and with a mediation of a kind that belongs not to thinking comprehension but to the lifting of representation, of empirical and ratiocinating consciousness, up to the standpoint of thought. On the familiar antithesis of thought or concept and being it looks like a weighty truth that no being as yet belongs to the former on its own, and that being has a ground of its own which is independent of thought. But so meagre in itself is the plain determination of being that on that score alone there is little occasion to make a stir over it; the universal is straightaway itself this immediate, since as something abstract it too is nothing but that abstract self-reference which being is. In truth the requirement that being be exhibited carries a deeper inner sense than that abstract determination; what it intends is rather the requirement that the concept be realized at large, and that lies not in the beginning but is the aim and the labour of the entire further unfolding of cognition. Further, where the content of the beginning is supposed to gain justification by being pointed out in inner or outer perception, and thereby credentials as something true or right, then what one has in view is no longer universality's form as such but rather its determinateness, which we must speak of at once. Credentials for the determinate content that the start is made with seem to lie behind the start; in truth, however, they count as a going forward, so long as they belong to comprehending cognition.

For method, accordingly, the beginning carries no determinateness beyond that of being simple and universal; and this is itself the determinateness that makes it defective. The pure, plain concept is universality, and method, as consciousness of that concept, knows universality to be a mere moment and knows that within it the concept is not yet determined in and for itself. Were the beginning carried further merely on the strength of such a consciousness, merely for method's sake, method would be a formal affair posited in outward reflection. Since it is instead the objective, immanent form, what is immediate at the beginning has to be the defective thing on its own account, and has to be furnished with the drive to carry itself on. Within the absolute method the universal holds good not as something merely abstract but as the objectively universal, in other words as that which in itself is the concrete totality, a totality nevertheless not yet posited, not yet for itself. Even the abstract universal as such, taken within the concept, taken that is according to its truth, is not the simple alone; being an abstractum, it stands already posited as burdened with a negation. Hence there also is nothing, whether in actuality or in thought, of the simplicity and abstractness people ordinarily picture. A simple of that sort is mere supposing, grounded in nothing but obliviousness to what is really present. – Earlier we determined what begins as the immediate; the immediacy of the universal is the same thing that gets expressed here as being-in-itself lacking being-for-itself. – One may well say, then, that every beginning has to be made with the absolute and that all advance is nothing but the exhibiting of it, so far as what has being in itself is the concept. Yet just because it as yet only is in itself, it is equally not the absolute, not the posited concept, not the idea either; for what these amount to is precisely that being-in-itself is only an abstract, one-sided moment. Advance is thus no sort of excess; it would be that if what begins were truly the absolute already; going forward consists rather in this, that the universal determines itself and is for itself the universal, which is to say, is a singular and a subject just as much. It is the absolute only where it is complete.

One may recall that a beginning which in itself is concrete totality can as such be free too, and that its immediacy can bear the determination of an outward existence; the germ of what lives, and the subjective purpose generally, showed themselves to be beginnings of that kind, which is why both are themselves drives. In what is neither spirit nor alive, on the other hand, the concrete concept is present only as real possibility; the highest rung on which the concrete concept, as a beginning inside the sphere of necessity, has immediate existence is the cause; but a cause is not yet a subject keeping itself intact as such through its actual realization as well. The sun, for example, and everything lifeless whatever, are determinate concrete existences where real possibility stays an inner totality, whose moments are not posited in them in subjective form, and which, so far as they do realize themselves, gain a concrete existence by way of other corporeal individuals.

2. Concrete totality, being what makes the beginning, contains as such within itself the beginning of going forward and of development. Concrete as it is, it is differentiated within itself; but owing to its first immediacy what is first differentiated stands at the outset merely as diverse. As self-referring universality, as subject, however, the immediate is also the unity of those diverse terms. – That reflection makes the first rung of the onward movement – the coming forth of difference, the judgment, determining at large. The essential thing is that absolute method should find and know the determination of the universal inside the universal itself. The finite cognition of the understanding goes about it by putting back into the concrete, just as externally, whatever it dropped out of the concrete when it abstractively produced that universal. Absolute method, on the contrary, does not conduct itself as outward reflection: it draws the determinate out of its own subject matter, being itself that subject matter's immanent principle and soul. – Just this is what Plato required of cognition, that things be considered in and for themselves, partly in their universality, partly in such a way that one does not wander off from them and clutch at circumstances, instances and comparisons, but keeps them alone in view and brings to consciousness what is immanent in them. – So far, then, the method of absolute cognition is analytic. That it finds the further determination of its initial universal within that universal and nowhere else is the absolute objectivity of the concept, of which objectivity method is the certainty. – Equally, though, it is synthetic, since its subject matter, determined immediately as a simple universal, reveals itself as an other through the determinateness it possesses in that very immediacy and universality. Such reference of something diverse, which the subject matter thus is inwardly, is nevertheless no longer what finite cognition means by synthesis; already through the equally analytic determination generally belonging to it, namely that it is reference inside the concept, it parts company altogether with that synthetic sort.

That moment of judgment — synthetic and analytic in equal measure — by which the initial universal determines itself out of itself as the other of itself is what deserves the name of the dialectical. Among the ancient sciences dialectic is one of those that the metaphysics of the moderns, and popular philosophy generally, ancient and modern alike, have most misjudged. Diogenes Laertius reports of Plato that, Thales having originated natural philosophy and Socrates moral philosophy, Plato originated the third science belonging to philosophy, dialectic; – antiquity reckoned this to him as his highest merit, though it commonly goes altogether unnoticed by those who have his name oftenest on their lips. Often enough dialectic has been treated as an art, as if it rested upon a subjective gift and had no part in the objectivity of the concept. The shape it took and the result it yielded in the Kantian philosophy have already been displayed in determinate examples of that philosophy's outlook. That dialectic has again been acknowledged as belonging necessarily to reason must count as a step of infinite importance, even though the result to be drawn has to be the opposite of the one drawn there.

Apart from the fact that dialectic ordinarily looks like something accidental, the more precise form it usually takes is this: of some subject matter or other, world, motion, point and so on, for example, one shows that some determination or other belongs to it (following the order of the objects just listed: finitude in space or in time, being at this place, absolute negation of space), and then, no less necessarily, that the contrary determination belongs to it too (infinity in space and in time, not being at this place, reference to space and therefore spatiality). Chiefly it was against motion that the older Eleatic school turned its dialectic; Plato turned his repeatedly against the representations and concepts current in his day, those of the sophists above all, yet also against the pure categories and determinations of reflection; and the educated scepticism of a later time stretched it beyond the immediate so-called facts of consciousness and the maxims of everyday living to every scientific concept as well. The conclusion that gets drawn from dialectic of this sort is on the whole the contradiction and the nullity of the assertions advanced. That, however, admits of two senses – objectively, that the subject matter contradicting itself in such fashion cancels itself and is null; – so, for example, ran the conclusion of the Eleatics, who on this ground refused truth to world, to motion, to point; – or subjectively, that cognition is defective. By this second conclusion one may understand either that it is dialectic alone which puts on the conjuring act of a false shine. Such is the customary view of what passes for sound human understanding, which clings to sensuous evidence and to familiar representations and sayings – now more placidly, as Diogenes the Dog laid bare the dialectic of motion by pacing to and fro without a word, now flying into a fury about it, treating it as mere tomfoolery, or, where matters of ethical weight are at stake, as an outrage bent on unsettling what is essentially firm and on teaching vice how to supply itself with reasons – an outlook met with in the Socratic dialectic against the sophistic one, and a rage which in turn cost Socrates his own life. Rabble-style refutation of the kind Diogenes practised, which confronts thought with sensuous consciousness and supposes truth to lie there, one had better leave to itself; but where dialectic cancels ethical determinations, one should trust reason to know how to reinstate them, in their truth this time, together with a consciousness of their right and of their restriction as well. – Or else the outcome of subjective nullity bears not on dialectic but rather on the cognition dialectic is aimed at; and, in the sense of scepticism and equally of the Kantian philosophy, on cognition at large.

The root prejudice in all this is that dialectic yields nothing but a negative result — a claim that will shortly get its closer determination. About the form cited, the one in which dialectic habitually appears, this much should be noted first: taken so, dialectic and its result bear upon the subject matter under discussion or else upon subjective cognition, pronouncing the one or the other null, while the determinations pointed out on it as on some third go unremarked and are presupposed to hold good on their own. That the Kantian philosophy drew notice to this uncritical way of proceeding, and so gave the impulse toward reinstating logic and dialectic in the sense of examining the determinations of thought in and for themselves, is a merit of infinite worth. Take the subject matter apart from thinking and the concept, and it is a representation, or else a name; it is in the determinations of thought and of concept that it is whatever it is. Everything therefore hangs on these alone; they are what reason genuinely deals with and genuinely contains, and whatever else one takes subject matter and content to mean apart from them holds good only through them and within them. One must not, then, lay it to the charge of a subject matter or of cognition that they turn out dialectical by reason of their constitution and of some outward linkage. The one and the other get pictured in this way as a subject into which the determinations have been introduced under the form of predicates, properties, self-subsistent universals, so that these, firm and correct on their own, are thrown into dialectical relations and into contradiction only by the alien, accidental combining in and by some third. But a subject of that outward, fixed sort, belonging to representation and understanding, and likewise the abstract determinations, far from being able to pass for ultimates that securely stay underneath, must themselves be viewed as an immediate, as just such a presupposed and beginning term which, as shown above, has to succumb to dialectic in and for itself, since it is to be taken as concept in itself. So too every opposition supposed to be fixed, finite and infinite, say, or singular and universal, falls into contradiction through no outward linkage; rather, as examining their nature has shown, they are the passing over in and for themselves; the synthesis, and the subject in which they turn up, is the product of their own concept's reflection. Should conceptless examination halt at their outward relation, leaving them isolated as fixed presuppositions, it is the concept, on the contrary, that keeps its eye upon them, stirs them as their soul, and brings their dialectic out.

This is precisely the standpoint marked out above, on which a universal first, examined in and for itself, turns out to be the other of itself. Grasped in the most general terms, the determination may be put thus: what was at first immediate is herewith posited as mediated, as referred to an other; or the universal is posited as a particular. The second term arising in this way is accordingly the negative of the first; and, with an eye already on the further course, the first negative. On this negative side the immediate has gone under in the other, yet the other is essentially not the empty negative, the nothing usually taken for dialectic's result, but is the other of the first, the negative of the immediate; determined therefore as the mediated, – it holds the determination of the first within it throughout. Essentially, then, the first is stored up and kept in the other as well. – Holding on to the positive within its negative, to the content of the presupposition within the result, is what counts for most in rational cognition; the barest reflection suffices, moreover, to convince one of the absolute truth and necessity of this requirement, and as for instances of its proof, the whole of logic is nothing else.

What we now have before us is the mediated, which, taken at first or equally immediately, is likewise a simple determination, for once the first has gone under in it only the second is there. And since the first is also held in the second, the second being the first's truth, this unity admits of expression as a proposition in which the immediate stands as subject and the mediated stands as predicate of it: the finite is infinite, for example, or one is many, or the singular is the universal. How inadequate the form of propositions and judgments of that sort is, though, strikes one of itself. Under the heading of judgment it was shown that judgment's form generally, and most of all the immediate form of the positive judgment, cannot contain the speculative and the truth. One would at least have to append the nearest supplement to it, the negative judgment. Within the judgment the first, as subject, carries the shine of subsisting on its own, whereas it is rather sublated in its predicate as in its other; the content of those propositions does indeed contain this negation, but their positive form runs counter to that content; what they contain therefore fails to get posited, which is exactly what using a proposition was meant to achieve.

The second determination — the negative or mediated — is furthermore the mediating one at the same time. At first it may be taken for a simple determination, but by its truth it is a reference or relation; for it is the negative, yet of the positive, and encloses the positive within it. So it is the other not in the sense of being other than something towards which it stands indifferent — in that case it would be no other, nor a reference or relation at all; – it is rather the other in its own self, the other of an other; hence it encloses its own other within it and thus is, as contradiction, the posited dialectic of itself. – Since the first or immediate is the concept in itself and hence is the negative also only in itself, its dialectical moment lies in the difference it contains in itself getting posited in it. The second, on the other hand, is itself the determinate, the difference or relation; its dialectical moment therefore lies in positing the unity that it contains. – If, then, the negative, the determinate, relation, judgment and all the determinations coming under this second moment do not already of themselves show up as contradiction and as dialectical, that is mere shortcoming in a thinking which fails to put its thoughts together. For the material — the opposed determinations within one reference — is already posited and there for thought. Formal thinking, however, sets identity up as its law, lets the contradictory content lying before it sink down into the sphere of representation, into space and time, where the contradictory terms are kept outside one another in juxtaposition and succession and so present themselves to consciousness without touching. About this it lays down the express principle that contradiction cannot be thought; in fact, though, thinking contradiction is the concept's essential moment. Formal thinking does think it, as a matter of fact, only it looks away from it at once and in that pronouncement merely goes over from it to abstract negation.

It is this negativity we have been looking at that now makes the turning point in the concept's movement. It is the simple point of negative reference to itself, the innermost wellspring of all activity, of living and spiritual self-movement, the dialectical soul which everything true possesses in itself and by which alone it is true; for it is upon this subjectivity alone that there rests the sublating of the opposition between concept and reality, and the unity that constitutes truth. – The second negative, the negative of the negative we have reached, is that sublating of contradiction; but no more than contradiction is it a deed of outward reflection — it is the innermost, most objective moment of life and of spirit, by which there is a subject, a person, something free. – The negative's reference to itself is to be looked upon as the second premise of the syllogism as a whole. Should the determinations analytic and synthetic be employed in their antithesis, the first premise may be viewed as the analytic moment, since in it the immediate stands immediately related to its other and hence goes over into it, or rather has gone over; – though this reference, as was already recalled, is on that very account synthetic too, because that into which it goes over is its other. The second premise, the one under review here, admits of being determined as the synthetic one, for it is the reference of what is differentiated as such to what is differentiated from it. – Where the first is the moment of universality and of imparting, the second is determined by singularity, which at the outset, exclusive and as something for itself and diverse, refers itself to the other. The negative shows up as the mediating term because it encloses within itself both itself and the immediate whose negation it is. So far as the two determinations are taken as referred outwardly to each other in some relation, we have only the mediating formality; as absolute negativity, however, the negative moment of absolute mediation is the unity that constitutes subjectivity and soul.

At this turn of the method, the course cognition runs also goes back into itself. Being the contradiction that sublates itself, this negativity is the reinstating of the first immediacy, of plain universality; for immediately the other's other, the negation of the negative, is the positive, the identical, the universal. Should one care to count at all, this second immediate is, within the whole course, the third, reckoned against the first immediate and against the mediated. But it is also the third reckoned against the first or formal negative and against absolute negativity, the second negative; and since that first negative is already the second term, whatever gets counted as third may be counted as fourth too, and in place of triplicity the abstract form may be taken for a quadruplicity; the negative, or difference, is on this reckoning counted as a twofoldness. – Third or fourth, it is at all events the unity of the first and second moments, of the immediate and of the mediated. – Admittedly, that it is this unity, and that the whole form of the method is a triplicity, belongs merely to the surface, the outward side of the way cognition goes; but to have pointed out even this much, and in a more determinate application at that — since the abstract numerical form itself, as everyone knows, was put forward long ago, only without concept and hence without consequence — [is] again to be counted an infinite merit of the Kantian philosophy. The syllogism, threefold likewise, has all along been recognized as reason's universal form; but in part it passed for a wholly outward form settling nothing about the nature of the content, and in part, since in the formal sense it runs itself out in the understanding's determination of identity, it wants the essential, dialectical moment, negativity; this moment does enter with the triplicity of determinations, however, because the third is the unity of the first two, and these, being diverse, can be in unity only as sublated. – Formalism, to be sure, laid hold of triplicity as well and stuck to its empty schema; the shallow mischief and the bareness of the modern philosophical so-called constructing, which amounts to nothing beyond hanging that formal schema on everywhere, without concept and without immanent determination, and using it for an outward tidying-up, has made the form tiresome and given it a bad name. Its inner worth cannot be diminished by the vapidity of such use, and it always deserves high regard that the shape of what is rational should have been discovered at least, even if uncomprehended.

More closely, the third is now the immediate, but by sublation of the mediation, the simple by sublating of difference, the positive by sublating of the negative — the concept that has realized itself by way of otherness and, sublating that reality, has closed with itself and reinstated its absolute reality, its plain self-reference. This result is accordingly the truth. It is no less immediacy than mediation; – yet those judgment forms, the third is immediacy and mediation, or it is the unity of them, cannot capture it, since it is no third at rest but is, precisely as this unity, the movement and activity that mediates itself with itself. – What begins is the universal; the result, by contrast, is the singular, the concrete, the subject; and what the one is in itself the other now is for itself just as much, the universal being posited in the subject. Those first two moments of the triplicity are the abstract, untrue moments, dialectical for that very reason, and by this negativity of theirs they make themselves into the subject. For us, to begin with, the concept itself is at once the universal having being in itself and the negative having being for itself, and also the third having being in and for itself, the universal that runs through every moment of the syllogism; the third, however, is the conclusion, wherein the concept, mediated with itself by its negativity, thereby stands posited for itself as the universal and as what is identical in its moments.

As the whole gone back into itself and identical with itself, this result has now given itself the form of immediacy once more. It is therefore now itself such as what begins had determined itself to be. Being plain self-reference, it is a universal, and the negativity which made up its dialectic and mediation has, within this universality, likewise collapsed into the plain determinateness that can serve as a beginning again. One might suppose at first that knowing this result must be an analysis of it and must therefore unpack once more the determinations and their course, by which it came about and which has been under review. But should the subject matter really be handled in this analytic way, that belongs to the stage of the idea reviewed above, to searching cognition, which of its subject matter states nothing but what is, leaving out the necessity of its concrete identity and the concept thereof. The method of truth, which comprehends the subject matter, is indeed, as shown, analytic itself, staying utterly within the concept, but it is synthetic just as much, for by the concept the subject matter gets determined dialectically and as an other. Upon the new foundation constituted by the result as the subject matter now in hand, the method stays what it was with the previous one. The difference touches only how the foundation stands as foundation; it is that now as well, to be sure, yet its immediacy is nothing but form, seeing that it was a result at the same time; hence its determinateness as content is no longer something merely picked up but something derived and proved.

Only here does the content of cognition as such step into the circle of consideration, since as derived it now belongs to the method. By this moment the method itself widens out into a system. – At the outset the beginning had to be for it entirely indeterminate as far as content goes; to that extent it shows up as the merely formal soul, for and through which the beginning stood determined solely as regards its form, namely as the immediate and universal. By the movement pointed out, the subject matter has acquired a determinateness of its own which is a content, because the negativity collapsed into simplicity is the sublated form and, as plain determinateness, confronts its own unfolding, in the first instance its own opposition to universality.

Now that this determinateness is the nearest truth of the indeterminate beginning, it faults that beginning as something incomplete, and faults the method too, which starting from it was merely formal. One may put this as the now determinate demand that the beginning, being itself something determinate over against the determinateness of the result, ought to be taken not as immediate but as mediated and derived; which can look like a demand for the endless progress backwards in proving and deriving; just as out of the new beginning obtained there likewise issues a result by the course of the method, so that the advance rolls on forwards into infinity in the same way.

That endless progress belongs on the whole to conceptless reflection has been shown often enough; the absolute method, having the concept for soul and content, cannot lead into it. Beginnings like being, essence, universality may at first look to be of a kind possessing that entire universality and lack of content which a wholly formal beginning, such as it ought to be, requires, and hence, as absolutely first beginnings, to demand and permit no going back behind them. Being pure self-references, immediate and indeterminate, they certainly do not carry on them the difference which in any other beginning gets posited straightaway between the universality of its form and its content. But the very indeterminateness which those logical beginnings have for their sole content is what makes their determinateness: that determinateness consists in their negativity as sublated mediation; and the particularity of the mediation lends their indeterminateness a particularity as well, by which being, essence and universality get told apart. The determinateness that falls to them, then, taken as they are taken for themselves, is their immediate determinateness, quite as much as that of any content whatever, and it therefore calls for a derivation; whether determinateness be taken as determinateness of form or of content is a matter of indifference for the method. So in fact no new mode sets [in] for the method with a content having determined itself through the first of its results; it thereby stays neither more nor less formal than before. For being the absolute form, the concept that knows itself and knows everything as concept, it has no content confronting it that might determine it into a one-sided, outward form. Just as the contentlessness of those beginnings does not turn them into absolute beginnings, so neither is it the content that as such would carry the method into an endless progress forwards or backwards. From one side the determinateness the method generates for itself in its result is the moment by which it is mediation with itself and turns the immediate beginning into something mediated. Conversely, though, determinateness is that through which this mediation of the method runs its course; the method travels through a content as through an apparent other of its own, and comes back to its beginning in such fashion that it not merely reinstates it but reinstates it as a determinate one, while the result is quite as much the sublated determinateness and so the reinstating too of that first indeterminateness with which it set out. This it achieves as a system of totality. Under that determination it has still to be considered.

The determinateness that was result is, as shown, itself a new beginning, thanks to the form of simplicity into which it has collapsed; and since this beginning differs from the one preceding by just that determinateness, cognition rolls on from content to content. In the first instance this going forward determines itself thus, that it sets out from simple determinatenesses and that those which follow grow ever richer and more concrete. For the result holds its own beginning, and the course that beginning ran has enriched it by a fresh determinateness. The universal makes the foundation; the advance is therefore not to be taken for a flowing from one other to another other. In the absolute method the concept keeps itself in its otherness, the universal keeps itself in its particularizing, in judgment and in reality; at every rung of further determination it lifts up the entire mass of its earlier content, and by its dialectical going forward it not only loses nothing and leaves nothing behind, but bears everything gained along with it, growing richer and denser within itself.

One may view this widening as the content's moment, and, taken in the whole, as the first premise; to the wealth of content the universal has been imparted and is immediately preserved in it. But the relation has its second, negative or dialectical side as well. Enrichment goes forward along the necessity of the concept, is held fast by the concept, and every determination is a reflection into self. Every fresh rung of going-out-of-itself, which is to say of further determining, is at once a going-into-itself, and greater extension is quite as much heightened intensity. What is richest is therefore what is most concrete and most subjective, and what draws itself back into the simplest depth is what is mightiest and reaches over the most. The highest, keenest peak is pure personality, which through the absolute dialectic that is its nature, and through that alone, no less embraces everything within itself and holds it, since it makes itself into the freest thing there is – into that simplicity which is the first immediacy and universality.

In this fashion every step of the advance in determining further, while withdrawing from the indeterminate beginning, is at the same time an approach back to it, so that what may at first look like two different things, the backward-running grounding of the beginning and the forward-running further determining of it, coincide and are one and the same. The method, which thereby winds itself into a circle, cannot, however, anticipate in a temporal unfolding that the beginning is as such already something derived; for the beginning in its immediacy it is enough that it be plain universality. So far as it is that, it has its condition complete; and there is no call to beg that it be let pass merely as provisional and hypothetical. Whatever might be urged against it – about the restrictions of human cognition, say, or about the requirement of critically examining the instrument of cognition before one takes up the fact – is itself so many presuppositions which, being concrete determinations, bring with them the demand that they be mediated and grounded. Since formally they have thus no advantage over the beginning with the fact against which they enter their protest, and since on account of their more concrete content they stand rather in need of derivation, they can only be taken for idle pretensions to be attended to sooner than anything else. Their content is untrue, for they make what is acknowledged to be finite and untrue into something unshakeable and absolute, namely a cognition that is limited and determined as form and instrument over against its content; and this untrue cognition is itself likewise the form, the backward-running grounding. – The method of truth also knows the beginning to be something incomplete, because it is beginning, but knows at the same time that this incompleteness in general is something necessary, since truth is nothing but the coming-to-itself by way of the negativity of immediacy. Impatience, which wants merely to get past the determinate — call it beginning, object, finite, or take it in whatever other form — and to be in the absolute straight away, has as knowledge nothing before it save the empty negative, the abstract infinite; – or else an absolute that is merely supposed, and merely supposed because it is not posited, not laid hold of; laid hold of it can be only through the mediation of cognition, of which the universal and immediate is one moment, whereas truth itself lies only in the unfolded course and at the end. – For the subjective need of those unacquainted with it, and for their impatience, a survey of the whole may indeed be offered beforehand – by way of a division for reflection which, out of the universal and after the manner of finite cognition, states the particular as something on hand and to be looked for in the science. Yet that yields no more than a picture for representation; for the genuine transition from the universal to the particular and to the whole determined in and for itself, wherein that first universal is itself once more a moment according to its genuine determination, is foreign to such a way of dividing and is the mediation of the science itself and nothing else.

Owing to the nature of the method as pointed out, science presents itself as a circle wound into itself, a circle into whose beginning, the simple ground, mediation winds the end back; and this circle is moreover a circle of circles, for each single link, ensouled as it is by the method, is reflection-into-self which, returning into the beginning, is at once the beginning of a fresh link. The individual sciences are pieces broken off this chain, each having a before and an after – or, to speak more exactly, each having only the before, while showing its after in its own conclusion.

Thus in the absolute idea logic too has gone back to that plain unity which is its beginning; the pure immediacy of being, in which every determination looks at first extinguished, or dropped by way of abstraction, is the idea come by mediation, that is, by the sublating of mediation, to the equality with itself that answers to it. The method is the pure concept that relates to nothing but itself; hence it is the plain reference to itself which is being. But now this is fulfilled being as well, the concept comprehending itself, being as the concrete and equally utterly intensive totality. – Of this idea there is, by way of close, only this further to be mentioned: that in it, firstly, the science of logic has laid hold of its own concept. At being, the beginning of its content, its concept shows up as a knowing external to that content, in subjective reflection. In the idea of absolute cognition, however, the concept has become the science's own content. The science is itself the pure concept having itself for subject matter, and this concept, running through the totality of its determinations as its own subject matter, builds itself into the whole of its reality, into the system of science, closing with the act of laying hold of this comprehending of itself, thereby sublating its standing as content and subject matter and coming to know the concept of the science. – Secondly, this idea is still logical, shut up within pure thought, the science of the divine concept only. Carrying the system out is indeed itself a realization, but one kept inside the same sphere. Because the pure idea of cognition is to that extent shut up within subjectivity, it is a drive to sublate that subjectivity, and pure truth, as the last result, becomes the beginning of another sphere and science as well. Here that transition needs no more than to be intimated.

For in positing itself as absolute unity of the pure concept and its reality, and so drawing itself together into the immediacy of being, the idea, as totality under this form, is – nature. – This determination is, however, no having-become and no transition, of the sort in which, higher up, the subjective concept in its totality becomes objectivity, or the subjective purpose becomes life. The pure idea, in which the determinateness or reality of the concept has itself been raised into concept, is rather absolute liberation, for which there is no immediate determination left that is not equally posited and concept; within this freedom, accordingly, no transition takes place, the plain being into which the idea determines itself stays wholly transparent to it and is the concept that in its determination stays with itself. The passing over must accordingly be grasped here rather in this way, that the idea freely releases itself, utterly sure of itself and reposing within itself. For the sake of this freedom the form of its determinateness is just as utterly free – the externality of space and time existing absolutely for itself without subjectivity. – So far as this externality only is according to the abstract immediacy of being and is grasped by consciousness, it is mere objectivity and outward life; within the idea, though, it remains in and for itself the totality of the concept, and science remains within the relation of divine cognition to nature. This nearest resolve of the pure idea to determine itself as external idea posits for itself thereby only the mediation out of which the concept lifts itself up as free concrete existence gone into itself out of externality, brings its liberation through itself to completion in the science of spirit, and finds the highest concept of itself in the science of logic, as the pure concept that comprehends itself.