C. Dissolution of Appearance

The world in and for itself constitutes the determinate ground of the appearing world, and constitutes it only insofar as it possesses in its own self the negative moment, and with it the totality of content-determinations and of the alterations they undergo, a totality answering to the appearing world while at the same time making up the side thoroughly opposed to it. The mutual bearing of the two worlds is accordingly such that what counts as positive in the appearing world counts as negative in the world in and for itself, while what is negative in the one is, conversely, positive in the other. In the appearing world the north pole is in and for itself the south pole, and vice versa; electricity that is positive is in itself negative, and so forth. Whatever counts in appearing existence as evil, as misfortune and so forth, is in and for itself something good and a happiness¹⁵.

As a matter of fact their difference has vanished precisely within this opposition of the two worlds, and whatever was meant to be the world in and for itself is itself an appearing world, while conversely the appearing world is in its own self the essential one. – At first the appearing world stands determined as the reflection into otherness, so that whatever determinations and concrete existences belong to it have ground and subsistence in something other; but as this other is itself likewise something reflected into an other, therein they refer merely to an other engaged in sublating itself, and thus to themselves; herewith the appearing world is in its own self a self-equal law. – The world in and for itself, conversely, is at first the content identical with itself, taken out of otherness and change; but this content, being the appearing world's complete reflection into its own self, or because the diversity belonging to it is difference reflected into itself and absolute, harbours within it the negative moment and the reference to itself as to otherness; thereby it turns into content opposed to itself, content inverting itself, content void of essence. This content of the world in and for itself has furthermore therewith also received the form of immediate concrete existence. For at first that world is ground of the appearing one; but as it possesses the opposition in its own self, it is in equal measure sublated ground and immediate concrete existence.

Each of the two, the appearing world and the essential world, is herewith in its own self the totality of the reflection that is identical with itself and of reflection-into-other, or of being-in-and-for-itself as well as of appearing. Each of them is a self-subsistent whole of concrete existence; the one was meant to be reflected concrete existence only, the other immediate concrete existence only; yet each continues itself within its other, and is on that score in its own self the identity of the two moments. What lies at hand, accordingly, is this totality, one repelling from itself two totalities, the one being the reflected totality and the other the immediate one. Both are in the first instance self-subsistent ones, but they are such only qua totalities, and they are such to this extent, that each essentially carries within it the moment belonging to the other. The differentiated self-subsistence of each, of the one determined as immediate and of the one determined as reflected, is on that score now posited so as to be nothing but essential reference to the other, and so as to have its self-subsistence within this unity of the two.

The beginning was made from the law of appearance; law is the identity of one diverse content with an other content, so fashioned that the one's positedness is the other's. Within law this difference is still at hand, namely that the identity of its sides is as yet an inner one only, and that these sides do not yet possess it in their own selves; herewith, for one part, that identity is not realized; law's content stands not as identical but as an indifferent, diverse content; – for another part, it is herewith determined only in itself so that the one's positedness is the other's; this is not yet at hand within law. By now, however, law stands realized; its inner identity is at the same time an existent one, and conversely law's content is raised into ideality; for in its own self that content is a sublated one, reflected into itself, since each side carries its other within it and is thereby genuinely identical with that other and with its own self.

So law is essential relation. At first the truth of the unessential world is a world in and for itself other to it; but that world is the totality, in that it is both itself and the first world; so the two are immediate concrete existences and hence reflections into their otherness, and by that same token genuinely reflected into themselves. World expresses, generally, the formless totality of manifoldness; this world, essential as much as appearing, has foundered, inasmuch as manifoldness has ceased to be a merely diverse one; so it is still totality, or universe, yet as essential relation. Within appearance two totalities of content have come to be; at first they stand determined over against each other as indifferent self-subsistent ones, and each does have form in its own self, though not over against the other; form, however, has shown itself to be their reference as well, and the essential relation is the consummation of their unity of form.

Chapter 3. The Essential Relation

The truth of appearance is the essential relation. Its content possesses immediate self-subsistence, namely the immediacy that is together with the reflected immediacy, or the reflection identical with itself. At the same time, within this self-subsistence the content is a relative one, existing simply and solely as reflection into what is other to it, or as unity of its reference with that other. Within this unity the self-subsistent content is a posited one, a sublated one; but this very unity is what makes up its essentiality and its self-subsistence; the reflection into other here is reflection into its own self. Sides belong to the relation because it is reflection into other; thus it carries within it the difference of its own self; and the sides of it are self-subsistent subsistence, seeing that in their mutually indifferent diversity they stand broken within themselves, so that whatever subsistence each has holds its meaning, in equal measure, only in the reference to the other, or in their negative unity.

The essential relation is on that score admittedly not yet the genuine third term to essence and to concrete existence; but the determinate uniting of the two is already harboured in it. Essence stands realized within it in such fashion that self-subsistent concretely existing ones serve it for its subsistence; and these have gone back out of their indifference into their essential unity, so that nothing but this unity serves them for their subsistence. The determinations of reflection, the positive one and the negative one, are likewise reflected into themselves only insofar as they stand reflected into what is opposed to them; yet no determination belongs to them beyond this negative unity of theirs; the essential relation, by contrast, has for its sides such terms as stand posited as self-subsistent totalities. The opposition here is the same one as that of positive and negative; but at the same time it is opposition as an inverted world. A side of the essential relation is a totality, one that, however, essentially has something opposed to it, a beyond of itself; it is appearance merely; its concrete existence is not, rather, its own, but that of its other. It is on that score something broken within its own self; but this sublatedness of its consists in its being the unity of its own self and of its other, hence a whole, and precisely for that reason it possesses self-subsistent concrete existence and is essential reflection into its own self.

Such is the concept of relation. To begin with, however, the identity it harbours is not yet complete; the totality which each relative term is in its own self is as yet merely something inner; a side of the relation is at first posited within one of the determinations of the negative unity; what makes up the form of the relation is the self-subsistence proper to each of the two sides. Its identity is on that score merely a reference, and their self-subsistence falls outside that reference, namely into the sides; there is not yet at hand the reflected unity of that identity together with the self-subsistent concrete existences, not yet the substance. – The concept of relation has thus indeed emerged as unity of reflected and of immediate self-subsistence. But this concept is at first still immediate itself, and hence its moments are immediate towards each other, their unity being their essential reference, which becomes the genuine unity answering to the concept only insofar as it realizes itself, that is, insofar as through its own movement it has posited itself as that unity.

The essential relation is on that score immediately the relation of whole and parts; – the reference of reflected and of immediate self-subsistence, such that both at once are only as mutually conditioning and presupposing each other.

Within this relation not one of the sides is as yet posited as a moment of the other, and hence their identity is itself a side; or else it is not their negative unity. It therefore passes over, secondly, into this, that the one is a moment of the other and is within the other as within its ground, as within what is genuinely self-subsistent of the two; – relation of force and its expression.

Thirdly, the inequality of this reference which is still at hand sublates itself, and the last relation is that of inner and outer. – Within this difference, which has become wholly formal, the relation itself founders, and substance, or the actual, comes forth as the absolute unity of immediate and of reflected concrete existence.

A. The Relation of Whole and Parts

[1.] What the essential relation contains is, first, the self-subsistence of concrete existence reflected into itself; so taken it is the simple form, and its determinations, while they too are concrete existences, are at the same time posited ones, moments kept within the unity. Reflected thus into itself, that self-subsistence is at once reflection into what stands opposed to it, namely into immediate self-subsistence; and the subsistence it has is essentially, no less than it is a self-subsistence of its own, just this identity with its opposite. – Precisely thereby there is also immediately posited, second, the further side: immediate self-subsistence, which, under the determination of the other, is a manifoldness of many kinds within itself, yet so that this manifoldness bears upon it essentially also the reference belonging to the other side, the unity of reflected self-subsistence. The one side, the whole, is that self-subsistence which the world in and for itself constituted; the parts, the other side, are the immediate concrete existence which the appearing world was. Within the relation of whole and parts both sides are self-subsistences of this kind, but so that each lets the other shine inside it, and each equally is only as this identity of the two. Since for now the essential relation is only the first, the immediate one, negative unity and positive self-subsistence are tied together by the also; both sides, posited though they are as moments, are just as much concretely existing self-subsistences. – That the two are posited as moments is accordingly parcelled out thus: first the whole, self-subsistence as reflected, is the concretely existing one, and within it the other, the immediate one, has the standing of a moment; – here it is the whole that constitutes the unity of the two sides, the foundation, and immediate concrete existence stands there as positedness. – Reversed, on the further side, that of the parts, the immediate concrete existence, manifold within, is the self-subsistent foundation, whereas the reflected unity, the whole, is nothing but external reference.

2. Accordingly this relation harbours the self-subsistence of its sides and no less their sublatedness, and the two of them outright in a single reference. Self-subsistent is the whole, and the parts are merely moments of this unity; yet no less are the parts themselves the self-subsistent ones, with their reflected unity for a mere moment; and each of them, in its very self-subsistence, is outright the relative of an other. Hence this relation is contradiction immediate in its own self, and it sublates itself.

Looked at more closely, the whole is the reflected unity possessing self-subsistent subsistence for itself; but this subsistence of its own has no less been repelled from it; being the negative unity, the whole is negative reference to its own self; so it has divested itself; its subsistence it has in what stands opposed to it, in the manifold immediacy, the parts. The whole therefore consists of the parts; so much so that without them it is nothing. It is thus the entire relation and the self-subsistent totality; but upon that very same ground it is only a relative, since what constitutes it a totality is rather its other, the parts; and its subsistence lies not in it but in that other of it.

The parts, likewise, are the entire relation. Immediate self-subsistence is what they are, over against the reflected kind, and they subsist not in the whole but for themselves. They have this whole, further, upon them as their moment; it constitutes their reference; where there is no whole there are no parts. But since they are the self-subsistent ones, that reference is a merely external moment, one to which they remain in and for themselves indifferent. At the same time, however, the parts, being manifold concrete existence, collapse within themselves, for such existence is being devoid of reflection; self-subsistence accrues to them only within the reflected unity, which is at once this unity and the concretely existing manifoldness; that is, self-subsistence is theirs only in the whole, and this is at the same time the self-subsistence that is other to the parts.

Whole and parts condition one another reciprocally, then; but the relation under consideration here stands at the same time higher than the reference of the conditioned and the condition to one another as that was determined above. Here that reference is realized: it is posited, namely, that the condition is the essential self-subsistence of the conditioned precisely in being presupposed by the latter. Taken as such, the condition is nothing but the immediate, and only in itself presupposed. The whole, though certainly the condition of the parts, immediately contains at the same time this as well, that it too only is so far as it has the parts for presupposition. With both sides of the relation posited in this way as reciprocally conditioning, each is an immediate self-subsistence in its own self, but its self-subsistence is no less mediated, or posited, by the other. By virtue of this reciprocity the whole relation is the return of conditioning into its own self, the non-relative, the unconditioned.

Now since neither side of the relation has its self-subsistence in its own self but each in the other, only one identity of the two is at hand, in which both are moments merely; but since each is self-subsistent in its own self, they are two self-subsistent concrete existences that stand indifferent to one another.

Taken in the first respect, that of these sides' essential identity, the whole is equal to the parts and the parts to the whole. In the whole there is nothing absent from the parts, and in the parts nothing absent from the whole. No abstract unity is the whole; it is unity as that of a diverse manifoldness; but this unity, as that wherein the manifold refers to one another, is the determinateness of the manifold whereby the latter is part. An inseparable identity, then, is what the relation has, and one self-subsistence only.

But further, the whole is equal to the parts, though not to them qua parts; for the whole is unity as reflected, whereas the parts constitute the determinate moment, the otherness, of that unity, and they are the diverse manifold. Equal the whole is, not to them as this self-subsistent diversity, but to them together. This together of theirs, however, is nothing else than their unity, the whole as such. Within the parts, therefore, the whole is equal to nothing but itself, and the equality of whole with parts voices only the tautology that the whole as whole is equal to the whole, and not to the parts.

The parts, inversely, are equal to the whole; but since otherness is the moment which they themselves are, their equality is not with it as the unity, but runs thus, that one among its manifold determinations devolves upon the part, or that they are equal to it qua something manifold; they are equal to it, that is, as a divided whole, which means as the parts. So here too the very same tautology is at hand: the parts as parts stand equal not to the whole as such, but within it to themselves, to the parts.

Whole and parts fall in this manner indifferently asunder; each of these sides refers to itself alone. Yet held asunder so, they wreck themselves. That whole which is indifferent towards the parts is the abstract identity, undifferentiated within; and such identity is a whole only as differentiated within its own self, differentiated within, moreover, in such a manner that these manifold determinations stand reflected into themselves and possess immediate self-subsistence. And identity of reflection, through its own movement, has already displayed this reflection into its other as its truth. – Just so the parts, indifferent as they are towards the unity of the whole, are the unrelated manifold merely, the other within itself, which as such is the other of its own self and only what sublates itself. – This reference-to-self of either side is its self-subsistence; but this self-subsistence, which each has for itself, is rather the negation of its own self. Neither, therefore, has its self-subsistence in its own self, but in the other; that other — the one constituting the subsistence — counts as its presupposed immediate, the thing that ought to be a first and its beginning; but this first belonging to each is itself only such a one as is not first, but has its beginning in the other.

The relation's truth lies accordingly in the mediation; its essence is that negative unity wherein reflected immediacy and the immediacy that is are alike sublated. Contradiction is what the relation is, contradiction going back into its ground, into the unity which, as returning, is the reflected unity; but since this unity has no less posited itself as sublated, it refers negatively to its own self, sublates itself, and turns itself into the immediacy that is. This negative reference of it, though, in that it counts as a first, an immediate one, has its mediation solely through its other, and is no less a posited. That other, the immediacy that is, equally is only as sublated; a first is its self-subsistence, but a first only in order to vanish, and the existence it has is posited and mediated.

So determined, the relation is that of whole and parts no longer; the immediacy possessed by its sides has gone over into positedness and mediation; each is posited, so far as it is immediate, as sublating itself and passing over into the other, and, so far as it is itself negative reference, as being at the same time conditioned by the other as by its positive; just as its immediate passing over is no less something mediated, a sublating, namely, posited by the other. – With that, the relation of whole and parts has gone over into the relation of force and its expression.

Remark

Above (Division I, p. 113 ff.) the antinomy of the infinite divisibility of matter came under consideration, in connection with the concept of quantity. Quantity is the unity of continuity and discreteness; within the self-subsistent one it harbours that one's having flowed together with others, and within this identity with itself, prolonged without interruption, it equally harbours the negation of that identity. Once the immediate reference of these moments of quantity gets voiced in the shape of the essential relation of whole and parts — quantity's one counting as part, its continuity as the whole compounded out of parts — the antinomy consists in that contradiction which showed up at the relation of whole and parts and was there dissolved. – For whole and parts are quite as essentially referred to one another, making up one identity only, as they are indifferent towards one another and possess self-subsistent subsistence. The relation, therefore, is antinomy in just this sense: the one moment, by liberating itself from the other, immediately brings that other along.

Let what concretely exists be determined as whole, then, and it has parts, and the parts make up its subsistence; the unity of the whole is a posited reference merely, an external putting together which is no affair of the self-subsistently existing thing. Now so far as the latter is part, it is not whole, not something put together, and so simple. But since reference to a whole is external to it, that reference is no affair of it; and so what is self-subsistent is not in itself part either, for part it is only through such reference. Yet since it is now not part, it is whole, for the only relation at hand is this one of whole and of parts, and the self-subsistent thing is one of the two. But being whole, it is once more something put together; once more it consists of parts, and so on into infinity. – This infinity amounts to nothing but the perennial alternation of the relation's two determinations, in each of which the other immediately springs up, so that the positedness of either is the vanishing of that same one. Let matter be determined as whole, then, and it consists of parts, and upon these the whole sinks to an unessential reference and vanishes. Yet the part, taken for itself in that manner, is likewise not part, but the whole. – Pressed quite closely together, the antinomy of this inference properly runs: because the whole is not the self-subsistent thing, the part is the self-subsistent thing; but because self-subsistence belongs to it only without the whole, self-subsistent it is not qua part, but rather as whole. The infinity of the resulting progress is the incapacity to hold together the two thoughts which this mediation carries, namely that either determination, precisely through its self-subsistence and its severance from the other, passes over into non-self-subsistence and into that other.

B. The Relation of Force and Its Expression

Force is that negative unity wherein the contradiction of whole and parts has found its dissolution, the truth of that first relation. Whole and parts is the thoughtless relation upon which representation lights first of all; or, objectively taken, it is the dead, mechanical aggregate, which does indeed carry form-determinations by which the manifoldness of its self-subsistent matter gets referred together into a unity, but a unity external to that matter. – The relation of force, by contrast, is the higher return into self, in which the whole's unity, the very thing that constituted the reference of self-subsistent otherness, ceases to be something external and indifferent to this manifoldness.

As the essential relation has by now determined itself, the immediate and the reflected self-subsistence — sides or extremes that in the foregoing relation subsisted for themselves — stand posited within it as sublated, that is, as moments. Contained in this is, first, that the reflected unity together with its immediate existence, so far as either is a first and an immediate, sublate themselves in their own selves and pass over into their other; the former, force, goes over into its expression, and the external is a vanishing thing which retreats into force as into its ground, and is only in being carried and posited by force. Second, this going-over is not a mere becoming and vanishing; it is negative reference to self, or what alters its determination is therein at the same time reflected into itself and maintains itself; the movement of force is not so much a going-over as force's setting itself across, and throughout this alteration posited by force itself force stays what it is. – Third, this reflected unity, referring itself to itself, is itself sublated too and a moment; mediated through its other, it has that other for its condition; and its negative reference to itself, which is a first and starts the movement of its going-over out of itself, has no less a presupposition that solicits it, and an other whence its starting is taken.

a. The Conditionedness of Force

Considered in the closer determinations belonging to it, force has upon it, first, the moment of the immediacy that is; force itself, over against this, stands determined as the negative unity. But this unity, under the determination of immediate being, is a concretely existing something. Such a something, being the negative unity in immediate shape, shows itself as the first; force, on the contrary, being the reflected side, shows itself as the positedness, and so far as belonging to the concretely existing thing or to some matter. Not that force would be the form of this thing and the thing be determined through force; the thing, rather, as something immediate, stays indifferent towards it. – On this determination no ground lies in the thing for its having a force; force, on the other side, being the side of positedness, has the thing essentially for its presupposition. So when the question is raised how thing or matter comes to have a force, force shows up as conjoined with it externally and as stamped upon the thing by some alien power.

In this immediate subsisting, force is a quiescent determinateness of the thing at large: not something expressing itself, but immediately something external. In this way force gets labelled a matter as well, and the magnetic, the electrical force, and so forth, is replaced. What is assumed in its place is a magnetic, an electrical matter, and so forth. Or, in place of the famous attractive force, a fine ether is assumed, said to hold everything together. – These are the matters into which the inert, forceless negative unity of the thing dissolves, and which came under consideration above.

Force, however, harbours immediate concrete existence as a moment, as something which is indeed condition but which goes over and sublates itself; not, therefore, as a concretely existing thing. Nor, further, is it negation in the guise of determinateness; it is negative unity reflecting itself into itself. The thing on which force was to reside thereby loses all further significance here; force is rather itself the positing of the externality that shows up as concrete existence. So neither is it a determinate matter and no more; self-subsistence of that kind long ago went over into positedness and into appearance.

Second, force is the unity of reflected and of immediate subsisting, or of the unity of form and external self-subsistence. It is the two in one; it is the touching of such terms of which the one is so far as the other is not; the positive reflection identical with itself, and the negated reflection. Thus force is the contradiction repelling itself from its own self; it is active; or it is the negative unity referring itself to itself, wherein the reflected immediacy, the essential being-within-itself, is posited as being only a sublated thing, a moment, and hence, so far as force marks itself off from immediate concrete existence, as going over into the latter. Force, then, taken as the determination of the whole's reflected unity, stands posited as coming to be, out of its own self, the concretely existing external manifoldness.

But third, force is as yet only an activity that is in-itself and immediate; it is the reflected unity, and just as essentially the negation of that unity; since it is diverse from this negation and yet is only as the identity of its own self with its negation, it stands essentially referred to the negation as to an immediacy external to it, and holds that immediacy for its presupposition and its condition.

Now this presupposition is no thing found standing over against force; indifferent self-subsistence of that sort is sublated in force; as force's condition it is a self-subsistent other to force. But since it is no thing, and since self-subsistent immediacy has here determined itself at the same time as negative unity referring itself to itself, it is itself force. – Force's activity is conditioned by force's own self as by what is other to it, by a force.

Force is in this way a relation in which either side is the same as the other. Forces are what stand in the relation, and they refer to one another essentially at that. – They are, further, at the outset merely diverse; the unity of their relation is as yet only the inner unity that is in itself. Being conditioned by another force is thus in itself force's own doing; or force is so far only a presupposing doing, one that refers to itself negatively and no more; this other force still lies beyond force's positing activity, beyond, that is, the reflection which in its determining returns into itself immediately.

b. The Solicitation of Force

Force is conditioned for this reason, that the moment of immediate concrete existence contained in it is only a posited one – but, being at once an immediate one, is a presupposed one, wherein force negates its own self. The externality on hand for force is accordingly its own presupposing activity itself, which at the outset stands posited as another force.

This presupposing is, further, mutual. Either of the two forces harbours the unity reflected into itself as sublated, and is on that account presupposing; it posits its own self as something external; that moment of externality is its own one; but because it is no less unity reflected into itself, it at the same time posits this externality of its not within its own self, but as another force.

Yet the external as such is what sublates its own self; and further, the activity that reflects itself into itself stands essentially referred to that external as to what is other to it, but no less as to something in itself null and identical with it. Seeing that the presupposing activity is quite as much reflection into self, it is the sublating of that negation of its, and posits the negation as its own self, or as its own external. Thus force in conditioning is mutually an impulse for the other force, an impulse against which the latter is active. Its bearing is not the passivity of getting determined, as though something else came into it thereby; the impulse only solicits it. In its own self it is the negativity of itself; its repelling of itself from itself is its own positing. What it does, then, consists in sublating this, that the impulse is something external; it turns the impulse into a bare impulse and posits it as its own repelling of its own self from itself, as its own expression.

Force in expressing itself is thus the very same as what at the outset was only presupposing activity, that is, a making of itself external; but force in expressing itself is at once the activity that negates externality and posits it as belonging to itself. Now so far as this consideration takes its start from force as being the negative unity of its own self and thereby presupposing reflection, it comes to the same thing as taking one's start, within the expression of force, from the soliciting impulse. Force is thus determined, in its concept, at first as self-sublating identity, and in its reality, the one of the two forces as soliciting, the other as the one solicited. But at large the concept of force is the identity of positing and of presupposing reflection, or of reflected and of immediate unity, and each of these determinations is outright a moment only, within unity, and hence is as mediated through the other. But equally, on the two forces standing in mutual reference there is no determination present of which would be the soliciting one and which the one being solicited; or rather, both form-determinations accrue to each alike. Yet this identity is not merely an external one of comparison; it is an essential unity of the two.

The one force, namely, is at the outset determined as soliciting, the other as being solicited; in this manner the form-determinations show up as immediate differences of the two forces, differences on hand in themselves. But they are essentially mediated. The one force gets solicited; this impulse is a determination posited into it from without. Force, however, is itself what presupposes; essentially it is a reflecting of itself into itself and a sublating of this, that the impulse should be something external. That it gets solicited is therefore its own doing; or it is determined through its own self that the other force is an other at all and is the soliciting one. The soliciting force refers negatively to its other, in that it sublates the other's externality; so far it is positing; but it is this only through the presupposition of having an other over against it; which is to say, soliciting it is itself only so far as it has an externality upon it, and hence only so far as it gets solicited. Or it is soliciting only so far as it gets solicited into being soliciting. Thus conversely the first gets solicited only so far as it itself solicits the other into soliciting it, the first, that is. Each of the two receives the impulse from the other, then; but the impulse which it gives as active consists precisely in this, that it receives an impulse from the other; and the impulse received by it is solicited by its own self. Both, the impulse given and the impulse received, or the active expression and the passive externality, are accordingly not something immediate but mediated; and indeed each of the two forces is thereby itself the determinateness which the other has towards it, is mediated through the other, and this mediating other is once again its own determining positing.

So this, that an impulse befalls force through another force, that force so far bears itself passively but then again crosses over from this passivity into activity – this is force's going back into its own self. It expresses itself. The expression is reaction in the sense of positing externality as force's own moment, and thereby sublating this, that force should have been solicited by another force. Both are one thing, therefore: the expression of force, whereby through its negative activity upon its own self it gives itself an existence-for-other, and the infinite return, within this externality, upon its own self, such that therein it refers to itself alone. The presupposing reflection, to which conditionedness and the impulse belong, is on that account immediately the reflection returning into itself as well, and the activity is essentially a reacting, against itself. To posit the impulse, or the external, is itself to sublate it, and inversely, to sublate the impulse is to posit externality.

c. The Infinity of Force

Finite force is, so far as its moments still carry the form of immediacy; presupposing reflection and self-referring reflection stand distinguished in it under this determination; the one shows up as an external force subsisting for itself, the other, in referring to that one, as passive. So far as form goes, then, force is conditioned, and so far as content goes it is limited as well; for determinateness on the side of form carries a limitation of content along with it. But what force's activity consists in is expressing itself; that is, as has come out, in sublating externality and determining it as that wherein force stands identical with itself. What force in truth expresses, accordingly, is this: that its reference to another is its reference to its own self, that its passivity subsists within its activity itself. The impulse whereby it gets solicited into activity is a soliciting of its own; the externality arriving upon it is nothing immediate, but something it has itself mediated, just as its own essential identity with itself is not immediate either, but mediated through its negation; or force expresses this, that its externality is identical with its inwardness.

C. Relation of Outer and Inner

1. Whole and parts stand in the relation that is immediate; hence within it each of the two immediacies, the reflected one and the one that is, possesses a self-subsistence of its own; but because they stand in the essential relation, that self-subsistence of theirs amounts to nothing but their negative unity. This is what has now come to be posited in force's expression: the reflected unity is essentially a becoming-other, a carrying over of itself into externality; but with equal immediacy externality is withdrawn back into that unity; whatever difference self-subsistent forces have sublates itself; and force's expression is nothing but the reflected unity mediating itself with its own self. Nothing is at hand but a difference that is empty and transparent, namely shine; and yet shine of this kind is the very mediating in which self-subsistent subsistence consists. These are not merely opposed determinations that sublate themselves in their own selves, nor is their movement merely a crossing over; for in part the immediacy taken as the starting point, out of which the passage into otherness was made, has no standing save as a posited one, and in part every one of the determinations is on that account already, in its immediacy, at one with its other, so that the crossing over is, quite as much and without qualification, a return into self that posits itself.

As the form of reflected immediacy, that is, of essence, the inner receives its determination over against the outer, which has the form of being; and yet the two make up but a single identity. – First, this identity is what the two are as one solid unity, a foundation replete with content, or the absolute fact, on which the pair of determinations hang as indifferent, external moments. So considered, it is content, and it is that totality which the inner is — an inner becoming external quite as much, yet without thereby being anything that has come to be or has crossed over, for it remains equal to its own self. Taken with this determination, the outer does not merely stand equal to the inner in point of content; the two are rather one fact and no more. – Being, however, simple identity with itself, this fact stands diverse from its form-determinations, or rather these lie outside it; so considered, it is an inner in its own right, diverse from the externality belonging to it. That externality, though, has its whole content in this, that inner and outer, the two determinations themselves, are what make the fact up. And the fact, for its part, is no more than the unity of the two. So in point of content the two sides come to the same thing once again. Within the fact, however, they are present as an identity permeating itself, a foundation replete with content. Out in externality, on the other hand, as forms which the fact has, they stand indifferent to that identity, and so the pair of them stand indifferent to one another.

2. So taken, they are the diverse determinations of form, ones whose identical foundation lies not in their own selves but in an other; they are determinations of reflection existing for themselves — the inner as reflection-into-self in its form, as essentiality; the outer as the immediacy reflected into an other in its form, as unessentiality. Only, what the nature of the relation has shown is that these determinations make up one identity and nothing else whatever. In expressing itself, force consists precisely in this, that determining as presupposing and determining as returning into itself are one and the same. Where inner and outer have accordingly been taken as determinations of form, they are, in the first place, nothing but the simple form as such, and, second, since therein they are at the same time determined as opposites, what unifies them is a purely abstract mediation, one in which each is immediately its other and is that other for the very reason that it is the one. The inner, then, is immediately only the outer, and it carries the determinateness of externality just because it is the inner; and the other way round, an outer is only an inner just because it is only an outer. – Since this unity of form holds its two determinations within itself as opposites, the identity it has is just this crossing over, and within that only the other of the pair, not any identity of theirs that would be content-laden. Or, put otherwise, clinging to form in this way is quite generally the side of determinateness. Whatever gets posited in keeping with that side is not the whole in its real totality, but only the totality, the fact itself, standing within that determinateness of form; and since form is the unqualified binding together of the two opposed determinations into one, then, taking either of them first – and which one is taken makes no difference – one must say of the foundation, or fact, that on that very account it lies just as essentially within the other determinateness, and again only within the other, in the same way as it was said at the outset to lie only within the first. –

A something, accordingly, that is only as yet an inner is on that very account only an outer. Or the reverse: a something that is only an outer is on that very account only an inner. Or again, with the inner determined as essence and the outer as being: a fact that is only in its essence is on that very account nothing but an immediate being, while a fact which merely is is on that very account still only in its essence. – Outer and inner are determinateness posited in such fashion that neither of the two determinations merely presupposes the other and crosses over into it as into its truth; each, rather, so far as it is that truth of the other, stays there posited as determinateness and points beyond to the totality of them both. – The inner is thus what completes essence so far as form goes. For essence, in being determined as inner, carries in itself the implication that it is defective and only is as a reference to its other, the outer; but the outer, in like manner, is not merely being, nor even concrete existence, but is as something referring itself to essence, to the inner. Yet what is at hand is not merely the reference of the two to one another, but the determinate reference belonging to absolute form, whereby each is immediately its own opposite, along with the reference they have in common to their third, or rather to their unity. Their mediation, though, is still without that identical foundation which would hold the two of them; their reference is on that account the immediate turning round of the one into the other; and the negative unity that ties them together is a simple point empty of content.

Remark

Essence in its movement is, in general terms, the becoming into the concept. What comes to the fore in the relation of inner and outer is the essential moment of that becoming, namely that its determinations are posited so as to stand in the negative unity in such fashion that each immediately is not only as its own other but also as the whole in its totality. This totality, though, is in the concept as such the universal; – a foundation which the relation of inner and outer does not yet have at hand. – Absent from the negative identity of inner and outer, which is the immediate inversion of one of these determinations into the other, is likewise the foundation that was called the fact a moment ago. –

The unmediated identity of form, as it is posited here while still without the content-laden movement of the fact itself, is very much worth noting. It turns up in the fact as the fact stands at its beginning. So pure being is immediately the nothing. Everything real whatever is, at its beginning, an identity merely immediate in this way; for at its beginning it has not yet set its moments in opposition and developed them, having on the one side not yet recollected itself out of externality, and on the other not yet externalized itself out of inwardness and brought itself forth by its own activity; hence it is only the inner as determinateness over against the outer, and only the outer as determinateness over against the inner. So it is, in part, only an immediate being; and in part, so far as it is quite as much the negativity which is to become the activity of development, it is as such essentially, to begin with, only an inner. – Throughout all development whatever, natural, scientific and spiritual, this shows itself, and it is essential to recognize that a first, where a something is as yet only inwardly or in its concept, is on that very account nothing but the immediate, passive existence of that something. So – to take at once the nearest example – the essential relation under consideration here, before it has moved through mediation, the relation of force, and thereby realized itself, is the relation only in itself, its concept, or as yet only inwardly. But precisely on that account it is only the external, immediate relation; that of the whole with its parts, where the sides possess a subsistence indifferent towards each other. Their identity is not yet in their own selves; it is as yet only inward, and on that account they fall apart, their subsistence being an immediate and external one. – Thus the sphere of being in general is as yet nothing but what is still, without qualification, inner, and on that account it is the sphere of the immediacy that is, of externality. – Essence too is as yet only the inner; that is why it also gets taken for a wholly external communality lacking all system; one says Schulwesen, Zeitungswesen, meaning by these a something held in common that is made by taking existing objects together from outside, so far as they are without any essential connection, without organization. – Or, with concrete objects: the germ of the plant, the child, is as yet only an inner plant, an inward human being. But just for that reason the plant, or the human being, as germ is something immediate, an outer, one that has not yet given itself the negative reference to its own self, a passive thing surrendered to otherness. – So too God in his immediate concept is not spirit; for spirit is not the immediate, the counterpart set against mediation, but is rather the essence that eternally posits its immediacy and eternally comes back out of it into itself. Immediately taken, then, God is only nature. Or nature is only God as inner, God not actual as spirit and thus not the genuine God. – Or God, in thinking taken as first thinking, is only pure being, or else essence, the abstract absolute; not, however, God as absolute spirit, which alone is the genuine nature of God.

3. Of the identities of inner and outer under consideration, the first is the foundation standing indifferent towards the difference of these determinations, as towards a form external to it, or it as content. The second identity is the difference of the two held in unmediated identity, the immediate inversion of each into the one opposed to it; – or it as pure form. These two identities, however, are only the sides of one totality; or that totality is itself only the inversion of the one into the other. Totality as foundation and content is this immediacy reflected into itself solely by way of the presupposing reflection of form, which sublates the difference that form has and posits itself over against that difference as indifferent identity, as reflected unity. Or content is form itself, so far as form determines itself as diversity and makes itself into one of its own sides, as externality, but into the other as immediacy reflected into itself, or into the inner.

Conversely, then, inner and outer, the differences of form, are each of them posited in its own self as the totality of itself and of its other; the inner, being simple identity reflected into itself, is the immediate and hence being and externality quite as much as essence; and the outer, being the manifold, determinate being, is merely outer, that is, posited as unessential and as gone back into its ground, and thus as inner. This crossing over of the two into one another is their immediate identity, as foundation; but it is also their mediated identity; each, namely, is by way of its other precisely what it is in itself, the relation in its totality. Or the other way about: because either side has totality in it, its determinateness is mediated with the other determinateness; totality thus mediates itself with its own self through form, or determinateness, and determinateness mediates itself with itself through its simple identity.

Whatever a something is, it is that wholly in its externality; externality is its totality, and quite as much its unity reflected into itself. Its appearance is reflection not merely into an other but into itself, and its externality is on that account the expression of what it is in itself; and since in this way its content and its form are identical without qualification, it is nothing in and for itself but this, to express itself. It is its essence's own revealing, so that this essence consists precisely and only in being what reveals itself.

With appearance thus identical with the inner, or with essence, the essential relation has determined itself into actuality.

Third Section. Actuality

Actuality is essence and concrete existence in their unity; in it the shapeless essence and the unsteady appearance; – or the subsistence that lacks determination and the manifoldness that lacks subsistence, have their truth. Concrete existence is indeed the immediacy that has come forth out of ground, but it has not yet posited form in itself; in determining and shaping itself it is appearance; and as this subsistence, determined merely as reflection-into-an-other, works its way on into reflection-into-self, it turns into two worlds, two totalities of content, one of them carrying the determination of being reflected into itself, the other that of being reflected into an other. The essential relation, however, exhibits their form-reference, and the completion of that reference is the relation of inner and outer: that the content of the two is but one identical foundation and quite as much but one identity of form. – Since this identity has now emerged with respect to form as well, the form-determination of their diversity is sublated, and it stands posited that they are one absolute totality.

This unity of the inner with the outer is absolute actuality. Such actuality, though, is at first the absolute as such; – insofar as it stands posited as a unity wherein form has sublated itself and turned itself into the empty or external difference of an outer and an inner. Towards this absolute, reflection bears itself as something external, one that contemplates the absolute rather than being the absolute's own movement. Yet since reflection essentially is that movement, it is, as the absolute's own negative return into itself,

Secondly, actuality proper. Actuality, possibility and necessity make up the formal moments of the absolute, or the reflection belonging to it.

Thirdly, the absolute and its reflection in their unity make up the absolute relation, or rather the absolute in relating to its own self; substance.

Chapter 1. The Absolute

The absolute's simple, solid identity is indeterminate, or rather within it every determinateness of essence and of concrete existence, indeed of being at large as well as of reflection, has dissolved. To that extent the determining of what the absolute is turns out negative, and the absolute itself shows up as nothing but the negating of every predicate, as the empty. Yet since it has quite as much to be pronounced the position of every predicate, it shows up as the most formal of contradictions. Where that negating and this positing are the business of external reflection, what we have is a formal, unsystematic dialectic which with little trouble picks up the sundry determinations here and there, and with just as little trouble displays on the one side their finitude and mere relativity, while on the other, the absolute hovering before it as the totality, it declares of the absolute that all determinations dwell within it – without being able to raise these positions and those negations into a genuine unity. – What ought to be exhibited, however, is what the absolute is; yet this exhibiting can be neither a determining nor an external reflection, whereby determinations of the absolute would arise; it is rather the exposition, and indeed the absolute's own exposition, a mere showing of what it is.

A. The Exposition of the Absolute

The absolute is neither merely being nor yet essence. The first of these is immediacy unreflected, the second immediacy reflected; each, moreover, is totality in its own self, though a determinate one. At essence, being steps forth as concrete existence; and the reference between being and essence has developed as far as the relation of the inner to the outer. Essence is what the inner is, though as the totality carrying essentially the determination of standing referred to being and of immediately being being. The outer, for its part, is being, though with the essential determination that, standing referred to reflection, it is immediately and just as much an identity with essence devoid of relation. The absolute itself is the absolute unity of the two; it is what at bottom makes up the ground of the essential relation, a relation which as relation has merely not yet gone back into this identity of its own and whose ground is not yet posited.

What emerges from this is that the absolute has for its determination to be the absolute form, though at the same time not as that identity whose moments are merely simple determinatenesses; – rather as the identity each of whose moments is in its own self the totality and so, indifferent as it is towards form, the complete content of the whole. Conversely, though, the absolute is the absolute content in such fashion that the content, indifferent manifoldness as content is, has the negative form-reference in it, whereby its manifoldness is only one solid identity.

The identity of the absolute is thus absolute in virtue of this, that its every part is itself the whole, or its every determinateness the totality, that is, that determinateness generally has become a shine wholly transparent, a difference vanished in its positedness. Essence, concrete existence, world that is in itself, whole, parts, force, – to representation such reflected determinations look like true being valid in and for itself; the absolute, set against them, is the ground wherein they have gone under. – Now because in the absolute form is only simple identity with itself, no determining of itself goes on in the absolute; for determination is a difference of form, which in the first instance holds as such. But because it contains at the same time all difference and form-determination generally, or because absolute form and reflection is what it itself is, the diversity of content must also come to the fore in it. Yet absolute identity is what the absolute itself is; this is its determination, since all the manifoldness of the world that is in itself and of the world that appears, of the inner and the outer totality, is sublated in it. – Within the absolute there is no becoming, for it is not being; nor is it the determining that reflects itself, for it is not the essence determining itself merely within itself; neither is it an expressing of itself, for it is as the identity of inner and outer. – But so stated, the movement of reflection stands over against this absolute identity of its. Sublated in that identity, reflection is only the identity's inner; and just with this it is external to it. – To begin with, therefore, its whole business consists in sublating within the absolute what it itself does. Being the beyond of manifold differences and determinations, and of the movement these make, it lies at the absolute's back; hence it does indeed take those differences up, yet at the same time lets them go under; and so it is that negative exposition of the absolute spoken of earlier. – In its genuine presentation this exposition is the whole logical movement so far, that of the sphere of being and of essence, whose content was neither snatched up from outside as given and contingent, nor plunged into the absolute's abyss by a reflection standing outside it, but has determined itself in its own self through the inner necessity it has and, as being's own becoming and essence's reflection, has gone back into the absolute as into its ground.

This exposition, however, has at the same time a positive side of its own; namely so far as the finite, in foundering, proves this nature of standing referred to the absolute, or of containing the absolute in its own self. This side, however, is less the positive exposition of the absolute itself than the exposition of the determinations: namely that the absolute is their abyss, yet their ground as well, or that what lends them, the shine, a subsistence is the absolute itself. – Shine is not the nothing; it is reflection, reference to the absolute; or it is shine so far as the absolute shines in it. In this way the positive exposition still detains the finite short of its vanishing, taking it for an expression and likeness of the absolute. Yet the finite's transparency, which lets nothing but the absolute be glimpsed through it, ends in vanishing altogether; for there is nothing about the finite that could keep for it any difference from the absolute; it is a medium swallowed up by what shines through it.

Therefore this positive exposition of the absolute is itself no more than a shining; for the truly positive that it and the expounded content contain is the absolute itself. Whatever further determinations turn up, the form wherein the absolute shines is something null, taken up by the exposition from outside, something on which it wins a beginning for what it does. A determination of that kind does not have its beginning in the absolute, but only its end there. This expounding is therefore indeed absolute doing by virtue of the reference it has to the absolute, into which it goes back, but not by virtue of its starting point, a determination lying outside the absolute.

In fact, however, the expounding of the absolute is the absolute's own doing, one that begins with itself just as it arrives at itself. The absolute, taken merely as absolute identity, is determinate; namely as identical; reflection has posited it thus, in contrast to opposition and manifoldness; or it is nothing but the negative belonging to reflection and to determining generally. – Not only that expounding of the absolute is on that account something imperfect; so too is this absolute itself, at which alone one arrives. Or an absolute of that sort, one that is merely as absolute identity, amounts to no more than the absolute of an external reflection. Hence it is not the absolutely-absolute but rather the absolute standing in a determinateness; or it is attribute.

But the absolute is not attribute merely because it is the object of an external reflection and hence something determined by that reflection. – Or reflection is not merely external to it; rather, immediately, and just because it is external to it, it is internal to it. What makes the absolute absolute is just that it is no abstract identity, but the identity of being with essence, the identity of inner with outer. So it is itself the absolute form, the form that makes the absolute shine within itself and determines it to attribute.

B. The Absolute Attribute

The expression that has been used, the absolutely-absolute, designates the absolute as returned into itself in its form, the absolute whose form equals its content. Attribute is the merely relative absolute, a conjunction that means nothing else than the absolute standing in a form-determination. For form, ahead of its completed exposition, is at first only as yet inward, or, what comes to the same, only outward, in general, to start with, determinate form, that is, negation in general. Since form at the same time is as the absolute's form, however, attribute is the absolute's whole content; it is the totality that showed itself earlier under the shape of a world, or as one of the two sides of the essential relation, either of them being itself the whole. Yet the two worlds, the appearing one and the one that is in and for itself, were each meant to be opposed to the other in its essence. Of the essential relation it did hold that its one side was equal to the other: the whole came to as much as the parts; force's expression to a content the same as force's own; and the outer in general to what the inner is. Yet at the same time each of these sides was meant to have an immediate subsistence of its own besides, the one as the immediacy that is, the other as the reflected immediacy. In the absolute, by contrast, these distinct immediacies are brought down to shine, and the totality which attribute is stands posited as its true and sole subsistence; whereas the determination in which that totality stands is posited as the unessential one.

The absolute is attribute for this reason, that as simple absolute identity it stands in the determination of identity; and to determination in general other determinations can now be attached, for instance that there are several attributes. But since the meaning of absolute identity is just this, not only that every determination is sublated, but that identity is itself the reflection which has sublated its own self, all determinations are posited in it as sublated ones. Or totality is posited as the absolute totality, that is, attribute has the absolute for its content and its subsistence; the form-determination it carries, by which it is attribute, is therefore likewise posited, immediately as mere shine, the negative as negative. The positive shine that the exposition gives itself through attribute, in taking the finite within its restriction not for something that is in and for itself but dissolving the finite's subsistence into the absolute and widening the finite into attribute, sublates the very thing that attribute is; it sinks attribute, and its own distinguishing activity, into the simple absolute.

But since reflection, distinguishing in this fashion, thereby comes back only to the absolute's identity, it has at the same time not got clear of its externality and reached the genuine absolute. All it has attained is the indeterminate, abstract identity; that is to say, the identity which stands in the determinateness of identity. – Or, where reflection in the capacity of inner form determines the absolute to attribute, this determining still remains diverse from externality; the absolute is not penetrated by that inner determination; its expression consists in vanishing, as something merely posited, at the absolute.

Form, then, whether it be taken as outer or as inner, the form by which the absolute would be attribute, is at the same time posited as null in its own self, as an external shine, or as a mere way and manner of being.

C. The Mode of the Absolute

Firstly, the attribute is the absolute as it stands in the simple identity of itself with itself. Secondly, the attribute is negation, and this as negation is the formal reflection-into-itself. These two sides constitute at first the attribute's two extremes, and the attribute is itself their middle term, being as it is the absolute and equally the determinateness. – Of these two extremes the second is the negative as negative, the reflection that is external to the absolute. – Or insofar as this reflection is taken as the inner of the absolute, and the absolute's own determination is to posit itself as mode, then the mode is the absolute's being-outside-itself, the loss of itself into the alterability and contingency of being, its having-passed-over into the opposite without return into itself; the totality-less manifoldness of determinations of form and of content. –

The mode, the externality of the absolute, is however not this alone, but the externality posited as such externality, a bare way and manner; and so the shine as shine, or the form's reflection into itself; and so the identity with itself that the absolute is. In fact, then, it is first in the mode that the absolute stands posited as absolute identity; it is nothing but what it is, namely identity with itself, as negativity that refers itself to itself, as shining posited as shining.

Insofar, then, as the exposition of the absolute takes its start from the absolute's absolute identity, moves on to the attribute, and thence to the mode, in all this it has traversed its moments completely. But firstly, therein it does not merely comport itself negatively towards these determinations; rather this doing of its is the reflecting movement itself, as which the absolute only truly is the absolute identity. – Secondly, what it thereby has to do with is not merely something external, and the mode is not just the outermost externality; because it is the shine as shine, it is rather the return into itself, the reflection that dissolves itself, as which the absolute is absolute being. – Thirdly, the expounding reflection has the look of setting out from determinations of its own and from something external; of picking up the modes, or likewise the determinations of the attribute, as found already outside the absolute; and of having for its doing merely the carrying of them back into the indifferent identity. But in truth the determinateness with which it begins it already has on the absolute itself. For as first indifferent identity the absolute is itself nothing but the determinate absolute, or the attribute, in that it is the absolute unmoved and as yet unreflected. Since it is determinateness, this determinateness pertains to the reflecting movement; through that movement alone is the absolute determined as the first identical, and through it alone likewise does the absolute possess the absolute form, so that it is not what is self-equal but what is self-equating.

The genuine meaning of the mode is accordingly that it is the absolute's own reflecting movement; a determining, yet not one by which the absolute would come to be an other, but only of what it already is; the transparent externality which is the showing of the absolute itself; a movement out of itself; and yet such that this being-turned-outward is quite as much inwardness itself; and hence quite as much a positing that is not mere positedness but absolute being.

If, then, the question is put about a content of the exposition, what it might be that the absolute shows? the difference of form and content is in the absolute already dissolved anyway. Or just this is the content of the absolute, to manifest itself. The absolute is that absolute form which, in dirempting itself, remains simply identical with itself, the negative as negative; or which closes together with itself, and only so is the absolute self-identity that is quite as much indifferent towards its differences, or absolute content; the content, accordingly, is nothing but this exposition itself.

The absolute, as this self-sustaining movement of exposition, as the way and manner which is its absolute identity with itself, is expression – not of an inner, not against an other – but is only as an absolute manifesting of itself for itself; thus it is actuality.

Remark

To the concept of the absolute, and to the relation which reflection bears towards it as this has here set itself out, there corresponds the concept of Spinozistic substance. Wherein Spinozism is a deficient philosophy is this, that reflection and its manifold determining are an external thinking. – Substance in this system is one substance, a single totality admitting of no separation; determinateness there is none but is held within this absolute and dissolved there; and it counts for a great deal that whatever appears to natural representation, or to the determining understanding, as self-subsistent and hovers before it as such is, within that necessary concept, brought down wholly to a mere positedness. – Determinateness is negation – such is the absolute principle of Spinozistic philosophy; this true and simple insight is what grounds substance's absolute unity. But Spinoza halts at negation taken as determinateness or quality; he does not press on to cognize it as absolute, that is, as self-negating negation; accordingly his substance does not itself contain the absolute form, and the cognizing of that substance is no immanent cognizing. Substance is indeed the absolute unity of thinking and of being or extension; it thus harbours thinking itself, though only in its unity with extension, which means: not as severing itself from extension, hence not at all as determining and forming, nor yet as the movement that comes back and starts out from itself. Partly, thereby, substance is without the principle of personality – the very defect that has chiefly stirred indignation against the Spinozistic system; – partly the cognizing is that external reflection which fails to grasp and to derive out of substance what has the look of the finite, the determinateness of the attribute and the mode, and itself as well, and which is at work instead as an understanding standing outside, taking the determinations up as given and leading them back to the absolute, though never fetching their beginnings from it.

The concepts which Spinoza furnishes of substance are those of the cause of itself, – that substance is that whose essence encloses concrete existence within itself; – that the concept of the absolute stands in need of no concept of another out of which it would have to be formed; – deep and correct as these concepts are, they are definitions, taken up immediately at the entrance of the science. Mathematics, and the other subordinate sciences, have to make their start from something presupposed, which constitutes their element and positive foundation. But the absolute cannot be something first and immediate; the absolute is essentially its result.

Following on the definition of the absolute, there next appears in Spinoza the definition of the attribute; and it is determined as that wherein the understanding apprehends substance's essence. Setting aside that the understanding is by its nature assumed to come later than the attribute – Spinoza determines it, after all, as a mode – the attribute, determination as determination of the absolute, is in this way made dependent on an other, on the understanding, which enters over against substance as something external and immediate.

Spinoza determines the attributes further as infinite, infinite moreover in the sense of an infinite plurality. Only two of them, to be sure, actually come up in the sequel – thinking and extension – and no showing is given of how the infinite plurality necessarily narrows itself down to the opposition, and to this determinate opposition, of thinking and extension. – These two attributes are on that account picked up empirically. Thinking and being present the absolute in a determination; the absolute itself is the absolute unity of both, so that they amount to unessential forms merely, the order among things running the same as the order among representations or thoughts, and the one absolute being surveyed under those two determinations by nothing but the external reflection, by a mode – now as a totality of representations, now as a totality of things and of their alterations. Just as it is this external reflection that draws the difference, so it is also this reflection that carries the difference back into the absolute identity and submerges it there. This whole movement, however, takes place outside the absolute. Granted, the absolute is itself also thinking, and so far the movement is only within the absolute; but, as was remarked, within the absolute it is only as unity with extension, and so not as this movement, which is essentially the moment of opposition as well. – The sublime demand Spinoza makes upon thinking is that it consider all things under the shape of eternity, sub specie aeterni, that is, as they are in the absolute. In that absolute, however, which is only the unmoved identity, the attribute, like the mode, is there only as vanishing, not as becoming, so that this vanishing too takes its positive beginning only from without.

The third, the mode, is in Spinoza affection of substance, the determinate determinateness, that which is in another and is conceived through this other. Strictly, the attributes have nothing but indeterminate diversity for their determination; each is to express substance's totality and to be conceived out of itself; but insofar as an attribute is the absolute as determinate, it harbours otherness and is not to be conceived out of itself alone. It is thus in the mode that the attribute's determination first gets properly posited. This third stays mere mode besides: on the one hand it is something immediately given, on the other its nullity goes uncognized as reflection into itself. – The Spinozistic exposition of the absolute is thus far indeed complete, in that it starts from the absolute, lets the attribute come next, and ends with the mode; but these three are merely counted off one after another, with no inner developmental sequence, and the third is not the negation as negation, not a negation referring itself negatively to itself, through which it would in it itself be the going-back into the first identity, and that identity the genuine one. What is missing, then, is the necessity of the absolute's progress into unessentiality, and equally the dissolving of unessentiality, in and for itself, into identity; or there is wanting the becoming of identity no less than of its determinations.

In like fashion, in the oriental representation of emanation the absolute is the light that lights itself. But it does not merely light itself; it also streams out. Its outstreamings are removals from its unclouded brightness; the progeny that follow are less perfect than those before them, out of which they arise. The streaming out is taken only as a happening, the becoming only as an ongoing loss. So being grows ever murkier, and night, the negative, is the last term of the line, which does not go back into the first light.

The defect of reflection into itself, which attaches to the Spinozistic exposition of the absolute as it does to the doctrine of emanation, is made good in the concept of Leibniz's monad. – To the one-sidedness of a philosophical principle the opposite one-sidedness is wont to be set over against it, and, as everywhere, the totality is wont to be present at least as a scattered completeness. – The monad is a one, a negative reflected within itself; it is the world's content in its totality; the diverse manifold has in it not merely gone under but is kept in a negative fashion; Spinozistic substance unifies all content, yet the world's manifold content is not in that substance as such, but in the reflection standing external to it. The monad is therefore essentially representing; finite though it be, however, it has no passivity; the alterations and determinations in it are rather manifestations of itself within itself. It is entelechy; the revealing is its own act. – With this the monad is also determinate, marked off from others; the determinateness falls into the particular content and into the way and manner in which the manifestation proceeds. The monad is therefore in itself, in respect of its substance, the totality, not in its manifestation. This limitation of the monad falls of necessity not into the monad as self-positing or representing, but into its being-in-itself, or it is an absolute limit, a predestination posited by a being other than the monad itself. Further, since bounded things are only in referring themselves to other bounded things, while the monad is at once an absolute shut up within itself, the harmony of these boundings – the reference, that is, of the monads to one another – lies outside them and is, again, pre-established by another being, or in itself.

It comes to light that through the principle of reflection-into-itself, which makes up the monad's fundamental determination, otherness and outside influence generally are indeed done away with, the monad's alterations being its own positing – yet that, on the other side, passivity through an other has merely been converted into an absolute restriction, a restriction upon being-in-itself. Leibniz credits the monads with a certain perfection within themselves, a sort of self-subsistence; they are created beings. – Looking more nearly at their restriction, this exposition yields the result that the self-manifestation which accrues to them is the totality of form. A concept of the highest importance is this: that the monad's alterations are represented as actions without passivity, as manifestations of the monad's own self, and that the principle of reflection into itself, or of individuation, stands forth as essential. It is further necessary to let finitude consist in this: that content, or substance, is held distinct from form, and then further that the one is limited whereas the other is infinite. But in the concept of the absolute monad what would have to be found is not merely that absolute unity of content and form, but the nature of reflection besides – namely, as the negativity referring itself to itself, to repel itself from itself, whereby it is positing and creating. In the Leibnizian system there is, to be sure, this further point present as well, that God is the source of the concrete existence and of the essence of the monads, that is, that those absolute restrictions in the monads' being-in-itself do not have being in and for themselves but disappear in the absolute. These determinations, however, exhibit nothing but the ordinary representations, left without philosophical development and never raised into speculative concepts. Thus the principle of individuation does not obtain its deeper working-out; the concepts concerning the distinctions among the various finite monads, and concerning their relation to their absolute, do not issue from this essence itself, or in an absolute manner, but pertain to ratiocinative, dogmatic reflection, and have accordingly reached no inner coherence.

Chapter 2. Actuality

The absolute is the unity of inner and outer as first unity, one that is in itself. The exposition showed itself as an external reflection which, for its part, has the immediate before it as something come upon, but which is at the same time the movement of that immediate and its reference to the absolute, and as such carries it back into the absolute and determines it to be nothing but a way and manner. Yet just this way and manner is the absolute's own determination, that is, the absolute's first identity, or its unity as merely being in itself. And indeed through this reflection not only is that first being-in-itself posited as an essenceless determination, but, because the reflection is negative reference to itself, that mode comes about only through the reflection. This reflection, as sublating itself in its determinations, and generally as the movement returning into itself, is what alone is truly absolute identity, being at the same time the determining of the absolute, or the absolute's modality. The mode is accordingly the externality of the absolute, though equally only as that absolute's reflection into itself; – or the mode is the absolute's own manifestation, such that this expression is the absolute's reflection-into-itself, and with that its being-in-and-for-itself.

Being manifestation in this sense, that the absolute is nothing further and has no content beyond being the manifestation of itself, the absolute is the absolute form. This reflected absoluteness is what actuality is to be taken for. Being is not yet something actual; it is immediacy in its first shape; the reflection of being is therefore becoming, a passing over into another; or the immediacy of being is not being-in-and-for-itself. Higher than concrete existence, too, stands actuality. Concrete existence is indeed that immediacy which has come forth out of ground and conditions, or out of essence and the reflection of essence. Hence it is, in itself, what actuality is, namely real reflection, but it is not yet the unity of reflection and immediacy as posited. By developing the reflection contained within it, concrete existence therefore passes over into appearance. Concrete existence is the foundered ground; its determination is that the ground be restored, and so it becomes essential relation, its final reflection being that its immediacy stands posited as the reflection-into-itself, and inversely; this unity, wherein concrete existence or immediacy, and being-in-itself, ground or the reflected, are moments outright, is now actuality. The actual is on that account manifestation; its externality does not draw it into the sphere of alteration, nor is it a shining of itself within an other; rather it manifests itself, which means that in its externality it is itself, and that only in that externality, namely only as the movement which differentiates and determines itself from itself, is it itself.

In actuality, then, taken as this absolute form, the moments are present only as sublated or formal ones, not yet realized; their diversity thus belongs at the outset to external reflection and has not been determined as content.

Actuality, being itself the immediate form-unity of inner and outer, thereby falls under the determination of immediacy as against the determination of reflection-into-itself; or it is an actuality over against a possibility. Their reference to each other is the third term, which determines the actual just as much as being reflected into itself, and determines this reflected being at the same time as immediately concretely existing. This third is necessity.

But at first, seeing that actual and possible are formal differences, the reference between them is likewise only formal, and consists merely in this, that the one as well as the other is a positedness, or it consists in contingency.

Now inasmuch as in contingency the actual, like the possible, is positedness, both have thereby acquired determination upon themselves; from this arises, secondly, real actuality, and along with it real possibility no less, and relative necessity.

The reflection of relative necessity into itself yields, thirdly, absolute necessity, which is absolute possibility and actuality.

A. Contingency, or Formal Actuality, Possibility and Necessity

1. Actuality counts as formal to the extent that, being actuality in its first shape, it is immediate, unreflected actuality merely, and so stands within this determination of form alone, not as the totality of form. Nothing further, then, does it amount to than a being or a concrete existence at large. Yet since it is essentially not bare immediate concrete existence but the unity of form joining being-in-itself, or inwardness, with externality, it harbours being-in-itself or possibility straightaway. What is actual is possible.

2. Actuality reflected into itself: such is this possibility. But this being-reflected, a first on its own account, is likewise something formal, and hence amounts at large to no more than the determination of identity with itself, or of being-in-itself taken generally. Because, however, what the determination here is, is totality of form, this being-in-itself gets determined as sublated, or as standing essentially only in reference to actuality: as the negative of actuality, posited in the character of a negative. Two moments are thus harboured in possibility; first the positive one, that possibility is a being-reflected into its own self; but seeing that within the absolute form it has been lowered to a moment, being-reflected-into-itself no longer counts for essence, and so carries, second, the negative import that possibility is a deficient thing which points away to an other, to actuality, and rounds itself out there.

Taken on the first, the merely positive side, possibility is the bare form-determination of identity with itself, the form of essentiality. So construed, it is that relationless, undetermined vessel which holds anything whatever. – On the reading given by this formal possibility, whatever does not contradict itself is possible; and so the realm of possibility is a manifoldness without bound. Yet every manifold thing carries negation in it, being determined within itself and against an other; indifferent diversity passes generally over into opposition, and opposition is nothing other than contradiction. Whence everything is quite as much a contradicting thing and hence an impossible one.

– To pronounce this merely formal thing of something – it is possible – is accordingly as shallow and as empty as the principle of contradiction together with any content taken up into it; A is possible amounts to just this much, that A is A. Where one declines to go into the unfolding of the content, that content wears the form of simplicity; only by its being dissolved into its determinations does difference come forth in it. Holding fast to that simple form, one leaves the content as an item identical with itself, hence as a possible. But by this, as by the formal proposition of identity, nothing whatever gets said.

More than the merely identical proposition is contained, however, in the possible. The possible is reflected being-reflected-into-itself; or the identical simply as moment of the totality, determined thereby as also not being in itself; hence it carries the second determination of being a possible merely, together with the ought of form's totality. Strip possibility of this ought and it is essentiality as such; the absolute form, though, carries with it that essence is itself only a moment and has its truth not without being. Possibility is this bare essentiality, so posited that it is a moment merely and falls short of the absolute form. Being-in-itself is what it is, yet determined as no more than a posited; or equally determined not to be in itself. – In its own self, then, possibility is likewise the contradiction; it is the impossibility.

The nearest expression of this is that possibility, being a form-determination posited as sublated, has some content or other in it. As possible, this content is a being-in-itself which is at once a sublated one, an otherness. Since the content is thus a merely possible one, an other content, its very contrary, is quite as possible. A is A; just so - A is - A. What each of the two propositions expresses is the possibility of its own content-determination. As these identical propositions, however, they stand indifferent to one another; the one does not posit that the other should join it. Possibility is the comparing reference of the pair; its determination, as a reflection of the totality, carries the point that the contrary too shall be possible. Hence it is the referring ground whereby, on that very account, since A = A, - A = - A as well; the possible A harbours the possible Not-A also, and this reference is itself what determines the two as possible.

Being this reference, though – that within the one possible its other is likewise contained – it is the contradiction which sublates itself. And since by its determination it is the reflected, and, as has now shown itself, the self-sublating reflected, it is thereby the immediate too, and with that it turns into actuality.

3. Not the first actuality but the reflected one is this, posited as the unity of itself with possibility. Possible is what the actual as such is; it stands with possibility in immediate positive identity; possibility, however, has determined itself as merely possibility; whence the actual too stands determined as merely a possible. And immediately so, since possibility is harboured immediately within actuality and is harboured there as a sublated one, as possibility merely. Turn it round: actuality, being in unity with possibility, amounts to immediacy sublated; – or, since formal actuality is nothing but an immediate first, it is a moment merely, actuality sublated merely, that is to say, possibility merely.

Herewith the determination is at once more closely expressed, of the respect in which possibility is actuality. For not yet is all actuality meant by possibility; real and absolute actuality have not yet come up for discussion; – it is as yet that actuality alone which turned up first, the formal one namely, which determined itself to be possibility merely, and hence formal actuality, which is nothing but being or concrete existence at large. To everything possible there belongs, accordingly, some being or some concrete existence.

Contingency is this unity of possibility with actuality. – A contingent is an actual determined at once as no more than possible, one whose other or contrary obtains just as well. Such actuality is accordingly bare being or concrete existence, yet posited in its truth so as to carry the worth of a positedness or of possibility. Turn it round: possibility, being reflection-into-itself or being-in-itself, stands posited as positedness; whatever is possible is an actual in this sense of actuality, carrying no more worth than contingent actuality carries; it is itself a contingent.

Two sides, then, are offered by the contingent; first, to the extent that possibility belongs to it immediately, or, which comes to the same, to the extent that possibility lies sublated within it, it is not positedness and not mediated either, but immediate actuality; no ground belongs to it. – Since this immediate actuality accrues to the possible as well, the possible stands determined as contingent quite as much as the actual does, and is likewise a groundless thing.

But second, the contingent is the actual taken as a merely possible or as a positedness; and just so the possible, being formal being-in-itself, is positedness merely. Neither of the two, therefore, is in and for its own self; each has its genuine reflection-into-itself rather in an other, or it has a ground.

So the contingent lacks a ground for the reason that it is contingent; and quite as much does it possess a ground for the reason that it is contingent.

It is the posited, unmediated turning over into one another of inner and outer, or of being-reflected-into-itself and of being; posited in that possibility and actuality each carries this determination in its own self, and this because they are moments of the absolute form. – Thus in its immediate unity with possibility actuality amounts to concrete existence alone, determined as a groundless thing which is only a posited or only possible; – whereas taken as reflected and determined against possibility it stands severed from possibility, from being-reflected-into-itself, and so is quite as immediately a mere possible too. – Just so possibility, being simple being-in-itself, is an immediate, a mere being at large; or set in opposition to actuality it is quite as much a being-in-itself void of actuality, a mere possible, but precisely on that account once more a concrete existence at large that is not reflected into itself.

Contingency is this absolute restlessness of the becoming belonging to these two determinations. Yet just because each turns over without mediation into the one opposed to it, within that opposite it equally and absolutely closes with itself, and this identity of the two, of each within the other, is necessity.

An actual is what the necessary is; as immediate it is therefore a groundless thing; quite as much, though, does it have its actuality through an other, that is, in its ground, while being at once that ground's positedness and the ground's own reflection into itself; whatever possibility the necessary has is a sublated one. So the contingent is necessary, both because the actual, determined as a possible, has thereby had its immediacy sublated and thrust off into ground or being-in-itself and into a grounded, and because this its possibility, the ground-reference, stands absolutely sublated and posited as being. The necessary is, and this being of it is itself the necessary. In itself it likewise is; this reflection-into-itself differs as an other from that immediacy of being; and the necessity belonging to what is amounts to something other. So what is, taken on its own, is not the necessary; yet this being-in-itself is for its part positedness merely, sublated and itself immediate. In this way actuality, within what is distinguished from it, within possibility, is identical with its own self. Being this identity, it is necessity.

B. Relative Necessity, or Real Actuality, Possibility and Necessity

1. Necessity as it has now emerged is formal, its moments being formal, that is, simple determinations which make up a totality only as immediate unity, or as the immediate turning over of the one into the other, and which accordingly do not wear the shape of self-subsistence. – Within this formal necessity, then, the unity is at first simple and stands indifferent to its own differences. Being the immediate unity of the form-determinations, such necessity is actuality; but an actuality possessed of a content, since its unity now stands determined as indifferent to the difference of the form-determinations, namely of actuality itself and of possibility. Being an indifferent identity, this content harbours the form too as indifferent, that is, as determinations merely diverse, and it is manifold content at large. Such actuality is real actuality.

As such, real actuality is at first the thing of many properties, the world in its existing; it is not, however, that concrete existence which dissolves into appearance; being actuality, it is rather at once being-in-itself and reflection-into-itself; amid the manifoldness of bare concrete existence it maintains itself; its externality is an inward comporting to itself alone. Whatever is actual can act; a thing announces its actuality by what it brings forth. Its comporting towards an other is the manifestation of itself – not a passing over, for that is how the something which is refers itself to an other; – nor yet an appearing, for that is how the thing stands only in relation to others; it is a self-subsistent, but one which has its reflection-into-itself, its determinate essentiality, in another self-subsistent.

Real actuality now likewise carries possibility immediately in its own self. The moment of being-in-itself is contained in it; but being as yet the immediate unity only, it stands within one of form's determinations, and so, as that which is, is marked off from being-in-itself or possibility.

2. Being the being-in-itself of real actuality, this possibility is itself real possibility, at first the content-filled being-in-itself. – Formal possibility is reflection-into-itself only as that abstract identity whereby something does not within itself contradict itself. But once one goes into the determinations, circumstances and conditions of a fact so as to cognize its possibility from them, one no longer halts at the formal sort; one is considering its real possibility.

Immediate concrete existence is what this real possibility itself is – no longer, though, for the reason that possibility as such, as a formal moment, is immediately its own contrary, an unreflected actuality; rather, being real possibility, it carries this determination at once in its own self. Hence the real possibility of a fact is the existent manifoldness of circumstances bearing upon it.

This manifoldness of existence is thus indeed possibility as much as actuality, yet their identity is as yet the content only, which stands indifferent to these determinations of form; they, accordingly, make up the form as determined over against their identity. – Or again, immediate real actuality, just because immediate, stands determined over against its possibility; being determinate in this way and hence reflected, it is real possibility. Real possibility, now, is indeed form's posited whole, but form in its determinateness – actuality, namely, as formal or immediate, and possibility likewise, as abstract being-in-itself. The actuality which makes up a fact's possibility is therefore not its own possibility; it is the being-in-itself of another actual; it is itself the actuality due to be sublated, possibility as possibility only. – Real possibility, then, makes up the whole of conditions, an actuality dispersed and unreflected into itself, yet determined to be the being-in-itself of an other and destined to go back into itself.

Whatever is really possible is thus, by its being-in-itself, a formally identical thing which by its simple content-determination does not contradict itself; but by its developed and differentiated circumstances too, and by everything with which it hangs together, it must, as the self-identical thing it is, not contradict itself. Yet second, being manifold within and hanging together manifoldly with an other, while diversity in its own self passes into opposition, it is a contradicting thing. Should a possibility be under discussion and its contradiction be required to show, one need only hold to the manifoldness which it harbours as content or as the concrete existence conditioning it; out of that its contradiction is easily hunted up. – This, however, is no contradiction of comparison; rather, manifold concrete existence is in its own self just this, to sublate itself and to founder; and therein it carries essentially, in its own self, the determination of being only a possible. – Let all the conditions of a fact be completely at hand and the fact steps into actuality; – completeness of conditions is totality as it stands at the content, and the fact itself is this content, determined to be an actual as much as a possible. Within the sphere of conditioned ground the conditions have their form – the ground, namely, or the reflection that is for itself – outside them, a reflection which refers them into moments of the fact and brings forth concrete existence in them. Here, by contrast, no presupposing reflection determines immediate actuality to be a condition; it is posited instead that actuality is itself the possibility.

Within real possibility as it sublates itself, what gets sublated is now a twofold; for possibility is itself the twofold of being actuality and possibility. 1) The actuality is the formal one, a concrete existence which showed itself as self-subsistent and immediate, and which by being sublated turns into reflected being, into the moment of an other, thereby gaining being-in-itself in it. 2) That concrete existence stood determined also as possibility, or as the being-in-itself, but of an other. As it sublates itself, then, this being-in-itself is sublated along with it and crosses over into actuality. – The movement of real possibility sublating its own self accordingly brings forth the very moments already at hand, each merely coming to be out of the other; in this negation, therefore, it is no passing over either, but a closing together with itself. – On formal possibility it held that, something being possible, not it itself but its other was possible as well. Real possibility no longer confronts such an other, being real precisely so far as it is itself actuality too. As the immediate concrete existence belonging to it, the circle of conditions, sublates itself, real possibility makes of itself the being-in-itself which it already is, namely the being-in-itself of an other. And as conversely its moment of being-in-itself thereby sublates itself at the same stroke, it turns into actuality, into the very moment which it likewise already is. – What disappears is thus this: that actuality stood determined as the possibility or the being-in-itself of an other, and possibility conversely as an actuality which is not that one whose possibility it is.

3. The negation of real possibility is accordingly its identity with itself; being thus, within its own sublating, the recoil of that sublating into its own self, it is real necessity.

What is necessary cannot be otherwise – what is possible at all certainly can; for possibility is that being-in-itself which is positedness merely and hence essentially otherness. Formal possibility is this identity as a crossing over into what is simply other; real possibility, though, having in it the other moment, actuality, is already necessity itself. Whatever is really possible can therefore no longer be otherwise; under such conditions and circumstances nothing else is able to ensue. Real possibility and necessity are thus distinguished in semblance only; necessity is an identity which does not first come to be but lies already presupposed at the ground. Real necessity is accordingly a content-filled reference; for the content is that identity which is in itself and stands indifferent to the differences of form.

This necessity, however, is at the same time relative. – It has, that is, a presupposition from which it starts; in the contingent lies its point of departure. For the real actual as such is the determinate actual, and it has its determinateness at first as immediate being in this, that it is a manifoldness of existing circumstances; but with this immediate being taken as determinateness it is also the negative of itself, is being-in-itself or possibility; so it is real possibility. As this unity of the two moments it constitutes form's totality, a totality still external to itself; its way of uniting possibility and actuality is that 1) manifold concrete existence is immediately or positively the possibility – a possible, a self-identical thing at large, just because it is an actual; 2) so far as this possibility of concrete existence gets posited, it stands determined as possibility only, as actuality's immediate turning over into its contrary, – as contingency, in other words. That possibility, then, which immediate actuality carries in it in being a condition, is the being-in-itself only as the possibility of an other. Because this otherness, as was shown, sublates itself, and because this positedness comes in its turn to be posited, real possibility does indeed turn into necessity; but necessity so arrived at starts out from that unity of possible and actual which is not yet reflected into itself; – such presupposing and the movement that returns into itself lie still apart; – or necessity has not yet determined itself out of itself into contingency.

At the content the relativity of real necessity shows itself thus, that the content is as yet the identity indifferent to form only, hence distinct from form and a determinate content at large. On that account the really necessary is some limited actuality or other, which for the sake of this limitedness is in another respect a contingent merely.

So in fact real necessity is in itself contingency as well. – At first this shows up thus, that the really necessary is, by form, indeed a necessary, but by content a limited thing, and through its content has its contingency. Yet contingency lies contained in the form of real necessity too; for as was shown, real possibility is the necessary in itself only, while posited it is the otherness of actuality and possibility to one another. Contingency is therefore contained in real necessity; real necessity is the return into itself out of that restless otherness of actuality and possibility to one another, but not a return out of its own self to itself.

In itself, then, the unity of necessity and contingency is here at hand; absolute actuality is the name to give this unity.

C. Absolute Necessity

Real necessity is determinate necessity; formal necessity as yet carries neither content nor determinateness upon it. Wherein the determinateness of necessity consists is this, that necessity has its own negation, contingency, present in it. Such is the result it has yielded.

In its first simplicity, however, this determinateness is actuality; hence determinate necessity is, and immediately so, actual necessity. Such actuality, which itself as such is necessary, holding necessity within it as its being-in-itself, counts as absolute actuality; – actuality that admits of being no otherwise, its being-in-itself being not possibility at all but necessity itself.

Yet just because it stands posited as absolute — posited, that is, as being itself the unity of itself and of possibility — this actuality amounts to no more than an empty determination; or it is contingency. – That its determination is thus empty reduces it to a mere possibility, to something able just as readily to be otherwise and to be determined as merely possible. But that possibility is the absolute one; for it consists precisely in being open to determination as possibility no less than as actuality. Since it is this indifference towards its own self, it stands posited as an empty, contingent determination.

Real necessity, then, does not merely harbour contingency in itself: contingency also becomes in it; but such becoming, taken as externality, amounts to nothing beyond that necessity's own being-in-itself, since it is no more than an immediate being-determined. Nor is that all it is: it is necessity's own becoming – the presupposition necessity had turns out to be a positing that it does itself. For qua real necessity it is the sublatedness of actuality within possibility and inversely; – and since it is this simple turning over of either moment into the other, it is likewise their simple positive unity, each of them, as we saw, going together with itself alone within the other. On that showing it is actuality — but an actuality having being solely as this simple going together of form with itself. Its negative positing of those moments is accordingly the presupposing itself, the positing of itself as sublated, of immediacy, in other words.

Precisely therein, however, does this actuality get determined as something negative; out of the actuality that was real possibility it is a going together with itself; the new actuality therefore emerges only out of its own being-in-itself, out of the negation of itself. – Herewith it stands at once determined immediately as possibility too, as something mediated by way of its negation. Such possibility, though, comes immediately to nothing more than this mediating, wherein being-in-itself — the possibility itself, that is — and immediacy count equally as positedness. – Necessity it is, then, that sublates this positedness no less than it posits immediacy and being-in-itself, and that in the very same stroke determines such sublating as positedness. So it is it itself that determines itself into contingency; – repelling itself from itself in its being, having in that very repelling done nothing but return into itself, and having, in that return taken as its being, repelled itself from its own self.

Thus has form, in realizing itself, worked through every one of its differences and rendered itself transparent, and qua absolute necessity it is nothing but this simple identity of being in its negation or in essence with its own self. – Gone likewise is the difference between content and form itself; for that unity of possibility within actuality, and inversely, is form standing indifferent towards itself in its determinateness or positedness, the content-laden fact upon whose surface the form of necessity externally ran itself out. Taken so, however, it is the reflected identity of the pair of determinations, indifferent as against them, and thereby the form-determination of being-in-itself set over against positedness; and it is this possibility that makes up how limited the content of real necessity was. Absolute necessity, though, is the dissolving of that difference, and its content is just this difference as it penetrates itself within it.

Absolute necessity, then, is the truth into which possibility and actuality generally withdraw, and formal and real necessity along with them. – What has emerged is that it is being which, within its negation, within essence, refers itself to itself and is being. Simple immediacy or pure being it is, no less than simple reflection-into-itself or pure essence; it consists in the two of these being one and the same. – Whatever is necessary without qualification is for the sole reason that it is; beyond that neither condition nor ground belongs to it. – Equally, though, it is pure essence, its being being simple reflection-into-itself; it is, because it is. Qua reflection it does have ground and condition — save that itself is the only ground and condition it has. Being-in-itself belongs to it, but this being-in-itself of its is its immediacy, and its possibility its actuality. – It is, then, because it is; as the going together of being with its own self it is essence; yet since this simple thing is at the same time immediate simplicity, it is being.

Absolute necessity is in this way the reflection or form of the absolute: unity of being and essence, a simple immediacy that is absolute negativity. On the one hand, accordingly, the differences it has do not stand as determinations of reflection but as a manifoldness that is, as differentiated actuality wearing the shape of self-subsistent others set against each other. On the other hand, their reference being absolute identity, necessity is the absolute turning round of its actuality into its possibility, and of its possibility into actuality. – Hence absolute necessity is blind. On the first side, the differentiated terms, determined as actuality and as possibility, wear the shape of reflection-into-self as of being; each of the two is therefore a free actuality, of which neither shines in the other, neither prepared to display upon itself so much as a trace of its reference to the other; grounded within itself, each is in its own self what is necessary. Necessity qua essence lies shut up inside this being; so the contact these actualities have through one another looks like a mere empty externality, and the actuality of the one in the other is mere possibility, contingency. Being, after all, stands posited as absolutely necessary, as that mediation-with-itself which is the absolute negation of mediation-through-another, or as a being identical with being alone; an other having its actuality in being therefore counts as something unqualifiedly merely possible, as empty positedness.

This contingency, however, is rather the absolute necessity itself; it is the essence belonging to those free actualities that are necessary in themselves. That essence shuns the light, for in such actualities there is no shining, no reflex; grounded purely within themselves, shaped for themselves, they make themselves manifest to themselves alone, – for they are nothing but being. – Their essence, though, will break forth upon them and lay open what it is and what they are. The simplicity their being has, their resting upon themselves, is absolute negativity; it is the freedom their shineless immediacy possesses. This negative breaks forth upon them since being, through this its essence, is contradiction with its own self; – breaks forth, moreover, against such being in the shape of being, and so as the negation of those actualities, a negation absolutely diverse from the being they have, as their nothing, as an otherness confronting them with just as much freedom as their being has. – And yet in them it was not to be misread. In the configuration wherein they rest upon themselves they stand indifferent towards form, a content, and so differentiated actualities with a determinate content; and this content is the mark pressed upon them by necessity — which, absolute return into its own self within its determination, let them go free as absolutely actual — the mark it appeals to as witness of its right, the mark whereby they are now laid hold of and go under. This manifesting of what determinateness is in truth, namely negative reference to its own self, is a blind going-under into otherness; the shining that breaks forth, or reflection, occurs in the beings as becoming, as the transition of being into nothing. But being, conversely, is quite as much essence, and becoming is reflection or shining. Their externality is in that way their inwardness, their reference absolute identity; the transition of what is actual into what is possible, of being into nothing, is a going together with its own self; contingency is absolute necessity; and it is contingency itself that presupposes those first absolute actualities.

This identity of being within its negation with its own self — such identity is now substance. As in its negation, or as in contingency, it is this unity; and so it is substance as relation to its own self. What the blind transition of necessity amounts to is rather the absolute's own exposition, its own movement within itself — an absolute that in externalizing itself rather displays that very self.