c. The Disjunctive Syllogism

Just as the hypothetical syllogism falls on the whole under the schema of the second figure, U–S–P, so the disjunctive falls under the schema of the third figure of the formal syllogism: S–U–P. Its middle term, however, is universality filled out with the form; it has determined itself as the totality, as developed objective universality. The Medius Terminus is on that account universality no less than particularity and singularity. In the first respect it is, to begin with, the substantial identity of the genus, but, secondly, an identity into which particularity has been taken up, and taken up as its equal, hence a universal sphere holding within it the whole of its particularization, – the genus laid apart into its species; A which is both B and C and D at once. Yet particularization, being differentiation, is quite as much the either-or of B, C and D, negative unity, the reciprocal shutting out of the determinations. – This shutting out, further, is now not merely reciprocal, nor the determination merely a relative one; it is quite as essentially a determination that refers to itself; the particular as singularity, to the exclusion of the rest.

A is either B or C or D

A, however, is B

Therefore A is not C nor D.

or again:

A is either B or C or D

A, however, is not C nor D

Therefore it is B.

Not in the two premises alone is A subject, but in the conclusion as well. In the first it is a universal, and in its predicate the universal sphere particularized into the totality of its species; in the second it stands as something determinate, or as one species; in the conclusion it is posited as the shutting-out, singular determinateness. – Or else, already in the minor premise it stands as shutting-out singularity, and in the conclusion is affirmatively posited as the determinate thing which it is.

What thus comes forward on the whole as the mediated is the universality of A along with singularity. What mediates, though, is this same A, which is at once the universal sphere of its particularizations and something determined as singular. The truth of the hypothetical syllogism, namely the unity of what mediates and what is mediated, stands accordingly posited in the disjunctive syllogism, which for just that reason is quite as much no syllogism any more. For the middle term posited in it as the totality of the concept has both extremes itself, in their full determinateness. Set off against this middle term, the extremes are only a positedness to which no determinateness of its own accrues over against the middle any longer.

Considered once more with more determinate regard to the hypothetical syllogism: there was at hand in the latter a substantial identity, serving as the inner bond of necessity, and, distinguished from it, a negative unity – namely the activity or the form which carried one existence over into another. Throughout, the disjunctive syllogism stands in the determination of universality; its middle term is A as genus and as something completely determinate; by virtue of this unity that formerly inner content is posited too, while conversely the positedness or the form is not an outward negative unity confronting an indifferent existence, but is identical with that solid content. The concept's whole form-determination stands posited in its determinate difference and at once in the simple identity of the concept.

Herewith the formalism of syllogizing, and with it the subjectivity of syllogism and of concept generally, has sublated itself. What was formal or subjective consisted in this, that what mediates the extremes, the concept, is an abstract determination and thereby diverse from those extremes whose unity it is. In the syllogism's completion, on the contrary, where objective universality stands posited quite as much as the totality of the form-determinations, the difference between what mediates and what is mediated has dropped away. What is mediated is itself an essential moment of that which mediates it, and every moment is as the totality of the mediated.

Each determinateness of the concept is exhibited singly by the figures of the syllogism as the middle term, which is at the same time the concept as ought, as the demand that what mediates be its own totality. The various kinds of syllogism, on the other hand, exhibit the degrees of fulfilment or concretion of the middle term. Within the formal syllogism the middle is posited as totality only in this way, that every determinateness, each of them however singly, passes through the office of mediating. Within the syllogisms of reflection the middle is that unity which gathers the determinations of the extremes together externally. Within the syllogism of necessity it has determined itself into a unity at once developed and total and simple, and thereby the form of the syllogism, which consisted in the middle's difference from its extremes, has sublated itself.

Herewith the concept generally has been realized; more determinately, it has won a reality of the sort that is objectivity. The nearest reality lay in this, that the concept, being the inwardly negative unity, divides itself asunder, positing as judgment its determinations in a difference determinate and indifferent, and in the syllogism placing its own self opposite them. Being thus still what is inward to this its outwardness, the outwardness gets evened out with the inward unity through the course of the syllogisms; the various determinations return into this unity by way of the mediation wherein at first they are one only in a third, and thereby the outwardness exhibits the concept on its own self, a concept which herewith is quite as much no longer distinguished from it as an inward unity.

That determination of the concept, however, which has been looked at as reality, is inversely quite as much a positedness. For it is not in this result alone that the identity of the concept's inwardness and outwardness has exhibited itself as its truth; already in the judgment the concept's moments, even in their indifference towards one another, remain determinations which have their significance only in their reference. The syllogism is mediation, the concept complete in its positedness. Its movement is the sublating of this mediation, wherein nothing is in and for itself, but each thing only by means of an other. What results is on that account an immediacy that has come forth by the sublating of mediation, a being quite as much identical with the mediation and the concept that has brought itself forth out of and within its otherness. Such being, then, is a fact which is in and for itself, – objectivity.

Second Section. Objectivity

In the objective logic's first book abstract being was set forth as passing over into existence, yet quite as much as going back into essence. In the second, essence shows of itself that it determines itself into ground, steps thereby into concrete existence and realizes itself into substance, only to go back once more into the concept. Of the concept it has now first been shown that it determines itself into objectivity. That this last transition is, as regards its determination, the very same as what used to figure in metaphysics under the head of the syllogism from the concept, from the concept of God that is, upon his existence, or else under the title of the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God, is plain of itself. – Just as familiar is it that Descartes's loftiest thought, that God is that whose concept encloses his being within itself, once it had sunk down into the bad form of the formal syllogism, into the form namely of that very proof, at length gave way before the critique of reason and before the thought that existence will not let itself be picked out of the concept. A few matters bearing on this proof were shed light upon earlier already; in the first Part S. 47. f. where being vanished into its immediate opposite, non-being, and becoming showed itself as the truth of the two, notice was drawn to the confusion that arises when, with a determinate existence, it is not the being of it but its determinate content that is held fast and hence meant, when this determinate content, a hundred thalers for instance, is set beside another determinate content, the context of my perception for instance, my state of assets, and a difference is found in the matter according as the one content is added to the other or not, – as if what were then in question were the difference of being and non-being, or even the difference of being and the concept. Light was further shed in the same place (p. 64 f. and Part II, p. 289) upon the determination of a sum total of all realities that turns up in the ontological proof. – What the just-completed consideration of the concept bears upon, and the whole course through which the concept determines itself into objectivity, is precisely the essential subject matter of that proof, the interconnection of the concept and of existence. As negativity absolutely identical with itself, the concept is what determines its own self; it has been observed that already in resolving itself in singularity into judgment it posits itself as something real, as something that is; and this reality, still abstract, brings itself to completion in objectivity.

Should it now look as though the transition of the concept into objectivity were something else than the transition from the concept of God to his existence, then it would have to be borne in mind, on the one side, that in the logical course the determinate content, God, made no difference, and that the ontological proof would be no more than an application of this logical course to that particular content. On the other side, however, one must essentially call to mind the observation made above, that the subject first obtains determinateness and content in its predicate, whereas prior to the predicate, be it for feeling, intuition and representation whatever else it may, it is for comprehending cognition only a name; in the predicate, though, realization in general sets in together with determinateness. – The predicates have, however, to be grasped as still shut up within the concept, and hence as something subjective, with which one has not yet come out into existence; to that extent the realization of the concept in the judgment is, on the one hand, admittedly not yet completed. On the other hand, the bare determining of an object through predicates, where it is not at the same time the realization and objectifying of the concept, likewise stays something so subjective that it is not so much as the genuine knowledge and determination of the concept of the object; – subjective in the sense of abstract reflection and of representations left uncomprehended. – God as living, and still more as absolute spirit, comes to be known only in his doing. Early on was the human being directed to know him in his works; from these alone can there issue the determinations which are called his properties; and in these his being likewise lies contained. So it is that comprehending cognition of his working, that is, of himself, grasps God's concept within his being, and his being within his concept. Being for itself, or even existence, is a determination so poor and so limited that the difficulty of finding it in the concept can hardly have arisen from anything else than the failure to look at what being or existence itself might be. – Being, as the utterly abstract, immediate reference to itself, is nothing else than the abstract moment of the concept, a moment which is abstract universality, and which performs as well what is asked of being, namely to lie outside the concept; for however much it is a moment of the concept, quite as much is it the difference, or the concept's abstract judgment, in which the concept sets its own self facing itself. Even as formal, the concept holds being within it immediately in a truer and richer form, being as it is singularity, negativity referring itself to itself.

Insurmountable, though, the difficulty of finding being in the concept generally, and just so in the concept of God, does indeed become, if what is meant is a being such as must turn up within the context of outer experience or under the form of sensuous perception, in the way that the hundred thalers turn up in my state of assets, a being merely grasped with the hand and not with the spirit, essentially visible to the outer and not to the inner eye; – if the name of being, reality, truth is given to what things possess as sensuous, temporal and perishable. – Where a philosophizing does not raise itself above the senses in the matter of being, there goes with it that in the matter of the concept, too, it does not let go of merely abstract thought; and abstract thought stands facing being.

The habit of taking the concept only for something as one-sided as abstract thought is will already balk at conceding what was put forward just now, namely at regarding the transition from the concept of God to his being in the light of an application of the logical course, set out above, by which the concept objectifies itself. Yet if, as commonly happens, it is allowed that the logical, as the formal element, makes up the form for the cognition of any determinate content whatever, then that relation would at the least have to be granted, unless one is to halt outright at just this opposition of concept to objectivity, at an untrue concept and a reality every bit as untrue, taking these for something ultimate. – Only, in the exposition of the pure concept it was intimated further that this concept is the absolute, divine concept itself, so that in truth no relation of application would obtain, but rather that logical course would be the immediate exhibition of God's self-determination to being. On this point, however, it is to be observed that inasmuch as the concept is to be exhibited as the concept of God, it must be apprehended as it stands already taken up into the idea. That pure concept runs through the finite forms of judgment and of syllogism for this reason, that it is not yet posited as being in and for itself one with objectivity, but is grasped only as in the becoming towards it. Thus this objectivity too is not yet divine concrete existence, not yet the reality that shines in the idea. Objectivity nevertheless surpasses in richness and height the ontological proof's being or existence by exactly as much as the pure concept surpasses that metaphysical void, the sum total of all reality. – I put off to another occasion, though, the closer illumination of the manifold misunderstanding that logical formalism has carried into the ontological proof, as into the remaining so-called proofs of the existence of God, and likewise of the Kantian critique of them, and the leading back of the thoughts lying at their base to their worth and dignity by the restoring of their true sense.

Several forms of immediacy have already turned up, as has been recalled; but under different determinations. Within the sphere of being it is being itself and existence; within the sphere of essence, concrete existence and then actuality and substantiality; within the sphere of the concept, besides immediacy as abstract universality, henceforth objectivity. – These expressions may be employed as synonyms wherever exactness in philosophical distinctions of concepts is not what is wanted; those determinations have issued from the necessity of the concept; – being is the first immediacy generally, and existence the same immediacy together with the first determinateness. Concrete existence, taken with the thing, is that immediacy which issues out of ground, – out of essence's simple reflection as a mediation sublating itself. Actuality, though, and substantiality are the immediacy issuing from the sublated difference between concrete existence, still unessential as appearance, and its essentiality. Objectivity, finally, is the immediacy into which the concept determines itself by sublating its abstraction and mediation. – Philosophy is entitled to select, out of the language of common life, which is cut for the world of representations, such expressions as seem to come near to the determinations of the concept. There can be no question of establishing, for a word selected out of the language of common life, that in common life too the same concept is bound up with it for which philosophy employs it, for common life has no concepts but representations, and philosophy itself just is to know the concept of what is otherwise mere representation. It must therefore be enough if something roughly of their difference floats before representation in the case of those of its expressions that are used for philosophical determinations; as may well be so with the expressions in question, that one recognizes in them shadings of representation which stand nearer to the corresponding concepts. – One will perhaps be slower to grant that something may be without existing; but at any rate one will scarcely trade being, say as the judgment's copula, for the expression to exist, and say: this commodity exists dear, suitable and so forth, the money exists metal, or metallic, in place of: this commodity is dear, suitable and so forth, the money is metal¹⁶; being, however, and appearing, appearance and actuality, as also bare being as against actuality, are elsewhere well enough distinguished, and all these expressions still more so from objectivity. – Yet even were they used as synonyms, philosophy will in any case be at liberty to turn such an idle superfluity of language to account for its distinctions.

In the case of the apodictic judgment, where, as in the judgment's completion, the subject loses its determinateness over against the predicate, notice was drawn to the doubled sense of subjectivity springing from that source, namely the sense of the concept and equally that of the externality and contingency which otherwise stands facing the concept. Just so there appears for objectivity too the doubled sense of standing over against the self-subsistent concept, and yet also of being that which is in and for itself. Where the object in the first sense stands facing the I=I that subjective idealism pronounces the absolutely true, it is the world in its manifoldness and its immediate existence, a world with which the I, or the concept, engages only in endless struggle, so as to give, by negating this other that is null in itself, the actual truth of its self-sameness to the first certainty of itself. – In a less determinate sense it thus signifies an object generally for some interest or activity of the subject.

In the opposing sense, though, the objective signifies that which is in and for itself, what is free of limitation and of opposition. Rational principles, perfect works of art and so forth are called objective so far as they stand free, above every contingency. Even though principles that are rational, theoretical or ethical belong only to the subjective, to consciousness, what in them is in and for itself is called objective all the same; knowledge of the truth is located in knowing the object as it is qua object, free from any addition of subjective reflection, and right conduct in the observance of objective laws, laws which are without subjective origin and admit of no arbitrary will and no handling that would pervert their necessity.

At the present standpoint of our treatise objectivity has, in the first place, the sense of the being of the concept that is in and for itself, of the concept which has sublated the mediation posited in its self-determination into an immediate reference to its own self. This immediacy is thereby itself immediate and wholly shot through with the concept, just as the concept's totality is immediately identical with its being. But since the concept has further to bring forth quite as much the free being-for-itself of its subjectivity, there sets in a relation of the concept as purpose to objectivity, wherein the immediacy of the latter turns into what is negative towards the concept and what is to be determined by its activity, and so receives the other sense, that of being what is null in and for itself insofar as it stands facing the concept.

In the first place, then, objectivity is in its immediacy, whose moments, for the sake of the totality of all the moments, subsist in self-subsistent indifference as objects outside one another, and in their relation have the subjective unity of the concept only as an inner one or as an outer; mechanism. – Since, however, within it

Secondly that unity shows itself as the immanent law of the objects themselves, their relation becomes their peculiar difference grounded in their law, and a reference in which their determinate self-subsistence sublates itself; chemism.

Thirdly this essential unity of the objects is by that very fact posited as distinguished from their self-subsistence; it is the subjective concept, yet posited as being, in and for [its] own self, referred to objectivity, as purpose; teleology.

Since purpose is the concept posited as referring on its own self to objectivity and as sublating through itself its defect of being subjective, the purposiveness at first outer turns, through the realizing of purpose, into the inner one, and into the idea.

Chapter 1. Mechanism

Since objectivity is the totality of the concept that has gone back into its unity, there is thereby posited an immediate which in and for itself is that totality and is also posited as such, but in which the negative unity of the concept has not yet parted itself off from the immediacy of this totality; – or objectivity is not yet posited as judgment. Insofar as it has the concept immanent within it, the difference of the concept is present at it; but for the sake of the objective totality the differentiated terms are complete and self-subsistent objects, which accordingly, even in their reference, comport themselves towards one another only as self-subsistent and in every combination remain external to each other. – This is what makes up the character of mechanism, that whatever reference takes place among the combined terms, this reference is one alien to them, one that has nothing to do with their nature, and that even when it is tied up with the shine of a one it remains nothing more than composition, mixture, heap, and so forth. As with material mechanism, so too spiritual mechanism consists in this, that what is referred to one another in spirit remains external to each other and to spirit itself. A mechanical way of representing, a mechanical memory, habit, a mechanical mode of action all mean that spirit's own characteristic pervasion of, and presence in, whatever it takes in or performs is absent. Granted that a theoretical or practical mechanism of spirit is impossible apart from spirit's self-activity, apart from a drive and from consciousness, the freedom of individuality is nonetheless wanting there, and since that freedom does not come to view in it, such doing shows itself as something merely external.

A. The Mechanical Object

1. The object is, as has come out, the syllogism whose mediation has been evened out and which has therefore become immediate identity. It is on that account universal in and for itself; a universality, though, that does not mean some fund of properties held in common, but one that pervades particularity and is within particularity immediate singularity.

1. In the first place, then, the object does not part itself into matter and form, the former of which would be its self-subsistent universal, the latter its particular and its singular; a difference so abstract, between singularity and universality, is by the object's own concept not to be found at it; taken as matter, it has to be taken as matter shaped in its own self. Just as well it admits of being determined as a thing bearing properties, as a whole made up of parts, as substance carrying accidents, and by the remaining relations of reflection; only, those relations have one and all gone under already within the concept; hence properties do not belong to the object, nor do accidents, such things being detachable from a thing or from a substance; in the object, on the contrary, particularity stands reflected outright into the totality. Within the parts of a whole one does find the sort of self-subsistence that attaches to the object's own differences, yet those differences are at once and essentially objects in their own right, totalities, which do not, as parts do, bear this determinateness in contrast with the whole.

To begin with, then, the object is indeterminate in this respect, that no determinate opposition is to be found at it; for it is mediation gathered together into immediate identity. Insofar as the concept is essentially determined, the object carries determinateness at it as one that is indeed complete but for the rest indeterminate, that is, as a relationless manifoldness, which makes up a totality equally not further determined to begin with; sides, parts, that admit of being told apart at it belong to an external reflection. Hence that entirely indeterminate difference amounts to no more than the presence of several objects, each holding its own determinateness only as reflected into its universality, without shining outwards. – Since this indeterminate determinateness is essential to it, the object is within its own self a multiplicity of that kind, and so has to be looked upon as something composite, as an aggregate. – Out of atoms, though, it is not built up, atoms being no objects at all, since they are no totalities. Something more of an object would be the Leibnizian monad, inasmuch as it is a totality of the world's representation; but, locked into its intensive subjectivity, it is meant to be at any rate essentially one inside itself. Still, once determined as an exclusive one, the monad amounts to no more than a principle assumed by reflection. It is, however, an object partly to this extent, that what grounds its manifold representations — the developed, which is to say the posited, determinations of a totality merely in itself — lies outside it, and partly to this extent, that the monad is just as indifferent about making up an object together with others; so in truth it is nothing exclusive, nothing self-determined for itself.

2. Since the object is now the totality of being-determined, though on account of its indeterminateness and its immediacy not the negative unity of that being-determined, it stands towards the determinations as singular ones determined in and for themselves, just as these stand towards one another, indifferently. These are for that reason to be comprehended neither out of it nor out of one another; its totality is the form of the universal being-reflected of its manifoldness into a singularity at large that is in its own self not determined. The determinatenesses that it carries at it do indeed accrue to it; the form, however, that constitutes their difference and ties them together into one unity is external and indifferent; whether it be a mixture, or beyond that an order, some given arrangement of parts and sides, such combinations leave the terms so referred quite indifferent.

So the object, like any existence whatever, holds what determines its totality outside it, in other objects, and these in turn hold theirs outside them, and so forth into infinity. This going-out into infinity does have to be taken as returning into itself, and that return has to be represented as a totality, as a world — which is nothing else, though, than the universality shut up within itself by indeterminate singularity, a universe.

Since, then, the object in its determinateness is equally indifferent towards that determinateness, it points of its own self, for its being-determined, out beyond itself, again to objects, to which however it is in like manner indifferent to be determining. Nowhere, therefore, is a principle of self-determination present; – determinism, – the standpoint at which cognition stands so long as the object, as it has here at first come out, counts for it as the true, – supplies for each determination of the object the determination of some other object; but that other is no less indifferent, alike towards its own being-determined and towards its active comportment. – Determinism is therefore itself equally indeterminate in going on into infinity; it may halt wherever it pleases and be satisfied, because the object over to which it has passed is, as a formal totality, closed within itself and indifferent towards being determined through an other. For this reason the explaining of an object's determination, together with the advance of this representation undertaken to that end, remains a mere empty word, seeing that no self-determination is lodged in the further object towards which the advance is made.

3. Since now the determinateness of an object lies in another, no determinate diversity is present between them; the determinateness is merely doubled, once at the one and then at the other object, something simply and only identical, and the explanation or the comprehending is to that extent tautological. This tautology is the external, empty going to and fro; since the determinateness receives no peculiar differentiation from the objects that are indifferent towards it, and for that reason is only identical, there is present but One determinateness; and that it should be doubled gives expression precisely to this externality, to the nothingness of such a difference. Yet at one and the same time the objects stand self-subsistent over against each other; within that identity, accordingly, they remain outright external to one another. – What is present here, then, is the contradiction between the objects' perfect indifference towards one another and the identity of their determinateness, or their perfect externality in the identity of their determinateness. Thus this contradiction is the negative unity of a plurality of objects that within it simply repel one another, – the mechanical process.

B. The Mechanical Process

Should objects be regarded solely as totalities sealed off within themselves, no acting of one upon another is possible for them. In this determination they amount to the same as the monads, which precisely on that score were thought without any effect whatever upon each other. But just this is why the concept of a monad is a deficient reflection. For, to start with, the monad is a determinate representation of its totality which merely is in itself; as a certain degree of development and of the positedness of the world it represents, it is something determinate; and since it is the totality shut up within itself, it is indifferent towards this determinateness as well; the determinateness, accordingly, is not its own but one posited through another object. Secondly, it is an immediate at large, insofar as it is supposed to be a merely representing one; its reference to itself is on that account abstract universality, and through this it is an existence standing open to others. – To secure the freedom of substance it does not suffice to represent substance as a totality which is complete in itself, having nothing from without to receive. On the contrary, precisely this conceptless, merely representing reference to itself is a passivity towards an other. – Likewise the determinateness, whether it be grasped as the determinateness of something which is or of something representing, as a degree of a development proper to it and coming from within, is something external; – the degree that the development attains has its limit in an other. To defer the reciprocity of substances into a pre-established harmony says nothing more than that it is turned into a presupposition, that is, into something withdrawn from the concept. – The need to escape any acting of substances upon one another was grounded in the moment of absolute self-subsistence and of originariness which had been made the basis. But because the positedness, the degree of development, fails to correspond to this being-in-itself, precisely on that account it has its ground in an other.

The relation of substantiality was shown, in its own place, to pass over into that of causality. Here, however, that which is bears no longer the determination of substance but that of an object; the relation of causality has gone under within the concept; the originariness of the one substance over against the other showed itself to be a shine, and its efficacy a passing over into what stands opposed. Hence this relation has no objectivity. Insofar, then, as one of the objects gets posited under the form of subjective unity, as an efficient cause, that no longer counts for an originary determination but for something mediated; only by the mediation of a further object does the acting object possess this determination of its own. – Mechanism, since it belongs to the sphere of the concept, has posited at it that which turned out to be the truth of the causal relation; that the cause, supposed to be what is in and for itself, is essentially effect no less, positedness. Within mechanism, accordingly, the object's causality is straightway a non-originariness; the object is indifferent towards this determination of its own; that it should be cause is for it therefore something contingent. – So far one may well say that the substances' causality is merely something represented. But this very represented causality is mechanism, mechanism consisting in just this, that causality, as the identical determinateness of diverse substances and hence as the going-under of their self-subsistence within this identity, is a bare positedness; the objects are indifferent towards this unity and hold themselves up against it. Yet quite as much is this indifferent self-subsistence of theirs a bare positedness too; hence they are capable of mingling and of aggregating themselves, and, as an aggregate, of turning into One object. By this indifference alike towards their transition and towards their self-subsistence, substances are objects.

a. The Formal Mechanical Process

The mechanical process posits what lies contained in the concept of mechanism, and so at first a contradiction.

1. From the concept exhibited, the acting of objects upon one another follows in this way, that such acting is the positing of the identical reference of the objects. This consists in nothing but the granting of the form of universality to the determinateness that is effected; – which is COMMUNICATION, and communication proceeds without any passing over into what stands opposed. – Spiritual communication, going on as it anyway does within the element that constitutes the universal under the form of universality, is for itself an ideal reference, wherein a determinateness continues itself unclouded out of the one person into the other and universalizes itself without alteration of any sort, – much as a scent spreads at large through an atmosphere that offers no resistance. But in the communication between material objects too their determinateness makes itself, so to speak, broad in a manner equally ideal; personality is a hardness infinitely more intensive than any that objects have. The object's formal totality at large, indifferent as it is towards determinateness and hence no self-determination, renders the object undifferentiated from the other, and so renders the acting upon it, in the first instance, an unimpeded continuation of the one's determinateness within the other.

In the spiritual sphere it is now a content infinitely manifold that lends itself to communication, since, once taken up into intelligence, it acquires this form of universality in which it becomes something communicable. But the objective as such is what is universal not merely through the form but in and for itself, alike in the spiritual sphere and in the corporeal; against which the singularity of external objects, and of persons likewise, counts as something unessential, incapable of offering it resistance. Laws, customs, rational representations at large are in the spiritual sphere communicables of that kind, penetrating individuals in a manner they are not conscious of and making themselves good in them. In the corporeal sphere they are motion, heat, magnetism, electricity and suchlike – which, however much one may wish to represent them as stuffs or matters, have to be determined as imponderable agents, – agents lacking that in materiality which is the ground of their individualization.

2. If now, in the acting of objects upon one another, their identical universality gets posited first, then with equal necessity the other moment of the concept, particularity, is to be posited; the objects accordingly give proof of their self-subsistence as well, hold themselves apart as external to one another, and re-establish singularity within that universality. This re-establishing is reaction at large. To begin with it is not to be grasped as a bare sublating of the action together with the determinateness communicated; what has been communicated is, as universal, positively there in the particular objects and particularizes itself only at their diversity. To that extent, then, what has been communicated stays what it is; it merely distributes itself over the objects, or gets determined through their particularity. – In its other, the effect, the cause goes lost, and the activity of the causal substance goes lost in its efficacy; the acting object, by contrast, becomes only a universal; its efficacy is at first no forfeiting of its determinateness but a particularization, whereby the object, which at first was that whole determinateness singular at it, now becomes one kind of it, and the determinateness is only thereby posited as a universal. The two, the raising of the singular determinateness into universality in communication, and the particularizing of it, or its lowering, which was only One, into a kind, in distribution, are one and the same.

Reaction is now equal to action. – This shows itself at first in such a way that the other object has taken the whole universal up into itself and is now in that way active over against the first. Its reaction, then, coincides with the action, a reciprocal repelling of the impact. Secondly, what has been communicated is the objective; it therefore remains substantial determination of the objects, given their presupposed diversity; the universal accordingly specifies itself in them at the same time, and each object accordingly does not merely render back the whole action, but has its own specific share. But thirdly, reaction is wholly negative action to this extent, that each object, thanks to the elasticity of its self-subsistence, thrusts out the positedness of an other lodged within it and keeps hold of its reference to itself. That specific particularity which the communicated determinateness has in the objects, called a kind just now, goes back to singularity, and the object makes good its externality against the communicated universality. By this the action passes over into rest. It proves to be an alteration merely superficial and transient at the object's indifferent totality closed within itself.

3. This going back constitutes the product of the mechanical process. Immediately the object stands presupposed as singular, further as particular over against others, thirdly however as indifferent towards its own particularity, as universal. The product is that totality of the concept which was presupposed, now as one that is posited. The conclusion it is, in which the communicated universal has been joined together with singularity through the object's particularity; at the same time, however, in the rest the mediation is posited as one that has sublated itself, or so that the product is indifferent towards this becoming-determined of its own, and the determinateness it has received is external at it.

So the product is nothing other than the object as it first goes into the process. Yet at the same time only through this movement is it determined; the mechanical object is object at all only as product, because what it is comes to be at it only through the mediation of an other. Thus as product it is what it was to be in and for [itself], something composite, something mixed, a certain order and arrangement of parts, at large something whose determinateness is no self-determination but a posited one.

On the other side, the result of the mechanical process is just as much not at hand already in advance of the process itself; its end lies not in its beginning, as happens with purpose. The product is a determinateness at the object as one externally posited. By the concept, then, this product is indeed the same as what the object already is from the outset. In the beginning, however, that external determinateness is not yet there as something posited. To that extent the result is something wholly other than the object's first existence, and is for the object something simply contingent.

b. The Real Mechanical Process

Into rest the mechanical process passes over. For the determinateness which the object gains through it is only an external one. This rest is for the object something just as external, since rest is the determinateness set over against the object's efficacy, while either of the two leaves the object indifferent; rest may therefore just as well be looked upon as brought about by an external cause, as indifferent as it was to the object to be something that acts.

Since now, further, the determinateness is something posited, and the concept of the object has travelled back through the mediation to itself, the object carries determinateness at it as one reflected into itself. The objects, and the mechanical process itself, have therefore from now on a more closely determined relation within that process. Merely diverse they are not; they stand determinately differentiated from each other. The result of the formal process, determinationless rest on the one side, is on the other side, thanks to the determinateness reflected into itself, the distribution of the opposition that the object carries at it at large among several objects that comport themselves mechanically towards each other. The object, which on the one side is the determinationless, behaving unelastically and non-self-subsistently, possesses on the other side a self-subsistence impenetrable to others. The objects now also carry towards each other this more determinate opposition of self-subsistent singularity and non-self-subsistent universality. – The closer difference may be grasped as a merely quantitative one, of the differing magnitude of mass in the corporeal sphere, or of intensity, or in a variety of other ways. In general, however, it is not to be kept fixed in that abstraction alone; as objects the two are also positive self-subsistent ones.

The first moment of this real process is now, as before, communication. By the stronger the weaker can be seized and pervaded only insofar as the weaker takes the stronger up and makes up One sphere along with it. As in the material sphere the weak is safe against what is disproportionately strong (a linen sheet hanging loose in the air is not shot through by a musket ball; a feeble organic receptivity is assailed less by strong stimulants than by weak ones), so a wholly feeble spirit is more secure against a strong one than is a spirit that stands closer to it; imagine something altogether stupid and ignoble, and neither high understanding nor nobility can make any impression upon it; the sole consistent means against reason is to refuse all involvement with it. – Insofar as the non-self-subsistent is unable to go together with the self-subsistent, so that no communication is possible between the two, neither can the latter offer any resistance, that is, it cannot specify for itself the universal communicated. – Did they not stand within One sphere, an infinite judgment would be their reference to each other, and between them no process at all could occur.

Resistance is the closer moment in the one object's being overpowered by the other, in that it is the moment with which the distribution of the communicated universal begins, and with it the positing of self-referring negativity, of the singularity that is to be restored. Resistance gets overpowered insofar as its determinateness proves not adequate to that communicated universal which the object has taken up and which is meant to singularize itself within the object. The relative non-self-subsistence of that resistance shows itself in this, that its singularity has not the capacity for what has been communicated and is therefore burst apart by it, since it cannot set itself up as subject at this universal, cannot make the universal into its predicate. – Only on this second side is violence against an object something alien to it. Power turns into violence through this, that as an objective universality it stands identical with the object's nature, while its determinateness or negativity is not the object's own negative reflection into itself, by which the object is a singular. Insofar as the object's negativity is not reflected into itself at the power, and the power is no reference of the object to itself, power counts towards it as merely abstract negativity, manifesting itself as a going under.

What is called fate is power in the shape of objective universality and of violence against the object; – a concept falling within mechanism insofar as fate is termed blind, that is, insofar as its objective universality goes uncognized by the subject in the subject's own specific ownness. – To offer a few remarks on this: the fate of what lives is at large the genus, manifesting itself through the perishability of living individuals, who in their actual singularity do not have it as genus. Merely living natures, being mere objects, have no fate, any more than the remaining things of a lower stage; whatever befalls them is a contingency; but in their concept as objects they are external to themselves; hence the alien power of fate is nothing whatever except their own immediate nature, is externality and contingency itself. Fate in the proper sense belongs to self-consciousness alone; for self-consciousness, being free, is on that account, in the singularity of the I that is its own, outright in and for itself, and can set itself over against its objective universality and estrange itself from it. But by this very separation it stirs up against itself the mechanical relation of a fate. If such a fate is to be able to hold violence over it, then, it must have conferred on itself one determinateness or another against the essential universality, must have carried out a deed. Herewith it has made itself into something particular, and this existence, as abstract universality, is at once the open side for the communication of that essence which has been estranged from it; at this side it gets torn into the process. Blameless is the people that has done no deed; wrapped in the objective, ethical universality and dissolved therein, it lacks that individuality which moves what is unmoved, which confers on itself a determinateness directed outwards and an abstract universality cut off from the objective one, whereby, however, the subject too becomes something divested of its essence, an object, and has entered into the relation of externality towards its own nature, the relation of mechanism.

c. The Product of the Mechanical Process

What formal mechanism yields as its product is the object at large, an indifferent totality at which determinateness stands as something posited. Since through this the object has stepped into the process as something determinate, the outcome is, on the one side, in the going-under of that determinateness, rest, the object's original formalism, namely the negativity of that being-determined-for-itself of its own. On the other side, however, it is the sublating of being-determined, as the positive reflection of that being-determined into itself, determinateness gone back within itself, in other words the posited totality of the concept; the genuine singularity of the object. The object, indeterminately universal to begin with, then particular, now stands determined as objectively singular; so that in this the shine of singularity, which is nothing but a self-subsistence setting itself over against substantial universality, has been sublated.

This reflection into itself is now, as it has come out, the objective being-one of the objects, which is individual self-subsistence, – the centre. Secondly, negativity's reflection is that universality which is no fate confronting determinateness but one determined within itself, a rational fate, – a universality that particularizes itself in its own self, the quiet difference holding fast amid the non-self-subsistent particularity of the objects and amid their process, the law. This result is the truth, and hence also the foundation, of the mechanical process.

C. Absolute Mechanism

a. The Centre

First, the object's empty manifoldness now stands gathered into objective singularity, into the simple self-determining central point. Second, insofar as the object, being immediate totality, keeps its indifference towards determinateness, that determinateness is at hand in it also as unessential, or as an outside-one-another of many objects. The first-named determinateness, the essential one, by contrast makes up the real middle term among the many objects that work mechanically upon each other — the term by which they are conjoined in and for itself — and it is the objective universality belonging to them. In the relation of communication universality showed itself at first as something at hand only through positing; as objective, however, it is that essence of the objects which permeates them and is immanent in them.

Within the material world this role falls to the central body, which is the genus, yet the individual universality, of the singular objects and of their mechanical process. Towards each other the unessential singular bodies behave by thrust and pressure; no such relation holds between them and the central body that is their essence, for externality has ceased to make up what fundamentally determines them. Rather, their identity with it is rest — namely, being in their centre — and this unity is their concept existing in and for itself. Yet it stays a mere ought, for the objects' externality, still posited alongside, fails to answer to that unity. Hence the striving they have towards the centre is their absolute universality, one not posited by way of communication; what it makes up is the genuine rest, itself concrete and not laid down from without, the rest into which the process of non-self-subsistence has to withdraw. – On this account it is an empty abstraction when mechanics supposes that a body put into motion would carry on in a straight line without end unless external resistance robbed it of its motion. Friction, under whatever shape resistance may appear, is merely centrality showing itself; centrality is what absolutely restores the body to it; for whatever the moving body rubs against owes the strength of a resistance solely to its oneness with the centre. – Where spirit is concerned, both the centre and oneness with it take on loftier shapes; yet even there the fundamental determination has to be made up by the unity of the concept and by its reality, which here is at first mechanical centrality.

To that extent the central body has stopped being a mere object, in which determinateness counts as something unessential; for what it now has is not only the being-in-itself of objective totality but its being-for-itself as well. On that account one may look upon it as an individual. Essentially, its determinateness differs from any mere order or arrangement and external connectedness of parts; being a determinateness in and for itself, it is immanent form, a principle that determines itself, one to which the objects adhere and by which they are joined into a genuine one.

So taken, however, this central individual is still only a middle term lacking genuine extremes; but as the negative unity of the total concept it sunders itself into extremes. Or: through the concept's withdrawal into itself, the objects that were previously non-self-subsistent and outside one another likewise get determined as individuals; the central body's identity with itself, still a striving, carries externality with it, and to that externality, taken up as it is into the body's objective singularity, this singularity is imparted. Owing to a centrality of their own, they are, once placed outside that first centre, themselves centres for whatever objects lack self-subsistence. Those second centres, together with the objects lacking self-subsistence, stand conjoined by that absolute middle term.

Yet the relative central individuals also make up on their own account the middle term of a second syllogism: on one side this term falls under a higher extreme, namely the objective universality and power of the absolute centre, while on the other it brings beneath itself the objects without self-subsistence, whose surface or formal singularization it carries. – Even these objects without self-subsistence are the middle term of a third syllogism, the formal one; for they are the bond tying absolute to relative central individuality, in that the latter has in them its externality, by which its reference to itself is at once a striving after an absolute central point. What the formal objects have as their essence is the selfsame gravity of the central body immediately theirs, a body in which they adhere as in their subject and their extreme of singularity; by way of the externality that they make up, this body falls under the absolute central body; they are, accordingly, particularity's formal middle term. – The absolute individual, though, is the objectively universal middle term, conjoining and holding together the relative individual's being-within-itself with its externality. – In the same way the government, the citizen individuals, and the needs, or the external life, of the singulars are three terms of which each is the middle of the other two. Government is the absolute centre wherein the extreme of the singulars gets conjoined with their external subsistence; and just as much the singulars are the middle that puts that universal individual into external concrete existence and carries over its ethical essence into the extreme of actuality. As for the third syllogism, it is the formal one, the syllogism of shine, according to which the singulars are attached to this universal absolute individuality by their needs and by external existence; being the merely subjective syllogism, it goes over into the other two and has its truth there.

Free mechanism is made up by this totality, whose moments are themselves the concept's complete relations, the syllogisms, and within which each of the three distinguished objects runs through the determination of middle term and of extremes. Within it, what the distinguished objects have as their fundamental determination is objective universality — the gravity that permeates and keeps itself selfsame throughout particularization. References such as pressure, thrust, attraction and the like, and likewise aggregations or minglings, fall to that relation of externality on which the third of the assembled syllogisms rests. Order, which is only the objects' external determinateness, has gone over into determination that is immanent and objective; and this determination is law.

b. Law

Law brings out the more determinate difference between objectivity's ideal reality and its external reality. Being the immediate totality of the concept, the object does not yet hold externality apart from the concept, which is not posited for itself. Having gone into itself by way of the process, it now displays the opposition of simple centrality to an externality that stands determined as externality, in other words that is posited as something not in and for itself. Because of its reference to externality, that identical or ideal side of individuality amounts to an ought; it is the self-determining unity of the concept, a unity determined in and for itself, and that external reality falls short of it, so that the unity reaches no further than striving. Yet, taken in and for itself, individuality is the concrete principle belonging to negative unity, and as such is itself totality — a unity which sunders into the determinate differences of the concept while remaining in a universality equal to itself; the central point, accordingly, is one widened by difference inside its own pure ideality. – Answering to the concept, this reality is the ideal one and is thereby marked off from the merely striving reality; difference, which at first amounts to a plurality of objects, is here taken in its essentiality and gathered into pure universality. That real ideality is the soul of the objective totality just developed, the system's identity determined in and for itself.

In its totality, therefore, objective being in and for itself comes out more determinately as the centre's negative unity, which parts itself into subjective individuality and external objectivity, keeps the one within the other and determines it in ideal difference. Self-determining, and absolutely carrying external objectivity back into ideality, this unity is a principle of self-movement; and the determinateness of what so ensouls — a determinateness which is the concept's own difference — is law. – What dead mechanism amounted to was the mechanical process we examined, a process of objects that looked immediately self-subsistent yet on that very account lack self-subsistence in truth and carry their centre elsewhere than in themselves; such a process, since it passes over into rest, shows either contingency together with indeterminate inequality, or else formal uniformity. Uniformity of that sort does count as a rule, though not as a law. A law belongs to free mechanism alone — the determination proper to pure individuality, or of the concept that is for itself; being difference within itself, law is an imperishable wellspring of motion that kindles from itself; and, referring in the ideality of its difference to nothing but itself, it is free necessity.

c. Transition of Mechanism

This soul, however, is still sunk in its body; the concept of objective totality, now determinate but inward, is free necessity in such a way that law has not yet stepped over against its object; it is concrete centrality as universality spread immediately through its own objectivity. That ideality, then, does not have the objects themselves for its determinate difference; the objects are self-subsistent individuals of the totality, or, should we look back to the formal stage, external objects that are not individual at all. Immanent in them law certainly is, constituting their nature and their power; but its difference remains shut up within its ideality, and the objects are not themselves parted according to law's ideal differentiation. But it is in ideal centrality and its law alone that the object has its essential self-subsistence; hence it has no force with which to withstand the concept's judgment and to keep itself in abstract, indeterminate self-subsistence and seclusion. Its existence, owing to the ideal difference that dwells within it, is a determinateness which the concept has posited. In this way its non-self-subsistence is no longer merely a striving towards the central point — over against which, just because its reference is only a striving, it still bears the appearance of a self-subsistent external object — but is rather a striving towards the object determinately opposed to it; and correspondingly the centre has itself fallen apart, its negative unity having passed over into objectified opposition. Centrality is therefore now the reference of these objectivities, negative towards one another and in tension. Free mechanism thus determines itself into chemism.

Chapter 2. Chemism

What chemism makes up, in the entirety of objectivity, is the moment of judgment; the moment of difference grown objective, and of process. Because determinateness and positedness are already there at its start, while the chemical object is objective totality besides, what follows in it runs simply, being fully determined by the presupposition it carries.

A. The Chemical Object

What marks off the chemical object from the mechanical one is that the latter is a totality standing indifferent towards determinateness, whereas with the chemical object determinateness, and with it the reference to another together with the manner of that reference, belongs to its very nature. – Such determinateness is essentially particularization as well, that is, it is received into universality; so it is principle – the universal determinateness, not that of the one singular object merely, but that of the other too. Hence there now becomes distinguishable in it, on the one hand its concept as the inner totality of both determinatenesses, and on the other the determinateness constituting the singular object's nature within its externality and concrete existence. Being in this way the whole concept in itself, it carries within it the necessity and the drive to sublate its opposed, one-sided subsistence and to make itself in existence into the real whole that it is according to its concept.

As regards the expression chemism for the relation of difference in objectivity as it has come out here, it may be remarked in passing that the word is not to be taken as though this relation presented itself only in that form of elementary nature which goes by the name of chemism proper. The meteorological relation already has to be viewed as a process whose parties have the nature of physical rather than of chemical elements. In living things the relation of the sexes falls under this schema; and for spiritual relations too — love, friendship, and so forth — it supplies the formal groundwork.

Considered more nearly, the chemical object is at the outset, as a self-subsistent totality in general, something reflected inwardly, distinguished thereby from its outward reflectedness – an indifferent base, an individual whose determination as differentiated has not yet occurred; a person likewise is such a base, one that so far refers merely to itself. The immanent determinateness constituting its difference is, first, inwardly reflected in this manner: the taking back of the outward reference amounts to no more than formal abstract universality, and the outward reference is on that account a determination of the immediacy and concrete existence belonging to the object. Viewed from that side, no return in its own self to individual totality takes place; rather, the negative unity finds the two moments of its opposition in a pair of particular objects. One chemical object is thus unintelligible from itself alone, the being of the one amounting to the being of an other. – Second, though, determinateness is inwardly reflected in absolute fashion and constitutes the concrete moment belonging to the individual concept of the whole, a concept which for the particular object is its universal essence, its real genus. Standing thus as the contradiction between its immediate positedness and the individual concept immanent in it, the chemical object is a striving: to sublate the determinateness attaching to its existence and to procure concrete existence for the concept's objective totality. Non-self-subsistent it therefore is too, yet after such a fashion that its very nature puts it in tension against this, so that it starts the process in self-determining fashion.

B. The Process

1. Its start is made from the presupposition that objects standing in tension — tense as they are against themselves — are precisely thereby tense in the first instance towards one another; – a relation which one calls their affinity. Each, in virtue of its concept, contradicts the one-sidedness that its own concrete existence has and hence strives to sublate it, and posited immediately therein is a striving that the other's one-sidedness be sublated as well, and that by such reciprocal levelling and joining reality be posited conformably to the concept, which contains both moments.

Since each is posited as self-contradicting and self-sublating within its own self, what holds the two in separation from one another and from their reciprocal completion is nothing but external force. First, then, the middle term by which these extremes now become conjoined is the nature of both that is in itself, the whole concept keeping the pair within it. Second, though, standing as they do over against one another in concrete existence, their absolute unity is besides an element that is still formal and exists as something distinguished from them; – the element of communication, in which the two come into outward community. The real difference falling to the extremes, this middle amounts merely to abstract neutrality, to the real possibility of those extremes; – it is, so to speak, the theoretical element in which chemical objects, their process and its result concretely exist; – in the corporeal realm the office of this medium is discharged by water; in the spiritual realm, so far as an analogue of such a relation is found there, one must look for it in the sign generally, and more nearly in language.

Taken as bare communication in this element, the objects' relation is on one side a quiet convergence, on the other quite as much a negative comportment, for the concrete concept that constitutes their nature, once posited into reality in the communication, brings the real differences among the objects down to its own unity. With that, the self-subsistent determinateness they previously had is sublated in the union conformable to the concept — one and the same concept in both — and their opposition and tension are thereby blunted; whereby striving reaches, in this reciprocal completion, the quiet neutrality that belongs to it.

So extinguished is the process; the contradiction of concept and reality having been settled, the syllogism's extremes no longer hold their opposition and have thus stopped being extremes over against each other and over against the middle. A neutral thing is the product — one, that is, in which the ingredients, which can no longer bear the name of objects, retain neither their tension nor those properties that accrued to them while in tension, but in which the capacity for their earlier self-subsistence and tension has been kept. For the neutral's negative unity sets out from a presupposed difference; with the chemical object, determinateness coincides with objectivity, being original to it. By the process we have examined that difference is so far sublated only immediately, so that determinateness is not yet absolutely reflected into itself, and the process yields no more than a formal unity as its product.

2. Granted, the opposition's tension and the negative unity as the process's activity are now extinguished in this product. Yet this unity, essential as it is to the concept and having itself come at the same time into concrete existence, remains at hand, though it has now stepped outside the neutral object. Of itself the process does not kindle anew, seeing that difference was for it only a presupposition and was not something it posited. – This negativity, self-subsistent outside the object — the concrete existence of abstract singularity, a singularity whose being-for-itself finds its reality in the indifferent object — now stands in tension within itself against its own abstraction, an activity inwardly unquiet which turns consumingly outwards. Immediately it refers to the object, in whose quiet neutrality lies the real possibility of the opposition it carries; and that object is henceforth the middle of a neutrality formerly bare formality, now grown concrete and determinate in its own self.

More precisely, the immediate reference of the extreme of negative unity to the object lies in the object's being determined by it and thereby sundered. One may at first take this sundering for the establishing of that opposition among objects in tension with which chemism made its start. This determination, however, is not what makes up the syllogism's other extreme; it belongs rather to the immediate reference borne by the differentiating principle towards the middle, wherein such a principle furnishes itself with immediate reality; it is the determinateness which in a disjunctive syllogism attaches to the middle over and above the middle's being the object's universal nature, and by which that object counts as objective universality no less than as determinate particularity. Over against the outer self-subsistent extreme of singularity stands the other extreme of the syllogism; hence it is the no less self-subsistent extreme of universality; and the sundering that the middle's real neutrality thereby undergoes in it consists in its being decomposed into moments that are not differentiated against each other but indifferent. So these moments are, on one side, the abstract and indifferent base, on the other the principle that animates that base, a principle which by being severed from the base likewise acquires the form of indifferent objectivity.

Chemism's totality is this disjunctive syllogism, in which one and the same objective whole gets exhibited as the self-subsistent negative unity, then, in the middle, as real unity, – and finally as chemical reality broken up into its abstract moments. In these last, determinateness has arrived at its reflection-into-itself not in an other, as happened in the neutral, but has withdrawn in itself into its abstraction, an originally determinate element.

3. Freed thereby from chemical tension are these elementary objects; in them the real process has posited the original ground of the very presupposition from which chemism set out. Insofar, further, as their inward determinateness taken as such is on one side essentially the contradiction between their simple indifferent subsistence and themselves qua determinateness, and is the outward drive that sunders itself and lays tension upon their object and upon an other in order to have one towards which it can bear itself as differentiated, in which it can neutralize itself and confer existent reality upon its simple determinateness — chemism has with that reverted to its beginning, where objects tensed against one another look for each other and then, through a formal external middle, combine into a neutral. On the other side, by such reversion into its concept chemism sublates itself and has crossed over into a higher sphere.

C. Transition of Chemism

Even ordinary chemistry supplies instances of chemical alteration where a body, for instance, allots a higher oxidation to one portion of its mass and so brings a further portion down to a lower degree of it, at which lower degree it first becomes capable of a neutral combination with another differentiated body brought into contact with it — a combination to which, at that first immediate degree, it would have been unreceptive. What takes place here is this: the object relates to another not according to some immediate, one-sided determinateness but, following the inner totality of an original relation, it posits that presupposition which a real reference demands of it, thereby furnishing itself with a middle whereby its concept is conjoined with its reality; here we have singularity that is determined in and for itself, the concrete concept serving as principle of disjunction into extremes, and the reunion of those extremes is the work of the selfsame negative principle, which by that route returns to its first determination — returns, though, objectified.

Of indifferent objectivity, and of determinateness in its externality, chemism is itself the first negation; hence the immediate self-subsistence of the object, and externality with it, still cling to it. On its own account it is thus not yet the totality of self-determination that comes forth out of it and in which it rather sublates itself. – Its totality is made up by the three syllogisms which have resulted: formal neutrality serves the first as its middle and the objects in tension as its extremes; for the second, the middle is what the first produced, namely real neutrality, while its extremes are the sundering activity and the indifferent element that this activity yields; the third, by contrast, is the concept in the course of realizing itself, laying down for itself the presupposition upon which the process of that realization depends, – a syllogism whose essence is the universal. Because of the immediacy and externality within whose determination chemical objectivity lies, these syllogisms do still fall asunder. In its own product the first process expires — the product being the neutrality of the objects in tension — and only a differentiation coming to it from outside can rouse it once more; being conditioned by an immediate presupposition, it spends itself upon that. – Likewise the driving out of the differentiated extremes from the neutral, and equally their breaking down into abstract elements, has to start from conditions accruing externally and from stimulations of the activity. Yet insofar as both essential moments of the process — neutralizing on one hand, parting and reduction on the other — are combined within a single and identical process, and the joining and blunting of the tensed extremes is at the same time a severance into such extremes, they do, owing to the externality still underlying everything, constitute two different sides; the extremes driven out in the same process are objects or materials other than those which come together in it; and insofar as the former emerge from it differentiated afresh, they have to turn outwards; their renewed neutralizing is not the process that occurred in the first case but another.

These various processes, however, which have proved necessary, are so many steps whereby externality and being-conditioned get sublated, and from which the concept comes forth as a totality determined in and for itself, one not conditioned by anything external. What the first sublates is the externality that the differentiated extremes, which constitute the whole reality, have against each other — or the difference between the determinate concept in itself and its determinateness as existent; in the second, what gets sublated is the externality of the real unity, the joining taken as merely neutral; – more nearly, formal activity sublates itself to begin with in bases just as formal, in indifferent determinatenesses whose inner concept is by now the absolute activity gone into itself and realizing itself in its own self, that is, an activity that posits determinate differences inside itself and, by such mediation, constitutes itself as real unity, – a mediation, therefore, belonging to the concept as its own, being its self-determination and, with regard to the concept's reflection out of it into itself, an immanent presupposing. As for the third syllogism, it is on one hand the restoration of the processes gone before, while on the other it sublates the final moment of indifferent bases too, – that quite abstract external immediacy which thus turns into a moment proper to the concept's mediating of itself by itself. Having thus sublated every moment of its objective existence as external and set them within its simple unity, the concept stands completely liberated from objective externality, to which it now relates only as to an unessential reality; and this objective, free concept is purpose.

Chapter 3. Teleology

Wherever purposiveness is perceived, an understanding is taken to be its originator, so that for purpose one demands the concept's own free concrete existence. Teleology is set over against mechanism above all, since in mechanism the determinateness posited at the object is essentially an external one, a determinateness at which no self-determination shows itself. The opposition between Causis efficientibus and Causis finalibus, between merely efficient and final causes, refers back to that same difference, and to it, taken in a concrete shape, there also reverts the inquiry whether the world's absolute essence should be grasped as a blind mechanism of nature or instead as an understanding determining itself by purposes. The antinomy of fatalism together with determinism, and of freedom, likewise bears on the opposition between mechanism and teleology; for the free is the concept in its concrete existence.

The metaphysics of former times handled these concepts as it handled its others; partly it presupposed a representation of the world and laboured to show that this or that concept suits it while the opposite one falls short, since the world admits of no explanation from it; partly it left uninvestigated, in doing so, the concept of mechanical cause and of purpose, the question which of them has truth in and for itself. Suppose that has been settled on its own account: then the objective world may offer up mechanical causes and final causes as it will; its concrete existence is no standard of the true, and it is rather the true that yields the criterion for which of these concrete existences is the world's genuine one. Just as the subjective understanding displays errors at itself as well, so the objective world displays those sides and levels of truth too which taken by themselves are still one-sided, incomplete, and no more than relations of appearance. Where mechanism and purposiveness stand opposed, precisely on that account they cannot be treated as indifferent ones, each of them a correct concept on its own and holding just as good as the other, with the whole issue turning merely on where the one or the other admits of application. That the two should count equally rests on nothing more than that they are, which is to say, that we have the two of them. Yet their being opposed makes the first, unavoidable question this: which of the two is the true one; while the higher and genuinely pressing question is whether a third is not their truth, or whether the one is the truth of the other. – The purpose-reference, however, has shown itself to be the truth of mechanism. – Whatever presented itself as chemism is taken together with mechanism to this extent, that purpose is the concept in free concrete existence and has confronting it, quite generally, the concept's unfreedom, its submergedness in externality; the two, mechanism as well as chemism, are on that account gathered under natural necessity, since in the first the concept has no concrete existence at the object, the object as mechanical harbouring no self-determination, whereas in the second the concept either has a strained, one-sided concrete existence, or else, insofar as it steps forward as the unity that strains the neutral object apart into the extremes, is external to its own self insofar as it sublates this separation.

The more closely the teleological principle was bound up with the concept of an extramundane understanding, and the more it was favoured on that score by piety, the further it seemed to withdraw from genuine inquiry into nature, an inquiry that means to cognize nature's properties not as something alien to it but as immanent determinatenesses, and that grants the title of a comprehending to no other cognizing. Purpose being the concept itself in its concrete existence, it may well strike one as strange that cognizing objects out of their concept should look rather like an illegitimate step across into a heterogeneous element, while mechanism, for which an object's determinateness counts as one posited at the object from outside and through an other, ranks as the more immanent outlook by comparison with teleology. Mechanism, at any rate the ordinary unfree sort, and chemism along with it, does of course have to count as an immanent principle to this extent, that the determining external is itself once more only such an object, an externally determined one to which such becoming-determined is a matter of indifference, or that in chemism the other object is a chemically determined one in its turn, so that quite generally some essential moment of the totality is always lodged in an outer term. Such principles accordingly come to a halt inside one and the same natural shape of finitude; and yet, unwilling as they are to reach out beyond the finite, and leading as they do for appearances only to finite causes that themselves call for a further step, they nevertheless broaden out at the same time, partly into a formal totality within the concept of force, of cause and of like determinations of reflection, which are meant to designate an originariness, and partly through the abstract universality of an all of the forces, a whole made up of reciprocal causes. That mechanism is itself a striving after totality shows in this, that it undertakes to grasp nature for itself as a whole needing nothing else for its concept, – a totality not to be met with in purpose, nor in the extramundane understanding bound up with purpose.

What purposiveness now displays at the outset is something higher generally; an understanding which determines the manifoldness of objects externally, by means of a unity that is in and for itself, with the result that the objects' indifferent determinatenesses come to be essential through this reference. In mechanism they come to be so through the bare form of necessity, and here their content is a matter of indifference, for they are meant to stay external, and only the understanding as such is to be satisfied, by cognizing its own interconnection, the abstract identity. In teleology, by contrast, the content acquires weight, since teleology presupposes a concept, something determined in and for itself and therefore self-determining, and has consequently marked off, from the reference of the differences and of their determination through one another, from the form, namely the unity reflected into itself, something determined in and for itself and hence a content. Yet if that content is otherwise a finite and trifling one, it stands in contradiction with what it ought to be, since purpose is, according [to] its form, a totality infinite within itself; – all the more so when the acting that works by purposes is taken to be absolute will and understanding. Teleology has laid itself so wide open to the charge of silliness because the purposes it exhibited are, as chance would have it, now weightier and now utterly slight, and the purpose-reference among objects was bound to look time and again like mere play, this reference showing itself as so external and hence as contingent. Mechanism for its part leaves the determinatenesses of objects, so far as their tenor goes, with the worth of contingencies, towards which the object is indifferent and which are to hold no higher standing either for themselves or for the subjective understanding. In its interconnection of external necessity this principle therefore affords the consciousness of an infinite freedom, over against teleology, which erects the trivialities, indeed the contemptible items, of its content into something absolute, where the more universal thought can discover for itself nothing but an infinite constriction, together with a downright nauseating affection.

The formal drawback under which this teleology at first labours is that it reaches no further than outer purposiveness. With the concept posited in this way as something formal, the content too is for this teleology something given to the concept from outside, within the manifoldness of the objective world, – in the very determinatenesses that also make up mechanism's content, though there as something external and contingent. It is this element held in common that makes the form of purposiveness, all by itself, what is essential in the teleological. Looked at in this way, and leaving aside for now the difference between outer and inner purposiveness, the purpose-reference as such has proved itself in and for itself to be the truth of mechanism. – What teleology possesses on the whole is the higher principle, namely the concept as it stands in concrete existence, the concept that in and for itself is the infinite and the absolute; – a principle of freedom, one which, wholly assured of its own self-determination, has been torn absolutely free of the external becoming-determined that belongs to mechanism.

Among the great merits Kant has earned in philosophy is the distinction he set up between relative or outer purposiveness and inner purposiveness; in the latter he unlocked the concept of life, the idea, and with it lifted philosophy positively above the determinations of reflection and above metaphysics' relative world, something the Critique of Reason accomplishes only imperfectly, on a very slanted turn, and only negatively. – It has been recalled that the opposition of teleology and mechanism is initially the more universal opposition of freedom and necessity. It was in this form that Kant listed the opposition among reason's antinomies, specifically as the third conflict of the transcendental ideas. – His presentation, already referred to earlier, I cite only very briefly, since what is essential in it is simple enough to require no drawn-out exposition, and since the manner of the Kantian antinomies has been illuminated at greater length elsewhere.

The thesis of the one to be looked at here reads: causality after the laws of nature is not the sole causality from which the appearances of the world can one and all be derived. For the explanation of them it is necessary to assume, in addition, a causality through freedom.

The antithesis: there is no freedom; on the contrary, everything in the world takes place solely after the laws of nature.

As with the other antinomies, the proof works in the first place apagogically, the contrary of each thesis being assumed; in the second place, to exhibit what is contradictory in that assumption, the contrary of the assumption is in turn assumed, which is accordingly the proposition to be proved, and it is presupposed as holding good; – the entire roundabout of proving might therefore just as well have been spared; it consists in nothing beyond the assertoric affirmation of the two opposed propositions.

For the proof of the thesis one is first supposed to assume that there is no other causality than one following laws of nature, which is to say, following the necessity of mechanism at large, chemism being included in it. This proposition, however, is said to contradict itself, on the ground that the law of nature consists precisely in this, that nothing happens without a sufficiently à priori determined cause, one that therefore harbours an absolute spontaneity within itself; – which is to say: what makes the assumption opposed to the thesis contradictory is simply that it contradicts the thesis.

To serve the proof of the antithesis one is to posit that there is a freedom, a peculiar sort of causality able to begin absolutely a state, and with it a series of that state's consequences. Now since a beginning of that sort presupposes a state having no connection of causality at all with the state preceding it in the same series, it stands in contradiction with the law of causality, apart from which no unity of experience, indeed no experience whatever, is possible; – which is to say: the assumption of freedom, opposed as it is to the antithesis, cannot be made, for the reason that it contradicts the antithesis.

Essentially the same antinomy comes back in the Critique of the teleological power of judgment as the opposition: that all generation of material things happens by merely mechanical laws, and that some generation of such things is not possible by laws of that kind. – Kant resolves this antinomy just as he resolves the rest in general; reason, that is, is in a position to prove neither the one proposition nor the other, since with respect to the possibility of things under merely empirical laws of nature we can have no determining principle à priori; – hence, further, that the pair of them have to count, not as objective propositions, but rather as subjective maxims; that on the one side I ought at all times to reflect on every natural event by the principle of bare natural mechanism, though this is no bar to hunting out certain natural forms, as occasion arises, by a different maxim, namely by the principle of final causes; – as if these two maxims, which incidentally are supposed to be required only for human reason, did not stand in exactly the opposition in which those propositions stand. – As was noted a moment ago, this entire standpoint leaves uninvestigated the one thing philosophical interest demands, namely which of the two principles holds truth in and for itself; and for that vantage point nothing turns on whether the principles are to be viewed as objective determinations of nature, which here means externally existing ones, or as bare maxims of a subjective cognizing; – such cognizing is in fact subjective, that is, contingent, applying now this maxim and now that as occasion arises, according as it deems one or the other suited to the objects given, and otherwise raising no question about the truth of these determinations themselves, be they determinations of the objects or of cognizing.

Inadequate though the Kantian treatment of the teleological principle is, then, with respect to the essential point of view, the place Kant assigns that principle is always worth noting. By attributing it to a reflecting power of judgment, he turns it into a middle member that binds the universal of reason to the singular of intuition; – he goes on to mark off that reflecting power of judgment from the determining one, the latter merely subsuming the particular under the universal. A universal of that kind, one that only subsumes, is an abstract universal, one that first becomes concrete at an other, at the particular. Purpose on the other hand is the concrete universal, carrying within itself the moment of particularity and of externality, and for that reason active, the drive to repel itself away from itself. Taken as purpose the concept is certainly an objective judgment, one in which the one determination is the subject, namely the concrete concept as determined through its own self, while the other is not a predicate merely but external objectivity. Yet the purpose-reference is on that account no reflecting judging that surveys external objects merely under a unity, as though some understanding had provided them for the behoof of our faculty of cognition; it is instead the true that is in and for itself, judging objectively and determining external objectivity absolutely. With that, the purpose-reference amounts to more than a judgment; it is the syllogism in which the free, self-subsistent concept joins together with itself by way of objectivity.

What has emerged as the third over against mechanism and chemism is purpose; it constitutes their truth. Standing as it still does within the sphere of objectivity, or within the immediacy of the concept in its totality, purpose remains affected by externality as such, and an objective world confronts it, one to which it refers itself. Seen from this side, mechanical causality, under which chemism is on the whole to be included, still turns up alongside this purpose-reference, the external one, though as subordinated to it, as in and for itself sublated. So far as the closer relation goes, the mechanical object, being an immediate totality, is indifferent towards its being-determined, and with that towards being anything that determines. This external being-determined has by now been developed on into self-determination, whereby the concept within the object that is merely inner, or, what comes to the same, the merely outer concept, stands posited at last; purpose is in the first instance just this concept itself, external to what is mechanical. For chemism too, then, purpose is what does the self-determining, leading the external becoming-determined by which chemism is conditioned back into the unity of the concept. – From this it follows how the two earlier forms of the objective process come to be subordinated; the other which lies at them in the infinite progress is nothing but the concept posited to begin with as something external to them, and this concept is purpose; the concept is not merely their substance, but externality as well is the moment essential to them, the moment constituting their determinateness. Owing to its character of being externally determined, then, mechanical or chemical technique presents itself of its own accord to the purpose-reference, which is now to be examined more closely.

A. The Subjective Purpose

What the subjective concept recovered and posited first of all, in the centrality belonging to the objective sphere, a centrality that is an indifference towards determinateness, was the negative point of unity; in chemism, on the other hand, the objectivity of the concept's determinations, through which the concept comes to be posited as concrete objective concept at all. Its determinateness, its simple difference, carries at its own self by now the determinateness of externality, and its simple unity is on that account a unity that repels itself away from itself and maintains itself in that repelling. Purpose accordingly is the subjective concept taken as essential striving and as the drive to posit itself in an external way. Herein it is exempt from passing over. It is not a force that gives expression to itself, nor yet a substance or cause manifesting itself in accidents and effects. A force stays a merely abstract inner so long as it has given itself no expression; or rather it attains existence only within the expression, to which it must first be solicited; the same holds of cause and of substance; having actuality only in the accidents and in the effect, their activity is the transition, and over against that transition they do not maintain themselves in freedom. Purpose may certainly be determined as force and as cause as well, yet these expressions cover only one incomplete side of what it means; if they are to be uttered of it according to its truth, they can be so only in a way that sublates the concept proper to them; as a force soliciting its own self into expression, as a cause that is the cause of itself, or whose effect is immediately the cause.

When what is purposive gets ascribed to an understanding, as was mentioned above, what is being kept in view is the determinate character of the content. Purpose is nevertheless to be taken, quite generally, as the rational in its concrete existence. Rationality is what it manifests, and it does so because it is the concrete concept, the concept that keeps the objective difference inside its absolute unity. Essentially, then, it is at its own self the syllogism. It is the universal that stays equal to itself, and this as harbouring the negativity that repels itself away from itself; to begin with, the universal and so far still undetermined activity; but since such activity is the negative reference to its own self, it determines itself without further ado and confers on itself the moment of particularity, which, being the totality of the form that is likewise reflected into itself, stands as content over against the posited differences of the form. With equal immediacy this negativity, by way of its reference to itself, is absolute reflection of the form into itself, and singularity. Taken one way, such reflection is the subject's inner universality; taken the other way, it is reflection outwards; and to that extent purpose is still something subjective, its activity being aimed at an external objectivity.

For purpose is the concept which, at objectivity, has come round to its own self; the determinateness it has conferred on itself there is that of the objective indifference and externality of being-determined; its self-repelling negativity is thus one whose moments, being nothing but determinations of the concept itself, carry as well the form of an objective indifference towards one another. – Within the formal judgment, subject and predicate already stand determined as self-subsistent, each against the other; their self-subsistence, though, is as yet no more than abstract universality; by now it has gained the determination of objectivity; but as a moment of the concept this consummate diversity is shut up inside the simple unity of the concept. Now insofar as purpose is this total reflection of objectivity into itself, and is such immediately, the self-determination or particularity, taken as simple reflection into itself, is firstly distinguished from the concrete form and constitutes a determinate content. On that showing purpose is finite, however much it may be infinite subjectivity as regards its form. In the second place, its determinateness having the form of objective indifference, that determinateness takes on the shape of a presupposition, and on this side the finitude of purpose lies in this, that there stands before it an objective world, mechanical and chemical, upon which its activity bears as upon something at hand; thus its self-determining activity is, within its own identity, immediately external to itself, and is reflection outwards quite as much as reflection into itself. To that extent purpose has still a genuinely extramundane concrete existence, namely insofar as that objectivity confronts it, just as the objectivity in turn confronts purpose as a whole that is mechanical and chemical, not yet determined and shot through by purpose.

The movement of purpose may therefore now be put in this way, that what it is bent upon is the sublating of its presupposition, namely the object's immediacy, and the positing of the object as determined through the concept. This negative bearing towards the object is every bit as much a negative bearing towards its own self, a sublating of the subjectivity of purpose. On the positive side it is the realizing of purpose, the uniting, that is, of objective being with purpose, so that objective being, which qua moment of purpose is immediately the determinateness identical with purpose, may be there as something external, while conversely the objective, qua presupposition, gets posited rather as determined through the concept. – Within itself purpose is the drive towards its own realization; externality is what the determinateness of the concept's moments comes to, yet the simplicity of these moments inside the unity of the concept is unequal to what that simplicity is, and so the concept repels itself away from itself. Such repelling is resolve as such, the negative unity's reference to itself, by which that unity is an excluding singularity; and yet by this very excluding it resolves upon itself, that is, unlocks itself, since the excluding is a self-determining, a positing of its own self. On the one side, subjectivity in determining itself turns itself into particularity and confers on itself a content which, being shut up inside the unity of the concept, remains an inward one; but this positing, the simple reflection into itself, is, as has come out, at once and immediately a presupposing as well; and at the very moment when the subject of purpose determines itself, it stands referred to an indifferent, external objectivity, one that purpose is to render equal to that inner determinateness, that is, is to posit as something determined through the concept, in the first instance as means.

B. The Means

The first immediate positing in the purpose is at once the positing of an inner — of what is determined, that is, as posited — and equally the presupposing of an objective world indifferent to the determination of purpose. The subjectivity of the purpose, however, is the absolute negative unity; hence its second determining consists in sublating this presupposition altogether; and such sublating counts as the return into itself insofar as what gets sublated thereby is that moment of the first negation, the positing, over against the subject, of the negative — the external object. Yet as measured against the presupposition, or against the immediacy of the determining, against the objective world, it is still no more than the first negation, one that is itself immediate and hence external. Such positing, accordingly, is still not the accomplished purpose itself but merely the beginning of it. The object determined in this fashion is as yet nothing but the means.

By way of a means the purpose conjoins itself with objectivity, and within objectivity with its own self. It is the means that constitutes the middle term of the syllogism. For its accomplishment the purpose stands in need of a means, since it is finite; – of a means, which is to say of a middle term that carries at once the shape of an external existence, one indifferent to the purpose itself and to the purpose's accomplishment. In the absolute concept mediation is so constituted that the concept's first positing is no presupposing in whose object indifferent externality would rank as the fundamental determination; the world as creature bears only the form of such externality, whereas what makes up its fundamental determination is rather its negativity and its positedness. – Wherein the finitude of the purpose consists is accordingly this, that its determining is on the whole external to itself, so that its first determining, as we saw, breaks apart into a positing and a presupposing; and so the negation of this determining is on one side only already reflection into itself, while on the other side it amounts rather to mere first negation; – or: reflection-into-itself is itself external to itself as well, and reflection outward.

What the means amounts to, then, is the formal middle term of a formal syllogism; measured against the extreme of the subjective purpose it is an external something, and for that very reason measured against the extreme of the objective purpose too; much as, in the formal syllogism, particularity amounts to a medius terminus that is indifferent and in whose room others may equally step. And just as that particularity is a middle term solely because in reference to the one extreme it is determinateness while in reference to the other it is a universal, so that it holds its mediating determination only relatively, by way of others, so likewise the means is the mediating middle term solely, in the first place, in being an immediate object, and in the second place in being a means through that reference to the extreme of the purpose which is external to it; – a reference that is for it a form towards which it stands indifferent.

In the means, accordingly, concept and objectivity are joined only externally; so far it is a merely mechanical object. The reference of the object to the purpose is one premise, or the immediate reference which, regarded from the side of the purpose, is, as was shown, reflection into itself; the means is a predicate that inheres; and its objectivity stands subsumed under the determination of purpose, this being universality on account of its concretion. Through this determination of purpose that attaches to it, the means is now in turn the subsuming factor over against the other extreme, the objectivity that for the present remains undetermined. – Conversely, as immediate objectivity the means possesses over against the subjective purpose the universality of existence, which the subjective singularity of the purpose still goes without. – Since the purpose is thus present in the means at first only as an external determinateness, the purpose itself, as the negative unity, lies outside the means, and the means for its part is a mechanical object holding the purpose in it merely as a determinateness, not as the simple concretion of the totality. As the conjoining factor, however, the middle term has to be the purpose's totality in its own right. We have seen that the determination of purpose present in the means is at once reflection into itself; so far it is a formal reference to self, inasmuch as the determinateness has been posited as real indifference, that is, as the objectivity belonging to the means. But just on that account this reference, on the one side sheer subjectivity, is equally activity. – Within the subjective purpose the negative reference to self is still identical with determinateness as such, with the content and with externality. In the incipient objectification of the purpose, however — a becoming-other of the simple concept — those moments step apart from each other; or, conversely, it is precisely in this that such becoming-other, or externality itself, resides.

This entire middle term is thus, in its own self, the syllogism's totality, the extremes of which are made up by the abstract activity and the external means, while its middle is made up by the determinateness that the object has through the purpose, the determinateness whereby the object is a means. – Further, however, universality is the reference of purposive activity and means. An object is what the means is, in itself the concept's totality; against the purpose it musters no force of resistance such as it musters, in the first instance, against another immediate object. Being in itself identical with the purpose — the purpose being the posited concept — it is therefore through and through penetrable by it and open to this communication. Now, however, it is also posited as penetrable by the concept, for in centrality it is a thing striving towards the negative unity; and in chemism likewise, whether as neutral or as differentiated, it has come to be something non-self-subsistent. – Its non-self-subsistence lies precisely in this, that it is the concept's totality only in itself; the concept, though, is being-for-itself. Against the purpose the object accordingly bears the character of being powerless and of serving the purpose; the purpose is the object's subjectivity, its soul, which has its external side in the object.

Thus immediately subjected to the purpose, the object is no extreme of the syllogism; this reference rather makes up one of the syllogism's premises. Yet the means has a side too on which it retains self-subsistence over against the purpose. The objectivity conjoined with the purpose in the means is, being conjoined with it only immediately, still external to it; and so the presupposition persists. That is why the purpose's activity through the means remains directed against this presupposition; and the purpose counts as activity, no longer as mere drive and striving, just to the extent that in the means the moment of objectivity stands posited in its determinateness as an external, and that the concept's simple unity now has that moment within itself as such.

C. The Accomplished Purpose

1. In its reference to the means the purpose stands already reflected into itself; what has not yet been posited, however, is its objective return into itself. Directed as it still is against objectivity taken as the original presupposition, the activity of the purpose by way of its means meets in that presupposition just this, to be indifferent towards determinateness. Were the activity once again to consist in nothing but determining the immediate objectivity, then what issued from it would once more be only a means, and so on into infinity; a purposive means would be all that came out, and not the objectivity of the purpose itself. The purpose at work in its means must therefore not determine the immediate object as an external, so that the object may rather come together with the concept's unity through its own self; or else that external activity which the purpose exercises by way of its means must determine itself as mediation and thereby sublate itself.

Referring as it does to the external object, the purpose's activity by way of the means is at first the second premise of the syllogism, – a reference, and an immediate one, of the middle term to the other extreme. It counts as immediate because an external object is what the middle term has in it, and the other extreme is just such an object. Efficacious and mighty against the latter the means is, because its own object is joined with the self-determining activity, while for that other the immediate determinateness it carries counts as indifferent. No other process obtains in this reference than the mechanical or the chemical; within this objective externality the earlier relations come out again, but now under the dominion of the purpose. – Such processes, however, as was exhibited in them, run of their own accord back into the purpose. If, then, the reference of the means to the external object that is to be worked upon counts at first as immediate, that reference has nonetheless presented itself even earlier as a syllogism, the purpose having proved to be its genuine middle term and unity. Since the means, then, is the object standing on the side of the purpose and carrying the purpose's activity within it, the mechanism taking place here is at the same time objectivity's return into itself, into the concept — a concept, though, already presupposed as the purpose; so far, the negative comportment of purposive activity towards the object is not an external comportment but the alteration, and the passing over, of objectivity in its own self into that concept.

That the purpose refers itself immediately to an object and turns it into a means, and likewise that by way of this object it determines another, may be looked upon as violence, so far as the purpose comes on the scene as having a nature altogether unlike the object's, and the two objects are for their part mutually self-subsistent totalities. But that the purpose sets itself in a mediated reference to the object, shoving a further object in between itself and it, may be looked upon as reason's cunning. Rationality in its finitude has, as was remarked, this side to it, that the purpose comports itself towards the presupposition, that is, towards the object's externality. Were its reference to that object an immediate reference, the purpose would step into mechanism or chemism itself and would thereby lie open to contingency and to the wreck of its determination of being a concept that is in and for itself. As things stand, though, it puts an object forward as means, lets that object do the outward drudgery in its stead, abandons it to attrition, and shelters itself behind it from mechanical violence.

Being finite, the purpose has furthermore a finite content; on this score it is nothing absolute, nor a rational simply in and for itself. The means, however, is the external middle term of that syllogism which is the purpose's accomplishment; and so it is in the means that the rationality present in the purpose declares itself as such — declares itself as a self-preserving within this external other, and precisely through such externality. So far the means ranks higher than do the finite purposes belonging to external purposiveness; – more honour attaches to the plough than to the enjoyments that are immediately got ready by it and that count as the purposes. The tool lives on, while the immediate enjoyments perish and drop out of memory. It is in tools that the human being holds power over outward nature, however much, as regards his purposes, he is rather subject to it.

The purpose, though, does not merely keep itself outside the mechanical process; it preserves itself within that process and is the determination of it. Being just as much the truth of mechanism that is in and for itself, the purpose — the concept, namely, which concretely exists in freedom against the object and the object's process, and which is self-determining activity — comes together in that process with nothing but itself. This identity that is for itself is the power of the purpose over the object; and the purpose's activity is the manifestation of that identity. As content the purpose is the determinateness in and for itself, which in the object holds as indifferent and external, whereas the purpose's activity is, on the one side, the process's truth and, being negative unity, the sublating of the shine of externality. Taken in the way of abstraction, what happens is that the indifferent determinateness of the object gets replaced, just as externally, by another; but in its truth the simple abstraction of determinateness is the negative's totality, the concrete concept, the concept that posits externality inside itself.

The purpose's content is its negativity as simple particularity reflected into itself, marked off from its totality taken as form. Owing to such simplicity, the determinateness of which is in and for itself the concept's totality, the content shows up as what stays identical throughout the realization of the purpose. What the teleological process is, is the translation into objectivity of the concept concretely existing distinctly as the concept's concept; and it turns out that this translating into a presupposed other is the concept's coming together through itself, with itself. So the purpose's content is that identity which concretely exists under the form of the identical. Through every transition the concept preserves itself — when, for instance, the cause turns into effect, the cause is what comes together, in the effect, with nothing but itself; in the teleological transition, though, it is the concept, already concretely existing as such as cause, as the concrete unity absolutely free against objectivity and its external determinability. The externality the purpose translates itself into has, as we saw, already been posited as a moment of the concept itself, as the form under which the concept differentiates itself within. In externality the purpose therefore has its own moment; and the content, being the content of the concrete unity, is the purpose's simple form, a form which throughout the differentiated moments of the purpose — as subjective purpose, as means and mediated activity, and as objective purpose — not only stays the same in itself but concretely exists as what stays the same.

Of teleological activity one may therefore say that within it the end amounts to the beginning, the consequence to the ground, the effect to the cause; that it constitutes a becoming of what has already become; that within it nothing enters concrete existence save what concretely exists already, and so on; which means that all determinations of relation that belong to the sphere of reflection, or to that of immediate being, have on the whole lost their differences, and that whatever gets pronounced as an other — end, consequence, effect and so on — no longer carries, in the purposive reference, the determination of an other, but is posited rather as identical with the simple concept.

2. Look now more closely at the product of teleological activity, and it has the purpose in it only externally, so far as the product stands as absolute presupposition over against the subjective purpose, so far, that is, as one halts at the thought that purposive activity by way of its means comports itself towards the object only mechanically, setting in the room of one indifferent determinateness of the object another every bit as external to it. A determinateness of that kind, which an object owes to the purpose, is on the whole marked off from another, merely mechanical one by carrying that moment of a unity, so that, external though it be to the object, it is nonetheless in its own self no merely external thing. An object exhibiting such a unity is a whole, and towards it its parts, its own externality, stand indifferent; a determinate, concrete unity gathering differentiated references and determinatenesses into itself. Such a unity, not to be comprehended out of the object's specific nature and, by its determinate content, other than the content peculiar to the object, is for itself no mechanical determinateness, though in the object it stays mechanical. Within this product of purposive activity the purpose's content and the object's content lie external to one another, and just so do the determinations of the two stand towards each other in the remaining moments of the syllogism, – in the conjoining middle term, purposive activity and the object that serves as means, and in the subjective purpose, the other extreme, the infinite form as the concept's totality and the form's content. Take the reference by which the subjective purpose is conjoined with objectivity, and the one premise — namely the reference to the still external object of the object determined as means — no less than the other, namely the reference of the subjective purpose to the object that is made into a means, is an immediate reference. The syllogism therefore labours under the defect of the formal syllogism at large, that the references composing it are not themselves conclusions or mediations, but presuppose already that very conclusion which they are supposed to serve as means for producing.

Take the one premise, the immediate reference of the subjective purpose to the object that thereby becomes a means, and the former cannot refer itself to the latter immediately; for the latter is every bit as immediate as the object of that other extreme where the purpose is supposed to reach accomplishment through mediation. So far as the two are posited as diverse, a means of their reference has to be shoved in between the subjective purpose and this objectivity; but a means of that sort is itself an object the purpose has already determined, and between its objectivity and its teleological determination a fresh means has to be shoved in, and so on into infinity. Herewith the infinite progress of mediation stands posited. – The like holds with respect to the other premise, the reference of the means to the object that is still undetermined. Utterly self-subsistent as the two are, only in a third can they be united, and so on into infinity. – Or conversely, since the premises presuppose the conclusion already, the conclusion, being what it is by way of premises merely immediate, can only be defective. The conclusion, or the product of purposive doing, is nothing beyond an object determined by a purpose external to it; it is therefore the same as the means. What has come out in such a product is accordingly itself only a means, not an accomplished purpose; or: in it the purpose has genuinely reached no objectivity at all. – Whether one regards an object determined by the external purpose as an accomplished purpose or merely as a means is therefore wholly a matter of indifference; what we have here is a relative determination, external to the object itself, and not an objective one. Every object, then, in which an external purpose has been accomplished is quite as much a mere means of the purpose. Whatever gets used for the accomplishment of a purpose and is to be taken essentially as means is means according to its determination of being worn away. But the object too, the one supposed to contain the accomplished purpose and to exhibit itself as the purpose's objectivity, is perishable; it likewise fulfils its purpose not by way of a quiescent, self-preserving existence, but only so far as it is worn away; for to that extent alone does it answer to the concept's unity, its externality — that is, its objectivity — sublating itself therein. – A house or a clock may show up as the purposes over against the tools used in bringing them forth; but the stones, beams, or the wheels, axles and so on which make up the purpose's actuality fulfil it only through the pressure they undergo, through the chemical processes to which they lie exposed along with air, light and water, processes they take off the human being's hands, through their friction and so on. Their determination they therefore fulfil only through being used and worn down, and only through their negation do they answer to what they are supposed to be. Positively they are not united with the purpose, since self-determination attaches to them only externally, and they are relative purposes only, or essentially just means as well.

Such purposes have on the whole, as was shown, a limited content; their form is the concept's infinite self-determination, which through that content has limited itself down to external singularity. Because of the limited content these purposes are inadequate to the concept's infinity and turn into an untruth; determinateness of that sort has already, by way of the sphere of necessity, by way of being, been handed over to becoming and alteration, and is a perishable thing.

3. What emerges as result is accordingly this, that external purposiveness, having as yet only the form of teleology, gets properly no further than means and never as far as an objective purpose, – because the subjective purpose stays an external, subjective determination, – or, so far as it is active and does carry itself out, though only in a means, it remains bound up immediately with objectivity, sunk into it; it is itself an object, and one may say that so far the purpose never gets as far as a means, because the purpose's accomplishment is called for beforehand, before that accomplishment could ever come about by way of a means.

In fact, however, the result is not merely an external purposive reference but the truth of such a reference, an inner purposive reference and an objective purpose. That externality of the object which is self-subsistent against the concept, and which the purpose presupposes for itself, is in this presupposing posited as an unessential shine, and in and for itself it has been sublated already; properly, then, the purpose's activity is nothing but the exhibiting of this shine and the sublating of it. – As the concept made evident, the first object becomes means through the communication, because it is in itself the concept's totality and because its determinateness, which is nothing other than externality itself, is posited only as an external and unessential, hence stands within the purpose itself as the purpose's own moment and not as something self-subsistent against it. Thereby [the] determination of the object into a means is an utterly immediate one. For the subjective purpose no violence is called for, then, nor any corroboration against the object beyond the corroboration of itself, in order to make the object into a means; the resolve, the disclosure, this self-determining of the concept, is the object's merely posited externality, and the object therein lies immediately subjected to the purpose and carries against it no determination other than the nullity of its being-in-and-for-itself.

From this the second sublating of objectivity by objectivity differs in that the first one just described is the purpose in objective immediacy, so that the second sublates not a first immediacy alone but both, the objective as a merely posited and the immediate. Negativity in this fashion returns into itself so as to be equally a restoring of objectivity — of an objectivity identical with it, though — and therein at once a positing of objectivity as an external one determined merely by the purpose. By virtue of the latter this product stays, as before, means as well; by virtue of the former it is the objectivity identical with the concept, the realized purpose, where the side of being a means is the very reality of the purpose. Within the accomplished purpose the means vanishes because it would be objectivity as yet only immediately subsumed under the purpose, objectivity which in the realized purpose figures as the purpose's return into itself; and along with it there vanishes further the mediation itself, being as it is a comportment of something external, vanishing partly into the concrete identity of the objective purpose, partly into that identity taken as abstract identity and as immediacy of existence.

Contained herein is also the mediation that was called for in the case of the first premise, the immediate reference of the purpose to the object. The accomplished purpose is means as well; conversely, it belongs quite as much to the truth of the means to be real purpose itself; and objectivity's first sublating is already the second too, just as the second showed itself to hold the first within it. The concept, namely, determines itself, and its determinateness is that external indifference which immediately, in the resolve, gets determined as sublated — namely as inner, as subjective — and at once as a presupposed object. The concept's further going forth out of itself, which showed up, namely, as the immediate communicating to the presupposed object and the subsuming of it under the concept, is at once a sublating of that inner determinateness of externality shut up within the concept — the determinateness, that is, posited as sublated — and at once a sublating of the presupposing of an object; so this apparently first sublating of indifferent objectivity turns out to be the second as well, a reflection-into-itself having passed through the mediation, and is the accomplished purpose.

Since the concept stands here in reciprocity with its own self, within the sphere of objectivity, where the concept's determinateness carries the form of indifferent externality, the exposition of its movement turns doubly hard and tangled at this point, that movement being immediately the doubled one, so that a first is invariably a second too. In the concept for itself, that is, in the concept's subjectivity, the difference of the concept from itself is for itself as an immediate identical totality; but since here the concept's determinateness is indifferent externality, the identity therein with itself is immediately once more a repelling of itself, such that what is determined as identity's external and indifferent is rather identity itself, while identity as its own self, reflected into itself, is rather identity's other. It is only in holding fast to this that one grasps the objective return of the concept into itself, that is, the concept's genuine objectification; – grasps it, namely, in such wise that every one of the single moments along which this mediation runs is itself the mediation's whole syllogism. Thus the concept's original inner externality, whereby the concept is the unity repelling itself from itself, purpose and the purpose's striving out towards objectification, amounts to the immediate positing, or presupposing, of an external object; the self-determination is at the same time a determining of an external object as one the concept has not determined; and conversely it is self-determination, that is, the externality sublated and posited as inner; – or, in other words, the certainty that the outer object is unessential. – As for the second reference, where the object is determined as means, it has just now been made plain how in its own self it is the purpose's mediation with itself in the object. – Likewise the third, the mechanism running its course under the dominion of the purpose and sublating the object through the object, counts on the one side as sublating the means, the object posited as sublated already, and so as a second sublating and reflection-into-itself, on the other side as a first determining of the object that is external. That last, as was remarked, amounts once again in the accomplished purpose to bringing forth nothing but a means; when the subjectivity of the finite concept flings the means away in contempt, it has reached nothing better in its goal. Yet this reflection — that in the means the purpose is reached, and that in the fulfilled purpose means and mediation alike are preserved — is the final result of the external purposive reference, wherein that reference has sublated its own self and has exhibited this reflection as its truth. – The third syllogism considered last is marked off by this, that it is, in the first place, the subjective purposive activity of the syllogisms that went before, but is also the sublation, through itself, of external objectivity and thereby of externality at large, and hence the totality in its positedness.

Now that we have watched subjectivity, the being-for-itself of the concept, pass over into that concept's being-in-itself, namely into objectivity, we find that within the latter the negativity of its being-for-itself has come forth once more; in objectivity the concept has determined itself so that its particularity is external objectivity, or so that it is the simple concrete unity, a unity whose externality constitutes its self-determination. What the movement of the purpose has now reached is this, that externality's moment is not merely posited within the concept, that the concept is not merely an ought and a striving, but that as concrete totality it is identical with immediate objectivity. On one side this identity is the simple concept and quite as much immediate objectivity, on the other side it is just as essentially mediation, and is that simple immediacy only by way of mediation, mediation sublating its own self; so the concept is essentially this, to be marked off, as identity that is for itself, from its objectivity that is in-itself, and thereby to have externality, yet within this external totality to be the self-determining identity of it. Thus the concept is now the IDEA.