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.

Third Section. The Idea

The idea is the adequate concept, that which is objectively true, or the true as such. Should anything whatever possess truth, it possesses it through its idea, or something has truth only, insofar as it is idea. – Elsewhere the word idea has often enough been used, in philosophy as in ordinary life, for concept as well, indeed for a bare representation; and when someone says that he has as yet no idea of this lawsuit, this building, this stretch of country, nothing more is intended by it than the representation. Kant reclaimed the word idea for the concept of reason. – On Kant's account the concept of reason is to be the concept of the unconditioned, though transcendent with regard to appearances, that is, incapable of any empirical use adequate to it. Concepts of reason are said to serve for comprehending, concepts of the understanding for the understanding of perceptions. – In truth, however, if the latter really are concepts, then they are concepts, – by them something is comprehended, and where perceptions are understood through concepts of the understanding, that will be a comprehending. Should understanding, though, amount to nothing more than a determining of perceptions by determinations such as whole and parts, force, cause and so forth, then it signifies no more than a determining through reflection, just as by understanding one can mean only the determinate representing of a thoroughly determinate sensuous content; if a man to whom the route is pointed out, that he must turn left where the wood ends, replies say: I understand, then his understanding amounts to nothing beyond a taking of it up into representation and into memory. – The term concept of reason, moreover, sits rather awkwardly; for the concept is as such already something rational; and to the extent that reason gets distinguished from the understanding and from the concept as such, reason is the totality of concept together with objectivity. – Taken in that sense, the idea is what is rational; – and it counts as unconditioned because conditions belong only to whatever refers itself essentially to an objectivity, and to an objectivity not determined through its own self at that, but to one that still confronts it under the form of indifference and of externality, as external purpose still did.

Now that the word idea is being held back for the objective or real concept, and marked off from the concept itself and still more from mere representation, there is all the further reason to throw out that estimate of the idea by which it passes for something merely unactual, and by which it is said of true thoughts that they are only ideas. Where thoughts are something merely subjective and contingent, they have of course no worth beyond that; but on this score they are not outdone by temporal and contingent actualities, whose worth likewise reaches no further than that of contingencies and appearances. If, on the other hand, the idea is denied the worth of truth on the ground that it is transcendent with regard to appearances, that no object congruent with it can be furnished in the sensuous world, then here is a strange misunderstanding, since objective validity is refused the idea for want of precisely what makes up appearance, the untrue being of the objective world. With regard to the practical ideas Kant grants that »nothing more harmful, nothing less worthy of a philosopher can be found than the vulgar invoking of an experience supposedly at odds with the idea. That experience would not so much as exist, had institutions of state been set up in good time in accordance with the ideas, and had crude concepts not, in their place and just because they had been drawn from experience, brought every good intention to nothing.« Kant looks upon the idea as something necessary, as the goal that has to be erected as the archetype for a maximum, and towards which the endeavour must be to bring the condition of actuality ever closer.

Now that the result has come out that the idea is the unity of concept and objectivity, the true, it is not to be looked upon merely as a goal one should draw near to while it stays for its own part a sort of beyond; rather everything actual only is to the extent that it carries the idea within it and gives it expression. The object, the objective world and the subjective world, are not merely supposed to be congruent with the idea; they are themselves the congruence of concept and reality; whatever reality does not answer to the concept is bare appearance, the subjective, the contingent, the arbitrary, that which is not the truth. When one says that experience turns up no object perfectly congruent with the idea, the idea is thereby placed opposite the actual as a subjective yardstick; but what an actual thing is truly to be, granted that its concept is not in it and its objectivity not in the least commensurate with that concept, no one can say; for it would be the nothing. Mechanical and chemical object alike, and the spiritless subject too, and the spirit aware only of the finite and not of its own essence, none of these, each after its differing nature, has its concept existing in it in its own free form. Yet true they can be at all only to the extent that they are the uniting of their concept with reality, of their soul with their body. Wholes of the sort of the state or the church stop existing once the unity of concept and reality in them has come undone; the human being, the living being, lies dead when in it soul and body come apart; dead nature, the mechanical and chemical world, if, that is, the dead be taken to stand for the inorganic world, since apart from that it would carry no positive sense whatever, – dead nature, then, once it is sundered into concept on the one side and reality on the other, amounts to no more than a subjective abstraction, a form merely thought and a matter without form. A spirit which were not idea, not the unity of the concept itself with itself, – [were] not the concept having the concept itself for its reality, would be spirit dead and spiritless, an object of matter.

Being has reached the meaning of truth in that the idea is the unity of concept and reality; henceforth, accordingly, that alone is which is idea. Finite things are finite just because they do not carry the reality of their concept complete within their own selves but require others for it; – or, put the other way about, because they are presupposed as objects and so carry the concept in them as an external determination. External purposiveness is the utmost they reach along the side of this finitude. That actual things fail to be congruent with the idea is the side of their finitude, of their untruth, the side on which they are objects, each of them determined within its own several sphere and within the relations of objectivity, mechanically, chemically, or by an external purpose. That the idea has not worked its reality through to the end, has brought it only incompletely under the concept, has its possibility resting on this, that the idea itself carries a limited content, that, essentially the unity of concept and reality as it is, it is quite as essentially the difference of the two; for the immediate unity, the unity, that is, which merely in itself is, belongs to the object alone. But suppose an object, the state for instance, were not at all commensurate with its idea, which is to say were rather no idea of the state whatever, suppose the reality of it, namely the self-conscious individuals, were in no way answerable to the concept, then soul and body in it would have parted; the former would take flight into the sequestered regions of thought, the latter would have crumbled into the single individualities; but since the concept of the state so essentially makes up their nature, it works in them as a drive so mighty that they find themselves driven either to set it over into reality, if only under the form of an external purposiveness, or else to acquiesce in it as it stands, or they would have to founder. The poorest state, whose reality answers least to the concept, is, so long as it still exists, idea nonetheless; its individuals still obey a concept that has power over them.

The idea, however, carries not merely the more general sense of genuine being, of the unity of concept and reality, but the more determinate sense of subjective concept and objectivity. For the concept as such is of itself already the identity of itself and of reality; the indeterminate expression reality, after all, says nothing else at all than determinate being; and the concept has this in its particularity and in its singularity. In the same way, further, objectivity is the total concept, gone together out of its determinateness into identity with itself. Within that subjectivity the determinateness, or the difference, of the concept is a shine, immediately sublated and gone back into being-for-itself, into the negative unity, an inhering predicate. Within this objectivity, by contrast, the determinateness stands posited as immediate totality, as an external whole. The idea has now shown itself to be the concept set free once more, out of the immediacy in which it lies sunk within the object, into its subjectivity, a concept marking itself off from its objectivity, which objectivity is nonetheless quite as much determined by it and draws its substantiality from that concept alone. Rightly, then, has this identity been determined as the subject-object; namely that it is just as fully the formal or subjective concept as it is the object in its own right. This, though, calls for a more determinate grasp. The concept, once it has genuinely reached its reality, is that absolute judgment whose subject, being the negative unity that refers itself to itself, marks itself off from its objectivity and is the being-in-and-for-itself of that objectivity, yet refers itself to it essentially through its own self, – and therefore is self-purpose and drive; – objectivity, on the other hand, does not for that very reason carry the subject immediately in it, for on that footing the subject would be nothing but the object's own totality, lost within it; objectivity is rather the realization of the purpose, an objectivity posited by the purpose's activity, one that as positedness holds its subsistence and its form solely in being shot through by its subject. Being objectivity, it carries in it the moment of the concept's externality, and is on that account the side of finitude, of changeableness and of appearance generally, a side whose going-under lies in this, that it goes back into the negative unity of the concept; the negativity by which its indifferent asunderness shows itself up as unessential and as positedness is the concept itself. For all that objectivity, therefore, the idea is downright simple and immaterial, since the externality counts only as determined by the concept and taken up into the concept's negative unity; to the extent that it subsists as indifferent externality it is not merely surrendered to mechanism at large, but is only as the perishable and the untrue. – Though the idea thus holds its reality in a materiature, that reality is no abstract being subsisting for itself against the concept, but is only as becoming, by way of the negativity of indifferent being, as simple determinateness of the concept.

There issue from this the following closer determinations of the idea. – It is first simple truth, namely the identity of concept with objectivity taken as a universal, one wherein the opposition and the subsistence of the particular have dissolved into the negativity identical with itself, and wherein it is as equality with its own self. Secondly, it is the reference between the subjectivity of the simple concept, existing for itself, and the objectivity distinguished from that subjectivity; the first of these is essentially the drive to sublate this separation, the second the indifferent positedness, a subsistence null in and for itself. As this reference the idea is the process of dirempting itself into individuality and into the inorganic nature belonging to that individuality, of drawing this nature back once more beneath the might of the subject, and of returning to the first simple universality. One with the process is the identity of the idea with its own self; the thought that frees actuality from the shine of purposeless changeableness and transfigures it into the idea dare not picture this truth of the actual to itself as a dead stillness, as a bare image, lifeless, void of drive and of motion, as a genius, or a number, or an abstract thought; for the sake of the freedom the concept reaches within it, the idea harbours the harshest opposition too; the repose of the idea lies in the assurance and the certainty wherewith it eternally begets that opposition and eternally masters it, going together in it with its own self.

To begin with, though, the idea is once again at first merely immediate, or merely within its concept; objective reality does answer to the concept, yet it has not been freed into the concept, and the concept does not exist for itself as the concept. The concept is thus indeed soul, but soul after the manner of something immediate, that is, its determinateness is not present as the soul itself, it has not laid hold of itself as soul, does not carry its objective reality within its own self; the concept is as a soul not yet soulful.

Thus the idea is FIRST life; the concept that, marked off from its objectivity and simple within itself, saturates that objectivity, that as self-purpose finds its means in it and posits it for its means, while staying immanent in this means and being therein the realized purpose identical with itself. – Because of its immediacy this idea has singularity for the form of its existence. The reflection of its absolute process into its own self, however, is the sublating of this immediate singularity; by it the concept, which within the idea is as universality the inner, turns the externality into universality, or posits its objectivity as equality with its own self. Thus the idea is

secondly the idea of the true and of the good, as cognition and willing. To begin with it is finite cognition and finite willing, in which the true and the good still stand apart and both are as yet only as goal. The concept has at first set itself free into its own self and has as yet furnished itself with an abstract objectivity alone for reality. The process of this finite cognizing and acting, though, turns the at first abstract universality into a totality, by which it comes to be complete objectivity. – Or, looked at from the other side, the finite, that is, the subjective spirit makes for itself the presupposition of an objective world, as life has such a presupposition; its activity, however, consists in sublating that presupposition and turning it into something posited. The objective world is accordingly its reality for it; or, the other way about, that world is the ideality wherein spirit cognizes its own self.

Thirdly, spirit cognizes the idea as absolute truth of its own, as truth such as is in and for itself; the infinite idea, wherein cognizing and doing have come into balance with each other, and which is absolute knowledge of its own self.

Chapter 1. Life

The idea of life has to do with an object so concrete and, if one will, so real that with it the province of logic might seem, on logic's usual representation, to have been overstepped. Were logic in fact to hold nothing beyond empty, dead thought-forms, no content of the kind that the idea, or life, is could come up in it at all. But if what logic has for its object is absolute truth, and if truth as such lies essentially in cognition, then cognition at any rate would have to be dealt with. – And indeed it is the custom to let an applied logic follow upon what is called pure logic, – a logic occupied with concrete cognition; leaving out of the count all that psychology and anthropology whose weaving into logic is often reckoned indispensable. The anthropological and psychological side of cognition, however, has to do with the appearance of cognition, wherein the concept is for its own self not yet this, an objectivity equal to it, that is, to have its own self for object. That part of logic which considers cognition does not fall under applied logic as such; on such terms every science would have to be hauled into logic, since each is an applied logic to the extent that it consists in laying hold of its object in forms of thought and of concept. – Presuppositions belong to the subjective concept, and they exhibit themselves in psychological, anthropological and yet other form. Into logic, though, there fall only such presuppositions of the pure concept as have the form of pure thoughts, of abstract essentialities, the determinations of being and of essence. In the same way, of cognition, the concept's laying hold of its own self, logic is to treat not the remaining shapes of its presupposition but only the one which is itself idea; and this one it must needs consider. This presupposition, now, is the immediate idea; for since cognizing is the concept, yet insofar as the concept is for its own self as a subjective in reference to an objective, it refers itself to the idea as to a presupposed or immediate one. The immediate idea, however, is life.

So far as that goes, the need for taking up the idea of life within logic would rest on the need, elsewhere conceded too, of treating the concrete concept of cognition at this place. This idea, though, has brought itself in through the concept's own necessity; the idea, what is true in and for itself, is by its essence the object of logic; and since it falls to be considered first in its immediacy, it has to be grasped and cognized under that determinateness wherein it is life, so that its consideration may not turn out something empty and void of determination. There may be occasion at most to remark how far the logical view of life differs from other scientific views of it; what belongs here, however, is not the manner in which unphilosophical sciences deal with life, but only how logical life as pure idea is to be marked off from the life of nature, which the philosophy of nature considers, and from life insofar as it stands in connection with spirit. – The first of these, as nature's life, is life to the extent that it has been flung out into the externality of subsistence, holds its condition in inorganic nature, and is, like the moments of the idea, a manifoldness of actual configurations. Life within the idea is without presuppositions of that kind, presuppositions that are shapes of actuality; what it presupposes is the concept, as this has been considered, on one side as subjective, on the other as objective. Within nature life shows itself as the highest stage, one that nature's externality attains through having gone into itself and sublating itself in subjectivity. Within logic it is simple being-within-itself, which in the idea of life has attained an externality genuinely answering to it; the concept, coming on earlier as subjective, is the very soul of life; it is the drive that mediates its own reality for itself by way of objectivity. Since nature attains this idea from out of its externality, it passes beyond its own self; its end is not as its beginning but as its limit, wherein it sublates its own self. – In the idea of life, likewise, the moments making up its reality take on no shape of external actuality but stay enclosed within the concept's form.

In spirit, however, life shows itself partly as facing spirit, partly as posited in one with it, and this unity in turn as purely brought forth by spirit. For life is here to be taken throughout in its proper sense as natural life, for whatever gets named the life of spirit as spirit is that peculiarity of spirit which stands opposed to bare life; as one speaks likewise of the nature of spirit, although spirit is nothing natural, being rather nature's opposite. For spirit, then, life as such is in part a means, and to that extent spirit places it over against itself; in part spirit is itself a living individual with life for its body; in part this unity of spirit with its living corporeality is brought forth out of spirit itself into the ideal. None of these references to spirit touches logical life, which is here to be considered neither as the means of a spirit, nor as spirit's living body, nor as a moment belonging to the ideal and to beauty. – Life in either case, both as natural and as standing in reference to spirit, has a determinateness of its externality, there through its presuppositions, other configurations of nature that these are, but here through the purposes and the activity of spirit. The idea of life for itself is free of that presupposed and conditioning objectivity, as of the reference to this subjectivity.

Life in its idea, taken now more closely, is in and for itself absolute universality; the objectivity it carries in it is utterly saturated by the concept, and has nothing but the concept for substance. Whatever marks itself off as a part, or according to some other external reflection, carries the whole concept within its own self; the concept is the soul omnipresent therein, which stays simple reference to its own self and one throughout the manifoldness accruing to objective being. This manifoldness, being objectivity external to itself, has an indifferent subsistence, one that in space and in time, could these already be brought up here, is a wholly diverse and self-subsistent asunderness. In life, however, the externality is at once as the simple determinateness of life's concept; the soul is thus poured out omnipresently through this manifoldness, and stays at once utterly the simple oneness of the concrete concept with its own self. – Before life, before this unity of its concept in the externality of objectivity, in the absolute plurality of atomistic matter, a thinking that clings to the determinations of the relations of reflection and of the formal concept finds all its thoughts running out on it altogether; for reflection, that the simple should be omnipresent in a manifold externality is an absolute contradiction, and inasmuch as reflection has at the same time to apprehend that omnipresence out of the perception of life, and so to concede the actuality of this idea, the thing becomes for it an incomprehensible mystery, since it does not lay hold of the concept, nor of the concept as the substance of life. – Simple life, though, is not omnipresent merely; it is downright the subsistence and the immanent substance of its objectivity, yet as subjective substance it is drive, and indeed the specific drive of the particular difference, and quite as essentially the one and universal drive of the specific, which leads this its particularizing back into unity and keeps it there. Life is life referring itself to itself, existing for itself, a soul, only as this negative unity of its own objectivity and particularization. With that it is essentially a singular, one that refers itself to objectivity as to an other, to an unliving nature. Herein, then, lies the original judgment of life: that it cuts itself off, as individual subject, from the objective, and that, constituting itself the negative unity of the concept, it makes the presupposition of an immediate objectivity.

Life is therefore to be considered first as living individual, which for itself is the subjective totality and stands presupposed as indifferent towards an objectivity that faces it as indifferent in turn.

Secondly, it is the life-process, the sublating of its presupposition, the positing as negative of the objectivity indifferent towards it, and the actualizing of itself as that objectivity's power and negative unity. With that it makes itself the universal, which is the unity of its own self and of its other. Life is therefore

Thirdly the process of the genus, the sublating of its singularization and the relating of itself to its objective existence as to its own self. This process is hereby, on the one side, a return into its concept and a repeating of the first diremption, a new individuality coming to be and the first immediate individuality dying; on the other side, however, the concept of life that has gone into itself is the becoming of the concept that relates itself to its own self, existing as universal and free for itself, the transition into cognition.

A. The Living Individual

1. Life's concept, or life taken universally, is the idea in immediate shape, the concept for which its objectivity is a fitting one; yet that objectivity fits it only so far as the concept is the negative unity of this externality — only, that is, so far as it posits the objectivity as fitting. The concept's infinite reference to its own self, being negativity, is self-determination, the diremption whereby it parts itself within itself as subjective singularity, and within itself as indifferent universality. Taken in its immediacy, the idea of life is at first nothing more than the creative universal soul. Just because of this immediacy, what the idea first does negatively is to refer to itself within itself, determining itself as concept, – a positing that is in itself and becomes being-for-itself only on returning into itself; the creative act of presupposing. By this self-determining, life in its universality turns into something particular; with that it has broken apart into the two extremes of a judgment which at once becomes a syllogism.

The determinations belonging to the opposition are the concept's own universal determinations, since it is the concept to which such breaking-apart belongs; what fills them out, however, is the idea. One of the two is that unity of concept and reality which the idea is, taken as the immediate unity, the one that earlier showed itself to be objectivity. Here, though, it stands under a different determination. There it was the unity of concept and reality in the sense that the concept had gone over into reality and was simply lost in it; there was no standing opposite, and since the concept is merely reality's inner, it amounts only to a reflection external to it. Objectivity in that sense is therefore immediacy itself taken immediately. In the present case, by contrast, objectivity is nothing but what has issued from the concept, so that positedness is its essence, so that it has the standing of a negative. – One has to look at it as the side of the concept's universality, and hence as abstract universality, something which by its very nature merely inheres in the subject and wears the form of immediate being that, once posited on its own, would be indifferent to the subject. Whatever totality of the concept falls to objectivity is on this showing merely lent to it; the last remnant of self-subsistence objectivity keeps against the subject is that being which in truth amounts only to the concept's moment of presupposing, caught in the first determinateness of a positing that is in itself, a positing not yet present as positing, not yet as unity reflected into itself. Issuing from the idea, then, self-subsistent objectivity is immediate being merely in the capacity of predicate in the judgment by which the concept determines itself, – a being distinct, to be sure, from the subject, yet posited at the same time and essentially as a moment of the concept.

So far as content goes, this objectivity is the concept's totality, but a totality confronted by the concept's subjectivity, or negative unity, and it is the latter that makes up the genuine centre, namely the concept's free unity with its own self. Such a subject is the idea under the form of singularity; as identity with self that is simple and yet negative; the living individual.

It is, to begin with, life in the shape of soul; the concept of its own self, thoroughly determined inwardly, the principle that begins and moves itself. Simple as the concept is, it holds determinate externality enclosed within it as a simple moment. – Yet further, this soul in its immediacy is external without mediation and carries an objective being on its own self; – reality made subject to the purpose, the immediate means, at the outset objectivity in the role of the subject's predicate, though later on it is the syllogism's middle term as well; the soul's corporeality is what lets the soul conclude with external objectivity. – Corporeality belongs to the living being at first as reality immediately one with the concept; in that respect it holds such reality simply from nature.

Now since this objectivity is the individual's predicate and has been drawn into the subjective unity, none of the object's earlier determinations attaches to it, neither the mechanical nor the chemical relation, and still less the abstract relations of reflection such as whole and parts and the like. Being externality, it is admittedly susceptible of such relations, but just so far it is no living existence; if one takes the living being for a whole put together out of parts, for something that mechanical or chemical causes work upon, for a mechanical or chemical product, whether merely that or something determined by an external purpose besides, then the concept counts as external to it and what one has taken is a dead thing. The concept being immanent to it, the living being's purposiveness has to be conceived as inner; the concept is present in it as determinate, marked off from its externality, and in the very act of marking itself off pervading that externality and staying identical with itself. Such objectivity of the living being is organism; it is the purpose's means and tool, purposive through and through because the concept makes up its substance; yet for that very reason this means and tool is itself the purpose carried out, in which the subjective purpose has thus far immediately concluded with its own self. On the side of its externality the organism is not a manifold of parts but of members, and these, as such, a) have subsistence only in the individuality; being external, they can be sundered and can be laid hold of in that externality; once sundered, however, they fall back under the mechanical and chemical relations of ordinary objectivity. b) The externality of the members runs counter to the negative unity of living individuality, which is therefore drive, drive to posit the abstract moment of the concept's determinateness as a real difference; and since the difference is immediate, it is the drive of every single, specific moment to bring itself forth, and equally to lift its particularity into universality, to sublate the others that lie outside it, to produce itself at their expense, but no less to sublate its own self and make itself a means for the rest.

2. Living individuality's process of this sort keeps within its own bounds and still falls wholly inside it. – When the syllogism of external purposiveness was under discussion, its first premise, that the purpose refers itself immediately to objectivity and turns it into a means, was taken in this way: within objectivity the purpose does remain equal to itself and has gone back into itself, yet objectivity has not yet sublated itself on its own self, so that the purpose is thus far not in and for itself within it, and comes to be so only in the conclusion. What the living being carries on with its own self is that premise, but a premise that is at once conclusion, since the subject's immediate reference to objectivity, which thereby turns into means and tool, is at the same time present as the concept's negative unity on its own self; the purpose carries itself out within this externality of its own by being the subjective power over it, by being the process wherein externality displays its self-dissolution and its going back into the negative unity of the purpose. The restlessness and mutability on the outward side of the living being is how the concept manifests itself in it, a concept which, being negativity on its own self, possesses objectivity only in the measure that objectivity's indifferent subsistence shows itself to be self-sublating. Driven by its drive, therefore, the concept brings itself forth in such fashion that the product, whose essence the concept is, is itself what produces, is product, that is, only as the externality that posits itself just as negatively, or as the very process of producing.

3. What was examined a moment ago is now the living subject's concept and that of its process; the determinations which are in relation to one another are, on one side, the concept's negative unity referring itself to itself, on the other the objectivity that serves it as means and within which it has nonetheless gone back into its own self. Since these are moments belonging to the idea of life within its concept, they do not count as the determinate concept-moments proper to the living individual in its reality. That individual's objectivity, or corporeality, is a concrete totality; the moments just named are the sides out of which livingness gets constituted, and so they are not moments of a livingness the idea has already constituted. The living objectivity of the individual as such, however, ensouled by the concept and having it for substance, carries on itself, as its essential differences, differences that are the concept's determinations, universality, particularity and singularity; hence the shape in which they stand externally apart is partitioned, or notched, according to them (insectum).

First, then, it is universality, the trembling of livingness purely and solely within its own self, sensibility. Universality in its concept, as this emerged above, is the simple immediacy that is such only by being absolute negativity within. Sensibility brings this concept of absolute difference before intuition, the concept as its negativity is dissolved into simplicity and stands equal to itself. It is being-within-itself, not in the sense of abstract simplicity, but an infinite determinable receptivity that in its determinateness does not turn into anything manifold or outward but is thoroughly reflected into itself. In such universality determinateness is present as a simple principle; a single outward determinateness, what is called an impression, comes back out of its outward and manifold determining into this simple self-feeling. One may accordingly take sensibility for the existence of a soul that is within itself, since sensibility receives every externality into itself yet carries it back into the perfect simplicity of a universality equal to itself.

Particularity is the concept's second determination, the moment of difference as posited; the unlocking of a negativity that lay shut up in simple self-feeling, or that was there an ideal and not yet a real determinateness; – irritability. Because its negativity is abstract, feeling is drive; it determines itself; and the living being's self-determination is its judgment, its making itself finite, whereby it refers itself to what is outward as to a presupposed objectivity and enters into reciprocity with it. – Taken in its particularity it is now partly a species standing beside other species of living things; the formal way in which such indifferent diversity is reflected into itself gives the formal genus and its arrangement into a system; the individual way of reflecting, by contrast, lies in this, that particularity is the negativity of its own determinateness taken as a direction outwards, and so is the concept's negativity referring itself to itself.

Under this third determination the living being stands as something singular. That reflection-into-self determines itself, more closely, thus: in irritability the living being is externality of itself as against its own self, as against the objectivity which it holds immediately on itself for means and tool and which admits of outward determining. Reflection-into-self does away with this immediacy, – partly as theoretical reflection, namely so far as negativity is present as the simple moment of sensibility that was examined there and that makes up feeling, – partly as real reflection, in that the concept's unity posits itself in its outward objectivity as negative unity, which is reproduction. – Of these, the first two, sensibility and irritability, are abstract determinations; in reproduction, as in its truth, life is something concrete, is livingness, and only there does it likewise possess feeling and the strength to resist. Reproduction is the negativity that constitutes the simple moment of sensibility, and irritability is a living strength to resist only in that the relation to what is outward is reproduction and individual identity with self. Every one of the single moments is essentially the totality of them all; what differentiates them is the ideal determinateness of form, and in reproduction this is posited as the concrete totality of the whole. This whole stands therefore, on one side, as a third, namely as real totality, opposed to those determinate totalities, while on the other side it is their essentiality existing in itself, and equally that in which they are held together as moments and have their subject and their subsistence.

With reproduction, which is the moment of singularity, what the living being posits is its own actual individuality, a being-for-itself referring itself to itself; but at once it is also a real reference outwards; the reflection of particularity, or irritability, against an other, as against the objective world. Shut up hitherto inside the individual, the process of life goes over into the reference to presupposed objectivity as such by this, that in positing itself as a subjective totality the individual becomes a totality also in the moment of its determinateness as reference to externality.

B. The Life-Process

In giving itself shape within its own self, the living individual thereby strains against that original presupposing of its own and takes up a position, as subject existing in and for itself, opposite the objective world it has presupposed. This subject is its own purpose, the concept holding its means and its subjective reality in the objectivity that has been subjected to it; by that route it stands constituted as the idea existing in and for itself, as the essentially self-subsistent, over against which the presupposed outer world carries only the value of a negative and non-self-subsistent thing. The living being, in its self-feeling, possesses this certainty that the otherness set over against it is in itself a nullity. Its drive is the need to sublate such otherness and to give that certainty its truth. Considered as subject, the individual is at the outset merely the concept of life's idea; the subjective process it runs within itself, feeding upon its own self, and positing immediate objectivity as a natural means conformably to its concept, is mediated by that other process which bears on externality fully posited, on the objective totality standing indifferently beside it.

Need is where this process begins, that is, with the moment in which the living being first determines itself and so posits itself as negated, referring itself thereby to something other than itself, to indifferent objectivity; – while secondly it is just as little lost in this loss of itself, maintains itself there and stays the identity of the concept that is equal to itself; hence it is the drive to posit that world which is other to it as equal, for itself, to itself, to sublate it and to objectify itself. By that route its self-determination wears the form of objective externality, and since it is identical with itself all the while, it is the absolute contradiction. Immediate shaping is the idea within its simple concept, objectivity conformable to the concept; so taken, it is by nature good. But once its negative moment realizes itself into objective particularity, that is, once each of the essential moments of its unity is realized on its own into a totality, then the concept is sundered into absolute inequality with itself, and since it is equally the absolute identity within that sundering, the living being is this sundering for its own self and has the feeling of the contradiction, which is pain. Pain is on that account the privilege of living natures; being the concept in existence, they are an actuality endowed with the infinite power of being within themselves the negativity of their own selves, of having this negativity of theirs for them, of holding themselves fast in their otherness. – If it is said that contradiction cannot be thought, contradiction is on the contrary, in the pain of what lives, even a concrete existence that is actual.

Such diremption of the living being within itself is feeling, in that it is taken up into the simple universality of the concept, into sensibility. Out of pain arise need and drive, which make up the transition by which the individual, being for itself as the negation of itself, shall come to be for itself as identity too, – an identity having being only as the negation of that negation. – What identity lies in drive as such is the subjective certainty of its own self, on the strength of which the individual bears itself towards its outward, indifferently existing world as towards an appearance, an actuality unessential and in itself without concept. Such a world is to receive the concept into itself only through the subject, which is the immanent purpose. That the objective world is indifferent towards determinateness, and hence towards the purpose, makes up its outward capacity for suiting the subject; whatever other specifications it may carry on it, its mechanical determinability, the absence of the immanent concept's freedom, makes up its impotence to hold out against the living being. – So far as the object stands to the living being at first as an indifferent outward thing, it can work mechanically upon it; but working so, it does not work upon it as upon something alive; so far as it does bear upon what lives, it works not as cause but stimulates it. Since the living being is drive, externality reaches it and enters it only so far as externality is already in and for itself within it; the working upon the subject accordingly consists in nothing else than that the subject finds the externality which offers itself to be corresponding; – granted that this externality may not suit the subject's totality, it must at any rate answer to some particular side of it, and that possibility rests on the subject's being a particular precisely in bearing itself outwardly.

Now in so far as the subject, determined by its need, refers itself to the outward and thereby is itself something outward or an instrument, it exercises force upon the object. Its particular character, its finitude generally, belongs to the more determinate appearing of this relation. – What is outward about the relation is the process of objectivity at large, mechanism and chemism. That process, however, is broken off at once and outwardness turned into inwardness. The external purposiveness which the subject's activity first brings about in the indifferent object is sublated in this, that over against the concept the object is no substance, so that the concept can become not merely the object's outer form but must posit itself as its essence and as the determination immanent to it and pervading it, conformably with their original identity.

With the seizing of the object, then, the mechanical process passes into the inner one, whereby the individual appropriates the object in such a way that it strips it of its peculiar constitution, turns it into its means, and hands over to it its own subjectivity for substance. This assimilation thereby falls together with the individual's process of reproduction examined earlier; in that process the individual feeds at first upon itself, making its own objectivity into its object; the mechanical and chemical conflict of its members with outward things is an objective moment of it. Whatever is mechanical and chemical in the process marks a beginning of the living being's dissolution. Since life is the truth of these processes, and hence, as living, the concrete existence of that truth and its power, it reaches out over them, pervades them as their universality, and their product is through and through determined by it. Their being so transformed into living individuality makes up the latter's return into its own self, so that production, which as such would be a passing over into an other, turns into reproduction, wherein the living being posits itself for itself as identical with itself.

The immediate idea is likewise the immediate identity of concept and reality, an identity not existing for itself; through the objective process the living being confers its self-feeling upon itself, for therein it posits itself, within its otherness posited as indifferent, as being what it is in and for itself, that which is identical with its own self, the negative unity of the negative. In this going-together of the individual with the objectivity it had at first presupposed as indifferent, the individual, while on one side constituting itself an actual singularity, has to that same degree sublated its particularity and lifted itself into universality. Its particularity had consisted in the diremption by which life posited, as its species, individual life along with the objectivity outward to it. By the outward life-process, therefore, it has posited itself as real universal life, as genus.

C. The Genus

Severed at the start from the universal concept of life, the living individual is a presupposition that has not yet borne itself out through its own self. Through the process carried on with the world presupposed along with it, the individual has posited its own self, for itself, as the negative unity of the otherness belonging to it, as the basis of its own self; with that it is the idea's actuality, so that the individual produces itself henceforth out of actuality, where formerly it issued only from the concept, and its coming-to-be, once a presupposing, now turns into its production.

The further determination it has won by sublating the opposition, however, is to be genus, identity of itself with the indifferent otherness it formerly had. Being this essential identity, such an idea of the individual is essentially the particularizing of its own self. Reckoned by the totality out of which it issues, this diremption of the idea is a doubling of the individual, – a presupposing of an objectivity identical with the individual, and a bearing of the living being towards its own self as towards another living being.

The universal in question is the third stage, the truth of life so long as life remains enclosed within its own sphere. That stage is the individual's self-referring process, where externality counts as its immanent moment, and secondly this externality is itself, as living totality, an objectivity that counts for the individual as the individual's own self; – an objectivity in which the individual holds the certainty of its own self not as something sublated but as something that subsists.

Now because the relation of the genus is an identity of individual self-feeling within one that is at the same time a second self-subsistent individual, that relation is contradiction; hence the living being is once more drive. – With the genus the idea of life is indeed brought to completion, yet at first it still lies within the sphere of immediacy; such universality is therefore actual in a singular shape, the concept whose reality wears the form of immediate objectivity. In itself the individual is accordingly genus, but genus it is not for itself; what is there for it is at first no more than a second living individual; the concept, in being distinguished from itself, has as its object, with which it stands identical, not itself qua concept, but a concept which, being alive, carries external objectivity for it besides, and hence a form that is at once mutual.

Identity with the other, the individual's universality, is on that account as yet only inward or subjective; hence the individual has the longing to posit that identity and to give itself reality as universal. This drive of the genus can be realized only by sublating individualities which, singular, are still particular over against one another. So far as it is these that, universal in themselves, appease the tension of their longing and dissolve into their genus-universality, the identity they realize is the negative unity of a genus that reflects itself into itself out of the sundering. It is to that extent the individuality of life itself, no longer brought forth out of life's concept, but out of the actual idea. At the outset it is itself nothing but the concept, one that has still to objectify itself, yet the actual concept; – the germ of a living individual. Here there lies before ordinary perception what the concept is, and that the subjective concept has outward actuality. For the germ of what lives is individuality wholly concentrated, holding all the various sides, properties and articulated differences of that individual in their entire determinateness, while the subjective totality, at first immaterial, remains undeveloped, simple and without sensuous character; so the germ is the whole living being under the inward form of the concept.

On this side the genus's reflection into itself is what secures it actuality, since the moment of negative unity and individuality gets posited in it, – the propagation of living kinds. The idea, which as life still wears the form of immediacy, falls back to that extent into actuality, and this reflection of it amounts to no more than repetition, the infinite progress wherein it never steps beyond the finitude of its immediacy. Yet this return into its first concept has a higher side as well: the idea has not only traversed the mediation of its processes inside immediacy, but by that very course has sublated immediacy and raised itself thereby into a higher form of its existence.

For the genus-process, in which the singular individuals sublate in one another their indifferent, immediate concrete existence and die away in that negative unity, has for the other side of its product the realized genus, which has posited itself as identical with the concept. – Within the genus-process the sundered singularities of individual life go under; the negative identity whereby the genus goes back into itself is on one hand the engendering of singularity and on the other the sublating of it, and so is the genus coming together with itself, the idea's universality in process of becoming for itself. Copulation is where the immediacy of living individuality dies away; the death of this life is the coming forth of spirit. The idea, which as genus is in itself, is for itself once it has sublated the particularity that made up the living kinds and has given itself, in so doing, a reality which is itself simple universality; so it is the idea which bears itself towards itself as idea, the universal whose determinateness and existence is universality itself; – the idea of cognition.