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.

Chapter 2. The Idea of Cognition

Life is the immediate idea, or the idea as its concept not yet realized in its own self. In its judgment the idea is cognition at large.

The concept is as concept for itself insofar as it concretely exists freely, as abstract universality or as genus. So it is its pure identity with itself, an identity that distinguishes itself within itself in such a way that what is distinguished is not an objectivity but is likewise set free into subjectivity, into the form of simple sameness with itself, so that the object of the concept is the concept itself. Its reality at large is the form of its existence; everything turns on how this form gets determined; upon that determination depends how the concept in itself, or as subjective, differs from the concept immersed in objectivity, and again from the concept within the idea of life. In the last of these the concept does stand apart from its outward reality and is posited for itself; yet such being-for-itself accrues to it only as that identity which consists in referring to itself while immersed in an objectivity subjugated to it, or in referring to itself as the substantial form dwelling within. What raises the concept above life is that its reality is now concept-form liberated into universality. By this judgment the idea becomes twofold: a subjective concept having itself for its reality, and an objective one that is as life. – Thinking, spirit, self-consciousness are determinations of the idea to the extent that it takes itself as object, and its existence, that is, the determinateness of the idea's being, is nothing other than its own self-differentiation.

The metaphysics of spirit, or, as people used more commonly to say, of the soul, revolved about the determinations of substance, simplicity, immateriality; – determinations in whose case the representation of spirit drawn from empirical consciousness was laid at the base as subject, and the question was then raised what sort of predicates agree with the perceptions; – a procedure that could get no further than the procedure of physics does in bringing the world of appearance under universal laws and determinations of reflection, since here too it was only spirit in its appearance that lay at the base; indeed it had to fall short even of the scientific standing of physics, for since spirit is not only infinitely richer than nature but has for its essence the absolute unity of what is opposed within the concept, spirit exhibits in its appearance and in its reference to externality the contradiction at its highest determinateness, so that for each of the opposed determinations of reflection an experience can be adduced, or, in the manner of formal inference, the opposed determinations can be arrived at from the experiences. Since the predicates that issue immediately from the appearance belong in the first instance to empirical psychology, what is really left over for metaphysical consideration is only quite meagre determinations of reflection. – Kant, in his critique of the rational doctrine of the soul, pins this metaphysics down to the point that, insofar as it is to be a rational science, the least thing that one might add from perception to the universal representation of self-consciousness would turn that science into an empirical one and would spoil its rational purity and its independence of all experience. – There remains accordingly nothing but the simple representation, wholly empty of content on its own account: I, and of this one cannot so much as say that it is a concept; it is rather a bare consciousness that accompanies all concepts. By this I, or also It (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented, on Kant's further consequences, than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = x, knowable solely by way of the thoughts which constitute its predicates, and of which, held apart from them, we can never have the least concept; this I has withal, in Kant's own phrase, the inconvenience that we must always already be availing ourselves of it in order to judge anything about it; for it is not so much a representation by which one particular object gets distinguished, as a form of representation in general, insofar as representation is to be called cognition. – The paralogism that the rational doctrine of the soul commits is then said to consist in this, that modes of self-consciousness in thinking are made into concepts of the understanding as concepts of an object, that this: I think, is taken as a thinking being, a thing-in-itself; in which manner the unwarranted inference is drawn, from my occurring in consciousness always as subject, and indeed as a singular one, one identical throughout all the manifoldness of representation and marking myself off from that manifoldness as external, that I am a substance, further something qualitatively simple, and a one, and something existing independently of the things in space and time. –

I have excerpted this exposition at some length, because it lets one recognize with precision both the nature of the erstwhile metaphysics of the soul and, above all, the nature of the critique through which that metaphysics foundered. – The former set out to determine the abstract essence of the soul; it began originally from perception and converted the empirical universality of perception, together with the determination of reflection that is external to the singularity of the actual at large, into the form of the cited determinations of essence. – Kant, for his part, has before him nothing but the condition of the metaphysics of his own day, which for the most part stopped short at such abstract, one-sided determinations without any dialectic at all; the genuinely speculative ideas of older philosophers concerning the concept of spirit he neither heeded nor examined. In his critique of those determinations he simply followed Hume's manner of scepticism; namely, he holds fast to how the I appears in self-consciousness, but from this, since the essence of the I, – the thing in itself, is supposed to be cognized, everything empirical is to be left out; now nothing remains but this appearance of the: I think, which accompanies all representations, – of which one has not the slightest concept. – It must certainly be granted that one has not the least concept either of the I or of anything whatever, and of the concept itself as well, insofar as one does not comprehend and stays put at the simple, fixed representation and at the name. – Odd is the thought, – if it may be called a thought at all, – that I must already avail myself of the I in order to judge about the I; the I that avails itself of self-consciousness as a means in order to judge, this surely is an x, of which, as of the relation of such availing, one can have not the slightest concept. But it is surely laughable to call this nature of self-consciousness, that the I is what thinks itself, that no thinking of the I takes place except where it is the I doing the thinking, – an inconvenience and, as something faulty, a circle; – a relation through which, in immediate empirical self-consciousness, the absolute, eternal nature of self-consciousness and of the concept reveals itself, and reveals itself for the reason that self-consciousness is precisely the existent, hence empirically perceivable, pure concept, the absolute reference to itself which, as a sundering judgment, makes itself into its own object and is solely this, to make itself thereby into a circle. – A stone has no such inconvenience; when it is to be thought, or judged about, it does not stand in its own way; – it is relieved of the burden of availing itself of itself for this business; it is an other outside it that must take that trouble on.

The defect that these representations, which deserve to be called barbaric, place in this, that in the thinking of the I the I itself cannot be left out as subject, then shows itself conversely in this way too, that I come forward only as subject of consciousness, or that I can use myself only as subject of a judgment, and that the intuition is missing through which the I would be given as an object; – but that the concept of a thing which can exist only as subject carries with it no objective reality whatever as yet. – If external intuition, determined in time and space, is what objectivity calls for, and it is this intuition that is found wanting, then one sees clearly enough that by objectivity nothing is meant but that sensuous reality above which to have raised oneself is the condition of thinking and of truth. But certainly, when the I is taken conceptlessly, as the plain simple representation we utter in the consciousness of every day, what we have is the abstract determination, not that self-referring which makes itself its own object; – so taken it is merely one extreme, a subject one-sidedly lacking its objectivity, or it might just as well be object lacking subjectivity, were it not for the inconvenience already touched upon, that from the I as object the thinking subject refuses to be removed. Yet in fact this same inconvenience attends the first determination as well, the I as subject; for the I thinks something, whether itself or an other. That the two forms in which the I sets itself over against itself cannot be parted belongs to what is most proper to the nature of the I's concept, and of the concept generally; and this is just what Kant means to keep at bay, in order to retain nothing but what does not differentiate itself internally, hence nothing but the conceptless representation. Something conceptless of that sort may well be set opposite the abstract determinations of reflection or categories of the older metaphysics; – in point of one-sidedness it ranks with them, even though they are for all that a higher achievement of thought; but held up against the profounder ideas of earlier philosophy on the concept of soul or of thinking, for instance the truly speculative ideas of Aristotle, it looks all the poorer and emptier. Had Kantian philosophy scrutinized those determinations of reflection, it had all the more reason to scrutinize the empty I clung to as an abstraction, the alleged idea of a thing-in-itself, which by reason of that very abstractness proves rather to be something thoroughly untrue; the felt inconvenience so lamented is itself the empirical datum wherein such an abstraction's untruth announces itself.

The only proof of the soul's persistence that the Kantian critique of rational psychology mentions is Mendelssohn's, and I cite its refutation of that proof for the sake of the curiousness of what is set against it. That proof is grounded on the simplicity of the soul, by virtue of which the soul is said to be incapable of alteration, of passing over into an other in time. Qualitative simplicity is the form of abstraction at large considered above; as qualitative determinateness it was examined in the sphere of being, and it was proved there that the qualitative, as a determinateness referring to itself in this abstract fashion, is for that very reason rather dialectical and is nothing but the passing over into an other. In the case of the concept, by contrast, it was shown that if the concept is considered with respect to persistence, indestructibility, imperishability, it is what is in and for itself and eternal for the reason that it is not abstract but concrete simplicity, not a being-determined that refers to itself abstractly, but the unity of itself and of its other, into which it therefore cannot pass over as though it were altering in it, and this precisely because the other, the being-determined, is the concept itself, so that in this passing over it only comes to itself. – The Kantian critique now sets the quantitative determination over against that qualitative determination of the unity of the concept. Although the soul, it is said, is not a manifold outside-one-another and contains no extensive magnitude, consciousness nonetheless has a degree, and the soul, like everything that concretely exists, an intensive magnitude; but with that the possibility of passing over into nothing through gradual vanishing is posited. – What, then, does this refutation amount to other than transferring to spirit one category of being, namely intensive magnitude? – transferring a determination that holds no truth of its own and stands rather sublated within the concept.

Metaphysics, – even that metaphysics which restricted itself to fixed concepts of the understanding and did not raise itself to the speculative, to the nature of the concept and of the idea, had for its purpose to cognize the truth, and examined its objects as to whether they are something true or not, substances or phenomena. But the victory of the Kantian critique over it consists rather in getting rid of the inquiry that has the true for its purpose, and of this purpose itself; it does not so much as raise the question that alone holds any interest, whether a determinate subject, here the abstract I of representation, has truth in and for itself. To stop short at the appearance, however, and at whatever issues in everyday consciousness for mere representation, amounts to renouncing the concept and philosophy. Whatever goes beyond that counts, in the Kantian critique, as something overflying, something to which reason is by no means entitled. In fact the concept does overfly the conceptless, and the nearest entitlement to go beyond is, on the one side, the concept itself, and on the other, on the negative side, the untruth of appearance and of representation, as also of such abstractions as things-in-themselves and that I which is supposed to be no object for itself.

Within the connection of this logical exposition it is the idea of life out of which the idea of spirit has emerged, or, what says the same, as whose truth it has proved itself. Being this result, the idea possesses its truth in and for its own self, and with that truth the empirical, the appearance of spirit, may afterwards be compared, to see how far the two agree; the empirical, though, is itself likewise graspable only through the idea and out of it. Of life we have seen that it is the idea, and yet it was shown at the same time that life is not yet the genuine exhibition, the very mode and manner in which the idea exists. For within life the idea's reality has the shape of singularity, whereas universality, the genus, remains the inner; hence the truth of life, as absolute negative unity, lies in sublating singularity in its abstract, that is to say immediate, form, and in being identical with itself as identical, self-equal as genus. This idea is now spirit. – On this it may be further remarked that spirit is considered here in the form belonging to this idea as logical. For it has yet other shapes, mentionable here only in passing, in which it must be treated by the concrete sciences dealing with spirit, namely as soul, consciousness and spirit as such.

The name: soul used formerly to be employed of the singular finite spirit at large, and the rational or empirical doctrine of the soul was meant to signify as much as doctrine of spirit. With the expression: soul there hovers before one the representation that it is a thing like other things; one asks after its seat, the spatial determination from which its forces operate; still more after how this thing is imperishable, subjected to the conditions of temporality yet withdrawn from alteration within them. The system of monads raises matter up into soul-likeness; on this representation the soul is an atom just as the atoms of matter are; the atom that rises as vapour from the coffee cup is, given favourable circumstances, capable of developing itself into a soul, and only the greater obscurity of its representing distinguishes it from such a thing as appears as soul. – The concept that is for its own self must of necessity be in immediate existence as well; taken in that substantial identity with life, sunk as it is into its own externality, it belongs to the treatment of anthropology. But to anthropology too that metaphysics must remain alien in which this form of immediacy becomes a soul-thing, an atom, on a par with the atoms of matter. – To anthropology there must be left only the dark region in which spirit stands under what used to be called sidereal and terrestrial influences, lives as a nature-spirit in sympathy with nature and becomes aware of nature's alterations in dreams and presentiments, dwells in the brain, the heart, the ganglia, the liver and so forth, to which last, according to Plato, the god gave the gift of divination, so that the unreasoning part too should be provided for out of his goodness and have a share in what is higher, a gift above which the self-conscious human being stands raised. To this unreasoning side belongs further the relation of representing and of the higher spiritual activity, insofar as in the singular subject this activity is subjected to the play of wholly contingent bodily constitution, of external influences and of singular circumstances.

The lowest among the concrete shapes, the one where spirit lies immersed in materiature, has for its immediately higher shape consciousness. In this form the free concept is as the I that is for itself, withdrawn from objectivity yet referring itself to objectivity as to its other, as to an object standing over against it. Since spirit here no longer is as soul, but rather, in the certainty of itself, the immediacy of being has for it the significance of a negative, the identity in which it is with itself in the objective is at the same time still only a shining, inasmuch as the objective still also has the form of something that is in itself. This stage is the object of the phenomenology of spirit, – a science standing midway between the science of nature-spirit and that of spirit as such, and one which considers spirit that is for itself at the same time in its reference to its other, an other that is thereby determined, as was recalled, both as object that is in itself and as negated, – considers spirit, that is, as appearing, as exhibiting itself in the opposite of itself.

The truth higher than this form, however, is spirit for itself, for which the object that is in itself for consciousness now bears the form of spirit's own determining, of representation at large; such spirit, at work upon the determinations as upon what belongs to it, upon feelings, representations and thoughts, is to that degree infinite in itself and in its form. To examine this stage is the business of the doctrine of spirit proper, which would cover the subject matter of what is ordinarily called empirical psychology, though if it is to be a science of spirit its procedure cannot be empirical but has to be conceived scientifically. – Spirit at this stage is finite spirit, insofar as the content of its determinateness is immediately given; the science of it has to set forth the course along which spirit liberates itself from that determinateness of its own and moves on to lay hold of its truth, of infinite spirit.

The idea of spirit, by contrast, which is a logical object, stands already within pure science; it has therefore no need to watch spirit run through the course in which spirit is entangled with nature, with immediate determinateness and with material or representation, which is what those three sciences consider; it has this course already behind it, or what is the same, rather ahead of it, – the former insofar as logic is taken as the last science, the latter insofar as it is taken as the first, from which the idea makes its first transition into nature. Within the logical idea of spirit, accordingly, the I is at once, just as it emerged from the concept of nature as nature's truth, the free concept which in its judgment has itself for object, the concept as its own idea. But in this shape too the idea is not yet completed.

Being the concept which, free though it be, has itself for object, the idea is immediate, and just on that account of immediacy it remains the idea under the aspect of its subjectivity, and thereby in its finitude at large. It is the purpose that is to realize itself, or it is the absolute idea itself still in its appearance. What it seeks is the true, this identity of the concept itself and of reality, but as yet it only seeks it; for here, as it first is, it is still something subjective. The object that is there for the concept is here, accordingly, also a given one, but it does not enter into the subject as an object acting upon it, nor as an object constituted as such on its own account, nor as representation; rather, the subject converts it into a determination of the concept; it is the concept that is at work in the object, that refers itself to itself therein, and that, by giving itself its reality in the object, finds truth.

The idea, then, is at first the one extreme of a syllogism, namely the concept which as purpose has at first no reality save its own subjective one; the opposite extreme, the restriction upon this subjectivity, is the objective world. What makes the two extremes identical is that both are the idea; in the first place their unity is the unity of the concept, which in the one is only for itself and in the other only in itself; in the second place, reality is abstract in the one and, in the other, present in its concrete externality. – Cognition is what now posits this unity; since it is the subjective idea which as purpose starts out from itself, the unity is at first only as middle term. – What cognizes does indeed, by the determinateness of its concept, namely abstract being-for-itself, refer itself to an outer world; but it does so in the absolute certainty of itself, so as to lift the reality it has in its own self, this merely formal truth, into real truth. In its concept it has the whole essentiality of the objective world; its process is to posit the concrete content of that world, for itself, as identical with the concept, and conversely to posit the concept as identical with objectivity.

Immediately, the idea of appearance is theoretical idea, cognition as such. For immediately the objective world has for the concept that is for itself the form of immediacy or of being, just as this concept is at first only the abstract concept of itself still enclosed within itself; it is therefore only as form; the reality it has in its own self is only its simple determinations of universality and particularity; singularity, however, or the determinate determinateness, the content, this form receives from outside.

A. The Idea of the True

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

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

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

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

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

a. Analytic Cognition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

b. Synthetic Cognition

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

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

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

1. Definition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Division

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The Theorem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B. The Idea of the Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 3. The Absolute Idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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