Remark

In the account given here of the syllogism's nature and of its various forms, notice has also been taken in passing of what makes up the chief interest in the customary consideration and treatment of syllogisms, namely how a correct inference can be drawn in each figure; in doing so, however, only the principal moment has been indicated, and those cases and entanglements have been passed over which arise once the difference between positive and negative judgments is drawn in along with the quantitative determination, particularity above all. – A few remarks upon the customary view of the syllogism in logic, and upon the manner of dealing with it, will not be out of place here. – As is well known, this doctrine was elaborated into such minute detail that its so-called subtleties became a general vexation and disgust. As natural understanding asserted itself against substanceless forms of reflection on every side of intellectual culture, it turned against that artificial acquaintance with the forms of reason as well, and supposed that such a science could be done without, for the reason that by nature, and with no special learning, it already performs of itself the individual operations of thought recorded there. Where rational thinking is concerned, the human being would in fact be as badly off, were the condition of it the toilsome study of the formulae of the syllogism, as he would be, (as was already remarked in the preface) if he could not walk and digest without having studied anatomy and physiology. Just as the study of those sciences may not be without profit for one's dietetic conduct, so too an influence more important still upon the correctness of thinking will doubtless have to be ascribed to the study of the forms of reason; but without entering here upon this side of the matter, which concerns the cultivation of subjective thinking and hence really belongs to pedagogy, it will have to be granted that a study whose object is how reason operates and what its laws are must in and for itself be of the very greatest interest, – of one at least no smaller than the knowledge of the laws of nature and of their particular shapes. If it is held to be no small thing to have discovered some sixty odd species of parrot, a hundred and thirty-seven kinds of veronica and so forth, then finding out the forms of reason must be held to be a far less trifling matter; is a figure of the syllogism not something infinitely higher than a parrot species or a veronica species?

Much as it is therefore to be reckoned nothing but crudity to despise acquaintance with the forms of reason altogether, just as much must one grant that the customary exposition of the syllogism and of its particular shapes yields no rational cognition, no exhibition of these as forms of reason, and that the wisdom of syllogistic, through its own worthlessness, drew upon itself the low esteem that fell to it. Its defect consists in this, that it stops short absolutely at the understanding's form of the syllogism, according to which the determinations of the concept get taken for abstract determinations of form. Holding fast to them as abstract qualities is all the more inconsequent in that in the syllogism it is the references among them that make up the essential thing, and inherence and subsumption already contain this, that the singular, having the universal inhere in it, is itself something universal, and the universal, subsuming the singular as it does, is itself something singular, while more precisely the syllogism expressly posits just this unity as middle term and its determination is mediation precisely, that is, that the determinations of the concept no longer have for their basis, as they do in the judgment, their externality towards one another, but rather their unity. – Through the concept of the syllogism, then, the imperfection of the formal syllogism is pronounced, the syllogism in which the middle term, instead of being the unity of the extremes, is to be held fast as an abstract determination of form, qualitatively diverse from them. – The consideration is rendered still emptier of content by the fact that even such references or judgments as those in which the formal determinations themselves become indifferent, as in the negative and the particular judgment, and which therefore come close to being mere propositions, are still accepted as perfect relations. – Since now the qualitative form S–P–U counts quite generally as the last and absolute one, the dialectical consideration of the syllogism drops away entirely, and the remaining syllogisms are accordingly regarded as species rather than as necessary alterations of that form. – Here it makes no difference whether the first formal syllogism is itself regarded merely as one species alongside the rest, or else as genus and species at once; the latter happens when the remaining syllogisms are led back to the first. Where this reduction is not carried out expressly, the same formal relation of external subsumption which the first figure expresses always lies at the basis.

The formal syllogism just described is the contradiction of a middle term that is to be the determinate unity of the extremes and yet is not that unity, but a determination qualitatively diverse from the very terms whose unity it is to be. Being this contradiction, the syllogism is dialectical in its own self. Its dialectical movement exhibits it in the complete moments of the concept, so that not merely the relation of subsumption, that is, particularity, but just as essentially the negative unity, along with universality, are moments of the conjoining. So far as each of them, taken for itself, is again only a one-sided moment of particularity, they too are imperfect middle terms, though they constitute at the same time the developed determinations of that middle term; the whole course through the three figures displays the middle term in one after another of these determinations, and what truly results from this is that the middle term is not a single one of them but their totality.

The formal syllogism's defect lies, therefore, not in the form of the syllogism, – this form is rather the very form of rationality, – but in its being there only as an abstract and hence conceptless form. It has been shown of the abstract determination that, by virtue of its abstract reference to itself, it may just as well be regarded as content; to that extent the formal syllogism accomplishes nothing beyond this, that a subject's reference to a predicate does or does not follow merely from this middle term. Nothing is gained by having proved a proposition through a syllogism of that sort; because the middle term has an abstract determinateness, being a conceptless quality, there may equally well be other middle terms yielding the opposite, and indeed from the same middle term opposed predicates can in turn be derived by further syllogisms. – Apart from accomplishing little, the formal syllogism is besides a very simple affair; the many rules people have devised are burdensome already because they stand in such contrast with the simple nature of the fact, but then also because they bear upon those cases in which the formal content of the syllogism is diminished altogether by the external form determination, particularity especially, and chiefly insofar as it must for this purpose be taken in the comprehensive sense, and in which results are brought out that are wholly void of content even as regards form. – The most just and the most important side of the disfavour into which syllogistic has fallen, however, is that it is so long-drawn-out and conceptless a business with an object whose one and only content is the concept itself. – The many syllogistic rules call to mind the procedure of reckoning masters, who likewise give a multitude of rules about the arithmetical operations, all of which presuppose that one does not have the concept of the operation. – But numbers are a conceptless material, the operation of reckoning an external gathering or separating, a mechanical procedure, as witness the calculating machines that have been invented to carry these operations out; the harshest and most glaring thing, by contrast, is that the form determinations of the syllogism, which are concepts, should be handled as a conceptless material.

The uttermost point of this conceptless way of taking the conceptual determinations of the syllogism is surely that Leibniz (Opp. Tom. II. P. I.) subjected the syllogism to the combinatorial calculus and by its means computed how many positions of the syllogism are possible; – with reference, namely, to the differences between positive and negative judgments, and then between universal, particular, indeterminate and singular ones; of such combinations 2048 turn out to be possible, and after exclusion of the unusable ones 24 usable figures are left over. – Leibniz makes a great deal of the usefulness of combinatorial analysis for finding not only the forms of the syllogism but the combinations of other concepts as well. The operation by which this is found is the same as the one by which it is computed what combinations of letters an alphabet permits, how many kinds of throw a game of dice affords, how many games are possible with a hand of L’hombre cards and so forth. What one finds here, then, is that the determinations of the syllogism are set in one class with the pips of the die and of the L’hombre card, that the rational is taken as something dead and conceptless, and that what is peculiar to the concept and its determinations, namely to refer themselves as spiritual essences and through this referring to sublate their immediate determination, is left on one side. – This Leibnizian application of combinatorial calculus to the syllogism, and to how other concepts combine, differed in nothing from the notorious Lullian art save that on the side of amount it was more methodical, matching it for the rest in senselessness. – Bound up with this was a favourite thought of Leibniz's, conceived by him in his youth and, for all its immaturity and shallowness, not given up in later years either, of a universal characteristic of concepts, – a written language in which every concept would be exhibited as being a reference out of others, or as referring itself to others – as though in the rational combination, which is essentially dialectical, a content still kept the same determinations that it has when it is fixed for itself.

Ploucquet's calculus has without doubt seized upon the most consistent procedure by which the relation of the syllogism becomes fit to be subjected to a calculus. This rests on abstracting from the difference of relation, from the difference of singularity, particularity and universality in the judgment, and on holding fast the abstract identity of subject and predicate, whereby these stand in mathematical equality; – a reference which turns inferring into a formation of propositions wholly empty of content and tautological. – In the proposition: the rose is red, what the predicate signifies is supposed to be not red in its universality but only the determinate red of the rose; again, in the proposition: all Christians are human beings, only those human beings who are Christians are what the predicate is supposed to signify; from this together with the proposition: the Jews are not Christians, there then follows the conclusion that did this syllogistic calculus no good service with Mendelssohn: therefore the Jews are not human beings, (namely not those human beings who are the Christians). – Ploucquet states, as something his invention brings with it, posse etiam rudes mechanice totam logicam doceri, uti pueri arithmeticam docentur, ita quidem, ut nulla formidine in ratiociniis suis errandi torqueri, vel fallaciis circumveniri possint, si in calculo non errant. – This recommendation, that the whole of logic could be imparted mechanically to the uneducated by way of the calculus, is assuredly the worst that could be said of an invention regarding the exposition of logical science.

B. The Syllogism of Reflection

What the qualitative syllogism ran through has sublated the abstract character of its determinations; the term has thereby posited itself as such a determinateness that the other shines within it too. Over and above the abstract terms, there is present in the syllogism their reference as well, and the conclusion posits this as mediated and necessary; in truth, then, no determinateness is posited as a single one on its own account, but each as a referring of the others, as concrete determinateness.

As abstract particularity, the middle term was for itself a simple determinateness, and a middle only in an external, relative way as against extremes that subsist on their own. Now it stands posited as the totality of determinations, and so is the posited unity of the extremes, though to begin with the unity of reflection embracing them; – an embracing which, as a first sublating of immediacy and a first referring of determinations, falls short still of the concept's absolute identity.

The extremes here are determinations belonging to the judgment of reflection; singularity in the proper sense, and universality as determination of relation, or a reflection drawing a manifold together in itself. Yet the singular subject, as the judgment of reflection showed, harbours besides the bare singularity that pertains to form the determinateness as well, as a universality reflected simply into itself, as a genus presupposed, that is, one here still taken up immediately.

Out of this determinateness of the extremes, belonging as it does to the course taken by the determining of judgment, there issues the closer content of the middle term, on which everything in the syllogism essentially turns, since it is what sets the syllogism apart from the judgment. What it contains is 1) singularity, 2) singularity widened, however, to universality, as all, 3) the universality that underlies these and unites singularity and abstract universality outright within itself, the genus. – Not until now, with the middle term posited as the totality of the determinations, does the syllogism of reflection possess the proper determinateness of form; measured against it the immediate syllogism is for that very reason the indeterminate one, its middle term being as yet no more than the abstract particularity, wherein the moments of its concept remain unposited. – One may call this first syllogism of reflection the syllogism of allness.

a. Syllogism of Allness

1. In the syllogism of allness the syllogism of the understanding stands perfected, though it amounts to nothing beyond that. It is indeed an essential requirement of the concept that the middle term here should not be abstract particularity but should be unfolded into its moments and so be a concrete one; yet the form of allness collects the singular into universality only in an outward fashion to begin with, and, conversely, it lets the singular persist within that universality as something still subsisting immediately for itself. Immediacy in the determinations was indeed negated, this being the result yielded by the syllogism of existence, but the negating is merely a first one and does not yet reach the negation of the negation, or absolute reflection into itself. Hence those singular determinations still underlie the reflective universality that gathers them into itself, – or allness is still not the universality proper to the concept, but the outward one belonging to reflection.

Contingency attached to the syllogism of existence because the Medius Terminus there, being some one singular determinateness of the concrete subject, leaves room for an indeterminable multitude of further such Mediorum Terminorum, whereby the subject could be joined by syllogism to indeterminably many others, and to opposed predicates as well. Now, however, that the middle term contains singularity and is thereby concrete on its own account, the only predicate that can be tied to the subject by its means is one accruing to the subject as concrete. – Suppose, for instance, one wanted to infer from the Medius Terminus: green, that a painting is agreeable, on the ground that green is agreeable to the eye, or that a poem, a building and so forth is beautiful because regularity belongs to it; the painting, and so forth, might for all that be ugly, by reason of other determinations from which this latter predicate could be drawn. Where, by contrast, the Medius Terminus carries the determination of allness, green and regularity are held in it as one concrete, which for that very reason is no abstraction of a merely green, merely regular and so forth; and to such a concrete only those predicates can be attached that answer to the totality of the concrete. – In the judgment: The green, or regular, is agreeable, the subject is merely the abstraction green, regularity; in the proposition: Everything green, or regular, is agreeable; the subject is instead: all the actual concrete objects that are green or regular, objects taken therefore as concrete, with all their properties besides the green or the regularity.

2. But it is exactly this perfection of reflection that turns the syllogism into a mere sham. The determinateness borne by the Medius Terminus is: all; and it is to these that the major premise attributes immediately the predicate which gets joined by syllogism to the subject. Yet all means all the singulars; so the singular subject possesses that predicate immediately there already, and does not first receive it by way of the syllogism. – Or again: through the conclusion a predicate accrues to the subject as a consequence; but the major premise harbours this very conclusion in itself; the major premise is accordingly not correct by itself, nor is it an immediate, presupposed judgment, but itself presupposes already the conclusion of which it was to be the ground. – In that much-loved perfect syllogism:

All men are mortal, Now Cajus is a man Ergo Cajus is mortal,

the major premise is correct only for the reason, and to the extent, that the conclusion is correct; should Cajus contingently fail to be mortal, the major premise too would fail of correctness. A proposition destined to figure as conclusion has to be correct immediately and by itself beforehand, for otherwise the major premise could not embrace all the singulars; before the major premise may count as correct, the prior question arises whether that conclusion is not itself an instance telling against it.

3. With the syllogism of existence it emerged from the very concept of syllogism that the premises, as immediate ones, stood in contradiction with the conclusion, that is, with the mediation which the concept of syllogism demands, so that the first syllogism had others for its presupposition, while these others in turn presupposed it. With the syllogism of reflection the matter is posited on the syllogism itself: the major premise presupposes its own conclusion, seeing that it contains that linkage of singular with predicate which is precisely what the conclusion was to supply.

What is actually at hand may then be put in this way to begin with: that the syllogism of reflection amounts to no more than an outward, empty shine of syllogizing, – that the essence of such syllogizing rests, accordingly, upon subjective singularity, which thereby makes up the middle term and has to be posited as this middle; – singularity as it is qua singularity, carrying universality on it only outwardly. – Or, taking the more determinate content of the syllogism of reflection, it appeared that the singular stands to its predicate in an immediate reference and not in one arrived at by inference, and that the major premise, which links something particular with something universal, or more exactly a formal universal with a universal that is in itself, has for its mediation the reference of the singularity contained in it, – singularity as allness. But this is the syllogism of induction.

b. Syllogism of Induction

1. It is the first figure's schema: S–P–U, under which the syllogism of allness stands; induction stands under the second's, U–S–P, because singularity is once again what serves it for middle term, not the abstract singularity, however, but singularity qua complete, posited, namely, along with the determination opposed to it, universality. – The one extreme is any predicate whatever that is common to all these singulars; the reference of that predicate to them makes up the immediate premises, one of which, in the preceding syllogism, was supposed to be a conclusion. – The other extreme can be the genus in its immediacy, in the shape in which it stood in the middle of the foregoing syllogism, or else in the subject of the universal judgment, a genus that finds itself exhausted in the whole set of singulars, or of species too, that constitute the middle. The syllogism accordingly takes the shape:

s s U– –P. s s into infinity.

2. The formal syllogism's second figure, U–S–P, failed to answer to the schema because in the one premise S, which makes up the middle term, was not subsuming or predicate. In induction this defect is removed; the middle term is here: all the singulars; and the proposition: U–S, which contains as its subject the objective universal, or genus, set apart so as to be an extreme, has a predicate of at least like extension with it and hence, for external reflection, identical with it. Lion, elephant and so forth make up the genus of the four-footed animal; the difference that the same content stands posited the one time in singularity, the other time in universality, is thereby a mere indifferent determination of form, – an indifference that constitutes the result, posited in the syllogism of reflection, of the formal syllogism, and that here is posited through the likeness of extension.

Induction is therefore not a syllogism of bare perception, nor of contingent existence, as the second figure answering to it is, but a syllogism of experience; – of the subjective drawing-together of the singulars into the genus, and of the genus's being joined by syllogism to a universal determinateness, because that determinateness is encountered in all the singulars. It bears also the objective meaning that through the totality of singularity the immediate genus determines itself into a universal property, and in a universal relation, or mark, possesses its existence. – Yet the objective meaning of this syllogism, as of the others, is so far only their inner concept, and here is still not posited.

3. Induction is rather still an essentially subjective syllogism. Its middle term consists of the singulars in their immediacy; their being drawn together into the genus by way of allness is a reflection that is external. Because of the subsisting immediacy of the singulars, and of the externality flowing from it, universality amounts only to completeness, or rather stays behind as a task. – In it, accordingly, the progress into the bad infinity comes to light once again; singularity ought to be posited identical with universality, yet inasmuch as the singulars are posited just as much as immediate ones, that unity remains a perennial ought; it is a unity of likeness; what ought to be identical ought at the same time not to be identical. The a, b, c, d, e make up the genus only as carried on into infinity, and give the completed experience. To that extent the conclusion of induction remains problematic.

In expressing this, however, that perception, if experience is to arise from it, ought to be prolonged into infinity, induction presupposes that the genus is joined by syllogism with its determinateness in and for itself. Thereby it actually presupposes its own conclusion, and rather as something immediate, in the way that the syllogism of allness had the conclusion for a presupposition of one of its premises. – Experience grounded on induction is taken to hold good even though the perception, by common admission, is not completed; yet the assumption that no instance against that experience can turn up is possible only insofar as the latter be in and for itself true. The inference by way of induction is thus grounded indeed upon an immediacy, but not upon the one on which it should ground itself, namely the immediacy of singularity which is, but upon that which is in and for itself, upon the universal. – The fundamental determination of induction is to be a syllogism; if singularity were taken as essential and universality merely as an external determination of the middle, the middle would fall apart into two unconnected pieces and no syllogism would be at hand; rather it is to the extremes that this externality belongs. Singularity can be middle term only as immediately identical with universality; a universality of that kind is properly the objective one, the genus. – The matter may also be viewed thus: on the determination of singularity that underlies the middle term of induction, universality is external, yet essential; an external of that sort is just as immediately its own opposite, the internal. – What induction's syllogism has for its truth, therefore, is a syllogism whose middle term is a singularity that immediately, in its own self, is universality; – the syllogism of analogy.

c. The Syllogism of Analogy

1. The third figure of the immediate syllogism, S–U–P, serves this syllogism for its abstract schema. No longer, though, is its middle term any singular quality whatever; it is a universality constituting the reflection-into-itself of a concrete, hence that concrete's nature; – and inversely, since the universality it is belongs thus to a concrete, it is in its own self at once this very concrete. – What is middle here is therefore a singular, yet a singular taken by its universal nature; and there is besides a further singular, an extreme, in which the very same universal nature is found. For instance.

The earth has inhabitants The moon is an earth, Hence the moon has inhabitants.

2. Analogy grows the shallower in proportion as the universal wherein the two singulars are one, and by which the one turns into predicate of the other, amounts to a bare quality or, quality being taken subjectively, to some mark or other, and as the identity of the pair in this respect passes for bare similarity. Shallowness of this kind, however, into which a form of understanding or of reason is dragged down when one demotes it to the sphere of bare representation, has no business being cited in logic at all. – Improper too is any presentation of this syllogism's major premise as reading: What resembles an object in certain marks resembles it in others besides. By such a procedure the form of the syllogism finds expression under the guise of a content, and the empirical content, the one properly so named, is put wholesale into the minor premise. So too the entire form of the first syllogism, for instance, admits of being stated as that syllogism's major premise: Whatever is subsumed under another in which a third inheres, has this third inhering in it too; Now however and so forth. In the syllogism itself, though, empirical content is beside the point, and turning its own form into a major premise's content is as immaterial as it would be to put any other empirical content there instead. But supposing that, with the syllogism of analogy, nothing were to turn on that content, which holds nothing except the syllogism's peculiar form, then with the first syllogism just as little would turn on it, that is, on what makes a syllogism into a syllogism. – What things turn on is invariably the form of the syllogism, no matter whether this form itself or something else supplies its empirical content. Hence the syllogism of analogy is a peculiar form, and quite empty is the ground for declining to see one in it, namely that its form admits of being made the content or matter of a major premise, whereas matter has nothing to do with the logical. – What can tempt one to this thought in the case of analogy, and possibly of induction too, is that in these the middle and the extremes alike carry a further determination than they do in the merely formal syllogism, so that the form-determination, being no longer simple and abstract, is bound to show itself as a content-determination besides. That the form determines itself in this way into content is, though, in the first instance a necessary onward movement of the formal, and so touches the syllogism's nature essentially; on that account, secondly, a content-determination of the sort cannot be looked upon as one like any other empirical content, nor abstracted away from.

Should the form of the syllogism of analogy be regarded in that formulation of its major premise, that when two objects agree in one or indeed in several properties, then a further property possessed by the other accrues to the one too, it may look as though four determinations were contained in this syllogism, the quaternionem terminorum; – a circumstance that carried with it the awkwardness of bringing analogy under the form of a formal syllogism. – Two singulars there are, thirdly a property immediately taken to be shared, and fourthly that other property which one of the singulars possesses immediately whereas the other comes by it only through the syllogism. – The source of this lies, as has come out, in the fact that within the analogical syllogism the middle stands posited as singularity and yet immediately also as the genuine universality thereof. – With induction the middle, over and above the two extremes, is an indeterminable multitude of singulars; in that syllogism one would accordingly have to count an infinite multitude of termini. – Within the syllogism of allness the universality on the middle is as yet nothing but the outward form-determination of allness; within the syllogism of analogy, on the other hand, it is essential universality. In the above example the Medius Terminus: the earth, is taken as a concrete which in accordance with its truth is no less a universal nature, a genus, than it is a singular.

From this side the Quaternio terminorum did not render analogy an imperfect syllogism. From another side, though, it does render it such; for even granting that the one subject possesses the universal nature that the other possesses, it stays undetermined whether the determinateness inferred for the other as well accrues to the one subject in virtue of its nature or in virtue of its particularity, whether, say, the earth possesses inhabitants qua celestial body as such, or only qua this particular celestial body. – To this extent analogy remains a syllogism of reflection, singularity and universality being immediately conjoined within its middle. Owing to that immediacy the reflective unity still carries its externality with it; the singular is only in itself the genus, it is not posited in that negativity whereby its own determinateness would count as the determinateness of the genus itself. The predicate accruing to the singular that is middle is on that account not already predicate of the other singular as well, notwithstanding that the two belong to one genus.

3. S–P (the moon has inhabitants) is the conclusion; the one premise, however (the earth has inhabitants), is an S–P of precisely the same sort; if S–P is to count as a conclusion, then the demand is implicit that this premise be a conclusion too. In its own self, then, this syllogism is the demand for itself directed against the immediacy it harbours; or it presupposes its own conclusion. Where a syllogism of existence finds its presupposition in the other syllogisms of existence, in the syllogisms just examined the presupposition has shifted inward, they being syllogisms of reflection. Since the syllogism of analogy is thus the demand for its own mediation over against the immediacy that clings to that mediation, what it calls for is the sublation of the moment of singularity. For the middle there is left, then, the objective universal, the genus, cleansed of immediacy. – Within the syllogism of analogy the genus counted as a moment of the middle merely by way of immediate presupposition; and since the syllogism itself calls for the sublation of the presupposed immediacy, the negation of singularity, and thereby the universal, is no longer immediate but posited. – Only the first negation of immediacy was contained in the syllogism of reflection ; the second has now supervened, and with it the outward universality of reflection is determined into one that is in and for itself. – Regarded from the positive side, the conclusion turns out identical with the premise, the mediation grown together with its own presupposition, and thus an identity of reflective universality by which that universality has become universality of a higher kind.

If we survey the course taken by the syllogisms of reflection, mediation there is throughout the posited, or concrete, unity of the extremes' determinations of form; reflection lies in just this positing of the one determination within the other; what mediates is accordingly allness. What shows itself as the essential ground of allness, however, is singularity, universality figuring on it only as an outward determination, as completeness. Universality is nevertheless essential to the singular if the latter is to be a middle that joins in syllogism; the singular is therefore to be taken as a universal that is in itself. With universality, though, it is not conjoined in this merely positive manner; it is sublated within universality and is a negative moment; thus the universal, the one that is in and for itself, is posited genus, whereas the singular, being immediate, is rather that genus's externality, or is extreme. – Broadly taken, the syllogism of reflection falls under the schema P–S–U, wherein the singular still counts as such for the essential determination of the middle; but with its immediacy sublated and the middle determined as universality in and for itself, the syllogism has moved under the formal schema: S–U–P, and the syllogism of reflection has crossed over into the syllogism of necessity.

C. The Syllogism of Necessity

By now what mediates has determined itself 1) into simple determinate universality, such as particularity is within the syllogism of existence; but 2) into objective universality, meaning one that holds the entire determinateness of the distinguished extremes, such as allness is within the syllogism of reflection; a universality filled and yet simple; – the universal nature belonging to the fact, the genus.

This syllogism is full of content, since the abstract middle belonging to the syllogism of existence has set itself out into determinate difference, as that middle is when it serves the syllogism of reflection, only for this difference to reflect itself back into simple identity. – Hence it is a syllogism of necessity, its middle being no further immediate content but rather the reflection into self of the determinateness belonging to the extremes. In the middle the extremes possess their inner identity, and its content-determinations are the extremes' determinations of form. – Whatever it is that tells the termini apart therefore counts as external, unessential form, while they themselves count as moments of one necessary existence.

At first this syllogism is the immediate one, and formal in so far as the connection of the termini is the essential nature, taken as content, which content is present at the distinguished termini in differing form merely, while the extremes on their own account are no more than an unessential subsistence. – To realize this syllogism is to determine it so that the extremes likewise get posited as that totality which at first the middle alone is, and so that the necessity of the reference, at first nothing but substantial content, becomes a reference of posited form.

a. The Categorical Syllogism

1. For one, or for both, of its premises the categorical syllogism has the categorical judgment. – Bound up here with this syllogism, as with the judgment, is the more determinate meaning that its middle is objective universality. Superficially construed, the categorical syllogism as well passes for no more than a bare syllogism of inherence.

Taken in its content-laden meaning, the categorical syllogism is necessity's first syllogism, one in which a subject stands joined by syllogism to a predicate through its substance. But substance, once raised into the sphere of the concept, is the universal, posited so as to be in and for itself in such wise that what it has for form, for the mode of its being, is not accidentality, which is what it has in its own peculiar relation, but the determination of the concept. The differences of substance are accordingly the syllogism's extremes, and determinately they are universality and singularity. The former, measured against the genus as this is more closely determined to be the middle, is abstract universality, or universal determinateness; – substance's accidentality drawn together into the simple determinateness that is nevertheless substance's essential difference, its specific difference. – Singularity, on the other hand, is what is actual, in itself the concrete unity of genus and determinateness, here however, as within an immediate syllogism, at first an immediate singularity, accidentality drawn together into the form of a subsistence that is for itself. – This extreme's reference to the middle constitutes a categorical judgment; and inasmuch as the other extreme likewise, on the determination stated, gives expression to the specific difference of the genus, or to its determinate principle, that other premise too is categorical.

2) Standing as the first, and hence immediate, syllogism of necessity, this syllogism falls at the outset under the schema of the first formal syllogism, S–P–U. – Yet because the middle is the singular's essential nature rather than any one whatever of its determinatenesses or properties, and because the extreme of universality likewise is no abstract universal, no merely singular quality over again, but the universal determinateness, the specific factor of the difference of the genus, there falls away the contingency of the subject's being joined by syllogism only through some Medius Terminus or other with some quality or other. – Since in this way the references of the extremes to the middle no longer carry the outward immediacy they carried in the syllogism of existence, the demand for a proof does not come up in the sense it had there, the sense that led on to the infinite progress.

Nor, furthermore, does this syllogism presuppose its conclusion for its premises, as a syllogism of reflection does. Following their substantial content, the termini stand in an identical reference to one another, a reference that is in and for itself; one essence is at hand traversing the three termini, and on it the determinations of singularity, particularity and universality are merely formal moments.

So far, then, the categorical syllogism is subjective no longer; objectivity takes its start in that identity; the middle is the content-laden identity of its extremes, and these are contained in it in respect of their self-subsistence, since their self-subsistence just is that substantial universality, the genus. What is subjective about the syllogism lies in the extremes' indifferent subsistence over against the concept, or the middle.

3) Still, this remains subjective about the syllogism, that the identity in question is there as yet only as the substantial one, or as content, and not at the same time as identity of form. The concept's identity is therefore still an inner bond, and thus, as reference, still necessity; the universality of the middle is a compact, positive identity, and not equally the negativity of its extremes.

More closely, the immediacy of this syllogism, an immediacy not yet posited as what it is in itself, is at hand thus. The properly immediate item of the syllogism is the singular. The singular stands subsumed under its genus as middle; but beneath that genus there stand other singulars too, indeterminately many; it is contingent, then, that just this singular is what gets posited as subsumed there. – Nor, moreover, does this contingency belong merely to external reflection, which by comparison with others finds the singular posited in the syllogism to be contingent; rather it is in the very fact of its being referred to the middle as its objective universality that the singular is posited as contingent, as a subjective actuality. On the other side, the subject being an immediate singular, it holds determinations that the middle, as the universal nature, does not hold; consequently it has besides a concrete existence indifferent to the middle, determined on its own account and of peculiar content. Conversely, then, this other terminus too has an indifferent immediacy and a concrete existence diverse from the first's. – Between the middle and the other extreme the same relation obtains; for this extreme likewise carries the determination of immediacy, and thus of a contingent being over against its middle.

Thus what the categorical syllogism has posited is, on the one hand, extremes so related to the middle that in themselves they possess objective universality, or self-subsistent nature, and at the same time are immediates, hence actualities indifferent to one another. On the other hand, though, they are determined just as much as contingent, or their immediacy as sublated within their identity. That identity, however, in view of the self-subsistence and totality of actuality just mentioned, is only the formal, inner one; by this the syllogism of necessity has determined itself into the hypothetical one.

b. The Hypothetical Syllogism

1. The hypothetical judgment carries in it only the necessary reference, without the immediacy of the terms so referred. If A is, then B is; or again, A's being is quite as much the being of an other, that of B; with which it is still not said, neither that A is, nor that B is. To this the hypothetical syllogism adjoins the immediacy of being:

If A is, then B is

Now A is,

Therefore B is.

Taken for itself, the minor premise pronounces the immediate being of A.

But it is not this alone that has come to the judgment. In the syllogism the reference of subject and predicate is contained not as the abstract copula, but as the filled-out, mediating unity. A's being is accordingly to be taken not as bare immediacy, but essentially as the middle term of the syllogism. This calls for closer consideration.

2. In the first instance the reference of the hypothetical judgment is necessity, or inner substantial identity under an outward diversity of concrete existence, or under the mutual indifference of the being that appears; – an identical content lying inwardly at the base. Hence the two sides of the judgment are not an immediate being, but a being held fast within necessity, and so at once a sublated being, or a being that only appears. As sides of the judgment they stand, further, as universality and singularity; the one is accordingly that content as totality of the conditions, the other as actuality. Which of the sides be taken for universality and which for singularity is, however, all one. For the conditions, so long as they remain what is inner and abstract in an actuality, are the universal, and it is their being drawn together into a singularity through which they have entered upon actuality. Inversely, the conditions are a singularized, dispersed appearance which first attains unity and significance, and a universally valid existence, in actuality.

The closer relation assumed here between the two sides, that of condition to conditioned, admits of being taken equally as cause and effect, as ground and consequence; here that is all one; yet the relation of condition answers more nearly to the reference at hand in the hypothetical judgment and syllogism, in that the condition is essentially an indifferent concrete existence, whereas ground and cause pass over of themselves; the condition is besides the more universal determination, comprehending as it does both sides of those relations, since effect, consequence and so forth are quite as much condition of cause and of ground as these are of them. –

A is now the mediating being: first so far as it is an immediate being, an indifferent actuality, but second so far as it is quite as much a being contingent in its own self, a being sublating itself. That which carries the conditions over into the actuality of the new shape for which they are conditions lies in this, that they are not being as the abstract immediate, but being in its concept, in the first place becoming; yet, the concept being no longer a passing over, more determinately singularity, as negative unity that refers itself to itself. – As conditions they are a dispersed material awaiting and demanding its employment; this negativity is what mediates, the free unity of the concept. It determines itself as activity, this middle term being the contradiction between objective universality, that is, the totality of the identical content, and indifferent immediacy. – This middle term is on that account no longer merely inner, but necessity which is; objective universality carries in it the reference to itself as simple immediacy, as being; – within the categorical syllogism this moment is at the outset a determination belonging to the extremes; measured against the objective universality of the middle term, though, it determines itself as contingency, and thus as something only posited, and sublated too, that is to say, as withdrawn into the concept or into the middle term as unity, a unity that now, in its objectivity, is itself being as well.

The conclusion, therefore B is, gives voice to the same contradiction, that B is something which immediately is, and yet is quite as much through an other, or is mediated. As regards its form it is accordingly the very concept that is the middle term; only that, as the necessary, it stands distinguished from necessity, – in the wholly superficial form of singularity as against universality. The absolute content of A and B is one and the same; they are merely two names for a single substrate, names holding for representation, insofar as it clings to the appearance of the differing shape of existence and marks off from the necessary its necessity; yet were this necessity to stand severed from B, B would not be what is necessary. In it, then, the identity of what mediates and what is mediated is at hand.

3. The hypothetical syllogism sets forth in the first place the necessary reference as an interconnection by way of the form or negative unity, just as the categorical does by way of the positive unity, the solid content, objective universality. But necessity collapses together into the necessary; the activity of form that carries the conditioning actuality over into the conditioned is in itself that unity wherein the determinatenesses of the opposition, earlier set free into indifferent existence, stand sublated, and wherein the difference between A and B is a hollow name. Necessity is therefore a unity reflected into itself, – and so an identical content; nor is it this merely in itself, for through this syllogism it is posited as well, seeing that A's being is likewise not its own but B's and conversely, the being of the one being throughout the being of the other, and that in the conclusion the immediate being or indifferent determinateness is determinately a mediated one, – externality having thus sublated itself, and its unity, gone into itself, being posited.

The mediation of the syllogism has thereby determined itself as singularity, as immediacy, and as negativity referring to itself, or as the identity that differentiates and out of this difference draws itself together within itself, – as absolute form, and precisely therewith as objective universality, as content identical with itself. In this determination the syllogism is the disjunctive syllogism.

c. The Disjunctive Syllogism

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

A is either B or C or D

A, however, is B

Therefore A is not C nor D.

or again:

A is either B or C or D

A, however, is not C nor D

Therefore it is B.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Section. Objectivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 1. Mechanism

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

A. The Mechanical Object

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B. The Mechanical Process

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

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

a. The Formal Mechanical Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

b. The Real Mechanical Process

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

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

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

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

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

c. The Product of the Mechanical Process

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

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

C. Absolute Mechanism

a. The Centre

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

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

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

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

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

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

b. Law

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

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

c. Transition of Mechanism

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