C) The Singular

Singularity, as has come out, is posited already through particularity; the latter is determinate universality; hence the determinateness that refers to itself, the determinate determinate.

1. At first, accordingly, singularity shows up as the reflection of the concept into itself out of its determinateness. It is that concept's mediation by way of itself, so far as its otherness has once more turned itself into an other, whereby the concept is re-established as equal to itself, though standing in the determination of absolute negativity. – What is negative in the universal, whereby the universal is a particular, was fixed above as the doubled shine; so far as this is a shining inwards, the particular stays a universal; by the shining outwards it is determinate; the return of this side into the universal runs two ways, either by the abstraction which drops the determinateness and mounts to the higher and highest genus, or else by the singularity into which the universal comes down within the determinateness itself. – At this point there branches off the side-road along which abstraction quits the path of the concept and abandons truth. That higher and highest universal to which abstraction lifts itself is nothing but a surface ever emptier of content; the singularity it spurns is the depth wherein the concept lays hold of itself and is posited as concept.

On one side, universality and particularity made their appearance as the moments of singularity's becoming. Yet it has been shown already that in their own selves they are the whole concept, so that in singularity they pass over into no other; what is posited there is only what they are in and for themselves. The universal is for itself in that it is, on its own part, the absolute mediation, self-reference only as absolute negativity. It is an abstract universal so far as this sublating is an external activity and with that a dropping of determinateness. Such negativity does indeed hang upon the abstract, but it remains outside it, a bare condition of it; it is abstraction itself, which sets its universal facing it, and which for that reason has no singularity within and is left conceptless. – Life, spirit, God, and the pure concept along with them, abstraction cannot grasp, and this because it withholds from its own products singularity, the principle of individuality and of personality, and so gets no further than universalities void of life and spirit, of colour and content.

So indivisible, however, is the unity of the concept that even these products of abstraction, though meant to let singularity fall away, are themselves rather singulars. Since abstraction lifts the concrete into universality while apprehending the universal only as determinate universality, what results is precisely singularity, which turned out to be determinateness referring to itself. Abstraction is thus a sundering of the concrete and a singularizing of its determinations; by it nothing but singular properties or moments get taken up, since its product has to hold within it what abstraction itself is. What marks off the singularity of abstraction's products from that of the concept is this, that in the former the singular counts as content and the universal as form, the two being diverse; – just because that content is not there as the absolute form, as the concept itself, or that form not as the totality of form. – Looked at more closely, though, the abstract shows itself as the unity of singular content with abstract universality, therefore as something concrete, as the very opposite of what it means to be.

On that same ground, being nothing but the determinate universal, the particular is also a singular; and the other way round, since the singular is the determinate universal, it is equally a particular. Clinging to this abstract determinateness, one finds in the concept three particular determinations, the universal, the particular and the singular; whereas before, only universal and particular were named as the species of the particular. Because singularity is the concept's return into itself as the negative, that very return can be ranged beside the others and counted off as an indifferent moment by the abstraction which in it is properly sublated.

Where singularity gets entered among the particular determinations of the concept, particularity becomes the totality embracing them all; and being that totality, it is their concrete, that is, singularity itself. It is the concrete on the side remarked upon earlier too, as determinate universality; taken so, it is the immediate unity wherein no one of these moments is posited as differentiated or as the determinant, and under this form it will serve as the middle term of the formal syllogism.

One notices without prompting that each determination made in the exposition of the concept thus far has straightway dissolved and lost itself in its other. Every distinction runs together in the very examination meant to isolate and secure it. Representation alone, for which abstracting has set them apart, manages to keep universal, particular and singular firmly asunder; on that footing they are countable, and for any further difference representation falls back on the wholly external difference of being, on quantity, which is nowhere less in place than here. – Singularity is where that true relation, the inseparability of the concept's determinations, stands posited; for being negation of negation, it holds their opposition and holds it at once within its ground or unity, the coming-together of each with its other. Since universality is in and for itself within this reflection, singularity is essentially the negativity of those determinations, and not merely so as to be a third term diverse from them; what is now posited, rather, is that positedness is being-in- and for-itself; that is, that each of the determinations belonging to the difference is itself the totality. The determinate concept's return into itself consists in its having the determination of being, in its determinateness, the whole concept.

2. Yet singularity is not the concept's return into itself alone; it is immediately the concept's loss. By way of singularity, in which the concept is thus within itself, it gets outside itself and enters actuality. Abstraction, being as the soul of singularity the reference of negative to negative, has proved to be nothing outward for universal and particular but immanent in both, and by it they are concrete, content, singular. Singularity, however, as this negativity, is the determinate determinateness, the act of distinguishing as such; by this reflection of the difference into itself the difference turns firm; the determining of the particular first arises through singularity; for singularity is that abstraction which now, just as singularity, is posited abstraction.

So the singular, as negativity referring to itself, is the immediate identity of the negative with itself; it is something that is for itself. Or else it is the abstraction which fixes the concept, in respect of its ideal moment of being, as an immediate. – The singular is accordingly a qualitative one or this. In virtue of this quality it is, first, the repelling of itself away from itself, and thereby the many other ones stand presupposed; secondly, it is now negative reference to these presupposed others, and so far forth the singular is exclusive. Universality brought into reference with these singulars as indifferent ones, – and into that reference it has to be brought, since it is a moment of the concept of singularity, – is merely what they have in common. Take the universal to mean whatever several singulars possess in common, and one has set out from their indifferent subsistence, mixing the immediacy of being into the determination of the concept. The poorest representation available of the universal, as it stands in reference to the singular, is just this external relation of it, as of something merely held in common.

In the reflective sphere of concrete existence the singular is as this, and it lacks that exclusive reference to another one which attaches to qualitative being-for-itself. As the one reflected into itself, this is for itself without repulsion; or else repulsion is here at one with abstraction and is the reflecting mediation, present in the this in such a way that the this is a posited immediacy, one shown by something external to it. This IS; it is immediate; yet it is only this so far as it is indicated. Indicating is the reflecting movement that draws itself together into itself and posits immediacy, though as something external to it. – The singular too, of course, is a this, the immediate brought forth out of mediation; only it does not carry that mediation outside itself, it is itself a repelling sundering, posited abstraction, and yet, in that very sundering, positive reference.

This abstracting on the part of the singular, being the reflection of difference into itself, is first of all a positing of the differentiated terms as self-subsistent, as reflected into themselves. They are immediately; but this severing is reflection as such besides, the shining of the one in the other; hence they stand in essential reference. Nor, further, are they merely singulars that are, set against one another; plurality of that kind belongs to being; singularity, positing itself as determinate, posits itself not in a difference that is external but in the difference of the concept; it shuts the universal out from itself, and yet, this being a moment of singularity itself, [it] refers itself to singularity no less essentially.

Taken as this reference among its self-subsistent determinations, the concept has lost itself; for so it is no more their posited unity, and they are no more as moments, as its shine, but as subsisting in and for themselves. – As singularity it turns back into itself within the determinateness; with that, the determinate has itself become totality. Its turning back into itself is therefore the absolute, original dividing of itself; or, as singularity, it is posited as judgment.

Chapter 2. Judgment

The judgment is the concept's own determinateness, posited at the concept itself. Determinations of the concept, or, what has shown itself to be the same thing, the determinate concepts, have already come under consideration for themselves; but that consideration amounted rather to a subjective reflection, a subjective abstraction. The concept, however, is itself this act of abstracting; the placing of its determinations one against another is its own determining. This positing of the determinate concepts by the concept itself is the judgment.

Judging is to this extent a different function from comprehending, or rather the other function of the concept, being as it is the concept's determining of itself through itself; and the onward course of the judgment into the diversity of judgments is this continued determining of the concept. Which determinate concepts there are, and how these determinations of the concept necessarily result, is what has to show itself in the judgment.

Hence the judgment may be called the concept's nearest realization, so far as reality signifies in general an entry into existence as determinate being. Looked at more closely, the nature of this realization has turned out as follows: that firstly the moments of the concept, by way of its reflection-into-itself or its singularity, are self-subsistent totalities, while secondly the concept's unity is the reference between them. Determinations reflected into themselves are determinate totalities, standing quite as essentially in an indifferent subsistence void of reference as in mutual mediation with one another. The determining is itself the totality only in holding these totalities and their reference within it. This totality is the judgment. – It holds, then, in the first place the two self-subsistent terms, which go by the names of subject and predicate. What each of them is cannot yet properly be stated; they remain indeterminate, since it is the judgment that has first to determine them. Being the concept in determinate shape, the judgment exhibits between them only the general difference of holding the determinate concept against the one still indeterminate. The subject may thus at first be taken, as against the predicate, for singular against universal, or again for particular against universal, or for singular against particular; so far, that is, as the two merely stand facing one another as the more determinate and the more universal.

It is accordingly serviceable, and a need besides, that the determinations of the judgment should carry these names, subject and predicate; as names they are something indeterminate, still awaiting the determination they are to receive, and beyond names they are therefore nothing. For the two sides of the judgment, determinations of the concept themselves were unusable, partly on this ground, but partly, and far more, because a determination of the concept shows its nature to lie in not being anything abstract and fixed, but in carrying its opposite within it and positing that opposite at itself; and since the sides of the judgment are concepts themselves, hence the totality of the concept's determinations, they must traverse them all and exhibit them at themselves, whether in abstract or in concrete form. To keep hold of the sides of the judgment in some general fashion through this alteration of their determination, names serve best, remaining as they do the same throughout. – Yet the name stands opposed to the fact or the concept, and this distinction turns up at the judgment itself as such; since it is the subject that in general voices what is determinate, and so rather what immediately is, while the predicate voices the universal, essence or concept, the subject taken by itself amounts at the outset to no more than a sort of name; for what it IS the predicate alone declares, and the predicate is what holds being in the concept's sense. What is this, or what sort of plant is this and so forth? under the being inquired after, often nothing but the name is meant, and once that has been learned one is content and knows now what the fact is. Such is being taken in the subject's sense. It is the predicate, though, that first yields the concept, or at any rate essence and the universal as such, and the question in the judgment's sense is directed after the predicate. – God, spirit, nature, or whatever it be, is therefore, as the subject of a judgment, no more than the name as yet; what such a subject is by its concept is at hand only in the predicate. Were one to inquire which predicate belongs to such a subject, a concept would have to underlie the appraisal already; but that concept is uttered only by the predicate itself. So it is really mere representation that constitutes the presupposed meaning of the subject and that leads on to an explanation of the name, where what is or is not meant by a name is a matter of contingency and a historical fact. Ever so many disputes over whether some predicate belongs to a given subject or not are on this account no more than disputes about words, since they set out from that form; the underlying term, (subjectum, ὑποκειμενον) is as yet nothing beyond the name.

It has now to be considered more closely how, secondly, the reference of subject and predicate stands determined in the judgment, and how they themselves come to be determined at first by just this. For its sides the judgment has totalities generally, and these count at first as essentially self-subsistent. The concept's unity is therefore as yet only a reference between self-subsistent terms; not yet that concrete, fulfilled unity which has come back into itself out of this reality, but a unity outside of which they subsist as extremes not sublated in it. – The judgment may now be considered starting either from the concept's original unity or from the extremes in their self-subsistence. The judgment is the concept's diremption of itself through itself; this unity is accordingly the ground on which the judgment gets considered in its genuine objectivity. To that extent it is the original division of what was originally one; the word: URTHEIL thereby points to what the judgment is in and for itself. That the concept, however, is in the judgment as appearance, its moments having there gained self-subsistence, – it is this side of externality that representation keeps rather to.

On this subjective way of considering it, then, subject and predicate are each regarded as finished for itself outside the other; the subject as an object that would be even without having this predicate, the predicate as a universal determination that would be even without belonging to this subject. Judging then carries with it the reflection whether this or that predicate, present in the head, can and ought to be attributed to the object that is outside for itself; and judging itself consists in this, that a predicate first gets connected with the subject through it, so that were this connection not to occur, subject and predicate would each for itself still remain what it is, the one a concretely existing object, the other a representation in the head. – But the predicate attributed to the subject is also supposed to belong to it, that is, to be identical with it in and for itself. By this sense of attributing, the subjective meaning of judging, along with the indifferent external subsistence of subject and predicate, is sublated once more: this action is good; what the copula announces is that the predicate pertains to the subject's being, rather than being tied to it in a merely external fashion. Taken in the grammatical sense, that subjective relation which sets out from an indifferent externality of subject and predicate holds good completely; for what get externally connected here are words. – It may be adduced on this occasion, too, that a proposition does have a subject and a predicate in the grammatical sense, yet is not therefore already a judgment. The latter requires that the predicate stand to the subject in the relation of determinations of the concept, hence as a universal to a particular or a singular. Should what is said of the singular subject itself express only something singular, we have a mere proposition. For instance, Aristotle died in the 73rd year of his age, in the 4th year of the 115th Olympiad, – is a mere proposition, not a judgment. Something of the latter would lie in it only if one of the circumstances, the time of the death or the age of that philosopher, had been thrown into doubt while the figures given were maintained on some ground or other. For in that case they would be taken as something universal, as a time subsisting even apart from that determinate content of Aristotle's death, filled with something else or else empty. Thus the news: my friend N. has died, amounts to a proposition; it would be a judgment only where the question stood whether he is truly dead or merely apparently so.

When the judgment is commonly explained as being the connection of two concepts, the indeterminate expression: connection may well be allowed to pass for the external copula, and so may the further point that what is connected is at least supposed to be concepts. Apart from that, however, the explanation is surely of the shallowest; not merely because more than two so-called concepts are connected in the disjunctive judgment, for instance, but rather because the explanation is a good deal better than the thing itself; for what are meant are no concepts at all, hardly concept-, properly only representation-determinations; in dealing with the concept as such, and with the determinate concept, it was remarked that what one habitually calls by that name in no way merits the title of concepts; whence, then, should concepts come in the judgment? – Above all, that explanation passes over what is essential to the judgment, namely the difference between its determinations; and it takes even less account of the relation the judgment bears to the concept.

As to the further determination of subject and predicate, it has been recalled that in the judgment they have properly yet to receive their determination. But to the extent that the judgment is the posited determinateness of the concept, that determinateness carries the differences named immediately and abstractly, as singularity and universality. – And to the extent that the judgment is generally the existence or the otherness of the concept, a concept not yet restored to the unity by which it is as concept, there also steps forth the determinateness that is conceptless: the opposition of being and reflection, or of being-in-itself. Since the concept, however, makes up the essential ground of the judgment, those determinations are at least indifferent enough that, the one falling to the subject and the other to the predicate, this relation obtains quite as well in reverse. The subject as the singular appears at first as what is, or as what is for itself, in keeping with the determinate determinateness of the singular – as an actual object, even where the object is one merely in representation, – such as courage, right, agreement and so forth – concerning which judgment is passed; – the predicate, for its part, as the universal, appears as this reflection upon it, or rather as its reflection into-itself, which reaches out past that immediacy and sublates the determinatenesses as merely being, – as its being-in-itself. – So far, the starting point is the singular, as first and immediate, and the judgment raises it into universality, just as, conversely, the universal that has being merely in itself comes down in the singular into existence, or turns into a being-for-itself.

This meaning of the judgment is to be taken for its objective sense, and at the same time for the true meaning of the earlier forms of transition. What is becomes and alters itself, the finite goes under within the infinite; the concretely existing issues forth from its ground into appearance and founders; the accident manifests substance's wealth and equally its power; within being there is transition into an other, within essence a shining upon an other, through which the necessary reference discloses itself. This passing over and shining has now passed over into the original dividing of the concept, which, by leading the singular back into the being-in-itself of its universality, determines the universal no less as something actual. One and the same thing is meant by both: that singularity is posited in its reflection-into-itself, and the universal posited as determinate.

To this objective meaning there belongs no less, however, that the differences named, stepping forth again within the determinateness of the concept, are at the same time posited only as appearing, which is to say that they are nothing fixed, but attach to the one determination of the concept quite as well as to the other. Hence the subject too must be taken for the being-in-itself, and the predicate, conversely, for the existence. The subject without predicate is what, in appearance, the thing without properties, the thing-in-itself, is, an empty indeterminate ground; it is thus the concept within itself, receiving distinction and determinateness only at the predicate, which thereby constitutes the side of the existence of the subject. Through this determinate universality the subject stands referred to what is external, lies open to the influence of other things, and thereby enters into activity towards them. What is there steps out of its being-within-itself into the universal element of interconnection and of relations, into the negative references and into actuality's interplay, and this is a continuation of the singular into other singulars, hence universality.

The identity just exhibited, that the subject's determination belongs quite as well to the predicate and conversely, does not fall merely within our own reflection upon it; it is not only in itself the case but stands posited in the judgment as well; for the judgment is precisely the reference of the two; the copula gives voice to this, that the subject is the predicate. Determinate determinateness is what the subject is, while the predicate is that determinateness of the subject posited; the subject has its determination only in its predicate, or it is subject only there; in the predicate it has returned into itself, and therein it is the universal. – But to the extent that the subject is what is self-subsistent, that identity takes the shape of a relation in which the predicate has no self-subsistent subsistence of its own, subsisting only in the subject; it inheres there. Insofar as the predicate is on this showing distinguished from the subject, it amounts only to an isolated determinateness of it, to but one among its properties, whereas the subject is the concrete, the totality of manifold determinatenesses of which the predicate holds one; it is the universal. – On the other side, though, the predicate is likewise universality in self-subsistent form, and the subject conversely no more than one of its determinations. To that extent the predicate subsumes the subject; singularity and particularity have no being for themselves, their essence and their substance lying in the universal. What the predicate expresses is the subject in its concept; singular and particular are contingent determinations at it; the predicate is their absolute possibility. If in subsuming one has in mind an external reference of subject and predicate, representing the subject as something self-subsistent, then subsuming bears on the subjective judging mentioned above, which starts out from the self-subsistence of both. Subsumption is on this footing only the application of the universal to a particular or singular, which gets posited under it, on an indeterminate representation, as of lesser quantity.

If the identity of subject and predicate has been so considered that the one time the one determination of the concept falls to the former and the other to the latter, while the other time it holds quite as much in reverse, the identity is by that still only one that is in itself; and because the two sides of the judgment are diverse in a self-subsistent way, their posited reference likewise carries these two sides, diverse ones to begin with. But the differenceless identity is what properly constitutes the true reference of subject to predicate. A determination of the concept is essentially itself reference, for it is a universal; so the very determinations which subject and predicate have, their reference itself has too. It is universal, being the positive identity of the two, of subject and predicate; yet it is determinate as well, since the predicate's determinateness is the subject's; and it is singular besides, since in it the self-subsistent extremes stand sublated as in their negative unity. – In the judgment, however, this identity is not yet posited; the copula stands there as the still indeterminate reference of being as such: A is B; for what the concept has as its reality in the judgment is just the self-subsistence of the concept's determinatenesses, of the extremes. Were the is of the copula already posited as that determinate and fulfilled unity of subject and predicate, as their concept, it would be the syllogism already.

The goal of the movement of the judgment is to restore this identity of the concept, or rather to posit it. Already present in the judgment there is, on the one hand, the self-subsistence and also the determinateness of subject and predicate as against each other, on the other hand their reference, abstract though it be. The subject is the predicate: this, at the outset, is what the judgment asserts; but inasmuch as the predicate is not meant to be that which the subject is, there is a contradiction at hand, one which must resolve itself and pass over into a result. Rather, though, since in and for themselves subject and predicate are the totality of the concept, and the judgment is the concept's reality, its onward movement is only development; what steps forth in it is already at hand in it, and the demonstration is to that extent only a monstration, a reflection as the positing of what is already present in the extremes of the judgment; yet this positing too is already at hand; it is the reference of the extremes.

The judgment as it stands immediately is FIRST OF ALL the judgment of existence; its subject is immediately an abstract singular which is, its predicate an immediate determinateness or property of that subject, an abstractly universal.

As this qualitative character of subject and predicate sublates itself, the determination of the one shines at first at the other; the judgment is now SECONDLY judgment of reflection.

This gathering-together, being the more external, passes over into the essential identity of a substantial, necessary interconnection; so it is THIRDLY the judgment of necessity.

FOURTHLY, once the difference of subject and predicate has within this essential identity become a form, the judgment turns subjective; what it holds is the concept opposed to its reality, together with the comparison of the two; it is the judgment of the concept.

It is this stepping-forth of the concept that founds the transition of the judgment into the syllogism.

A. The Judgment of Existence

What the subjective judgment seeks is a twofold view of one and the same object: on the one occasion in its singular actuality, on the other in its essential identity, that is, in its concept; here the singular is elevated to its universality, or, equivalently, the universal is made singular within its actuality. So taken, the judgment is truth; for it constitutes the concordance of concept with reality. Yet the judgment is not so constituted at the outset; for at the outset it is immediate, no reflection and no movement of the determinations having emerged in it as yet. It is this immediacy that makes the first judgment a judgment of existence, one that may equally be named the qualitative judgment, though only to the extent that quality pertains not solely to the determinateness of being but takes in besides the abstract universality which, by reason of its simplicity, carries the form of immediacy no less.

The judgment of inherence is a further name for the judgment of existence; since immediacy is what determines it, and since, in the distinction between subject and predicate, it is the subject that counts as the immediate and thereby as what comes first and matters essentially in this judgment, the predicate takes on the shape of something non-self-subsistent, grounded as it is in the subject.

a. The Positive Judgment

1. Subject and predicate, as was recalled, are at first only names; their actual determination is won solely through the judgment's own course. As sides of the judgment, which is the posited determinate concept, they do have the determination of its moments; but for immediacy's sake that determination is still quite simple, on the one hand not yet enriched by mediation, on the other hand taken at first under the abstract opposition, as abstract singularity and universality. – Taking the predicate first, it is the abstract universal; yet since the abstract is conditioned by mediation, by the sublating of the singular or the particular, to that extent it is nothing more than a presupposition. Within the sphere of the concept no other immediacy can be had than one which in and for itself holds mediation within it and has arisen only by sublating that mediation, that is, the universal one. Thus qualitative being too, in its own concept, is a universal; as being, however, immediacy is not yet posited in this way; only as universality is it that concept-determination in which it is posited that negativity belongs to it essentially. This reference is at hand in the judgment, where universality is the predicate of a subject. – Likewise the subject is an abstract singular; that is, the immediate which is supposed to be as such; hence it is supposed to be the singular as a something in general. So far the subject makes up the judgment's abstract side, the side by which the concept in it has gone over into externality. – As the two concept-determinations are determined, so likewise is their reference, the is, the copula; it too can bear no other meaning than that of an immediate, abstract being. Because this reference as yet holds neither mediation nor negation in it, the judgment goes by the name of the positive one.

2. Hence the immediate pure expression which the positive judgment receives is the proposition:

The singular is universal.

One must not construe this expression as: A is B; for A and B are names wholly devoid of form and hence of meaning, whereas the judgment as such, and thus already the judgment of existence, has concept-determinations for its extremes. A is B can stand for any bare proposition quite as well as for a judgment. In every judgment, though, even in one whose form is more richly determined, it is this determinate content that gets asserted: the singular is universal; namely insofar as every judgment is also abstract judgment in general. Of the negative judgment, how far it too falls under this expression, there will be talk directly. – If people do not otherwise think of it that with every judgment, at least with every positive one to begin with, the assertion is made that the singular is a universal, this comes about partly because the determinate form by which subject and predicate differ gets overlooked, – the judgment being supposed to be nothing but the reference of two concepts, – and partly perhaps also because the judgment's further content: Cajus is learned, or the rose is red, floats before a consciousness which, busied with the representation of Cajus and so forth, does not reflect on the form, – though content of that sort, such as the logical Cajus who habitually has to serve for the example, is at any rate a very slightly interesting content, and is indeed picked just so uninteresting in order that it may not draw attention off the form and onto itself.

According to the objective meaning, the proposition that the singular is universal marks, as was mentioned in passing before, partly the transitoriness of singular things, partly their positive subsistence in the concept in general. The concept itself is imperishable; but whatever steps out of it in its partition is exposed to alteration and to the going back into its universal nature. Conversely, however, the universal gives itself an existence. As essence goes forth into the shine of its determinations, ground into the appearance of concrete existence, substance into manifestation in its accidents, so the universal resolves itself into the singular; the judgment is this disclosure of it, the development of the negativity which the universal already is in itself. – This last the converse proposition states: the universal is singular, and it too is pronounced in the positive judgment. The subject, at first the immediately singular, stands in the judgment referred to its other, namely to the universal; with that it is posited as the concrete; on the side of being, as a something of many qualities; – or, as reflection's concrete, a thing with manifold properties, an actual with manifold possibilities, a substance with accidents of just that sort. Since these manifold determinations here belong to the subject of the judgment, the something, or the thing and so forth, is reflected into itself in its qualities, properties, or accidents, or is continuing itself right through them; holding itself in them, and them just as much in itself. Positedness, or determinateness, belongs to being-in-and-for-itself. Hence the subject is, on its own part, the universal. – The predicate, on the other hand, being not a real or concrete but this abstract universality, is over against the subject the determinateness, and holds only one moment of the subject's totality, shutting out the rest. Because of this negativity, which as an extreme of the judgment refers itself at the same time to itself, the predicate is an abstractly-singular. – In the proposition the rose is fragrant, for instance, it brings out only one of the many properties of the rose; it singularizes that property, grown together in the subject with the rest, in the way that, when the thing dissolves, the manifold properties inherent in it are singularized by making themselves self-subsistent as matters. Taken from this side, the judgment's proposition therefore reads: the universal is singular.

If we put together this reciprocal determination of subject and predicate in the judgment, a twofold result comes out: 1) that the subject is indeed immediately what is, or the singular, while the predicate is the universal. But since the judgment is the reference of the two, and the subject is determined by the predicate as universal, the subject is the universal; 2) the predicate gets its determination in the subject; for what it is is no determination as such, but one of the subject; the rose is fragrant; this sweet scent is no indeterminate one whatever, but the rose's; the predicate is accordingly a singular. – Now since subject and predicate stand in the relation of the judgment, they are supposed to stay opposed as regards the concept-determinations; as also in causality's reciprocity, so long as it has not reached its truth, both sides are meant to stay self-subsistent and opposed despite the sameness of their determination. If, then, the subject is determined as universal, the predicate's own determination of universality must not be taken up along with it, for otherwise no judgment would be at hand, but only its determination of singularity; just as, so far as the subject is determined as singular, the predicate has to be taken as universal. – If one reflects on that bare identity, two identical propositions come forward:

The singular is singular,

The universal is universal, wherein the judgment's determinations have fallen quite apart, only their reference to themselves being expressed, while their reference to one another is dissolved and the judgment thereby would be sublated. – Of those two propositions the one, the universal is singular, states the judgment by its content, which in the predicate is a singularized determination but in the subject the totality of such; the other, the singular is universal, states the form, which that proposition itself immediately gives. – Within the immediate positive judgment the extremes remain simple, and form and content are accordingly not yet apart. Or, put otherwise, it does not consist of two propositions; the doubled reference that came out in it immediately makes up the one positive judgment. For its extremes are a) the self-subsistent, abstract determinations of the judgment, b) each side gets determined by the other in virtue of the copula that refers them. In itself, though, the difference of form and content is present in it on that account, as has come out; and what the first proposition, the singular is universal, holds belongs to the form, for what it states is the judgment's immediate determinateness. The relation that the other proposition expresses, by contrast, the universal is singular, or the determining of the subject as universal and of the predicate as particular or singular, bears on the content, since its determinations first rise through reflection-into-self, whereby the immediate determinatenesses are sublated and the form thereby makes itself into content, into an identity gone into itself which stands over against the difference of form.

3. If the two propositions, that of the form and that of the content:

(Subject) (Predicate) The singular is universal The universal is singular

were now to be brought into one on the ground of their both lying in the one positive judgment, so that subject and predicate alike would then count as unity of singularity and universality, then both would be the particular; which in itself is to be acknowledged as their inner determination. But in part this combination would have come to pass only by an external reflection, and in part the proposition issuing from it, the particular is the particular, would be no judgment any more but an empty identical proposition, just as the propositions already turned up within it were, namely the singular is singular and the universal is universal. – Singularity and universality do not yet admit of union in particularity, since within the positive judgment they still stand posited as immediate. – Or: a distinction must still be drawn in the judgment between its form and its content, precisely because subject and predicate are still distinguished as immediacy and as mediated, or because the judgment, taken by its reference, is both: self-subsistence of the terms referred and their reciprocal determination, or mediation.

The judgment, then, taken first by its form, reads:

The singular is universal. Rather, though, a singular of that immediate kind is NOT universal; its predicate has a wider extent and so does not answer to it. The subject is something that immediately is for itself, and therefore the opposite of that abstraction, of the universality posited by mediation which was to be asserted of it.

Secondly, if the judgment is taken by its content, that is, as the proposition the universal is singular, then the subject is a universal of qualities, a concrete infinitely determined, and inasmuch as its determinatenesses are so far merely qualities, properties, or accidents, the totality of them is their badly infinite plurality. Such a subject is therefore rather not one singular property of that sort, as its predicate declares it to be. Both propositions must accordingly be negated, and the positive judgment must rather be posited as negative.

b. The Negative Judgment

1. The ordinary representation has already been spoken of above, namely that whether a judgment is true or not hangs on its content alone, seeing that logical truth is said to bear on the form only and to require nothing beyond that this content be free of self-contradiction. Nothing is reckoned to the form of the judgment itself beyond its being the reference of two concepts. Yet it has come out that these two concepts do not carry the merely relationless determination of an amount; rather they comport themselves as singular and universal. Such determinations constitute the genuinely logical content, and in this abstraction the content of the positive judgment; whatever else by way of content (the sun is round, Cicero was a great orator at Rome, it is day now, and so forth) turns up in a judgment is nothing to the judgment as such; all it pronounces is this: the subject is predicate, or, these being mere names, more determinately: the singular is universal and conversely. – For the sake of this purely logical content the positive judgment is not true; its truth lies in the negative judgment. – The content, so runs the demand, has only to avoid self-contradiction in the judgment; but in that judgment it does contradict itself, as has been shown. – It is, though, wholly a matter of indifference if one chooses to call that logical content form as well and to mean by content only the further empirical filling; the form then holds more in it than the empty identity beyond which the determination of content would fall. By its form as positive judgment, then, the positive judgment possesses no truth; anyone who gave the name truth to the correctness of an intuition or a perception, to the accord of the representation with its object, would at least be left without a word for what philosophy has as its subject matter and its purpose. This last would at any rate have to be called truth of reason, and it will readily be conceded that judgments like this, that Cicero was a great orator, that it is day now, and so forth, are not truths of reason. They are not so, however, not because they happen as it were by chance to carry an empirical content, but because they are merely positive judgments, and such judgments neither can nor should have any content other than an immediately singular and an abstract determinateness.

In the first place the positive judgment has its truth in the negative one: the singular is not abstractly universal, – but rather, since the predicate of the singular is a predicate of that sort, or, viewed for itself apart from the reference to the subject, since it is an abstract-universal, that predicate is itself something determinate; hence the singular is at first a particular. Again, going by the other proposition that lies in the positive judgment, the negative one reads: the universal is not abstractly singular, but rather this predicate, just because it is predicate, or because it stands referred to a universal subject, is something broader than bare singularity, so that the universal likewise is at first a particular. – Now because this universal, as subject, is itself under the judgment-determination of singularity, the two propositions shrink to one: the singular is a particular.

Two things may be noticed, a) that particularity turns up here for the predicate, the particularity spoken of a little while back; only here it is not put there by an outward reflection but has arisen by way of the negative reference pointed out in the judgment. b) Only for the predicate does this determination turn up here. Within the immediate judgment, the judgment of existence, the subject is what underlies; so the determination looks at first as though it ran its course upon the predicate. In truth, however, this first negation can as yet be no determination, or strictly no positing of the singular, since the singular is only the second thing, the negative of the negative.

The singular is a particular: such is the positive way of putting the negative judgment. So far as the positive judgment, by reason of its immediacy, has none but the abstract for its extremes, while the particular arises just through the positing of the judgment's reference as the first mediated determination, this way of putting it is not itself positive judgment. – This determination, though, has to be taken not merely as moment of the extreme, but also, as strictly it first is, as determination of the reference; that is, the judgment must be looked at as negative too.

The ground of this transition lies in the relation of the extremes and of their reference within the judgment generally. What the positive judgment references is the immediately singular and the universal, terms therefore of which the one at once is not what the other is; that reference is accordingly quite as essentially separation, or negative; which is why the positive judgment had to be posited as negative. Logicians had therefore no ground for such a to-do over the not of the negative judgment being pulled across into the copula. Whatever in the judgment counts as determination of the extreme counts equally as determinate reference. The judgment-determination, or the extreme, is not that purely qualitative determination of immediate being which is to be set over against only an other outside itself. Nor is it a determination of reflection, whose universal form has it behaving as positive and negative, each of these posited as exclusive and identical with the other only in itself. Being a concept-determination, the judgment-determination is in its own self a universal, posited as continuing itself over into its other. The judgment's reference, conversely, carries the very determination that the extremes carry; for it is just this universality of theirs and their continuation into one another; and so far as they stand distinguished, negativity attaches to the reference as well.

The transition given above from the form of reference to the form of determination yields the immediate consequence that the copula's not has equally to be reckoned to the predicate, and this to be determined as the not-universal. By a consequence just as immediate, however, the not-universal is the particular. – Hold the negative fast in the entirely abstract determination of immediate non-being, and the predicate is nothing but the wholly indeterminate not-universal. Logic otherwise treats of this determination in connection with contradictory concepts, impressing it as a matter of weight that with the negative of a concept one should keep to the negative alone and take it for the merely indeterminate scope of what is other than the positive concept. So the bare not-white would be red, yellow, blue, and so forth every bit as much as black. But white as such is that determination of intuition which is without concept; the not of white is then a non-being equally without concept, an abstraction looked at right at the outset of the logic, whose nearest truth was there recognized as becoming. Where, in examining the determinations of the judgment, conceptless content of this kind out of intuition and representation gets used for illustration, and the determinations of being and those of reflection are passed off as determinations of the judgment, the procedure is just as uncritical as applying, on Kant's reckoning, the concepts of the understanding to the infinite idea of reason or to the so-called thing-in-itself; for the concept, and with it the judgment that proceeds from it, is the genuine thing-in-itself, or what is rational, whereas those determinations are at home in being or in essence and are forms not yet carried through into the fashion in which they stand in their truth, in the concept. – Stop short at white and red as sensuous representations, and then, as commonly happens, something gets called concept which is no more than a determination of representation, and then of course the not-white and the not-red are nothing positive, just as the non-triangular is something altogether indeterminate, for a determination that rests on number and on quantum at large is the essentially indifferent and conceptless one. Yet such sensuous content, like non-being itself, is meant to be grasped in its concept and to shed the indifference and abstract immediacy that belong to it in blind, motionless representation. Even in existence the thoughtless nothing turns into limit, and by it something does after all refer itself to an other lying outside it. In reflection, on the other hand, it is the negative which essentially refers itself to a positive and is on that account determinate; a negative is by then no longer that indeterminate non-being, it is posited as being at all only through the positive standing against it, the third term being their ground; the negative is thus kept inside a closed sphere, within which whatever the one is not is something determinate. – Far more, though, in the absolutely fluid continuity of the concept and of its determinations, the not is straightaway something positive, and negation is not determinateness merely but is drawn up into universality and posited as one with it. Hence the not-universal is directly the particular.

2. Since the negation bears upon the judgment's reference, and the negative judgment is still under consideration as such, it is to begin with still a judgment; there is accordingly a relation of subject and predicate, of singularity and universality, and a reference between them; the form of the judgment. Being the underlying immediate, the subject is left untouched by the negation, and so keeps its determination of having a predicate, its reference to universality. What gets negated, then, is not universality at large in the predicate, but the predicate's abstraction or determinateness, which showed itself as content over against that universality. – So the negative judgment is not total negation; the universal sphere which the predicate holds still stands; the subject's reference to the predicate is therefore still essentially positive; and the determination of the predicate that is left over is quite as much reference. – Say, for instance, that the rose is not red: with that only the determinateness of the predicate is negated and cut away from the universality that belongs to it no less; the universal sphere, colour, stands fast; if the rose is not red, one takes it thereby that it does have a colour, and another colour; in respect of this universal sphere the judgment remains positive.

The singular is a particular, – such is the positive shape of the negative judgment, and it says as much straight out; for the particular has universality in it. Over and above that it says the predicate is not a universal only, but something determinate besides. The negative shape says the same; for granted that the rose, say, is not red, still it is to keep not only the universal sphere of colour for predicate but to have some other determinate colour as well; only the singular determinateness of red, then, is sublated, and not merely is the universal sphere left standing, the determinateness too is kept, though turned into an indeterminate one, a universal determinateness; and thus into particularity.

3. Particularity, which has come out as the positive determination of the negative judgment, is what mediates between singularity and universality; and so the negative judgment is now the mediating factor generally, towards the third step, the reflection of the judgment of existence into itself. Objectively taken, it is no more than the moment of the alteration of accidents, or, in existence, of the concrete's singularized properties. By this alteration the full determinateness of the predicate, the concrete, comes forward as posited.

The singular is particular, on the positive way of putting the negative judgment. But the singular is also not particular; for particularity has a wider extent than singularity; particularity is thus a predicate not answering to the subject, and in it the subject does not yet have its truth. The singular is only singular, that negativity which refers itself not to something else, positively or negatively, but to its own self alone. – The rose is not just any coloured thing; it has only the determinate colour which is rose-colour. The singular is not something indeterminately determinate, but the determinately determinate.

Setting out from this positive shape of the negative judgment, the negation of it looks once more like a merely first negation. It is not that, however. On the contrary, in and for itself the negative judgment is already the second negation, the negation of the negation; and this that it is in and for itself has now to be posited. That is to say, what it negates is the positive judgment's predicate in its determinateness, that predicate's abstract universality, or, taken as content, the singular quality of the subject which it holds. But the negation of determinateness is already the second one, and thus the infinite going back of singularity into its own self. Herewith the restoration of the concrete totality of the subject has come about, or rather only now is the subject posited as singular, having been mediated with itself through the negation and the sublating of that negation. On its side the predicate has thereby gone over from its first universality into absolute determinateness, and has come level with the subject. To that extent the judgment reads: the singular is singular. – Looked at from the other side: the subject was quite as much to be assumed as universal, and to that extent the predicate, which over against that determination of the subject is the singular, widened itself in the negative judgment into particularity; and since the negation of this determinateness is furthermore just as much the purifying of the universality the predicate holds, this judgment also reads: the universal is the universal.

In both these judgments, which earlier came out through an external reflection, the predicate stands already expressed in its positivity. First, though, the negation of the negative judgment has itself to make its appearance in the shape of a negative judgment. It showed itself that a positive reference of subject to predicate, and the universal sphere of the latter, were still left in it. On this side, therefore, it held a universality purer of limitedness than the positive judgment held, and it is on that account all the more to be negated of the subject as singular. In this manner the predicate's whole extent is negated, and no positive reference is left between predicate and subject. Such is the infinite judgment.

c. The Infinite Judgment

The negative judgment is no more a true judgment than the positive one is. But the infinite judgment, the one meant to be the negative judgment's truth, comes down on its negative side of expression to the negative-infinite; a judgment wherein the judgment-form itself has been sublated too. – Yet a thing of that sort is an absurd judgment. A judgment it is meant to be, hence to carry within it a reference of subject to predicate; and yet that very reference is at the same time meant not to be there. – Ordinary logics do, to be sure, list the name of the infinite judgment, though what its point really is never comes clearly to light. – Instances of negative-infinite judgments cost little trouble: one has only to bind negatively, as subject and predicate, determinations of which the one lacks not merely the other's determinateness but its universal sphere besides; so, for instance, spirit [is] not red, yellow and so forth, not sour, not alkaline and so forth, the rose is no elephant, the understanding is no table, and the like. – Such judgments are correct, or true as the word goes, and yet, truth of that sort notwithstanding, absurd and inane. – Or better, they are no judgments. – The evil deed furnishes a more real instance of the infinite judgment. Where a civil lawsuit is in question, something gets negated purely as the property of the opposing party; yet with the admission that it would be theirs were the right to it on their side, and the claim is pressed under no other title than that of right; so right, the universal sphere, finds recognition and preservation within that negative judgment. Crime, by contrast, is the infinite judgment: it negates not the particular right alone but, along with it, the universal sphere, negating right as right. It carries correctness with it insofar as an actual deed is what it is, but since this deed bears itself throughout negatively toward ethical life, which constitutes its universal sphere, it proves absurd.

What is positive about the infinite judgment, about the negation of the negation, lies in the reflection of singularity into its own self, through which singularity first gets posited as the determinate determinateness. The singular is singular, such ran the expression of it in the wake of that reflection. Within the judgment of existence the subject figures as an immediate singular, hence at that stage rather as a mere something in general. It first comes to be posited as singular by way of the mediation carried out in the negative and the infinite judgment.

With this the singular stands posited as continuing itself into its predicate, a predicate identical with it; and correspondingly universality too is no longer the immediate sort, but rather a gathering together of what is distinguished. Quite as much does the positive-infinite judgment run: the universal is universal, and in that shape it is posited as the return into its own self.

By this reflection of the judgment's determinations into themselves the judgment has by now sublated itself; within the negative-infinite one the difference is, so to say, too great for anything like a judgment to survive; between subject and predicate there is no positive reference whatever; within the positive-infinite, conversely, nothing but identity is at hand, and with difference wholly wanting there is no judgment left.

Put more determinately, what has sublated itself is the judgment of existence; and with that there stands posited what the copula of the judgment holds within it, namely that in this their identity the qualitative extremes are sublated. Since this unity is, however, the concept, it is straightway sundered once more into its extremes, and exists as judgment, only that its determinations are no longer immediate ones but such as are reflected into themselves. With this the judgment of existence has passed over into the judgment of reflection.

B. The Judgment of Reflection

A singular as such is what the subject is in the judgment that has by now emerged; likewise the universal is no longer abstract universality, or a single property, but stands posited as a universal that has drawn itself into one through the reference of things distinguished, or, taken with respect to the content of diverse determinations at large, as that which is the taking together of manifold properties and concrete existences. – Should examples of predicates belonging to judgments of reflection be called for, they must be of a different cast from those serving judgments of existence. Properly speaking, it is only in the judgment of reflection that a determinate content, that is, a content at all, is at hand; for the content is the form-determination reflected into identity, marked off from form insofar as form is differentiated determinateness, – which is what form still amounts to as judgment. Within the judgment of existence, the content is merely something immediate, or something abstract and undetermined. – Judgments of reflection may accordingly be exemplified thus: the human being is mortal, things are transient, this thing is useful, harmful; hardness, elasticity in bodies, happiness and so forth are predicates of that peculiar sort. What they [express] is an essentiality, one that is nevertheless a determination within a relation, or a gathering universality. This universality, which will go on determining itself in the course of the judgment of reflection's movement, still stands apart from the universality of the concept as such; granted, it is no longer the abstract universality of the qualitative judgment, yet it keeps a reference to the immediate out of which it comes, and has that immediate lying at its base for its negativity. – In the first instance the concept determines existence into relational determinations, into continuities of themselves within the diverse manifoldness of concrete existence, – so that, while the truly universal is indeed their inner essence, still, in appearance, this relative nature, or their mark, is not yet what they are in and for themselves.

It might well look like the obvious course to determine the judgment of reflection as the judgment of quantity, in the way that the judgment of existence was also determined as the qualitative judgment. Yet just as the immediacy there was not only the immediacy which is but essentially the mediated, abstract one besides, so here too the sublated immediacy in question is not simply sublated quality, hence not simply quantity; quantity is rather, in the same manner in which quality is the most external immediacy, the most external determination belonging to mediation.

A remark remains to be made about the determination as it shows itself in its movement within the judgment of reflection: in the judgment of existence the movement of that determination displayed itself at the predicate, this judgment standing in the determination of immediacy, so that the subject appeared as what lies at the base. On the same grounds, in the judgment of reflection the onward course of determining runs off at the subject, since it is reflected being-in-itself that this judgment has for its determination. Here, then, what is essential is the universal, or the predicate; it therefore makes up what lies at the base, whereby the subject is to be measured and in conformity with which it is to be determined. – The predicate does, all the same, acquire a further determination through the ongoing formation of the subject's form, only indirectly so, whereas the latter formation, on the grounds just given, shows itself as direct onward determining.

Turning to the objective significance of the judgment: through its universality the singular steps into existence, yet as within an essential relational determination, an essentiality that holds itself intact throughout the manifoldness of appearance; the subject ought to be what is determined in and for itself; this determinateness it possesses in its predicate. On the other side, the singular is reflected into this predicate of its own, which is its universal essence; to that extent the subject is what concretely exists and what appears. The predicate in this judgment does not any longer inhere in the subject; it is rather what is in itself, under which the singular in question stands subsumed as something accidental. Whereas the judgments of existence may also be determined as judgments of inherence, those of reflection count rather as judgments of subsumption.

a. The Singular Judgment

The immediate judgment of reflection now reads once more: the singular is universal; only that subject and predicate now bear the sense indicated; put more closely, therefore, it may be worded thus: this is an essentially universal.

But a this is not an essentially universal. Positive though that judgment at large is by its universal form, it has to be taken negatively. But inasmuch as a merely positive judgment is not all that the judgment of reflection amounts to, the negation fails to touch the predicate directly, this being no inhering predicate but rather what is in itself. Rather it is the subject that is alterable and awaits determining. The negative judgment must accordingly be caught here in this shape: not a this is a universal of reflection; an in-itself such as this has a concrete existence of wider universality than what lies in one single this. The singular judgment thus has its next truth in the particular one.

b. The Particular Judgment

That non-singularity of the subject which must be posited in place of its singularity in the first judgment of reflection is particularity. Singularity, however, stands determined in the judgment of reflection as essential singularity; particularity therefore cannot be some simple, abstract determination wherein the singular would stand sublated and whatever concretely exists would have foundered, but only an expansion of that singular in external reflection; hence the subject reads: some thises, or a particular multitude of singulars.

The judgment some singulars are a universal of reflection looks at first like a positive judgment, and yet is negative every bit as much; for some harbours universality; on that score it may be regarded as comprehensive; but so far as it is particularity, it fails just as much to match universality. As was shown above, the negative determination which the subject has acquired through the singular judgment's transition is a determination of the reference too, of the copula. – Lodged in the judgment some human beings are happy is the immediate consequence: some human beings are not happy. Granted that some things are useful, then for that very reason some things are not useful. Positive and negative judgment no longer fall asunder; the particular judgment holds both together at once, immediately, precisely on account of its being a judgment of reflection. – But for that reason the particular judgment is indeterminate.

Take the subject further, in the example of such a judgment, as some human beings, animals and so forth: besides the particular form-determination some, it holds within it the content-determination human being and so forth. For the singular judgment the subject could read this human being, a singularity that belongs properly to outward showing; better, then, that it should run, say, Cajus. Yet some Caji can no longer serve as the subject of the particular judgment; for Cajus is meant to be a singular as such. To the some, therefore, a more universal content gets attached, say human beings, animals and so forth. Such a content is not merely empirical but one determined through the judgment's form; namely, it is a universal, since some harbours universality, and this universality must at the same time stand apart from the singulars, reflected singularity lying at the base. More precisely, it is also the universal nature, or the genus human being, animal; – thus anticipating that universality which is the outcome of the judgment of reflection, much as the positive judgment, having the singular for its subject, anticipated the determination that is the outcome of the judgment of existence.

To that extent the subject, holding within it the singulars, their reference to particularity, and the universal nature, already stands posited as the totality of the determinations of the concept. Such a consideration, however, is properly an external one. What its form posits in the subject, in the first instance and in reference of the terms to one another, is the expansion of the this into particularity; only, this universalizing does not match the this; this is something perfectly determinate, whereas some this is undetermined. The expansion is meant to attach to the this, hence to be perfectly determinate in conformity with it; and such is totality, or in the first instance universality at large.

Underlying this universality is the this, for the singular is here what is reflected into itself; the further determinations of the singular therefore run their course upon it externally, and just as particularity for that reason determined itself as some, so the universality the subject has gained is allness, and with that the particular judgment has passed over into the universal one.

c. The Universal Judgment

Universality, as it is met with at the subject of the universal judgment, is that external universality belonging to reflection, allness; all are all the singulars; the singular remains unaltered within it. Such universality is therefore no more than a gathering together of singulars that subsist on their own; it is a commonality accruing to them only upon comparison. – Where universality comes up for discussion, it is commonality of this kind that habitually presents itself first to subjective representation. When a ground is wanted, closest to hand, for why some determination should count as a universal one, what gets alleged is that it belongs to several. – In analysis chiefly, too, this concept of universality is what hovers before one, seeing that, for instance, developing a function by a polynomial passes for the more universal procedure over against developing the same function by a binomial; because the polynomial exhibits more singularities than the binomial does. Strictly, the requirement that the function be exhibited in its universality calls for a pantonomial, for infinity run through to the end; but at this point the restriction upon that requirement sets in of its own accord, and the exhibition of the infinite multitude has to rest content with the ought of such exhibition, and hence with a polynomial after all. In point of fact, however, the binomial already is the pantonomial in every case where the method or rule concerns nothing beyond the dependence of one term upon one other, and where the dependence of the several terms upon those preceding them does not particularize itself, one and the same function staying at the base. It is the method or rule that has to be looked upon as the truly universal; carrying the development onward, or developing a polynomial, merely repeats it; through the enlarged multiplicity of terms it accordingly gains nothing in universality. Bad infinity and the deception belonging to it have been discussed earlier already; the universality of the concept is the beyond attained; that infinity, though, stays saddled with the beyond as with something unattainable, so far as it stays the mere progress into infinity. Should nothing but allness hover before one in the case of universality, a universality supposed to be exhausted in the singulars taken as singulars, then here is a relapse into that bad infinity; or else plurality is simply passed off for allness. Plurality, be it ever so vast, stays sheer particularity all the same, and is not allness. – Dimly, however, there hovers along with all this the universality of the concept, which is in and for itself; it is the concept that drives forcibly out beyond the stubborn singularity to which representation clings, and out beyond the externality of representation's reflection, slipping allness as totality in its place, or rather the categorical being-in-and-for-itself.

The same shows itself elsewhere in allness, which at large is the empirical universality. So far as the singular is presupposed as something immediate, and hence come upon and taken up externally, the reflection that gathers it into allness is external to it in just the same measure. But since the singular as this is utterly indifferent toward such reflection, universality and a singular of that sort cannot close into one unity. Empirical allness therefore remains a task; an ought which, so taken, admits of no exhibition as being. An empirically universal proposition, for such are put forward all the same, rests, then, upon the tacit agreement that, so long as no instance to the contrary can be adduced, the multiplicity of cases is to hold as allness; or that the subjective allness, namely that of the cases which have come to knowledge, may be taken for an objective allness.

Looking now more closely at the universal judgment where we stand: the subject, which, as was noted just now, holds within it the universality that is in and for itself as presupposed, now carries [that same universality] at itself as posited too. All human beings expresses first the genus human being, second this genus in its singularization, though in such wise that the singulars are simultaneously widened out into the universality of the genus; conversely, through this linkage with singularity universality is determined every bit as perfectly as singularity is; hereby the posited universality has become EQUAL to the presupposed one.

Properly, however, no advance account is to be taken of what is presupposed; the outcome is rather to be considered on its own at the form-determination. – Singularity, in having widened itself out to allness, is posited, as negativity that is identical reference to itself. It has thereby not stayed that first singularity, such as, for instance, the singularity of a Cajus, but is the determination identical with universality, or the universal's absolute being-determined. – The first singularity belonging to the singular judgment was no immediate one such as the positive judgment has, but had arisen out of the dialectical movement of the judgment of existence taken as a whole; already it stood determined as the negative identity of that judgment's determinations. Here is the genuine presupposition within the judgment of reflection; over against the positing that runs its course in the latter, that first determinateness of singularity was singularity's in-itself; what singularity accordingly is in itself now stands posited through the movement of the judgment of reflection, namely singularity as the identical reference of what is determinate to its own self. Hence that reflection which widens singularity out to allness is none that would be external to it; what singularity already is in itself merely comes thereby to be for itself. – So the outcome is in truth objective universality. To that extent the subject has stripped off the form-determination of the judgment of reflection, which travelled from this by way of some to allness; in place of all human beings one has henceforth to say: the human being.

Universality thus arisen is the genus; the universality that is concrete at its own self. The genus does not inhere in the subject, nor is it a single property, and at large not a property of the subject at all; every singularized determinateness it holds dissolved within its substantial solidity. – Precisely because it stands posited as this negative identity with itself, the genus is essentially subject; but it is no longer subsumed under its predicate. Herewith the nature of the judgment of reflection alters altogether.

That judgment was essentially one of subsumption. Its predicate stood determined over against its subject as the universal that is in itself; on the side of content it admitted of being taken as an essential relational determination, or else as a mark; – a determination whereby the subject is nothing but an essential appearance. Determined as objective universality, however, the subject ceases to be subsumed under any such relational determination, or gathering reflection; a predicate of that sort is rather, measured against this universality, a particular one. The relation of subject and predicate has thus turned itself about, and to that extent the judgment has for the time being sublated itself.

This sublation of the judgment coincides with what turns into the determination of the copula, still awaiting our consideration; the sublating of the judgment's determinations and their transition into the copula are one and the same. – For so far as the subject has raised itself into universality, in this determination it has become equal to the predicate, which as the reflected universality comprises particularity too within itself; subject and predicate are accordingly identical, that is, they have run together into the copula. Such identity is the genus, or the nature of a thing as it is in and for itself. So far, then, as this identity sunders itself once more into a judgment, it is the inner nature by which subject and predicate refer to each other; – a reference of necessity, wherein those determinations of the judgment are unessential differences merely. – What belongs to all the singulars of a genus, belongs by their nature, to the genus, – this is an immediate consequence, and the expression of what came out just now, that the subject, for instance all human beings, strips off its form-determination, and the human being is to be said instead. – Such interconnection, which is in and for itself, makes up the groundwork of a new judgment; – the judgment of necessity.

C. The Judgment of Necessity

The determination into which universality has developed is, as has come out, universality in and for itself, or objective universality, answering to which in the sphere of essence stands substantiality. What sets it apart from substantiality is that it belongs to the concept, and thereby is not the inner necessity of its determinations only but the posited necessity as well, or that difference is immanent to it, whereas substance harbours its own difference only in its accidents and not as a principle within its own self.

In the judgment this objective universality is now posited; hence first along with this its essential determinateness, as immanent to it, second as distinct from it as particularity, for which that universality makes up the substantial groundwork. Determined in this manner, it is genus and species.

a. The Categorical Judgment

The genus divides itself, or repels itself essentially into species; genus it is only so far as it comprises species beneath it; and the species is species only so far as, on the one side, it concretely exists in singulars, and, on the other, possesses in the genus a universality higher than itself. – As its predicate the categorical judgment now has a universality of that kind, wherein the subject possesses its immanent nature. It is itself, however, the first, immediate judgment of necessity; hence the determinateness of the subject, whereby the subject is a particular or a singular over against genus or species, belongs so far to the immediacy that external concrete existence has. – Objective universality, however, likewise has here as yet only its immediate particularization; on one side it is on that account itself something determinate, over against which higher genera stand; – on the other side it is not exactly the nearest genus, that is, one whose determinateness is not precisely what constitutes the principle of the subject's specific particularity. What is necessary about it, though, is the substantial identity of the subject with the predicate, over against which whatever is peculiar to the former, marking it off from the latter, counts only as an unessential positedness, – or indeed as a mere name; in its predicate the subject is reflected back into its being-in-and-for-itself. – A predicate of this sort ought not to be lumped in with the predicates of the judgments treated so far; if the judgments, say: the rose is red, the rose is a plant, or else: this ring is yellow, it is gold, get flung together into a single class, and a property as external as the colour of a flower is taken for a predicate on a par with the flower's vegetable nature, then a difference is passed over that must strike even the crudest apprehension. – Sharply, therefore, must the categorical judgment be marked off from positive and negative judgment; in the latter two, what the subject gets credited with is a single contingent content, while in the former it is that totality of the form which is reflected into itself. In it, accordingly, the copula carries the meaning of necessity, in those others only that of abstract, immediate being.

At first the determinateness of the subject whereby the subject is a particular over against the predicate is still something contingent; subject and predicate stand in no necessary reference through form or determinateness; necessity therefore still stands as something inner. – Subject, however, the subject is only as a particular, and so far as it has objective universality, it is to have that universality essentially in accordance with the determinateness which is as yet only immediate. In determining itself, that is, in setting itself into the judgment, the objectively universal stands essentially in identical reference with this determinateness as such repelled out of it, that is, the determinateness is essentially not to be posited as something merely contingent. Only through such necessity of its immediate being does the categorical judgment answer to its objective universality, and in this manner has passed over into the hypothetical judgment.

b. The Hypothetical Judgment

If A is, then B is; or, A's being is not a being of its own, but the being of an other, of B. – What this judgment posits is the necessary interconnection of immediate determinatenesses, something the categorical judgment does not yet posit. – Two immediate concrete existences are present here, or externally contingent ones, of which the categorical judgment at first has only the one, the subject; but since the one stands externally over against the other, this other likewise stands, immediately, externally over against the first. – Given such immediacy the content of the two sides remains indifferent, each towards the other; hence this judgment is at first a proposition of empty form. Now immediacy is, first, admittedly a self-subsistent, concrete being as such; but, second, it is the reference of this being that is essential; hence that being counts equally as mere possibility; what the hypothetical judgment contains is not that A is, nor that B is, but only this: if one of them is, then so is the other; the interconnection of the extremes alone is posited, as being, and not the extremes themselves. On the contrary, within this necessity each is posited as being equally the being of an other. – The proposition of identity declares: A is A only, not B; and B is B only, not A; whereas in the hypothetical judgment the concept posits the being of finite things according to their formal truth, namely this: that the finite is a being of its own and yet equally not its own, but the being of an other. Within the sphere of being the finite alters itself, it turns into an other; within the sphere of essence it is appearance, and it is posited that its being consists in an other's shining in it, while necessity is the inner reference, not yet posited as such. But the concept is precisely this: that such identity is posited, and that whatever has being is not abstract identity with itself but concrete identity, and, immediately in its own self, the being of an other.

The hypothetical judgment may be taken in a closer determinateness by way of the relations of reflection, as the relation of ground and consequence, of condition and conditioned, of causality, and so forth. What substantiality is in the categorical judgment, the interconnection of causality is in the hypothetical, in its form as concept. This relation and the rest all fall under it, but here they are no longer relations between self-subsistent sides; these sides essentially are only moments of one and the selfsame identity. – Within it, however, they are not yet opposed following the determinations of the concept, as singular or particular and universal, but only as moments in general. So far, then, the hypothetical judgment has rather the shape of a proposition; as the particular judgment is indeterminate in content, so the hypothetical is indeterminate in form, since its content does not stand in the determination of subject and predicate. – Yet in itself being, being as it is the being of the other, is precisely thereby unity of itself and of the other, and so universality; therewith it is at the same time properly only a particular, since it is determinate and, in its determinateness, does not refer merely to itself. What is posited, however, is not the simple abstract particularity; through the immediacy which the determinatenesses have, the moments of that particularity are as differentiated; through their unity, which constitutes their reference, particularity is at the same time also their totality. – Accordingly, what this judgment in truth posits is universality, the concept's concrete identity, whose determinations possess no subsistence on their own account and are merely particularities posited within it. So it is the disjunctive judgment.

c. The Disjunctive Judgment

The concept in the categorical judgment is as objective universality, and an external singularity. Upon this externality, in the hypothetical, the concept comes forward in its negative identity; through that identity they obtain the determinateness now posited in the disjunctive judgment, the determinateness which in the former they have immediately. The disjunctive judgment is accordingly objective universality posited at once together with the form. What it holds is therefore, first, the concrete universality or the genus, under simple form, as the subject; second, however, that same universality as totality of the determinations differentiated within it. A is either B or C. Herein lies the necessity of the concept, wherein, first, there is the selfsameness of the two extremes, one and the same extension, content and universality; second, they stand differentiated following the form of the determination of the concept, though so that, for the sake of that identity, this form is as mere form. Third, the identical objective universality appears on that account as what is reflected into itself over against the unessential form, as content, which nonetheless carries the determinateness of form in its own self; the one time as the simple determinateness of the genus; the other time just this determinateness as developed into its difference, – in which manner it constitutes the particularity of the species, and the totality of these, the genus's universality. – Particularity in its development makes up the predicate, because it is to that extent the more universal, in that it contains the whole universal sphere of the subject, yet contains it also in the laying-out of particularization.

Looking at this particularization more closely, then in the first place the substantial universality of the species is constituted by the genus; the subject is accordingly both B and C; this both and marks the positive identity of particular with universal; this objective universal maintains itself completely in its particularity. The species, second, shut each other out; A is either B or C; for they constitute the determinate difference of the universal sphere. This either-or is the negative reference of them. In the latter, however, they are just as identical as in the former; the genus is their unity as determinate particulars. – Were the genus abstract universality, as in the judgments of existence, then the species too would have to be taken merely as diverse ones, indifferent towards each other; but the genus is not that external universality arising only through comparison and omission, but rather their immanent and concrete one. – Necessity is lacking in an empirical disjunctive judgment; A is either B or C or D and so forth, because the species B, C, D and so forth have simply turned up; strictly speaking no either-or can be pronounced by such a judgment; for species of that kind make up at best a subjective completeness; the one species does indeed exclude the other; but either-or excludes every further one, and closes off a total sphere within itself. The necessity of this totality lies in the negative unity of the objectively universal, which has dissolved singularity within itself and carries it immanently within itself as the simple principle of difference, whereby the species stand determined and referred to one another. The empirical species, by contrast, have their differences in some contingency or other, one that is an external principle and hence not their principle, and so also not the immanent determinateness of the genus; for that reason they are not referred to one another according to their determinateness either. – It is through the reference of their determinateness, though, that the species make up the universality of the predicate. – The so-called contrary and contradictory concepts ought strictly to find their place only here; for in the disjunctive judgment the essential difference of the concept is posited; but therein they at the same time also have their truth, namely that the contrary and the contradictory are themselves differentiated just as much contrarily as contradictorily. The species are contrary insofar as they are only diverse, namely, through the genus as their objective nature they have a subsistence in and for itself; contradictory, insofar as they exclude each other. Each of these determinations taken on its own is, however, one-sided and lacking in truth; within the either-or of the disjunctive judgment there is posited their unity as their truth, according to which that self-subsistent subsistence, as concrete universality, is itself likewise the principle of the negative unity through which they shut each other out.

Through the identity of subject and predicate just now exhibited, an identity following negative unity, the disjunctive judgment determines the genus as the nearest one. This expression points at first to a bare quantitative difference of more or fewer determinations that a universal may contain over against a particularity standing beneath it. On such a reckoning it remains contingent what the nearest genus properly is. But insofar as one takes the genus for a universal formed merely by leaving determinations out, it cannot properly form any disjunctive judgment; for it is contingent whether the determinateness making up the principle of the either-or has happened to remain in it; the genus would not be exhibited in the species according to its determinateness at all, and these could have only a contingent completeness. In the categorical judgment the genus stands over against the subject at first only in this abstract form, hence not necessarily as the genus nearest to it, and to that extent externally. But since the genus, as concrete, is essentially determinate universality, as the simple determinateness it is the unity of those moments of the concept which in that simplicity are merely sublated but have their real difference in the species. The genus is therefore the nearest one of a species insofar as that species has its specific differentiation in the essential determinateness of the genus, and insofar as the species in general have their differentiated determination, as principle, in the nature of the genus.

The side just considered makes up the identity of subject and predicate on the side of being-determined in general; a side that has been posited through the hypothetical judgment, whose necessity is an identity of immediates and of diverse things, and is therefore essentially as negative unity. This negative unity is what in general separates subject and predicate, though it is now itself posited as differentiated, in the subject as simple determinateness, and in the predicate as totality. That separating of the subject from the predicate is the difference of the concept; but the totality of the species in the predicate can just as little be any other difference. – The determination of the disjunctive members over against each other thus issues from this. It reduces itself to the difference of the concept, for the concept alone disjoins itself and manifests its negative unity in its determination. For the rest, the species comes into consideration here only according to its simple determinateness of the concept, not according to the shape in which it has stepped out of the idea into a further self-subsistent reality; that shape does indeed fall away where the genus's simple principle is concerned; but the essential differentiation has to be a moment of the concept. In the judgment considered here it is properly through the concept's own further determining that its disjunction is now itself posited, that which emerged in the case of the concept as its determination existing in and for itself, as its differentiation into determinate concepts. – Since the concept is now the universal, the positive just as much as the negative totality of the particulars, precisely thereby it itself is also immediately one of its disjunctive members; the other, though, is this universality resolved into its particularity, that is, the concept's determinateness as determinateness; and in that determinateness universality just so presents itself as the totality. – If a genus's disjunction into species has not yet attained this form, that is proof that it has not risen to the concept's determinateness and has not issued out of it. – Colour is either violet, indigo, light blue, green, yellow, orange, or red; – in a disjunction of that sort its mixedness and impurity, empirical as well, can be seen at once; regarded on this side on its own, it already deserves to be called barbaric. If colour has been grasped as the concrete unity of bright and dark, then this genus carries the determinateness in it which makes up the principle by which it is particularized into species. Among these, however, one has to be the absolutely simple colour, which holds the opposition in even balance and enclosed and negated within its intensity; over against it the opposition of the relation of the bright and the dark must present itself, to which, since a phenomenon of nature is at issue, the indifferent neutrality of the opposition must further be added. – Taking mixtures like violet and orange, and gradations like indigo and light blue, for species can have its ground only in a wholly unconsidered procedure, one showing too little reflection even for empiricism. – What differentiated and still more closely determined forms the disjunction may have, according as it takes place in the element of nature or of spirit, does not belong here to be worked out.

The disjunctive judgment has the members of the disjunction at first in its predicate; but it is just as much itself disjoined; the members of the disjunction are its subject and its predicate; these are the concept's moments, posited in their determinateness and yet at once as identical, as identical α) in objective universality, this being the simple genus in the subject, and in the predicate the universal sphere together with the totality of the concept's moments, and β) in the negative unity, the developed interconnection of necessity, according to which the simple determinateness in the subject has gone apart into the difference of the species, and precisely therein is their essential reference and what is identical with itself.

The copula of this judgment, this unity into which the extremes have gone together through their identity, is thus the concept itself, and indeed as posited; with this the mere judgment of necessity has raised itself to the judgment of the concept.

D. The Judgment of the Concept

Knowing how to pass judgments of existence: the rose is red, snow is white, and so forth, will hardly count as evidence of a great power of judgment. The judgments of reflection come closer to being propositions; the object in the judgment of necessity stands, admittedly, in its objective universality, yet only in the judgment now to be considered is its reference to the concept at hand. Therein the concept is laid down as ground, and since it stands in reference to the object, it is there as an ought to which reality may correspond or may fail to. – Hence only a judgment of this sort holds a genuine appraisal; the predicates good, bad, true, beautiful, correct, and so forth express that the fact, measured against its universal concept as against the simply presupposed ought, either stands in agreement with it or does not.

The judgment of the concept has been called judgment of modality, and is looked upon as containing the form in which the reference of subject and predicate stands within an external understanding, and as concerning the value of the copula only in reference to thinking. On this account the problematic judgment is said to consist in one's taking the affirming or denying as optional or as possible; – the assertoric, in one's taking it as true, that is, actual; and the apodictic, in one's taking it as necessary. – It is easy to see why, with this judgment, it lies so near to hand to step outside the judgment itself and to view its determination as something merely subjective. For what steps forward once more in the judgment here is the concept, the subjective, and it comports itself towards an immediate actuality. Only, this subjective is not to be confounded with external reflection, which is admittedly also something subjective, but in another sense than the concept itself; the concept, stepping forward again out of the disjunctive judgment, is on the contrary the very reverse of a mere manner and mode. In this sense the earlier judgments are only something subjective, since they rest upon an abstraction and one-sidedness wherein the concept has gone lost. As against them, the judgment of the concept is rather the objective one and the truth, precisely because what lies at its ground is the concept in its determinateness as concept, and not the concept in external reflection or in reference to a subjective, that is, contingent thinking.

In the disjunctive judgment the concept had been posited as identity of the universal nature with its particularization; therewith the relation of the judgment had sublated itself. This concrete unity of universality and particularization is at the outset a simple result; it has now to build itself out further into totality, seeing that the moments it holds have at first gone under within it and do not yet confront one another in determinate self-subsistence. – The deficiency of the result may also be put more determinately thus: that in the disjunctive judgment the objective universality has indeed become complete in its particularization, but that the negative unity of the latter goes back only into the former and has not yet determined itself into the third, into singularity. – Insofar, however, as the result is itself the negative unity, it already is this singularity; but so taken it is only this one determinateness, which now has to posit its own negativity, to sunder itself into the extremes, and thus to develop itself fully into the syllogism.

The next diremption of this unity is the judgment, wherein it is posited the one time as subject, as an immediately singular, and then as predicate, as the determinate reference of its moments.

a. The Assertoric Judgment

At first the judgment of the concept is immediate; so taken it is the assertoric judgment. Its subject is a concrete singular in general, while the predicate expresses that same singular as the reference of its actuality, determinateness or constitution, to its own concept. (This house is bad, this action is good.) More closely, then, what it holds is a) that the subject ought to be something or other; its universal nature has posited itself as self-subsistent concept; b) the particularity, which is as constitution and external concrete existence not merely on account of its immediacy but because it is expressly differentiated from its self-subsistent universal nature; owing to the self-subsistence of the concept, this particularity is for its part likewise indifferent towards the universal, and may prove adequate to it or fail to. – Such constitution is the singularity that lies outside the universal's necessary determination in the disjunctive judgment, a determination which is only as the particularizing of the species and as the genus's negative principle. To that extent the concrete universality issuing from the disjunctive judgment is, in the assertoric judgment, torn in two into the form of extremes, and these still lack the concept itself as the posited unity referring them to each other.

For that reason the judgment is as yet only assertoric; its verification is a subjective assurance. That something is good or bad, correct, fitting or not, and so forth, has its interconnection in an external third. But that this interconnection is externally posited amounts to the same as its being as yet only in itself or inwardly. – If something is good or bad and so forth, hardly anyone will therefore suppose that it is good only in subjective consciousness while in itself perhaps bad, or that good and bad, correct, fitting, and so forth are not predicates of the objects themselves. What is merely subjective in the assertion of this judgment thus lies in this, that the interconnection of subject and predicate which is in itself is not yet posited, or, what comes to the same, that it is merely external; the copula remains an immediate, abstract being.

The assurance of the assertoric judgment is therefore met, with just as much right, by the opposite one. Should the assurance run: this action is good; then the opposite, this action is bad, still has warrant just as good. – Or, considered in itself: since the subject of this judgment is an immediate singular, it has in this abstraction not yet posited in it that determinateness which would hold its reference to the universal concept; it is thus still something contingent, as apt to answer to the concept as to fail of it. The judgment is therefore essentially problematic.

b. The Problematic Judgment

The problematic judgment is nothing but the assertoric one, insofar as the latter has to be taken positively just as much as negatively. – On this qualitative side the particular judgment is a problematic one as well, for it holds positively just as much as negatively; – in like manner the being of subject and predicate is problematic in the hypothetical judgment; – through these judgments too it is posited that the singular and the categorical judgment are as yet something merely subjective. Within the problematic judgment as such, though, this positing is more immanent than it is in the judgments mentioned above, since in the latter the content of the predicate is the reference of the subject to the concept, and here therewith the determination of the immediate as a contingent thing is itself at hand.

At the outset it appears merely problematic whether the predicate is to be joined with some given subject or not, and to that extent the indeterminateness falls within the copula. Nothing determinate can issue from this for the predicate, for the predicate already is objective, concrete universality. What is problematic concerns, then, the immediacy of the subject, an immediacy thereby determined as contingency. – Yet the singularity of the subject is not on that account to be abstracted from; cleansed of singularity altogether, the subject would be a universal merely; the predicate holds precisely this, that the subject's concept is to be posited in reference to its singularity. – There is no saying: the house or a house is good; the answer runs rather: according to how it is constituted. – What is problematic about the subject in its own self makes up its contingency as a moment: the subjectivity of the fact set over against its objective nature or its concept, the bare manner and mode, or the constitution.

The subject is thus itself differentiated into its universality or objective nature, its ought, and into the particular constitution of existence. Therewith it holds the ground of whether it is as it ought to be. In this way it has been brought into balance with the predicate. – The negativity of what is problematic, insofar as it is turned against the immediacy of the subject, accordingly signifies nothing but this original dividing of the subject, which in itself already is as unity of universal and particular, into these its moments; – a dividing which is the judgment itself.

One may further remark that each of the subject's two sides, its concept and its constitution, might be called that subject's subjectivity. The concept is a fact's universal essence gone into itself, the fact's negative unity with itself; and this unity constitutes its subjectivity. But a fact is also essentially contingent and carries an external constitution; this too is called its bare subjectivity, over against the objectivity just named. The fact itself is precisely this, that its concept, as the negative unity of itself, negates its universality and puts itself forth into the externality of singularity. – It is as this doubled thing that the subject of the judgment is posited here; those conflicting significations of subjectivity are, according to their truth, in one. – The signification of the subjective has itself turned problematic through this, that it has lost the immediate determinateness which belonged to it in the immediate judgment, together with its determinate opposition to the predicate. – That conflicting signification of the subjective, occurring as it does in the reasoning of ordinary reflection as well, might at least on its own draw notice to the point that the subjective has no truth in one of the two alone. The doubled signification is the appearance of this, that each on its own, taken singly, is one-sided.

Once what is problematic is posited in this way as the problematic of the fact, as the fact along with its constitution, then the judgment is itself no longer problematic but apodictic.

c. The Apodictic Judgment

The apodictic judgment's subject (a house of such and such a make is good, an action so and so constituted is right,) carries about it first the universal, what it ought to be, secondly its constitution; the second of these holds the ground for why a predicate belonging to the judgment of the concept does or does not attach to the subject entire, that is, whether or not the subject measures up to its concept. – With this the judgment is genuinely objective; or rather, it is the truth of judgment generally. Subject and predicate answer to each other, their content is one and the same, and this content is itself concrete universality as posited; for within it lie a pair of moments — the objectively universal element, or the genus, together with the singularized. So what we have here is the universal which is itself, which carries itself on through its opposite, and which counts as universal only in being unity with that opposite. – A universal of this kind — such predicates as good, fitting, correct, and so on — rests upon an ought, and at once takes in the answering of existence to that ought; not that ought, nor the genus for itself, but precisely this answering is the universality that constitutes what is predicated in the apodictic judgment.

These two moments are contained in the subject likewise, in immediate unity, as the fact. But the truth about the fact is that it stands broken within itself into its ought and its being; such is the absolute judgment upon all actuality. – That this original division, the very omnipotence of the concept, is equally a return into the concept's unity and an absolute reference of ought and being to one another — this is what makes the actual into one fact; and the inner reference between them, this concrete identity, makes up the soul of the fact.

The transition from the fact's immediate simplicity over to the answering that is the determinate reference between its ought and its being, – or the copula, now proves on closer inspection to have its seat in the fact's particular determinateness. The genus is the universal that is in and for itself, which to that extent shows up as standing in no reference at all; the determinateness, by contrast, is what reflects itself within that universality into itself and yet at the same time into an other. Hence the judgment has its ground in how the subject is constituted, and for that reason is apodictic. So there is now present the determinate and fulfilled copula, the one that formerly consisted in the abstract is but has by now grown out into ground as such. To begin with it sits at the subject as an immediate determinateness, yet it is every bit as much the reference to the predicate, whose content is nothing but this answering itself, or the subject's reference to universality.

So the judgment's form has gone under: first, because in themselves subject and predicate are one and the same content; but secondly, because through its determinateness the subject points out beyond itself and refers itself to the predicate, while thirdly this referring has equally passed over into the predicate, makes up the predicate's whole content, and is thus the posited reference, or the judgment itself. – In this way the concrete identity of the concept — which was the result of the disjunctive judgment and which makes up the inner groundwork of the judgment of the concept — is established throughout the whole, whereas at first it was posited only in the predicate.

Looked at more closely, the positive side of this result, the side that makes for the judgment's transition into another form, shows subject and predicate in the apodictic judgment, as we have seen, each of them as the concept entire. – Yet the unity of the concept, being the determinateness that makes up the copula which sets them in reference to each other, is at the same time distinguished from the two. To begin with, it stands only over on the subject's side, as that subject's immediate constitution. But since it is essentially the referring factor, it is not just such an immediate constitution but rather what runs through subject and predicate alike, and is universal. – Given that subject and predicate have the same content, what that determinateness posits, by contrast, is the form-reference; the determinateness as a universal, or particularity. – Thus it holds both form-determinations of the extremes within itself; and is the determinate reference of subject and predicate; it is the fulfilled or content-laden copula of the judgment, the concept's unity stepped forth again out of the judgment in which it had been lost in the extremes. – Through this fulfilment of the copula the judgment has turned into the syllogism.

Chapter 3. The Syllogism

The syllogism has emerged as the reinstatement of the concept within the judgment, and hence as the unity and truth of the two. The concept as such keeps its moments sublated in unity; in the judgment this unity is something inner, or, what comes to the same, something outer, and though the moments do stand in reference, they are posited as self-subsistent extremes. In the syllogism the determinations of the concept are just as the extremes of the judgment are, and along with that their determinate unity is posited.

The syllogism is thus the concept posited in full; on that account it is the rational. – Understanding counts as the faculty of the determinate concept, the concept being held fast for itself by way of abstraction and of the form of universality. Within reason, by contrast, the determinate concepts stand posited in their totality and unity. Hence the syllogism is not merely something rational; rather, whatever is rational is a syllogism. Syllogizing has long since been ascribed to reason; yet on the other side people speak of reason in and for itself, of rational principles and laws, in a manner that leaves it obscure how the reason which draws a syllogism and this reason which is the wellspring of laws and of further eternal verities and absolute thoughts are connected at all. Should the former be merely formal reason while the latter is to bring forth content, then by that very difference the form of reason — the syllogism — would be precisely what the latter could not do without. For all that, the two are customarily held so far apart, neither being mentioned where the other is discussed, that the reason of absolute thoughts appears as if ashamed of the reason of the syllogism, while the syllogism appears to be counted a doing of reason almost solely by inherited usage. Yet, as has just been noted, logical reason, taken as the formal kind, must plainly be discernible in essence within that reason too which deals with a content; indeed, no content whatever can be rational except through the rational form. For guidance here one cannot turn to the very common chatter about reason, since it abstains from saying what is to be understood by reason at all; the cognition that purports to be rational is for the most part so taken up with its subject matters that it neglects to cognize reason itself, marking reason off and naming it merely by the subject matters it is said to possess. Suppose reason is to be the cognition which knows of God, of freedom, of right and of duty, of the infinite, the unconditioned, the supersensible, or which at least yields representations and feelings of these; then partly these latter are only negative subject matters, and partly there still remains the very first question, namely what it is in all those subject matters for the sake of which they are rational? – This is what it is: that the infinite in them is no empty abstraction from the finite, no universality bare of content and of determination, but rather fulfilled universality, the concept, which is determinate and which has its determinateness at itself in that genuine way of drawing distinctions within itself and of being the unity of these its own distinctions, distinctions belonging to the understanding and themselves determinate. Only thus does reason lift itself above the finite, the conditioned, the sensible, or however else that may be determined, and in this negativity it is essentially content-laden, for it is unity precisely as unity of determinate extremes; taken so, however, the rational is nothing other than the syllogism.

At first, then, the syllogism is immediate, as the judgment was; its determinations (termini) are thus simple, abstract determinatenesses, and it is on that account a syllogism of the understanding. Where one halts at this shape of it, the rationality within it, though certainly present and posited, remains inconspicuous. Its essential moment is the extremes in their unity, the middle term conjoining them and the ground upholding them. In that abstraction holds fast to the self-subsistence of the extremes, it confronts them with this unity as with a determinateness just as rigid, just as much for itself, and in that manner takes it to be non-unity rather than unity. The designation: middle term (medius terminus) is borrowed from spatial representation, and does its part in keeping us fixed upon the determinations' being-outside-one-another. If now the syllogism consists in this, that the unity of the extremes is posited within it, while that unity is nonetheless taken flatly, on the one hand as a particular for itself, on the other as a merely external reference, and non-unity is turned into the syllogism's essential relation, then the reason which the syllogism is contributes nothing to rationality.

The syllogism of existence, first, in which the determinations are determined thus immediately and abstractly, exhibits at its own self — seeing that, like the judgment, it is the reference of those determinations — the fact that they are no such abstract determinations, but each of them is rather the reference to the other, and that the middle term holds not merely particularity over against the determinations of the extremes, but holds these posited at itself.

By this dialectic of its own it makes itself into the syllogism of reflection, the second syllogism, – one with determinations of such a sort that in each of them the other essentially shines, or that stand posited as mediated, which is what they are meant to be according to the syllogism as such.

Thirdly, once this shining or being-mediated has reflected itself into its own self, the syllogism stands determined as syllogism of necessity, where the mediating factor is the objective nature of the fact. Inasmuch as this syllogism determines the extremes of the concept just as much as totalities, the syllogism has attained the answering of its concept, or the middle term, to its existence, or the extreme differences, and so has reached its truth, and with that has stepped over out of subjectivity into objectivity.

A. The Syllogism of Existence

1. In the way it is immediate, the syllogism has for its moments the concept's determinations as immediate ones. These are thus form's abstract determinatenesses, not yet worked up through mediation into concretion, but only the determinatenesses taken singly. The first syllogism is on that account the strictly formal one. Syllogizing's formalism lies in halting at what determines this first syllogism. Sundered into its abstract moments, the concept has for its extremes singularity and universality, while the concept itself shows up as the particularity that stands between them. Owing to their immediacy, as determinatenesses referring solely to themselves, they amount taken together to one single content. Particularity makes up the middle term, to begin with, only to this extent, that it holds the two moments — singularity and universality — united immediately within itself. Owing to its determinateness, it falls on one side under the universal as subsumed, and on the other side the singular, in relation to which it counts as universality, falls as subsumed under it. Yet this concretion is at first no more than a two-sidedness; owing to the immediacy in which the Medius Terminus stands within the immediate syllogism, it is there only as simple determinateness, and the mediation that it constitutes is not yet posited. The dialectical movement belonging to the syllogism of existence now consists in this: that the mediation which alone constitutes the syllogism should come to be posited at the syllogism's moments.