Third Section. The Idea

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 1. Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. The Living Individual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

B. The Life-Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

C. The Genus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 2. The Idea of Cognition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A. The Idea of the True

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

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

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

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

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

a. Analytic Cognition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

b. Synthetic Cognition

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

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

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

1. Definition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Division

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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