Remark

It is one of the most familiar determinations of representing that a thing consists of many self-subsistent matters. On the one side the thing is considered as having properties whose subsistence is the thing. On the other side, however, these diverse determinations are taken as matters whose subsistence is not the thing; on the contrary, the thing consists of them; it is itself nothing but their external combination and their quantitative limit. The properties and the matters are both alike the same determinations of content, save that in the former case they are moments reflected into their negative unity as into a foundation distinguished from them, namely thinghood, whereas here they are diverse self-subsistent ones, each reflected into a unity of its own with itself. These matters now determine themselves further as self-subsistent subsistence; but they are also together in one thing. This thing has the two determinations: first, to be this, and second, to be the also. The also is that which in outer intuition occurs as spatial extension; this, however, the negative unity, is the punctiformity of the thing. The matters are together in the punctiformity, and their also, or extension, is everywhere this punctiformity; for the also, as thinghood, is essentially determined as negative unity too. Where one of these matters is, accordingly, there in one and the same point is the other; the thing's colour is not in one place, its odorous matter in another, its caloric matter in a third, and so forth; rather, at the very point at which it is warm it is also coloured, sour, electrical, and so on. Now since these matters are not outside one another but in one this, they are assumed to be porous, so that the one exists in the interstices of the other. But the one that finds itself in the interstices of the other is itself porous as well; in its pores, conversely, the other therefore exists; and not this one alone, but the third, the tenth, and so forth. All are porous, and in the interstices of each there are found all the others, just as it in turn, together with the rest, is found in these pores of each of them. They are therefore a multitude that so reciprocally interpenetrates that the ones doing the penetrating are just as much penetrated by the others, so that each thereby penetrates once more its own being-penetrated. Each of them is posited as being its own negation, and that negation is another's subsistence; but this subsistence is no less the negation of that other and the first one's subsistence.

The evasion by which representing wards off the contradiction of the self-subsistent subsistence of several matters in one, or their indifference towards one another in their interpenetration, is notoriously wont to be the smallness of the parts and of the pores. Wherever difference-in-itself, contradiction, and the negation of negation come on the scene, wherever in general something is to be comprehended, representing lets itself drop down into the external, quantitative difference; with regard to coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be it takes refuge in gradualness, and with regard to being in smallness, wherein what vanishes is brought down to the imperceptible, the contradiction to a confusion, and the true relation is played over into an indeterminate representing whose murkiness saves what is sublating itself.

Examined more closely, however, this murkiness shows itself to be the contradiction, in part the subjective one of representing, in part the objective one of the object; representing itself contains the elements of it in full. For what it first of all does itself is the contradiction of wanting to hold to perception and to have before it things of existence, and, on the other side, of ascribing sensible existence to what is not perceptible and is determined through reflection; – the little parts and the pores are supposed at once to be a sensible existence, while their positedness is talked of as having that same mode of reality – which belongs to colour, warmth, and so forth. If, furthermore, representing were to look more closely at this objective fog, the pores and the little particles, it would recognize in them not merely a matter and also its negation, such that here there would be the matter, and alongside it its negation, the pore, and next to this again matter, and so on, but rather that in this thing it has 1) the matter that is self-subsistent, 2) its negation, that is, porosity, together with the other self-subsistent matter in one and the same point, and that this porosity, along with the matters' self-subsistent subsistence in one another as in one, is a reciprocal negation and a penetrating of the penetrating. – The more recent accounts given by physics of the diffusion of water vapor in atmospheric air and of the gases through one another bring out more determinately one side of the concept that has here emerged concerning the nature of the thing. They show, namely, that a given volume, for example, takes up just as much water vapor whether it be empty of atmospheric air or filled with it; also that the gases spread through one another in such a way that for each the other is as good as a vacuum, at least that they stand in no chemical combination with one another, each remaining uninterruptedly continuous with itself through the other and preserving itself, in its interpenetration with the others, indifferent towards them. – But the further moment in the concept of the thing is that in the this the one matter is located where the other is, and that what penetrates is at that same point penetrated as well, or that what is self-subsistent is immediately another's self-subsistence. This is a contradiction; yet the thing is nothing else than just this contradiction; that is why it is appearance.

A situation similar to the one obtaining with these matters obtains in the spiritual domain with the representation of the forces of the soul or faculties of the soul. Spirit is this in a far deeper sense: the negative unity within which its determinations penetrate one another. But when it is represented as soul, it is frequently wont to be taken for a thing. Just as the human being at large is allowed to consist of soul and body, each counting as something self-subsistent for itself, so the soul is allowed to consist of so-called forces of the soul, each of which has a self-subsistence subsisting for itself, or is an immediate activity operating for itself according to its determinateness. One represents it to oneself in this way, that here the understanding, there the imagination is at work for itself, that one cultivates the understanding, the memory, and so forth, each for itself, and for the time being lets the other forces lie idle on the left hand until their turn perhaps comes, or perhaps does not. Inasmuch as they are relocated into the materially simple soul-thing, which is supposed to be simple in being immaterial, the faculties are indeed not represented as particular matters; but as forces they are assumed to be quite as indifferent towards one another as those matters are. Spirit, however, is not that contradiction which the thing is, the thing that dissolves itself and passes over into appearance; rather, it is in its own self already the contradiction that has gone back into its absolute unity, namely the concept, wherein the differences are no longer to be thought of as self-subsistent ones, but only as particular moments within the subject, within simple individuality.

Chapter 2. Appearance

Concrete existence is that immediacy of being into which essence has re-established itself. In itself this immediacy is essence's reflection into itself. Essence has stepped up out of its ground as concrete existence, and the ground has itself passed over into that existence. Insofar as it is in its own self the absolute negativity, concrete existence is this reflected immediacy. And now it is posited as such as well, having determined itself as appearance.

Appearance is therefore, to begin with, essence as it is in its concrete existence; essence is immediately at hand in it. That this existence is reflected rather than immediate is what makes up in it the moment of essence; or, taken as essential concrete existence, concrete existence is appearance.

A something is only appearance – meaning that concrete existence as such is merely a posited being, not one that is in and for itself. To have in its own self the negativity of reflection, the nature of essence, is what constitutes its essentiality. This is not some alien reflection, external to it, one to which essence would belong and which, through a comparison of essence with concrete existence, would pronounce this existence to be appearance. Rather, as has emerged, the essentiality of concrete existence which consists in being appearance is concrete existence's own truth. The reflection through which it is this belongs to it itself.

If, however, it is claimed that something is only appearance, taking this to mean that immediate concrete existence would by contrast be the truth, then appearance is on the contrary the higher truth; for appearance is the concrete existence that is essential, while concrete existence is the appearance that is still void of essence, since it has in it only the one moment of appearance, namely concrete existence as immediate, and not yet appearance's negative reflection. When appearance is called void of essence, the moment of its negativity is thought of as though by contrast the immediate were the positive and the genuine; yet it is this immediate that does not yet have the essential truth in it. Concrete existence ceases, rather, to be void of essence precisely by passing over into appearance.

Essence at first shines within its own self, in its simple identity; so understood it is abstract reflection, the pure movement which, from nothing and through nothing, returns to itself. Essence appears, and it is now therefore real shine, since the moments of shine have concrete existence. Appearance, as has emerged, is the thing taken as the negative mediation of itself with its own self; the differences that it contains are self-subsistent matters, and these are the contradiction of being an immediate subsistence while at the same time having their subsistence only in an alien self-subsistence, that is, in the negation of their own, and, once more precisely for that reason, only in the negation of that alien one, or in the negation of their own negation. Shine is this same mediation, but in appearance its unstable moments have the shape of immediate self-subsistence. The immediate self-subsistence that belongs to concrete existence, by contrast, is for its part brought down to a moment. Appearance is accordingly the unity of shine and concrete existence.

Appearance now determines itself more closely. It is essential concrete existence; the essentiality of this existence distinguishes itself from it as unessential, and these two sides enter into reference to each other. – First, then, appearance is simple identity with itself which at the same time contains diverse determinations of content, such that these determinations, as well as their reference, are what remains equal to itself in the flux of appearance; the law of appearance.

Second, however, the law, simple in its diversity, passes over into opposition; what is essential to appearance is set in opposition to appearance itself, and over against the world of appearance there stands the world that is in itself.

Third, this opposition goes back into its ground; what is in itself is present in appearance, and conversely what appears is determined as taken up into its being-in-itself; appearance turns into relation.

A. The Law of Appearance

1. Appearance is what concretely exists, mediated through its negation, which makes up its subsistence. This negation of it is indeed an other self-subsistent, but this other is just as essentially something sublated. What concretely exists is therefore the return of itself into its own self by way of its negation and by way of the negation of that negation of it; it thus possesses essential self-subsistence, just as it is with equal immediacy simply positedness, having a ground and an other for its subsistence. – At first, then, appearance is concrete existence along with its essentiality, positedness along with its ground; this ground, however, is the negation; and that other self-subsistent, the ground of the first one, is itself likewise nothing but a positedness. Or: what concretely exists is, as what appears, reflected into an other, and this other, which is its ground, is itself nothing but this, namely to be reflected into an other. Since it is a return into its own self, the essential self-subsistence accruing to it is, given the negativity of the moments, a returning of nothing through nothing back by way of itself; the self-subsistence of what concretely exists is therefore only the essential shine. The interconnection of what concretely exists and reciprocally grounds itself consists for that reason in this reciprocal negation, namely that what the one subsists in is not the other's subsistence but the other's positedness, and this reference of positedness is alone what makes up their subsistence. The ground is at hand as it is in its truth, namely as a first that is only something presupposed.

This now makes up the negative side of appearance. But in this negative mediation there is immediately contained the positive identity of what concretely exists with itself. For it is not positedness over against an essential ground, or it is not the shine on something self-subsistent; it is rather positedness referring itself to a positedness, or a shine only in a shine. Within this negation of it, or within its other, itself something sublated, it refers to its own self; hence it is essentiality identical with itself, or positive essentiality. – This identical element is not the immediacy that accrues to concrete existence as such and is only the unessential feature, that of having its subsistence in something else. What it is, rather, is the essential content of appearance, and this content has two sides: first, that of standing in the form of positedness or of external immediacy; second, that of being positedness which is identical with itself. Taken according to the first side, it is as an existence, but as a contingent, unessential one which, in accordance with its immediacy, is subject to transition, to coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be. Taken according to the other side, it is the simple determination of content withdrawn from that flux, the abiding element in it.

Besides being in general the simple element of what is transitory, this content is also a content that is more determinate and diverse within itself. It is the reflection of appearance, of negative existence, into itself, and hence contains determinateness essentially. Appearance, however, is the manifold diversity that is, tossing itself about in unessential manifoldness; its reflected content, by contrast, is its manifoldness reduced to simple difference. For the determinate essential content is, more precisely, not merely determinate in general but, as what is essential to appearance, the complete determinateness: one and its other. Within appearance each of the two has the other for its subsistence, in such a way that at the same time it is only in that other's non-subsistence. The contradiction sublates itself; and the reflection of it into itself is the identity of their subsistence on both sides, namely that the one's positedness is also the other's positedness. They make up one subsistence, and are at the same time diverse content indifferent towards each other. In the essential side of appearance the negative of the unessential content, namely its sublating of itself, has thus gone back into identity; that content is an indifferent subsistence, one that is not the sublatedness but is rather the other's subsistence.

This unity is the law of appearance.

2. Accordingly the law is the positive element in the mediation of what appears. To begin with, appearance is concrete existence as the negative mediation with itself, so that what concretely exists is mediated with itself by its own non-subsistence, by an other, and once again by the non-subsistence of this other. Contained in this is, first, the mere shining and the vanishing of both, unessential appearance; second, also the abiding element, or the law; for in that sublating of the other each of the two concretely exists; and their positedness, taken as their negativity, is at once the identical, positive positedness of the two.

The abiding subsistence that appearance possesses in the law is thus, in the shape it has determined itself into, first set over against the immediacy of being that belongs to concrete existence. This immediacy is indeed in itself the reflected one, that is, the ground returned into itself; but within appearance the simple immediacy now stands distinguished from the reflected immediacy, whereas in the thing the two had only begun to part. The concretely existing thing, in its dissolution, has become this opposition; what is positive about its dissolution is that identity of what appears, as positedness, with itself in its other positedness. – Second, this reflected immediacy is itself determined as positedness in contrast with the immediacy of concrete existence that is. This positedness is now what is essential and truly positive. The German expression Gesetz likewise contains this determination. In this positedness there lies the essential reference between the two sides of the difference which the law contains; the two are mutually diverse immediate content, and are so as the reflection of the vanishing content that belongs to appearance. Taken as essential diversity, the diverse ones are simple determinations of content that refer to themselves. But just as much, none of them is immediate for itself; each is rather essentially positedness, or is only insofar as the other is.

Third, one and the same content belongs to appearance and to the law. The law is appearance's reflection into identity with itself; thus appearance, as the null immediate, stands over against what is reflected-into-itself, and according to this form the two are distinguished. But the reflection of appearance through which this difference obtains is at the same time the essential identity of appearance itself with its reflection – which is what reflection's nature amounts to in general; it is what is identical with itself in positedness and indifferent towards that difference which is the form or the positedness; hence a content that continues itself out of appearance into the law, the content of the law and of appearance.

This content thereby makes up the foundation of appearance; the law is this foundation itself, appearance is the same content but contains something more besides, namely the unessential content of its immediate being. For the form-determination too, through which appearance as such is distinguished from the law, is a content, and likewise one distinguished from the law's content. For concrete existence, taken as immediacy in general, is likewise an identity with itself of matter and form, indifferent towards its form-determinations and hence content; it is thinghood together with its properties and matters. But this content is one whose self-subsistent immediacy at the same time only is as a non-subsistence. The identity of that content with itself in this its non-subsistence, however, is the other, the essential content. This identity, the foundation of appearance that makes up the law, is a moment belonging to appearance itself; it is essentiality's positive side, through which concrete existence is appearance.

The law is therefore not beyond appearance but immediately present in it; the realm of laws is the tranquil image of the world that concretely exists or appears. Rather, both are one totality, and the world that concretely exists is itself the realm of laws, which as the simple identical is at the same time identical with itself within positedness, that is, within the self-dissolving self-subsistence of concrete existence. Concrete existence goes back into the law as into its ground; appearance contains the two together, the simple ground and that dissolving movement of the universe which appears, whose essentiality the ground is.

3. The law is therefore essential appearance; it is the reflection of appearance into itself within its positedness, the content that is identical in it and in unessential concrete existence. First, the identity of the law with its own concrete existence is as yet only the immediate, simple identity, and the law is indifferent towards its concrete existence; appearance still has another content over against the content of the law. The former content is indeed the unessential one and is what goes back into the latter; but for the law it is a first that is not posited by the law; as content, therefore, it is externally connected with the law. Appearance is a multitude of more precise determinations which belong to the this or to what is concrete, and which are not contained in the law but are determined through an other. – Second, whatever appearance contains that is different from the law determined itself as a positive, or as another content; but essentially it is a negative; it is the form and the form's movement as such, which is what belongs to appearance. The realm of laws is appearance's tranquil content; appearance is that same content, but exhibiting itself in restless flux and as the reflection into an other. It is the law as the negative concrete existence that alters itself absolutely, the movement of passing over into what is opposed, of sublating itself and going back into unity. The law does not contain this side of the restless form, or of negativity; appearance is therefore the totality as against the law, for it contains the law but something more besides, namely the moment of the self-moving form. – This defect is present in the law, third, in this way, that the law's content is as yet only a diverse content and hence one indifferent towards itself; the identity of its sides with one another is therefore as yet only an immediate and hence inner identity, or one that is not yet necessary. In the law two determinations of content are essentially connected (for example, in the law of the motion of a falling body, the magnitude of space and the magnitude of time; the spaces traversed stand in the ratio of the squares of the elapsed times); they are connected; this reference is as yet only an immediate one. It is therefore likewise as yet only a posited reference, just as in appearance the immediate has in general acquired the meaning of positedness. What would constitute the essential unity of the law's two sides is their negativity, namely that the one should contain its other in its own self; but this essential unity has not yet emerged in the law. (– Thus the concept of the space traversed in falling does not contain within it that time corresponds to it as a square. Because falling is a sensible motion, it is the reference of time and space; but, first, it is not to be found in the determination of time itself – that is, in the way time is taken according to its representation – that time refers to space, and conversely; one says that one can perfectly well represent time without space and space without time; the one, then, is added externally to the other, and this external reference is motion. Second, the more precise determination is a matter of indifference, according to which magnitudes space and time stand related to each other in motion. The law about this is cognized from experience; to that extent it is only immediate; it still requires a proof, that is, a mediation, for cognition, so that the law does not merely take place but is necessary; this proof and its objective necessity the law as such does not contain. –) The law, therefore, is only the positive essentiality of appearance and not its negative essentiality, in accordance with which the determinations of content are moments of the form, pass over as such into their other, and in their own selves are just as much not themselves but their other. In the law, then, the positedness of the one side of it is indeed the positedness of the other; but their content is indifferent towards this reference, it does not contain this positedness in its own self. The law is therefore certainly the essential form, but not yet the real form reflected into its sides as content.

B. The World of Appearance and the World-in-itself

1. The concretely existing world lifts itself calmly into a realm of laws; the null content belonging to its manifold existence subsists within something other; that subsistence of its is accordingly its dissolution. But within this other what appears also goes together with itself; hence appearance, amid its changing, is likewise an abiding, and its positedness is law. This simple identity of appearance with itself is what law is; law is on that account appearance's foundation, not appearance's ground; for law is not appearance's negative unity, but rather, being appearance's simple identity, the immediate as an abstract unity, alongside which the remaining content of appearance therefore also finds a place. The content is this one, coheres internally, or possesses its negative reflection inside its own self. It stands reflected into something other; and that other is itself one of appearance's concrete existences; appearing things find their grounds and their conditions in other appearing things.

As a matter of fact, though, law is likewise the other of appearance as such, and it is appearance's negative reflection, reflection namely into appearance's other. That content of appearance which is diverse from law's content is the concretely existing, which holds its negativity as its ground or stands reflected into its own non-being. Yet this other, itself something concretely existing, has likewise been reflected in just that way into its non-being; it is thus the same, and therein what appears is in fact reflected not into an other at all but into itself; law is precisely this reflection of positedness into itself. But qua something appearing it stands essentially reflected into its non-being, or else its identity is itself, essentially and in equal measure, its negativity and its other. Appearance's reflection-into-itself, law, is thus not merely appearance's identical foundation either; in law appearance rather possesses its own opposite, and law constitutes appearance's negative unity.

The determination of law has thereby altered in law's own self. To begin with it is only a diverse content, plus the formal reflection of positedness into itself, such that positedness on one of its sides amounts to positedness on the other. But since law is likewise the negative reflection into itself, its two sides stand related not merely as diverse ones but as ones referring negatively to each other. – Or again, law taken barely for itself: then the sides of its content are mutually indifferent; but they are equally sublated through their identity; what is posited in the one is the other's positedness; and so each side's subsisting is also its own non-subsistence. That the one is posited within the other constitutes their negative unity, and each of them is not merely its own positedness but the other's as well, or rather each is itself this negative unity. Within law as such the positive identity belonging to them is as yet only their inner unity, one requiring proof and mediation, since this negative unity has not yet been posited in them. But now that law's diverse sides are determined as being diverse within their negative unity, or as such that each harbours its other in its own self while at once, being self-subsistent, repelling this otherness of its away from itself, law's identity is henceforth a posited and real one too.

Law has therewith likewise acquired the moment it lacked, that of the negative form on its sides; the moment which up to now still belonged to appearance; concrete existence has consequently gone back wholly into itself, and has reflected itself into that absolute otherness of its own which is in and for itself. What was law before is on this account no longer just One side of a whole whose other side had been appearance as such; it is rather the whole itself. It is appearance's essential totality, so that it now embraces the moment of unessentiality as well, which up to now still fell to appearance; embracing it, however, as reflected unessentiality that is in itself, that is, as essential negativity. – Being immediate content, law is determinate in general, marked off from other laws, and of these there is an indeterminable multitude. But since essential negativity now belongs to it in its own self, it no longer harbours a determination of content merely indifferent and contingent in that way; all determinateness whatever is rather its content, standing in an essential reference which makes itself into totality. So appearance reflected into itself is henceforth a world that, being in and for itself, opens up above the world of appearance.

What the realm of laws holds is only the simple, changeless, yet diverse content of the concretely existing world. Yet now that it is that world's total reflection, it holds the moment of that world's essenceless manifoldness as well. This moment of changeableness and of change, reflected into itself and thereby essential, is absolute negativity or form in general as such, though the moments of that form possess, in the world in and for itself, the reality of concrete existence that is self-subsistent and yet reflected; conversely, this reflected self-subsistence now carries form in its own self, whereby its content is not something merely manifold but something essentially cohering with itself.

– This world in and for itself is also called the supersensible world; insofar, that is, as the concretely existing world gets determined as the sensible one, namely as the one that is there for intuition, for consciousness in its immediate comportment. – Immediacy, concrete existence, belongs to the supersensible world too, but reflected, essential concrete existence. Essence has as yet no existence; but it is, and in a deeper sense than being; the thing marks the start of reflected concrete existence; it is an immediacy not yet posited as essential or reflected; in truth, however, it is no immediate that is. Only as things of another world, a supersensible one, do things get posited: firstly as genuine concrete existences, secondly as the true over against what has being; – in them one acknowledges that a being distinct from immediate being exists, a being which is genuine concrete existence. This determination overcomes, on the one hand, the sensible representation that grants concrete existence solely to the immediate being of feeling and intuition; on the other hand it overcomes unconscious reflection too, which does indeed carry the representation of things, of forces, of what is inner and so forth, without knowing that determinations of that sort are not sensible immediacies, nor immediacies that have being, but reflected concrete existences.

2. The world in and for itself is concrete existence in its totality; outside it there is nothing else. But since in its own self it is absolute negativity, or form, its reflection-into-itself is a negative reference to itself. Opposition is contained in it, and it repels itself into itself as the essential world and into itself as the world of otherness, the world of appearance. Thus, on the very grounds that it is the totality, it also is merely as one side of that totality, and under this determination it makes up a self-subsistence diverse from appearance's world. In the essential world the world of appearance possesses its negative unity, foundering in that unity and going back into it as into its ground. The essential world is furthermore the ground that posits the world of appearance; for, holding absolute form within its essentiality, its self-identity sublates itself, turns itself into positedness, and, as this posited immediacy, it is the appearing world.

Furthermore, it is not merely the ground of the appearing world in general, but that world's determinate ground. Already qua realm of laws it is manifold content, the essential content namely of the world of appearance, and, being a ground filled with content, it is the determinate ground of the other world, though only as regards this content; for the appearing world still possessed manifold content besides what that realm did, since the negative moment still fell to it as its own. But now that the realm of laws likewise carries this moment in itself, it is the content of the world of appearance in its totality and the ground of that world's entire manifoldness. Yet it is at the same time the negative of that world, and so [it] is the world opposed to it. – In the identity of the two worlds, namely, and given that the one is determined as regards form as the essential one and the other as that same world though posited and unessential, the ground-reference has indeed been re-established; but re-established at once as the ground-reference of appearance, that is, as a reference neither of an identical content nor of a merely diverse one such as law is, but as total reference, or as negative identity and essential reference of content as opposed. – The realm of laws does not amount merely to this, that one content's positedness is another's; this identity is rather essentially, as has come out, negative unity as well; within the negative unity each of law's two sides is in its own self its other content; hence the other is not indeterminately an other in general, but is its other, or carries the first one's determination of content just as much; the two sides are opposed ones accordingly. Since the realm of laws now carries this negative moment and this opposition in itself, and thus, being the totality, repels away from itself both a world in and for itself and an appearing world, the identity of the two is the essential reference of opposition. – Ground-reference as such is opposition foundered in its contradiction; and concrete existence is the ground going together with itself. But concrete existence turns into appearance; ground stands sublated in concrete existence; ground re-establishes itself as appearance's return into itself, but re-establishes itself at once as something sublated, namely as ground-reference of opposed determinations; the identity of such determinations, though, is essentially becoming and passing over, no longer ground-reference as such.

The world in and for itself is thus itself a world internally differentiated into the totality of manifold content; it is identical with the appearing or posited world, and to that extent its ground, yet its identical connection stands at the same time determined as opposition, since the form of the world of appearance consists in reflection into that world's otherness, so that within the world in and for itself the appearing world has genuinely gone back into its own self in the very measure in which this latter is its opposite. So the reference is determined precisely thus, that the world in and for itself is the inverted world of the appearing one.

C. Dissolution of Appearance

The world in and for itself constitutes the determinate ground of the appearing world, and constitutes it only insofar as it possesses in its own self the negative moment, and with it the totality of content-determinations and of the alterations they undergo, a totality answering to the appearing world while at the same time making up the side thoroughly opposed to it. The mutual bearing of the two worlds is accordingly such that what counts as positive in the appearing world counts as negative in the world in and for itself, while what is negative in the one is, conversely, positive in the other. In the appearing world the north pole is in and for itself the south pole, and vice versa; electricity that is positive is in itself negative, and so forth. Whatever counts in appearing existence as evil, as misfortune and so forth, is in and for itself something good and a happiness¹⁵.

As a matter of fact their difference has vanished precisely within this opposition of the two worlds, and whatever was meant to be the world in and for itself is itself an appearing world, while conversely the appearing world is in its own self the essential one. – At first the appearing world stands determined as the reflection into otherness, so that whatever determinations and concrete existences belong to it have ground and subsistence in something other; but as this other is itself likewise something reflected into an other, therein they refer merely to an other engaged in sublating itself, and thus to themselves; herewith the appearing world is in its own self a self-equal law. – The world in and for itself, conversely, is at first the content identical with itself, taken out of otherness and change; but this content, being the appearing world's complete reflection into its own self, or because the diversity belonging to it is difference reflected into itself and absolute, harbours within it the negative moment and the reference to itself as to otherness; thereby it turns into content opposed to itself, content inverting itself, content void of essence. This content of the world in and for itself has furthermore therewith also received the form of immediate concrete existence. For at first that world is ground of the appearing one; but as it possesses the opposition in its own self, it is in equal measure sublated ground and immediate concrete existence.

Each of the two, the appearing world and the essential world, is herewith in its own self the totality of the reflection that is identical with itself and of reflection-into-other, or of being-in-and-for-itself as well as of appearing. Each of them is a self-subsistent whole of concrete existence; the one was meant to be reflected concrete existence only, the other immediate concrete existence only; yet each continues itself within its other, and is on that score in its own self the identity of the two moments. What lies at hand, accordingly, is this totality, one repelling from itself two totalities, the one being the reflected totality and the other the immediate one. Both are in the first instance self-subsistent ones, but they are such only qua totalities, and they are such to this extent, that each essentially carries within it the moment belonging to the other. The differentiated self-subsistence of each, of the one determined as immediate and of the one determined as reflected, is on that score now posited so as to be nothing but essential reference to the other, and so as to have its self-subsistence within this unity of the two.

The beginning was made from the law of appearance; law is the identity of one diverse content with an other content, so fashioned that the one's positedness is the other's. Within law this difference is still at hand, namely that the identity of its sides is as yet an inner one only, and that these sides do not yet possess it in their own selves; herewith, for one part, that identity is not realized; law's content stands not as identical but as an indifferent, diverse content; – for another part, it is herewith determined only in itself so that the one's positedness is the other's; this is not yet at hand within law. By now, however, law stands realized; its inner identity is at the same time an existent one, and conversely law's content is raised into ideality; for in its own self that content is a sublated one, reflected into itself, since each side carries its other within it and is thereby genuinely identical with that other and with its own self.

So law is essential relation. At first the truth of the unessential world is a world in and for itself other to it; but that world is the totality, in that it is both itself and the first world; so the two are immediate concrete existences and hence reflections into their otherness, and by that same token genuinely reflected into themselves. World expresses, generally, the formless totality of manifoldness; this world, essential as much as appearing, has foundered, inasmuch as manifoldness has ceased to be a merely diverse one; so it is still totality, or universe, yet as essential relation. Within appearance two totalities of content have come to be; at first they stand determined over against each other as indifferent self-subsistent ones, and each does have form in its own self, though not over against the other; form, however, has shown itself to be their reference as well, and the essential relation is the consummation of their unity of form.

Chapter 3. The Essential Relation

The truth of appearance is the essential relation. Its content possesses immediate self-subsistence, namely the immediacy that is together with the reflected immediacy, or the reflection identical with itself. At the same time, within this self-subsistence the content is a relative one, existing simply and solely as reflection into what is other to it, or as unity of its reference with that other. Within this unity the self-subsistent content is a posited one, a sublated one; but this very unity is what makes up its essentiality and its self-subsistence; the reflection into other here is reflection into its own self. Sides belong to the relation because it is reflection into other; thus it carries within it the difference of its own self; and the sides of it are self-subsistent subsistence, seeing that in their mutually indifferent diversity they stand broken within themselves, so that whatever subsistence each has holds its meaning, in equal measure, only in the reference to the other, or in their negative unity.

The essential relation is on that score admittedly not yet the genuine third term to essence and to concrete existence; but the determinate uniting of the two is already harboured in it. Essence stands realized within it in such fashion that self-subsistent concretely existing ones serve it for its subsistence; and these have gone back out of their indifference into their essential unity, so that nothing but this unity serves them for their subsistence. The determinations of reflection, the positive one and the negative one, are likewise reflected into themselves only insofar as they stand reflected into what is opposed to them; yet no determination belongs to them beyond this negative unity of theirs; the essential relation, by contrast, has for its sides such terms as stand posited as self-subsistent totalities. The opposition here is the same one as that of positive and negative; but at the same time it is opposition as an inverted world. A side of the essential relation is a totality, one that, however, essentially has something opposed to it, a beyond of itself; it is appearance merely; its concrete existence is not, rather, its own, but that of its other. It is on that score something broken within its own self; but this sublatedness of its consists in its being the unity of its own self and of its other, hence a whole, and precisely for that reason it possesses self-subsistent concrete existence and is essential reflection into its own self.

Such is the concept of relation. To begin with, however, the identity it harbours is not yet complete; the totality which each relative term is in its own self is as yet merely something inner; a side of the relation is at first posited within one of the determinations of the negative unity; what makes up the form of the relation is the self-subsistence proper to each of the two sides. Its identity is on that score merely a reference, and their self-subsistence falls outside that reference, namely into the sides; there is not yet at hand the reflected unity of that identity together with the self-subsistent concrete existences, not yet the substance. – The concept of relation has thus indeed emerged as unity of reflected and of immediate self-subsistence. But this concept is at first still immediate itself, and hence its moments are immediate towards each other, their unity being their essential reference, which becomes the genuine unity answering to the concept only insofar as it realizes itself, that is, insofar as through its own movement it has posited itself as that unity.

The essential relation is on that score immediately the relation of whole and parts; – the reference of reflected and of immediate self-subsistence, such that both at once are only as mutually conditioning and presupposing each other.

Within this relation not one of the sides is as yet posited as a moment of the other, and hence their identity is itself a side; or else it is not their negative unity. It therefore passes over, secondly, into this, that the one is a moment of the other and is within the other as within its ground, as within what is genuinely self-subsistent of the two; – relation of force and its expression.

Thirdly, the inequality of this reference which is still at hand sublates itself, and the last relation is that of inner and outer. – Within this difference, which has become wholly formal, the relation itself founders, and substance, or the actual, comes forth as the absolute unity of immediate and of reflected concrete existence.

A. The Relation of Whole and Parts

[1.] What the essential relation contains is, first, the self-subsistence of concrete existence reflected into itself; so taken it is the simple form, and its determinations, while they too are concrete existences, are at the same time posited ones, moments kept within the unity. Reflected thus into itself, that self-subsistence is at once reflection into what stands opposed to it, namely into immediate self-subsistence; and the subsistence it has is essentially, no less than it is a self-subsistence of its own, just this identity with its opposite. – Precisely thereby there is also immediately posited, second, the further side: immediate self-subsistence, which, under the determination of the other, is a manifoldness of many kinds within itself, yet so that this manifoldness bears upon it essentially also the reference belonging to the other side, the unity of reflected self-subsistence. The one side, the whole, is that self-subsistence which the world in and for itself constituted; the parts, the other side, are the immediate concrete existence which the appearing world was. Within the relation of whole and parts both sides are self-subsistences of this kind, but so that each lets the other shine inside it, and each equally is only as this identity of the two. Since for now the essential relation is only the first, the immediate one, negative unity and positive self-subsistence are tied together by the also; both sides, posited though they are as moments, are just as much concretely existing self-subsistences. – That the two are posited as moments is accordingly parcelled out thus: first the whole, self-subsistence as reflected, is the concretely existing one, and within it the other, the immediate one, has the standing of a moment; – here it is the whole that constitutes the unity of the two sides, the foundation, and immediate concrete existence stands there as positedness. – Reversed, on the further side, that of the parts, the immediate concrete existence, manifold within, is the self-subsistent foundation, whereas the reflected unity, the whole, is nothing but external reference.

2. Accordingly this relation harbours the self-subsistence of its sides and no less their sublatedness, and the two of them outright in a single reference. Self-subsistent is the whole, and the parts are merely moments of this unity; yet no less are the parts themselves the self-subsistent ones, with their reflected unity for a mere moment; and each of them, in its very self-subsistence, is outright the relative of an other. Hence this relation is contradiction immediate in its own self, and it sublates itself.

Looked at more closely, the whole is the reflected unity possessing self-subsistent subsistence for itself; but this subsistence of its own has no less been repelled from it; being the negative unity, the whole is negative reference to its own self; so it has divested itself; its subsistence it has in what stands opposed to it, in the manifold immediacy, the parts. The whole therefore consists of the parts; so much so that without them it is nothing. It is thus the entire relation and the self-subsistent totality; but upon that very same ground it is only a relative, since what constitutes it a totality is rather its other, the parts; and its subsistence lies not in it but in that other of it.

The parts, likewise, are the entire relation. Immediate self-subsistence is what they are, over against the reflected kind, and they subsist not in the whole but for themselves. They have this whole, further, upon them as their moment; it constitutes their reference; where there is no whole there are no parts. But since they are the self-subsistent ones, that reference is a merely external moment, one to which they remain in and for themselves indifferent. At the same time, however, the parts, being manifold concrete existence, collapse within themselves, for such existence is being devoid of reflection; self-subsistence accrues to them only within the reflected unity, which is at once this unity and the concretely existing manifoldness; that is, self-subsistence is theirs only in the whole, and this is at the same time the self-subsistence that is other to the parts.

Whole and parts condition one another reciprocally, then; but the relation under consideration here stands at the same time higher than the reference of the conditioned and the condition to one another as that was determined above. Here that reference is realized: it is posited, namely, that the condition is the essential self-subsistence of the conditioned precisely in being presupposed by the latter. Taken as such, the condition is nothing but the immediate, and only in itself presupposed. The whole, though certainly the condition of the parts, immediately contains at the same time this as well, that it too only is so far as it has the parts for presupposition. With both sides of the relation posited in this way as reciprocally conditioning, each is an immediate self-subsistence in its own self, but its self-subsistence is no less mediated, or posited, by the other. By virtue of this reciprocity the whole relation is the return of conditioning into its own self, the non-relative, the unconditioned.

Now since neither side of the relation has its self-subsistence in its own self but each in the other, only one identity of the two is at hand, in which both are moments merely; but since each is self-subsistent in its own self, they are two self-subsistent concrete existences that stand indifferent to one another.

Taken in the first respect, that of these sides' essential identity, the whole is equal to the parts and the parts to the whole. In the whole there is nothing absent from the parts, and in the parts nothing absent from the whole. No abstract unity is the whole; it is unity as that of a diverse manifoldness; but this unity, as that wherein the manifold refers to one another, is the determinateness of the manifold whereby the latter is part. An inseparable identity, then, is what the relation has, and one self-subsistence only.

But further, the whole is equal to the parts, though not to them qua parts; for the whole is unity as reflected, whereas the parts constitute the determinate moment, the otherness, of that unity, and they are the diverse manifold. Equal the whole is, not to them as this self-subsistent diversity, but to them together. This together of theirs, however, is nothing else than their unity, the whole as such. Within the parts, therefore, the whole is equal to nothing but itself, and the equality of whole with parts voices only the tautology that the whole as whole is equal to the whole, and not to the parts.

The parts, inversely, are equal to the whole; but since otherness is the moment which they themselves are, their equality is not with it as the unity, but runs thus, that one among its manifold determinations devolves upon the part, or that they are equal to it qua something manifold; they are equal to it, that is, as a divided whole, which means as the parts. So here too the very same tautology is at hand: the parts as parts stand equal not to the whole as such, but within it to themselves, to the parts.

Whole and parts fall in this manner indifferently asunder; each of these sides refers to itself alone. Yet held asunder so, they wreck themselves. That whole which is indifferent towards the parts is the abstract identity, undifferentiated within; and such identity is a whole only as differentiated within its own self, differentiated within, moreover, in such a manner that these manifold determinations stand reflected into themselves and possess immediate self-subsistence. And identity of reflection, through its own movement, has already displayed this reflection into its other as its truth. – Just so the parts, indifferent as they are towards the unity of the whole, are the unrelated manifold merely, the other within itself, which as such is the other of its own self and only what sublates itself. – This reference-to-self of either side is its self-subsistence; but this self-subsistence, which each has for itself, is rather the negation of its own self. Neither, therefore, has its self-subsistence in its own self, but in the other; that other — the one constituting the subsistence — counts as its presupposed immediate, the thing that ought to be a first and its beginning; but this first belonging to each is itself only such a one as is not first, but has its beginning in the other.

The relation's truth lies accordingly in the mediation; its essence is that negative unity wherein reflected immediacy and the immediacy that is are alike sublated. Contradiction is what the relation is, contradiction going back into its ground, into the unity which, as returning, is the reflected unity; but since this unity has no less posited itself as sublated, it refers negatively to its own self, sublates itself, and turns itself into the immediacy that is. This negative reference of it, though, in that it counts as a first, an immediate one, has its mediation solely through its other, and is no less a posited. That other, the immediacy that is, equally is only as sublated; a first is its self-subsistence, but a first only in order to vanish, and the existence it has is posited and mediated.

So determined, the relation is that of whole and parts no longer; the immediacy possessed by its sides has gone over into positedness and mediation; each is posited, so far as it is immediate, as sublating itself and passing over into the other, and, so far as it is itself negative reference, as being at the same time conditioned by the other as by its positive; just as its immediate passing over is no less something mediated, a sublating, namely, posited by the other. – With that, the relation of whole and parts has gone over into the relation of force and its expression.

Remark

Above (Division I, p. 113 ff.) the antinomy of the infinite divisibility of matter came under consideration, in connection with the concept of quantity. Quantity is the unity of continuity and discreteness; within the self-subsistent one it harbours that one's having flowed together with others, and within this identity with itself, prolonged without interruption, it equally harbours the negation of that identity. Once the immediate reference of these moments of quantity gets voiced in the shape of the essential relation of whole and parts — quantity's one counting as part, its continuity as the whole compounded out of parts — the antinomy consists in that contradiction which showed up at the relation of whole and parts and was there dissolved. – For whole and parts are quite as essentially referred to one another, making up one identity only, as they are indifferent towards one another and possess self-subsistent subsistence. The relation, therefore, is antinomy in just this sense: the one moment, by liberating itself from the other, immediately brings that other along.

Let what concretely exists be determined as whole, then, and it has parts, and the parts make up its subsistence; the unity of the whole is a posited reference merely, an external putting together which is no affair of the self-subsistently existing thing. Now so far as the latter is part, it is not whole, not something put together, and so simple. But since reference to a whole is external to it, that reference is no affair of it; and so what is self-subsistent is not in itself part either, for part it is only through such reference. Yet since it is now not part, it is whole, for the only relation at hand is this one of whole and of parts, and the self-subsistent thing is one of the two. But being whole, it is once more something put together; once more it consists of parts, and so on into infinity. – This infinity amounts to nothing but the perennial alternation of the relation's two determinations, in each of which the other immediately springs up, so that the positedness of either is the vanishing of that same one. Let matter be determined as whole, then, and it consists of parts, and upon these the whole sinks to an unessential reference and vanishes. Yet the part, taken for itself in that manner, is likewise not part, but the whole. – Pressed quite closely together, the antinomy of this inference properly runs: because the whole is not the self-subsistent thing, the part is the self-subsistent thing; but because self-subsistence belongs to it only without the whole, self-subsistent it is not qua part, but rather as whole. The infinity of the resulting progress is the incapacity to hold together the two thoughts which this mediation carries, namely that either determination, precisely through its self-subsistence and its severance from the other, passes over into non-self-subsistence and into that other.

B. The Relation of Force and Its Expression

Force is that negative unity wherein the contradiction of whole and parts has found its dissolution, the truth of that first relation. Whole and parts is the thoughtless relation upon which representation lights first of all; or, objectively taken, it is the dead, mechanical aggregate, which does indeed carry form-determinations by which the manifoldness of its self-subsistent matter gets referred together into a unity, but a unity external to that matter. – The relation of force, by contrast, is the higher return into self, in which the whole's unity, the very thing that constituted the reference of self-subsistent otherness, ceases to be something external and indifferent to this manifoldness.

As the essential relation has by now determined itself, the immediate and the reflected self-subsistence — sides or extremes that in the foregoing relation subsisted for themselves — stand posited within it as sublated, that is, as moments. Contained in this is, first, that the reflected unity together with its immediate existence, so far as either is a first and an immediate, sublate themselves in their own selves and pass over into their other; the former, force, goes over into its expression, and the external is a vanishing thing which retreats into force as into its ground, and is only in being carried and posited by force. Second, this going-over is not a mere becoming and vanishing; it is negative reference to self, or what alters its determination is therein at the same time reflected into itself and maintains itself; the movement of force is not so much a going-over as force's setting itself across, and throughout this alteration posited by force itself force stays what it is. – Third, this reflected unity, referring itself to itself, is itself sublated too and a moment; mediated through its other, it has that other for its condition; and its negative reference to itself, which is a first and starts the movement of its going-over out of itself, has no less a presupposition that solicits it, and an other whence its starting is taken.

a. The Conditionedness of Force

Considered in the closer determinations belonging to it, force has upon it, first, the moment of the immediacy that is; force itself, over against this, stands determined as the negative unity. But this unity, under the determination of immediate being, is a concretely existing something. Such a something, being the negative unity in immediate shape, shows itself as the first; force, on the contrary, being the reflected side, shows itself as the positedness, and so far as belonging to the concretely existing thing or to some matter. Not that force would be the form of this thing and the thing be determined through force; the thing, rather, as something immediate, stays indifferent towards it. – On this determination no ground lies in the thing for its having a force; force, on the other side, being the side of positedness, has the thing essentially for its presupposition. So when the question is raised how thing or matter comes to have a force, force shows up as conjoined with it externally and as stamped upon the thing by some alien power.

In this immediate subsisting, force is a quiescent determinateness of the thing at large: not something expressing itself, but immediately something external. In this way force gets labelled a matter as well, and the magnetic, the electrical force, and so forth, is replaced. What is assumed in its place is a magnetic, an electrical matter, and so forth. Or, in place of the famous attractive force, a fine ether is assumed, said to hold everything together. – These are the matters into which the inert, forceless negative unity of the thing dissolves, and which came under consideration above.

Force, however, harbours immediate concrete existence as a moment, as something which is indeed condition but which goes over and sublates itself; not, therefore, as a concretely existing thing. Nor, further, is it negation in the guise of determinateness; it is negative unity reflecting itself into itself. The thing on which force was to reside thereby loses all further significance here; force is rather itself the positing of the externality that shows up as concrete existence. So neither is it a determinate matter and no more; self-subsistence of that kind long ago went over into positedness and into appearance.

Second, force is the unity of reflected and of immediate subsisting, or of the unity of form and external self-subsistence. It is the two in one; it is the touching of such terms of which the one is so far as the other is not; the positive reflection identical with itself, and the negated reflection. Thus force is the contradiction repelling itself from its own self; it is active; or it is the negative unity referring itself to itself, wherein the reflected immediacy, the essential being-within-itself, is posited as being only a sublated thing, a moment, and hence, so far as force marks itself off from immediate concrete existence, as going over into the latter. Force, then, taken as the determination of the whole's reflected unity, stands posited as coming to be, out of its own self, the concretely existing external manifoldness.

But third, force is as yet only an activity that is in-itself and immediate; it is the reflected unity, and just as essentially the negation of that unity; since it is diverse from this negation and yet is only as the identity of its own self with its negation, it stands essentially referred to the negation as to an immediacy external to it, and holds that immediacy for its presupposition and its condition.

Now this presupposition is no thing found standing over against force; indifferent self-subsistence of that sort is sublated in force; as force's condition it is a self-subsistent other to force. But since it is no thing, and since self-subsistent immediacy has here determined itself at the same time as negative unity referring itself to itself, it is itself force. – Force's activity is conditioned by force's own self as by what is other to it, by a force.

Force is in this way a relation in which either side is the same as the other. Forces are what stand in the relation, and they refer to one another essentially at that. – They are, further, at the outset merely diverse; the unity of their relation is as yet only the inner unity that is in itself. Being conditioned by another force is thus in itself force's own doing; or force is so far only a presupposing doing, one that refers to itself negatively and no more; this other force still lies beyond force's positing activity, beyond, that is, the reflection which in its determining returns into itself immediately.

b. The Solicitation of Force

Force is conditioned for this reason, that the moment of immediate concrete existence contained in it is only a posited one – but, being at once an immediate one, is a presupposed one, wherein force negates its own self. The externality on hand for force is accordingly its own presupposing activity itself, which at the outset stands posited as another force.

This presupposing is, further, mutual. Either of the two forces harbours the unity reflected into itself as sublated, and is on that account presupposing; it posits its own self as something external; that moment of externality is its own one; but because it is no less unity reflected into itself, it at the same time posits this externality of its not within its own self, but as another force.

Yet the external as such is what sublates its own self; and further, the activity that reflects itself into itself stands essentially referred to that external as to what is other to it, but no less as to something in itself null and identical with it. Seeing that the presupposing activity is quite as much reflection into self, it is the sublating of that negation of its, and posits the negation as its own self, or as its own external. Thus force in conditioning is mutually an impulse for the other force, an impulse against which the latter is active. Its bearing is not the passivity of getting determined, as though something else came into it thereby; the impulse only solicits it. In its own self it is the negativity of itself; its repelling of itself from itself is its own positing. What it does, then, consists in sublating this, that the impulse is something external; it turns the impulse into a bare impulse and posits it as its own repelling of its own self from itself, as its own expression.

Force in expressing itself is thus the very same as what at the outset was only presupposing activity, that is, a making of itself external; but force in expressing itself is at once the activity that negates externality and posits it as belonging to itself. Now so far as this consideration takes its start from force as being the negative unity of its own self and thereby presupposing reflection, it comes to the same thing as taking one's start, within the expression of force, from the soliciting impulse. Force is thus determined, in its concept, at first as self-sublating identity, and in its reality, the one of the two forces as soliciting, the other as the one solicited. But at large the concept of force is the identity of positing and of presupposing reflection, or of reflected and of immediate unity, and each of these determinations is outright a moment only, within unity, and hence is as mediated through the other. But equally, on the two forces standing in mutual reference there is no determination present of which would be the soliciting one and which the one being solicited; or rather, both form-determinations accrue to each alike. Yet this identity is not merely an external one of comparison; it is an essential unity of the two.

The one force, namely, is at the outset determined as soliciting, the other as being solicited; in this manner the form-determinations show up as immediate differences of the two forces, differences on hand in themselves. But they are essentially mediated. The one force gets solicited; this impulse is a determination posited into it from without. Force, however, is itself what presupposes; essentially it is a reflecting of itself into itself and a sublating of this, that the impulse should be something external. That it gets solicited is therefore its own doing; or it is determined through its own self that the other force is an other at all and is the soliciting one. The soliciting force refers negatively to its other, in that it sublates the other's externality; so far it is positing; but it is this only through the presupposition of having an other over against it; which is to say, soliciting it is itself only so far as it has an externality upon it, and hence only so far as it gets solicited. Or it is soliciting only so far as it gets solicited into being soliciting. Thus conversely the first gets solicited only so far as it itself solicits the other into soliciting it, the first, that is. Each of the two receives the impulse from the other, then; but the impulse which it gives as active consists precisely in this, that it receives an impulse from the other; and the impulse received by it is solicited by its own self. Both, the impulse given and the impulse received, or the active expression and the passive externality, are accordingly not something immediate but mediated; and indeed each of the two forces is thereby itself the determinateness which the other has towards it, is mediated through the other, and this mediating other is once again its own determining positing.

So this, that an impulse befalls force through another force, that force so far bears itself passively but then again crosses over from this passivity into activity – this is force's going back into its own self. It expresses itself. The expression is reaction in the sense of positing externality as force's own moment, and thereby sublating this, that force should have been solicited by another force. Both are one thing, therefore: the expression of force, whereby through its negative activity upon its own self it gives itself an existence-for-other, and the infinite return, within this externality, upon its own self, such that therein it refers to itself alone. The presupposing reflection, to which conditionedness and the impulse belong, is on that account immediately the reflection returning into itself as well, and the activity is essentially a reacting, against itself. To posit the impulse, or the external, is itself to sublate it, and inversely, to sublate the impulse is to posit externality.

c. The Infinity of Force

Finite force is, so far as its moments still carry the form of immediacy; presupposing reflection and self-referring reflection stand distinguished in it under this determination; the one shows up as an external force subsisting for itself, the other, in referring to that one, as passive. So far as form goes, then, force is conditioned, and so far as content goes it is limited as well; for determinateness on the side of form carries a limitation of content along with it. But what force's activity consists in is expressing itself; that is, as has come out, in sublating externality and determining it as that wherein force stands identical with itself. What force in truth expresses, accordingly, is this: that its reference to another is its reference to its own self, that its passivity subsists within its activity itself. The impulse whereby it gets solicited into activity is a soliciting of its own; the externality arriving upon it is nothing immediate, but something it has itself mediated, just as its own essential identity with itself is not immediate either, but mediated through its negation; or force expresses this, that its externality is identical with its inwardness.

C. Relation of Outer and Inner

1. Whole and parts stand in the relation that is immediate; hence within it each of the two immediacies, the reflected one and the one that is, possesses a self-subsistence of its own; but because they stand in the essential relation, that self-subsistence of theirs amounts to nothing but their negative unity. This is what has now come to be posited in force's expression: the reflected unity is essentially a becoming-other, a carrying over of itself into externality; but with equal immediacy externality is withdrawn back into that unity; whatever difference self-subsistent forces have sublates itself; and force's expression is nothing but the reflected unity mediating itself with its own self. Nothing is at hand but a difference that is empty and transparent, namely shine; and yet shine of this kind is the very mediating in which self-subsistent subsistence consists. These are not merely opposed determinations that sublate themselves in their own selves, nor is their movement merely a crossing over; for in part the immediacy taken as the starting point, out of which the passage into otherness was made, has no standing save as a posited one, and in part every one of the determinations is on that account already, in its immediacy, at one with its other, so that the crossing over is, quite as much and without qualification, a return into self that posits itself.

As the form of reflected immediacy, that is, of essence, the inner receives its determination over against the outer, which has the form of being; and yet the two make up but a single identity. – First, this identity is what the two are as one solid unity, a foundation replete with content, or the absolute fact, on which the pair of determinations hang as indifferent, external moments. So considered, it is content, and it is that totality which the inner is — an inner becoming external quite as much, yet without thereby being anything that has come to be or has crossed over, for it remains equal to its own self. Taken with this determination, the outer does not merely stand equal to the inner in point of content; the two are rather one fact and no more. – Being, however, simple identity with itself, this fact stands diverse from its form-determinations, or rather these lie outside it; so considered, it is an inner in its own right, diverse from the externality belonging to it. That externality, though, has its whole content in this, that inner and outer, the two determinations themselves, are what make the fact up. And the fact, for its part, is no more than the unity of the two. So in point of content the two sides come to the same thing once again. Within the fact, however, they are present as an identity permeating itself, a foundation replete with content. Out in externality, on the other hand, as forms which the fact has, they stand indifferent to that identity, and so the pair of them stand indifferent to one another.

2. So taken, they are the diverse determinations of form, ones whose identical foundation lies not in their own selves but in an other; they are determinations of reflection existing for themselves — the inner as reflection-into-self in its form, as essentiality; the outer as the immediacy reflected into an other in its form, as unessentiality. Only, what the nature of the relation has shown is that these determinations make up one identity and nothing else whatever. In expressing itself, force consists precisely in this, that determining as presupposing and determining as returning into itself are one and the same. Where inner and outer have accordingly been taken as determinations of form, they are, in the first place, nothing but the simple form as such, and, second, since therein they are at the same time determined as opposites, what unifies them is a purely abstract mediation, one in which each is immediately its other and is that other for the very reason that it is the one. The inner, then, is immediately only the outer, and it carries the determinateness of externality just because it is the inner; and the other way round, an outer is only an inner just because it is only an outer. – Since this unity of form holds its two determinations within itself as opposites, the identity it has is just this crossing over, and within that only the other of the pair, not any identity of theirs that would be content-laden. Or, put otherwise, clinging to form in this way is quite generally the side of determinateness. Whatever gets posited in keeping with that side is not the whole in its real totality, but only the totality, the fact itself, standing within that determinateness of form; and since form is the unqualified binding together of the two opposed determinations into one, then, taking either of them first – and which one is taken makes no difference – one must say of the foundation, or fact, that on that very account it lies just as essentially within the other determinateness, and again only within the other, in the same way as it was said at the outset to lie only within the first. –

A something, accordingly, that is only as yet an inner is on that very account only an outer. Or the reverse: a something that is only an outer is on that very account only an inner. Or again, with the inner determined as essence and the outer as being: a fact that is only in its essence is on that very account nothing but an immediate being, while a fact which merely is is on that very account still only in its essence. – Outer and inner are determinateness posited in such fashion that neither of the two determinations merely presupposes the other and crosses over into it as into its truth; each, rather, so far as it is that truth of the other, stays there posited as determinateness and points beyond to the totality of them both. – The inner is thus what completes essence so far as form goes. For essence, in being determined as inner, carries in itself the implication that it is defective and only is as a reference to its other, the outer; but the outer, in like manner, is not merely being, nor even concrete existence, but is as something referring itself to essence, to the inner. Yet what is at hand is not merely the reference of the two to one another, but the determinate reference belonging to absolute form, whereby each is immediately its own opposite, along with the reference they have in common to their third, or rather to their unity. Their mediation, though, is still without that identical foundation which would hold the two of them; their reference is on that account the immediate turning round of the one into the other; and the negative unity that ties them together is a simple point empty of content.

Remark

Essence in its movement is, in general terms, the becoming into the concept. What comes to the fore in the relation of inner and outer is the essential moment of that becoming, namely that its determinations are posited so as to stand in the negative unity in such fashion that each immediately is not only as its own other but also as the whole in its totality. This totality, though, is in the concept as such the universal; – a foundation which the relation of inner and outer does not yet have at hand. – Absent from the negative identity of inner and outer, which is the immediate inversion of one of these determinations into the other, is likewise the foundation that was called the fact a moment ago. –

The unmediated identity of form, as it is posited here while still without the content-laden movement of the fact itself, is very much worth noting. It turns up in the fact as the fact stands at its beginning. So pure being is immediately the nothing. Everything real whatever is, at its beginning, an identity merely immediate in this way; for at its beginning it has not yet set its moments in opposition and developed them, having on the one side not yet recollected itself out of externality, and on the other not yet externalized itself out of inwardness and brought itself forth by its own activity; hence it is only the inner as determinateness over against the outer, and only the outer as determinateness over against the inner. So it is, in part, only an immediate being; and in part, so far as it is quite as much the negativity which is to become the activity of development, it is as such essentially, to begin with, only an inner. – Throughout all development whatever, natural, scientific and spiritual, this shows itself, and it is essential to recognize that a first, where a something is as yet only inwardly or in its concept, is on that very account nothing but the immediate, passive existence of that something. So – to take at once the nearest example – the essential relation under consideration here, before it has moved through mediation, the relation of force, and thereby realized itself, is the relation only in itself, its concept, or as yet only inwardly. But precisely on that account it is only the external, immediate relation; that of the whole with its parts, where the sides possess a subsistence indifferent towards each other. Their identity is not yet in their own selves; it is as yet only inward, and on that account they fall apart, their subsistence being an immediate and external one. – Thus the sphere of being in general is as yet nothing but what is still, without qualification, inner, and on that account it is the sphere of the immediacy that is, of externality. – Essence too is as yet only the inner; that is why it also gets taken for a wholly external communality lacking all system; one says Schulwesen, Zeitungswesen, meaning by these a something held in common that is made by taking existing objects together from outside, so far as they are without any essential connection, without organization. – Or, with concrete objects: the germ of the plant, the child, is as yet only an inner plant, an inward human being. But just for that reason the plant, or the human being, as germ is something immediate, an outer, one that has not yet given itself the negative reference to its own self, a passive thing surrendered to otherness. – So too God in his immediate concept is not spirit; for spirit is not the immediate, the counterpart set against mediation, but is rather the essence that eternally posits its immediacy and eternally comes back out of it into itself. Immediately taken, then, God is only nature. Or nature is only God as inner, God not actual as spirit and thus not the genuine God. – Or God, in thinking taken as first thinking, is only pure being, or else essence, the abstract absolute; not, however, God as absolute spirit, which alone is the genuine nature of God.

3. Of the identities of inner and outer under consideration, the first is the foundation standing indifferent towards the difference of these determinations, as towards a form external to it, or it as content. The second identity is the difference of the two held in unmediated identity, the immediate inversion of each into the one opposed to it; – or it as pure form. These two identities, however, are only the sides of one totality; or that totality is itself only the inversion of the one into the other. Totality as foundation and content is this immediacy reflected into itself solely by way of the presupposing reflection of form, which sublates the difference that form has and posits itself over against that difference as indifferent identity, as reflected unity. Or content is form itself, so far as form determines itself as diversity and makes itself into one of its own sides, as externality, but into the other as immediacy reflected into itself, or into the inner.

Conversely, then, inner and outer, the differences of form, are each of them posited in its own self as the totality of itself and of its other; the inner, being simple identity reflected into itself, is the immediate and hence being and externality quite as much as essence; and the outer, being the manifold, determinate being, is merely outer, that is, posited as unessential and as gone back into its ground, and thus as inner. This crossing over of the two into one another is their immediate identity, as foundation; but it is also their mediated identity; each, namely, is by way of its other precisely what it is in itself, the relation in its totality. Or the other way about: because either side has totality in it, its determinateness is mediated with the other determinateness; totality thus mediates itself with its own self through form, or determinateness, and determinateness mediates itself with itself through its simple identity.

Whatever a something is, it is that wholly in its externality; externality is its totality, and quite as much its unity reflected into itself. Its appearance is reflection not merely into an other but into itself, and its externality is on that account the expression of what it is in itself; and since in this way its content and its form are identical without qualification, it is nothing in and for itself but this, to express itself. It is its essence's own revealing, so that this essence consists precisely and only in being what reveals itself.

With appearance thus identical with the inner, or with essence, the essential relation has determined itself into actuality.

Third Section. Actuality

Actuality is essence and concrete existence in their unity; in it the shapeless essence and the unsteady appearance; – or the subsistence that lacks determination and the manifoldness that lacks subsistence, have their truth. Concrete existence is indeed the immediacy that has come forth out of ground, but it has not yet posited form in itself; in determining and shaping itself it is appearance; and as this subsistence, determined merely as reflection-into-an-other, works its way on into reflection-into-self, it turns into two worlds, two totalities of content, one of them carrying the determination of being reflected into itself, the other that of being reflected into an other. The essential relation, however, exhibits their form-reference, and the completion of that reference is the relation of inner and outer: that the content of the two is but one identical foundation and quite as much but one identity of form. – Since this identity has now emerged with respect to form as well, the form-determination of their diversity is sublated, and it stands posited that they are one absolute totality.

This unity of the inner with the outer is absolute actuality. Such actuality, though, is at first the absolute as such; – insofar as it stands posited as a unity wherein form has sublated itself and turned itself into the empty or external difference of an outer and an inner. Towards this absolute, reflection bears itself as something external, one that contemplates the absolute rather than being the absolute's own movement. Yet since reflection essentially is that movement, it is, as the absolute's own negative return into itself,

Secondly, actuality proper. Actuality, possibility and necessity make up the formal moments of the absolute, or the reflection belonging to it.

Thirdly, the absolute and its reflection in their unity make up the absolute relation, or rather the absolute in relating to its own self; substance.

Chapter 1. The Absolute

The absolute's simple, solid identity is indeterminate, or rather within it every determinateness of essence and of concrete existence, indeed of being at large as well as of reflection, has dissolved. To that extent the determining of what the absolute is turns out negative, and the absolute itself shows up as nothing but the negating of every predicate, as the empty. Yet since it has quite as much to be pronounced the position of every predicate, it shows up as the most formal of contradictions. Where that negating and this positing are the business of external reflection, what we have is a formal, unsystematic dialectic which with little trouble picks up the sundry determinations here and there, and with just as little trouble displays on the one side their finitude and mere relativity, while on the other, the absolute hovering before it as the totality, it declares of the absolute that all determinations dwell within it – without being able to raise these positions and those negations into a genuine unity. – What ought to be exhibited, however, is what the absolute is; yet this exhibiting can be neither a determining nor an external reflection, whereby determinations of the absolute would arise; it is rather the exposition, and indeed the absolute's own exposition, a mere showing of what it is.

A. The Exposition of the Absolute

The absolute is neither merely being nor yet essence. The first of these is immediacy unreflected, the second immediacy reflected; each, moreover, is totality in its own self, though a determinate one. At essence, being steps forth as concrete existence; and the reference between being and essence has developed as far as the relation of the inner to the outer. Essence is what the inner is, though as the totality carrying essentially the determination of standing referred to being and of immediately being being. The outer, for its part, is being, though with the essential determination that, standing referred to reflection, it is immediately and just as much an identity with essence devoid of relation. The absolute itself is the absolute unity of the two; it is what at bottom makes up the ground of the essential relation, a relation which as relation has merely not yet gone back into this identity of its own and whose ground is not yet posited.

What emerges from this is that the absolute has for its determination to be the absolute form, though at the same time not as that identity whose moments are merely simple determinatenesses; – rather as the identity each of whose moments is in its own self the totality and so, indifferent as it is towards form, the complete content of the whole. Conversely, though, the absolute is the absolute content in such fashion that the content, indifferent manifoldness as content is, has the negative form-reference in it, whereby its manifoldness is only one solid identity.

The identity of the absolute is thus absolute in virtue of this, that its every part is itself the whole, or its every determinateness the totality, that is, that determinateness generally has become a shine wholly transparent, a difference vanished in its positedness. Essence, concrete existence, world that is in itself, whole, parts, force, – to representation such reflected determinations look like true being valid in and for itself; the absolute, set against them, is the ground wherein they have gone under. – Now because in the absolute form is only simple identity with itself, no determining of itself goes on in the absolute; for determination is a difference of form, which in the first instance holds as such. But because it contains at the same time all difference and form-determination generally, or because absolute form and reflection is what it itself is, the diversity of content must also come to the fore in it. Yet absolute identity is what the absolute itself is; this is its determination, since all the manifoldness of the world that is in itself and of the world that appears, of the inner and the outer totality, is sublated in it. – Within the absolute there is no becoming, for it is not being; nor is it the determining that reflects itself, for it is not the essence determining itself merely within itself; neither is it an expressing of itself, for it is as the identity of inner and outer. – But so stated, the movement of reflection stands over against this absolute identity of its. Sublated in that identity, reflection is only the identity's inner; and just with this it is external to it. – To begin with, therefore, its whole business consists in sublating within the absolute what it itself does. Being the beyond of manifold differences and determinations, and of the movement these make, it lies at the absolute's back; hence it does indeed take those differences up, yet at the same time lets them go under; and so it is that negative exposition of the absolute spoken of earlier. – In its genuine presentation this exposition is the whole logical movement so far, that of the sphere of being and of essence, whose content was neither snatched up from outside as given and contingent, nor plunged into the absolute's abyss by a reflection standing outside it, but has determined itself in its own self through the inner necessity it has and, as being's own becoming and essence's reflection, has gone back into the absolute as into its ground.

This exposition, however, has at the same time a positive side of its own; namely so far as the finite, in foundering, proves this nature of standing referred to the absolute, or of containing the absolute in its own self. This side, however, is less the positive exposition of the absolute itself than the exposition of the determinations: namely that the absolute is their abyss, yet their ground as well, or that what lends them, the shine, a subsistence is the absolute itself. – Shine is not the nothing; it is reflection, reference to the absolute; or it is shine so far as the absolute shines in it. In this way the positive exposition still detains the finite short of its vanishing, taking it for an expression and likeness of the absolute. Yet the finite's transparency, which lets nothing but the absolute be glimpsed through it, ends in vanishing altogether; for there is nothing about the finite that could keep for it any difference from the absolute; it is a medium swallowed up by what shines through it.

Therefore this positive exposition of the absolute is itself no more than a shining; for the truly positive that it and the expounded content contain is the absolute itself. Whatever further determinations turn up, the form wherein the absolute shines is something null, taken up by the exposition from outside, something on which it wins a beginning for what it does. A determination of that kind does not have its beginning in the absolute, but only its end there. This expounding is therefore indeed absolute doing by virtue of the reference it has to the absolute, into which it goes back, but not by virtue of its starting point, a determination lying outside the absolute.

In fact, however, the expounding of the absolute is the absolute's own doing, one that begins with itself just as it arrives at itself. The absolute, taken merely as absolute identity, is determinate; namely as identical; reflection has posited it thus, in contrast to opposition and manifoldness; or it is nothing but the negative belonging to reflection and to determining generally. – Not only that expounding of the absolute is on that account something imperfect; so too is this absolute itself, at which alone one arrives. Or an absolute of that sort, one that is merely as absolute identity, amounts to no more than the absolute of an external reflection. Hence it is not the absolutely-absolute but rather the absolute standing in a determinateness; or it is attribute.

But the absolute is not attribute merely because it is the object of an external reflection and hence something determined by that reflection. – Or reflection is not merely external to it; rather, immediately, and just because it is external to it, it is internal to it. What makes the absolute absolute is just that it is no abstract identity, but the identity of being with essence, the identity of inner with outer. So it is itself the absolute form, the form that makes the absolute shine within itself and determines it to attribute.

B. The Absolute Attribute

The expression that has been used, the absolutely-absolute, designates the absolute as returned into itself in its form, the absolute whose form equals its content. Attribute is the merely relative absolute, a conjunction that means nothing else than the absolute standing in a form-determination. For form, ahead of its completed exposition, is at first only as yet inward, or, what comes to the same, only outward, in general, to start with, determinate form, that is, negation in general. Since form at the same time is as the absolute's form, however, attribute is the absolute's whole content; it is the totality that showed itself earlier under the shape of a world, or as one of the two sides of the essential relation, either of them being itself the whole. Yet the two worlds, the appearing one and the one that is in and for itself, were each meant to be opposed to the other in its essence. Of the essential relation it did hold that its one side was equal to the other: the whole came to as much as the parts; force's expression to a content the same as force's own; and the outer in general to what the inner is. Yet at the same time each of these sides was meant to have an immediate subsistence of its own besides, the one as the immediacy that is, the other as the reflected immediacy. In the absolute, by contrast, these distinct immediacies are brought down to shine, and the totality which attribute is stands posited as its true and sole subsistence; whereas the determination in which that totality stands is posited as the unessential one.

The absolute is attribute for this reason, that as simple absolute identity it stands in the determination of identity; and to determination in general other determinations can now be attached, for instance that there are several attributes. But since the meaning of absolute identity is just this, not only that every determination is sublated, but that identity is itself the reflection which has sublated its own self, all determinations are posited in it as sublated ones. Or totality is posited as the absolute totality, that is, attribute has the absolute for its content and its subsistence; the form-determination it carries, by which it is attribute, is therefore likewise posited, immediately as mere shine, the negative as negative. The positive shine that the exposition gives itself through attribute, in taking the finite within its restriction not for something that is in and for itself but dissolving the finite's subsistence into the absolute and widening the finite into attribute, sublates the very thing that attribute is; it sinks attribute, and its own distinguishing activity, into the simple absolute.

But since reflection, distinguishing in this fashion, thereby comes back only to the absolute's identity, it has at the same time not got clear of its externality and reached the genuine absolute. All it has attained is the indeterminate, abstract identity; that is to say, the identity which stands in the determinateness of identity. – Or, where reflection in the capacity of inner form determines the absolute to attribute, this determining still remains diverse from externality; the absolute is not penetrated by that inner determination; its expression consists in vanishing, as something merely posited, at the absolute.

Form, then, whether it be taken as outer or as inner, the form by which the absolute would be attribute, is at the same time posited as null in its own self, as an external shine, or as a mere way and manner of being.

C. The Mode of the Absolute

Firstly, the attribute is the absolute as it stands in the simple identity of itself with itself. Secondly, the attribute is negation, and this as negation is the formal reflection-into-itself. These two sides constitute at first the attribute's two extremes, and the attribute is itself their middle term, being as it is the absolute and equally the determinateness. – Of these two extremes the second is the negative as negative, the reflection that is external to the absolute. – Or insofar as this reflection is taken as the inner of the absolute, and the absolute's own determination is to posit itself as mode, then the mode is the absolute's being-outside-itself, the loss of itself into the alterability and contingency of being, its having-passed-over into the opposite without return into itself; the totality-less manifoldness of determinations of form and of content. –

The mode, the externality of the absolute, is however not this alone, but the externality posited as such externality, a bare way and manner; and so the shine as shine, or the form's reflection into itself; and so the identity with itself that the absolute is. In fact, then, it is first in the mode that the absolute stands posited as absolute identity; it is nothing but what it is, namely identity with itself, as negativity that refers itself to itself, as shining posited as shining.

Insofar, then, as the exposition of the absolute takes its start from the absolute's absolute identity, moves on to the attribute, and thence to the mode, in all this it has traversed its moments completely. But firstly, therein it does not merely comport itself negatively towards these determinations; rather this doing of its is the reflecting movement itself, as which the absolute only truly is the absolute identity. – Secondly, what it thereby has to do with is not merely something external, and the mode is not just the outermost externality; because it is the shine as shine, it is rather the return into itself, the reflection that dissolves itself, as which the absolute is absolute being. – Thirdly, the expounding reflection has the look of setting out from determinations of its own and from something external; of picking up the modes, or likewise the determinations of the attribute, as found already outside the absolute; and of having for its doing merely the carrying of them back into the indifferent identity. But in truth the determinateness with which it begins it already has on the absolute itself. For as first indifferent identity the absolute is itself nothing but the determinate absolute, or the attribute, in that it is the absolute unmoved and as yet unreflected. Since it is determinateness, this determinateness pertains to the reflecting movement; through that movement alone is the absolute determined as the first identical, and through it alone likewise does the absolute possess the absolute form, so that it is not what is self-equal but what is self-equating.

The genuine meaning of the mode is accordingly that it is the absolute's own reflecting movement; a determining, yet not one by which the absolute would come to be an other, but only of what it already is; the transparent externality which is the showing of the absolute itself; a movement out of itself; and yet such that this being-turned-outward is quite as much inwardness itself; and hence quite as much a positing that is not mere positedness but absolute being.

If, then, the question is put about a content of the exposition, what it might be that the absolute shows? the difference of form and content is in the absolute already dissolved anyway. Or just this is the content of the absolute, to manifest itself. The absolute is that absolute form which, in dirempting itself, remains simply identical with itself, the negative as negative; or which closes together with itself, and only so is the absolute self-identity that is quite as much indifferent towards its differences, or absolute content; the content, accordingly, is nothing but this exposition itself.

The absolute, as this self-sustaining movement of exposition, as the way and manner which is its absolute identity with itself, is expression – not of an inner, not against an other – but is only as an absolute manifesting of itself for itself; thus it is actuality.

Remark

To the concept of the absolute, and to the relation which reflection bears towards it as this has here set itself out, there corresponds the concept of Spinozistic substance. Wherein Spinozism is a deficient philosophy is this, that reflection and its manifold determining are an external thinking. – Substance in this system is one substance, a single totality admitting of no separation; determinateness there is none but is held within this absolute and dissolved there; and it counts for a great deal that whatever appears to natural representation, or to the determining understanding, as self-subsistent and hovers before it as such is, within that necessary concept, brought down wholly to a mere positedness. – Determinateness is negation – such is the absolute principle of Spinozistic philosophy; this true and simple insight is what grounds substance's absolute unity. But Spinoza halts at negation taken as determinateness or quality; he does not press on to cognize it as absolute, that is, as self-negating negation; accordingly his substance does not itself contain the absolute form, and the cognizing of that substance is no immanent cognizing. Substance is indeed the absolute unity of thinking and of being or extension; it thus harbours thinking itself, though only in its unity with extension, which means: not as severing itself from extension, hence not at all as determining and forming, nor yet as the movement that comes back and starts out from itself. Partly, thereby, substance is without the principle of personality – the very defect that has chiefly stirred indignation against the Spinozistic system; – partly the cognizing is that external reflection which fails to grasp and to derive out of substance what has the look of the finite, the determinateness of the attribute and the mode, and itself as well, and which is at work instead as an understanding standing outside, taking the determinations up as given and leading them back to the absolute, though never fetching their beginnings from it.

The concepts which Spinoza furnishes of substance are those of the cause of itself, – that substance is that whose essence encloses concrete existence within itself; – that the concept of the absolute stands in need of no concept of another out of which it would have to be formed; – deep and correct as these concepts are, they are definitions, taken up immediately at the entrance of the science. Mathematics, and the other subordinate sciences, have to make their start from something presupposed, which constitutes their element and positive foundation. But the absolute cannot be something first and immediate; the absolute is essentially its result.

Following on the definition of the absolute, there next appears in Spinoza the definition of the attribute; and it is determined as that wherein the understanding apprehends substance's essence. Setting aside that the understanding is by its nature assumed to come later than the attribute – Spinoza determines it, after all, as a mode – the attribute, determination as determination of the absolute, is in this way made dependent on an other, on the understanding, which enters over against substance as something external and immediate.

Spinoza determines the attributes further as infinite, infinite moreover in the sense of an infinite plurality. Only two of them, to be sure, actually come up in the sequel – thinking and extension – and no showing is given of how the infinite plurality necessarily narrows itself down to the opposition, and to this determinate opposition, of thinking and extension. – These two attributes are on that account picked up empirically. Thinking and being present the absolute in a determination; the absolute itself is the absolute unity of both, so that they amount to unessential forms merely, the order among things running the same as the order among representations or thoughts, and the one absolute being surveyed under those two determinations by nothing but the external reflection, by a mode – now as a totality of representations, now as a totality of things and of their alterations. Just as it is this external reflection that draws the difference, so it is also this reflection that carries the difference back into the absolute identity and submerges it there. This whole movement, however, takes place outside the absolute. Granted, the absolute is itself also thinking, and so far the movement is only within the absolute; but, as was remarked, within the absolute it is only as unity with extension, and so not as this movement, which is essentially the moment of opposition as well. – The sublime demand Spinoza makes upon thinking is that it consider all things under the shape of eternity, sub specie aeterni, that is, as they are in the absolute. In that absolute, however, which is only the unmoved identity, the attribute, like the mode, is there only as vanishing, not as becoming, so that this vanishing too takes its positive beginning only from without.

The third, the mode, is in Spinoza affection of substance, the determinate determinateness, that which is in another and is conceived through this other. Strictly, the attributes have nothing but indeterminate diversity for their determination; each is to express substance's totality and to be conceived out of itself; but insofar as an attribute is the absolute as determinate, it harbours otherness and is not to be conceived out of itself alone. It is thus in the mode that the attribute's determination first gets properly posited. This third stays mere mode besides: on the one hand it is something immediately given, on the other its nullity goes uncognized as reflection into itself. – The Spinozistic exposition of the absolute is thus far indeed complete, in that it starts from the absolute, lets the attribute come next, and ends with the mode; but these three are merely counted off one after another, with no inner developmental sequence, and the third is not the negation as negation, not a negation referring itself negatively to itself, through which it would in it itself be the going-back into the first identity, and that identity the genuine one. What is missing, then, is the necessity of the absolute's progress into unessentiality, and equally the dissolving of unessentiality, in and for itself, into identity; or there is wanting the becoming of identity no less than of its determinations.

In like fashion, in the oriental representation of emanation the absolute is the light that lights itself. But it does not merely light itself; it also streams out. Its outstreamings are removals from its unclouded brightness; the progeny that follow are less perfect than those before them, out of which they arise. The streaming out is taken only as a happening, the becoming only as an ongoing loss. So being grows ever murkier, and night, the negative, is the last term of the line, which does not go back into the first light.

The defect of reflection into itself, which attaches to the Spinozistic exposition of the absolute as it does to the doctrine of emanation, is made good in the concept of Leibniz's monad. – To the one-sidedness of a philosophical principle the opposite one-sidedness is wont to be set over against it, and, as everywhere, the totality is wont to be present at least as a scattered completeness. – The monad is a one, a negative reflected within itself; it is the world's content in its totality; the diverse manifold has in it not merely gone under but is kept in a negative fashion; Spinozistic substance unifies all content, yet the world's manifold content is not in that substance as such, but in the reflection standing external to it. The monad is therefore essentially representing; finite though it be, however, it has no passivity; the alterations and determinations in it are rather manifestations of itself within itself. It is entelechy; the revealing is its own act. – With this the monad is also determinate, marked off from others; the determinateness falls into the particular content and into the way and manner in which the manifestation proceeds. The monad is therefore in itself, in respect of its substance, the totality, not in its manifestation. This limitation of the monad falls of necessity not into the monad as self-positing or representing, but into its being-in-itself, or it is an absolute limit, a predestination posited by a being other than the monad itself. Further, since bounded things are only in referring themselves to other bounded things, while the monad is at once an absolute shut up within itself, the harmony of these boundings – the reference, that is, of the monads to one another – lies outside them and is, again, pre-established by another being, or in itself.

It comes to light that through the principle of reflection-into-itself, which makes up the monad's fundamental determination, otherness and outside influence generally are indeed done away with, the monad's alterations being its own positing – yet that, on the other side, passivity through an other has merely been converted into an absolute restriction, a restriction upon being-in-itself. Leibniz credits the monads with a certain perfection within themselves, a sort of self-subsistence; they are created beings. – Looking more nearly at their restriction, this exposition yields the result that the self-manifestation which accrues to them is the totality of form. A concept of the highest importance is this: that the monad's alterations are represented as actions without passivity, as manifestations of the monad's own self, and that the principle of reflection into itself, or of individuation, stands forth as essential. It is further necessary to let finitude consist in this: that content, or substance, is held distinct from form, and then further that the one is limited whereas the other is infinite. But in the concept of the absolute monad what would have to be found is not merely that absolute unity of content and form, but the nature of reflection besides – namely, as the negativity referring itself to itself, to repel itself from itself, whereby it is positing and creating. In the Leibnizian system there is, to be sure, this further point present as well, that God is the source of the concrete existence and of the essence of the monads, that is, that those absolute restrictions in the monads' being-in-itself do not have being in and for themselves but disappear in the absolute. These determinations, however, exhibit nothing but the ordinary representations, left without philosophical development and never raised into speculative concepts. Thus the principle of individuation does not obtain its deeper working-out; the concepts concerning the distinctions among the various finite monads, and concerning their relation to their absolute, do not issue from this essence itself, or in an absolute manner, but pertain to ratiocinative, dogmatic reflection, and have accordingly reached no inner coherence.