CHAPTER IX.. Third Sub-Division of Logic.

THIRD SUB-DIVISION OF LOGIC.

THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION.

160.] The Notion is the principle of freedom, the power of substance self-realised. It is a systematic whole, in which each of its constituent functions is the very total which the notion is, and is put as indissolubly one with it. Thus in its self-identity it has original and complete determinateness.

The position taken up by the notion is that of absolute idealism. Philosophy is a knowledge through notions because it sees that what on other grades of consciousness is taken to have Being, and to be naturally or immediately independent, is but a constituent stage in the Idea. In the logic of understanding, the notion is generally reckoned a mere form of thought, and treated as a general conception. It is to this inferior view of the notion that the assertion refers, so often urged on behalf of the heart and sentiment, that notions as such are something dead, empty, and abstract. The case is really quite the reverse. The notion is, on the contrary, the principle of all life, and thus possesses at the same time a character of thorough concreteness. That it is so follows from the whole logical movement up to this point, and need not be here proved. The contrast between form and content, which is thus used to criticise the notion when it is alleged to be merely formal, has, like all the other contrasts upheld by reflection, been already left behind and overcome dialectically or through itself. The notion, in short, is what contains all the earlier categories of thought merged in it. It certainly is a form, but an infinite and creative form, which includes, but at the same time releases from itself, the fulness of all content. And so too the notion may, if it be wished, be styled abstract, if the name concrete is restricted to the concrete facts of sense or of immediate perception. For the notion is not palpable to the touch, and when we are engaged with it, hearing and seeing must quite fail us. And yet, as it was before remarked, the notion is a true concrete; for the reason that it involves Being and Essence, and the total wealth of these two spheres with them, merged in the unity of thought.

If, as was said at an earlier point, the different stages of the logical idea are to be treated as a series of definitions of the Absolute, the definition which now results for us is that the Absolute is the Notion. That necessitates a higher estimate of the notion, however, than is found in formal conceptualist Logic, where the notion is a mere form of our subjective thought, with no original content of its own. But if Speculative Logic thus attaches a meaning to the term notion so very different from that usually given, it may be asked why the same word should be employed in two contrary acceptations, and an occasion thus given for confusion and misconception. The answer is that, great as the interval is between the speculative notion and the notion of Formal Logic, a closer examination shows that the deeper meaning is not so foreign to the general usages of language as it seems at first sight. We speak of the deduction of a content from the notion, e.g. of the specific provisions of the law of property from the notion of property; and so again we speak of tracing back these material details to the notion. We thus recognise that the notion is no mere form without a content of its own: for if it were, there would be in the one case nothing to deduce from such a form, and in the other case to trace a given body of fact back to the empty form of the notion would only rob the fact of its specific character, without making it understood.

161.] The onward movement of the notion is no longer either a transition into, or a reflection on something else, but Development. For in the notion, the elements distinguished are without more ado at the same time declared to be identical with one another and with the whole, and the specific character of each is a free being of the whole notion.

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Transition into something else is the dialectical process within the range of Being: reflection (bringing something else into light), in the range of Essence. The movement of the Notion is development: by which that only is explicit which is already implicitly present. In the world of nature it is organic life that corresponds to the grade of the notion. Thus e.g. the plant is developed from its germ. The germ virtually involves the whole plant, but does so only ideally or in thought: and it would therefore be a mistake to regard the development of the root, stem, leaves, and other different parts of the plant, as meaning that they were realiter present, but in a very minute form, in the germ. That is the so-called 'box-within-box' hypothesis; a theory which commits the mistake of supposing an actual existence of what is at first found only as a postulate of the completed thought. The truth of the hypothesis on the other hand lies in its perceiving that in the process of development the notion keeps to itself and only gives rise to alteration of form, without making any addition in point of content. It is this nature of the notion--this manifestation of itself in its process as a development of its own self,--which is chiefly in view with those who speak of innate ideas, or who, like Plato, describe all learning merely as reminiscence. Of course that again does not mean that everything which is embodied in a mind, after that mind has been formed by instruction, had been present in that mind beforehand, in its definitely expanded shape.

The movement of the notion is as it were to be looked upon merely as play: the other which it sets up is in reality not an other. Or, as it is expressed in the teaching of Christianity: not merely has God created a world which confronts Him as an other; He has also from all eternity begotten a Son in whom He, a Spirit, is at home with Himself.

162.] The doctrine of the notion is divided into three parts. (1) The first is the doctrine of the Subjective or Formal Notion. (2) The second is the doctrine of the notion invested with the character of immediacy, or of Objectivity. (3) The third is the doctrine of the Idea, the subject-object, the unity of notion and objectivity, the absolute truth.

The Common Logic covers only the matters which come before us here as a portion of the third part of the whole system, together with the so-called Laws of Thought, which we have already met; and in the Applied Logic it adds a little about cognition. This is combined with psychological, metaphysical, and all sorts of empirical materials, which were introduced because, when all was done, those forms of thought could not be made to do all that was required of them. But with these additions the science lost its unity of aim. Then there was a further circumstance against the Common Logic. Those forms, which at least do belong to the proper domain of Logic, are supposed to be categories of conscious thought only, of thought too in the character of understanding, not of reason.

The preceding logical categories, those viz. of Being and Essence, are, it is true, no mere logical modes or entities: they are proved to be notions in their transition or their dialectical element, and in their return into themselves and totality. But they are only in a modified form notions (cp. §§ 84 and 112), notions rudimentary, or, what is the same thing, notions for us. The antithetical term into which each category passes, or in which it shines, so producing correlation, is not characterised as a particular. The third, in which they return to unity, is not characterised as a subject or an individual: nor is there any explicit statement that the category: is identical in its antithesis,--in other words, its freedom is not expressly stated: and all this because the category is not universality.--What generally passes current under the name of a notion is a mode of understanding, or, even, a mere general representation, and therefore, in short, a finite mode of thought (cp. § 62).

The Logic of the Notion is usually treated as a science of form only, and understood to deal with the form of notion, judgment, and syllogism as form, without in the least touching the question whether anything is true. The answer to that question is supposed to depend on the content only. If the logical forms of the notion were really dead and inert receptacles of conceptions and thoughts, careless of what they contained, knowledge about them would be an idle curiosity which the truth might dispense with. On the contrary they really are, as forms of the notion, the vital spirit of the actual world. That only is true of the actual which is true in virtue of these forms, through them and in them. As yet, however, the truth of these forms has never been considered or examined on their own account any more than their necessary interconnexion.

A.--THE SUBJECTIVE NOTION.

(a) The Notion as Notion.

163.] The Notion as Notion contains the three following 'moments' or functional parts. (1) The first is Universality--meaning that it is in free equality with itself in its specific character. (2) The second is Particularity--that is, the specific character, in which the universal continues serenely equal to itself. (3) The third is Individuality--meaning the reflection-into-self of the specific characters of universality and particularity;--which negative self-unity has complete and original determinateness, without any loss to its self-identity or universality.

Individual and actual are the same thing: only the former has issued from the notion, and is thus, as a universal, stated expressly as a negative identity with itself. The actual, because it is at first no more than a potential or immediate unity of essence and existence, may possibly have effect: but the individuality of the notion is the very source of effectiveness, effective moreover no longer as the cause is, with a show of effecting something else, but effective of itself.--Individuality, however, is not to be understood to mean the immediate or natural individual, as when we speak of individual things or individual men: for that special phase of individuality does not appear till we come to the judgment. Every function and 'moment' of the notion is itself the whole notion (§ 160); but the individual or subject is the notion expressly put as a totality.

(1) The notion is generally associated in our minds with abstract generality, and on that account it is often described as a general conception. We speak, accordingly, of the notions of colour, plant, animal, &c. They are supposed to be arrived at by neglecting the particular features which distinguish the different colours, plants, and animals from each other, and by retaining those common to them all. This is the aspect of the notion which is familiar to understanding; and feeling is in the right when it stigmatises such hollow and empty notions as mere phantoms and shadows. But the universal of the notion is not a mere sum of features common to several things, confronted by a particular which enjoys an existence of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularising or self-specifying, and with undimmed clearness finds itself at home in its antithesis. For the sake both of cognition and of our practical conduct, it is of the utmost importance that the real universal should not be confused with what is merely held in common. All those charges which the devotees of feeling make against thought, and especially against philosophic thought, and the reiterated statement that it is dangerous to carry thought to what they call too great lengths, originate in the confusion of these two things.

The universal in its true and comprehensive meaning is a thought which, as we know, cost thousands of years to make it enter into the consciousness of men. The thought did not gain its full recognition till the days of Christianity. The Greeks, in other respects so advanced, knew neither God nor even man in their true universality. The gods of the Greeks were only particular powers of the mind; and the universal God, the God of all nations, was to the Athenians still a God concealed. They believed in the same way that an absolute gulf separated themselves from the barbarians. Man as man was not then recognised to be of infinite worth and to have infinite rights. The question has been asked, why slavery has vanished from modern Europe. One special circumstance after another has been adduced in explanation of this phenomenon. But the real ground why there are no more slaves in Christian Europe is only to be found in the very principle of Christianity itself, the religion of absolute freedom. Only in Christendom is man respected as man, in his infinitude and universality. What the slave is without, is the recognition that he is a person: and the principle of personality is universality. The master looks upon his slave not as a person, but as a selfless thing. The slave is not himself reckoned an 'I';--his 'I' is his master.

The distinction referred to above between what is merely in common, and what is truly universal, is strikingly expressed by Rousseau in his famous 'Contrat Social,' when he says that the laws of a state must spring from the universal will (volonté générale,) but need not on that account be the will of all (volonté de tous.) Rousseau would have made a sounder contribution towards a theory of the state, if he had always keep this distinction in sight. The general will is the notion of the will: and the laws are the special clauses of this will and based upon the notion of it.

(2) We add a remark upon the account of the origin and formation of notions which is usually given in the Logic of Understanding. It is not we who frame the notions. The notion is not something which is originated at all. No doubt the notion is not mere Being, or the immediate: it involves mediation, but the mediation lies in itself. In other words, the notion is what is mediated through itself and with itself. It is a mistake to imagine that the objects which form the content of our mental ideas come first and that our subjective agency then supervenes, and by the aforesaid operation of abstraction, and by colligating the points possessed in common by the objects, frames notions of them. Rather the notion is the genuine first; and things are what they are through the action of the notion, immanent in them, and revealing itself in them. In religious language we express this by saying that God created the world out of nothing. In other words, the world and finite things have issued from the fulness of the divine thoughts and the divine decrees. Thus religion recognises thought and (more exactly) the notion to be the infinite form, or the free creative activity, which can realise itself without the help of a matter that exists outside it.

164.] The notion is concrete out and out: because the negative unity with itself, as characterisation pure and entire, which is individuality, is just what constitutes its self-relation, its universality. The functions or 'moments' of the notion are to this extent indissoluble. The categories of 'reflection' are expected to be severally apprehended and separately accepted as current, apart from their opposites. But in the notion, where their identity is expressly assumed, each of its functions can be immediately apprehended only from and with the rest.

Universality, particularity, and individuality are, taken in the abstract, the same as identity, difference, and ground. But the universal is the self-identical, with the express qualification, that it simultaneously contains the particular and the individual. Again, the particular is the different or the specific character, but with the qualification that it is in itself universal and is as an individual. Similarly the individual must be understood to be a subject or substratum, which involves the genus and species in itself and possesses a substantial existence. Such is the explicit or realised inseparability of the functions of the notion in their difference (§ 160)--what may be called the clearness of the notion, in which each distinction causes no dimness or interruption, but is quite as much transparent.

No complaint is oftener made against the notion than that it is abstract. Of course it is abstract, if abstract means that the medium in which the notion exists is thought in general and not the sensible thing in its empirical concreteness. It is abstract also, because the notion falls short of the idea. To this extent the subjective notion is still formal. This however does not mean that it ought to have or receive another content than its own. It is itself the absolute form, and so is all specific character, but as that character is in its truth. Although it be abstract therefore, it is the concrete, concrete altogether, the subject as such. The absolutely concrete is the mind (see end of § 159)--the notion when it exists as notion distinguishing itself from its objectivity, which notwithstanding the distinction still continues to be its own. Everything else which is concrete, however rich it be, is not so intensely identical with itself and therefore not so concrete on its own part,--least of all what is commonly supposed to be concrete, but is only a congeries held together by external influence.--What are called notions, and in fact specific notions, such as man, house, animal, &c, are simply denotations and abstract representations. These abstractions retain out of all the functions of the notion only that of universality; they leave particularity and individuality out of account and have no development in these directions. By so doing they just miss the notion.

165.] It is the element of Individuality which first explicitly differentiates the elements of the notion. Individuality is the negative reflection of the notion into itself, and it is in that way at first the free differentiating of it as the first negation, by which the specific character of the notion is realised, but under the form of particularity. That is to say, the different elements are in the first place only qualified as the several elements of the notion, and, secondly, their identity is no less explicitly stated, the one being said to be the other. This realised particularity of the notion is the Judgment.

The ordinary classification of notions, as clear, distinct and adequate, is no part of the notion; it belongs to psychology. Notions, in fact, are here synonymous with mental representations; a clear notion is an abstract simple representation: a distinct notion is one where, in addition to the simplicity, there is one 'mark' or character emphasised as a sign for subjective cognition. There is no more striking mark of the formalism and decay of Logic than the favourite category of the 'mark.' The adequate notion comes nearer the notion proper, or even the Idea: but after all it expresses only the formal circumstance that a notion or representation agrees with its object, that is, with an external thing.--The division into what are called subordinate and co-ordinate notions implies a mechanical distinction of universal from particular which allows only a mere correlation of them in external comparison. Again, an enumeration of such kinds as contrary and contradictory, affirmative and negative notions, &c, is only a chance-directed gleaning of logical forms which properly belong to the sphere of Being or Essence, (where they have been already examined,) and which have nothing to do with the specific notional character as such. The true distinctions in the notion, universal, particular, and individual, may be said also to constitute species of it, but only when they are kept severed from each other by external reflection. The immanent differentiating and specifying of the notion come to sight in the judgment: for to judge is to specify the notion.

(b) The Judgment.

166.] The Judgment is the notion in its particularity, as a connexion which is also a distinguishing of its functions, which are put as independent and yet as identical with themselves, not with one another.

One's first impression about the Judgment is the independence of the two extremes, the subject and the predicate. The former we take to be a thing or term per se, and the predicate a general term outside the said subject and somewhere in our heads. The next point is for us to bring the latter into combination with the former, and in this way frame a Judgment. The copula 'is' however enunciates the predicate of the subject, and so that external subjective subsumption is again put in abeyance, and the Judgment taken as a determination of the object itself.--The etymological meaning of the Judgment (Urtheil) in German goes deeper, as it were declaring the unity of the notion to be primary, and its distinction to be the original partition. And that is what the Judgment really is.

In its abstract terms a Judgment is expressible in the proposition: 'The individual is the universal.' These are the terms under which the subject and the predicate first confront each other, when the functions of the notion are taken in their immediate character or first abstraction. [Propositions such as, 'The particular is the universal,' and 'The individual is the particular,' belong to the further specialisation of the judgment.] It shows a strange want of observation in the logic-books, that in none of them is the fact stated, that in every judgment there is such a statement made, as, The individual is the universal, or still more definitely, The subject is the predicate: (e.g. God is absolute spirit). No doubt there is also a distinction between terms like individual and universal, subject and predicate: but it is none the less the universal fact, that every judgment states them to be identical.

The copula 'is' springs from the nature of the notion, to be self-identical even in parting with its own. The individual and universal are its constituents, and therefore characters which cannot be isolated. The earlier categories (of reflection) in their correlations also refer to one another: but their interconnexion is only 'having' and not 'being,' i.e. it is not the identity which is realised as identity or universality. In the judgment, therefore, for the first time there is seen the genuine particularity of the notion: for it is the speciality or distinguishing of the latter, without thereby losing universality.

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Judgments are generally looked upon as combinations of notions, and, be it added, of heterogeneous notions. This theory of judgment is correct, so far as it implies that it is the notion which forms the presupposition of the judgment, and which in the judgment comes up under the form of difference. But on the other hand, it is false to speak of notions differing in kind. The notion, although concrete, is still as a notion essentially one, and the functions which it contains are not different kinds of it. It is equally false to speak of a combination of the two sides in the judgment, if we understand the term 'combination' to imply the independent existence of the combining members apart from the combination. The same external view of their nature is more forcibly apparent when judgments are described as produced by the ascription of a predicate to the subject. Language like this looks upon the subject as self-subsistent outside, and the predicate as found somewhere in our head. Such a conception of the relation between subject and predicate however is at once contradicted by the copula 'is.' By saying 'This rose is red,' or 'This picture is beautiful,' we declare, that it is not we who from outside attach beauty to the picture or redness to the rose, but that these are the characteristics proper to these objects. An additional fault in the way in which Formal Logic conceives the judgment is, that it makes the judgment look as if it were something merely contingent, and does not offer any proof for the advance from notion on to judgment. For the notion does not, as understanding supposes, stand still in its own immobility. It is rather an infinite form, of boundless activity, as it were the punctum saliens of all vitality, and thereby self-differentiating. This disruption of the notion into the difference of its constituent functions',--a disruption imposed by the native act of the notion, is the judgment. A judgment therefore means the particularising of the notion. No doubt the notion is implicitly the particular. But in the notion as notion the particular is not yet explicit, and still remains in transparent unity with the universal. Thus, for example, as we remarked before (§ 160, note), the germ of a plant contains its particular, such as root, branches, leaves, &c.: but these details are at first present only potentially, and are not realised till the germ uncloses. This unclosing is, as it were, the judgment of the plant. The illustration may also serve to show how neither the notion nor the judgment are merely found in our head, or merely framed by us. The notion is the very heart of things, and makes them what they are. To form a notion of an object means therefore to become aware of its notion: and when we proceed to a criticism or judgment of the object, we are not performing a subjective act, and merely ascribing this or that predicate to the object. We are, on the contrary, observing the object in the specific character imposed by its notion.

167.] The Judgment is usually taken in a subjective sense as an operation and a form, occurring merely in self-conscious thought. This distinction, however, has no existence on purely logical principles, by which the judgment is taken in the quite universal signification that all things are a judgment. That is to say, they are individuals, which are a universality or inner nature in themselves,--a universal which is individualised. Their universality and individuality are distinguished, but the one is at the same time identical with the other.

The interpretation of the judgment, according to which it is assumed to be merely subjective, as if we ascribed a predicate to a subject, is contradicted by the decidedly objective expression of the judgment. The rose is red; Gold is a metal. It is not by us that something is first ascribed to them.--A judgment is however distinguished from a proposition. The latter contains a statement about the subject, which does not stand to it in any universal relationship, but expresses some single action, or some state, or the like. Thus, 'Caesar was born at Rome in such and such a year, waged war in Gaul for ten years, crossed the Rubicon, &c.,' are propositions, but not judgments. Again it is absurd to say that such statements as, 'I slept well last night,' or 'Present arms!' may be turned into the form of a judgment. 'A carriage is passing by'--would be a judgment, and a subjective one at best, only if it were doubtful, whether the passing object was a carriage, or whether it and not rather the point of observation was in motion:--in short, only if it were desired to specify a conception which was still short of appropriate specification.

168.] The judgment is an expression of finitude. Things from its point of view are said to be finite, because they are a judgment, because their definite being and their universal nature, (their body and their soul,) though united indeed (otherwise the things would be nothing), are still elements in the constitution which are already different and also in any case separable.

169.] The abstract terms of the judgment, 'The individual is the universal,' present the subject (as negatively self-relating) as what is immediately concrete, while the predicate is what is abstract, indeterminate, in short, the universal. But the two elements are connected together by an 'is': and thus the predicate (in its universality) must also contain the speciality of the subject, must, in short, have particularity: and so is realised the identity between subject and predicate; which, being thus unaffected by this difference in form, is the content.

It is the predicate which first gives the subject, which till then was on its own account a bare mental representation or an empty name, its specific character and content. In judgments like 'God is the most real of all things,' or 'The Absolute is the self-identical,' God and the Absolute are mere names; what they are we only learn in the predicate. What the subject may be in other respects, as a concrete thing, is no concern of this judgment. (Cp. § 31.)

To define the subject as that of which something is said, and the predicate as what is said about it, is mere trifling. It gives no information about the distinction between the two. In point of thought, the subject is primarily the individual, and the predicate the universal. As the judgment receives further development, the subject ceases to be merely the immediate individual, and the predicate merely the abstract universal: the former acquires the additional significations of particular and universal,--the latter the additional significations of particular and individual. Thus while the same names are given to the two terms of the judgment, their meaning passes through a series of changes.

170.] We now go closer into the speciality of subject and predicate. The subject as negative self-relation (§§ 163, 166) is the stable substratum in which the predicate has its subsistence and where it is ideally present. The predicate, as the phrase is, inheres in the subject. Further, as the subject is in general and immediately concrete, the specific connotation of the predicate is only one of the numerous characters of the subject. Thus the subject is ampler and wider than the predicate.

Conversely, the predicate as universal is self-subsistent, and indifferent whether this subject is or not. The predicate outflanks the subject, subsuming it under itself: and hence on its side is wider than the subject. The specific content of the predicate (§ 169) alone constitutes the identity of the two.

171.] At first, subject, predicate, and the specific content or the identity are, even in their relation, still put in the judgment as different and divergent. By implication, however, that is, in their notion, they are identical. For the subject is a concrete totality,--which means not any indefinite multiplicity, but individuality alone, the particular and the universal in an identity: and the predicate too is the very same unity (§ 170).--The copula again, even while stating the identity of subject and predicate, does so at first only by an abstract 'is.' Conformably to such an identity the subject has to be put also in the characteristic of the predicate. By this means the latter also receives the characteristic of the former: so that the copula receives its full complement and full force. Such is the continuous specification by which the judgment, through a copula charged with content, comes to be a syllogism. As it is primarily exhibited in the judgment, this gradual specification consists in giving to an originally abstract, sensuous universality the specific character of allness, of species, of genus, and finally of the developed universality of the notion.

After we are made aware of this continuous specification of the judgment, we can see a meaning and an interconnexion in what are usually stated as the kinds of judgment. Not only does the ordinary enumeration seem purely casual, but it is also superficial, and even bewildering in its statement of their distinctions. The distinction between positive, categorical and assertory judgments, is either a pure invention of fancy, or is left undetermined. On the right theory, the different judgments follow necessarily from one another, and present the continuous specification of the notion; for the judgment itself is nothing but the notion specified.

When we look at the two preceding spheres of Being and Essence, we see that the specified notions as judgments are reproductions of these spheres, but put in the simplicity of relation peculiar to the notion.

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The various kinds of judgment are no empirical aggregate. They are a systematic whole based on a principle; and it was one of Kant's great merits to have first emphasised the necessity of showing this. His proposed division, according to the headings in his table of categories, into judgments of quality, quantity, relation and modality, can not be called satisfactory, partly from the merely formal application of this categorical rubric, partly on account of their content. Still it rests upon a true perception of the fact that the different species of judgment derive their features from the universal forms of the logical idea itself. If we follow this clue, it will supply us with three chief kinds of judgment parallel to the stages of Being, Essence, and Notion. The second of these kinds, as required by the character of Essence, which is the stage of differentiation, must be doubled. We find the inner ground for this systematisation of judgments in the circumstance that when the Notion, which is the unity of Being and Essence in a comprehensive thought, unfolds, as it does in the judgment, it must reproduce these two stages in a transformation proper to the notion. The notion itself meanwhile is seen to mould and form the genuine grade of judgment.

Far from occupying the same level, and being of equal value, the different species of judgment form a series of steps, the difference of which rests upon the logical significance of the predicate. That judgments differ in value is evident even in our ordinary ways of thinking. We should not hesitate to ascribe a very slight faculty of judgment to a person who habitually framed only such judgments as, 'This wall is green,' 'This stove is hot.' On the other hand we should credit with a genuine capacity of judgment the person whose criticisms dealt with such questions as whether a certain work of art was beautiful, whether a certain action was good, and so on. In judgments of the first-mentioned kind the content forms only an abstract quality, the presence of which can be sufficiently detected by immediate perception. To pronounce a work of art to be beautiful, or an action to be good, requires on the contrary a comparison of the objects with what they ought to be, i.e. with their notion.

(α) Qualitative Judgment.

172.] The immediate judgment is the judgment of definite Being. The subject is invested with a universality as its predicate, which is an immediate, and therefore a sensible quality. It may be (1) a Positive judgment: The individual is a particular. But the individual is not a particular: or in more precise language, such a single quality is not congruous with the concrete nature of the subject. This is (2) a Negative judgment.

It is one of the fundamental assumptions of dogmatic Logic that Qualitative judgments such as, 'The rose is red,' or 'is not red,' can contain truth. Correct they may be, i.e. in the limited circle of perception, of finite conception and thought: that depends on the content, which likewise is finite, and, on its own merits, untrue. Truth, however, as opposed to correctness, depends solely on the form, viz. on the notion as it is put and the reality corresponding to it. But truth of that stamp is not found in the Qualitative judgment.

In common life the terms truth and correctness are often treated as synonymous: we speak of the truth of a content, when we are only thinking of its correctness. Correctness, generally speaking, concerns only the formal coincidence between our conception and its content, whatever the constitution of this content may be. Truth, on the contrary, lies in the coincidence of the object with itself, that is, with its notion. That a person is sick, or that some one has committed a theft, may certainly be correct. But the content is untrue. A sick body is not in harmony with the notion of body, and there is a want of congruity between theft and the notion of human conduct. These instances may show that an immediate judgment, in which an abstract quality is predicated of an immediately individual thing, however correct it may be, cannot contain truth. The subject and predicate of it do not stand to each other in the relation of reality and notion.

We may add that the untruth of the immediate judgment lies in the incongruity between its form and content. To say 'This rose is red,' involves (in virtue of the copula 'is') the coincidence of subject and predicate. The rose however is a concrete thing, and so is not red only: it has also an odour, a specific form, and many other features not implied in the predicate red. The predicate on its part is an abstract universal, and does not apply to the rose alone. There are other flowers and other objects which are red too. The subject and predicate in the immediate judgment touch, as it were, only in a single point, but do not cover each other. The case is different with the notional judgment. In pronouncing an action to be good, we frame a notional judgment. Here, as we at once perceive, there is a closer and a more intimate relation than in the immediate judgment. The predicate in the latter is some abstract quality which may or may not be applied to the subject. In the judgment of the notion the predicate is, as it were, the soul of the subject, by which the subject, as the body of this soul, is characterised through and through.

173.] This negation of a particular quality, which is the first negation, still leaves the connexion of the subject with the predicate subsisting. The predicate is in that manner a sort of relative universal, of which a special phase only has been negatived. [To say, that the rose is not red, implies that it is still coloured--in the first place with another colour; which however would be only one more positive judgment.] The individual however is not a universal. Hence (3) the judgment suffers disruption into one of two forms. It is either (a) the Identical judgment, an empty identical relation stating that the individual is the individual; or it is (b) what is called the Infinite judgment, in which we are presented with the total incompatibility of subject and predicate.

Examples of the latter are: 'The mind is no elephant:' 'A lion is no table;' propositions which are correct but absurd, exactly like the identical propositions: 'A lion is a lion;' 'Mind is mind.' Propositions like these are undoubtedly the truth of the immediate, or, as it is called, Qualitative judgment. But they are not judgments at all, and can only occur in a subjective thought where even an untrue abstraction may hold its ground.--In their objective aspect, these latter judgments express the nature of what is, or of sensible things, which, as they declare, suffer disruption into an empty identity on the one hand, and on the other a fully-charged relation--only that this relation is the qualitative antagonism of the things related, their total incongruity.

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The negatively-infinite judgment, in which the subject has no relation whatever to the predicate, gets its place in the Formal Logic solely as a nonsensical curiosity. But the infinite judgment is not really a mere casual form adopted by subjective thought. It exhibits the proximate result of the dialectical process in the immediate judgments preceding (the positive and simply-negative), and distinctly displays their finitude and untruth. Crime may be quoted as an objective instance of the negatively-infinite judgment. The person committing a crime, such as a theft, does not, as in a suit about civil rights, merely deny the particular right of another person to some one definite thing. He denies the right of that person in general, and therefore he is not merely forced to restore what he has stolen, but is punished in addition, because he has violated law as law, i.e. law in general. The civil-law suit on the contrary is an instance of the negative judgment pure and simple where merely the particular law is violated, whilst law in general is so far acknowledged. Such a dispute is precisely paralleled by a negative judgment, like, 'This flower is not red:' by which we merely deny the particular colour of the flower, but not its colour in general, which may be blue, yellow, or any other. Similarly death, as a negatively-infinite judgment, is distinguished from disease as simply-negative. In disease, merely this or that function of life is checked or negatived: in death, as we ordinarily say, body and soul part, i.e. subject and predicate utterly diverge.

(ß) Judgment of Reflection.

174.] The individual put as individual (i.e. as reflected-into-self) into the judgment, has a predicate, in comparison with which the subject, as self-relating, continues to be still an other thing.--In existence the subject ceases to be immediately qualitative, it is in correlation, and inter-connexion with an other thing,--with an external world. In this way the universality of the predicate comes to signify this relativity--(e.g.) useful, or dangerous; weight or acidity; or again, instinct; are examples of such relative predicates.

The Judgment of Reflection is distinguished from the Qualitative judgment by the circumstance that its predicate is not an immediate or abstract quality, but of such a kind as to exhibit the subject as in relation to something else. When we say, e.g. 'This rose is red.' we regard the subject in its immediate individuality, and without reference to anything else. If, on the other hand, we frame the judgment, 'This plant is medicinal,' we regard the subject, plant, as standing in connexion with something else (the sickness which it cures), by means of its predicate (its medicinality). The case is the same with judgments like: This body is elastic: This instrument is useful: This punishment has a deterrent influence. In every one of these instances the predicate is some category of reflection. They all exhibit an advance beyond the immediate individuality of the subject, but none of them goes so far as to indicate the adequate notion of it. It is in this mode of judgment that ordinary raisonnement luxuriates. The greater the concreteness of the object in question, the more points of view does it offer to reflection; by which however its proper nature or notion is not exhausted.

175.] (1) Firstly then the subject, the individual as individual (in the Singular judgment), is a universal. But (2) secondly, in this relation it is elevated above its singularity. This enlargement is external, due to subjective reflection, and at first is an indefinite number of particulars. (This is seen in the Particular judgment, which is obviously negative as well as positive: the individual is divided in itself: partly it is self-related, partly related to something else.) (3) Thirdly, Some are the universal: particularity is thus enlarged to universality: or universality is modified through the individuality of the subject, and appears as allness Community, the ordinary universality of reflection.

* * * * *

The subject, receiving, as in the Singular judgment, a universal predicate, is carried out beyond its mere individual self. To say, 'This plant is wholesome,' implies not only that this single plant is wholesome, but that some or several are so. We have thus the particular judgment (some plants are wholesome, some men are inventive, &c). By means of particularity the immediate individual comes to lose its independence, and enters into an inter-connexion with something else. Man, as this man, is not this single man alone: he stands beside other men and becomes one in the crowd, just by this means however he belongs to his universal, and is consequently raised.--The particular judgment is as much negative as positive. If only some bodies are elastic, it is evident that the rest are not elastic.

On this fact again depends the advance to the third form of the Reflective judgment, viz. the judgment of allness (all men are mortal, all metals conduct electricity). It is as 'all' that the universal is in the first instance generally encountered by reflection. The individuals form for reflection the foundation, and it is only our subjective action which collects and describes them as 'all.' So far the universal has the aspect of an external fastening, that holds together a number of independent individuals, which have not the least affinity towards it. This semblance of indifference is however unreal: for the universal is the ground and foundation, the root, and substance of the individual. If e.g. we take Caius, Titus, Sempronius, and the other inhabitants of a town or country, the fact that all of them are men is not merely something which they have in common, but their universal or kind, without which these individuals would not be at all. The case is very different with that superficial generality falsely so called, which really means only what attaches, or is common, to all the individuals. It has been remarked, for example, that men, in contradistinction from the lower animals, possess in common the appendage of ear-lobes. It is evident, however, that the absence of these ear-lobes in one man or another would not affect the rest of his being, character, or capacities: whereas it would be nonsense to suppose that Caius, without being a man, would still be brave, learned, &c. The individual man is what he is in particular, only in so far as he is before all things a man as man and in general. And that generality is not something external to, or something in addition to other abstract qualities, or to mere features discovered by reflection. It is what permeates and includes in it everything particular.

176.] The subject being thus likewise characterised as a universal, there is an express identification of subject and predicate, by which at the same time the speciality of the judgment form is deprived of all importance. This unity of the content (the content being the universality which is identical with the negative reflection-in-self of the subject) makes the connexion in judgment a necessary one.

The advance from the reflective judgment of allness to the judgment of necessity is found in our usual modes of thought, when we say that whatever appertains to all, appertains to the species, and is therefore necessary. To say all plants, or all men, is the same thing as to say the plant, or the man.

(γ) Judgment of Necessity.

177.] The Judgment of Necessity, i.e. of the identity of the content in its difference (1), contains, in the predicate, partly the substance or nature of the subject, the concrete universal, the genus; partly, seeing that this universal also contains the specific character as negative, the predicate represents the exclusive essential character, the species. This is the Categorical judgment.

(2) Conformably to their substantiality, the two terms receive the aspect of independent actuality. Their identity is then inward only; and thus the actuality of the one is at the same time not its own, but the being of the other. This is the Hypothetical judgment.

(3) If, in this self-surrender and self-alienation of the notion, its inner identity is at the same time explicitly put, the universal is the genus which is self-identical in its mutually-exclusive individualities. This judgment, which has this universal for both its terms, the one time as a universal, the other time as the circle of its self-excluding particularisation in which the 'either--or' as much as the 'as well as' stands for the genus, is the Disjunctive judgment. Universality, at first as a genus, and now also as the circuit of its species, is thus described and expressly put as a totality.

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The Categorical judgment (such as 'Gold is a metal,' 'The rose is a plant') is the un-mediated judgment of necessity, and finds within the sphere of Essence its parallel in the relation of substance. All things are a Categorical judgment. In other words, they have their substantial nature, forming their fixed and unchangeable substratum. It is only when things are studied from the point of view of their kind, and as with necessity determined by the kind, that the judgment first begins to be real. It betrays a defective logical training to place upon the same level judgments like 'gold is dear,' and judgments like 'gold is a metal.' That 'gold is dear' is a matter of external connexion between it and our wants or inclinations, the costs of obtaining it, and other circumstances. Gold remains the same as it was, though that external reference is altered or removed. Metalleity, on the contrary, constitutes the substantial nature of gold, apart from which it, and all else that is in it, or can be predicated of it, would be unable to subsist. The same is the case if we say, 'Caius is a man.' We express by that, that whatever else he may be, has worth and meaning, only when it corresponds to his substantial nature or manhood.

But even the Categorical judgment is to a certain extent defective. It fails to give due place to the function or element of particularity. Thus 'gold is a metal,' it is true; but so are silver, copper, iron: and metalleity as such has no leanings to any of its particular species. In these circumstances we must advance from the Categorical to the Hypothetical judgment, which may be expressed in the formula: If A is, B is. The present case exhibits the same advance as formerly took place from the relation of substance to the relation of cause. In the Hypothetical judgment the specific character of the content shows itself mediated and dependent on something else: and this is exactly the relation of cause and effect. And if we were to give a general interpretation to the Hypothetical judgment, we should say that it expressly realises the universal in its particularising. This brings us to the third form of the Judgment of Necessity, the Disjunctive judgment. A is either B or C or D. A work of poetic art is either epic or lyric or dramatic. Colour is either yellow or blue or red. The two terms in the Disjunctive judgment are identical. The genus is the sum total of the species, and the sum total of the species is the genus. This unity of the universal and the particular is the notion: and it is the notion which, as we now see, forms the content of the judgment.

(δ) Judgment of the Notion.

178.] The Judgment of the Notion has for its content the notion, the totality in simple form, the universal with its complete speciality. The subject is, (1) in the first place, an individual, which has for its predicate the reflection of the particular existence on its universal; or the judgment states the agreement or disagreement of these two aspects. That is, the predicate is such a term as good, true, correct. This is the Assertory judgment.

Judgments, such as whether an object, action, &c. is good, bad, true, beautiful, &c, are those to which even ordinary language first applies the name of judgment. We should never ascribe judgment to a person who framed positive or negative judgments like, This rose is red, This picture is red, green, dusty, &c.

The Assertory judgment, although rejected by society as out of place when it claims authority on its own showing, has however been made the single and all-essential form of doctrine, even in philosophy, through the influence of the principle of immediate knowledge and faith. In the so-called philosophic works which maintain this principle, we may read hundreds and hundreds of assertions about reason, knowledge, thought, &c. which, now that external authority counts for little, seek to accredit themselves by an endless restatement of the same thesis.

179.] On the part of its at first un-mediated subject, the Assertory judgment does not contain the relation of particular with universal which is expressed in the predicate. This judgment is consequently a mere subjective particularity, and is confronted by a contrary assertion with equal right, or rather want of right. It is therefore at once turned into (2) a Problematical judgment. But when we explicitly attach the objective particularity to the subject and make its speciality the constitutive feature of its existence, the subject (3) then expresses the connexion of that objective particularity with its constitution, i.e. with its genus; and thus expresses what forms the content of the predicate (see § 178). [This (the immediate individuality) house (the genus,) being so and so constituted (particularity,) is good or bad.] This is the Apodictic judgment. All things are a genus (i.e. have a meaning and purpose) in an individual actuality of a particular constitution. And they are finite, because the particular in them may and also may not conform to the universal.

180.] In this manner subject and predicate are each the whole judgment. The immediate constitution of the subject is at first exhibited as the intermediating ground, where the individuality of the actual thing meets with its universality, and in this way as the ground of the judgment. What has been really made explicit is the oneness of subject and predicate, as the notion itself, filling up the empty 'is' of the copula. While its constituent elements are at the same time distinguished as subject and predicate, the notion is put as their unity, as the connexion which serves to intermediate them: in short, as the Syllogism.

(c) The Syllogism.

181.] The Syllogism brings the notion and the judgment into one. It is notion,--being the simple identity into which the distinctions of form in the judgment have retired. It is judgment,--because it is at the same time set in reality, that is, put in the distinction of its terms. The Syllogism is the reasonable, and everything reasonable.

Even the ordinary theories represent the Syllogism to be the form of reasonableness, but only a subjective form; and no inter-connexion whatever is shown to exist between it and any other reasonable content, such as a reasonable principle, a reasonable action, idea, &c. The name of reason is much and often heard, and appealed to: but no one thinks of explaining its specific character, or saying what it is,--least of all that it has any connexion with Syllogism. But formal Syllogism really presents what is reasonable in such a reasonless way that it has nothing to do with any reasonable matter. But as the matter in question can only be rational in virtue of the same quality by which thought is reason, it can be made so by the form only: and that form is Syllogism. And what is a Syllogism but an explicit putting, i.e. realising of the notion, at first in form only, as stated above? Accordingly the Syllogism is the essential ground of whatever is true: and at the present stage the definition of the Absolute is that it is the Syllogism, or stating the principle in a proposition: Everything is a Syllogism. Everything is a notion, the existence of which is the differentiation of its members or functions, so that the universal nature of the Notion gives itself external reality by means of particularity, and thereby, and as a negative reflection-into-self, makes itself an individual. Or, conversely: the actual thing is an individual, which by means of particularity rises to universality and makes itself identical with itself.--The actual is one: but it is also the divergence from each other of the constituent elements of the notion; and the Syllogism represents the orbit of intermediation of its elements, by which it realises its unity.

The Syllogism, like the notion and the judgment, is usually described as a form merely of our subjective thinking. The Syllogism, it is said, is the process of proving the judgment. And certainly the judgment does in every case refer us to the Syllogism. The step from the one to the other however is not brought about by our subjective action, but by the judgment itself which puts itself as Syllogism, and in the conclusion returns to the unity of the notion. The precise point by which we pass to the Syllogism is found in the Apodictic judgment. In it we have an individual which by means of its qualities connects itself with its universal or notion. Here we see the particular becoming the mediating mean between the individual and the universal. This gives the fundamental form of the Syllogism, the gradual specification of which, formally considered, consists in the fact that universal and individual also occupy this place of mean. This again paves the way for the passage from subjectivity to objectivity.

182.] In the 'immediate' Syllogism the several aspects of the notion confront one another abstractly, and stand in an external relation only. We have first the two extremes, which are Individuality and Universality; and then the notion, as the mean for locking the two together, is in like manner only abstract Particularity. In this way the extremes are put as independent and without affinity either towards one another or towards their mean. Such a Syllogism contains reason, but in utter notionlessness,--the formal Syllogism of Understanding. In it the subject is coupled with an other character; or the universal by this mediation subsumes a subject external to it. In the rational Syllogism, on the contrary, the subject is by means of the mediation coupled with itself. In this manner it first comes to be a subject: or, in the subject we have the first germ of the rational Syllogism.

In the following examination, the Syllogism of Understanding, according to the interpretation usually put upon it, is expressed in its subjective shape; the shape which it has when we are said to make such Syllogisms. And it really is only a subjective syllogising. Such Syllogism however has also an objective meaning; it expresses only the finitude of things, but does so in the specific mode which the form has here reached. In the case of finite things their subjectivity, being only thinghood, is separable from their properties or their particularity, but also separable from their universality: not only when the universality is the bare quality of the thing and its external inter-connexion with other things, but also when it is its genus and notion.

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On the above-mentioned theory of syllogism, as the rational form par excellence, reason has been defined as the faculty of syllogising, whilst understanding is defined as the faculty of forming notions. We might object to the conception on which this depends, and according to which the mind is merely a sum of forces or faculties existing side by side. But apart from that objection, we may observe in regard to the parallelism of understanding with the notion, as well as of reason with syllogism, that the notion is as little a mere category of the understanding as the syllogism is without qualification definable as rational. For, in the first place, what the Formal Logic usually examines in its theory of syllogism, is really nothing but the mere syllogism of understanding, which has no claim to the honour of being made a form of rationality, still less to be held as the embodiment of all reason. The notion, in the second place, so far from being a form of understanding, owes its degradation to such a place entirely to the influence of that abstract mode of thought. And it is not unusual to draw such a distinction between a notion of understanding and a notion of reason. The distinction however does not mean that notions are of two kinds. It means that our own action often stops short at the mere negative and abstract form of the notion, when we might also have proceeded to apprehend the notion in its true nature, as at once positive and concrete. It is e.g. the mere understanding, which thinks liberty to be the abstract contrary of necessity, whereas the adequate rational notion of liberty requires the element of necessity to be merged in it. Similarly the definition of God, given by what is called Deism, is merely the mode in which the understanding thinks God: whereas Christianity, to which He is known as the Trinity, contains the rational notion of God.

(α) Qualitative Syllogism.

183.] The first syllogism is a syllogism of definite being,--a Qualitative Syllogism, as stated in the last paragraph. Its form (1) is I--P--U: i.e. a subject as Individual is coupled (concluded) with a Universal character by means of a (Particular) quality.

Of course the subject (terminus minor) has other characteristics besides individuality, just as the other extreme (the predicate of the conclusion, or terminus major) has other characteristics than mere universality. But here the interest turns only on the characteristics through which these terms make a syllogism.

The syllogism of existence is a syllogism of understanding merely, at least in so far as it leaves the individual, the particular, and the universal to confront each other quite abstractly. In this syllogism the notion is at the very height of self-estrangement. We have in it an immediately individual thing as subject: next some one particular aspect or property attaching to this subject is selected, and by means of this property the individual turns out to be a universal. Thus we may say, This rose is red: Red is a colour: Therefore, this rose is a coloured object. It is this aspect of the syllogism which the common logics mainly treat of. There was a time when the syllogism was regarded as an absolute rule for all cognition, and when a scientific statement was not held to be valid until it had been shown to follow from a process of syllogism. At present, on the contrary, the different forms of the syllogism are met nowhere save in the manuals of Logic; and an acquaintance with them is considered a piece of mere pedantry, of no further use either in practical life or in science. It would indeed be both useless and pedantic to parade the whole machinery of the formal syllogism on every occasion. And yet the several forms of syllogism make themselves constantly felt in our cognition. If any one, when awaking on a winter morning, hears the creaking of the carriages on the street, and is thus led to conclude that it has frozen hard in the night, he has gone through a syllogistic operation:--an operation which is every day repeated under the greatest variety of conditions. The interest, therefore, ought at least not to be less in becoming expressly conscious of this daily action of our thinking selves, than confessedly belongs to the study of the functions of organic life, such as the processes of digestion, assimilation, respiration, or even the processes and structures of the nature around us. We do not, however, for a moment deny that a study of Logic is no more necessary to teach us how to draw correct conclusions, than a previous study of anatomy and physiology is required in order to digest or breathe.

Aristotle was the first to observe and describe the different forms, or, as they are called, figures of syllogism, in their subjective meaning: and he performed his work so exactly and surely, that no essential addition has ever been required. But while sensible of the value of what he has thus done, we must not forget that the forms of the syllogism of understanding, and of finite thought altogether, are not what Aristotle has made use of in his properly philosophical investigations. (See § 189.)

184.] This syllogism is completely contingent (α) in the matter of its terms. The Middle Term, being an abstract particularity, is nothing but any quality whatever of the subject: but the subject, being immediate and thus empirically concrete, has several others, and could therefore be coupled with exactly as many other universalities as it possesses single qualities. Similarly a single particularity may have various characters in itself, so that the same medius terminus would serve to connect the subject with several different universals.

It is more a caprice of fashion, than a sense of its incorrectness, which has led to the disuse of ceremonious syllogising. This and the following section indicate the uselessness of such syllogising for the ends of truth.

The point of view indicated in the paragraph shows how this style of syllogism can 'demonstrate' (as the phrase goes) the most diverse conclusions. All that is requisite is to find a medius terminus from which the transition can be made to the proposition sought. Another medius terminus would enable us to demonstrate something else, and even the contrary of the last. And the more concrete an object is, the more aspects it has, which may become such middle terms. To determine which of these aspects is more essential than another, again, requires a further syllogism of this kind, which fixing on the single quality can with equal ease discover in it some aspect or consideration by which it can make good its claims to be considered necessary and important.

Little as we usually think on the Syllogism of Understanding in the daily business of life, it never ceases to play its part there. In a civil suit, for instance, it is the duty of the advocate to give due force to the legal titles which make in favour of his client. In logical language, such a legal title is nothing but a middle term. Diplomatic transactions afford another illustration of the same, when, for instance, different powers lay claim to one and the same territory. In such a case the laws of inheritance, the geographical position of the country, the descent and the language of its inhabitants, or any other ground, may be emphasised as a medius terminus.

185.] (ß) This syllogism, if it is contingent in point of its terms, is no less contingent in virtue of the form of relation which is found in it. In the syllogism, according to its notion, truth lies in connecting two distinct things by a Middle Term in which they are one. But connexions of the extremes with the Middle Term (the so-called premisses, the major and the minor premiss) are in the case of this syllogism much more decidedly immediate connexions. In other words, they have not a proper Middle Term.

This contradiction in the syllogism exhibits a new case of the infinite progression. Each of the premisses evidently calls for a fresh syllogism to demonstrate it: and as the new syllogism has two immediate premisses, like its predecessor, the demand for proof is doubled at every step, and repeated without end.

186.] On account of its importance for experience, there has been here noted a defect in the syllogism, to which in this form absolute correctness had been ascribed. This defect however must lose itself in the further specification of the syllogism. For we are now within the sphere of the notion; and here therefore, as well as in the judgment, the opposite character is not merely present potentially, but is explicit. To work out the gradual specification of the syllogism, therefore, there need only be admitted and accepted what is at each step realised by the syllogism itself.

Through the immediate syllogism I--P--U, the Individual is mediated (through a Particular) with the Universal, and in this conclusion put as a universal. It follows that the individual subject, becoming itself a universal, serves to unite the two extremes, and to form their ground of intermediation. This gives the second figure of the syllogism, (2) U--I--P. It expresses the truth of the first; it shows in other words that the intermediation has taken place in the individual, and is thus something contingent.

187.] The universal, which in the first conclusion was specified through individuality, passes over into the second figure and there now occupies the place that belonged to the immediate subject. In the second figure it is concluded with the particular. By this conclusion therefore the universal is explicitly put as particular--and is now made to mediate between the two extremes, the places of which are occupied by the two others (the particular and the individual). This is the third figure of the syllogism: (3) P--U--I.

What are called the Figures of the syllogism (being three in number, for the fourth is a superfluous and even absurd addition of the Moderns to the three known to Aristotle) are in the usual mode of treatment put side by side, without the slightest thought of showing their necessity, and still less of pointing out their import and value. No wonder then that the figures have been in later times treated as an empty piece of formalism. They have however a very real significance, derived from the necessity for every function or characteristic element of the notion to become the whole itself, and to stand as mediating ground.--But to find out what 'moods' of the propositions (such as whether they may be universals, or negatives) are needed to enable us to draw a correct conclusion in the different figures, is a mechanical inquiry, which its purely mechanical nature and its intrinsic meaninglessness have very properly consigned to oblivion. And Aristotle would have been the last person to give any countenance to those who wish to attach importance to such inquiries or to the syllogism of understanding in general. It is true that he described these, as well as numerous other forms of mind and nature, and that he examined and expounded their specialities. But in his metaphysical theories, as well as his theories of nature and mind, he was very far from taking as basis, or criterion, the syllogistic forms of the 'understanding.' Indeed it might be maintained that not one of these theories would ever have come into existence, or been allowed to exist, if it had been compelled to submit to the laws of understanding. With all the descriptiveness and analytic faculty which Aristotle after his fashion is substantially strong in, his ruling principle is always the speculative notion; and that syllogistic of 'understanding' to which he first gave such a definite expression is never allowed to intrude in the higher domain of philosophy.

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In their objective sense, the three figures of the syllogism declare that everything rational is manifested as a triple syllogism; that is to say, each one of the members takes in turn the place of the extremes, as well as of the mean which reconciles them. Such, for example, is the case with the three branches of philosophy; the Logical Idea, Nature, and Mind. As we first see them, Nature is the middle term which links the others together. Nature, the totality immediately before us, unfolds itself into the two extremes of the Logical Idea and Mind. But Mind is Mind only when it is mediated through nature. Then, in the second place, Mind, which we know as the principle of individuality, or as the actualising principle, is the mean; and Nature and the Logical Idea are the extremes. It is Mind which cognises the Logical Idea in Nature and which thus raises Nature to its essence. In the third place again the Logical Idea itself becomes the mean: it is the absolute substance both of mind and of nature, the universal and all-pervading principle. These are the members of the Absolute Syllogism.

188.] In the round by which each constituent function assumes successively the place of mean and of the two extremes, their specific difference from each other has been superseded. In this form, where there is no distinction between its constituent elements, the syllogism at first has for its connective link equality, or the external identity of understanding. This is the Quantitative or Mathematical Syllogism: if two things are equal to a third, they are equal to one another.

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Everybody knows that this Quantitative syllogism appears as a mathematical axiom, which like other axioms is said to be a principle that does not admit of proof, and which indeed being self-evident does not require such proof. These mathematical axioms however are really nothing but logical propositions, which, so far as they enunciate definite and particular thoughts, are deducible from the universal and self-characterising thought. To deduce them, is to give their proof. That is true of the Quantitative syllogism, to which mathematics gives the rank of an axiom. It is really the proximate result of the qualitative or immediate syllogism. Finally, the Quantitative syllogism is the syllogism in utter formlessness. The difference between the terms which is required by the notion is suspended. Extraneous circumstances alone can decide what propositions are to be premisses here: and therefore in applying this syllogism we make a pre-supposition of what has been elsewhere proved and established.

189.] Two results follow as to the form. In the first place, each constituent element has taken the place and performed the function of the mean and therefore of the whole, thus implicitly losing its partial and abstract character (§ 182 and § 184); secondly, the mediation has been completed (§ 185), though the completion too is only implicit, that is, only as a circle of mediations which in turn pre-suppose each other. In the first figure I--P--U the two premisses I is P and P is U are yet without a mediation. The former premiss is mediated in the third, the latter in the second figure. But each of these two figures, again, for the mediation of its premisses pre-supposes the two others.

In consequence of this, the mediating unity of the notion must be put no longer as an abstract particularity, but as a developed unity of the individual and universal--and in the first place a reflected unity of these elements. That is to say, the individuality gets at the same time the character of universality. A mean of this kind gives the Syllogism of Reflection.

(β) Syllogism of Reflection.

190.] If the mean, in the first place, be not only an abstract particular character of the subject, but at the same time all the individual concrete subjects which possess that character, but possess it only along with others, (1) we have the Syllogism of Allness. The major premiss, however, which has for its subject the particular character, the terminus medius, as allness, pre-supposes the very conclusion which ought rather to have pre-supposed it. It rests therefore (2) on an Induction, in which the mean is given by the complete list of individuals as such,--a, b, c, d, &c. On account of the disparity, however, between universality and an immediate and empirical individuality, the list can never be complete. Induction therefore rests upon (3) Analogy. The middle term of Analogy is an individual, which however is understood as equivalent to its essential universality, its genus, or essential character.--The first syllogism for its intermediation turns us over to the second, and the second turns us over to the third. But the third no less demands an intrinsically determinate Universality, or an individuality as type of the genus, after the round of the forms of external connexion between individuality and universality has been run through in the figures of the Reflective Syllogism.

By the Syllogism of Allness the defect in the first form of the Syllogism of Understanding, noted in § 184, is remedied, but only to give rise to a new defect. This defect is that the major premiss itself pre-supposes what really ought to be the conclusion, and pre-supposes it as what is thus an 'immediate' proposition. All men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal: All metals conduct electricity, therefore e.g. copper does so. In order to enunciate these major premisses, which when they say 'all' mean the 'immediate' individuals and are properly intended to be empirical propositions, it is requisite that the propositions about the individual man Caius, or the individual metal copper, should previously have been ascertained to be correct. Everybody feels not merely the pedantry, but the unmeaning formalism of such syllogisms as: All men are mortal, Caius is a man, therefore Caius is mortal.

The syllogism of Allness hands us over to the syllogism of Induction, in which the individuals form the coupling mean. 'All metals conduct electricity,' is an empirical proposition derived from experiments made with each of the individual metals. We thus get the syllogism of Induction I in the following shape P--I--U. I . . .

Gold is a metal: silver is a metal: so is copper, lead, &c. This is the major premiss. Then comes the minor premiss: All these bodies conduct electricity; and hence results the conclusion, that all metals conduct electricity. The point which brings about a combination here is individuality in the shape of allness. But this syllogism once more hands us over to another syllogism. Its mean is constituted by the complete list of the individuals. That pre-supposes that over a certain region observation and experience are completed. But the things in question here are individuals; and so again we are landed in the progression ad infinitum (i, i, i, &c.). In other words, in no Induction can we ever exhaust the individuals. The 'all metals,' 'all plants,' of our statements, mean only all the metals, all the plants, which we have hitherto become acquainted with. Every Induction is consequently imperfect. One and the other observation, many it may be, have been made: but all the cases, all the individuals, have not been observed. By this defect of Induction we are led on to Analogy. In the syllogism of Analogy we conclude from the fact that some things of a certain kind possess a certain quality, that the same quality is possessed by other things of the same kind. It would be a syllogism of Analogy, for example, if we said: In all planets hitherto discovered this has been found to be the law of motion, consequently a newly discovered planet will probably move according to the same law. In the experiential sciences Analogy deservedly occupies a high place, and has led to results of the highest importance. Analogy is the instinct of reason, creating an anticipation that this or that characteristic, which experience has discovered, has its root in the inner nature or kind of an object, and arguing on the faith of that anticipation. Analogy it should be added may be superficial or it may be thorough. It would certainly be a very bad analogy to argue that since the man Caius is a scholar, and Titus also is a man, Titus will probably be a scholar too: and it would be bad because a man's learning is not an unconditional consequence of his manhood. Superficial analogies of this kind however are very frequently met with. It is often argued, for example: The earth is a celestial body, so is the moon, and it is therefore in all probability inhabited as well as the earth. The analogy is not one whit better than that previously mentioned. That the earth is inhabited does not depend on its being a celestial body, but in other conditions, such as the presence of an atmosphere, and of water in connexion with the atmosphere, &c.: and these are precisely the conditions which the moon, so far as we know, does not possess. What has in modern times been called the Philosophy of Nature consists principally in a frivolous play with empty and external analogies, which, however, claim to be considered profound results. The natural consequence has been to discredit the philosophical study of nature.

(γ) Syllogism of Necessity.

191.] The Syllogism of Necessity, if we look to its purely abstract characteristics or terms, has for its mean the Universal in the same way as the Syllogism of Reflection has the Individual, the latter being in the second, and the former in the third figure (§ 187). The Universal is expressly put as in its very nature intrinsically determinate. In the first place (1) the Particular, meaning by the particular the specific genus or species, is the term for mediating the extremes--as is done in the Categorical syllogism. (2) The same office is performed by the Individual, taking the individual as immediate being, so that it is as much mediating as mediated:--as happens in the Hypothetical syllogism. (3) We have also the mediating Universal explicitly put as a totality of its particular members, and as a single particular, or exclusive individuality:--which happens in the Disjunctive syllogism. It is one and the same universal which is in these terms of the Disjunctive syllogism; they are only different forms for expressing it.

192.] The syllogism has been taken conformably to the distinctions which it contains; and the general result of the course of their evolution has been to show that these differences work out their own abolition and destroy the notion's outwardness to its own self. And, as we see, in the first place, (1) each of the dynamic elements has proved itself the systematic whole of these elements, in short a whole syllogism,--they are consequently implicitly identical. In the second place, (2) the negation of their distinctions and of the mediation of one through another constitutes independency; so that it is one and the same universal which is in these forms, and which is in this way also explicitly put as their identity. In this ideality of its dynamic elements, the syllogistic process may be described as essentially involving the negation of the characters through which its course runs, as being a mediative process through the suspension of mediation,--as coupling the subject not with another, but with a suspended other, in one word, with itself.

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In the common logic, the doctrine of syllogism is supposed to conclude the first part, or what is called the 'elementary' theory. It is followed by the second part, the doctrine of Method, which proposes to show how a body of scientific knowledge is created by applying to existing objects the forms of thought discussed in the elementary part. Whence these objects originate, and what the thought of objectivity generally speaking implies, are questions to which the Logic of Understanding vouchsafes no further answer. It believes thought to be a mere subjective and formal activity, and the objective fact, which confronts thought, to have a separate and permanent being. But this dualism is a half-truth: and there is a want of intelligence in the procedure which at once accepts, without inquiring into their origin, the categories of subjectivity and objectivity. Both of them, subjectivity as well as objectivity, are certainly thoughts--even specific thoughts: which must show themselves founded on the universal and self-determining thought. This has here been done--at least for subjectivity. We have recognised it, or the notion subjective (which includes the notion proper, the judgment, and the syllogism) as the dialectical result of the first two main stages of the Logical Idea, Being and Essence. To say that the notion is subjective and subjective only, is so far quite correct: for the notion certainly is subjectivity itself. Not less subjective than the notion are also the judgment and syllogism: and these forms, together with the so-called Laws of Thought (the Laws of Identity, Difference, and Sufficient Ground), make up the contents of what is called the 'Elements' in the common logic. But we may go a step further. This subjectivity, with its functions of notion, judgment, and syllogism, is not like a set of empty compartments which has to get filled from without by separately-existing objects. It would be truer to say that it is subjectivity itself which, as dialectical, breaks through its own barriers and opens out into objectivity by means of the syllogism.

193.] This 'realisation' of the notion,--a realisation in which the universal is this one totality withdrawn back into itself (of which the different members are no less the whole, and) which has given itself a character of 'immediate' unity by merging the mediation:--this realisation of the notion is the Object.

I his transition from the Subject, the notion in general, and especially the syllogism, to the Object, may, at the first glance, appear strange, particularly if we look only at the Syllogism of Understanding, and suppose syllogising to be only an act of consciousness. But that strangeness imposes on us no obligation to seek to make the transition plausible to the image-loving conception. The only question which can be considered is, whether our usual conception of what is called an 'object' approximately corresponds to the object as here described. By 'object' is commonly understood not an abstract being, or an existing thing merely, or any sort of actuality, but something independent, concrete, and self-complete, this completeness being the totality of the notion. That the object (Objekt) is also an object to us (Gegenstand) and is external to something else, will be more precisely seen, when it puts itself in contrast with the subjective. At present, as that into which the notion has passed from its mediation, it is only immediate object and nothing more, just as the notion is not describable as subjective, previous to the subsequent contrast with objectivity.

Further, the Object in general is the one total, in itself still unspecified, the Objective World as a whole, God, the Absolute Object. The object, however, has also difference attaching to it: it falls into pieces, indefinite in their multiplicity (making an objective world); and each of these individualised parts is also an object, an intrinsically concrete, complete, and independent existence.

Objectivity has been compared with being, existence, and actuality; and so too the transition to existence and actuality (not to being, for it is the primary and quite abstract immediate) maybe compared with the transition to objectivity. The ground from which existence proceeds, and the reflective correlation which is merged in actuality, are nothing but the as yet imperfectly realised notion. They are only abstract aspects of it,--the ground being its merely essence-bred unity, and the correlation only the connexion of real sides which are supposed to have only self-reflected being. The notion is the unity of the two; and the object is not a merely essence-like, but inherently universal unity, not only containing real distinctions, but containing them as totalities in itself.

It is evident that in all these transitions there is a further purpose than merely to show the indissoluble connexion between the notion or thought and being. It has been more than once remarked that being is nothing more than simple self-relation, and this meagre category is certainly implied in the notion, or even in thought. But the meaning of these transitions is not to accept characteristics or categories, as only implied;--a fault which mars even the Ontological argument for God's existence, when it is stated that being is one among realities. What such a transition does, is to take the notion, as it ought to be primarily characterised per se as a notion, with which this remote abstraction of being, or eve of objectivity, has as yet nothing to do, and looking at its specific character as a notional character alone, to see when and whether it passes over into a form which is different from the character as it belongs to the notion and appears in it.

If the Object, the product of this transition, be brought into relation with the notion, which, so far as its special form is concerned, has vanished in it, we may give a correct expression to the result, by saying that notion or, if it be preferred, subjectivity and object are implicitly the same. But it is equally correct to say that they are different. In short, the two modes of expression are equally correct and incorrect. The true state of the case can be presented in no expressions of this kind. The 'implicit' is an abstraction, still more partial and inadequate than the notion itself, of which the inadequacy is upon the whole suspended, by suspending itself to the object with its opposite inadequacy. Hence that implicitness also must, by its negation, give itself the character of explicitness. As in every case, speculative identity is not the above-mentioned triviality of an implicit identity of subject and object. This has been said often enough. Yet it could not be too often repeated, if the intention were really to put an end to the stale and purely malicious misconception in regard to this identity:--of which however there can be no reasonable expectation.

Looking at that unity in a quite general way, and raising no objection to the one-sided form of its implicitness, we find it as the well-known pre-supposition of the ontological proof for the existence of God. There, it appears as supreme perfection. Anselm, in whom the notable suggestion of this proof first occurs, no doubt originally restricted himself to the question whether a certain content was in our thinking only. His words are briefly these: 'Certe id quo majus cogitari nequit, non potest esse in intellectu solo. Si enim vel in solo intellectu est, potest cogitari esse et in re: quod majus est. Si ergo id quo majus cogitari non potest, est in solo intellectu; id ipsum quo majus cogitari non potest, est quo majus cogitari potest. Sed certe hoc esse non potest.' (Certainly that, than which nothing greater can be thought, cannot be in the intellect alone. For even if it is in the intellect alone, it can also be thought to exist in fact: and that is greater. If then that, than which nothing greater can be thought, is in the intellect alone; then the very thing, which is greater than anything which can be thought, can be exceeded in thought. But certainly this is impossible.) The same unity received a more objective expression in Descartes, Spinoza and others: while the theory of immediate certitude or faith presents it, on the contrary, in somewhat the same subjective aspect as Anselm. These Intuitionalists hold that in our consciousness the attribute of being is indissolubly associated with the conception of God. The theory of faith brings even the conception of external finite things under the same inseparable nexus between the consciousness and the being of them, on the ground that perception presents them conjoined with the attribute of existence: and in so saying, it is no doubt correct. It would be utterly absurd, however, to suppose that the association in consciousness between existence and our conception of finite things is of the same description as the association between existence and the conception of God. To do so would be to forget that finite things are changeable and transient, i.e. that existence is associated with them for a season, but that the association is neither eternal nor inseparable. Speaking in the phraseology of the categories before us, we may say that, to call a thing finite, means that its objective existence is not in harmony with the thought of it, with its universal calling, its kind and its end. Anselm, consequently, neglecting any such conjunction as occurs in finite things, has with good reason pronounced that only to be the Perfect which exists not merely in a subjective, but also in an objective mode. It does no good to put on airs against the Ontological proof, as it is called, and against Anselm thus denning the Perfect. The argument is one latent in every unsophisticated mind, and it recurs in every philosophy, even against its wish and without its knowledge--as may be seen in the theory of immediate belief.

The real fault in the argumentation of Anselm is one which is chargeable on Descartes and Spinoza, as well as on the theory of immediate knowledge. It is this. This unity which is enunciated as the supreme perfection or, it may be, subjectively, as the true knowledge, is pre-supposed, i.e. it is assumed only as potential. This identity, abstract as it thus appears, between the two categories may be at once met and opposed by their diversity; and this was the very answer given to Anselm long ago. In short, the conception and existence of the finite is set in antagonism to the infinite; for, as previously remarked, the finite possesses objectivity of such a kind as is at once incongruous with and different from the end or aim, its essence and notion. Or, the finite is such a conception and in such a way subjective, that it does not involve existence. This objection and this antithesis are got over, only by showing the finite to be untrue and these categories in their separation to be inadequate and null. Their identity is thus seen to be one into which they spontaneously pass over, and in which they are reconciled.

B.--THE OBJECT.

194.] The Object is immediate being, because insensible to difference, which in it has suspended itself. It is, further, a totality in itself, whilst at the same time (as this identity is only the implicit identity of its dynamic elements) it is equally indifferent to its immediate unity. It thus breaks up into distinct parts, each of which is itself the totality. Hence the object is the absolute contradiction between a complete independence of the multiplicity, and the equally complete non-independence of the different pieces.

The definition, which states that the Absolute is the Object, is most definitely implied in the Leibnizian Monad. The Monads are each an object, but an object implicitly 'representative,' indeed the total representation of the world. In the simple unity of the Monad, all difference is merely ideal, not independent or real. Nothing from without comes into the monad: It is the whole notion in itself, only distinguished by its own greater or less development. None the less, this simple totality parts into the absolute multeity of differences, each becoming an independent monad. In the monad of monads, and the Pre-established Harmony of their inward developments, these substances are in like manner again reduced to 'ideality' and unsubstantiality. The philosophy of Leibnitz, therefore, represents contradiction in its complete development.

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As Fichte in modern times has especially and with justice insisted, the theory which regards the Absolute or God as the Object and there stops, expresses the point of view taken by superstition and slavish fear. No doubt God is the Object, and, indeed, the Object out and out, confronted with which our particular or subjective opinions and desires have no truth and no validity. As absolute object however, God does not therefore take up the position of a dark and hostile power over against subjectivity. He rather involves it as a vital element in Himself. Such also is the meaning of the Christian doctrine, according to which God has willed that all men should be saved and all attain blessedness. The salvation and the blessedness of men are attained when they come to feel themselves at one with God, so that God, on the other hand, ceases to be for them mere object, and, in that way, an object of fear and terror, as was especially the case with the religious consciousness of the Romans. But God in the Christian religion is also known as Love, because in His Son, who is one with Him, He has revealed Himself to men as a man amongst men, and thereby redeemed them. All which is only another way of saying that the antithesis of subjective and objective is implicitly overcome, and that it is our affair to participate in this redemption by laying aside our immediate subjectivity (putting off the old Adam), and learning to know God as our true and essential self.

Just as religion and religious worship consist in overcoming the antithesis of subjectivity and objectivity, so science too and philosophy have no other task than to overcome this antithesis by the medium of thought. The aim of knowledge is to divest the objective world that stands opposed to us of its strangeness, and, as the phrase is, to find ourselves at home in it: which means no more than to trace the objective world back to the notion,--to our innermost self. We may learn from the present discussion the mistake of regarding the antithesis of subjectivity and objectivity as an abstract and permanent one. The two are wholly dialectical. The notion is at first only subjective: but without the assistance of any foreign material or stuff it proceeds, in obedience to its own action, to objectify itself. So, too, the object is not rigid and processless. Its process is to show itself as what is at the same time subjective, and thus form the step onwards to the idea. Any one who, from want of familiarity with the categories of subjectivity and objectivity, seeks to retain them in their abstraction, will find that the isolated categories slip through his fingers before he is aware, and that he says the exact contrary of what he wanted to say.

(2) Objectivity contains the three forms of Mechanism, Chemism, and Teleology. The object of mechanical type is the immediate and undifferentiated object. No doubt it contains difference, but the different pieces stand, as it were, without affinity to each other, and their connexion is only extraneous. In chemism, on the contrary, the object exhibits an essential tendency to differentiation, in such a way that the objects are what they are only by their relation to each other: this tendency to difference constitutes their quality. The third type of objectivity, the teleological relation, is the unity of mechanism and chemism. Design, like the mechanical object, is a self-contained totality, enriched however by the principle of differentiation which came to the fore in chemism, and thus referring itself to the object that stands over against it. Finally, it is the realisation of design which forms the transition to the Idea.

(a) Mechanism.

196.] The object (1) in its immediacy is the notion only potentially; the notion as subjective is primarily outside it; and all its specific character is imposed from without. As a unity of differents, therefore, it is a composite, an aggregate; and its capacity of acting on anything else continues to be an external relation. This is Formal Mechanism.--Notwithstanding, and in this connexion and non-independence, the objects remain independent and offer resistance, external to each other.

Pressure and impact are examples of mechanical relations. Our knowledge is said to be mechanical or by rote, when the words have no meaning for us, but continue external to sense, conception, thought; and when, being similarly external to each other, they form a meaningless sequence. Conduct, piety, &c. are in the same way mechanical, when a man's behaviour is settled for him by ceremonial laws, by a spiritual adviser, &c.; in short, when his own mind and will are not in his actions, which in this way are extraneous to himself.

* * * * *

Mechanism, the first form of objectivity, is also the category which primarily offers itself to reflection, as it examines the objective world. It is also the category beyond which reflection seldom goes. It is, however, a shallow and superficial mode of observation, one that cannot carry us through in connexion with Nature and still less in connexion with the world of Mind. In Nature it is only the veriest abstract relations of matter in its inert masses which obey the law of mechanism. On the contrary the phenomena and operations of the province to which the term 'physical' in its narrower sense is applied, such as the phenomena of light, heat, magnetism, and electricity, cannot be explained by any mere mechanical processes, such as pressure, impact, displacement of parts, and the like. Still less satisfactory is it to transfer these categories and apply them in the field of organic nature; at least if it be our aim to understand the specific features of that field, such as the growth and nourishment of plants, or, it may be, even animal sensation. It is at any rate a very deep-seated, and perhaps the main, defect of modern researches into nature, that, even where other and higher categories than those of mere mechanism are in operation, they still stick obstinately to the mechanical laws; although they thus conflict with the testimony of unbiassed perception, and foreclose the gate to an-adequate knowledge of nature. But even in considering the formations in the world of Mind, the mechanical theory has been repeatedly invested with an authority which it has no right to. Take as an instance the remark that man consists of soul and body. In this language, the two things stand each self-subsistent, and associated only from without. Similarly we find the soul regarded as a mere group of forces and faculties, subsisting independently side by side.

Thus decidedly must we reject the mechanical mode of inquiry when it comes forward and arrogates to itself the place of rational cognition in general, and seeks to get mechanism accepted as an absolute category. But we must not on that account forget expressly to vindicate for mechanism the right and import of a general logical category. It would be, therefore, a mistake to restrict it to the special physical department from which it derives its name. There is no harm done, for example, in directing attention to mechanical actions, such as that of gravity, the lever, &c, even in departments, notably in physics and in physiology, beyond the range of mechanics proper. It must however be remembered, that within these spheres the laws of mechanism cease to be final or decisive, and sink, as it were, to a subservient position. To which may be added, that, in Nature, when the higher or organic functions are in any way checked or disturbed in their normal efficiency, the otherwise subordinate category of mechanism is immediately seen to take the upper hand. Thus a sufferer from indigestion feels pressure on the stomach, after partaking of certain food in slight quantity; whereas those whose digestive organs are sound remain free from the sensation, although they have eaten as much. The same phenomenon occurs in the general feeling of heaviness in the limbs, experienced in bodily indisposition. Even in the world of Mind, mechanism has its place; though there, too, it is a subordinate one. We are right in speaking of mechanical memory, and all sorts of mechanical operations, such as reading, writing, playing on musical instruments, &c. In memory, indeed, the mechanical quality of the action is essential: a circumstance, the neglect of which has not unfrequently caused great harm in the training of the young, from the misapplied zeal of modern educationalists for the freedom of intelligence. It would betray bad psychology, however, to have recourse to mechanism for an explanation of the nature of memory, and to apply mechanical laws straight off to the soul. The mechanical feature in memory lies merely in the fact that certain signs, tones, &c. are apprehended in their purely external association, and then reproduced in this association, without attention being expressly directed to their meaning and inward association. To become acquainted with these conditions of mechanical memory requires no further study of mechanics, nor would that study tend at all to advance the special inquiry of psychology.

196.] The want of stability in itself which allows the object to suffer violence, is possessed by it (see preceding §) only in so far as it has a certain stability. Now as the object is implicitly invested with the character of notion, the one of these characteristics is not merged into its other; but the object, through the negation of itself (its lack of independence), closes with itself, and not till it so closes, is it independent. Thus at the same time in distinction from the outwardness, and negativing that outwardness in its independence, does this independence form a negative unity with self,--Centrality (subjectivity). So conceived, the object itself has direction and reference towards the external. But this external object is similarly central in itself, and being so, is no less only referred towards the other centre; so that it no less has its centrality in the other. This is (2) Mechanism with Affinity (with bias, or 'difference'), and may be illustrated by gravitation, appetite, social instinct, &c.

197.] This relationship, when fully carried out, forms a syllogism. In that syllogism the immanent negativity, as the central individuality of an object, (abstract centre,) relates itself to non-independent objects, as the other extreme, by a mean which unites the centrality with the non-independence of the objects, (relative centre.) This is (3) Absolute Mechanism.

198.] The syllogism thus indicated (I--P--U) is a triad of syllogisms. The wrong individuality of non-independent objects, in which formal Mechanism is at home, is, by reason of that non-independence, no less universality, though it be only external. Hence these objects also form the mean between the absolute and the relative centre (the form of syllogism being U--I--P): for it is by this want of independence that those two are kept asunder and made extremes, as well as related to one another. Similarly absolute centrality, as the permanently-underlying universal substance (illustrated by the gravity which continues identical), which as pure negativity equally includes individuality in it, is what mediates between the relative centre and the non-independent objects (the form of syllogism being P--U--I). It does so no less essentially as a disintegrating force, in its character of immanent individuality, than in virtue of universality, acting as an identical bond of union and tranquil self-containedness.

Like the solar system, so for example in the practical sphere the state is a system of three syllogisms. (1) The Individual or person, through his particularity or physical or mental needs (which when carried out to their full development give civil society), is coupled with the universal, i.e. with society, law, right, government. (2) The will or action of the individuals is the intermediating force which procures for these needs satisfaction in society, in law, &c, and which gives to society, law, &c. their fulfilment and actualisation. (3) But the universal, that is to say the state, government, and law, is the permanent underlying mean in which the individuals and their satisfaction have and receive their fulfilled reality, inter-mediation, and persistence. Each of the functions of the notion, as it is brought by intermediation to coalesce with the other extreme, is brought into union with itself and produces itself: which production is self-preservation.--It is only by the nature of this triple coupling, by this triad of syllogisms with the name termini, that a whole is thoroughly understood in its organisation.

199.] The immediacy of existence, which the objects have in Absolute Mechanism, is implicitly negatived by the fact that their independence is derived from, and due to, their connexions with each other, and therefore to their own want of stability. Thus the object must be explicitly stated as in its existence having an Affinity (or a bias) towards its other,--as not-indifferent.

(b) Chemism.

200.] The not-indifferent (biassed) object has an immanent mode which constitutes its nature, and in which it has existence. But as it is invested with the character of total notion, it is the contradiction between this totality and the special mode of its existence. Consequently it is the constant endeavour to cancel this contradiction and to make its definite being equal to the notion.

* * * * *

Chemism is a category of objectivity which, as a rule, is not particularly emphasised, and is generally put under the head of mechanism. The common name of mechanical relationship is applied to both, in contra-distinction to the teleological. There is a reason for this in the common feature which belongs to mechanism and chemism. In them the notion exists, but only implicit and latent, and they are thus both marked off from teleology where the notion has real independent existence. This is true: and yet chemism and mechanism are very decidedly distinct. The object, in the form of mechanism, is primarily only an indifferent reference to self, while the chemical object is seen to be completely in reference to something else. No doubt even in mechanism, as it develops itself, there spring up references to something else: but the nexus of mechanical objects with one another is at first only an external nexus, so that the objects in connexion with one another still retain the semblance of independence. In nature, for example; the several celestial bodies, which form our solar system, compose a kinetic system, and thereby show that they are related to one another. Motion, however, as the unity of time and space, is a connexion which is purely abstract and external. And it seems therefore as if these celestial bodies, which are thus externally connected with each other, would continue to be what they are, even apart from this reciprocal relation. The case is quite different with chemism. Objects chemically biassed are what they are expressly by that bias alone. Hence they are the absolute impulse towards integration by and in one another.

201.] The product of the chemical process consequently is the Neutral object, latent in the two extremes, each on the alert. The notion or concrete universal, by means of the bias of the objects (the particularity), coalesces with the individuality (in the shape of the product), and in that only with itself. In this process too the other syllogisms are equally involved. The place of mean is taken both by individuality as activity, and by the concrete universal, the essence of the strained extremes; which essence reaches definite being in the product.

202.] Chemism, as it is a reflectional nexus of objectivity, has pre-supposed, not merely the bias or non-indifferent nature of the objects, but also their immediate independence. The process of chemism consists in passing to and fro from one form to another; which forms continue to be as external as before.--In the neutral product the specific properties, which the extremes bore towards each other, are merged. But although the product is conformable to the notion, the inspiring principle of active differentiation does not exist in it; for it has sunk back to immediacy. The neutral body is therefore capable of disintegration. But the discerning principle, which breaks up the neutral body into biassed and strained extremes, and which gives to the indifferent object in general its affinity and animation towards another;--that principle, and the process as a separation with tension, falls outside of that first process.

* * * * *

The chemical process does not rise above a conditioned and finite process. The notion as notion is only the heart and core of the process, and does not in this stage come to an existence of its own. In the neutral product the process is extinct, and the existing cause falls outside it.

203.] Each of these two processes, the reduction of the biassed (not-indifferent) to the neutral, and the differentiation of the indifferent or neutral, goes its own way without hindrance from the other. But that want of inner connexion shows that they are finite, by their passage into products in which they are merged and lost. Conversely the process exhibits the nonentity of the pre-supposed immediacy of the not-indifferent objects.--By this negation of immediacy and of externalism in which the notion as object was sunk, it is liberated and invested with independent being in face of that externalism and immediacy. In these circumstances it is the End (Final Cause).

* * * * *

The passage from chemism to the teleological relation is implied in the mutual cancelling of both of the forms of the chemical process. The result thus attained is the liberation of the notion, which in chemism and mechanism was present only in the germ, and not yet evolved. The notion in the shape of the aim or end thus comes into independent existence.

(c) Teleology.

204.] In the End the notion has entered on free existence and has a being of its own, by means of the negation of immediate objectivity. It is characterised as subjective, seeing that this negation is, in the first place, abstract, and hence at first the relation between it and objectivity still one of contrast. This character of subjectivity, however, compared with the totality of the notion, is one-sided, and that, be it added, for the End itself, in which all specific characters have been put as subordinated and merged. For it therefore even the object, which it pre-supposes, has only hypothetical (ideal) reality,--essentially no-reality. The End in short is a contradiction of its self-identity against the negation stated in it, i.e. its antithesis to objectivity, and being so, contains the eliminative or destructive activity which negates the antithesis and renders it identical with itself. This is the realisation of the End: in which, while it turns itself into the other of its subjectivity and objectifies itself, thus cancelling the distinction between the two, it has only closed with itself, and retained itself.

The notion of Design or End, while on one hand called redundant, is on another justly described as the rational notion, and contrasted with the abstract universal of understanding. The latter only subsumes the particular, and so connects it with itself: but has it not in its own nature.--The distinction between the End or final cause, and the mere efficient cause (which is the cause ordinarily so called), is of supreme importance. Causes, properly so called, belong to the sphere of necessity, blind, and not yet laid bare. The cause therefore appears as passing into its correlative, and losing its primordiality there by sinking into dependency. It is only by implication, or for us, that the cause is in the effect made for the first time a cause, and that it there returns into itself. The End, on the other hand, is expressly stated as containing the specific character in its own self,--the effect, namely, which in the purely causal relation is never free from otherness. The End therefore in its efficiency does not pass over, but retains itself, i.e. it carries into effect itself only, and is at the end what it was in the beginning or primordial state. Until it thus retains itself, it is not genuinely primordial.--The End then requires to be speculatively apprehended as the notion, which itself in the proper unity and ideality of its characteristics contains the judgment or negation,--the antithesis of subjective and objective,--and which to an equal extent suspends that antithesis.

By End however we must not at once, nor must we ever merely, think of the form which it has in consciousness as a mode of mere mental representation. By means of the notion of Inner Design Kant has resuscitated the Idea in general and particularly the idea of life. Aristotle's definition of life virtually implies inner design, and is thus far in advance of the notion of design in modern Teleology, which had in view finite and outward design only.

Animal wants and appetites are some of the readiest instances of the End. They are the felt contradiction, which exists within the living subject, and pass into the activity of negating this negation which mere subjectivity still is. The satisfaction of the want or appetite restores the peace between subject and object. The objective thing which, so long as the contradiction exists, i.e. so long as the want is felt, stands on the other side, loses this quasi-independence, by its union with the subject. Those who talk of the permanence and immutability of the finite, as well subjective as objective, may see the reverse illustrated in the operations of every appetite. Appetite is, so to speak, the conviction that the subjective is only a half-truth, no more adequate than the objective. But appetite in the second place carries out its conviction. It brings about the supersession of these finites: it cancels the antithesis between the objective which would be and stay an objective only, and the subjective which in like manner would be and stay a subjective only.

As regards the action of the End, attention may be called to the fact, that in the syllogism, which represents that action, and shows the end closing with itself by the means of realisation, the radical feature is the negation of the termini. That negation is the one just mentioned both of the immediate subjectivity appearing in the End as such, and of the immediate objectivity as seen in the means and the objects pre-supposed. This is the same negation, as is in operation when the mind leaves the contingent things of the world as well as its own subjectivity and rises to God. It is the 'moment' or factor which (as noticed in the Introduction and § 192) was overlooked and neglected in the analytic form of syllogisms, under which the so-called proofs of the Being of a God presented this elevation.

205.] In its primary and immediate aspect the Teleological relation is external design, and the notion confronts a pre-supposed object. The End is consequently finite, and that partly in its content, partly in the circumstance that it has an external condition in the object, which has to be found existing, and which is taken as material for its realisation. Its self-determining is to that extent in form only. The un-mediatedness of the End has the further result that its particularity or content--which as form-characteristic is the subjectivity of the End--is reflected into self, and so different from the totality of the form, subjectivity in general, the notion. This variety constitutes the finitude of Design within its own nature. The content of the End. in this way, is quite as limited, contingent, and given, as the object is particular and found ready to hand.

* * * * *

Generally speaking, the final cause is taken to mean nothing more than external design. In accordance with this view of it, things are supposed not to carry their vocation in themselves, but merely to be means employed and spent in realising a purpose which lies outside of them. That may be said to be the point of view taken by Utility, which once played a great part even in the sciences, but of late has fallen into merited disrepute, now that people have begun to see that it failed to give a genuine insight into the nature of things. It is true that finite things as finite ought in justice to be viewed as non-ultimate, and as pointing beyond themselves. This negativity of finite things however is their own dialectic, and in order to ascertain it we must pay attention to their positive content.

Teleological observations on things often proceed from a well-meant wish to display the wisdom of God as it is especially revealed in nature. Now in thus trying to discover final causes for which the things serve as means, we must remember that we are stopping short at the finite, and are liable to fall into trifling reflections: as, for instance, if we not merely studied the vine in respect of its well-known use for man, but proceeded to consider the cork-tree in connexion with the corks which are cut from its bark to put into the wine-bottles. Whole books used to be written in this spirit. It is easy to see that they promoted the genuine interest neither of religion nor of science. External design stands immediately in front of the idea: but what thus stands on the threshold often for that reason is least adequate.

206.] The teleological relation is a syllogism in which the subjective end coalesces with the objectivity external to it, through a middle term which is the unity of both. This unity is on one hand the purposive action, on the other the Means, i.e. objectivity made directly subservient to purpose.

* * * * *

The development from End to Idea ensues by three stages, first, Subjective End; second, End in process of accomplishment; and third, End accomplished. First of all we have the Subjective End; and that, as the notion in independent being, is itself the totality of the elementary functions of the notion. The first of these functions is that of self-identical universality, as it were the neutral first water, in which everything is involved, but nothing as yet discriminated. The second of these elements is the particularising of this universal, by which it acquires a specific content. As this specific content again is realised by the agency of the universal, the latter returns by its means back to itself, and coalesces with itself. Hence too when we set some end before us, we say that we 'conclude' to do something: a phrase which implies that we were, so to speak, open and accessible to this or that determination. Similarly we also at a further step speak of a man 'resolving' to do something, meaning that the agent steps forward out of his self-regarding inwardness and enters into dealings with the environing objectivity. This supplies the step from the merely Subjective End to the purposive action which tends outwards.

207.] (1) The first syllogism of the final cause represents the Subjective End. The universal notion is brought to unite with individuality by means of particularity, so that the individual as self-determination acts as judge. That is to say, it not only particularises or makes into a determinate content the still indeterminate universal, but also explicitly puts an antithesis of subjectivity and objectivity, and at the same time is in its own self a return to itself; for it stamps the subjectivity of the notion, pre-supposed as against objectivity, with the mark of defect, in comparison with the complete and rounded totality, and thereby at the same time turns outwards.

208.] (2) This action which is directed outwards is the individuality, which in the Subjective End is identical with the particularity under which, along with the content, is also comprised the external objectivity. It throws itself in the first place immediately upon the object, which it appropriates to itself as a Means. The notion is this immediate power; for the notion is the self-identical negativity, in which the being of the object is characterised as wholly and merely ideal.--The whole Means then is this inward power of the notion, in the shape of an agency, with which the object as Means is 'immediately' united and in obedience to which it stands.

In finite teleology the Means is thus broken up into two elements external to each other, (a) the action and (b) the object which serves as Means. The relation of the final cause as power to this object, and the subjugation of the object to it, is immediate (it forms the first premiss in the syllogism) to this extent, that in the teleological notion as the self-existent ideality the object is put as potentially null. This relation, as represented in the first premiss, itself becomes the Means, which at the same time involves the syllogism, that through this relation--in which the action of the End is contained and dominant--the End is coupled with objectivity.

* * * * *

The execution of the End is the mediated mode of realising the End; but the immediate realisation is not less needful. The End lays hold of the object immediately, because it is the power over the object, because in the End particularity, and in particularity objectivity also, is involved.--A living being has a body; the soul takes possession of it and without intermediary has objectified itself in it. The human soul has much to do, before it makes its corporeal nature into a means. Man must, as it were, take possession of his body, so that it may be the instrument of his soul.

209.] (3) Purposive action, with its Means, is still directed outwards, because the End is also not identical with the object, and must consequently first be mediated with it. The Means in its capacity of object stands, in this second premiss, in direct relation to the other extreme of the syllogism, namely, the material or objectivity which is pre-supposed. This relation is the sphere of chemism and mechanism, which have now become the servants of the Final Cause, where lies their truth and free notion. Thus the Subjective End, which is the power ruling these processes, in which the objective things wear themselves out on one another, contrives to keep itself free from them, and to preserve itself in them. Doing so, it appears as the Cunning of reason.

* * * * *

Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. Cunning may be said to lie in the inter-mediative action which, while it permits the objects to follow their own bent and act upon one another till they waste away, and does not itself directly interfere in the process, is nevertheless only working out its own aims. With this explanation, Divine Providence may be said to stand to the world and its process in the capacity of absolute cunning. God lets men do as they please with their particular passions and interests; but the result is the accomplishment of--not their plans, but His, and these differ decidedly from the ends primarily sought by those whom He employs.

210.] The realised End is thus the overt unity of subjective and objective. It is however essentially characteristic of this unity, that the subjective and objective are neutralised and cancelled only in the point of their one-sidedness, while the objective is subdued and made conformable to the End, as the free notion, and thereby to the power above it. The End maintains itself against and in the objective for it is no mere one-sided subjective or particular, it is also the concrete universal, the implicit identity of both. This universal, as simply reflected in itself, is the content which remains unchanged through all the three termini of the syllogism and their movement.

211.] In finite design, however, even the executed End has the same radical rift or flaw as had the Means and the initial End. We have got therefore only a form extraneously impressed on a pre-existing material: and this form, by reason of the limited content of the End, is also a contingent characteristic. The End achieved consequently is only an object, which again becomes a Means or material for other Ends, and so on for ever.

212.] But what virtually happens in the realising of the End is that the one-sided subjectivity and the show of objective independence confronting it are both cancelled. In laying hold of the means, the notion constitutes itself the very implicit essence of the object. In the mechanical and chemical processes the independence of the object has been already dissipated implicitly, and in the course of their movement under the dominion of the End, the show of that independence, the negative which confronts the notion, is got rid of. But in the fact that the End achieved is characterised only as a Means and a material, this object, viz. the teleological, is there and then put as implicitly null, and only 'ideal.' This being so, the antithesis between form and content has also vanished. While the End by the removal and absorption of all form-characteristics coalesces with itself, the form as self-identical is thereby put as the content, so that the notion, which is the action of form, has only itself for content. Through this process, therefore, there is made explicitly manifest what was the notion of design: viz. the implicit unity of subjective and objective is now realised. And this is the Idea.

* * * * *

This finitude of the End consists in the circumstance, that, in the process of realising it, the material, which is employed as a means, is only externally subsumed under it and made conformable to it. But, as a matter of fact, the object is the notion implicitly: and thus when the notion, in the shape of End, is realised in the object, we have but the manifestation of the inner nature of the object itself. Objectivity is thus, as it were, only a covering under which the notion lies concealed. Within the range of the finite we can never see or experience that the End has been really secured. The consummation of the infinite End, therefore, consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished. The Good, the absolutely Good, is eternally accomplishing itself in the world: and the result is that it needs not wait upon us, but is already by implication, as well as in full actuality, accomplished. This is the illusion under which we live. It alone supplies at the same time the actualising force on which the interest in the world reposes. In the course of its process the Idea creates that illusion, by setting an antithesis to confront it; and its action consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has created. Only out of this error does the truth arise. In this fact lies the reconciliation with error and with finitude. Error or other-being, when superseded, is still a necessary dynamic element of truth: for truth can only be where it makes itself its own result.

C.--THE IDEA.

213.] The Idea is truth in itself and for itself,--the absolute unity of the notion and objectivity. Its 'ideal' content is nothing but the notion in its detailed terms: its 'real' content is only the exhibition which the notion gives itself in the form of external existence, whilst yet, by enclosing this shape in its ideality, it keeps it in its power, and so keeps itself in it.

The definition, which declares the Absolute to be the Idea, is itself absolute. All former definitions come back to this. The Idea is the Truth: for Truth is the correspondence of objectivity with the notion:--not of course the correspondence of external things with my conceptions,--for these are only correct conceptions held by me, the individual person. In the idea we have nothing to do with the individual, nor with figurate conceptions, nor with external things. And yet, again, everything actual, in so far as it is true, is the Idea, and has its truth by and in virtue of the Idea alone. Every individual being is some one aspect of the Idea: for which, therefore, yet other actualities are needed, which in their turn appear to have a self-subsistence of their own. It is only in them altogether and in their relation that the notion is realised. The individual by itself does not correspond to its notion. It is this limitation of its existence which constitutes the finitude and the ruin of the individual.

The Idea itself is not to be taken as an idea of something or other, any more than the notion is to be taken as merely a specific notion. The Absolute is the universal and one idea, which, by an act of 'judgment,' particularises itself to the system of specific ideas; which after all are constrained by their nature to come back to the one idea where their truth lies. As issued out of this 'judgment' the Idea is in the first place only the one universal substance: but its developed and genuine actuality is to be as a subject and in that way as mind.

Because it has no existence for starting-point and point d'appui, the Idea is frequently treated as a mere logical form. Such a view must be abandoned to those theories, which ascribe so-called reality and genuine actuality to the existent thing and all the other categories which have not yet penetrated as far as the Idea. It is no less false to imagine the Idea to be mere abstraction. It is abstract certainly, in so far as everything untrue is consumed in it: but in its own self it is essentially concrete, because it is the free notion giving character to itself, and that character, reality. It would be an abstract form, only if the notion, which is its principle, were taken as an abstract unity, and not as the negative return of it into self and as the subjectivity which it really is.

* * * * *

Truth is at first taken to mean that I know how something is. This is truth, however, only in reference to consciousness; it is formal truth, bare correctness. Truth in the deeper sense consists in the identity between objectivity and the notion. It is in this deeper sense of truth that we speak of a true state, or of a true work of art. These objects are true, if they are as they ought to be, i.e. if their reality corresponds to their notion. When thus viewed, to be untrue means much the same as to be bad. A bad man is an untrue man, a man who does not behave as his notion or his vocation requires. Nothing however can subsist, if it be wholly devoid of identity between the notion and reality. Even bad and untrue things have being, in so far as their reality still, somehow, conforms to their notion. Whatever is thoroughly bad or contrary to the notion, is for that very reason on the way to ruin. It is by the notion alone that the things in the world have their subsistence; or, as it is expressed in the language of religious conception, things are what they are, only in virtue of the divine and thereby creative thought which dwells within them.

When we hear the Idea spoken of, we need not imagine something far away beyond this mortal sphere. The idea is rather what is completely present: and it is found, however confused and degenerated, in every consciousness. We conceive the world to ourselves as a great totality which is created by God, and so created that in it God has manifested Himself to us. We regard the world also as ruled by Divine Providence: implying that the scattered and divided parts of the world are continually brought back, and made conformable, to the unity from which they have issued. The purpose of philosophy has always been the intellectual ascertainment of the Idea; and everything deserving the name of philosophy has constantly been based on the consciousness of an absolute unity where the understanding sees and accepts only separation.--It is too late now to ask for proof that the Idea is the truth. The proof of that is contained in the whole deduction and development of thought up to this point. The idea is the result of this course of dialectic. Not that it is to be supposed that the idea is mediate only, i.e. mediated through something else than itself. It is rather its own result, and being so, is no less immediate than mediate. The stages hitherto considered, viz. those of Being and Essence, as well as those of Notion and of Objectivity, are not, when so distinguished, something permanent, resting upon themselves. They have proved to be dialectical; and their only truth is that they are dynamic elements of the idea.

214.] The Idea may be described in many ways. It may be called reason (and this is the proper philosophical signification of reason); subject-object; the unity of the ideal and the real, of the finite and the infinite, of soul and body; the possibility which has its actuality in its own self; that of which the nature can be thought only as existent, &c. All these descriptions apply, because the Idea contains all the relations of understanding, but contains them in their infinite self-return and self-identity.

It is easy work for the understanding to show that everything said of the Idea is self-contradictory. But that can quite as well be retaliated, or rather in the Idea the retaliation is actually made. And this work, which is the work of reason, is certainly not so easy as that of the understanding. Understanding may demonstrate that the Idea is self-contradictory: because the subjective is subjective only and is always confronted by the objective,--because being is different from notion and therefore cannot be picked out of it,--because the finite is finite only, the exact antithesis of the infinite, and therefore not identical with it; and so on with every term of the description. The reverse of all this however is the doctrine of Logic. Logic shows that the subjective which is to be subjective only, the finite which would be finite only, the infinite which would be infinite only, and so on, have no truth, but contradict themselves, and pass over into their opposites. Hence this transition, and the unity in which the extremes are merged and become factors, each with a merely reflected existence, reveals itself as their truth.

The understanding, which addresses itself to deal with the Idea, commits a double misunderstanding. It takes first the extremes of the Idea (be they expressed as they will, so long as they are in their unity), not as they are understood when stamped with this concrete unity, but as if they remained abstractions outside of it. It no less mistakes the relation between them, ever when it has been expressly stated. Thus, for example it overlooks even the nature of the copula in the judgment, which affirms that the individual, or subject, is after all not individual, but universal. But, in the second place, the understanding believes its 'reflection,'--that the self-identical Idea contains its own negative, or contains contradiction,--to be an external reflection which does not lie within the Idea itself. But the reflection is really no peculiar cleverness of the understanding. The Idea itself is the dialectic which for ever divides and distinguishes the self-identical from the differentiated, the subjective from the objective, the finite from the infinite, soul from body. Only on these terms is it an eternal creation, eternal vitality, and eternal spirit. But while it thus passes or rather translates itself into the abstract understanding, it for ever remains reason. The Idea is the dialectic which again makes this mass of understanding and diversity understand its finite nature and the pseudo-independence in its productions, and which brings the diversity back to unity. Since this double movement is not separate or distinct in time, nor indeed in any other way--otherwise it would be only a repetition of the abstract understanding--the Idea is the eternal vision of itself in the other, --notion which in its objectivity has carried out itself,--object which is inward design, essential subjectivity.

The different modes of apprehending the Idea as unity of ideal and real, of finite and infinite, of identity and difference, &c. are more or less formal. They designate some one stage of the specific notion. Only the notion itself, however, is free and the genuine universal: in the Idea, therefore, the specific character of the notion is only the notion itself,--an objectivity, viz. into which it, being the universal, continues itself, and in which it has only its own character, the total character. The Idea is the infinite judgment, of which the terms are severally the independent totality; and in which, as each grows to the fulness of its own nature, it has thereby at the same time passed into the other. None of the other specific notions exhibits this totality complete on both its sides as the notion itself and objectivity.

215.] The Idea is essentially a process, because its identity is the absolute and free identity of the notion, only in so far as it is absolute negativity and for that reason dialectical. It is the round of movement, in which the notion, in the capacity of universality which is individuality, gives itself the character of objectivity and of the antithesis thereto; and this externality which has the notion for its substance, finds its way back to subjectivity through its immanent dialectic.

As the idea is (a) a process, it follows that such an expression for the Absolute as unity of thought and being, of finite and infinite, &c. is false; for unity expresses an abstract and merely quiescent identity. As the Idea is (b) subjectivity, it follows that the expression is equally false on another account. That unity of which it speaks expresses a merely virtual or underlying presence of the genuine unity. The infinite would thus seem to be merely neutralised by the finite, the subjective by the objective, thought by being. But in the negative unity of the Idea, the infinite overlaps and includes the finite, thought overlaps being, subjectivity overlaps objectivity. The unity of the Idea is thought, infinity, and subjectivity, and is in consequence to be essentially distinguished from the Idea as substance, just as this overlapping subjectivity, thought, or infinity is to be distinguished from the one-sided subjectivity, one-sided thought, one-sided infinity to which it descends in judging and defining.

* * * * *

The idea as a process runs through three stages in its development. The first form of the idea is Life: that is, the idea in the form of immediacy. The second form is that of mediation or differentiation; and this is the idea in the form of Knowledge, which appears under the double aspect of the Theoretical and Practical idea. The process of knowledge eventuates in the restoration of the unity enriched by difference. This gives the third form of the idea, the Absolute Idea: which last stage of the logical idea evinces itself to be at the same time the true first, and to have a being due to itself alone.

(a) Life.

216.] The immediate idea is Life. As soul, the notion is realised in a body of whose externality the soul is the immediate self-relating universality. But the soul is also its particularisation, so that the body expresses no other distinctions than follow from the characterisations of its notion. And finally it is the Individuality of the body as infinite negativity,--the dialectic of that bodily objectivity, with its parts lying out of one another, conveying them away from the semblance of independent subsistence back into subjectivity, so that all the members are reciprocally momentary means as well as momentary ends. Thus as life is the initial particularisation, so it results in the negative self-asserting unity: in the dialectic of its corporeity it only coalesces with itself. In this way life is essentially something alive, and in point of its immediacy this individual living thing. It is characteristic of finitude in this sphere that, by reason of the immediacy of the idea, body and soul are separable. This constitutes the mortality of the living being. It is only, however, when the living being is dead, that these two sides of the idea are different ingredients.

* * * * *

The single members of the body are what they are only by and in relation to their unity. A hand e.g. when hewn off from the body is, as Aristotle has observed, a hand in name only, not in fact. From the point of view of understanding, life is usually spoken of as a mystery, and in general as incomprehensible. By giving it such a name, however, the Understanding only confesses its own finitude and nullity. So far is life from being incomprehensible, that in it the very notion is presented to us, or rather the immediate idea existing as a notion. And having said this, we have indicated the defect of life. Its notion and reality do not thoroughly correspond to each other. The notion of life is the soul, and this notion has the body for its reality. The soul is, as it were, infused into its corporeity; and in that way it is at first sentient only, and not yet freely self-conscious. The process of life consists in getting the better of the immediacy with which it is still beset: and this process, which is itself threefold, results in the idea under the form of judgment, i.e. the idea as Cognition.

217.] A living being is a syllogism, of which the very elements are in themselves systems and syllogisms (§§ 198, 201, 207). They are however active syllogisms or processes; and in the subjective unity of the vital agent make only one process. Thus the living being is the process of its coalescence with itself, which runs on through three processes.

218.] (1) The first is the process of the living being inside itself. In that process it makes a split on its own self, and reduces its corporeity to its object or its inorganic nature. This corporeity, as an aggregate of correlations, enters in its very nature into difference and opposition of its elements, which mutually become each other's prey, and assimilate one another, and are retained by producing themselves. Yet this action of the several members (organs), is only the living subject's one act to which their productions revert; so that in these productions nothing is produced except the subject: in other words, the subject only reproduces itself.

* * * * *

The process of the vital subject within its own limits has in Nature the threefold form of Sensibility, Irritability, and Reproduction. As Sensibility, the living being is immediately simple self-relation--it is the soul omnipresent in its body, the outsideness of each member of which to others has for it no truth. As Irritability, the living being appears split up in itself; and as Reproduction, it is perpetually restoring itself from the inner distinction of its members and organs. A vital agent only exists as this continually self-renewing process within its own limits.

219.] (2) But the judgment of the notion proceeds, as free, to discharge the objective or bodily nature as an independent totality from itself; and the negative relation of the living thing to itself makes, as immediate individuality, the pre-supposition of an inorganic nature confronting it. As this negative of the animate is no less a function in the notion of the animate itself, it exists consequently in the latter (which is at the same time a concrete universal) in the shape of a defect or want. The dialectic by which the object, being implicitly null, is merged, is the action of the self-assured living thing, which in this process against an inorganic nature thus retains, develops, and objectifies itself.

* * * * *

The living being stands face to face with an inorganic nature, to which it comports itself as a master and which it assimilates to itself. The result of the assimilation is not, as in the chemical process, a neutral product in which the independence of the two confronting sides is merged; but the living being shows itself as large enough to embrace its other which cannot withstand its power. The inorganic nature which is subdued by the vital agent suffers this fate, because it is virtually the same as what life is actually. Thus in the other the living being only coalesces with itself. But when the soul has fled from the body, the elementary powers of objectivity begin their play. These powers are, as it were, continually on the spring, ready to begin their process in the organic body; and life is the constant battle against them.

220.] (3) The living individual, which in its first process comports itself as intrinsically subject and notion, through its second assimilates its external objectivity and thus puts the character of reality into itself. It is now therefore implicitly a Kind, with essential universality of nature. The particularising of this Kind is the relation of the living subject to another subject of its Kind: and the judgment is the tie of Kind over these individuals thus appointed for each other. This is the Affinity of the Sexes.

221.] The process of Kind brings it to a being of its own. Life being no more than the idea immediate, the product of this process breaks up into two sides. On the one hand, the living individual, which was at first pre-supposed as immediate, is now seen to be mediated and generated. On the other, however, the living individuality, which, on account of its first immediacy, stands in a negative attitude towards universality, sinks in the superior power of the latter.

* * * * *

The living being dies, because it is a contradiction. Implicitly it is the universal or Kind, and yet immediately it exists as an individual only. Death shows the Kind to be the power that rules the immediate individual. For the animal the process of Kind is the highest point of its vitality. But the animal never gets so far in its Kind as to have a being of its own; it succumbs to the power of Kind. In the process of Kind the immediate living being mediates itself with itself, and thus rises above its immediacy, only however to sink back into it again. Life thus runs away, in the first instance, only into the false infinity of the progress ad infinitum. The real result, however, of the process of life, in the point of its notion, is to merge and overcome that immediacy with which the idea, in the shape of life, is still beset.

222.] In this manner however the idea of life has thrown off not some one particular and immediate 'This,' but this first immediacy as a whole. It thus comes to itself, to its truth: it enters upon existence as a free Kind self-subsistent. The death of merely immediate and individual vitality is the 'procession' of spirit.

(b) Cognition in general.

223.] The idea exists free for itself, in so far as it has universality for the medium of its existence,--as objectivity itself has notional being,--as the idea is its own object. Its subjectivity, thus universalised, is pure self-contained distinguishing of the idea,--intuition which keeps itself in this identical universality. But, as specific distinguishing, it is the further judgment of repelling itself as a totality from itself, and thus, in the first place, pre-supposing itself as an external universe. There are two judgments, which though implicitly identical are not yet explicitly put as identical.

224.] The relation of these two ideas, which implicitly and as life are identical, is thus one of correlation: and it is that correlativity which constitutes the characteristic of finitude in this sphere. It is the relationship of reflection, seeing that the distinguishing of the idea in its own self is only the first judgment--presupposing the other and not yet supposing itself to constitute it. And thus for the subjective idea the objective is the immediate world found ready to hand, or the idea as life is in the phenomenon of individual existence. At the same time, in so far as this judgment is pure distinguishing within its own limits (§ 223), the idea realises in one both itself and its other. Consequently it is the certitude of the virtual identity between itself and the objective world.--Reason comes to the world with an absolute faith in its ability to make the identity actual, and to raise its certitude to truth; and with the instinct of realising explicitly the nullity of that contrast which it sees to be implicitly null.

225.] This process is in general terms Cognition. In Cognition in a single act the contrast is virtually superseded, as regards both the one-sidedness of subjectivity and the one-sidedness of objectivity. At first, however, the supersession of the contrast is but implicit. The process as such is in consequence immediately infected with the finitude of this sphere, and splits into the twofold movement of the instinct of reason, presented as two different movements. On the one hand it supersedes the one-sidedness of the Idea's subjectivity by receiving the existing world into itself, into subjective conception and thought; and with this objectivity, which is thus taken to be real and true, for its content it fills up the abstract certitude of itself. On the other hand, it supersedes the one-sidedness of the objective world, which is now, on the contrary, estimated as only a mere semblance, a collection of contingencies and shapes at bottom visionary. It modifies and informs that world by the inward nature of the subjective, which is here taken to be the genuine objective. The former is the instinct of science after Truth, Cognition properly so called:--the Theoretical action of the idea. The latter is the instinct of the Good to fulfil the same--the Practical activity of the idea or Volition.

(α) Cognition proper.

226.] The universal finitude of Cognition, which lies in the one judgment, the pre-supposition of the contrast (§ 224),--a pre-supposition in contradiction of which its own act lodges protest, specialises itself more precisely on the face of its own idea. The result of that specialisation is, that its two elements receive the aspect of being diverse from each other, and, as they are at least complete, they take up the relation of 'reflection,' not of 'notion,' to one another. The assimilation of the matter, therefore, as a datum, presents itself in the light of a reception of it into categories which at the same time remain external to it, and which meet each other in the same style of diversity. Reason is active here, but it is reason in the shape of understanding. The truth which such Cognition can reach will therefore be only finite: the infinite truth (of the notion) is isolated and made transcendent, an inaccessible goal in a world of its own. Still in its external action cognition stands under the guidance of the notion, and notional principles form the secret clue to its movement.

* * * * *

The finitude of Cognition lies in the pre-supposition of a world already in existence, and in the consequent view of the knowing subject as a tabula rasa. The conception is one attributed to Aristotle; but no man is further than Aristotle from such an outside theory of Cognition. Such a style of Cognition does not recognise in itself the activity of the notion--an activity which it is implicitly, but not consciously. In its own estimation its procedure is passive. Really that procedure is active.

227.] Finite Cognition, when it pre-supposes what is distinguished from it to be something already existing and confronting it,--to be the various facts of external nature or of consciousness--has, in the first place, (1) Formal identity or the abstraction of universality for the form of its action. Its activity therefore consists in analysing the given concrete object, isolating its differences, and giving them the form of abstract universality. Or it leaves the concrete thing as a ground, and by setting aside the unessential-looking particulars, brings into relief a concrete universal, the Genus, or Force and Law. This is the Analytical Method.

* * * * *

People generally speak of the analytical and synthetical methods, as if it depended solely on our choice which we pursued. This is far from the case. It depends on the form of the objects of our investigation, which of the two methods, that are derivable from the notion of finite cognition, ought to be applied. In the first place, cognition is analytical. Analytical cognition deals with an object which is presented in detachment, and the aim of its action is to trace back to a universal the individual object before it. Thought in such circumstances means no more than an act of abstraction or of formal identity. That is the sense in which thought is understood by Locke and all empiricists. Cognition, it is often said, can never do more than separate the given concrete objects into their abstract elements, and then consider these elements in their isolation. It is, however, at once apparent that this turns things upside down, and that cognition, if its purpose be to take things as they are, thereby falls into contradiction with itself. Thus the chemist e.g. places a piece of flesh in his retort, tortures it in many ways, and then informs us that it consists of nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, &c. True: but these abstract matters have ceased to be flesh. The same defect occurs in the reasoning of an empirical psychologist when he analyses an action into the various aspects which it presents, and then sticks to these aspects in their separation. The object which is subjected to analysis is treated as a sort of onion from which one coat is peeled off after another.

228.] This universality is (2) also a specific universality. In this case the line of activity follows the three 'moments' of the notion, which (as it has not its infinity in finite cognition) is the specific or definite notion of understanding. The reception of the object into the forms of this notion is the Synthetic Method.

* * * * *

The movement of the Synthetic method is the reverse of the Analytical method. The latter starts from the individual, and proceeds to the universal; in the former the starting-point is given by the universal (as a definition), from which we proceed by particularising (in division) to the individual (the theorem). The Synthetic method thus presents itself as the development of the 'moments' of the notion on the object.

229.] (α) When the object has been in the first instance brought by cognition into the form of the specific notion in general, so that in this way its genus and its universal character or speciality are explicitly stated, we have the Definition. The materials and the proof of Definition are procured by means of the Analytical method (§ 227). The specific character however is expected to be a 'mark' only: that is to say it is to be in behoof only of the purely subjective cognition which is external to the object.

* * * * * Definition involves the three organic elements of the notion: the universal or proximate genus genus proximum, the particular or specific character of the genus (qualitas specified,) and the individual, or object defined.--The first question that definition suggests, is where it comes from. The general answer to this question is to say, that definitions originate by way of analysis. This will explain how it happens that people quarrel about the correctness of proposed definitions; for here everything depends on what perceptions we started from, and what points of view we had before our eyes in so doing. The richer the object to be defined is, that is, the more numerous are the aspects which it offers to our notice, the more various are the definitions we may frame of it. Thus there are quite a host of definitions of life, of the state, &c. Geometry, on the contrary, dealing with a theme so abstract as space, has an easy task in giving definitions. Again, in respect of the matter or contents of the objects defined, there is no constraining necessity present. We are expected to admit that space exists, that there are plants, animals, &c, nor is it the business of geometry, botany, &c. to demonstrate that the objects in question necessarily are. This very circumstance makes the synthetical method of cognition as little suitable for philosophy as the analytical: for philosophy has above all things to leave no doubt of the necessity of its objects. And yet several attempts have been made to introduce the synthetical method into philosophy. Thus Spinoza, in particular, begins with definitions. He says, for instance, that substance is the causa sui. His definitions are unquestionably a storehouse of the most speculative truth, but it takes the shape of dogmatic assertions. The same thing is also true of Schelling.

230.] (ß) The statement of the second element of the notion, i.e. of the specific character of the universal as particularising, is given by Division in accordance with some external consideration.

* * * * *

Division we are told ought to be complete. That requires a principle or ground of division so constituted, that the division based upon it embraces the whole extent of the region designated by the definition in general. But, in division, there is the further requirement that the principle of it must be borrowed from the nature of the object in question. If this condition be satisfied, the division is natural and not merely artificial, that is to say, arbitrary. Thus, in zoology, the ground of division adopted in the classification of the mammalia is mainly afforded by their teeth and claws. That is so far sensible, as the mammals themselves distinguish themselves from one another by these parts of their bodies; back to which therefore the general type of their various classes is to be traced. In every case the genuine division must be controlled by the notion. To that extent a division, in the first instance, has three members: but as particularity exhibits itself as double, the division may go to the extent even of four members. In the sphere of mind trichotomy is predominant, a circumstance which Kant has the credit of bringing into notice.

231.] (γ) In the concrete individuality, where the mere unanalysed quality of the definition is regarded as a correlation of elements, the object is a synthetical nexus of distinct characteristics. It is a Theorem. Being different, these characteristics possess but a mediated identity. To supply the materials, which form the middle terms, is the office of Construction: and the process of mediation itself, from which cognition derives the necessity of that nexus, is the Demonstration.

As the difference between the analytical and synthetical methods is commonly stated, it seems entirely optional which of the two we employ. If we assume, to start with, the concrete thing which the synthetic method presents as a result, we can analyse from it as consequences the abstract propositions which formed the pre-suppositions and the material for the proof. Thus, algebraical definitions of curved lines are theorems in the method of geometry. Similarly even the Pythagorean theorem, if made the definition of a right-angled triangle, might yield to analysis those propositions which geometry had already demonstrated on its behoof. The optionalness of either method is due to both alike starting from an external pre-supposition. So far as the nature of the notion is concerned, analysis is prior; since it has to raise the given material with its empirical concreteness into the form of general abstractions, which may then be set in the front of the synthetical method as definitions.

That these methods, however indispensable and brilliantly successful in their own province, are unserviceable for philosophical cognition, is self-evident. They have pre-suppositions; and their style of cognition is that of understanding, proceeding under the canon of formal identity. In Spinoza, who was especially addicted to the use of the geometrical method, we are at once struck by its characteristic formalism. Yet his ideas were speculative in spirit; whereas the system of Wolf, who carried the method out to the height of pedantry, was even in subject-matter a metaphysic of the understanding. The abuses which these methods with their formalism once led to in philosophy and science have in modern times been followed by the abuses of what is called 'Construction.' Kant brought into vogue the phrase that mathematics 'construes' its notions. All that was meant by the phrase was that mathematics has not to do with notions, but with abstract qualities of sense-perceptions. The name 'Construction (construing) of notions' has since been given to a sketch or statement of sensible attributes which were picked up from perception, quite guiltless of any influence of the notion, and to the additional formalism of classifying scientific and philosophical objects in a tabular form on some pre-supposed rubric, but in other respects at the fancy and discretion of the observer. In the background of all this, certainly, there is a dim consciousness of the Idea, of the unity of the notion and objectivity,--a consciousness, too, that the idea is concrete. But that play of what is styled 'construing' is far from presenting this unity adequately--a unity which is none other than the notion properly so called: and the sensuous concreteness of perception is as little the concreteness of reason and the idea.

Another point calls for notice. Geometry works with the sensuous but abstract perception of space; and in space it experiences no difficulty in isolating and defining certain simple analytic modes. To geometry alone therefore belongs in its perfection the synthetical method of finite cognition. In its course, however (and this is the remarkable point), it finally stumbles upon what are termed irrational and incommensurable quantities; and in their case any attempt at further specification drives it beyond the principle of the understanding. This is only one of many instances in terminology, where the title rational is perversely applied to the province of understanding, while we stigmatise as irrational that which shows a beginning and a trace of rationality. Other sciences, removed as they are from the simplicity of space or number, often and necessarily reach a point where understanding permits no further advance: but they get over the difficulty without trouble. They make a break in the strict sequence of their procedure, and assume whatever they require, though it be the reverse of what preceded, from some external quarter,--opinion, perception, conception or any other source. Its inobservancy as to the nature of its methods and their relativity to the subject-matter prevents this finite cognition from seeing that, when it proceeds by definitions and divisions, &c., it is really led on by the necessity of the laws of the notion. For the same reason it cannot see when it has reached its limit; nor, if it have transgressed that limit, does it perceive that it is in a sphere where the categories of understanding, which it still continues rudely to apply, have lost all authority.

232.] The necessity, which finite cognition produces in the Demonstration, is, in the first place, an external necessity, intended for the subjective intelligence alone. But in necessity as such, cognition itself has left behind its presupposition and starting-point, which consisted in accepting its content as given or found. Necessity quâ necessity is implicitly the self-relating notion. The subjective idea has thus implicitly reached an original and objective determinateness,--a something not-given, and for that reason immanent in the subject. It has passed over into the idea of Will.

* * * * *

The necessity which cognition reaches by means of the demonstration is the reverse of what formed its starting-point. In its starting-point cognition had a given and a contingent content; but now, at the close of its movement, it knows its content to be necessary. This necessity is reached by means of subjective agency. Similarly, subjectivity at starting was quite abstract, a bare tabula rasa. It now shows itself as a modifying and determining principle. In this way we pass from the idea of cognition to that of will. The passage, as will be apparent on a closer examination, means that the universal, to be truly apprehended, must be apprehended as subjectivity, as a notion self-moving, active, and form-imposing.

(ß) Volition.

233.] The subjective idea as original and objective determinateness, and as a simple uniform content, is the Good. Its impulse towards self-realisation is in its behaviour the reverse of the idea of truth, and rather directed towards moulding the world it finds before it into a shape conformable to its purposed End.--This Volition has, on the one hand, the certitude of the nothingness of the pre-supposed object; but, on the other, as finite, it at the same time pre-supposes the purposed End of the Good to be a mere subjective idea, and the object to be independent.

234.] This action of the Will is finite: and its finitude lies in the contradiction that in the inconsistent terms applied to the objective world the End of the Good is just as much not executed as executed,--the end in question put as unessential as much as essential,--as actual and at the same, time as merely possible. This contradiction presents itself to imagination as an endless progress in the actualising of the Good; which is therefore set up and fixed as a mere 'ought,' or goal of perfection. In point of form however this contradiction vanishes when the action supersedes the subjectivity of the purpose, and along with it the objectivity, with the contrast which makes both finite; abolishing subjectivity as a whole and not merely the one-sidedness of this form of it. (For another new subjectivity of the kind, that is, a new generation of the contrast, is not distinct from that which is supposed to be past and gone.) This return into itself is at the same time the content's own 'recollection' that it is the Good and the implicit identity of the two sides,--it is a 'recollection' of the pre-supposition of the theoretical attitude of mind (§ 224) that the objective world is its own truth and substantiality.

* * * * *

While Intelligence merely proposes to take the world as it is, Will takes steps to make the world what it ought to be. Will looks upon the immediate and given present not as solid being, but as mere semblance without reality. It is here that we meet those contradictions which are so bewildering from the standpoint of abstract morality. This position in its 'practical' bearings is the one taken by the philosophy of Kant, and even by that of Fichte. The Good, say these writers, has to be realised: we have to work in order to produce it: and Will is only the Good actualising itself. If the world then were as it ought to be, the action of Will would be at an end. The Will itself therefore requires that its End should not be realised. In these words, a correct expression is given to the finitude of Will. But finitude was not meant to be the ultimate point: and it is the process of Will itself which abolishes finitude and the contradiction it involves. The reconciliation is achieved, when Will in its result returns to the pre-supposition made by cognition. In other words, it consists in the unity of the theoretical and practical idea. Will knows the end to be its own, and Intelligence apprehends the world as the notion actual. This is the right attitude of rational cognition. Nullity and transitoriness constitute only the superficial features and not the real essence of the world. That essence is the notion in posse and in esse: and thus the world is itself the idea. All unsatisfied endeavour ceases, when we recognise that the final purpose of the world is accomplished no less than ever accomplishing itself. Generally speaking, this is the man's way of looking; while the young imagine that the world is utterly sunk in wickedness, and that the first thing needful is a thorough transformation. The religious mind, on the contrary, views the world as ruled by Divine Providence, and therefore correspondent with what it ought to be. But this harmony between the 'is' and the 'ought to be' is not torpid and rigidly stationary. Good, the final end of the world, has being, only while it constantly produces itself. And the world of spirit and the world of nature continue to have this distinction, that the latter moves only in a recurring cycle, while the former certainly also makes progress.

235.] Thus the truth of the Good is laid down as the unity of the theoretical and practical idea in the doctrine that the Good is radically and really achieved, that the objective world is in itself and for itself the Idea, just as it at the same time eternally lays itself down as End, and by action brings about its actuality. This life which has returned to itself from the bias and finitude of cognition, and which by the activity of the notion has become identical with it, is the Speculative or Absolute Idea.

(c) The Absolute Idea.

236.] The Idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the notion of the Idea,--a notion whose object (Gegenstand) is the Idea as such, and for which the objective (Objekt) is Idea,--an Object which embraces all characteristics in its unity. This unity is consequently I the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself,--and here at least as a thinking or Logical Idea.

* * * * *

The Absolute Idea is, in the first place, the unity of the theoretical and practical idea, and thus at the same time the unity of the idea of life with the idea of cognition. In cognition we had the idea in a biassed, one-sided shape. The process of cognition has issued in the overthrow of this bias and the restoration of that unity, which as unity, and in its immediacy, is in the first instance the Idea of Life. The defect of life lies in its being only the idea implicit or natural: whereas cognition is in an equally one-sided way the merely conscious idea, or the idea for itself. The unity and truth of these two is the Absolute Idea, which is both in itself and for itself. Hitherto we have had the idea in development through its various grades as our object, but now the idea comes to be its own object. This is the νόησις νοήσεως which Aristotle long ago termed the supreme form of the idea.

237.] Seeing that there is in it no transition, or presupposition, and in general no specific character other than what is fluid and transparent, the Absolute Idea is for itself the pure form of the notion, which contemplates its content as its own self. It is its own content, in so far as it ideally distinguishes itself from itself, and the one of the two things distinguished is a self-identity in which however is contained the totality of the form as the system of terms describing its content. This content is the system of Logic. All that is at this stage left as form for the idea is the Method of this content,--the specific consciousness of the value and currency of the 'moments' in its development.

* * * * *

To speak of the absolute idea may suggest the conception that we are at length reaching the right thing and the sum of the whole matter. It is certainly possible to indulge in a vast amount of senseless declamation about the idea absolute. But its true content is only the whole system of which we have been hitherto studying the development. It may also be said in this strain that the absolute idea is the universal, but the universal not merely as an abstract form to which the particular content is a stranger, but as the absolute form, into which all the categories, the whole fullness of the content it has given being to, have retired. The absolute idea may in this respect be compared to the old man who utters the same creed as the child, but for whom it is pregnant with the significance of a lifetime. Even if the child understands the truths of religion, he cannot but imagine them to be something outside of which lies the whole of life and the whole of the world. The same may be said to be the case with human life as a whole and the occurrences with which it is fraught. All work is directed only to the aim or end; and when it is attained, people are surprised to find nothing else but just the very thing which they had wished for. The interest lies in the whole movement. When a man traces up the steps of his life, the end may appear to him very restricted: but in it the whole decursus vitae is comprehended. So, too, the content of the absolute idea is the whole breadth of ground which has passed under our view up to this point. Last of all comes the discovery that the whole evolution is what constitutes the content and the interest. It is indeed the prerogative of the philosopher to see that everything, which, taken apart, is narrow and restricted, receives its value by its connexion with the whole, and by forming an organic element of the idea. Thus it is that we have had the content already, and what we have now is the knowledge that the content is the living development of the idea. This simple retrospect is contained in the form of the idea. Each of the stages hitherto reviewed is an image of the absolute, but at first in a limited mode, and thus it is forced onwards to the whole, the evolution of which is what we termed Method.

238.] The several steps or stages of the Speculative Method are, first of all, (a) the Beginning, which is Being or Immediacy: self-subsistent, for the simple reason that it is the beginning. But looked at from the speculative idea, Being is its self-specialising act, which as the absolute negativity or movement of the notion makes a judgment and puts itself as its own negative. Being, which to the beginning as beginning seems mere abstract affirmation, is thus rather negation, dependency, derivation, and pre-supposition. But it is the notion, of which Being is the negation: and the notion is completely self-identical in its otherness, and is the certainty of itself. Being therefore is the notion implicit, before it has been explicitly put as a notion. This Being therefore, as the still unspecified notion,--a notion that is only implicitly or 'immediately' specified--is equally describable as the Universal.

When it means immediate being, the beginning is taken from sensation and perception--the initial stage in the analytical method of finite cognition. When it means universality, it is the beginning of the synthetic method. But since the Logical Idea is as much a universal as it is in being--since it is pre-supposed by the notion as much as it itself immediately is, its beginning is a synthetical as well as an analytical beginning.

* * * * *

Philosophical method is analytical as well as synthetical, not indeed in the sense of a bare juxtaposition or mere alternating employment of these two methods of finite cognition, but rather in such a way that it holds them merged in itself. In every one of its movements therefore it displays an attitude at once analytical and synthetical. Philosophical thought proceeds analytically, in so far as it only accepts its object, the Idea, and while allowing it its own way, is only, as it were, an on-looker at its movement and development. To this extent philosophising is wholly passive. Philosophic thought however is equally synthetic, and evinces itself to be the action of the notion itself. To that end, however, there is required an effort to keep back the incessant impertinence of our own fancies and private opinions.

239.] (b) The Advance renders explicit the judgment implicit in the Idea. The immediate universal, as the notion implicit, is the dialectical force which on its own part deposes its immediacy and universality to the level of a mere stage or 'moment.' Thus is put the negative of the beginning, its specific character: it supposes a correlative, a relation of different terms,--the stage of Reflection.

Seeing that the immanent dialectic only states explicitly what was involved in the immediate notion, this advance is Analytical; but seeing that in this notion this distinction was not yet stated,--it is equally Synthetical.

* * * * *

In the advance of the idea, the beginning exhibits itself as what it is implicitly. It is seen to be mediated and derivative, and neither to have proper being nor proper immediacy. It is only for the consciousness which is itself immediate, that Nature forms the commencement or immediacy, and that Spirit appears as what is mediated by Nature. The truth is that Nature is the creation of Spirit, and it is Spirit itself which gives itself a pre-supposition in Nature.

240.] The abstract form of the advance is, in Being, an other and transition into an other; in Essence showing or reflection in the opposite; in Notion, the distinction of individual from universality, which continues itself as such into, and is as an identity with, what is distinguished from it.

241.] In the second sphere the primarily implicit notion has come as far as shining, and thus is already the idea in germ. The development of this sphere becomes a regress into the first, just as the development of the first is a transition into the second.

It is only by means of this double movement, that the difference first gets its due, when each of the two members distinguished, observed on its own part, completes itself to the totality, and in this way works out its unity with the other. It is only by both merging their one-sidedness on their own part, that their unity is kept from becoming one-sided.

242.] The second sphere developes the relation of the differents to what it primarily is,--to the contradiction in its own nature. That contradiction which is seen in the infinite progress is resolved (c) into the end or terminus, where the differenced is explicitly stated as what it is in notion. The end is the negative of the first, and as the identity with that, is the negativity of itself. It is consequently the unity in which both of these Firsts, the immediate and the real First, are made constituent stages in thought, merged, and at the same time preserved in the unity. The notion, which from its implicitness thus comes by means of its differentiation and the merging of that differentiation to close with itself, is the realised notion,--the notion which contains the relativity or dependence of its special features in its own independence. It is the idea which, as absolutely first (in the method), regards this terminus as merely the disappearance of the show or semblance, which made the beginning appear immediate, and made itself seem a result. It is the knowledge that the idea is the one systematic whole.

243.] It thus appears that the method is not an extraneous form, but the soul and notion of the content, from which it is only distinguished, so far as the dynamic elements of the notion even on their own part come in their own specific character to appear as the totality of the notion. This specific character, or the content, leads itself with the form back to the idea; and thus the idea is presented as a systematic totality which is only one idea, of which the several elements are each implicitly the idea, whilst they equally by the dialectic of the notion produce the simple independence of the idea. The science in this manner concludes by apprehending the notion of itself, as of the pure idea for which the idea is.

244.] The Idea which is independent or for itself, when viewed on the point of this its unity with itself, is Perception or Intuition, and the percipient Idea is Nature. But as intuition the idea is, through an external 'reflection,' invested with the one-sided characteristic of immediacy, or of negation. Enjoying however an absolute liberty, the Idea does not merely pass over into life, or as finite cognition allow life to show in it: in its own absolute truth it resolves to let the 'moment' of its particularity, or of the first characterisation and other-being, the immediate idea, as its reflected image, go forth freely as Nature.

* * * * *

We have now returned to the notion of the Idea with which we began. This return to the beginning is also an advance. We began with Being, abstract Being: where we now are we also have the Idea as Being: but this Idea which has Being is Nature.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS