V. Reason

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V. The Certainty and Truth of Reason.

231 In the thought it has grasped, that singular consciousness is in itself absolute essence, consciousness returns into itself. For unhappy consciousness, being-in-itself is the beyond of itself. But its movement has accomplished this within it: it has posited singularity in its complete development, or the singularity that is actual consciousness, as the negative of itself, namely as the objective extreme; or it has wrested its being-for-itself out of itself and made it into being. In this, its unity with this universal has also come to be for it. For us, since the sublated singular is the universal, this unity no longer falls outside consciousness; and since consciousness preserves itself in this negativity of its own, its essence is present in it as such. Its truth is what appears as the middle term in the syllogism whose extremes appeared held absolutely apart: the middle term that declares to unchangeable consciousness that 1807 163 singular consciousness has renounced itself, and to singular consciousness that the unchangeable is no longer an extreme for it, but is reconciled with it. This middle term is the unity that immediately knows both and relates them, and the consciousness of their unity, which it declares to consciousness and thereby to itself: the certainty of being all truth.

232 With self-consciousness’s being reason, its previously negative relationship to otherness turns into a positive one. Until now it has been concerned only with its independence and freedom, with saving and preserving itself for itself at the expense of the world or of its own actuality, both of which appeared to it as the negative of its essence. But as reason, assured of itself, it has gained peace in relation to them and can endure them; for it is certain of itself as reality, or certain that all actuality is nothing other than itself. Its thinking is immediately actuality itself; it therefore relates to actuality as idealism. In apprehending itself this way, it is as though the world were only now coming into being for it. Previously it does not understand the world; it desires it and works upon it, withdraws from it into itself, and eradicates it for itself, and itself as consciousness—as consciousness of the world as essence, and as consciousness of its nullity. Only here, after the grave of its truth has been lost, the eradication of its actuality itself 1807 164 eradicated, and the singularity of consciousness has become for it absolute essence in itself, does it discover the world as its new actual world, which interests it in its endurance just as previously only in its vanishing. For the world’s subsistence becomes for it its own truth and presence; it is certain of experiencing only itself within it.

233 Reason is consciousness’s certainty of being all reality: this is how idealism expresses its concept. Just as consciousness, appearing as reason, immediately has this certainty within it, so idealism expresses it immediately: I am I, in the sense that the I that is my object is not, as in self-consciousness in general, merely an empty object in general, nor, as in free self-consciousness, merely an object withdrawing from the others that still have validity beside it. Rather, it is an object accompanied by consciousness of the nonbeing of anything else: the sole object, all reality and presence. Yet self-consciousness is all reality not merely for itself, but also in itself, only by becoming this reality, or rather proving itself to be such. It proves itself so along the path on which, first, in the dialectical movement of meaning, perceiving, and understanding, otherness as in itself, and then, in the movement through the independence of consciousness in lordship and bondage, through the thought of freedom, skeptical 1807 165 liberation, and the struggle for absolute liberation of consciousness divided within itself, otherness insofar as it is only for consciousness, vanishes for consciousness itself. Two sides appeared successively: one in which essence, or the true, had for consciousness the determination of being, the other in which it had that of being only for consciousness. But both reduced themselves to one truth: that what is, or the in-itself, is only insofar as it is for consciousness, and that what is for consciousness is also in itself. The consciousness that is this truth has this path behind it and has forgotten it, insofar as it appears immediately as reason; or this immediately appearing reason appears only as the certainty of that truth. It thus merely asserts that it is all reality, but does not itself comprehend this; for that forgotten path is the comprehension of this immediately expressed assertion. Likewise, for someone who has not traveled that path, this assertion, heard in this pure form—although in a concrete shape he certainly makes it himself—is incomprehensible.

234 Idealism that does not exhibit that path, but begins with this assertion, is therefore also a mere assurance, which neither comprehends itself nor can make itself comprehensible to others. It expresses an immediate certainty confronted by other immediate certainties, which have been lost only along that path. The assurances of these other certainties therefore place themselves with equal right beside the 1807 166 *assurance of that certainty. Reason appeals to the self-consciousness of every consciousness: I am I; my object and essence is I; and none will deny it this truth. But in founding this truth on that appeal, it sanctions the truth of the other certainty, namely: there is something other for me; something other than I is my object and essence; or, insofar as I am my own object and essence, I am so only by withdrawing from the other in general and taking my place as an actuality beside it.—Only when reason appears as a reflection out of this opposed certainty does its assertion about itself appear not merely as certainty and assurance, but as truth, and not beside others, but as the only truth. Its immediate appearance is the abstraction of its presence, whose essence and being-in-itself is absolute concept, that is, the movement of its having become.—Consciousness will determine its relationship to otherness, or its object, in different ways according to the stage it occupies in world-spirit’s becoming conscious of itself. How world-spirit on each occasion immediately finds and determines itself and its object, or how it is for itself, depends on what it has already become, or what it already is in itself.

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235 Reason is the certainty of being all reality. But this in-itself, or this reality, is still something entirely universal, the pure abstraction of reality. It is the first positivity that self-consciousness is within itself, for itself; and the I is therefore only the pure essentiality of what is, or the simple category. The category, which otherwise had the meaning of being the essentiality of what is—indeterminately, of what is in general, or of what is over against consciousness—is now the essentiality, or simple unity, of what is only as thinking actuality; or it is this: that self-consciousness and being are the same essence; the same, not in comparison, but in and for themselves. Only one-sided, defective idealism lets this unity appear again on one side as consciousness, with an in-itself confronting it.—But this category, or simple unity of self-consciousness and being, contains difference within itself; for its essence is precisely to be immediately equal to itself in otherness, or in absolute difference. Difference therefore is, but is completely transparent, and is a difference that is at the same time no difference. It appears as a multiplicity of categories. Since idealism declares the simple unity of self-consciousness to be all reality, and makes it essence immediately, without having comprehended it as absolutely negative essence—which alone has negation, determinacy, or difference within 1807 168 itself—the second assertion, that the category contains differences or species, is still more incomprehensible than the first. This assurance in general, like the assurance of any determinate number of its species, is a new assurance, but one that contains within itself the demand that we no longer accept it as an assurance. For since difference begins within the pure I, within pure understanding itself, this posits that here immediacy, assuring, and finding must be abandoned, and comprehending begin. To take up the multiplicity of categories again in any manner as a discovery—for example, from judgments—and accept them in this way must in fact be regarded as a disgrace to science. Where else should understanding be able to demonstrate a necessity, if it cannot do so in itself, in pure necessity?

236 Since, then, both the pure essentiality of things and their difference belong to reason, strictly speaking there could no longer be any talk of things at all—that is, of something that would be for consciousness merely the negative of itself. For to say that the many categories are species of the pure category means that it is still their genus or essence, not opposed to them. Yet they are already the ambiguous element that also contains, in its multiplicity, otherness 1807 169 over against the pure category. Through this multiplicity they do in fact contradict it, and pure unity must sublate them within itself, thereby constituting itself as the negative unity of differences. But as negative unity it excludes from itself both the differences as such and that first immediate pure unity as such, and is singularity: a new category that is exclusive consciousness, that is, this—that another is for it. Singularity is the category’s transition from its concept to an external reality: the pure schema, which is consciousness, but which, because it is singularity and an exclusive one, is equally an indication of another. Yet this category’s other consists only in the other first categories, namely pure essentiality and pure difference; and in it—that is, precisely in the positedness of the other, or in this other itself—consciousness is likewise itself. Each of these distinct moments refers to another; yet in them no otherness comes about. The pure category refers to the species, which pass over into the negative category, or singularity; but the latter points back to the former. It is itself pure consciousness, which in each remains this clear unity with itself; but a unity that is equally referred to another, which, in being, has vanished, and in vanishing is also produced again.

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237 Here we see pure consciousness posited in a doubled manner: first as the restless back-and-forth movement that runs through all its moments, has otherness hovering before it in them, and sublates this otherness in grasping it; second, rather, as the resting unity certain of its truth. For this unity, that movement is the other; but for that movement, the resting unity is the other; and consciousness and object alternate in these reciprocal determinations. Thus at one time consciousness is for itself the searching that moves back and forth, and its object is the pure in-itself and essence; at another, consciousness is for itself the simple category, and the object is the movement of differences. But consciousness as essence is this entire course itself: passing from itself as simple category into singularity and the object, intuiting this course in the object, sublating it as distinct, appropriating it, and declaring itself to be this certainty of being all reality, both itself and its object.

238 Its first declaration is only this abstract, empty word: everything is its own. For the certainty of being all reality is initially only the pure category. Empty idealism expresses this reason that first recognizes itself in the object; it apprehends reason only as reason initially is for itself, and 1807 171 imagines that by demonstrating this pure mine of consciousness in all being and declaring things to be sensations or representations, it has demonstrated that mine as completed reality. It must therefore at the same time be absolute empiricism, for to fill the empty mine—that is, to provide its difference and all its development and configuration—its reason requires an alien impulse in which alone the manifoldness of sensation or representation would lie. This idealism therefore becomes a self-contradictory ambiguity like skepticism, except that while skepticism expresses itself negatively, idealism expresses itself positively. But it is equally incapable of bringing together its contradictory thoughts of pure consciousness as all reality, and of an alien impulse, or sensuous sensation and representation, as an equal reality. Instead, it throws itself back and forth between the one and the other, and has fallen into the bad, namely sensuous, infinity. Since reason is all reality in the sense of the abstract mine, and the other is for it an indifferent alien, precisely that knowledge of another is posited within reason which occurred as meaning, perceiving, and the understanding that apprehends what is meant and perceived. Such knowledge is at the same time declared not to be true knowledge by the concept 1807 172 of this idealism itself, for only the unity of apperception is the truth of knowledge. Thus, to reach this other, which is essential to it—that is, its in-itself—but which it does not have within itself, this idealism’s pure reason is referred back by its own doing to a knowledge that is not knowledge of the true. It thus knowingly and willingly condemns itself to untrue knowledge, and cannot relinquish meaning and perceiving, which have no truth for reason itself. It finds itself in an immediate contradiction, asserting two utterly opposed things as essence: the unity of apperception and equally the thing, which, even if called alien impulse, or empirical essence, or sensibility, or the thing in itself, remains in its concept the same alien to that unity.

239 This idealism is caught in this contradiction because it asserts the abstract concept of reason as the true; hence reality immediately arises for it just as much as something that is not, rather, reason’s reality, while reason is supposed to be all reality at the same time. Reason remains a restless search that, in searching itself, declares the satisfaction of finding to be utterly impossible.—Actual reason is 1807 173 not so inconsistent. Rather, being at first only the certainty of being all reality, in this concept it is conscious of itself as certainty, as I, as not yet being reality in truth, and is driven to raise its certainty to truth and fill the empty mine.

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A. Observing Reason.

240 We now indeed see this consciousness, for which being has the meaning of its own, enter once more into meaning and perceiving, but not as into the certainty of something merely other, but with the certainty of itself being this other. Previously it merely happened to perceive and experience various things about the thing; here it undertakes observations and experience itself. Meaning and perceiving, which previously sublated themselves for us, are now sublated by consciousness for itself; reason seeks to know the truth, to find as concept what for meaning and perceiving is a thing—that is, to have in thinghood only consciousness of itself. Reason therefore now has a universal interest in the world, because it is the certainty of having presence within it, or that presence is rational. It seeks its other, knowing that in it it possesses nothing other than itself; it seeks only its own infinity.

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241 At first only sensing itself obscurely in actuality, or knowing actuality merely as its own in general, it proceeds in this spirit to take universal possession of the property assured to it, planting the sign of its sovereignty on every height and in every depth. But this superficial mine is not its ultimate interest; the joy of this universal appropriation still finds in its property the alien other that abstract reason does not have within itself. Reason senses itself as an essence deeper than the pure I is, and must demand that difference, manifold being, become for the I itself its own: that it intuit itself as actuality and find itself present as shape and thing. But even if reason rummages through all the entrails of things and opens all their veins so that it may spring out of them to meet itself, it will not attain this happiness; rather, it must first have perfected itself within itself in order then to be able to experience its perfection.

242 Consciousness observes: that is, reason wants to find and possess itself as an existent object, in an actual, sensuously present mode. The consciousness engaged in this observation does indeed mean and say that it wishes to experience not itself, but on the contrary the essence of things as things. That this consciousness means and says this lies in its being reason, while reason 1807 176 is not yet its object as such. If it knew reason as the same essence of things and itself, and knew that reason can be present in its distinctive shape only in consciousness, it would descend into its own depths and seek reason there rather than in things. Having found reason in those depths, it would be directed outward again toward actuality, to intuit reason’s sensuous expression there, but would immediately take this essentially as concept. Reason, as it appears immediately as consciousness’s certainty of being all reality, takes its reality in the sense of the immediacy of being, and likewise the unity of the I with this objective essence in the sense of an immediate unity in which it has not yet separated and reunited the moments of being and I, or which it has not yet cognized. Thus, as observing consciousness, it approaches things in the belief that it truly takes them as sensuous things opposed to the I; yet its actual activity contradicts this belief. For it cognizes things; it transforms their sensuousness into concepts, that is, precisely into a being that is at the same time I, and thus transforms thinking into an existent thinking, or being into a thought being, and asserts in fact that things have truth only as concepts. In this, for observing consciousness only what things 1807 177 are comes to be, but for us what it itself is; the result of its movement, however, will be its becoming for itself what it is in itself.

243 The activity of observing reason must be considered in the moments of its movement: how it takes up nature, spirit, and finally their relation as sensuous being, and seeks itself as existent actuality.

a. Observation of Nature.

244 When thoughtless consciousness declares observing and experiencing to be the source of truth, its words may well sound as though it were concerned solely with tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing, and seeing. In its zeal for recommending tasting, smelling, and so forth, it forgets to say that in fact it has also, just as essentially, already determined for itself the object of this sensing, and that this determination counts for it at least as much as that sensing. It will also immediately admit that it is not merely concerned with perceiving in general, and will not, for example, let the perception that this penknife lies beside this snuffbox count as an observation. What is perceived must at least have the significance of a universal, not of a sensuous this.

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245 This universal is thus at first only what remains equal to itself; its movement is only the uniform recurrence of the same activity. Consciousness, which to this extent finds in the object only universality, or the abstract mine, must take the object’s actual movement upon itself. Since it is not yet the object’s understanding, it must at least be its memory, expressing in a universal manner what is present in actuality only in a singular manner. This superficial lifting out of singularity, and the equally superficial form of universality into which the sensuous is merely taken up without having become universal in itself—this describing of things—does not yet have movement in the object itself; rather, movement is only in the describing. The object, once described, has therefore lost its interest; once one is described, another must be taken up, and continually sought, so that describing does not run out. When new whole things are no longer so easy to find, one must return to those already found, divide them further, take them apart, and track down still new aspects of thinghood in them. This restless, unsettled instinct can never lack material. Discovering a new, distinctive genus, or even a new planet—which, although an individual, nevertheless has the nature of a 1807 179 universal—can fall only to the fortunate. But the boundaries of what is distinctive, like the elephant, the oak, gold—what is genus and species—pass through many stages into the infinite particularization of the chaotic animals and plants, kinds of rock, or metals, earths, and so forth that must first be produced by force and art. In this realm of the universal’s indeterminacy, in which particularization again approaches singularization, and here and there descends entirely into it again, an inexhaustible store is opened up for observing and describing. Yet here, where a field beyond survey opens before it, at the boundary of the universal, it may instead have found only the limit of nature and its own activity rather than an immeasurable wealth. It can no longer know whether what appears to be in itself is not a contingency. What bears the stamp of a confused or immature formation, weak and scarcely developing out of elemental indeterminacy, cannot claim even to be described.

246 Although this searching and describing seems concerned only with things, we see that in fact it does not proceed along the course of sensuous perception. Rather, what allows things to be cognized is more important to it than the remaining range of sensuous properties, which the 1807 180 thing itself admittedly cannot dispense with, but which consciousness dispenses with. Through this distinction between the essential and the inessential, the concept rises out of sensuous dispersion, and cognition declares that it is concerned at least as essentially with itself as with things. Given this doubled essentiality, it wavers over whether what is essential and necessary for cognition is so also in the things. On the one hand, characteristic marks are supposed merely to serve cognition in distinguishing things from each other; but on the other, what is to be cognized is not the inessential in things, but that through which they themselves break free from the universal continuity of being in general, separate themselves from the other, and are for themselves. Characteristic marks are to have an essential relation not only to cognition, but also to be the essential determinations of things; the artificial system is to accord with nature’s own system and express only this. This is necessary from the concept of reason, and reason’s instinct—for it behaves only as instinct in this observing—has also attained this unity in its systems where its objects are themselves so constituted that they have an essentiality, or a being-for-themselves, within them, and are not merely the contingency of this moment or this here. The distinguishing marks 1807 181 of animals, for example, are taken from claws and teeth; for in fact cognition not only distinguishes one animal from another by these, but the animal separates itself off through them. Through these weapons it preserves itself for itself, and apart from the universal. The plant, by contrast, does not attain being-for-itself, but only touches the boundary of individuality; it has therefore been apprehended and distinguished at this boundary, where it displays the semblance of division into sexes. What stands lower still can no longer distinguish itself from others, but is lost when it enters into opposition. Being at rest and being in relationship come into conflict with each other; in the latter the thing is something different from what it is in the former, whereas the individual consists precisely in preserving itself in relationship to another. But what cannot do this, and chemically becomes something other than it empirically is, confuses cognition and brings it into the same conflict over whether to hold to one side or the other, since the thing itself is nothing constant, and the two fall apart within it.

247 In such systems of the universal that remains equal to itself, this universal thus has the meaning of being what remains equal to itself both in cognition and in things themselves. Yet this expansion of constant determinations, each of 1807 182 which calmly describes the sequence of its progression and receives room to act on its own, passes just as essentially into its opposite, into the confusion of these determinations. For the characteristic mark, the universal determinacy, is the unity of opposites, of the determinate and the intrinsically universal; it must therefore separate into this opposition. Now, if on one side determinacy overcomes the universal in which it has its essence, on the other the universal equally maintains its mastery over determinacy, drives it to its boundary, and there mingles its differences and essential features. Observation, which kept these neatly apart and believed it had something fixed in them, sees the other principles encroach upon one principle, transitions and confusions form, and in these sees joined what it first took to be utterly separated, and separated what it counted together. Thus this clinging to tranquil being that remains equal to itself must, precisely in its most universal determinations—for example, what essential characteristics animals or plants have—find itself teased by instances that rob it of every determination, silence the universality to which it had risen, and cast it back into thoughtless observing and describing.

248 Thus this observation, which confines itself to the simple, or restricts sensuous dispersion through the universal, 1807 183 finds in its object the confusion of its principle, because the determinate must by its nature lose itself in its opposite. Reason must therefore proceed instead from the inert determinacy that seemed permanent to observing it as it truly is, namely as relating itself to its opposite. What are called essential characteristics are determinations at rest; expressed and apprehended as simple, they do not exhibit what constitutes their nature: to be vanishing moments of the movement that takes itself back into itself. Since reason’s instinct now comes to seek determinacy in accordance with its nature—essentially not to be for itself, but to pass over into its opposite—it searches for the law and its concept. It admittedly searches for them equally as existent actuality; but this will in fact vanish for it, and the sides of the law will become pure moments, or abstractions, so that the law emerges in the nature of the concept, which has eradicated within itself the indifferent subsistence of sensuous actuality.

249 For observing consciousness, the truth of the law is in experience, as the manner in which sensuous being is for it, not in and for itself. But if the law does not have its truth in the concept, it is something contingent, 1807 184 not a necessity, or in fact not a law. Yet its being essentially as concept not only does not contradict its being present for observation; rather, for that very reason it has necessary existence and is for observation. The universal, in the sense of reason’s universality, is also universal in the sense that the former has within it: that it presents itself for consciousness as present and actual, or that the concept exhibits itself in the manner of thinghood and sensuous being—but without thereby losing its nature and falling into inert subsistence or indifferent succession. What is universally valid also holds universally; what ought to be actually is as well, and what merely ought to be without being has no truth. Reason’s instinct rightly holds fast to this on its side, and will not be led astray by thought-entities that merely ought to be, and are supposed to have truth as an ought, although they are encountered in no experience—by hypotheses any more than by all the other invisibilities of a perpetual ought. For reason is precisely this certainty of having reality, and what is not for consciousness as a self-existent essence—that is, what does not appear—is nothing at all for it.

250 That the truth of the law is essentially reality does indeed become again, for this consciousness that remains at the level of observation, 1807 185 an opposition to the concept and to the intrinsically universal; something such as its law is not for it an essence of reason. It believes that in the law it obtains something alien. Yet it refutes this belief through its deed, in which it does not itself take universality to mean that all singular sensuous things must have shown it the law’s appearance before it can assert its truth. To establish that stones lifted from the earth and released fall, it does not demand that this experiment be made with all stones. It may indeed say that it must at least have been tried with very many, from which one could then infer the rest with the greatest probability, or with full justification by analogy. Yet analogy not only provides no full justification; by its nature it refutes itself so often that, inferring by analogy itself, analogy instead permits no inference. The probability to which its result would be reduced loses, when set against truth, all distinction between lesser and greater probability; however great it may be, it is nothing against truth. In fact, however, reason’s instinct accepts such laws as truth, and only in relation to their necessity, which it does not cognize, does it fall into this 1807 186 distinction and lower the truth of the matter itself to probability, in order to designate the imperfect manner in which truth is present for a consciousness that has not yet attained insight into the pure concept. For universality is present only as simple, immediate universality. Yet at the same time it is for the sake of this universality that the law has truth for consciousness: that the stone falls is true for it because the stone is heavy, that is, because in gravity the stone in and for itself has the essential relation to the earth that expresses itself as falling. Thus in experience consciousness has the being of the law, but equally the law as concept, and only because of both circumstances together is it true for consciousness. It therefore counts as law because it exhibits itself in appearance and is at the same time concept in itself.

251 Because the law is at the same time concept in itself, this consciousness’s instinct of reason necessarily aims—though without knowing that this is what it wants—at purifying the law and its moments into concept. It conducts experiments concerning the law. As the law first appears, it presents itself impure, enveloped in singular sensuous being, the concept that constitutes its nature submerged in empirical material. In its experiments, reason’s instinct seeks to find what happens under these or those circumstances. The law 1807 187 seems thereby only to be immersed still further in sensuous being; yet this being instead disappears in the process. The inward meaning of this inquiry is to find the law’s pure conditions. This means nothing other—even if the consciousness expressing itself this way should believe it means something else—than raising the law entirely into the shape of the concept and eradicating every bond of its moments to determinate being. Negative electricity, for example, which perhaps first announces itself as resinous electricity, just as positive electricity does as vitreous electricity, loses this significance entirely through experiments and becomes purely positive and negative electricity, neither of which belongs any longer to a particular kind of thing. It ceases to be possible to say that some bodies are positively electrical, others negatively electrical. Likewise, the relationship of acid and base and their movement toward each other constitutes a law in which these opposites appear as bodies. Yet these separated things have no actuality; the force that tears them apart cannot prevent them from immediately entering a process again, for they are only this relation. They cannot remain for themselves like a tooth or claw and be pointed out as such. That their essence is to pass immediately into a neutral product makes their being a being sublated in itself, or a 1807 188 universal being, and acid and base have truth only as universals. Thus, just as glass and resin can be both positively and negatively electrical, acid and base are not bound as properties to this or that actuality, but each thing is acidic or basic only relatively. What appears to be a decided base or acid acquires the opposite significance in relation to another in the so-called synsomaties.—In this way the result of experiments sublates the moments, or animating principles, as properties of determinate things, and frees predicates from their subjects. These predicates are found, as they truly are, only as universals; because of this independence they therefore receive the name of forms of matter, which are neither bodies nor properties, and one takes care not to call oxygen and so forth, positive and negative electricity, heat, and so on, bodies.

252 Matter, by contrast, is not an existent thing, but being as universal, or in the manner of the concept. Reason, still instinct, makes this correct distinction without the consciousness that, in testing the law against all sensuous being, it thereby sublates its merely sensuous being, and that, in apprehending its moments as forms of matter, their essentiality has become universal for it, expressed in this term as an unsensuous sensuousness, an incorporeal yet objective being.

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253 We must now see what turn its result takes for this instinct, and what new shape of its observing thereby appears. As the truth of this experimenting consciousness we see pure law, freed from sensuous being; we see it as concept, present in sensuous being yet moving independently and unbound within it, immersed in it yet free of it, and simple concept. What is in truth the result and essence now itself appears for this consciousness, but as object; and precisely because for consciousness it is not result, and bears no relation to the preceding movement, it appears as a particular kind of object, and consciousness’s relationship to it as another kind of observing.

254 Such an object, which contains the process within the simplicity of the concept, is the organic. It is this absolute fluidity in which the determinacy through which it would be only for another is dissolved. Whereas the inorganic thing has determinacy as its essence, and therefore constitutes the completeness of the concept’s moments only together with another thing, and consequently is lost on entering into movement, in the organic being, by contrast, all determinations through which it is open to another are bound under organic simple unity. None appears as essential that would relate freely 1807 190 to another; and the organic therefore preserves itself within its relation.

255 As follows from this determination, the sides of the law whose observation reason’s instinct seeks here are initially organic and inorganic nature in their relation to each other. For organic nature, inorganic nature is precisely the freedom, opposed to its simple concept, of unbound determinations in which individual nature is at the same time dissolved, and from whose continuity it at the same time separates itself and is for itself. Air, water, earth, zones, and climate are such universal elements, constituting the indeterminate simple essence of individualities, in which these are at the same time reflected into themselves. Neither individuality nor the elemental is simply in and for itself; rather, in the independent freedom in which they confront each other for observation, they also behave as essential relations, but in such a way that the independence and mutual indifference of both predominate and pass only partly into abstraction. Here, then, the law is present as the relation of an element to the formation of the organic, which at one time has elemental being opposite it, at another exhibits it in its organic reflection. Yet such laws as that animals belonging to air have the constitution of birds, those 1807 191 belonging to water the constitution of fish, northern animals a thickly furred hide, and so forth, immediately reveal a poverty that does not correspond to organic diversity. Besides the fact that organic freedom knows how to withdraw its forms again from these determinations, and necessarily offers exceptions everywhere to such laws or rules, as one might call them, even in those beings that fall under them this remains so superficial a determination that the expression of their necessity can be no different, and gets no further than great influence, without our knowing what actually belongs to this influence and what does not. Such relations of the organic to the elemental therefore cannot in fact be called laws. For, in part, as remarked, such a relation does not by its content remotely exhaust the range of the organic; in part, the moments of the relation themselves also remain indifferent to each other and express no necessity. The concept of base lies in the concept of acid, as negative electricity lies in the concept of positive electricity; but however often thick fur may be found together with the north, or the structure of fish with water and that of birds with air, the concept of thick fur does not lie in the concept of the north, nor that of the structure of fish in the concept of the sea, 1807 192 nor that of birds’ structure in the concept of air. Because of this freedom of the two sides toward each other, there are also land animals that have the essential characteristics of a bird, of a fish, and so forth. Since necessity cannot be comprehended as intrinsic to essence, it also ceases to have sensuous existence and can no longer be observed in actuality, but has stepped outside it. Not finding itself in the real essence itself, necessity is what is called a teleological relation: a relation external to the things related, and therefore rather the opposite of a law. It is thought entirely freed from necessary nature, leaving nature and moving for itself above it.

256 If the relation of the organic to elemental nature touched upon earlier does not express the organic’s essence, this essence is, by contrast, contained in the concept of purpose. For this observing consciousness, admittedly, that concept is not the organic’s own essence, but falls outside it, and is then only that external, teleological relation. Yet as the organic was determined above, it is in fact real purpose itself. For in preserving itself in relation to another, it is precisely the natural being in which nature reflects itself into the concept, and the moments spread apart in necessity—cause 1807 193 and effect, an active and a passive—are brought together into one. Thus something appears here not merely as the result of necessity; rather, because it has returned into itself, the last, or result, is equally the first, which begins the movement, and is for itself the purpose it actualizes. The organic does not produce something, but only preserves itself; or what is produced is just as much already present as it is produced.

257 This determination must be discussed more closely, both as it is in itself and as it is for reason’s instinct, in order to see how that instinct finds itself within it, yet does not recognize itself in its discovery. The concept of purpose, then, to which observing reason rises, is, just as it is reason’s conscious concept, equally present as something actual; it is not merely an external relation of this actuality, but its essence. To say that this actuality, itself a purpose, relates purposively to another means that its relation is contingent according to what both immediately are; immediately, both are independent and indifferent to each other. Yet the essence of their relation is other than what they thus appear to be, and their activity has a meaning other than what it immediately is for sensuous perception. Necessity is hidden in what happens, and shows itself only at the end, but in such a way that this very end shows that necessity was also the first. 1807 194 The end, however, shows this priority of itself by the fact that the alteration brought about by activity yields nothing other than what already was. Or, if we begin with the first, this first merely returns to itself in its end, or in the result of its activity; and precisely thereby it proves to be something that has itself as its end, and thus, as first, has already returned to itself, or is in and for itself. What it reaches through the movement of its activity is therefore itself; and its reaching only itself is its self-feeling. There is thus indeed a difference between what it is and what it seeks, but this is only the semblance of a difference, and through this it is concept within itself.

258 Self-consciousness, however, is likewise constituted so as to distinguish itself from itself in a manner in which no difference emerges. In observing organic nature, it therefore finds nothing other than this essence; it finds itself as a thing, as a life, but still makes a distinction between what it itself is and what it has found—a distinction that is none. Just as an animal’s instinct seeks and consumes food, yet thereby brings forth nothing other than itself, so reason’s instinct finds only reason itself in its seeking. The animal ends with self-feeling. Reason’s instinct, by contrast, is 1807 195 at the same time self-consciousness; but because it is only instinct, it stands to one side in relation to consciousness and has its opposite in consciousness. Its satisfaction is therefore divided by this opposite; it does indeed find itself, namely purpose, and equally finds this purpose as thing. But first, purpose falls for it outside the thing that presents itself as purpose. Second, this purpose as purpose is at the same time objective; it therefore also falls, for reason’s instinct, not within itself as consciousness, but within another understanding.

259 Considered more closely, this determination lies equally in the thing’s concept: that it is purpose within itself. For it preserves itself; that is, it is at the same time its nature to conceal necessity and exhibit it in the form of a contingent relation. For its freedom, or being-for-itself, is precisely this: to behave indifferently toward what is necessary for it. It therefore exhibits itself as something whose concept falls outside its being. Likewise, reason has the necessity of intuiting its own concept as falling outside itself, hence as a thing, as something toward which it is indifferent, and which is therefore reciprocally indifferent toward reason and toward its own concept. As instinct, reason also remains within this being, or indifference, and the thing expressing the concept remains for it something other than this concept, the concept 1807 196 something other than the thing. Thus for reason the organic thing is purpose within itself only in such a way that the necessity exhibiting itself as hidden in the thing’s activity—since what acts behaves in that activity as something indifferent, being for itself—falls outside the organic itself.—But since the organic, as purpose within itself, cannot behave otherwise than as such a purpose, its being purpose within itself is also apparent and sensuously present, and is observed as such. The organic shows itself as preserving itself, returning into itself, and having returned into itself. Yet in this being, observing consciousness does not recognize the concept of purpose, or recognize that this concept exists not somewhere else in an understanding, but precisely here, and is as a thing. It makes a distinction between the concept of purpose and being-for-itself and self-preservation, a distinction that is none. That it is none is not present for consciousness; instead, an activity that appears contingent and indifferent toward what is accomplished through it, and the unity that nonetheless links the two together—that activity and this purpose—fall apart for consciousness.

260 On this view, what belongs to the organic itself is the activity lying midway between its first and last, insofar as this activity has the character of singularity. But activity insofar as it has the character of universality, and 1807 197 what acts is equated with what is produced through it—purposive activity as such—would not belong to the organic. That singular activity, which is only a means, falls through its singularity under the determination of a wholly singular or contingent necessity. What the organic does to preserve itself as an individual, or itself as a genus, is therefore, according to this immediate content, entirely lawless, for the universal and the concept fall outside it. Its activity would accordingly be empty efficacy without content in itself; it would not even be the efficacy of a machine, for a machine has a purpose, and its efficacy thereby a determinate content. Thus abandoned by the universal, it would be the activity only of an existent as existent, that is, an activity not at the same time reflected into itself, like that of an acid or base: an efficacy that could not detach itself from its immediate existence, or give up this existence, which is lost in relation to its opposite, yet preserve itself. But the being whose efficacy is being considered here is posited as a thing that preserves itself in its relation to its opposite. Activity as such is nothing but the pure, essenceless form of its being-for-itself; and its substance, which is not merely determinate being but the universal—its purpose—does not fall outside this activity. In itself, it is activity returning into itself, not 1807 198 activity turned back into itself by something alien.

261 Yet this unity of universality and activity is not present for this observing consciousness, because that unity is essentially the inward movement of the organic and can be apprehended only as concept. Observation, however, seeks the moments in the form of being and permanence; and because the organic whole is essentially such that it does not have the moments in this form within it and does not allow them to be found there, consciousness, in its view, transforms the opposition into one suited to that view.

262 In this way organic essence arises for consciousness as a relation of two existent and fixed moments—an opposition whose two sides therefore seem, on the one hand, to be given to it in observation, and on the other, in their content, express the opposition of the organic concept of purpose and actuality. Yet because the concept as such is effaced in this, they express it in an obscure, superficial manner in which thought has sunk into representation. Thus we see the first roughly intended under the inner, the other under the outer, and their relation generates the law: the outer is the expression of the inner.

263 Closer consideration of this inner, its opposite, and their relation to each other shows 1807 199 that, first, the two sides of the law no longer have the character they had in earlier laws, where they appeared as independent things, each as a particular body; nor, second, is the universal supposed to have its existence somewhere else outside what exists. Rather, organic essence in general, undivided, is laid down as the foundation, as the content of inner and outer, and is the same for both. The opposition is therefore now only a purely formal one, whose real sides have the same in-itself as their essence. Yet at the same time, since inner and outer are also opposed reality and a being differentiated for observation, each seems to observation to have a distinctive content. But since this distinctive content is the same substance or organic unity, it can in fact only be a different form of that unity; observing consciousness indicates this in saying that the outer is only the expression of the inner.—We have seen the same determinations of the relationship in the concept of purpose: the indifferent independence of the different sides, and within it their unity, in which they vanish.

264 We must now see what shape inner and outer have in their being. The inner as such must have an outer being and a shape just as much as the outer as such, for it 1807 200 is object, or is itself posited as existent and present for observation.

265 As inner, organic substance is the simple soul, the pure concept of purpose, or the universal, which in its division remains equally universal fluidity, and therefore in its being appears as the activity or movement of vanishing actuality. By contrast, the outer, opposed to that existent inner, consists in the organic’s being at rest. The law, as the relation of that inner to this outer, thus expresses its content at one time in the presentation of universal moments or simple essentialities, at another in the presentation of actualized essentiality, or shape. Those first simple organic properties, to call them so, are sensibility, irritability, and reproduction. These properties, at least the first two, admittedly seem to relate not to the organism in general, but only to the animal organism. The vegetable organism does in fact express only the simple concept of the organism, which does not develop its moments; therefore, regarding these moments insofar as they are to be for observation, we must keep to the organism that exhibits their developed existence.

266 As for these properties themselves, they follow immediately from the concept of an end in itself. For sensibility expresses in general the simple 1807 201 concept of organic reflection into itself, or its universal fluidity; irritability, however, expresses organic elasticity, the capacity to behave reactively at the same time in reflection, and the actualization opposed to that first tranquil being-within-itself, in which that abstract being-for-itself is a being for another. Reproduction, however, is the action of this whole organism reflected into itself, its activity as purpose in itself or as genus, in which the individual thus repels itself from itself and repeats itself by generating either its organic parts or the whole individual. Taken in the sense of self-preservation in general, reproduction expresses the formal concept of the organic, or sensibility; but properly it is the real organic concept, or the whole that returns into itself as individual through producing its own singular parts, or as genus through producing individuals.

267 The other meaning of these organic elements, namely as the outer, is their configured mode, in which they are present as actual but at the same time also universal parts, or organic systems: sensibility, for instance, as the nervous system; irritability as the muscular system; reproduction as the viscera preserving the individual and the genus.

1807 202

268 Distinctive laws of the organic therefore concern a relationship of organic moments in their doubled meaning: at one time being a part of the organic configuration, at another a universal, fluid determinacy passing through all those systems. Thus in the expression of such a law, for example, a determinate sensibility as a moment of the whole organism would have its expression in a determinately formed nervous system, or would also be linked with a determinate reproduction of the individual’s organic parts, or propagation of the whole, and so forth.—The two sides of such a law can be observed. According to its concept the outer is being for another; sensibility, for example, has its immediately actualized mode in the sensitive system, and as a universal property it is equally something objective in its manifestations. The side called the inner has its own outer side, distinct from what is called the outer in the whole.

269 The two sides of an organic law could therefore indeed be observed, but not laws of their relation; and observation is inadequate not because, as observation, it would be too shortsighted, and one ought not to proceed empirically but to begin from the idea. For such laws, if they were something real, would in fact have to be actually present, and therefore 1807 203 observable. Rather, observation is inadequate because the thought of laws of this kind proves to have no truth.

270 For a law, the relationship emerged in which the universal organic property would have made itself into a thing in an organic system and have its configured imprint in it, so that both would be the same essence, present at one time as universal moment, at another as thing. But besides this, the inner side is also in itself a relationship of several sides; hence the thought of a law first presents itself as a relation of the universal organic activities or properties to each other. Whether such a law is possible must be decided from the nature of such a property. As universal fluidity, however, it is, in part, not something limited in the manner of a thing, maintaining itself within the distinction of an existence that would constitute its shape; rather, sensibility extends beyond the nervous system and passes through all the organism’s other systems. In part, it is a universal moment, essentially undivided and inseparable from reaction, or irritability, and reproduction. For as reflection into itself, it simply has reaction within it. Mere reflectedness into itself is passivity, or dead being, not sensibility, just as action—which is the same as reaction—without reflectedness into itself is not irritability. Reflection in action or 1807 204 reaction, and action or reaction in reflection, is precisely that whose unity constitutes the organic, a unity synonymous with organic reproduction. It follows that in every mode of actuality the same magnitude of sensibility must be present as of irritability—considering first their relationship to each other—and that an organic appearance can be apprehended and determined, or explained if one wishes, just as much in terms of the one as of the other. The same thing that one person takes, perhaps, as high sensibility, another can equally well regard as high irritability, and irritability of the same degree. If they are called factors, and this is not to be a meaningless word, it states precisely that they are moments of the concept, and that the real object whose essence this concept constitutes therefore has them within itself in the same manner; if it is determined in terms of the one as highly sensitive, it must equally be declared in terms of the other to be just as irritable.

271 If they are distinguished, as they necessarily must be, they are distinguished according to the concept, and their opposition is qualitative. But if, beyond this true distinction, they are also posited as existent and different for representation, as they might be as sides of a law, they appear in quantitative difference. Their distinctive qualitative 1807 205 opposition thus enters into magnitude, and laws arise of the kind that, for example, sensibility and irritability stand in inverse ratio to their magnitudes, so that as one increases, the other decreases; or, better, taking magnitude itself directly as the content, that the magnitude of something increases as its smallness decreases.—But if this law is given a determinate content, say that the size of a hole increases the more what fills it decreases, this inverse ratio can equally be transformed into a direct one and expressed by saying that the size of the hole increases in direct proportion to the quantity removed—a tautological proposition, whether expressed as a direct or an inverse ratio, which in its distinctive expression means only that a magnitude increases as this magnitude increases. Just as the hole and what fills it and is removed are qualitatively opposed, but their reality and its determinate magnitude in both are one and the same, and likewise increase of magnitude and decrease of smallness are the same, so that their meaningless opposition ends in a tautology, so the organic moments are equally inseparable in their reality and in their magnitude, which is the magnitude of that same reality. One decreases only with the other, and increases only with it, for one has significance only insofar as the 1807 206 other is present—or rather, it is indifferent whether an organic appearance is considered as irritability or as sensibility, both generally and when its magnitude is discussed. It is equally indifferent whether the increase of a hole is expressed as an increase of it as emptiness or as an increase of the fullness taken out. Or a number, for example three, remains equally large whether I take it positively or negatively; and if I enlarge three to four, the positive as well as the negative has become four—just as a magnet’s south pole is exactly as strong as its north pole, or a positive electricity, or an acid, exactly as strong as its negative electricity, or the base upon which it acts.—An organic existence is a magnitude like that three, or a magnet, and so forth; it is what is increased and diminished, and when it is increased, both its factors are increased, just as both poles of the magnet, or both electricities, increase when a magnet and so forth is strengthened.—That the two can differ no more in intensity and extension—that one cannot decrease in extension but increase in intensity, while the other conversely is supposed to diminish its intensity but increase in extension—falls under the same concept of empty opposition. Real intensity is 1807 207 simply just as great as extension, and conversely.

272 As is clear, what actually happens in this legislation is that irritability and sensibility first constitute the determinate organic opposition; but this content disappears, and the opposition trails off into the formal opposition of increase and decrease of magnitude, or of differing intensity and extension—an opposition that no longer concerns the nature of sensibility and irritability at all, and no longer expresses them. Hence such an empty game of legislating is not bound to organic moments, but can be played everywhere with anything, and rests in general upon unfamiliarity with the logical nature of these oppositions.

273 Finally, if reproduction, instead of sensibility and irritability, is related to either of them, even the occasion for this legislation disappears. For reproduction does not stand opposed to these moments as they do to each other; and since this legislation rests on opposition, even the semblance of its applicability disappears here.

274 The legislation just considered contains the organism’s differences in their significance as moments of its concept, and was properly intended to be a priori legislation. But 1807 208 it essentially contains within itself the thought that these moments have the significance of things present, and merely observing consciousness must in any case adhere only to their existence. Organic actuality necessarily contains an opposition such as its concept expresses, which can be determined as irritability and sensibility, just as both again appear distinct from reproduction.—The externality in which the moments of the organic concept are considered here is the inner’s own immediate externality, not the outer that is outer in the whole and is shape, and with which the inner is subsequently to be considered in relation.

275 But if the opposition of the moments is apprehended as it is in existence, sensibility, irritability, and reproduction sink to ordinary properties, universalities as indifferent toward each other as specific gravity, color, hardness, and so forth. In this sense one may certainly observe that one organic being is more sensitive or irritable, or has greater reproductive power, than another; likewise that the sensibility and so forth of one differs in kind from that of another, that one behaves differently toward determinate stimuli than another—as the horse behaves differently toward oats than toward hay, and the dog differently again toward both, and so forth—just as one can observe that one body is harder than 1807 209 another, and so forth.—Yet these sensuous properties—hardness, color, and so on—as well as the appearances of receptivity to the stimulus of oats, irritability under burdens, or the number and manner of giving birth to young, essentially resist lawfulness when related to and compared with one another. For the determinacy of their sensuous being consists precisely in existing completely indifferently toward one another, and in exhibiting nature’s freedom released from the concept rather than the unity of a relation: exhibiting its irrational play back and forth on the scale of contingent magnitude between the concept’s moments rather than these moments themselves.

276 The other side, on which the simple moments of the organic concept are compared with the moments of configuration, would first yield the law proper, which would declare the true outer as the imprint of the inner.—Now, because those simple moments are pervasive, fluid properties, they do not have in the organic thing a segregated real expression such as what is called a singular system of shape. Or, if the organism’s abstract idea is truly expressed in those three moments only because they are nothing stationary, but merely moments of the concept and movement, the organism as configuration, by contrast, is not contained within three such determinate systems 1807 210 as anatomy lays out. Insofar as such systems are supposed to be found in their actuality and legitimated by this finding, we must also recall that anatomy displays not merely three such systems, but many more.—Furthermore, quite apart from this, the sensitive system must in general mean something entirely different from what is called the nervous system; likewise the irritable system something different from the muscular system, and the reproductive system something different from the viscera of reproduction. In the systems of shape as such, the organism is apprehended on the abstract side of dead existence; its moments, taken this way, belong to anatomy and the cadaver, not to cognition and the living organism. As such parts they have, rather, ceased to be, for they cease to be processes. Since the organism’s being is essentially universality, or reflection into itself, the being of its whole, like that of its moments, cannot consist in an anatomical system. Rather, their actual expression and externality are present only as a movement running through the various parts of the configuration, in which what is torn out and fixed as a singular system exhibits itself essentially as a fluid moment. Thus not that actuality as anatomy finds it may count as their reality, but only actuality 1807 211 as process, within which alone the anatomical parts also have a meaning.

277 It follows, then, that neither are the moments of the organic inner, taken on their own, capable of providing sides of a law of being—since, in such a law, predicated of an existence, they would have to be distinguished from one another, and each could not be named indifferently in place of the other—nor, placed on one side, do they have their realization on the other in a fixed system. For this latter is no more something possessing organic truth in general than it is the expression of those inner moments. Rather, since the essential character of the organic is in itself the universal, it consists in general in having its moments in actuality equally as universal, that is, as processes running through it, not in giving an image of the universal in an isolated thing.

278 In this way the representation of a law in general disappears in the organic. The law seeks to apprehend and express the opposition as sides at rest, and in them the determinacy that is their relation to each other. The inner, to which appearing universality belongs, and the outer, to which the parts of shape at rest belong, were to constitute the corresponding sides of the law; yet held apart in this way, they lose their organic significance. The representation of law lays down precisely this as 1807 212 its foundation: that its two sides should have an indifferent subsistence for themselves, and that the relation should be distributed between them as a doubled, corresponding determinacy. Rather, each side of the organic is within itself this: simple universality in which all determinations are dissolved, and the movement of this dissolution.

279 Insight into the difference between this legislation and earlier forms will fully illuminate its nature.—If we look back at the movement of perceiving and of the understanding that therein reflects itself into itself and thereby determines its object, this understanding does not have before it, in its object, the relation of these abstract determinations—universal and singular, essential and external—but is itself the passing-over, for which this passing-over does not become objective. Here, by contrast, organic unity—that is, precisely the relation of those opposites, and this relation is pure passing-over—is itself the object. This passing-over in its simplicity is immediately universality; and as universality enters into the difference whose relation the law is to express, its moments as universals are objects of this consciousness, and the law states that the outer is expression of the inner. Understanding has here grasped the thought of law itself, whereas 1807 213 previously it merely sought laws in general, and their moments hovered before it as a determinate content, not as the thoughts of those moments.—As regards content, then, what are to be obtained here are not laws that merely take up purely existent differences at rest into the form of universality, but laws that immediately contain in these differences the concept’s unrest, and thereby also the necessity of the sides’ relation. Yet precisely because the object, organic unity, immediately unites infinite sublation, or the absolute negation of being, with being at rest, and the moments are essentially pure passing-over, no such existent sides arise as are required for law.

280 To obtain such sides, understanding must adhere to the other moment of the organic relationship: organic existence’s reflectedness into itself. But this being is so completely reflected into itself that no determinacy over against another remains to it. Immediate sensuous being is immediately one with determinacy as such, and therefore expresses a qualitative difference within itself—for example, blue as opposed to red, acid as opposed to alkaline, and so forth. But organic being, having returned into itself, is completely indifferent toward another; its existence is simple universality, and denies 1807 214 observation permanent sensuous differences, or, what is the same, displays its essential determinacy only as the alternation of existent determinations. Thus difference’s expression as existent is precisely its being an indifferent difference, that is, as magnitude. In this, however, the concept is effaced and necessity has vanished.—But the content and filling of this indifferent being, the alternation of sensuous determinations gathered into the simplicity of an organic determination, then at the same time expresses that it does not have precisely that determinacy of immediate property, and the qualitative falls solely into magnitude, as we saw above.

281 Thus, although what is objective, apprehended as organic determinacy, contains the concept within itself, and thereby differs from the object for understanding that behaves as purely perceptive in apprehending the content of its laws, this apprehension nonetheless falls entirely back into the principle and manner of merely perceiving understanding, because what is apprehended is used as moments of a law. For it thereby acquires the mode of a fixed determinacy, the form of an immediate property or an appearance at rest, is further taken up into the determination of magnitude, and the nature of the concept is suppressed.—The exchange of something merely perceived for 1807 215 something reflected into itself, of a merely sensuous determinacy for an organic one, therefore loses its value again, precisely because understanding has not yet sublated legislation.

282 To make the comparison regarding this exchange through a few examples: something that for perception is an animal with strong muscles is determined as an animal organism of high irritability; or what for perception is a state of great weakness is determined as a state of high sensibility—or, if preferred, as an abnormal affection, specifically a potentiation of sensibility: expressions that translate the sensuous not into the concept but into a German-Latin jargon. Understanding can also express the animal’s having strong muscles by saying that the animal possesses great muscular power, just as great weakness can be expressed as slight power. Determination through irritability has an advantage over determination as power: the latter expresses indeterminate reflection into itself, the former determinate reflection, for the muscle’s distinctive power is precisely irritability. It has an advantage over determination as strong muscles in that, as already in power, reflection into itself is also contained within it. Likewise weakness, or slight power, organic passivity, is determinately expressed through sensibility. But sensibility thus taken and fixed on its own, and further combined with the 1807 216 determination of magnitude, and as greater or lesser sensibility opposed to greater or lesser irritability—each is wholly reduced to the sensuous element and the ordinary form of a property, and their relation is not the concept, but, on the contrary, magnitude, into which the opposition now falls and becomes a thoughtless difference. Although the indeterminacy of expressions such as power, strength, and weakness has been removed here, what now arises is an equally empty and indeterminate wandering among the oppositions of higher and lower sensibility and irritability, in their rising and falling in themselves and in relation to each other. Greater or lesser sensibility and irritability are sensuous appearances apprehended and expressed without thought, no less than strength and weakness are wholly sensuous, thoughtless determinations. The concept has not taken the place of those conceptless expressions; rather, strength and weakness have been filled with a determination that, taken on its own, rests upon the concept and has it as its content, but entirely loses this origin and character.—Thus, through the form of simplicity and immediacy in which this content is made one side of a law, and through magnitude, which constitutes the element of difference between such determinations, the essence originally being and posited as concept retains the 1807 217 mode of sensuous perception, and remains as remote from cognition as in determination through strength and weakness of power, or through immediate sensuous properties.

283 It now remains to consider on its own what is the outer of the organic, and how the opposition of its inner and outer determines itself within it, just as first the inner of the whole was considered in relation to its own outer.

284 The outer, considered on its own, is configuration in general, the system of life articulating itself in the element of being, and essentially at the same time the being of organic essence for another—objective essence in its being-for-itself.—This other appears initially as its external inorganic nature. Considered in relation to a law, these two cannot, as we saw above, have inorganic nature constitute one side of a law opposite organic essence, because organic essence is also absolutely for itself and has a universal and free relation to inorganic nature.

285 More closely determined in the organic shape itself, the relationship of these two sides is thus that on one side it is turned toward inorganic nature, while on the other it is for itself and reflected into itself. The actual organic being is the middle term joining life’s being-for-itself with the outer in general, or being-in-itself. 1807 218—But the extreme of being-for-itself is the inner as infinite one, which takes the moments of shape themselves back into itself out of their subsistence and their connection with the outer; the contentless, which gives itself its content in shape and appears within it as its process. In this extreme, as simple negativity or pure singularity, the organic has its absolute freedom, through which it is indifferent and secure against being for another and against the determinacy of the moments of shape. This freedom is at the same time the freedom of the moments themselves: their possibility of appearing and being apprehended as existent. In it they are liberated and indifferent not only toward the external but also toward each other, for the simplicity of this freedom is being, or their simple substance. This concept, or pure freedom, is one and the same life, however variously shape, or being for another, may roam in its play; this stream of life is indifferent to what kind of mills it drives.—First, it must now be noted that this concept is not to be apprehended here, as earlier in the consideration of the inner proper, in its form of process, or the development of its moments, but in its form as simple inner, constituting the purely universal side over against the actual living being, or as the element of subsistence of the existent members of 1807 219 shape. For it is shape that we are considering here, and within it life’s essence is as the simplicity of subsistence. Then being for another, or the determinacy of actual configuration, taken up into this simple universality that is its essence, is an equally simple, universal, unsensuous determinacy, and can only be what is expressed as number.—It is the middle term of shape, linking indeterminate life with actual life, simple like the former and determinate like the latter. What would be number in the former, the inner, the outer would have to express in its own manner as multiform actuality, mode of life, color, and so forth—in general as the entire multitude of differences developing in appearance.

286 Comparing the two sides of the organic whole—one the inner, the other the outer, so that each again has an inner and outer within itself—in terms of their respective inner, the inner of the first was the concept as the unrest of abstraction; the second, however, has as its inner universality at rest, and within it also determinacy at rest, number. Hence, if the first deceptively promised laws through the semblance of necessity in relation, because the concept develops its moments within it, the second immediately renounces this promise, since number shows itself as the determination of one side of its laws. 1807 220 For number is precisely the wholly resting, dead, indifferent determinacy in which all movement and relation have died out, and which has broken off the bridge to the living reality of drives, mode of life, and other sensuous existence.

287 Yet this consideration of organic shape as such, and of the inner as an inner merely of shape, is in fact no longer a consideration of the organic. For the two sides that were to be related are posited only as indifferent to each other, thereby sublating the reflection into itself that constitutes the essence of the organic. Rather, the attempted comparison of inner and outer is here transferred to inorganic nature; the infinite concept is here only the essence that is hidden within, or falls outside into self-consciousness, and no longer has its objective presence as in the organic. This relation of inner and outer must therefore still be considered in its proper sphere.

288 First, that inner of shape, as the simple singularity of an inorganic thing, is specific gravity. It can be observed as simple being, as can the numerical determinacy of which alone it is capable—or properly, found by comparing observations—and seems in this way to provide one side of the law. 1807 221 Shape, color, hardness, toughness, and an innumerable multitude of other properties would together constitute the outer side and have to express the inner’s determinacy, number, so that one would have its counterpart in the other.

289 Now, because negativity is apprehended here not as the movement of process, but as tranquilized unity, or simple being-for-itself, it appears instead as that through which the thing resists the process and maintains itself within itself as indifferent to it. But because this simple being-for-itself is a calm indifference toward another, specific gravity appears as one property beside others; and with this every necessary relation of it to this multiplicity, or all lawfulness, ceases.—As this simple inner, specific gravity does not have difference within itself, or has only inessential difference; for its pure simplicity sublates every essential distinction. This inessential difference, magnitude, would therefore have to have its counterpart or other on the other side, which is the multiplicity of properties, since only thereby is it difference at all. If this multiplicity itself is gathered into the simplicity of opposition and determined, perhaps, as cohesion, so that cohesion is being-for-itself in otherness, while specific gravity is pure being-for-itself, then this 1807 222 cohesion is initially this pure determinacy posited in the concept over against that determinacy, and the manner of legislation would be the one considered above in the relation of sensibility to irritability.—Furthermore, as the concept of being-for-itself in otherness, it is only the abstraction of the side opposed to specific gravity, and as such has no existence. For being-for-itself in otherness is the process in which the inorganic would have to express its being-for-itself as a self-preservation that kept it from emerging from the process as a moment of a product. Yet precisely this is contrary to its nature, which does not have purpose or universality within itself. Rather, its process is only the determinate behavior in which its being-for-itself, its specific gravity, sublates itself. But this determinate behavior itself, in which its cohesion in its true concept would consist, and the determinate magnitude of its specific gravity, are concepts entirely indifferent to each other. If the manner of behavior were entirely disregarded and restricted to the representation of magnitude, one might perhaps conceive the determination that greater specific weight, as a higher being-within-itself, would resist entering the process more than lesser specific weight. Yet conversely, the freedom of being-for-itself proves itself only in the ease with which it engages with everything and preserves itself in 1807 223 this manifoldness. That intensity without extension of relations is an abstraction without substance, for extension constitutes intensity’s existence. But the inorganic’s self-preservation in its relation falls, as remarked, outside its nature, since it does not have the principle of movement within itself, or since its being is not absolute negativity and concept.

290 If, by contrast, this other side of the inorganic is considered not as process but as being at rest, it is ordinary cohesion: a simple sensuous property that has stepped to one side over against the released moment of otherness, which lies dispersed in many indifferent properties; and, like specific gravity, it itself takes its place among these. The multitude of properties together then constitutes the other side over against cohesion. But in it, as in the others, number is the sole determinacy, which not only does not express a relation and transition of these properties to one another, but essentially consists precisely in having no necessary relation, and instead exhibiting the eradication of all lawfulness; for number is the expression of determinacy as inessential. Thus a series of bodies expressing difference as the numerical difference of their specific gravities runs in no way parallel to a series of differences in the other 1807 224 properties, even if, to make matters easier, only one or a few of them are taken. For in fact only their whole aggregate could constitute the other side in this parallel. In order to order this aggregate within itself and join it into a whole, the quantitative determinations of these various properties are, on the one hand, present for observation, but on the other their differences enter as qualitative. What in this heap would have to be designated positive or negative and cancel reciprocally—in general, the inward configuration and exposition of the formula, which would be highly composite—would belong to the concept, which is excluded precisely by the manner in which the properties lie before us and are to be apprehended as existent. In this being, none exhibits the character of a negative toward another; rather, one is just as much as another, nor does it otherwise indicate its place in the arrangement of the whole.—With a series proceeding in parallel differences—whether the relationship is intended as increasing on both sides together, or increasing on one and decreasing on the other—the concern is only with the final simple expression of this gathered whole, which was to constitute one side of the law opposite specific gravity. Yet this one side, as an existent result, is precisely nothing other than what has already been mentioned: 1807 225 a singular property, such as ordinary cohesion, beside which the others, including specific gravity, are indifferently present; and any other can be chosen with equal right—that is, with equal wrong—as representative of the whole other side. One, like another, would merely represent the essence, or put it before us, but would not be the matter itself. Thus the attempt to find series of bodies that proceeded along the simple parallel of two sides and expressed the essential nature of bodies according to a law of these sides must be taken as a thought that does not know its task or the means by which it was to be accomplished.

291 Earlier, the relation of outer and inner in shape that was to present itself to observation was immediately carried over into the inorganic sphere. The determination drawing it there can now be stated more precisely, and from this another form and relation of this relationship emerges. For in the organic, what seems in the inorganic to offer the possibility of such a comparison of inner and outer disappears altogether. The inorganic inner is a simple inner, presenting itself to perception as an existent property; its determinacy is 1807 226 therefore essentially magnitude, and as an existent property it appears indifferent to the outer, or the many other sensuous properties. But the being-for-itself of organic life does not thus step to one side over against its outer, but contains the principle of otherness within itself. If we determine being-for-itself as a simple, self-preserving relation to itself, its otherness is simple negativity, and organic unity is the unity of self-equal self-relation and pure negativity. This unity as unity is the inner of the organic; the organic is thereby universal in itself, or is genus. But the genus’s freedom toward its actuality is different from the freedom of specific gravity toward shape. The latter’s freedom is an existent freedom, or its stepping to one side as a particular property. But because it is existent freedom, it is also only one determinacy that belongs essentially to this shape, or through which this shape as essence is determinate. The genus’s freedom, however, is universal and indifferent toward this shape or toward its actuality. The determinacy belonging to inorganic being-for-itself as such therefore falls in the organic beneath its being-for-itself, just as in the inorganic it falls only beneath its being. Hence, although in the inorganic this determinacy is at the same time only a property, 1807 227 it nevertheless receives the dignity of essence, because as the simple negative it confronts existence as being for another; and this simple negative, in its ultimate singular determinacy, is a number. The organic, however, is a singularity that is itself pure negativity, and therefore eradicates within itself the fixed determinacy of number belonging to indifferent being. Insofar as it has the moment of indifferent being, and within it number, number can therefore be taken only as a play within it, not as the essence of its livingness.

292 Yet although pure negativity, the principle of process, does not fall outside the organic, and the organic therefore does not have it as a determinacy in its essence, but singularity itself is universal in itself, this pure singularity is nevertheless not developed and actual within the organic in its moments as themselves abstract or universal. Rather, this expression falls outside that universality, which withdraws into inwardness; and between actuality or shape—that is, developing singularity—and the organic universal or genus, there enters the determinate universal, species. The existence that the negativity of the universal or genus attains is only the developed movement of a process running through the parts of existent shape. If the genus, 1807 228 as simplicity at rest, contained the differentiated parts within it, and if its simple negativity as such were thus at the same time movement running through equally simple parts immediately universal within themselves, which as such moments would be actual here, then organic genus would be consciousness. As it is, however, simple determinacy, as the determinacy of species, is present within it in a spiritless manner; actuality begins from it, or what enters actuality is not genus as such—that is, not thought at all. As an actual organic being, genus is represented only by a representative. Yet this representative, number, which seems to designate the transition from genus into individual configuration and to give observation both sides of necessity—at one time as simple determinacy, at another as configuration developed and born forth into manifoldness—designates instead the indifference and freedom of universal and singular toward each other. The singular is abandoned by genus to the inessential difference of magnitude, yet as living it shows itself equally free from this difference. True universality, as determined, is here only inner essence; as determinacy of species it is formal universality, and over against this, that true universality steps to the side of singularity, which thereby is living and, through its inner, rises above its 1807 229 determinacy as species. But this singularity is not at the same time a universal individual—that is, one in which universality would equally have external actuality; rather, this falls outside organic life. Yet this universal individual, as it immediately is the individual of natural configurations, is not consciousness itself; if it were to be consciousness, its existence as a singular organic living individual would not have to fall outside it.

293 We therefore see a syllogism in which one extreme is universal life as universal, or as genus, while the other extreme is the same life as singular, or as universal individual; the middle term, however, is composed of both. The first seems to send itself into it as determinate universality, or species, while the other does so as proper or singular singularity.—And since this syllogism belongs altogether to the side of configuration, what is distinguished as inorganic nature is equally comprehended under it.

294 Now, since universal life as the simple essence of genus, for its part, develops the differences of the concept and must exhibit them as a series of simple determinations, this series is a system of indifferently posited differences, or a numerical series. Previously the organic in the form of singularity was opposed to this inessential difference, which does not express or contain its 1807 230 living nature—and the same must be said of the inorganic according to its whole existence developed in the multitude of its properties. Now, however, it is the universal individual that must be considered not only as free of every articulation of genus, but also as its power. Genus, which divides itself into species according to the universal determinacy of number, or may also take singular determinations of its existence, for example figure, color, and so forth, as its basis of division, suffers violence in this tranquil business from the universal individual, the earth. As universal negativity, the earth asserts against the systematizing of genus the differences as it contains them within itself, whose nature, because of the substance to which they belong, is different from the nature of those of genus. This activity of genus becomes an entirely restricted business, which it may pursue only within those mighty elements, and which their unbridled force everywhere interrupts, leaves incomplete, and stunts.

295 It follows that in configured existence, reason can become present to observation only as life in general, which, however, in its differentiation does not actually contain a rational sequence and articulation within itself, and is not a self-grounded system of shapes.—If 1807 231 in the syllogism of organic configuration the middle term, into which species and its actuality as singular individuality fall, contained within itself the extremes of inner universality and universal individuality, this middle term would have in the movement of its actuality the expression and nature of universality, and would be self-systematizing development. Thus consciousness has, as the middle term between universal spirit and its singularity, or sensuous consciousness, the system of consciousness’s configurations as a life of spirit ordering itself into a whole—the system considered here, which has its objective existence as world history. But organic nature has no history; from its universal, life, it falls immediately down into the singularity of existence. The moments united in this actuality, simple determinacy and singular livingness, produce becoming only as the contingent movement in which each is active at its own part and the whole is preserved. Yet this activity is for itself restricted to its own point, because the whole is not present within it, and the whole is not present there because it is not here for itself as a whole.

296 Thus, beyond observing reason’s attaining in organic nature only the intuition of itself as universal life in general, 1807 232 it gains an intuition of life’s development and realization only according to systems distinguished in an entirely general way, whose determination has its essence not in the organic as such but in the universal individual; and under these differences of the earth, according to sequences that genus attempts.

297 Since, then, in its actuality the universality of organic life lets itself fall immediately into the extreme of singularity, without true mediation that is for itself, observing consciousness has only meaning before it as a thing; and if reason can take an idle interest in observing this meaning, it is restricted to describing and recounting nature’s opinions and fancies. This spiritless freedom of meaning will indeed everywhere offer beginnings of laws, traces of necessity, hints of order and sequence, ingenious and plausible relations. Yet in the relation of the organic to the existent differences of the inorganic—the elements, zones, and climates—observation gets no further, regarding law and necessity, than great influence. Likewise, on the other side, where individuality has not the meaning of the earth but that of the one immanent in organic life, and although this one in immediate unity with the universal constitutes genus, 1807 233 precisely for that reason the genus’s simple unity determines itself only as number and therefore leaves qualitative appearance free—observation can get no further than pleasing remarks, interesting relations, a friendly accommodation to the concept. But pleasing remarks are no knowledge of necessity; interesting relations stop at interest, while interest is still only an opinion about reason; and the friendliness with which the individual alludes to a concept is a childlike friendliness, which becomes childish if it claims or is supposed to count for something in and for itself.

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b. Observation of Self-Consciousness in Its Purity and Its Relation to External Actuality; Logical and Psychological Laws.

298 Observation of nature finds the concept realized in inorganic nature: laws whose moments are things that at the same time behave as abstractions; but this concept is not a simplicity reflected into itself. The life of organic nature, by contrast, is only this simplicity reflected into itself; its opposition to itself as universal and singular does not separate within the essence of this life itself. Its essence is not genus dividing and moving within its undifferentiated element, while at the same time remaining undifferentiated for itself in its opposition. Observation finds this free concept, whose universality equally contains developed singularity absolutely within itself, only in the concept itself existing as concept, or in self-consciousness.

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299 Now turning into itself and directing itself toward the concept actual as free concept, observation first finds the laws of thought. This singularity, which thinking is within itself, is the abstract movement of the negative, entirely taken back into simplicity, and the laws are outside reality.—To say that they have no reality means nothing other than that they are without truth. They are indeed supposed to be, if not complete, nevertheless formal truth. Yet the purely formal without reality is a thought-entity, or empty abstraction without the division within itself that would be nothing other than content.—On the other hand, since they are laws of pure thinking, and pure thinking is the intrinsically universal, and therefore a knowing that immediately contains being and with it all reality, these laws are absolute concepts and indivisibly the essentialities of form as of things. Since universality moving within itself is the divided simple concept, it thus has content within itself, and a content that is all content, only not a sensuous being. It is a content neither contradicting form nor separated from it at all, but rather essentially form itself; for form is nothing other than the universal dividing itself into its pure moments.

300 But insofar as this form or content is for observation as observation, it receives the 1807 236 determination of a found, given—that is, merely existent—content. It becomes the being at rest of relations, a multitude of isolated necessities that are supposed to have truth as a fixed content in and for themselves, in their determinacy, and are thus in fact withdrawn from form.—Yet this absolute truth of fixed determinations, or of many different laws, contradicts the unity of self-consciousness, or of thinking and form in general. What is declared to be a fixed law, abiding in itself, can be only a moment of unity reflecting itself into itself, can appear only as a vanishing magnitude. But torn by consideration out of this movement’s context and posited singly, they do not lack content, for they have, rather, a determinate content; what they lack instead is form, which is their essence. These laws are not the truth of thinking, in fact, not because they are supposed to be merely formal and have no content, but for precisely the opposite reason: because in their determinacy, or precisely as a content deprived of form, they are supposed to count as something absolute. In their truth, as moments vanishing in the unity of thinking, they would have to be taken as knowing, or thinking movement, not as laws of knowing. But observation is not knowing itself, and does not know it; instead, it inverts knowing’s nature into the 1807 237 shape of being, that is, apprehends its negativity only as its laws.—It is sufficient here to have shown the invalidity of the so-called laws of thought from the general nature of the matter. Their more precise development belongs to speculative philosophy, where they show themselves as what they truly are: singular vanishing moments whose truth is only the whole of thinking movement, knowing itself.

301 This negative unity of thinking is for itself, or rather it is being-for-itself, the principle of individuality, and in its reality, active consciousness. The nature of the matter therefore carries observing consciousness onward to active consciousness as the reality of those laws. Since this connection is not present for it, it believes that on one side thinking remains standing for it within its laws, while on the other it obtains another being in what is now its object: active consciousness, which is for itself in such a way that it sublates otherness and has its actuality in this intuition of itself as the negative.

302 Thus a new field opens for observation in the acting actuality of consciousness. Psychology contains the multitude of laws according to which spirit behaves differently toward the different modes of its actuality as a 1807 238 *preexisting otherness: partly receiving these into itself and conforming to the habits, customs, and way of thinking it finds, as that in which it is its own object as actuality; partly knowing itself as self-active against them, selecting only something particular from them for itself through inclination and passion, and making the objective conform to itself. In the former case it behaves negatively toward itself as singularity, in the latter toward itself as universal being.—On the first side, independence gives what it finds only the form of conscious individuality in general, and as regards content remains within the universal actuality already present. On the other side, however, it gives that actuality at least a distinctive modification that does not contradict its essential content, or else a modification through which the individual, as particular actuality and distinctive content, opposes it—and becomes criminal insofar as it sublates this actuality in a merely singular manner; or, doing this in a universal manner and thus for all, replaces the existing world, right, law, and customs with another world, another right, law, and customs.

303 Observing psychology, which first states its perceptions of the universal modes it encounters in active consciousness, finds various faculties, inclinations, and passions; and since 1807 239 recollection of the unity of self-consciousness cannot be suppressed while this collection is recounted, it must at least proceed to amazement that so many varied and heterogeneous things, contingent to each other, can be together in spirit as in a sack, especially since they show themselves not as dead things at rest, but as restless movements.

304 In recounting these different faculties, observation occupies the universal side; the unity of these manifold capacities is the side opposed to this universality, actual individuality.—But to apprehend and recount differentiated actual individualities in turn by saying that one person has more inclination toward this, another toward that, one more understanding than another, is something far less interesting than even enumerating species of insects, mosses, and so forth. For these give observation the right to take them thus singly and without concept, because they belong essentially to the element of contingent singularization. To take conscious individuality spiritlessly as a singular existent appearance, by contrast, involves the contradiction that its essence is the universal of spirit. Yet insofar as apprehension also lets individuality enter the form of universality, it finds its law, and now seems to have a rational purpose and pursue a necessary business.

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305 The moments constituting the content of the law are, on one side, individuality itself, and on the other, its universal inorganic nature: the preexisting circumstances, situation, habits, customs, religion, and so on. Determinate individuality is to be comprehended from these. They contain the determinate as well as the universal and are at the same time things present, offering themselves to observation and expressing themselves on the other side in the form of individuality.

306 The law of this relationship between the two sides would now have to contain the effect and influence that these determinate circumstances exert upon individuality. But individuality is precisely this: equally to be the universal, and thus in a calm, immediate manner to flow together with the present universal—customs, habits, and so forth—and conform to them, and to behave in opposition to them and instead overturn them; as well as, in its singularity, to behave wholly indifferently toward them, neither letting them act upon it nor acting against them. What is to influence individuality and what influence it is to have—which actually amounts to the same thing—therefore depends solely upon individuality itself. To say that through this an individuality has become this determinate individuality means nothing other than that it already was this. Circumstances, situation, customs, and so forth, which are shown on one side 1807 241 as present, and on the other in this determinate individuality, express only its indeterminate essence, which is not what concerns us. Had these circumstances, way of thinking, customs, and state of the world in general not existed, the individual would indeed not have become what it is; for all those who find themselves in this state of the world are this universal substance.—But as the world has particularized itself in this individual—and it is such an individual that is to be comprehended—it would have to have particularized itself in and for itself and acted upon an individual in this determinacy it had given itself. Only thus would it have made the individual into the determinate one it is. If the outer had constituted itself in and for itself as it appears in individuality, individuality would be comprehended from it. We would have a doubled gallery of pictures, one the reflection of the other: one the gallery of the complete determination and delimitation of external circumstances, the other the same translated into the manner in which they are in the conscious being; the former the surface of the sphere, the latter the center that represents that surface within itself.

307 But the sphere’s surface, the individual’s world, immediately has the ambiguous meaning of being a world and situation existing in and for themselves, and the individual’s world either insofar as the individual had merely flowed together with it, let it enter into itself as it is, 1807 242 and behaved toward it only as formal consciousness;—or, alternatively, of being the individual’s world as what is present has been overturned by that individual.—Since, because of this freedom, actuality is capable of this doubled meaning, the individual’s world can be comprehended only from the individual itself; and the influence upon the individual of actuality represented as existing in and for itself receives through the individual an absolutely opposed meaning: either it lets the stream of incoming actuality run its course within it, or it interrupts and overturns it. But thereby psychological necessity becomes so empty a word that what is supposed to have had this influence contains the absolute possibility that it might equally not have had it.

308 Thus the being that would be in and for itself, and was to constitute one side—and specifically the universal side—of a law, disappears. Individuality is what its world is as its own; individuality itself is the sphere of its activity in which it has exhibited itself as actuality, and is simply only the unity of preexisting and produced being. The sides of this unity do not fall apart, as in the representation of psychological law, into a world present in itself and an individuality existing for itself; or, if each is thus considered on its own, no necessity or law of their relation to each other is present.

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c. Observation of the Relation of Self-Consciousness to Its Immediate Actuality; Physiognomy and the Study of the Skull.

309 Psychological observation finds no law of self-consciousness’s relationship to actuality, or to the world opposed to it, and through their mutual indifference is driven back upon the distinctive determinacy of real individuality, which is itself in and for itself, or contains the opposition of being-for-itself and being-in-itself effaced in their absolute mediation. This is the object that has now arisen for observation, or to which it passes over.

310 The individual is in and for itself: it is for itself, or is a free activity; but it is also in itself, or itself has an original, determinate being—a determinacy that according to the concept is the same as what psychology wished to find outside it. Thus within the individual itself there emerges the opposition of being this doubled thing: the movement of 1807 244 consciousness and the fixed being of an appearing actuality, an actuality that is immediately its own within it. This being, the body of determinate individuality, is its originality, what it has not done. Yet since the individual is at the same time only what it has done, its body is also the expression of itself produced by it; at the same time a sign that has not remained the immediate thing, but in which it merely makes known what it is in the sense that it puts its original nature into practice.

311 If we consider the moments present here in relation to the preceding view, there is here a universal human shape, or at least the universal shape of a climate, continent, or people, just as previously there were the same universal customs and cultivation. To these are added the particular circumstances and situation within universal actuality; here this particular actuality is present as a particular formation of the individual’s shape.—On the other side, just as previously the individual’s free activity and actuality as its own were set against preexisting actuality, here stands shape as the expression of its actualization posited by itself, the features and forms of its self-active essence. But the actuality, both universal and particular, that observation previously found outside the individual is here its own actuality, its inborn body; and into this very body 1807 245 falls the expression belonging to its activity. In the psychological consideration, actuality existing in and for itself and determinate individuality were to be related to each other; here, however, the whole determinate individuality is the object of observation, and each side of its opposition is itself this whole. Thus the outer whole includes not only original being, the inborn body, but equally its formation, which belongs to the activity of the inner. It is the unity of unformed and formed being, and the individual’s actuality permeated by being-for-itself. This whole, encompassing the determinate original fixed parts and the features that arise only through activity, is, and this being is the expression of the inner, of the individual posited as consciousness and movement.—This inner, likewise, is no longer formal, contentless, or indeterminate self-activity whose content and determinacy would, as previously, lie in external circumstances; rather, it is an original character determinate in itself, whose form alone is activity. The relationship between these two sides is therefore considered here: how it is to be determined, and what is to be understood by this expression of the inner in the outer.

312 Initially this outer does not make the inner visible, or into a being for another at all, as an organ; for insofar as the inner is in the 1807 246 organ, it is activity itself. The speaking mouth, the working hand, and, if desired, the legs as well, are the organs of actualization and accomplishment, containing activity as activity, or the inner as such; but the externality the inner acquires through them is the deed, as an actuality separated from the individual. Speech and work are manifestations in which the individual no longer retains and possesses itself within itself, but lets the inner come entirely outside itself and surrenders it to another. One can therefore equally say that these manifestations express the inner too much and too little: too much, because the inner itself bursts forth in them, leaving no opposition between them and it; they give not merely an expression of the inner, but immediately the inner itself. Too little, because in speech and action the inner makes itself into another and thereby surrenders itself to the element of transformation, which overturns the spoken word and accomplished deed and makes something different of them from what they are in and for themselves as actions of this determinate individual. Through this externality, the works of action not only lose, under the influence of others, the character of being something enduring over against other individualities; but since they relate to the inner they contain as a separated, indifferent outer, 1807 247 they can, as inner, through the individual itself, be something other than they appear—either because the individual intentionally makes them appear as something other than they truly are, or because it is too inept to give itself the outward aspect it really wanted, and to fix it so that others cannot distort its work. Thus activity as accomplished work has a doubled, opposed meaning: either to be the inner individuality and not its expression, or, as outer, to be an actuality free of the inner and something entirely other than it.—Because of this ambiguity, we must look for the inner as it still is in the individual itself, but visibly or externally. In the organ, however, it is only as immediate activity itself, acquiring its externality in the deed, which either represents the inner or does not. Considered according to this opposition, the organ therefore does not provide the expression sought.

313 If, then, outward shape could express inward individuality only insofar as it is not organ or activity, and hence is a whole at rest, it would behave as a subsisting thing that calmly received the inner as something alien into its passive existence and thereby became its sign: an external, contingent expression whose actual side is in itself 1807 248 meaningless—a language whose sounds and combinations of sounds are not the matter itself, but are linked with it by free choice and are contingent for it.

314 Such an arbitrary connection between things external to each other yields no law. Physiognomy, however, is supposed to distinguish itself from other disreputable arts and pernicious studies by considering determinate individuality in the necessary opposition of inner and outer, of character as conscious essence and that same character as existent shape, and relating these moments to each other as they are related through their concept, and therefore must constitute the content of a law. In astrology, palmistry, and similar sciences, by contrast, only outer seems to be related to outer, something to something alien to it. This constellation at birth, and, if this outer is brought closer to the body itself, these lines of the hand, are external moments in relation to the individual’s long or short life and fate in general. As externalities they behave indifferently toward each other and do not have the necessity for each other that is supposed to lie in the relation of an outer and an inner.

315 The hand, admittedly, seems not so much something external to fate, but rather 1807 249 something inward in relation to it. For fate, in turn, is only the appearance of what determinate individuality in itself is as inward original determinacy.—The palmist, like the physiognomist, arrives at knowing what individuality is in itself by a shorter route than, for example, Solon, who thought this could be known only from and after the course of the whole life. He considered appearance; they consider the in-itself. Yet that the hand must exhibit individuality’s in-itself regarding its fate is easily seen from the fact that, next to the organ of speech, it is above all that through which the human being brings itself into appearance and actualization. It is the ensouled master craftsman of its fortune; one can say of it that it is what a human being does. For in the hand, as the active organ of self-accomplishment, the human being is present as animating; and since originally it is its own fate, the hand will therefore express this in-itself.

316 From this determination—that the organ of activity is equally a being and the activity within it, or that inward being-in-itself is itself present within it and has a being for others—there follows another view of it than the preceding one. For if organs in general proved incapable of being taken as expressions of the inner because in them activity as activity 1807 250 is present, while activity as deed is merely outer, so that inner and outer thus fall apart and are or can be alien to each other, then, according to the determination considered, the organ must also be taken again as the middle term of both. For precisely the fact that activity is present in it at the same time constitutes an externality of activity, and indeed a different one from the deed: this externality remains with and in the individual.—Now this middle term and unity of inner and outer is, first, itself also external; but then this externality is at the same time taken up into the inner. As simple externality it stands opposed to dispersed externality, which is either only a singular work or state contingent for the whole individuality, or, as whole externality, fate splintered into a multiplicity of works and states. Thus the simple lines of the hand, likewise the tone and range of the voice as the individual determinacy of speech—and speech again as it acquires through the hand a firmer existence than through the voice, writing, specifically in its particularity as handwriting—all this is expression of the inner. As simple externality, it in turn relates to the manifold externality of action and fate as inner over against these.—If, then, the individual’s determinate nature and inborn peculiarity, 1807 251 together with what these have become through cultivation, are initially taken as the inner, as the essence of action and fate, this inner has its appearance and externality first in its mouth, hand, voice, handwriting, as well as in its other organs and their abiding determinations; and only then does it express itself further outward in its actuality in the world.

317 Since this middle term is now determined as a manifestation at the same time taken back into the inner, its existence is not confined to the immediate organ of activity; rather, it is the movement and form of the face and of configuration in general that accomplish nothing. According to this concept, these features and their movement are activity held back and remaining in the individual; in relation to actual activity they are its own supervision and observation of that activity, manifestation as reflection upon actual manifestation.—The individual is not silent concerning and during its external activity, because in that activity it is at the same time reflected into itself, and manifests this reflectedness into itself. This theoretical activity, or the individual’s speech with itself about its activity, is also perceptible to others, for it is itself a manifestation.

318 In this inner, then, which remains inner in its manifestation, the individual’s reflectedness 1807 252 out of its actuality is observed; and we must see how matters stand with the necessity posited in this unity.—This reflectedness is, first, different from the deed itself, and can therefore be something other, and taken for something other, than the deed is; one sees in someone’s face whether they are serious about what they say or do.—Conversely, however, what is supposed to be expression of the inner is at the same time an existent expression, and thus itself sinks to the determination of being, which is absolutely contingent for the self-conscious essence. It is therefore indeed expression, but at the same time only like a sign, so that the expressed content is completely indifferent to the constitution of that through which it is expressed. In this appearance the inner is indeed visible invisibility, but without being bound to it; it can equally be in another appearance, just as another inner can be in the same appearance.—Lichtenberg therefore rightly says: “Suppose the physiognomist once caught hold of the human being; it would take only a stout resolve to make oneself incomprehensible again for millennia.”—Just as in the preceding relationship the given circumstances were an existent from which individuality took what it could and wanted, either submitting to it or overturning it, for which reason it did not contain individuality’s necessity and essence, 1807 253 so here individuality’s appearing immediate being is something that either expresses its reflectedness out of actuality and its being-within-itself, or is for it merely a sign, indifferent toward what is signified, and therefore in truth signifying nothing. It is equally its face and its mask, which it can lay aside.—Individuality permeates its shape, moves and speaks within it; yet this whole existence equally passes over into an indifferent being over against will and action. Individuality effaces in it the significance it previously had of containing its reflectedness into itself, or its true essence, and conversely places this instead in the will and the deed.

319 Individuality gives up that reflectedness into itself which is expressed in its features, and places its essence in the work. In doing so it contradicts the relationship established, regarding what is to be its inner and outer, by reason’s instinct when it turns to observing self-conscious individuality. This standpoint leads us to the actual thought underlying physiognomic science—if one wishes to call it that. Formally, the opposition this observing has reached is that of practical and theoretical, both posited within the practical itself: individuality 1807 254 actualizing itself in action, taken in the most general sense, and the same individuality insofar as in this action it is at the same time reflected out of it into itself and has it as its object. Observation takes up this opposition according to the same inverted relationship in which it determines itself in appearance. For observation, the deed itself and the work, whether of speech or of a more firmly established actuality, count as the inessential outer, while individuality’s being-within-itself counts as the essential inner. Of the two sides practical consciousness contains, intention and deed—its meaning concerning its action and the action itself—observation chooses the former as the true inner. This is supposed to have its more or less inessential manifestation in the deed, but its true manifestation in its shape. The latter manifestation is the immediate sensuous presence of individual spirit; the inwardness that is supposed to be true is the particularity of intention and the singularity of being-for-itself: both are spirit as meant. Thus what observation has as its objects is existence as meant, and it seeks laws between such objects.

320 Immediate meaning concerning spirit’s supposed presence is natural physiognomy: the hasty judgment, at first sight of a shape, concerning its inward nature and character. The object of this opinion is of such a 1807 255 kind that its essence lies in being in truth something other than merely sensuous, immediate being. What is present, what is observation’s object, is indeed precisely this reflectedness within the sensuous, out of it into itself: visibility as the visibility of the invisible. But this very immediate sensuous presence is spirit’s actuality as it is only for opinion; and on this side observation busies itself with its supposed existence, with physiognomy, handwriting, tone of voice, and so forth.—It relates such existence to just such a supposed inner. It is not the murderer or thief who is to be cognized, but the capacity to be one. Fixed abstract determinacy thereby loses itself in the concrete, infinite determinacy of the singular individual, which now requires more artful portrayals than those qualifications. Such artful portrayals certainly say more than qualification as murderer, thief, or good-hearted, unspoiled, and so on, but nowhere near enough for their purpose of expressing supposed being, or singular individuality; no more than portrayals of shape that go beyond the flat forehead, long nose, and so forth. For singular shape, like singular self-consciousness, is inexpressible as supposed being. The science of knowing human beings, directed toward the supposed human being, like 1807 256 physiognomy, directed toward their supposed actuality and wishing to elevate natural physiognomy’s unconscious judging into knowledge, is therefore something endless and bottomless, which can never arrive at saying what it means, because it merely means, and its content is merely what is meant.

321 The laws this science sets out to find are relations of these two supposed sides, and therefore can themselves be nothing but empty opinion. Moreover, since this supposed knowledge concerning spirit’s actuality has precisely this as its object—that spirit reflects itself out of its sensuous existence into itself, and determinate existence is an indifferent contingency for it—it must immediately know, regarding the laws it finds, that nothing is said by them, but that there is actually only pure chatter, or merely an opinion of oneself is given. This expression has the truth of stating these as the same thing: saying one’s opinion, and thereby contributing not the matter itself but merely an opinion of oneself. As regards content, however, these observations cannot differ from these: “It always rains when we have a fair,” says the shopkeeper; “and always when I dry my laundry,” says the housewife.

322 Lichtenberg, who characterizes physiognomic observation in this way, also says: “If someone said, you do act like an honest 1807 257 man, but I see from your figure that you are forcing yourself and are a rogue at heart—truly, until the end of the world every decent fellow will answer such an address with a slap in the face.”—This reply is striking because it refutes the first presupposition of such a science of opinion: namely, that a person’s actuality is their face, and so forth.—Rather, a person’s true being is their deed; in it individuality is actual, and it is the deed that sublates the supposed in both its sides. First, the supposed as a bodily being at rest: individuality instead exhibits itself in action as the negative essence that is only insofar as it sublates being. Then the deed likewise sublates opinion’s inexpressibility regarding self-conscious individuality, which in opinion is infinitely determinate and determinable. In the accomplished deed this bad infinity is annihilated. The deed is something simply determinate, universal, comprehensible in an abstraction; it is murder, theft, or beneficence, a courageous deed, and so forth, and what it is can be said of it. It is this, and its being is not merely a sign, but the matter itself. It is this, and the individual human being is what it is; in the simplicity of this being, the person is for others an existent, universal essence and ceases to be merely supposed. 1807 258 Admittedly the person is not thereby posited as spirit; but since we are speaking of their being as being, and on one side the doubled being of shape and deed stands opposed, and both are supposed to be their actuality, it is rather only the deed that must be affirmed as their genuine being—not their figure, which was supposed to express what they mean concerning their deeds, or what one supposed they merely could do. Likewise, since on the other side their work and their inward possibility, capacity, or intention are opposed, the work alone is to be regarded as their true actuality, even if they themselves are mistaken about it and, turning from their action into themselves, suppose that in this inwardness they are something other than in the deed. Individuality, entrusting itself to the objective element by becoming work, does indeed thereby expose itself to alteration and inversion. But the character of the deed consists precisely in whether it is an actual being that maintains itself, or merely a supposed work that passes away, null within itself. Objectivity does not alter the deed itself, but merely shows what it is—that is, whether it is, or whether it is nothing.—The dissection of this being into intentions and similar subtleties, through which the actual human being—that is, their deed—is to be explained back into a supposed being, just as they themselves may also invent particular intentions concerning their actuality, 1807 259 must be left to the idleness of opinion. If this idleness wishes to put its deedless wisdom into practice, deny the character of reason to the acting person, and mistreat them by declaring not the deed but rather figure and features to be their being, it must expect the reply above, which proves to it that figure is not the in-itself, but can instead become an object of treatment.

323 If we now survey the full range of relationships in which self-conscious individuality can be observed as standing toward its outer, one will remain that observation must still make its object. In psychology, it is the external actuality of things that is supposed to have its self-conscious counterpart in spirit and make spirit comprehensible. In physiognomy, by contrast, spirit is supposed to be cognized in its own outer as in a being that is its language—the visible invisibility of its essence. There still remains the determination of the side of actuality according to which individuality expresses its essence in its immediate, fixed, purely existent actuality.—This last relation therefore differs from the physiognomic relation in that the latter is the individual’s speaking presence; in its acting manifestation, the individual also exhibits its presence as reflecting into itself and contemplating itself: a manifestation 1807 260 that is itself movement, features at rest that are themselves essentially a mediated being. But in the determination still to be considered, the outer is finally an entirely resting actuality, which is not in itself a speaking sign but, separated from self-conscious movement, exhibits itself on its own and is as a mere thing.

324 Regarding the inner’s relation to this outer of its own, it is initially clear that it seems to have to be comprehended as the relationship of causal connection, since the relation of one thing existing in itself to another existing in itself, as a necessary relation, is this relationship.

325 Now, for spiritual individuality to have an effect upon the body, it must itself be bodily as cause. But the bodily thing in which it is as cause is the organ—not, however, of activity directed against external actuality, but of the activity of the self-conscious essence within itself, directed outward only against its body. It is not immediately evident what these organs can be. Were one thinking merely of organs in general, the organ of work in general would readily be at hand, likewise the organ of the sexual drive, and so forth. Yet such organs are to be regarded as instruments or parts that spirit, as one extreme, has as middle terms toward the other extreme, which is an external object. 1807 261 Here, however, what is meant is an organ in which the self-conscious individual, as an extreme over against its own actuality opposed to it, preserves itself for itself, not at the same time turned outward but reflected in its action, and in which the side of being is not a being for another. In the physiognomic relation the organ is indeed also considered as an existence reflected into itself and commenting on activity; but this being is objective, and the result of physiognomic observation is that self-consciousness confronts precisely this actuality of its own as something indifferent. This indifference vanishes when this reflectedness into itself is itself effective; that existence thereby acquires a necessary relation to it. But for it to act upon existence, it must itself have a being, though not properly an objective one, and it is to be pointed out as this organ.

326 In ordinary life, anger, for example, as such an inward activity, is located in the liver; Plato even grants the liver something higher still, which according to some is even the highest: prophecy, or the gift of expressing the holy and eternal in an irrational manner. Yet the movement the individual has in the liver, heart, and so forth cannot be regarded as its movement wholly reflected into itself; 1807 262 rather, in these it is such that it has already struck into the body and has an animal existence turning outward toward externality.

327 The nervous system, by contrast, is the immediate repose of the organic in its movement. The nerves themselves are indeed in turn organs of consciousness already immersed in its outward direction; but brain and spinal cord may be regarded as the immediate presence of self-consciousness remaining within itself—not objective, nor going outward. Insofar as this organ’s moment of being is a being for another, an existence, it is dead being, no longer the presence of self-consciousness. Yet this being within itself is according to its concept a fluidity in which the circles cast into it immediately dissolve, and no difference expresses itself as existent. Meanwhile, just as spirit itself is not something abstractly simple but a system of movements in which it differentiates itself into moments, yet remains free in this differentiation itself, and just as it articulates its body in general for different functions and assigns a singular part to only one, so one can also imagine that the fluid being of its being-within-itself is articulated. Indeed it seems it must be imagined this way, because spirit’s reflected being in the 1807 263 brain is itself again only a middle term between its pure essence and its bodily articulation—a middle term that must therefore partake of the nature of both and thus, on the side of the latter, also contain existent articulation within itself.

328 Spiritual-organic being at the same time has the necessary side of an existence subsisting at rest; the former must withdraw as the extreme of being-for-itself and have this side opposite it as the other extreme, which is then the object upon which it acts as cause. Now, if brain and spinal cord are that bodily being-for-itself of spirit, skull and vertebral column are the other separated extreme belonging to it, namely the fixed thing at rest.—But since everyone, when thinking of the actual location of spirit’s existence, thinks not of the back but only of the head, we can, in investigating a knowledge such as this, content ourselves with this reason—not too poor for it—to restrict this existence to the skull. If someone should think of the back insofar as knowledge and activity are sometimes partly driven into a person through it and partly driven out, this would prove nothing toward including the spinal cord among spirit’s dwelling places and its column as its corresponding existence, because it would prove too much. For one can likewise recall that 1807 264 other external ways of approaching spirit’s activity to arouse or restrain it are also favored.—The vertebral column thus disappears, if one wishes, rightly; and it is constructed, just as well as many other doctrines of natural philosophy, that the skull alone remains, though it does not contain spirit’s organs. For this was excluded above by the concept of this relationship, and the skull was therefore assigned to the side of existence. Or if we were not permitted to recall the concept of the matter, experience surely teaches that, just as one sees with the eye as organ, one does not murder, steal, compose poetry, and so forth with the skull.—One must therefore also refrain from the expression organ for the meaning of the skull still to be discussed. For although people are accustomed to saying that reasonable persons care not about the word but about the matter, this does not grant permission to designate a matter by a word that does not belong to it. For this is at once ineptitude and deception, which merely believes and pretends that it lacks the right word, concealing from itself that it in fact lacks the matter, that is, the concept; if this were present, it would also have its right word.—For now, only this has been determined here: that as the brain is the living head, the skull is the caput mortuum.

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329 In this dead being, then, the spiritual movements and determinate modes of the brain would have to give themselves their presentation in external actuality, though still an actuality in the individual itself. For their relationship to the skull, which as dead being does not have spirit dwelling within it, the relationship established above first presents itself: the external, mechanical relationship, in which the actual organs—and these are in the brain—press it out round here, hammer it broad there, or push it flat, or however else this action may be represented. Since the skull itself is part of the organism, a living self-formation must indeed be conceived within it, as in every bone, so that, considered in this way, it for its part instead presses the brain and imposes its external limit; as the harder, it is also more capable of this. Yet the same relationship would still remain in the determination of their reciprocal activity; for whether the skull is determining or determined would alter nothing in the causal connection in general, except that the skull would then be made the immediate organ of self-consciousness, since in it as cause the side of being-for-itself would be found. Yet insofar as being-for-itself as organic livingness falls equally within both, their causal connection in fact disappears. This further formation of both would, however, be inwardly connected, 1807 266 and would be an organic preestablished harmony, leaving the two related sides free toward each other and each with its own shape, to which the other’s shape need not correspond; still more would shape and quality be free toward each other, as are the shape of the grape and the taste of the wine.—But since the determination of being-for-itself falls on the brain’s side, and that of existence on the skull’s side, a causal connection between them must also be posited within organic unity: a necessary relation of them as external to each other, that is, a relation itself external, through which their shape would thus be determined by each other.

330 Regarding the determination, however, in which the organ of self-consciousness would be an active cause upon the opposed side, one can talk back and forth in many ways. For we are speaking of the constitution of a cause considered according to its indifferent existence, its shape and magnitude—a cause whose inwardness and being-for-itself are supposed to be precisely such as do not concern immediate existence. The skull’s organic self-formation is initially indifferent to mechanical action, and the relationship of these two relationships is, since the former is self-relation, precisely this indeterminacy and 1807 267 boundlessness itself. Furthermore, even if the brain took spirit’s differences into itself as existent differences and were a multiplicity of inward organs occupying different spaces—which contradicts nature, which gives the concept’s moments an existence of their own and therefore places the fluid simplicity of organic life purely on one side, and its articulation and division, likewise in its differences, on the other side, so that these, as they are to be apprehended here, show themselves as particular anatomical things—it would remain indeterminate whether a spiritual moment, according as it were originally stronger or weaker, would have to possess a more expanded brain-organ in the former case and a more contracted one in the latter, or precisely the reverse.—Likewise, whether its development enlarged or diminished the organ, made it coarser and thicker, or finer. Because the constitution of the cause remains indeterminate, it is left equally indeterminate how its action upon the skull occurs: whether it expands it or narrows it and lets it collapse. If this action is perhaps determined more elegantly as stimulation, it remains indeterminate whether this occurs by swelling, like a cantharides plaster, or by shriveling, like vinegar.—Plausible reasons can be offered for all such views, for the organic relation, 1807 268 which intervenes just as much, lets one pass as well as another, and is indifferent to all this understanding.

331 Observing consciousness, however, is not concerned with determining this relationship. For in any case what stands on one side is not the brain as an animal part, but as the being of self-conscious individuality.—As abiding character and moving conscious activity, individuality is for itself and within itself; opposed to this being-for-and-within-itself is its actuality and existence for another. Being-for-and-within-itself is the essence and subject that has in the brain a being subsumed under it, receiving its value only through the meaning dwelling within it. But the other side of self-conscious individuality, the side of its existence, is being as independent and subject, or as a thing, namely a bone; the actuality and existence of the human being is its skull-bone.—This is the relationship and the meaning these two sides of the relation have within the consciousness observing them.

332 This consciousness is now concerned with the more determinate relation of these sides. The skull-bone does indeed have, in general, the significance of being spirit’s immediate actuality. But spirit’s many-sidedness gives its existence an equal multiplicity of meanings; what is to be gained is the 1807 269 determinacy of the meaning of the singular locations into which this existence is divided, and we must see how they contain the indication of it within them.

333 The skull-bone is no organ of activity, nor a speaking movement; one neither steals nor murders and so forth with the skull-bone, nor does it alter its expression in the slightest for such deeds, so as to become a speaking gesture.—Nor does this existent have the value of a sign. Facial expression and gesture, tone, even a pillar or a stake driven into a deserted island, announce at once that something else is meant by them than what they immediately merely are. They immediately present themselves as signs, since they contain a determinacy indicating something else by not belonging peculiarly to themselves. One can certainly entertain all kinds of thoughts before a skull, as Hamlet before Yorick’s; but the skull-bone in itself is so indifferent and unassuming a thing that immediately nothing else can be seen or meant in it than simply itself. It does indeed recall the brain and its determinacy, skulls of other formations, but not a conscious movement, since it contains neither facial expression nor gesture, nor anything impressed upon it that announces itself as coming from conscious activity. For it is the actuality that was to exhibit in individuality 1807 270 another side no longer being that reflects itself into itself, but purely immediate being.

334 Since, further, it does not itself feel, a more determinate meaning for it might still seem attainable if determinate sensations, through proximity, allowed what is meant by it to be cognized; and since a conscious mode of spirit has its feeling at a determinate place in the skull, perhaps this location in its shape would indicate that mode and its particularity. For example, as some people complain of feeling a painful tension somewhere in the head during strenuous thinking, or even during thinking in general, so stealing, murdering, composing poetry, and so forth could each be accompanied by a sensation of its own, which would also have to have its particular location. This location in the brain, being more moved and activated in this way, would probably also develop the neighboring part of the bone more; or through sympathy or consensus this part too would not be inert, but would enlarge or diminish itself, or form itself in some manner.—What makes this hypothesis improbable, however, is that feeling in general is something indeterminate, and feeling in the head as center might be the universal sympathetic feeling of all suffering, so that other sensations would mingle with the thief’s, murderer’s, or poet’s 1807 271 tickling or pain in the head and could be distinguished from each other, and from those one can call merely bodily, no more than the disease can be determined from the symptom of headache, if we restrict its meaning to the bodily alone.

335 In fact, from whatever side the matter is considered, every necessary reciprocal relation disappears, along with any self-speaking indication of it. If the relation is nevertheless to take place, what remains and is necessary is a free preestablished harmony, without concept, between the corresponding determinations of the two sides; for one side is supposed to be spiritless actuality, mere thing.—Thus on one side stands a multitude of skull locations at rest, and on the other a multitude of spiritual properties, whose multiplicity and determination will depend on the state of psychology. The more wretched the representation of spirit, the easier matters become from this side; for the properties become both fewer and more separated, fixed, and bony, hence more like determinations of bone and more comparable with them. Yet although the wretchedness of the representation of spirit makes much easier, a very great multitude still remains on both sides; for observation, their relation remains entirely contingent. If each of the children of Israel 1807 272 were to take from the sand of the sea, to which they are supposed to correspond, the grain of which they are the sign, the indifference and arbitrariness assigning each their own would be just as great as that which assigns skull locations and bone forms to each faculty of the soul, passion, and—what would equally have to be considered here—the shades of character about which subtler psychology and knowledge of human beings are accustomed to speak.—The murderer’s skull has this—not organ, nor sign, but this bump; yet this murderer has a multitude of other properties, as well as other bumps, and depressions along with the bumps: one has a choice among bumps and depressions. And again, his murderous disposition can be related to any bump or depression whatever, and these in turn to any property whatever; for the murderer is neither merely this abstraction of a murderer, nor has he only one prominence and one depression. Observations made about this must therefore sound just as good as the shopkeeper’s and housewife’s rain during the fair and the laundry. Shopkeeper and housewife could equally observe that it always rains when this neighbor passes by, or when roast pork is eaten. As rain is indifferent toward these circumstances, so for observation is this 1807 273 determinacy of spirit toward this determinate being of the skull. For of the two objects of this observation, one is a dry being-for-itself, a bony property of spirit, just as the other is a dry being-in-itself. So bony a thing as either of them is completely indifferent toward everything else; a high bump is just as indifferent to a murderer’s being nearby as the murderer is to flatness in his vicinity.

336 The possibility certainly remains irrefutable that some property, passion, and so forth is connected with a bump at some location. One can imagine the murderer with a high bump here at this location of the skull, the thief with one there. From this side the science of the skull is still capable of great expansion; for at first it seems to restrict itself only to the connection of a bump with a property in the same individual, so that this individual possesses both. But natural skull-science already—for there must be such a thing just as much as a natural physiognomy—goes beyond this limit. It judges not only that a cunning person has a fist-sized bump behind the ears, but also imagines that the unfaithful wife does not herself have bumps on the forehead, but that the other married individual does.—Likewise, 1807 274 one can also imagine the person living under the same roof as the murderer, or his neighbor, and further his fellow citizens and so forth, with high bumps somewhere on the skull, just as well as the flying cow that was first caressed by the crab riding on the donkey, and afterward, and so forth.—But if possibility is taken not in the sense of the possibility of imagining, but of inner possibility, or the concept, the object is an actuality that is and is supposed to be pure thing, without such meaning, and can therefore have it only in representation.

337 If, despite the two sides’ indifference, the observer nevertheless sets to work determining relations—partly encouraged by the universal rational ground that the outer is the expression of the inner, partly supporting himself with the analogy of animals’ skulls, animals that may indeed have a simpler character than human beings, but whose character will at the same time be all the harder to state, since it cannot be so easy for every person’s imagination to enter properly into an animal’s nature—then in asserting the laws he claims to have discovered, the observer finds excellent assistance in a distinction that must necessarily occur to us here as well.—Spirit’s being 1807 275 cannot at least be taken as something so utterly fixed and immovable. The human being is free; it is admitted that original being consists only in predispositions over which the human being has considerable power, or which require favorable circumstances to develop—that is, an original being of spirit must equally be declared a being that does not exist as being. If, then, observations contradicted what someone happened to assert as a law—if the weather were fine during the fair or the laundry—the shopkeeper and housewife could say that it really ought to rain, and that the predisposition was nevertheless present. Likewise, skull-observation could say that this individual really ought to be as the skull states according to the law, and has an original predisposition that has, however, not been developed; this quality is not present, but it ought to be present.—The law and the ought rest on observation of actual rain and actual disposition in conjunction with this determinacy of the skull; but if actuality is not present, empty possibility counts for just as much.—This possibility—that is, the nonactuality of the established law, and hence observations contradicting it—must enter precisely because the individual’s freedom and the developing circumstances are indifferent toward being 1807 276 in general, both as original inner being and as external bony being, and because the individual can also be something other than what it originally is inwardly, and still more than what it is as a bone.

338 Thus we obtain the possibility that this bump or depression of the skull designates both something actual and merely a predisposition—indeed, indeterminately to anything whatever—and so something nonactual. We see a poor excuse meet its usual fate: it can itself be used against what it is supposed to help. We see opinion brought by the nature of the matter to say, though thoughtlessly, the opposite of what it holds fast: to say that this bone indicates something, but just as well does not.

339 What hovers before opinion itself in this excuse is the true thought that precisely eradicates it: that being as such is not the truth of spirit at all. Just as predisposition is an original being that has no share in spirit’s activity, so bone, for its part, is precisely such a being. What exists without spiritual activity is a thing for consciousness, and so far from being its essence that it is rather the opposite of it; consciousness is actual for itself only through the negation and eradication of such being.—From 1807 277 this side, to pass off a bone as consciousness’s actual existence must be regarded as a complete denial of reason; and this is how bone is passed off when considered as spirit’s outer, for the outer is precisely existent actuality. It does not help to say that one merely infers from this outer to the inner, which is something else, and that the outer is not the inner itself, but only its expression. For in their relationship to each other, precisely the determination of actuality that thinks itself and is thought falls on the inner side, while that of existent actuality falls on the outer.—Thus if a person is told, you—your inner—are this because your bone is constituted so, this means nothing other than: I regard a bone as your actuality. The reply to such a judgment by a slap in the face, mentioned in connection with physiognomy, initially displaces the soft parts from their appearance and position, and proves only that these are no true in-itself, not spirit’s actuality; here the reply would properly have to go so far as to smash the skull of someone judging in this way, to prove, as palpably as his wisdom is palpable, that a bone is for the human being no in-itself, much less its true actuality.—

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340 The crude instinct of self-conscious reason will reject such a science of the skull without examination—this other, observing instinct of reason, which, having advanced to an intimation of cognition, has grasped it in the spiritless manner that the outer is expression of the inner. But the worse the thought, the less one sometimes notices precisely where its badness lies, and the harder it is to set it out. For a thought is called worse the purer and emptier the abstraction it takes as essence. Yet the opposition at issue here has as its members self-conscious individuality and the abstraction of externality become wholly a thing: that inner being of spirit apprehended as fixed, spiritless being, opposed to just such a being.—But thereby observing reason does indeed seem to have reached its summit, from which it must abandon itself and overturn itself; for only what is utterly bad contains the immediate necessity of reversing itself.—Just as one can say of the Jewish people that precisely because it stands immediately before the gate of salvation it is the most rejected, and has been so: what it ought to be in and for itself, this self-essentiality, it is not for itself, but places beyond itself. Through this alienation it makes a higher 1807 279 existence possible for itself, if it could take its object back into itself, than if it had remained within the immediacy of being; for spirit is all the greater the greater the opposition out of which it returns into itself. But it makes this opposition for itself in sublating its immediate unity and alienating its being-for-itself. Yet if such a consciousness does not reflect itself, the middle in which it stands is the unhappy void, since what should fill it has become a fixed extreme. Thus this last stage of observing reason is its worst, but for that reason its reversal is necessary.

341 For a survey of the series of relationships considered so far, constituting observation’s content and object, shows that in its first mode, observation of the relationships of inorganic nature, sensuous being already vanishes for it. The moments of their relationship exhibit themselves as pure abstractions and simple concepts, which were to be firmly bound to the existence of things; but this existence is lost, so that the moment proves to be pure movement and universal. This free process, complete within itself, retains the significance of something objective, but now appears as a one. In the inorganic process the one is the inner that does not exist; but existing as one, the process is the 1807 280 organic.—As being-for-itself or negative essence, the one stands opposed to the universal, withdraws from it, and remains free for itself, so that the concept, realized only in the element of absolute singularization, does not find in organic existence its true expression of being present as universal, but remains an outer or, what is the same, an inner of organic nature.—The organic process is free only in itself, but not for itself; in purpose, its freedom’s being-for-itself enters: it exists as another essence, as a self-conscious wisdom outside that process. Observing reason therefore turns toward this wisdom, toward spirit, the concept existing as universality or purpose existing as purpose, and its own essence is now its object.

342 It first turns toward spirit’s purity; but since it apprehends the object moving in its differences as an existent, what arise for it are laws of thought, relations of what abides to what abides. Yet since the content of these laws consists only in moments, they trail off into the one of self-consciousness.—This new object, likewise taken as existent, is singular, contingent self-consciousness; observation therefore remains within supposed spirit and the contingent relationship of conscious actuality to unconscious actuality. Spirit alone, within itself, 1807 281 is the necessity of this relation; observation therefore moves closer to its body and compares its willing and acting actuality with its reflected and contemplating actuality, which is itself objective. This outer, although a language the individual possesses within itself, is at the same time, as sign, something indifferent toward the content it was to signify, just as what posits the sign for itself is indifferent toward it.

343 From this changeable language, observation therefore finally returns to fixed being and, according to its concept, declares that externality—not as organ, nor as language and sign, but as dead thing—is spirit’s outer and immediate actuality. What the very first observation of inorganic nature sublated, namely that the concept should be present as a thing, this final mode restores by making spirit’s actuality itself a thing, or, expressed conversely, giving dead being the significance of spirit.—Observation has thereby arrived at expressing what our concept of it was: that reason’s certainty seeks itself as objective actuality.—One may indeed not mean thereby that spirit, represented by a skull, is declared a thing; no 1807 282 materialism, as it is called, is supposed to lie in this thought; rather, spirit is still to be something other than these bones. Yet to say it is means nothing other than that it is a thing. If being as such, or thing-being, is predicated of spirit, the true expression of this is therefore that it is something like a bone. It must therefore be regarded as highly important that the true expression has been found for purely saying of spirit that it is. If one otherwise says of spirit that it is, has a being, is a thing, a singular actuality, something one can see or take in one’s hand, strike, and so on is not thereby meant, but such a thing is said. What is truly said thus expresses itself as this: the being of spirit is a bone.

344 This result now has a doubled meaning: first its true meaning, insofar as it completes the result of self-consciousness’s preceding movement. Unhappy self-consciousness alienated its independence and wrested its being-for-itself out into a thing. It thereby returned from self-consciousness into consciousness, that is, into consciousness for which the object is a being, a thing;—but what is a thing is self-consciousness, and thus it is the unity of I and being, the category. When the object is thus 1807 283 determined for consciousness, consciousness has reason. Consciousness, like self-consciousness, properly is reason in itself; but only of consciousness for which the object has determined itself as the category can it be said that it has reason.—From this, however, the knowledge of what reason is remains distinct.—The category, the immediate unity of being and its own, must run through both forms, and observing consciousness is precisely that for which it exhibits itself in the form of being. In its result, consciousness expresses as a proposition that of which it is unconscious certainty—the proposition lying in the concept of reason. It is the infinite judgment that the self is a thing—a judgment that sublates itself.—Through this result, then, this has determinately been added to the category: that it is this self-sublating opposition. The pure category, which is for consciousness in the form of being or immediacy, is the still unmediated, merely present object, and consciousness is an equally unmediated relating. The moment of that infinite judgment is the transition of immediacy into mediation, or negativity. The present object is therefore determined as a negative one, while consciousness is determined as self-consciousness over against it; or the category, having run through the form of being in observation, is now posited in the form of 1807 284 being-for-itself. Consciousness no longer wants to find itself immediately, but to produce itself through its activity. It itself is for itself the purpose of its activity, just as in observation it was concerned only with things.

345 The other meaning of the result is that of conceptless observation, already considered. This observation knows no other way of grasping and expressing itself than ingenuously declaring the bone, as found as a sensuous thing that does not at the same time lose its objectivity for consciousness, to be the actuality of self-consciousness. Yet it also has no clarity of consciousness about its saying this, and does not grasp its proposition in the determinacy of subject and predicate and their relation, still less in the sense of the infinite self-dissolving judgment and of the concept.—Rather, from a deeper self-consciousness of spirit, which appears here as a natural honesty, it conceals from itself the disgrace of the naked, conceptless thought of taking a bone for self-consciousness’s actuality. It whitewashes this thought through thoughtlessness itself, mixing in various relationships of cause and effect, sign, organ, and so forth, which have no meaning here, and hiding the proposition’s glaring character through distinctions taken from them.

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346 Brain fibers and the like, considered as spirit’s being, are already a thought actuality, merely hypothetical—not existent, not felt or seen, not true actuality; when they are there, when they are seen, they are dead objects and then no longer count as spirit’s being. But objectivity proper must be immediate and sensuous, so that spirit is posited as actual in this objectivity as dead—for bone is the dead insofar as it is in the living itself.—The concept of this representation is that reason is for itself all thinghood, even pure objectivity itself; but it is this in the concept, or the concept alone is its truth. And the purer the concept itself, the sillier the representation into which it sinks when its content is not as concept but as representation—when the self-sublating judgment is taken not with consciousness of this infinity of its own, but as an abiding proposition whose subject and predicate each count on their own, the self fixed as self and the thing as thing, and yet one is supposed to be the other.—Reason, essentially concept, is immediately divided into itself and its opposite, an opposition that for that very reason is equally immediately sublated. But offering itself thus as itself and its opposite, and held fast in the entirely singular moment of this 1807 286 separation, it is apprehended irrationally; and the purer its moments, the more glaring the appearance of this content, which alone is either present for consciousness or ingenuously expressed by it.—The depth that spirit drives outward from within, but only as far as its representing consciousness, leaving it there—and this consciousness’s ignorance of what it is saying—is the same conjunction of high and low that nature naively expresses in the living being by joining the organ of its highest perfection, the organ of generation, with the organ of pissing.—The infinite judgment as infinite would be the perfection of life comprehending itself; but consciousness of it remaining in representation behaves as pissing.

B. The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness through Itself.

347 Self-consciousness found the thing as itself and itself as thing; that is, it is for it that it is in itself objective actuality. It is no longer the immediate certainty of being all reality, but a certainty for which the immediate in general has the form of something sublated, so that its objectivity counts only as a surface whose inner and essence is it itself.—The object to which it relates positively is therefore a self-consciousness; it is in the form of thinghood, that is, it is independent. But self-consciousness has the certainty that this independent object is nothing alien for it; it thus knows that in itself it is recognized by it. It is spirit, which has the certainty of possessing its unity with itself in the doubling of its self-consciousness and in the independence of both. This certainty must now raise itself to truth for it; what it takes itself to be in itself and in its 1807 288 *inward certainty must enter its consciousness and become for it.

348 The general stages of this actualization are already indicated in general by comparison with the path so far. Just as observing reason repeated, in the element of the category, the movement of consciousness—sense-certainty, perception, and understanding—so this reason will also run once more through the doubled movement of self-consciousness and pass from independence into its freedom. At first this active reason is conscious of itself only as an individual, and as such must demand and produce its actuality in the other. But then, as its consciousness rises to universality, it becomes universal reason and is conscious of itself as reason, as already recognized in and for itself, uniting all self-consciousness in its pure consciousness. It is simple spiritual essence, which, in also coming to consciousness, is the real substance into which the earlier forms return as into their ground, so that in relation to it they are only singular moments of its becoming. They indeed break loose and appear as shapes of their own, but in fact have existence and actuality only as borne by it, and have their truth only insofar as they are and remain within it.

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349 If we take this goal—which is the concept that has already emerged for us, namely recognized self-consciousness, possessing the certainty of itself, and precisely therein its truth, in the other free self-consciousness—in its reality, or bring forth this still inward spirit as substance that has already attained its existence, then in this concept the realm of ethical life opens up. For ethical life is nothing other than the absolute spiritual unity of individuals’ essence within their independent actuality: a self-consciousness universal in itself, which is so actual to itself in another consciousness that this other has complete independence, or is a thing for it, and precisely therein it is conscious of unity with it and is self-consciousness only in this unity with this objective essence. This ethical substance, in the abstraction of universality, is only the thought law; but it is just as much immediately actual self-consciousness, or is custom. Conversely, singular consciousness is this existent one only insofar as it is conscious, in its singularity, of universal consciousness as its being, insofar as its activity and existence are universal custom.

350 In the life of a people, the concept of the actualization of self-conscious reason has in fact its completed reality: to intuit, in the independence of the other, complete unity with it, or to have as object this 1807 290 free thinghood of another that I find before me, which is the negative of myself, as my being-for-me. Reason is present as fluid universal substance, as unchangeable simple thinghood, which equally bursts into many completely independent essences, as light into stars as innumerable points shining for themselves. In their absolute being-for-themselves they are dissolved in the simple independent substance not only in themselves, but for themselves: they are conscious of being these singular independent essences through sacrificing their singularity, and through this universal substance’s being their soul and essence; just as this universal is in turn their activity as singular beings, or the work produced by them.

351 The individual’s purely singular activity and pursuits relate to the needs it has as a natural being, that is, as existent singularity. That even these most ordinary functions of its own do not come to nothing, but have actuality, is brought about through the universal preserving medium, through the power of the whole people.—Yet it has in universal substance not only this form of its activity’s subsistence in general, but equally its content: what it does is the universal skill and custom of all. Insofar as this content becomes completely 1807 291 singular, in its actuality it is interwoven with the activity of all. The individual’s work for its needs is just as much a satisfaction of others’ needs as of its own, and it achieves satisfaction of its own only through others’ work.—Just as the singular person already unconsciously accomplishes universal work in their singular work, so they also accomplish universal work again as their conscious object. The whole as whole becomes their work, for which they sacrifice themselves, and precisely thereby receive themselves back from it.—There is nothing here that is not reciprocal, nothing in which the individual’s independence does not give itself, in the dissolution of its being-for-itself, in the negation of itself, its positive significance of being for itself. This unity of being for another, or of making oneself a thing, and being-for-itself—this universal substance speaks its universal language in the customs and laws of its people. Yet this existent, unchangeable essence is nothing other than the expression of singular individuality itself, which seems opposed to it. The laws express what every singular person is and does; the individual recognizes them not only as its universal objective thinghood, but equally recognizes itself in that thinghood, or as singularized in its own individuality and in each of its fellow citizens. In universal spirit, therefore, each has only the 1807 292 certainty of itself, of finding in existent actuality nothing other than itself; each is as certain of the others as of itself.—I intuit in all that they are for themselves these independent essences only as I am; I intuit free unity with the others in them as existing through the others themselves just as through me. They as me, I as them.

352 In a free people, therefore, reason is actualized in truth; it is present, living spirit, in which the individual not only finds its determination, that is, its universal and singular essence, expressed and present as thinghood, but is itself this essence and has also attained its determination. The wisest men of antiquity therefore declared: wisdom and virtue consist in living in accordance with the customs of one’s people.

353 But self-consciousness, which initially is spirit only immediately and according to the concept, has stepped out of this happiness of having attained its determination and living within it; or, alternatively, it has not yet attained it—for both can be said in the same way.

354 Reason must step out of this happiness; for only in itself, or immediately, is the life of a free people real ethical life, or ethical life is an existent one. Thus this universal spirit itself is also a singular one, the whole of 1807 293 customs and laws a determinate ethical substance that sheds its limitation only in the higher moment, namely in consciousness of its essence, and has its absolute truth only in this cognition, not immediately in its being. In this being it is partly limited; partly, the absolute limitation is precisely that spirit is in the form of being.

355 Further, therefore, singular consciousness, as it immediately has its existence in real ethical life or in the people, is solid trust, for which spirit has not dissolved into its abstract moments, and which therefore also does not know itself as pure singularity being for itself. But once it has arrived at this thought, as it must, this immediate unity with spirit, or its being within spirit, its trust, is lost. Isolated for itself, it now takes itself as the essence, no longer universal spirit. The moment of this singularity of self-consciousness is indeed in universal spirit itself, but only as a vanishing magnitude that, as it appears for itself, dissolves just as immediately within spirit, and comes to consciousness only as trust. In fixing itself thus—and every moment, because it is a moment of essence, must itself attain to exhibiting itself as essence—the individual has confronted laws and customs. They are only a thought without absolute essentiality, an abstract 1807 294 theory without actuality; but as this I, the individual is for itself living truth.

356 Or self-consciousness has not yet attained this happiness of being ethical substance, the spirit of a people. For, having returned from observation, spirit is initially not yet actualized as such through itself; it is posited only as inner essence, or as abstraction.—Or it is at first only immediately; but existing immediately, it is singular. It is practical consciousness entering its preexisting world with the purpose of doubling itself in this determinacy of a singular being, producing itself as this singular being, as its existent counterpart, and becoming conscious of this unity of its actuality with objective essence. It has the certainty of this unity; for it, this unity is in itself, or this agreement of itself and thinghood is already present and has only to become so for it through itself, or its making is equally the finding of this unity. Since this unity is called happiness, this individual is thus sent out into the world by its spirit to seek its happiness.

357 If, then, the truth of this rational self-consciousness is for us ethical substance, here for it is the beginning of its ethical experience of the world. From the side that it has not yet become that substance, this movement presses toward it, and what is sublated in the movement are the singular 1807 295 moments that count for consciousness in isolation. They have the form of an immediate willing, or natural drive, attaining its satisfaction, which is itself the content of a new drive.—But from the side that self-consciousness has lost the happiness of being in substance, these natural drives are connected with consciousness of their purpose as true determination and essentiality; ethical substance has sunk to a selfless predicate whose living subjects are individuals who must fill their universality through themselves and provide from themselves for their determination.—In the former meaning, then, those shapes are the becoming of ethical substance and precede it; in the latter, they follow it and resolve for self-consciousness what its determination is. On the former side, in the movement that experiences what their truth is, the immediacy or crudity of the drives is lost and their content passes into a higher one; on the latter, consciousness’s false representation, which places its determination in them, is lost. On the former, the goal they attain is immediate ethical substance; on the latter, consciousness of that substance, specifically a consciousness knowing it as its own essence. In this respect, this movement would be the becoming of morality, a higher shape than the former. Yet these shapes at the same time constitute only one side of its becoming: 1807 296 the side falling within being-for-itself, or in which consciousness sublates its purposes, not the side according to which morality emerges from substance itself. Since these moments cannot yet have the significance of being made purposes in opposition to lost ethical life, they do indeed count here according to their unselfconscious content, and the goal toward which they press is ethical substance. But since the form in which they appear after consciousness has lost its ethical life, and, seeking it, repeats those forms, is closer to our own times, they may be presented more in the expression of this mode.

358 Self-consciousness, which is at first only the concept of spirit, begins this path in the determination of being for itself, as singular spirit, the essence; its purpose is therefore to give itself actualization as a singular being, and as this singular being to enjoy itself within that actualization.

359 In taking itself, as a being-for-itself, to be the essence, it is the negativity of the other. In its consciousness, therefore, it itself appears as the positive over against something that indeed is, but has for it the significance of not being in itself. Consciousness appears divided into this preexisting actuality and the purpose it accomplishes by sublating that actuality, making the purpose actual in its place. Its 1807 297 first purpose, however, is its immediate, abstract being-for-itself, or to intuit itself as this singular being in another, or another self-consciousness as itself. The experience of what the truth of this purpose is raises self-consciousness higher, and it now becomes purpose for itself insofar as it is also universal and has the law immediately within it. Yet in carrying out this law of its heart, it experiences that the singular essence cannot preserve itself here, but that the good can be accomplished only through its sacrifice, and it becomes virtue. Virtue’s experience can be no other than that its purpose is already accomplished in itself, that happiness is immediately found in activity itself, and that activity itself is the good. The concept of this whole sphere—that thinghood is spirit’s own being-for-itself—comes to be for self-consciousness in this sphere’s movement. Having found it, self-consciousness is thus for itself reality as immediately self-expressing individuality, which finds no further resistance in an opposed actuality and has only this self-expression itself as object and purpose.

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a. Pleasure and Necessity.

360 Self-consciousness, which is for itself reality in general, has its object within itself, but as an object it has at first only for itself, and which is not yet existent. Being confronts it as an actuality other than its own, and it seeks, through accomplishing its being-for-itself, to intuit itself as another independent essence. This first purpose is to become conscious of itself as a singular essence in the other self-consciousness, or to make this other into itself; it has the certainty that in itself this other already is itself.—Insofar as it has risen out of ethical substance and the tranquil being of thinking to its being-for-itself, it has behind it, as a gray shadow even now vanishing, the law of custom and existence, the knowledge of observation, and theory; for these are instead knowledge of something whose being-for-itself and actuality are other than those of self-consciousness. In place of the apparently heavenly spirit of the universality of knowledge and action, in which the feeling and enjoyment of singularity fall silent, the earth-spirit has entered it, for which only the being that is the actuality of singular consciousness counts as true actuality.

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It scorns understanding and science,humanity’s highest gifts—it has surrendered to the deviland must come to ruin.

361 Thus it plunges into life and puts into effect the pure individuality in which it appears. It does not so much make its happiness as take and enjoy it immediately. The shadows of science, laws, and principles, which alone stand between it and its own actuality, vanish like a lifeless mist unable to contend with the certainty of its reality. It takes life as one plucks a ripe fruit, which comes toward one just as much as it is taken.

362 Its activity is an activity of desire only in one moment; it is directed not toward eradicating the whole objective essence, but only toward the form of its otherness or independence, which is an essenceless semblance. For in itself the objective essence counts for consciousness as the same essence, or as its selfhood. The element in which desire and its object subsist indifferently toward each other and independently is living existence; desire’s enjoyment sublates this insofar as it belongs to its object. Here, however, this element that gives both a separate actuality is instead the category, 1807 300 a being essentially represented; it is therefore the consciousness of independence—whether natural consciousness or consciousness developed into a system of laws—which preserves the individuals each for itself. For self-consciousness, which knows the other as its own selfhood, this separation does not exist in itself. Thus it attains the enjoyment of pleasure, consciousness of its actualization in a consciousness appearing independent, or intuition of the unity of both independent self-consciousnesses. It reaches its purpose, but precisely therein experiences what its truth is. It comprehends itself as this singular essence being for itself, but the actualization of this purpose is itself its sublation; for it becomes its own object not as this singular being, but rather as unity of itself and the other self-consciousness, hence as sublated singular, or universal.

363 Enjoyed pleasure indeed has the positive meaning of having become oneself as objective self-consciousness, but equally the negative meaning of having sublated oneself. And since consciousness comprehended its actualization only in the former meaning, its experience enters its consciousness as a contradiction in which the achieved actuality of its singularity sees itself annihilated by the negative essence that, 1807 301 without actuality, stands emptily opposed to it, yet is its consuming power. This essence is nothing other than the concept of what this individuality is in itself. But individuality is still the poorest shape of self-actualizing spirit; for it is for itself as yet only the abstraction of reason, or the immediacy of the unity of being-for-itself and being-in-itself. Its essence is therefore only the abstract category. Yet the category no longer has the form of immediate, simple being, as for observing spirit, where it is abstract being, or, posited as alien, thinghood in general. Here being-for-itself and mediation have entered this thinghood. It therefore appears as a circle whose content is the developed pure relation of simple essentialities. The actualization this individuality has attained therefore consists in nothing other than its having cast this circle of abstractions out of the enclosure of simple self-consciousness into the element of being-for-it, or objective expansion. What therefore becomes object for self-consciousness in enjoying pleasure, as its essence, is the expansion of those empty essentialities: pure unity, pure difference, and their relation; beyond this, the object individuality experiences as its essence has no content. It is what is called necessity; for necessity, 1807 302 fate, and the like are precisely that of which one does not know how to say what it does, what its determinate laws and positive content may be, because it is the absolute pure concept itself intuited as being: the simple and empty, but unstoppable and undisturbable, relation whose work is only the nothingness of singularity. It is this fixed connection because what is connected consists of pure essentialities or empty abstractions. Unity, difference, and relation are categories, each of which is nothing in and for itself, but only in relation to its opposite, and which therefore cannot separate. They are related through their concept, for they are the pure concepts themselves; and this absolute relation and abstract movement constitutes necessity. Thus merely singular individuality, which has as its content only the pure concept of reason, instead of plunging from dead theory into life, has plunged instead only into consciousness of its own lifelessness, and receives itself only as empty and alien necessity, as dead actuality.

364 The transition takes place from the form of the one into that of universality, from one absolute abstraction into the other; from the purpose of pure being-for-itself, which has cast off community with others, into its pure opposite, 1807 303 being-in-itself, thereby equally abstract. This thus appears as though the individual had merely perished, and the absolute brittleness of singularity had shattered against equally hard but continuous actuality.—Since, as consciousness, it is the unity of itself and its opposite, this ruin is still for it: its purpose and actualization, as well as the contradiction between what was essence for it and what essence is in itself. It experiences the doubled meaning lying in what it did, namely having taken its life: it took life, but in doing so grasped death instead.

365 This transition of its living being into lifeless necessity therefore appears to it as an inversion mediated by nothing. The mediating term would have to be that in which both sides were one, so that consciousness cognized one moment in the other—its purpose and activity in fate, and its fate in its purpose and activity—its own essence in this necessity. But for this consciousness this unity is precisely pleasure itself, or simple, singular feeling, and the transition from the moment of this purpose into the moment of its true essence is for it a pure leap into the opposite. For these moments are contained and connected not in feeling, but only in the pure self that is a universal, or 1807 304 thinking. Through its experience, in which its truth was to come to be for it, consciousness has therefore instead become a riddle to itself. The consequences of its deeds are not for it its deeds themselves; what befalls it is not for it the experience of what it is in itself; the transition is not a mere change of form of the same content and essence, represented at one time as consciousness’s content and essence, at another as object or intuited essence of itself. Abstract necessity thus counts as the merely negative, uncomprehended power of universality against which individuality is shattered.

366 The appearance of this shape of self-consciousness extends this far; the final moment of its existence is the thought of its loss in necessity, or the thought of itself as an essence absolutely alien to itself. Yet self-consciousness in itself has survived this loss, for this necessity, or pure universality, is its own essence. This reflection of consciousness into itself, knowing necessity as itself, is a new shape of consciousness.

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b. The Law of the Heart and the Madness of Self-Conceit.

367 What necessity truly is in self-consciousness, it is for self-consciousness’s new shape, in which self-consciousness is for itself the necessary. It knows immediately that it has the universal, or the law, within itself; because of this determination, that the law is immediately within consciousness’s being-for-itself, it is called the law of the heart. This shape, like the preceding one, is for itself essence as singularity, but it is richer by this determination: that this being-for-itself counts for it as necessary or universal.

368 Thus the law immediately belonging to self-consciousness itself, or a heart that has a law within it, is the purpose it sets out to actualize. We must see whether its actualization will correspond to this concept, and whether in that actualization consciousness will experience this law of its own as essence.

369 An actuality stands opposed to this heart; for in the heart the law is at first only for itself, not yet actualized, and therefore at the same time something other than the concept is. This other thereby determines itself as an actuality that is the opposite of what is to be actualized, hence the contradiction of law and singularity. 1807 306 Thus it is, on the one hand, a law by which singular individuality is oppressed, a violent order of the world contradicting the law of the heart; and on the other, a humanity suffering under it, following not the law of the heart but subject to an alien necessity.—This actuality appearing opposite the present shape of consciousness is, as is clear, nothing other than the preceding divided relationship of individuality and its truth, the relationship of a cruel necessity by which individuality is crushed. For us, the preceding movement confronts the new shape because this shape has in itself arisen from that movement, so that the moment from which it comes necessarily exists for it; but for the shape itself this moment appears as something already found, since it has no consciousness of its origin, and its essence is rather to be for itself, or the negative over against this positive in-itself.

370 Thus this individuality is directed toward sublating the necessity contradicting the law of the heart, as well as the suffering present through it. It is therefore no longer the frivolity of the previous shape, which wanted only singular pleasure, but the seriousness of a lofty purpose, seeking its pleasure in exhibiting its own excellent essence and producing the welfare of humanity. What 1807 307 it actualizes is itself the law, and its pleasure therefore at the same time the universal pleasure of all hearts. For it the two are undivided: its pleasure is what accords with law, and actualizing the law of universal humanity is providing its singular pleasure. For within itself individuality and the necessary are immediately one: the law is the law of the heart. Individuality has not yet been displaced from its position, and the unity of the two has not come about through their mediating movement, not yet through discipline. Actualizing the immediate, undisciplined essence counts as exhibiting excellence and producing humanity’s welfare.

371 By contrast, the law standing opposed to the law of the heart is separated from the heart and free for itself. The humanity belonging to it lives not in the happiness-giving unity of law and heart, but either in cruel separation and suffering, or at least deprived of the enjoyment of itself in following the law, and lacking consciousness of its own excellence in transgressing it. Because that powerful divine and human order is separated from the heart, it is for the heart a semblance that ought to lose what still accompanies it, namely force and actuality. Its content 1807 308 may indeed happen to agree with the law of the heart, and then the heart can accept it; but what accords with law purely as such is not its essence. Rather, its essence is that in this it should have consciousness of itself, that it should have satisfied itself therein. But where the content of universal necessity does not agree with the heart, necessity is nothing in itself even according to its content, and must give way to the law of the heart.

372 Thus the individual carries out the law of its heart; the law becomes universal order, and pleasure an actuality lawful in and for itself. Yet in this actualization the law has in fact escaped the individual; what immediately comes to be is only the relationship that was to be sublated. Precisely through its actualization, the law of the heart ceases to be the law of the heart. For in actualization it receives the form of being and is now universal power, indifferent to this heart, so that the individual no longer finds its own order as its own, precisely because it establishes it. Through actualizing its law, therefore, the individual does not produce its law; rather, since this order is in itself its own but for it an alien one, it produces only its entanglement in the actual order—and indeed in it as an overwhelming power not merely alien but hostile to it.—Through its deed it posits itself in, or rather 1807 309 as, the universal element of existent actuality, and its deed itself is to have, according to its own intention, the value of a universal order. Yet thereby it has let itself go free from itself; as universality it grows onward for itself and purifies itself of singularity. The individual, which wants to cognize universality only in the form of its immediate being-for-itself, therefore does not recognize itself in this free universality, while at the same time belonging to it, for it is its activity. This activity therefore has the inverted meaning of contradicting universal order, for its deed is to be the deed of its singular heart, not free universal actuality; and at the same time it has in fact recognized that order, for activity has the meaning of positing its essence as free actuality, that is, recognizing actuality as its essence.

373 Through the concept of its activity, the individual has determined more precisely the manner in which the actual universality to which it has made itself belong turns against it. Its deed, as actuality, belongs to the universal; but its content is its own individuality, which wants to preserve itself as this singular individuality opposed to the universal. What is at issue is not the establishment of some determinate law; rather, immediate unity of the singular heart with universality is the thought elevated into law and supposed to hold good: that in what is law, 1807 310 every heart must recognize itself. But only the heart of this individual has posited its actuality in its deed, which expresses for it its being-for-itself or its pleasure. This deed is immediately supposed to count as universal; that is, it is in truth something particular and has only the form of universality: its particular content as such is to count as universal. Hence others find in this content not the law of their heart accomplished, but rather that of another; and precisely according to the universal law that everyone ought to find their heart in what is law, they turn against the actuality it established, just as it turned against theirs. Thus the individual now finds not merely the rigid law, as at first, but the hearts of human beings themselves opposed to its excellent intentions and deserving abhorrence.

374 Because this consciousness knows universality only as immediate, and necessity as necessity of the heart, it does not know the nature of actualization and efficacy: that as existent, in their truth they are rather the intrinsically universal, in which the singularity of consciousness entrusting itself to them in order to be as this immediate singularity instead perishes. Thus, in being, instead of attaining this being of its own, consciousness attains the estrangement of itself. Yet that in which it does not recognize itself is 1807 311 no longer dead necessity, but necessity as animated by universal individuality. It took this divine and human order it found in force as a dead actuality in which those belonging to it would have no consciousness of themselves, just as it itself—fixed as this heart being for itself and opposed to the universal—would have none. But it finds this order instead animated by the consciousness of all, and as the law of all hearts. It in fact experiences actuality as animated order precisely through actualizing the law of its heart; for this means nothing other than that individuality becomes its own object as universal, in which, however, it does not recognize itself.

375 Thus what emerges as the true from this shape of self-consciousness’s experience contradicts what it is for itself. Yet what it is for itself has for it the form of absolute universality, and is the law of the heart, immediately one with self-consciousness. At the same time, the subsisting and living order is equally its own essence and work; it produces nothing other than this order, which is in an equally immediate unity with self-consciousness. Belonging in this way to a doubled, opposed essentiality, self-consciousness contradicts itself within itself and is shattered at its core. The 1807 312 law of this heart is alone that in which self-consciousness recognizes itself; but through the actualization of that law, the universally valid order has likewise become for it its own essence and its own actuality. Thus both things contradicting each other in its consciousness are for it in the form of essence and its own actuality.

376 In expressing this moment of its consciously experienced ruin, and therein the result of its experience, it shows itself as this inward inversion of itself, as the derangement of consciousness for which its essence is immediately nonessence, its actuality immediately nonactuality.—Derangement cannot be taken to consist simply in regarding something essenceless as essential, something nonactual as actual, so that what is essential or actual for one person would not be so for another, and consciousness of actuality and nonactuality, or essentiality and inessentiality, would fall apart.—If something is in fact actual and essential for consciousness in general, but not for me, then in consciousness of its nullity, since I am at the same time consciousness in general, I have consciousness of its actuality as well; and insofar as both are fixed, this is a unity that is madness in general. In this, however, only 1807 313 an object is deranged for consciousness, not consciousness as such in and for itself. But in the result of experience that has emerged here, consciousness is conscious in its law of itself as this actual being; and at the same time, since precisely the same essentiality, the same actuality, is estranged from it, as self-consciousness, as absolute actuality, it is conscious of its nonactuality. Or both sides, in their contradiction, count for it immediately as its essence, which is thus deranged at its core.

377 The heart’s beating for humanity’s welfare therefore passes into the raging of deranged self-conceit: into consciousness’s fury to preserve itself against its destruction, by casting out of itself the perversity it itself is, and striving to regard and express it as something other. Thus it declares universal order to be a perversion of the law of the heart and its happiness, invented by fanatical priests, debauched despots, and their servants, who compensate for their humiliation by humiliating and oppressing those below them, and administered to the nameless misery of deceived humanity.—In this derangement, consciousness declares individuality to be what deranges and is deranged, but an alien and contingent individuality. Yet the heart, or consciousness’s singularity that wants immediately 1807 314 to be universal, is itself this deranging and deranged element, and its activity only brings it about that this contradiction becomes present to its consciousness. For the true is for it the law of the heart—a mere supposition that, unlike the subsisting order, has not endured the light of day, but instead perishes as soon as it shows itself to that light. This law of its own was to have actuality; in this respect the law as actuality, as valid order, is for it purpose and essence, yet immediately actuality, precisely the law as valid order, is equally for it what is null.—Likewise its own actuality, it itself as the singularity of consciousness, is its essence for it; but its purpose is to posit this actuality as existent. Thus, immediately, its self as nonsingular is instead its essence, or its purpose as law, precisely thereby as a universality that it itself would be for its consciousness.—Through its activity, this concept of its own becomes its object; thus it instead experiences its self as the nonactual and nonactuality as its actuality. It is therefore not a contingent and alien individuality, but precisely this heart that is in every respect within itself the perverse and perverting element.

378 But since immediately universal individuality is the perverse and perverting element, this universal order, as the law of all hearts, that is, of the perverse, is 1807 315 no less itself intrinsically perverse, as raging derangement declared. On the one hand, in the resistance the law of one heart encounters in other singular individuals, it proves to be the law of all hearts. Existing laws are defended against an individual’s law because they are not unconscious, empty, dead necessity, but spiritual universality and substance, in which those in whom it has its actuality live as individuals and are conscious of themselves. Thus, even when they complain about this order as though it ran counter to their inward law and oppose to it the opinions of the heart, they in fact cling to it with their hearts as their essence; and if this order is taken from them, or they place themselves outside it, they lose everything. Since the actuality and power of public order consist precisely in this, this order thus appears as the self-equal, universally animated essence, and individuality as its form.—Yet this order is equally the perverse.

379 For insofar as it is the law of all hearts, and all individuals are immediately this universal, it is an actuality that is only the actuality of individuality being for itself, or of the heart. Thus consciousness establishing the law of its heart encounters resistance from others because it contradicts the equally 1807 316 singular laws of their hearts, and in resisting they do nothing other than establish and assert their law. The universal that is present is therefore only a universal resistance and struggle of all against one another, in which each asserts its own singularity yet at the same time fails to do so, because that singularity encounters the same resistance and is reciprocally dissolved by the others. What seems public order is therefore this universal feud in which everyone snatches what they can, administers justice upon the singularity of others, and establishes their own, which equally vanishes through others. It is the way of the world, the semblance of an abiding course, which is only a supposed universality, and whose content is rather the essenceless play of establishing singularities and dissolving them.

380 If we consider the two sides of universal order in relation to each other, the latter universality has as its content restless individuality, for which opinion, or singularity, is law, the actual is nonactual, and the nonactual actual. Yet it is at the same time the side of the order’s actuality, for to it belongs individuality’s being-for-itself.—The other side is the universal as an essence at rest, but precisely for that reason only as an inner, which is not nothing at all, yet is no actuality, and 1807 317 can itself become actual only through the sublation of individuality, which has arrogated actuality to itself. This shape of consciousness—becoming for itself, in the law, in what is true and good in itself, not as singularity but only as essence, while knowing individuality as the perverse and perverting element, and therefore having to sacrifice consciousness’s singularity—is virtue.

c. Virtue and the Way of the World.

381 In active reason’s first shape, self-consciousness was for itself pure individuality, and empty universality stood opposed to it. In the second, both parts of the opposition each contained both moments, law and individuality; but one, the heart, was their immediate unity, the other their opposition. Here, in the relationship of virtue and the way of the world, both members are each unity and opposition of these moments, or a movement of law and individuality against each other, but an opposed movement. For the consciousness of virtue, the law is the essential, and individuality what must be sublated, both 1807 318 in its own consciousness and in the way of the world. In its consciousness, its own individuality must be disciplined under the universal, the true and good in itself; but it still remains personal consciousness therein. True discipline is only the sacrifice of the entire personality, as confirmation that in fact it has not remained attached to singular things. In this singular sacrifice, individuality in the way of the world is also eradicated, for individuality is also a simple moment common to both.—In the way of the world, individuality behaves in the reverse manner to its positing in virtuous consciousness: it makes itself essence, and subjects to itself the good and true in themselves.—Further, for virtue the way of the world is likewise not merely this universal perverted by individuality; absolute order is also a common moment, present in the way of the world not as existent actuality for consciousness, but as its inner essence. Thus this order is not properly to be produced by virtue for the first time; for producing, as activity, is consciousness of individuality, and individuality is rather to be sublated. Through this sublation, however, room is, as it were, merely made for the in-itself of the way of the world to enter into existence in and for itself.

382 The universal content of the actual way of the world has already emerged; considered more closely, 1807 319 it is again nothing other than the two preceding movements of self-consciousness. The shape of virtue has arisen from them; since they are its origin, it has them before it, but it seeks to sublate its origin and realize itself, or become for itself. Thus on one side the way of the world is singular individuality seeking its pleasure and enjoyment, in which it indeed finds its ruin and thereby satisfies the universal. But this satisfaction itself, like the other moments of this relationship, is an inverted shape and movement of the universal. Actuality is only the singularity of pleasure and enjoyment, while the universal is opposed to it: a necessity that is only the universal’s empty shape, a merely negative reaction and contentless activity.—The other moment of the way of the world is individuality that wants to be law in and for itself, and in this conceit disturbs the subsisting order. Universal law does indeed preserve itself against this self-conceit and appears no longer as something opposed to consciousness and empty, not as dead necessity, but as necessity within consciousness itself. Yet as it exists as the conscious relation of absolutely contradictory actuality, it is derangement; as it is objective actuality, however, it is perversity in general. Thus the universal 1807 320 does indeed exhibit itself on both sides as the power of their movement, but the existence of this power is only universal inversion.

383 It is now to receive its true actuality from virtue, through sublating individuality, the principle of perversion. Virtue’s purpose is thereby to reverse the perverted way of the world again and bring forth its true essence. This true essence is present in the way of the world at first only as its in-itself; it is not yet actual, and virtue therefore only believes in it. Virtue sets out to raise this belief to vision, but without enjoying the fruits of its work and sacrifice. For insofar as it is individuality, it is the activity of the struggle it enters with the way of the world; but its purpose and true essence are the conquest of the way of the world’s actuality. The existence of the good thereby brought about is thus the cessation of its activity, or of the consciousness of individuality.—How this struggle itself is endured, what virtue experiences in it, whether through the sacrifice it takes upon itself the way of the world is defeated and virtue victorious—this must be decided from the nature of the living weapons the combatants wield. For the weapons are nothing other than the combatants’ essence itself, which emerges only for both reciprocally. Their weapons have therefore already emerged from what is present in itself in this struggle.

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384 For virtuous consciousness, the universal is true in belief, or in itself: not yet an actual, but an abstract universality. In this consciousness itself it is as purpose; in the way of the world, as inner. In precisely this determination the universal also presents itself in virtue for the way of the world; for virtue only wants to carry out the good and does not itself yet claim it as actuality. This determinacy can also be considered thus: in entering the struggle against the way of the world, the good thereby presents itself as being for another, as something that is not in and for itself, for otherwise it would not want to acquire its truth only through overcoming its opposite. That it is at first only for another means the same as what showed itself earlier in the opposed consideration: namely, it is as yet an abstraction, having reality only within the relationship, not in and for itself.

385 The good or universal, as it appears here, is what is called gifts, capacities, powers. It is a mode of spiritual being in which the spiritual is represented as a universal requiring the principle of individuality for its animation and movement, and having its actuality in individuality. By this principle, insofar as it is in the consciousness of virtue, this universal is well applied, but insofar as it is in the way of the world, it is misused: a passive 1807 322 instrument that, governed by the hand of free individuality and indifferent to the use individuality makes of it, can also be misused to produce an actuality that is its destruction; a lifeless matter lacking independence of its own, which can be formed this way or that, even to its own ruin.

386 Since this universal is equally at the disposal of virtuous consciousness and the way of the world, one cannot see whether virtue, thus equipped, will conquer vice. The weapons are the same: these capacities and powers. Virtue has indeed laid its faith in the original unity of its purpose and the essence of the way of the world in ambush, a unity that is to attack the enemy from behind during the struggle and accomplish that struggle in itself. Thus, in fact, for the knight of virtue his own activity and fighting is properly a mock combat, which he cannot take seriously, because he places his true strength in the good’s being in and for itself, that is, accomplishing itself—a mock combat that he also must not allow to become serious. For what he turns against the enemy and finds turned against himself, and whose wearing down and injury he risks in both himself and his enemy, is not supposed to be the good itself, for it is to preserve and accomplish this that he fights. Rather, what 1807 323 is risked is only the indifferent gifts and capacities. Yet these are in fact nothing other than precisely that universal without individuality which is to be preserved and actualized through the struggle.—But at the same time, through the concept of struggle itself, it is immediately already actualized: it is the in-itself, the universal, and its actualization means only that it is at the same time for another. The two sides stated above, according to each of which it became an abstraction, are no longer separated; rather, in and through the struggle the good is posited in both ways at once.—Yet virtuous consciousness enters the struggle against the way of the world as against something opposed to the good. What the way of the world offers it here is the universal, not merely as abstract universal, but as animated by individuality and being for another, or the actual good. Thus wherever virtue takes hold of the way of the world, it always encounters places that are the existence of the good itself. As the in-itself of the way of the world, the good is inseparably interwoven into all its appearance and has its existence in its actuality; the way of the world is therefore invulnerable for virtue. All the moments that virtue itself was to stake and sacrifice are equally existences of the good, and hence inviolable relationships. Fighting can therefore be only a 1807 324 wavering between preserving and sacrificing; or rather, neither sacrificing one’s own nor injuring another’s can take place. Virtue resembles not only the combatant concerned in battle solely to keep his sword bright; it has also begun the struggle to preserve the weapons. And not only can it not use its own, but it must also keep the enemy’s uninjured and protect them against itself, for all are noble parts of the good for which it entered the struggle.

387 For this enemy, by contrast, the essence is not the in-itself but individuality; its strength is therefore the negative principle for which nothing subsists and is absolutely sacred, but which can risk and endure the loss of each and everything. Through this, victory is as certain to it in itself as through the contradiction in which its opponent becomes entangled. What for virtue is in itself is for the way of the world only for it; it is free of every moment that is fixed for virtue and binds it. It has such a moment in its power because the moment counts for it merely as something it can equally sublate or let subsist; and thereby it also has in its power the virtuous knight fastened to that moment. He cannot disentangle himself from it as from a cloak thrown around him externally, and free himself by leaving it 1807 325 behind; for it is for him the essence that must not be surrendered.

388 Finally, as for the ambush from which the good in itself is cunningly to attack the way of the world from behind, this hope is intrinsically null. The way of the world is wakeful consciousness, certain of itself, which does not let anyone approach from behind but presents its face everywhere; for it is precisely this: that everything is for it, that everything stands before it. But if the good in itself is for its enemy, it is in the struggle we have seen; insofar, however, as it is not for it, but in itself, it is the passive instrument of gifts and capacities, matter without actuality. Represented as existence, it would be a sleeping consciousness remaining somewhere behind, no one knows where.

389 Virtue is therefore conquered by the way of the world because abstract, nonactual essence is in fact its purpose, and because with regard to actuality its activity rests upon distinctions lying only in words. It sought to consist in bringing the good into actuality through sacrificing individuality, but the side of actuality is itself nothing other than the side of individuality. The good was supposed to be what is in itself and opposed to what is; but the in-itself, taken according to its reality and truth, is instead being itself. The in-itself is 1807 326 initially the abstraction of essence over against actuality; but abstraction is precisely what is not true, but only for consciousness. This means, however, that it is itself what is called actual, for the actual is what is essentially for another, or is being. But the consciousness of virtue rests upon this distinction between in-itself and being, which has no truth.—The way of the world was supposed to be the perversion of the good because it had individuality as its principle; yet individuality is the principle of actuality, for it is precisely the consciousness through which what is in itself is equally for another. The way of the world inverts the unchangeable, but in fact inverts it from the nothingness of abstraction into the being of reality.

390 Thus the way of the world triumphs over what constitutes virtue in opposition to it; it triumphs over virtue for which essenceless abstraction is essence. Yet it triumphs not over something real, but over the creation of distinctions that are no distinctions, over these pompous speeches about humanity’s highest good and its oppression, about sacrifice for the good and misuse of gifts. Such ideal essences and purposes collapse as empty words that elevate the heart and leave reason empty; edify, but build nothing; declamations that determinately express only this content: that the individual 1807 327 pretending to act for such noble purposes and uttering such excellent phrases considers itself an excellent being—a swelling that makes its own and others’ heads large, but large with empty inflation.—Ancient virtue had its determinate, secure meaning, for it had its content-filled foundation in the people’s substance, and an actual good already existing as its purpose. Hence it was not directed against actuality as a universal perversity and against a way of the world. But the virtue considered here has stepped outside substance: an essenceless virtue, a virtue merely of representation and words lacking that content.—The emptiness of this rhetoric struggling against the way of the world would immediately be exposed if one were required to say what its phrases mean; they are therefore presupposed as familiar. The demand to state this familiar meaning would either be met with a fresh torrent of phrases, or opposed by an appeal to the heart, which says inwardly what they mean; that is, the inability actually to say it would be admitted.—The nullity of that rhetoric also seems unconsciously to have become certain for the cultivation of our age, since all interest has vanished from the whole mass of those phrases and the manner of puffing oneself up with them: a loss 1807 328 expressing itself in their producing only boredom.

391 Thus the result emerging from this opposition consists in consciousness letting go, like an empty cloak, of the representation of a good in itself that would not yet have actuality. In its struggle it has experienced that the way of the world is not as bad as it appeared, for its actuality is the actuality of the universal. With this experience the means of producing the good through sacrificing individuality disappears, for individuality is precisely the actualization of what is in itself; and inversion ceases to be regarded as an inversion of the good, for it is instead precisely the inversion of the good as a mere purpose into actuality. The movement of individuality is the reality of the universal.

392 Yet thereby what confronted consciousness of the in-itself as the way of the world has in fact equally been conquered and vanished. In it, individuality’s being-for-itself was opposed to essence or the universal, and appeared as an actuality separated from being-in-itself. But since actuality has shown itself to be in undivided unity with the universal, the being-for-itself of the way of the world equally proves no longer to be, just as virtue’s in-itself is merely a 1807 329 view. The individuality of the way of the world may well suppose it acts only for itself, or selfishly; it is better than it supposes, its activity is at the same time universal activity being in itself. When it acts selfishly, it merely does not know what it is doing; and when it asserts that all people act selfishly, it asserts only that all people lack consciousness of what activity is.—When it acts for itself, this is precisely the bringing into actuality of what is at first only in itself. Thus the purpose of being-for-itself, which supposes itself opposed to the in-itself—its empty cunning, as well as its subtle explanations that know how to show self-interest everywhere—has vanished just as much as the purpose of the in-itself and its rhetoric.

393 Thus individuality’s activity and pursuits are purpose in themselves; the exercise of powers, the play of their manifestations, is what gives life to powers that would otherwise be the dead in-itself. The in-itself is not an unexecuted, nonexistent, abstract universal; rather, it itself is immediately this presence and actuality of individuality’s process.

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C. Individuality That Is Real in and for Itself.

394 Self-consciousness has now grasped the concept of itself that was initially only our concept of it: to be all reality in the certainty of itself. Purpose and essence for it are now the moving interpenetration of the universal—gifts and capacities—and individuality.—The singular moments of this filling and interpenetration before the unity into which they have come together are the purposes considered so far. They have vanished as abstractions and chimeras belonging to those first insipid shapes of spiritual self-consciousness, having their truth only in the supposed being of the heart, imagination, and speeches, not in reason. Reason, now certain in and for itself of its reality, no longer seeks first to produce itself as purpose in opposition to immediately existent actuality, but has the category as such as the object of its consciousness.—For the determination of self-consciousness being for itself, 1807 331 or negative self-consciousness, in which reason appeared, has been sublated. It found an actuality that would be its negative, and only through sublating this did it actualize its purpose for itself. But since purpose and being-in-itself have proved to be the same as being for another and preexisting actuality, truth no longer separates from certainty—whether the posited purpose is taken as certainty of itself and its actualization as truth, or purpose as truth and actuality as certainty. Rather, essence and purpose in and for themselves are the certainty of immediate reality itself, the interpenetration of being-in-itself and being-for-itself, of the universal and individuality. Activity is in itself its truth and actuality, and the presentation, or expression of individuality, is its purpose in and for itself.

395 With this concept, then, self-consciousness has returned into itself from the opposed determinations that the category, and its relation to the category, had for it as observing and then as active. It has the pure category itself as its object, or is the category become conscious of itself. Its account with its previous shapes is thereby settled; they lie behind it in 1807 332 oblivion, do not confront it as its preexisting world, but develop only within itself as transparent moments. Yet in its consciousness they still separate as a movement of distinct moments that has not yet gathered itself into their substantial unity. But in all it holds fast to the simple unity of being and self that is their genus.—

396 Consciousness has thereby cast off every opposition and every condition of its activity; it sets out freshly from itself, and aims not at another, but at itself. Since individuality is actuality within itself, the material of effective activity and the purpose of action lie in activity itself. Activity therefore has the appearance of the movement of a circle moving freely within itself in the void, unhindered now expanding, now contracting, and perfectly content to play only in and with itself. The element in which individuality presents its shape has the significance of purely receiving this shape; it is daylight in general, to which consciousness wishes to show itself. Activity changes nothing and goes against nothing; it is the pure form of translating from not being seen into being seen, and the content brought to daylight and presenting itself is nothing other than what this activity already is in itself. It is in itself—this is its form as thought unity; and it is actual—this is its form as 1807 333 existent unity. It itself is content only in this determination of simplicity over against the determination of its passing-over and movement.

a. The Spiritual Animal Kingdom and Deceit, or the Matter Itself.

397 This individuality, real in itself, is initially again singular and determinate; the absolute reality it knows itself to be is therefore, as it becomes conscious of it, the abstract universal reality that, without filling or content, is only the empty thought of this category.—We must see how this concept of individuality real in itself determines itself in its moments, and how individuality’s concept of itself enters its consciousness.

398 The concept of this individuality, as it is as such all reality for itself, is initially result; individuality has not yet exhibited its movement and reality, and is here posited immediately as simple being-in-itself. But negativity, the same as what appears as movement, is in the simple in-itself as determinacy; and being, or the simple in-itself, becomes a determinate 1807 334 range. Individuality therefore appears as an original determinate nature—as original nature, for it is in itself; as originally determinate, for the negative is in the in-itself, which is thereby a quality. Yet this limitation of being cannot limit consciousness’s activity, for this is here a completed relation to itself; the relation to another that would be its limitation is sublated. Nature’s original determinacy is therefore only a simple principle—a transparent universal element in which individuality remains equally free and equal to itself, just as it unfolds its differences unhindered within it, and is pure interaction with itself in its actualization. Just as indeterminate animal life breathes its breath, say, into the element of water, air, or earth, and within these into more determinate principles, immerses all its moments in them, yet despite this limitation of the element keeps them in its power and itself in its oneness, and as this particular organization remains the same universal animal life.

399 This determinate original nature of consciousness, which remains free and whole within it, appears as the immediate and sole proper content of what is purpose for the individual. It is indeed determinate content, but it is content at all only insofar as we consider being-in-itself in isolation; in 1807 335 truth, however, it is reality permeated by individuality: actuality as consciousness, as singular, has it within itself, and is initially posited as existent, not yet as active. For activity, however, this determinacy is, on the one hand, no limitation beyond which it would want to go, because, considered as existent quality, it is the simple color of the element in which activity moves; on the other hand, negativity is determinacy only in being, whereas activity itself is nothing other than negativity. Thus in acting individuality, determinacy is dissolved into negativity in general, or the totality of all determinacy.

400 Now, in activity and the consciousness of activity, simple original nature enters into the difference belonging to activity. First, it is present as object—specifically as object still belonging to consciousness—as purpose, and thus opposed to a present actuality. The second moment is the movement of purpose represented as at rest: actualization, as the relation of purpose to wholly formal actuality, hence the representation of the transition itself, or the means. Finally, the third is the object as no longer purpose, of which active consciousness is immediately conscious as its own, but as outside it and for it as an other.—Yet according to the concept of this sphere, these different 1807 336 sides must be held fast so that the content remains the same within them and no difference enters: neither between individuality and being in general, nor between purpose and individuality as original nature, nor between purpose and present actuality; likewise neither between the means and original nature as absolute purpose, nor between effected actuality and purpose, original nature, or means.

401 First, then, individuality’s originally determinate nature, its immediate essence, is not yet posited as active, and is thus called particular capacity, talent, character, and so forth. This distinctive tincture of spirit is to be regarded as the sole content of purpose itself, and alone as reality. If one imagined consciousness as going beyond it and wanting to bring another content into actuality, one would imagine consciousness working as a nothing into nothing.—Further, this original essence is not merely the content of purpose, but in itself also the actuality that otherwise appears as the given material of activity, as preexisting actuality to be formed in activity. For activity is only the pure translation from the form of being not yet presented into that of presented being; the being-in-itself of that actuality opposed to consciousness has sunk to mere empty semblance. 1807 337 Thus, in determining itself to act, this consciousness does not let the semblance of present actuality lead it astray, and equally must gather itself away from wandering among empty thoughts and purposes and hold to the original content of its essence.—Admittedly, this original content is for consciousness only when it has actualized it; but the distinction between something that is for consciousness only within it and an actuality existing in itself outside it has disappeared.—It must act solely so that what it is in itself may be for it; or acting is precisely the becoming of spirit as consciousness. Thus it knows what it is in itself from its actuality. The individual therefore cannot know what it is before bringing itself into actuality through activity.—Yet it thereby seems unable to determine the purpose of its activity before it has acted; but at the same time, since it is consciousness, it must have the action before it in advance as wholly its own, that is, as purpose. The individual setting out to act thus seems to be in a circle in which each moment already presupposes the other, and therefore unable to find a beginning, because it learns its original essence, which must be its purpose, only from the deed, but to act must first have the purpose. But precisely for that reason it must begin immediately, and whatever the 1807 338 circumstances, proceed to activity without further reflection about beginning, means, and end; for its essence and nature in itself are beginning, means, and end all in one. As beginning, this nature is present in the circumstances of action, and the interest the individual finds in something is the already given answer to the question of whether and what is to be done here. For what seems a preexisting actuality is in itself the individual’s original nature, which has only the semblance of a being—a semblance lying in the concept of activity dividing itself—but expresses itself as its original nature in the interest it finds in that actuality.—Likewise the how, or the means, are determined in and for themselves. Talent is equally nothing other than determinate original individuality considered as an inner means, or transition of purpose into actuality. But the actual means and real transition are the unity of talent and the nature of the matter present in interest; talent represents the side of activity in the means, the nature of the matter the side of content. Both are individuality itself, as the interpenetration of being and activity. What is present, then, is preexisting circumstances, which in themselves are the individual’s original nature; then interest, which posits them precisely as its own, or as purpose; and finally the connection and sublation of this opposition in the means. This connection 1807 339 itself still falls within consciousness, and the whole just considered is one side of an opposition. This remaining semblance of opposition is sublated through the transition itself, or the means; for the means is the unity of outer and inner, the opposite of the determinacy it has as inner means. It therefore sublates that determinacy and posits itself, this unity of activity and being, equally as outer, as actualized individuality itself—that is, individuality posited for itself as existent. In this way the whole action does not step outside itself, whether as circumstances, purpose, means, or work.

402 Yet with the work the difference of original natures seems to enter; like the original nature it expresses, the work is determinate, for, freely released from activity as existent actuality, it contains negativity as quality. But consciousness determines itself over against the work as that which contains determinacy as negativity in general, as activity. It is therefore the universal over against that determinacy of the work, and can thus compare it with others and from this apprehend the individualities themselves as different: the individual reaching further in its work as either a stronger energy of will or a richer nature, that is, one whose original determinacy is less limited; another, by contrast, as a weaker and 1807 340 poorer nature.

403 In contrast to this inessential difference of magnitude, good and bad would express an absolute difference; but this does not occur here. What would be taken in one way or the other is equally an activity and pursuit, a self-presentation and self-expression of an individuality, and therefore all is good; one could not properly say what the bad would be. What would be called a bad work is the individual life of a determinate nature actualizing itself within it; it would be spoiled into a bad work only through comparative thought, which, however, is something empty, since it goes beyond the essence of the work—to be an expression of individuality—and seeks and demands in it something else, no one knows what.—This thought could concern only the difference mentioned earlier; but this, as a difference of magnitude, is intrinsically inessential, and is determinate here because different works or individualities would be compared with one another; yet these do not concern each other, each relates only to itself. Original nature alone is the in-itself, or what could be laid down as the standard for judging the work, and conversely; but both correspond to each other. Nothing is for individuality that is not through it, or there is no actuality that is not its nature and 1807 341 activity, and no activity or in-itself belonging to it that is not actual; and only these moments are to be compared.

404 Hence there is in general neither exultation, nor complaint, nor repentance; for all such things come from thought imagining another content and another in-itself than the individual’s original nature and its execution present in actuality. Whatever it does and whatever befalls it, it has done this and is this itself. It can have only the consciousness of the pure translation of itself from the night of possibility into the day of presence, of the abstract in-itself into the significance of actual being, and the certainty that what it encounters in the latter is nothing other than what slept in the former. Consciousness of this unity is indeed also a comparison, but what is compared has precisely only the semblance of opposition: a semblance of form that, for reason’s self-consciousness that individuality is actuality within itself, is nothing more than semblance. Thus, knowing that in its actuality it can find nothing other than actuality’s unity with itself, or only the certainty of itself in its truth, and that it therefore always attains its purpose, the individual can experience only joy in itself.

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405 This is the concept formed of itself by consciousness certain of itself as the absolute interpenetration of individuality and being; let us see whether experience confirms this concept for consciousness and whether its reality agrees with it. The work is the reality consciousness gives itself; it is that in which the individual is for itself what it is in itself, and in such a way that the consciousness for which it comes to be in the work is not particular, but universal consciousness. In the work it has placed itself outside itself in general, in the element of universality, in the space of being devoid of determinacy. Consciousness stepping back from its work is in fact universal in relation to its work, which is determinate, because in this opposition consciousness becomes absolute negativity, or activity. It therefore goes beyond itself as work and is itself the space devoid of determinacy that does not find itself filled by its work. If earlier their unity was nevertheless preserved in the concept, this occurred precisely through the work’s being sublated as existent work. But it is supposed to be, and we must see how, in its being, individuality will preserve its universality and know how to satisfy itself.—Initially the completed work must be considered on its own. It has received individuality’s whole nature along with it; its being is therefore itself an activity in which all differences 1807 343 interpenetrate and dissolve. The work is thus cast out into a subsistence in which the determinacy of original nature in fact turns outward against other determinate natures, intervenes in them as these others intervene in it, and loses itself as a vanishing moment in this universal movement. If within the concept of individuality real in and for itself all moments—circumstances, purpose, means, and actualization—are equal to each other, and originally determinate nature counts only as a universal element, then, by contrast, when this element becomes objective being, its determinacy as such comes to light in the work and receives its truth in its dissolution. More closely, this dissolution presents itself thus: in this determinacy the individual has become actual for itself as this individual; yet determinacy is not merely actuality’s content, but equally its form, or actuality as such in general is precisely this determinacy of being opposed to self-consciousness. From this side actuality shows itself as the merely preexisting, alien actuality that had vanished from the concept. The work is, that is, it is for other individualities, and for them an alien actuality in whose place they must set their own, in order through their activity to give themselves consciousness of their unity with actuality. Or their interest in 1807 344 that work, posited through their original nature, is other than the work’s own interest, whereby the work is made into something else. Thus the work is in general something transient, effaced by the counterplay of other powers and interests, exhibiting individuality’s reality as vanishing rather than as accomplished.

406 Thus in its work there arises for consciousness the opposition of activity and being, which in consciousness’s earlier shapes was also the beginning of activity, but here is only result. Yet it has in fact equally lain at the foundation, insofar as consciousness set out to act as individuality real in itself. For determinate original nature was presupposed for acting as the in-itself, and pure accomplishment for the sake of accomplishment had it as content. Pure activity, however, is the form equal to itself, to which the determinacy of original nature is therefore unequal. Here, as elsewhere, it is indifferent which is called concept and which reality. Original nature is the thought, or the in-itself, over against activity, in which alone it has its reality; or original nature is the being both of individuality as such and of individuality as work, while activity is the original concept, as absolute transition, or as becoming. This inadequacy of concept and reality, lying in its essence, is experienced by 1807 345 consciousness in its work; in the work, therefore, consciousness becomes for itself what it is in truth, and its empty concept of itself vanishes.

407 Thus in this fundamental contradiction of the work, which is the truth of this individuality real in itself, all its sides emerge again as contradictory. Or the work, as the content of the whole individuality, placed out of activity, which is negative unity and holds all moments captive, into being, now lets those moments go free; and in the element of subsistence they become indifferent to one another. Concept and reality therefore separate as purpose and as what is the original essentiality. It is contingent that purpose should have true essence, or that the in-itself should be made purpose. Likewise concept and reality separate again as transition into actuality and as purpose; or it is contingent that the means expressing purpose should be chosen. And finally these inward moments together, whether or not they possess unity within themselves—the individual’s activity is again contingent in relation to actuality in general; luck decides, as much for a badly determined purpose and badly chosen means as against them.

408 If, then, in its work there arises for consciousness the opposition of willing and accomplishing, of purpose and means, and again of this inward totality and actuality itself, 1807 346 which in general contains the contingency of its activity within itself, then equally the unity and necessity of that activity are also present. This side reaches beyond the other, and the experience of the contingency of activity is itself only a contingent experience. The necessity of activity consists in purpose being absolutely related to actuality, and this unity is the concept of activity; action occurs because activity in and for itself is the essence of actuality. In the work, admittedly, there emerges the contingency that having been accomplished possesses in relation to willing and accomplishing, and this experience, which seems bound to count as truth, contradicts that concept of action. Yet if we consider the content of this experience in its completeness, it is the vanishing work. What preserves itself is not vanishing; rather, vanishing is itself actual and bound to the work, and itself vanishes along with it; the negative itself perishes with the positive whose negation it is.

409 This vanishing of vanishing lies in the concept of individuality real in itself. For that in which the work vanishes, or what vanishes in it, and what was to give what has been called experience its superiority over the concept individuality has of itself, is objective actuality. Yet 1807 347 objective actuality is a moment that, even in this consciousness itself, no longer has truth on its own; that truth consists only in its unity with activity, and the true work is only that unity of activity and being, of willing and accomplishing. Thus, because of the certainty underlying its action, actuality opposed to consciousness is itself something that is only for it. For consciousness as self-consciousness returned into itself, for which all opposition has vanished, opposition can no longer arise in this form of its being-for-itself over against actuality. Rather, the opposition and negativity appearing in the work thereby affect not merely the content of the work or even of consciousness, but actuality as such, and with it the opposition and vanishing of the work that are present only through and within actuality. Thus consciousness reflects itself into itself out of its transient work, and asserts its concept and certainty as what is and abides against the experience of the contingency of activity. In fact it experiences its concept, in which actuality is merely a moment, something for it, not the in-and-for-itself; it experiences actuality as a vanishing moment, and actuality therefore counts for it only as being in general, whose universality is the same as activity. This unity is the true work; it is the matter itself, which absolutely maintains itself and 1807 348 is experienced as abiding, independently of the affair that is the contingency of individual activity as such, of circumstances, means, and actuality.

410 The matter itself is opposed to these moments only insofar as they are supposed to count in isolation; but essentially, as the interpenetration of actuality and individuality, it is their unity. It is equally an activity, and as activity pure activity in general, thereby just as much the activity of this individual; and this activity as still belonging to the individual, in opposition to actuality, is purpose. Equally, the matter itself is the transition from this determinacy into the opposite; and finally an actuality present for consciousness. The matter itself thus expresses the spiritual essentiality in which all these moments are sublated as valid for themselves, and therefore count only as universal, and in which consciousness’s certainty of itself is for it objective essence, a matter: the object born out of self-consciousness as its own, without ceasing to be a free, genuine object.—The thing of sense-certainty and perception now has its meaning for self-consciousness solely through self-consciousness; on this rests the distinction between a thing and a matter.—A movement corresponding to sense-certainty and perception will be traversed in it.

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411 Thus in the matter itself, as the interpenetration of individuality and objectivity itself become objective, self-consciousness has gained its true concept of itself, or has come to consciousness of its substance. At the same time, as it is here, it is a consciousness of substance that has just come to be and is therefore immediate; this is the determinate manner in which spiritual essence is present here, not yet having developed into truly real substance. In this immediate consciousness of it, the matter itself has the form of simple essence, which as universal contains all its different moments within itself and belongs to them, yet is again indifferent toward them as determinate moments and free for itself; as this free, simple, abstract matter itself, it counts as essence. The different moments of original determinacy, or of this individual’s matter, its purpose, means, activity itself, and actuality, are for this consciousness, on the one hand, singular moments it can leave and surrender in favor of the matter itself. On the other hand, however, they all have the matter itself as essence only in such a way that, as their abstract universal, it is found in each of these different moments and can be their predicate. It itself is not yet the subject; rather, those moments count as subject, because they fall on the side of singularity in general, while the matter itself is still 1807 350 only the simple universal. It is the genus found in all these moments as its species, and equally free of them.

412 Consciousness is called honest when it has, on the one hand, arrived at this idealism expressed by the matter itself, and on the other has its truth in the matter itself as this formal universality; when it is always concerned only with the matter itself, and therefore moves among its different moments or species, and, insofar as it does not attain the matter itself in one of them or in one meaning, precisely thereby takes possession of it in another. It thus in fact always gains the satisfaction that, according to its concept, was to fall to this consciousness. However things turn out, it has accomplished and attained the matter itself, for as this universal genus of those moments, it is the predicate of all.

413 If consciousness does not bring a purpose into actuality, it has nevertheless willed it; that is, it makes purpose as purpose, pure activity that does nothing, into the matter itself, and can therefore express and console itself by saying that something has nevertheless been done and pursued. Since the universal itself contains the negative, or vanishing, under it, the work’s annihilation is also itself its activity; it has provoked others to it, and still finds satisfaction in the vanishing of its actuality, just as naughty boys 1807 351 enjoy themselves in the slap they receive, namely as its cause. Or it has not even tried to carry out the matter itself and has done nothing at all: then it did not care to; the matter itself is for it precisely the unity of its decision and reality. It asserts that actuality would be nothing other than its liking.—Finally, something of interest to it has come about in general without its intervention: then this actuality is for it the matter itself precisely in the interest it finds in it, although it was not produced by it. If it is a piece of good fortune befalling it personally, it insists upon it as its deed and merit; if instead it is an event in the world that does not otherwise concern it, it equally makes this its own, and inactive interest counts for it as the side it has taken for or against it, and has fought or upheld.

414 The honesty of this consciousness, like the satisfaction it experiences everywhere, consists, as is clear, in fact in its not bringing together the thoughts it has of the matter itself. The matter itself is for it equally its own affair and no work at all, or pure activity and empty purpose, or again an actuality without deed. It makes one meaning after another the subject of this predicate and forgets one after another. Now, in merely having willed, or even in not having cared to, the matter itself has the 1807 352 meaning of empty purpose and the thought unity of willing and accomplishing. Consolation for the annihilation of purpose—that one has nevertheless willed, or nevertheless purely acted—like satisfaction in having given others something to do, makes pure activity, or the utterly bad work, essence; for a work that is none at all must be called bad. Finally, in the fortunate accident of finding actuality before one, this being without deed becomes the matter itself.

415 But the truth of this honesty is not to be as honest as it appears. For it cannot be so thoughtless as actually to let these different moments fall apart in this way; rather, it must have immediate consciousness of their opposition, because they relate absolutely to one another. Pure activity is essentially the activity of this individual, and this activity is equally essentially an actuality, or a matter. Conversely, actuality is essentially only as its activity, and as activity in general; and its activity is at the same time, just as activity in general, also actuality. Thus, while it seems concerned only with the matter itself as abstract actuality, it is also concerned with it as its own activity. Yet equally, while it is concerned only with activity and pursuit, it is not serious about this, but is concerned with a matter, and with the matter as its own. Finally, while it seems to want only its own 1807 353 matter and its own activity, it is again concerned with the matter in general, or actuality abiding in and for itself.

416 Just as the matter itself and its moments appear here as content, they are equally necessarily present in consciousness as forms. They appear as content only to disappear, each giving way to the other. They must therefore be present with the determination of being sublated; but as such they are aspects of consciousness itself. The matter itself is present as its in-itself, or its reflection into itself; but the displacement of the moments by one another is expressed in consciousness in this way: they are posited in it not in themselves, but only for another. Consciousness brings one moment of the content into the light of day and presents it for others; yet at the same time it has reflected out of this moment into itself, and the opposite is equally present within it; it keeps this to itself as its own. Nor is it always one particular moment that is only put forward, and another that is kept only within; rather, consciousness alternates between them, since it must make each essential both for itself and for others. The whole is the moving interpenetration of individuality and the universal; but because this whole is present for this consciousness only as the simple essence, and thus as the abstraction of the matter itself, its moments fall 1807 354 separately outside it and apart from one another; and as a whole it is exhausted and presented only through the divisive alternation of displaying and keeping to oneself. Since in this alternation consciousness has one moment for itself and as essential within its reflection, but another only externally attached to it, or for others, a play of individualities with one another thus arises, in which they find themselves both deceiving and deceived, both by themselves and by one another.

417 An individuality thus sets out to accomplish something; it seems thereby to have made something its concern. It acts, becomes through its action something for others, and seems concerned with actuality. Others therefore take its action to express an interest in the matter as such, and the purpose that the matter should itself be accomplished, regardless of whether by the first individuality or by them. Accordingly, they show that they have already accomplished it themselves, or, if not, offer and provide their help; but this consciousness has instead already left the place where they think it is. What interests it in the matter is its own activity and enterprise; and when they realize that this was the matter itself, they find themselves deceived.—But in fact their own rush to help was itself nothing other than a wish to see and display their own activity, not the matter itself; that is, they wished to deceive the other in precisely the way in which they complain of having been 1807 355 deceived.—Now that it has emerged that one's own activity and enterprise, the play of one's powers, passes for the matter itself, consciousness seems to pursue its essence for itself, not for others, and to be concerned only with action as its own, not as the action of others, thus leaving others equally free in their affairs. But they are mistaken again; it has already left the place where they thought it was. Its concern is not with the matter as this particular affair of its own, but with it as a matter, as something universal that is for everyone. It therefore interferes in their action and work; and if it can no longer take this out of their hands, it at least takes an interest by busying itself with judgments about it. If it stamps the work with its approval and praise, the implication is that in the work it praises not only the work itself, but also its own magnanimity and restraint in not having spoiled the work as a work, or even spoiled it through its criticism. In showing an interest in the work, it enjoys itself in it; equally, a work it criticizes is welcome as an occasion for the same enjoyment of its own activity. But those who consider themselves deceived by this interference, or claim to do so, actually wished to deceive in the same way themselves. They represent their activity and enterprise as something that is only for themselves, in which they aimed only at 1807 356 themselves and their own essence. Yet by doing something, and thus presenting themselves and coming into the light of day, they directly contradict in deed their claim to wish to exclude the daylight itself, universal consciousness, and everyone's participation. Actualization is, rather, a display of what is one's own within the universal element, through which it becomes, and is meant to become, the concern of all.

418 It is therefore equally a deception of oneself and of others to pretend that one's concern is only with the pure matter. A consciousness that opens up a matter instead experiences others hurrying to it like flies to freshly set-out milk, eager to feel busy about it; and they experience in it that its concern, likewise, is not with the matter as an object, but as its own. Conversely, if action itself alone, the exercise of powers and capacities or the expression of this individuality, is supposed to be essential, the reciprocal experience is again that everyone bestirs themselves and considers themselves invited, and that, instead of a pure action, or a distinctive action of a single individual, what has been opened up is something that is just as much for others, or a matter itself. The same thing happens in both cases, but has a different meaning from the one assumed and intended to hold. Consciousness experiences both sides as equally essential 1807 357 moments, and in this experiences the nature of the matter itself: it is neither merely a matter opposed to action in general and to individual action, nor action opposed to subsistence, a genus free of these moments as its species. Rather, it is an essence whose being is the action of the single individual and of all individuals, and whose action is immediately for others, or a matter, and is a matter only as the action of each and all: the essence that is the essence of all essences, the spiritual essence. Consciousness experiences that none of those moments is subject; each instead dissolves in the universal matter itself. The moments of individuality, which the thoughtlessness of this consciousness successively took for the subject, gather into the simple individuality that, as this individuality, is equally immediately universal. The matter itself thereby loses the relation of a predicate and the determination of lifeless abstract universality; it is instead substance permeated by individuality: the subject in which individuality exists equally as itself, or as this individual, and as all individuals; and the universal that has being only as this action of each and all, an actuality in that this consciousness knows it as its own individual actuality and as the actuality of all. The pure matter itself is what was determined above as the category: being that is I, or I that is being, but as thinking, which is still distinguished from 1807 358 actual self-consciousness. Here, however, the moments of actual self-consciousness—whether we call them its content, purpose, action, and actuality, or its form, being-for-itself and being-for-another—are posited as one with the simple category itself, and the category is thereby also all content.

b. Lawgiving Reason.

419 In its simple being, spiritual essence is pure consciousness and this self-consciousness. The individual's originally determinate nature has lost its positive significance of being in itself the element and purpose of the individual's activity; it is only a sublated moment, and the individual is a self, as a universal self. Conversely, the formal matter itself finds its fulfillment in active individuality differentiating itself within itself, since the differences of this individuality constitute the content of that universal. The category is in itself as the universal of pure consciousness; it is equally for itself, since the self of consciousness is equally its moment. It is absolute being, since that universality is the simple self-equality of being.

420 What is the object for consciousness therefore has the significance of being the true; it is and holds good 1807 359 in the sense of being and holding good in and for itself. It is the absolute matter, which no longer suffers from the opposition between certainty and its truth, the universal and the individual, purpose and its reality; rather, its existence is the actuality and action of self-consciousness. This matter is therefore ethical substance, and consciousness of it is ethical consciousness. Its object counts for it equally as the true, since it unites self-consciousness and being in a single unity; it counts as the absolute, since self-consciousness can no longer, and no longer wishes to, go beyond this object, for in it self-consciousness is at home with itself. It cannot, since the object is all being and power;—it does not wish to, since the object is the self, or the will of this self. It is in its own self the real object as object, since it contains the difference belonging to consciousness; it divides into spheres that are the determinate laws of absolute essence. But these spheres do not cloud the concept, since the moments of being, pure consciousness, and the self remain enclosed within it—a unity that constitutes the essence of these spheres and, within this difference, no longer lets these moments fall apart.

421 These laws, or spheres of ethical substance, are immediately acknowledged; one cannot ask after their origin and justification or seek something else, since anything other than 1807 360 the essence that is in and for itself would be only self-consciousness itself. But self-consciousness is nothing other than this essence, since it is itself the being-for-itself of this essence, which is the truth precisely because it is just as much the self of consciousness as its in-itself, or pure consciousness.

422 Since self-consciousness knows itself as a moment of the being-for-itself of this substance, it expresses the existence of the law within it by saying that sound reason immediately knows what is right and good. As immediately as it knows this, so immediately does it hold good for it, and it says immediately: this is right and good. And specifically this: they are determinate laws; it is the matter itself, fulfilled and full of content.

423 What presents itself so immediately must be taken up and considered just as immediately. As with what sense-certainty immediately pronounces to be, so too with the being pronounced by this immediate ethical certainty, or with the immediately existing spheres of ethical essence, we must see what their constitution is. Examples of some such laws will show this; and by taking them in the form of pronouncements of knowing, sound reason, we need not first introduce the moment that must be brought to bear on them when they are considered as immediate sensory laws.

424 “Everyone should speak the truth.”—With this duty, pronounced as unconditional, 1807 361 a condition will immediately be conceded: if one knows the truth. The commandment will now therefore run: everyone should speak the truth according to their knowledge and conviction of it at the time. Sound reason, this very ethical consciousness that immediately knows what is right and good, will also declare that this condition was already so bound up with its universal pronouncement that this was what it meant by the commandment. But it thereby actually admits that it had already violated the commandment in the very act of pronouncing it. It said: everyone should speak the truth; but it meant that one should speak it according to one's knowledge and conviction of it; that is, it said something other than it meant, and to say something other than one means is not to speak the truth. The corrected untruth or clumsiness now expresses itself thus: everyone should speak the truth according to their knowledge and conviction of it at the time.—But the universal necessity valid in itself, which the proposition intended to express, has thereby turned instead into complete contingency. For whether the truth is spoken is left to the chance of whether I know it and can convince myself of it; and nothing more is said than that truth and falsehood should be spoken indiscriminately, just as someone happens to know, suppose, and comprehend them. This contingency of content has universality only in the 1807 362 form of a proposition in which it is expressed; but as an ethical proposition it promises a universal and necessary content, and so contradicts itself through the contingency of that content.—If, finally, the proposition is corrected so that the contingency of knowing and being convinced of the truth should fall away, and the truth should also be known, this would be a commandment directly contradicting the starting point. Sound reason was initially supposed to possess immediately the capacity to pronounce the truth; but now it is said that it ought to know the truth—that is, that it does not know how to pronounce it immediately.—Considered from the side of content, this has fallen away in the demand that one should know the truth; for this demand concerns knowing in general: one should know. What is demanded is therefore, rather, something free of all determinate content. But what was at issue here was a determinate content, a difference within ethical substance. Yet this immediate determination of substance is a content that showed itself instead to be completely contingent; and, raised to universality and necessity so that knowing is pronounced to be the law, it instead disappears.

425 Another famous commandment is: Love your neighbor as yourself. It is addressed to the individual in relation to individuals, and asserts this as a relation of individual to individual, 1807 363 or as a relation of feeling. Active love—for inactive love has no being, and is therefore presumably not intended—aims to remove evil from a person and bring that person good. To this end one must distinguish what constitutes evil for that person, what good is appropriate against this evil, and what their welfare consists in generally; that is, I must love them with understanding. Uncomprehending love will harm them, perhaps more than hatred. But beneficence that understands and is substantial, in its richest and most important form, is the intelligent universal action of the state—an action compared with which the action of the individual as an individual becomes something altogether so insignificant that it is scarcely worth speaking of. Moreover, that action is so powerful that if individual action wished to oppose it, either by being directly criminal on its own account or, out of love for another, by defrauding the universal of its right and its share in that individual, it would be entirely futile and irresistibly destroyed. Beneficence that is feeling retains only the significance of an entirely individual action, an emergency assistance as contingent as it is momentary. Chance determines not only its occasion, but also whether it is a work at all, whether it is not immediately dissolved again and even turned instead into evil 1807 364. This action for the welfare of others, therefore, which is pronounced to be necessary, is such that it may exist or may not; that, if the occasion happens to arise, it may be a work and may be good, or may not. This law thus has no more universal content than the first one considered, and does not express something that is in and for itself, as it ought to do as an absolute ethical law. Or such laws remain at the level of ought, but have no actuality; they are not laws, but merely commandments.

426 In fact, however, the nature of the matter itself makes clear that any universal absolute content must be renounced; for every determinacy posited in simple substance is inadequate to it, whose essence is precisely to be this simplicity. In its simple absoluteness, the commandment itself expresses immediate ethical being; the difference appearing in it is a determinacy, and hence a content standing below the absolute universality of this simple being. Since an absolute content must thus be renounced, the commandment can possess only formal universality, or the property of not contradicting itself; for universality without content is formal, and absolute content itself means a difference that is no difference, or absence of content.

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427 What remains for lawgiving, therefore, is the pure form of universality, or in fact the tautology of consciousness, which confronts the content and is a knowing, not of the existing or actual content, but of its essence, or self-equality.

428 Ethical essence is thus not itself immediately a content, but only a standard for whether a content is capable of being law or not, insofar as it does not contradict itself. Lawgiving reason has been reduced to a reason that merely tests.

c. Law-Testing Reason.

429 A difference within simple ethical substance is a contingency for it, which we saw emerge in the determinate commandment as the contingency of knowing, actuality, and action. The comparison between that simple being and the determinacy that does not correspond to it fell to us; and simple substance has shown itself in this to be formal universality, or pure consciousness, which, free of the content, confronts it and is a knowing of it as determinate. In this way this universality remains what the matter itself was. But in consciousness it is something else: it is no longer the thoughtless, inert 1807 366 genus, but is related to the particular and counts as its power and truth.—This consciousness initially seems to be the same testing that we ourselves previously were, and its action seems capable of being nothing other than what has already occurred: a comparison of the universal with the determinate, from which their inadequacy to one another would emerge as before. But the relation of content to the universal is different here, since the latter has acquired a different meaning. It is formal universality, of which the determinate content is capable, since in it this content is considered only in relation to itself. In our testing, universal, solid substance stood opposed to determinacy, which developed as the contingency of the consciousness into which substance entered. Here one member of the comparison has disappeared; the universal is no longer the substance that is and holds good, or what is right in and for itself, but simple knowing or form, which compares a content only with itself and considers whether it is a tautology. Laws are no longer given, but tested; and for the testing consciousness the laws are already given. It takes up their content in its simplicity, without entering, as we did, into consideration of the individuality and contingency adhering to its actuality; rather, it stops at the commandment as commandment and relates to it as simply as its standard is simple.

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430 But for this very reason this testing does not reach far: precisely because the standard is tautology and indifferent to content, it admits this content just as readily as its opposite.—The question is whether it should be a law in and for itself that property should exist; in and for itself, not from usefulness for other purposes. Ethical essentiality consists precisely in the law being equal only to itself and thus grounded through this self-equality in its own essence, not being conditional. Property in and for itself does not contradict itself; it is an isolated determinacy, or one posited as equal only to itself. Non-property, things belonging to no one, or community of goods, contradicts itself just as little. That something belongs to no one, or to the first person who takes possession of it, or to everyone together, and to each according to their need or in equal shares, is a simple determinacy, a formal thought, just like its opposite, property.—If, to be sure, the ownerless thing is considered as a necessary object of need, it is necessary that it become the possession of some individual; and it would be contradictory to make the thing's freedom the law instead. But the thing's being ownerless is not meant as absolute ownerlessness either; rather, it is to come into possession according to the individual's need, not indeed to be stored away, but to be 1807 368 used immediately. Yet providing for need entirely according to chance in this way contradicts the nature of the conscious being that alone is under discussion; for this being must represent its need in the form of universality, provide for its whole existence, and acquire lasting goods. Thus the thought that a thing should fall by chance to the next self-conscious living being according to its need would not agree with itself.—In community of goods, where provision would be made in a universal and lasting way, each receives either as much as they need, in which case this inequality contradicts the essence of consciousness, for which the equality of individuals is the principle; or distribution is equal, according to the latter principle, in which case the share does not have the relation to need that is, after all, its sole concept.

431 Yet if non-property appears contradictory in this way, this happens only because it has not been left as a simple determinacy. Property fares just the same when it is resolved into moments. The individual thing that is my property thereby counts as something universal, secured, and lasting; but this contradicts its nature, which consists in being used and disappearing. At the same time it counts as mine, which all others acknowledge, excluding 1807 369 themselves from it. But my being acknowledged implies instead my equality with everyone, the opposite of exclusion.—What I possess is a thing, that is, a being for others in general, wholly universal and without the determination of being only for me; that I possess it contradicts its universal thinghood. Property therefore contradicts itself in every respect just as much as non-property; each contains these two opposed, self-contradictory moments of individuality and universality.—But each of these determinacies, represented simply as property or non-property without further development, is as simple as the other—that is, not self-contradictory.—The standard of law that reason has in itself therefore fits everything equally well, and is thus in fact no standard at all.—It would indeed be strange if tautology, the principle of contradiction, which is conceded to be only a formal criterion for the cognition of theoretical truth—that is, something entirely indifferent to truth and untruth—were supposed to be more for the cognition of practical truth.

432 In the two moments just considered of the fulfillment of the previously empty spiritual essence, both the positing of immediate determinacies in ethical substance and then the knowing of whether they are laws have been sublated. The 1807 370 result thus seems to be that neither determinate laws nor a knowledge of them can exist. But substance is consciousness of itself as absolute essentiality, and therefore can relinquish neither the difference within it nor the knowledge of this difference. That lawgiving and law-testing proved null means that both, taken singly and in isolation, are merely unsupported moments of ethical consciousness; and the movement in which they appear has the formal meaning that ethical substance thereby presents itself as consciousness.

433 Insofar as these two moments are more precise determinations of consciousness of the matter itself, they can be regarded as forms of honesty. Just as honesty previously busied itself with the formal moments of the matter itself, so now it busies itself with a supposedly obligatory content of the good and right and with testing such fixed truth, imagining that sound reason and intelligent insight possess the force and validity of the commandments.

434 Without this honesty, however, the laws do not count as the essence of consciousness, nor does testing count as an action within it. Rather, as each of these moments appears immediately on its own as an actuality, one expresses an invalid establishment and existence of actual laws, and the other an equally invalid liberation from them. As a determinate 1807 371 law, the law has a contingent content—here this means that it is the law of an individual consciousness, with an arbitrary content. That immediate lawgiving is therefore the tyrannical outrage that makes arbitrary will into law and ethical life into obedience to it—to laws that are only laws, not also commandments. Likewise, the second moment, insofar as it is isolated, means testing laws, moving the immovable, and the outrage of a knowing that reasons itself free of absolute laws and takes them for an arbitrary will alien to itself.

435 In both forms these moments are a negative relation to substance, or to real spiritual essence; or, in them, substance does not yet have its reality. Rather, consciousness still contains substance in the form of its own immediacy, and substance is as yet only a will and a knowing of this individual, or the ought of an unactual commandment and a knowing of formal universality. But as these modes sublated themselves, consciousness returned into the universal and those oppositions disappeared. Spiritual essence is actual substance through these modes being valid not separately, but only as sublated; and the unity in which they are merely moments is the self of consciousness, which, now posited within spiritual essence, 1807 372 makes it actual, fulfilled, and self-conscious.

436 Spiritual essence is thus, in the first place, law existing in itself for self-consciousness; the universality of testing, which was formal and did not exist in itself, is sublated. It is equally an eternal law, grounded not in the will of this individual, but existing in and for itself: the absolute pure will of all, which has the form of immediate being. Nor is it a commandment that merely ought to be; rather, it is and holds good. It is the universal I of the category, which is immediately actuality, and the world is only this actuality. But since this existing law holds good absolutely, the obedience of self-consciousness is not service to a master whose commands would be arbitrary and in whom it would not recognize itself. Rather, the laws are thoughts of its own absolute consciousness, which it itself immediately has. Nor does it believe in them, for belief indeed intuits essence, but an alien essence. Ethical self-consciousness is immediately one with essence through the universality of its self; belief, by contrast, begins with individual consciousness and is its movement of continually approaching this unity without attaining the presence of its essence.—The former consciousness, however, has sublated itself as individual; this mediation is 1807 373 accomplished, and only because it is accomplished is consciousness immediate self-consciousness of ethical substance.

437 The difference between self-consciousness and essence is therefore perfectly transparent. Consequently, the differences within essence itself are not contingent determinacies. Rather, because of the unity of essence with self-consciousness—the latter alone could be the source of inequality—they are the spheres of their articulation, permeated by their life: spirits clear to themselves and undivided, spotless heavenly figures that preserve, in their differences, the unprofaned innocence and unanimity of their essence.—Self-consciousness is likewise a simple, clear relation to them. They are, and nothing more—this constitutes the consciousness of its relation. Thus, for Sophocles' Antigone, they hold good as the gods' unwritten and unfailing law: it lives not merely now and yesterday, but forever, and no one knows from where it appeared. They are. If I ask after their genesis and confine them to the point of their origin, I have gone beyond them; for I am now the universal, while they are conditioned and limited. If they are to legitimate themselves before my insight, I have already shaken their unwavering being-in-itself and regard them as something that may be true or may not be true for me 1807 374. The ethical disposition consists precisely in steadfastly holding to what is right and refraining from any movement, shaking, or reduction of it.—A deposit is entrusted to me; it is another's property, and I acknowledge it because this is so, while wavering in this relation. If I keep the deposit for myself, I commit no contradiction whatever according to the principle of my testing, tautology; for then I no longer regard it as another's property. Keeping something that I do not regard as another's property is perfectly consistent. The change of view is no contradiction, since what is at issue is not the view as a view, but the object and content that is supposed not to contradict itself. Just as I can change the view that something is my property into the view that it is another's property—as I do when I give something away—without thereby becoming guilty of contradiction, so I can equally take the opposite course.—Something is therefore not right because I find it noncontradictory; rather, it is right because it is what is right. That something is another's property is the ground. I have no business reasoning about this, or seeking out or devising all sorts of thoughts, connections, and considerations; 1807 375 I am to think neither of lawgiving nor of testing. Through such movements of my thought I would unsettle that relation, since I could in fact, as I pleased, find the opposite equally in conformity with my indeterminate tautological knowing, and thus make it law. Rather, whether this determination or its opposite is right is determined in and for itself. I, for my part, could make whichever I pleased into law, or just as well neither; and as soon as I begin to test, I am already on an unethical path. Through what is right being in and for itself for me, I am within ethical substance; thus it is the essence of self-consciousness, while self-consciousness is its actuality and existence, its self and will.

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V. The Certainty and Truth of Reason.

231 In grasping the thought that individual consciousness is in itself absolute essence, consciousness returns into itself. For unhappy consciousness, being-in-itself is the beyond of itself. But its movement has accomplished this: it has posited individuality in its full development—individuality that is actual consciousness—as its own negative, namely as the objective extreme. It has wrested its being-for-itself out of itself and made it into being. In this, its unity with this universal has also come about for it. For us this unity no longer falls outside it, since the sublated individual is the universal. And since consciousness preserves itself in this negativity of its own, this unity is its essence within consciousness as such. Its truth is what appears as the middle term in the syllogism whose extremes appeared absolutely separated. This middle term tells unchanging consciousness that 1807 163 the individual has renounced itself, and tells the individual that the unchanging is no longer an extreme for it but is reconciled with it. This middle is the unity that immediately knows both and relates them. It is consciousness of their unity, which it declares to consciousness and thereby to itself: the certainty of being all truth.

232 Since self-consciousness is reason, its previously negative relationship to otherness turns into a positive one. Until now, its concern has been only its independence and freedom: saving and preserving itself for itself at the expense of the world or its own actuality. Both appeared to it as the negative of its essence. But as reason, assured of itself, it has gained peace toward them and can tolerate them. For it is certain of itself as reality, or certain that all actuality is nothing other than itself. Its thinking is immediately actuality itself. It therefore relates to actuality as idealism. In grasping itself this way, it feels as though the world has only now come into being for it. Previously it does not understand the world. It desires and works on it, withdraws from it into itself, and destroys it for itself. It also destroys itself as consciousness: as consciousness of the world as essence, and as consciousness of its nothingness. Only now, after the grave of its truth has been lost, the destruction of its actuality itself 1807 164 destroyed, and the individuality of consciousness has become absolute essence in itself for it, does it discover the world as its new actual world. The world's persistence now interests it, just as previously only its disappearance did. For the world's continuance becomes its own truth and presence. It is certain of experiencing only itself in it.

233 Reason is consciousness's certainty of being all reality. This is how idealism states its concept. Just as consciousness appearing as reason immediately has this certainty within it, idealism also states it immediately: I am I. Here the I that is my object is not, as in self-consciousness in general, merely an empty object in general. Nor is it, as in free self-consciousness, merely an object withdrawing from others that still count alongside it. Instead it is an object accompanied by consciousness of the nonbeing of anything else: the sole object, all reality and presence. But self-consciousness is all reality not only for itself but also in itself only by becoming this reality—or rather, by proving itself to be so. It proves this along the path on which otherness disappears for consciousness itself: first, otherness as being-in-itself, in the dialectical movement of meaning, perceiving, and understanding; then otherness insofar as it is only for consciousness, through the independence of consciousness in lordship and servitude, the thought of freedom, skeptical 1807 165 liberation, and the struggle for absolute liberation by consciousness divided within itself. Two sides appeared in succession. On one side, essence or truth had the determination of being for consciousness; on the other, it had the determination of being only for consciousness. But both reduced themselves to one truth: what is, or the in-itself, is only insofar as it is for consciousness, and what is for consciousness also is in itself. When consciousness, which is this truth, appears immediately as reason, it has this path behind it and has forgotten it. Or, this reason appearing immediately appears only as the certainty of that truth. It therefore merely asserts that it is all reality, but does not itself comprehend this. For the forgotten path is the conceptual comprehension of this immediately stated claim. Likewise, anyone who has not traveled that path finds the claim incomprehensible on hearing it in this pure form, although in a concrete shape they may indeed make it themselves.

234 Idealism that does not present this path but begins with this claim is therefore also a mere assertion. It neither comprehends itself nor can make itself comprehensible to others. It states an immediate certainty opposed by other immediate certainties, which have been lost only along that path. Thus the assertions of those other certainties stand with equal right alongside the 1807 166 *assertion of this one. Reason appeals to the self-consciousness of every consciousness: I am I; my object and essence is I. No consciousness will deny it this truth. But by grounding the truth in this appeal, reason sanctions the truth of the other certainty: there is something other for me. Something other than I is my object and essence. Or, insofar as I am my object and essence, I am so only by withdrawing from the other in general and taking my place as an actuality alongside it. Only when reason appears as reflection out of this opposed certainty does its claim about itself appear not merely as certainty and assertion but as truth: not alongside others, but as the only truth. Its immediate appearance is an abstraction from its being present, whose essence and being-in-itself is the absolute concept—that is, the movement of its having become. Consciousness will determine its relationship to otherness, or its object, differently according to the stage it occupies in world spirit's becoming conscious of itself. How spirit immediately finds and determines itself and its object each time, or how it is for itself, depends on what it has already become, or what it already is in itself.

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235 Reason is the certainty of being all reality. But this in-itself, or this reality, is still entirely universal: the pure abstraction of reality. It is the first positivity that self-consciousness is within itself, for itself. The I is therefore only the pure essentiality of what exists, or the simple category. Previously the category meant the essentiality of what exists—indeterminately, of what exists in general, or of what exists over against consciousness. Now it is the essentiality, or simple unity, of what exists only as thinking actuality. Or it means that self-consciousness and being are the same essence: the same not by comparison but in and for themselves. Only one-sided, bad idealism lets this unity step back onto one side as consciousness, with an in-itself facing it. Now this category, or simple unity of self-consciousness and being, contains difference within itself. For its essence is precisely to be immediately self-identical in otherness, or absolute difference. Difference therefore is, but is completely transparent, and is a difference that is also no difference. It appears as a multiplicity of categories. Idealism declares the simple unity of self-consciousness to be all reality and immediately makes it the essence, without comprehending it as absolutely negative essence—only such an essence contains negation, determinacy, or difference 1807 168 within itself. So its second claim, that the category contains differences or kinds, is even more incomprehensible than its first. This assertion in general, like the assertion of any definite number of its kinds, is a new assertion. Yet it implies that we must no longer accept it merely as an assertion. For when difference begins in the pure I, in pure understanding itself, this means that immediacy, asserting, and finding must be abandoned here and conceptual comprehension must begin. To take up the multiplicity of categories again as something found in some way—for example, from judgments—and simply accept them like this must indeed be considered a disgrace to science. Where could understanding still demonstrate necessity if it cannot do so in itself, which is pure necessity?

236 Since both the pure essentiality of things and their difference thus belong to reason, strictly speaking we could no longer speak of things at all: of something that would be for consciousness merely the negative of itself. For saying that the many categories are kinds of the pure category means that it is still their genus or essence, not opposed to them. But they are already ambiguous: in their multiplicity they also contain otherness 1807 169 over against the pure category. Through this multiplicity they actually contradict it. Pure unity must sublate them within itself, thereby constituting itself as the negative unity of differences. But as negative unity it excludes both the differences as such and that first immediate pure unity as such. It is individuality: a new category that is excluding consciousness, meaning that something other exists for it. Individuality is the category's transition from its concept to an external reality. It is the pure schema, which is both consciousness and, because it is individuality and an excluding one, a pointing toward something other. But this category's other consists only of the other, first categories, namely pure essentiality and pure difference. Within individuality—that is, precisely in the positing of the other, or in this other itself—consciousness is equally itself. Each of these distinct moments refers to another, but in them no otherness comes about either. The pure category refers to the kinds, which pass into the negative category, or individuality. Individuality, however, points back to them. It is itself pure consciousness, which in each category remains this clear unity with itself. Yet this unity is equally referred to another, which has vanished as soon as it is, and is produced again as soon as it has vanished.

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237 Here we see pure consciousness posited in two ways. First, as a restless back-and-forth movement running through all its moments, with otherness hovering before it in them, only to be sublated when grasped. Second, as the resting unity certain of its truth. For this unity, that movement is the other; for the movement, the resting unity is the other. Consciousness and object alternate in these reciprocal determinations. Thus at one time consciousness regards itself as the searching that moves back and forth, and its object as the pure in-itself and essence. At another, consciousness regards itself as the simple category and its object as the movement of differences. But consciousness as essence is this entire course itself: passing from itself as simple category into individuality and the object; intuiting this course in the object; sublating it as something distinct; appropriating it; and declaring itself to be this certainty of being all reality, both itself and its object.

238 Its first declaration is only the abstract, empty statement that everything is its own. For the certainty of being all reality is at first only the pure category. Empty idealism expresses reason in this first recognition of itself in the object. It grasps reason only as reason initially is for itself. 1807 171 By showing this pure mine of consciousness in all being and describing things as sensations or representations, it imagines it has demonstrated this mine as complete reality. It must therefore also be absolute empiricism. For to fill the empty mine—to supply its differences and all its development and shaping—its reason needs an alien stimulus, in which alone the variety of sensation or representation would lie. This idealism therefore becomes the same self-contradictory ambiguity as skepticism. The only difference is that skepticism expresses itself negatively, idealism positively. Idealism no more brings its contradictory thoughts together: pure consciousness as all reality, and the alien stimulus, or sensory sensation and representation, as equally real. Instead it throws itself back and forth between them and has fallen into bad infinity, namely sensory infinity. Since reason is all reality in the sense of the abstract mine, while the other is something indifferently alien to it, precisely that knowledge of another is posited in reason which appeared as meaning, perception, and the understanding that grasps what is meant and perceived. The concept 1807 172 of this idealism itself also declares such knowledge untrue: only the unity of apperception is the truth of knowledge. Thus, to reach this other that is essential to it—that is, the in-itself—but which it does not have within itself, the pure reason of this idealism sends itself back to knowledge that is not knowledge of truth. It knowingly and willingly condemns itself to untrue knowledge. It cannot let go of meaning and perception, which for it itself have no truth. It is caught in the immediate contradiction of asserting two absolutely opposed things as essence: the unity of apperception and equally the thing. Whether called an alien stimulus, an empirical essence, sensibility, or the thing in itself, this thing remains in its concept the same thing alien to that unity.

239 This idealism is caught in this contradiction because it asserts the abstract concept of reason as truth. Thus reality immediately arises for it just as much as something that is not reason's reality, although reason is supposed to be all reality. Reason remains a restless search that declares, in the searching itself, that the satisfaction of finding is absolutely impossible. But 1807 173 actual reason is not so inconsistent. Being at first only the certainty of being all reality, it is conscious in this concept that, as certainty, as I, it is not yet reality in truth. It is driven to raise its certainty to truth and fill the empty mine.

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A. Observing Reason.

240 We now see this consciousness, for which being means its own, enter meaning and perceiving again. But it does not enter them as certainty of something merely other. It is certain of being this other itself. Previously it merely happened to perceive and experience various things about an object. Here it conducts observations and experience itself. Meaning and perceiving, which previously sublated themselves for us, are now sublated by consciousness for itself. Reason aims to know the truth: to find as a concept what is a thing for meaning and perceiving—that is, to have in thinghood only consciousness of itself. Reason therefore now has a universal interest in the world, because it is certain of having its presence in it, or that the present is rational. It seeks its other, knowing that in it it possesses nothing but itself. It seeks only its own infinity.

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241 At first it only dimly senses itself in actuality, or knows actuality only as its own in general. In this sense it proceeds to take universal possession of the property assured to it, planting the sign of its sovereignty on every height and in every depth. But this superficial mine is not its final interest. In the joy of this universal taking of possession, it still finds in its property the alien other that abstract reason does not have within itself. Reason senses itself as a deeper essence than the pure I is. It must demand that difference, manifold being, become its own for it: that it intuit itself as actuality and find itself present as shape and thing. But even if reason rummages through all the entrails of things and opens all their veins so that it might spring out of them toward itself, it will not reach this happiness. It must first have completed itself within itself, to be able then to experience its completion.

242 Consciousness observes: reason wants to find and have itself as an existing object, in an actual, sensibly present form. The consciousness engaged in this observation certainly thinks and says that it wants to experience not itself but, on the contrary, the essence of things as things. This consciousness thinks and says so because it is reason, but reason 1807 176 is not yet its object as reason. If it knew reason as the same essence of things and itself, and knew that reason can be present in its characteristic shape only in consciousness, it would descend into its own depths and seek reason there rather than in things. Had it found reason in those depths, reason would be directed out again toward actuality, to intuit its sensory expression there, but immediately take this expression essentially as concept. Reason, as it appears immediately as consciousness's certainty of being all reality, takes its reality in the sense of the immediacy of being. Likewise, it takes the unity of the I with this objective essence as an immediate unity, within which it has not yet separated and reunited the moments of being and I—a unity it has not yet recognized. As observing consciousness, it therefore approaches things thinking it truly takes them as sensory things opposed to the I. But its actual activity contradicts this view. For it knows things. It transforms their sensory character into concepts: into a being that is also I. It thus transforms thinking into an existing thinking, or being into a thought being. In fact, it asserts that things have truth only as concepts. In this, observing consciousness discovers only what things 1807 177 are; we discover what it itself is. But the result of its movement will be that it becomes for itself what it is in itself.

243 We must consider the activity of observing reason in the moments of its movement: how it takes up nature, spirit, and finally their relationship as sensory being, and searches for itself as existing actuality.

a. Observation of Nature.

244 When thoughtless consciousness declares observation and experience the source of truth, its words may sound as though tasting, smelling, feeling, hearing, and seeing were all that mattered. In its eagerness to recommend tasting, smelling, and so forth, it forgets to say that it has in fact already determined the object of this sensation for itself, and that this determination matters to it at least as much as sensation does. It will also immediately admit that it is not concerned merely with perception in general. For example, it will not count perceiving that this penknife lies beside this snuffbox as an observation. What is perceived must at least have the meaning of a universal, not a sensory this.

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245 At first this universal is only what remains self-identical. Its movement is only the uniform repetition of the same activity. Consciousness, which so far finds only universality, or the abstract mine, in the object, must take the object's actual movement onto itself. Since it is not yet the object's understanding, it must at least be its memory, expressing universally what is present in actuality only individually. This superficial lifting out of individuality, and the equally superficial form of universality into which the sensory is merely taken without becoming universal in itself—this description of things—does not yet contain movement in the object itself. The movement lies only in describing. Once described, therefore, the object has lost its interest. Once one object is described, another must be taken up and continually sought so that describing does not run out. When new whole things are no longer easy to find, one must return to those already found, divide them further, take them apart, and track down new sides of their thinghood. This restless, unquiet instinct can never lack material. Only the fortunate may discover a new distinctive genus, or even a new planet, which, though an individual, still has the nature of a 1807 179 universal. But the boundaries of what is distinctive, like the elephant, oak, and gold—what is a genus and species—pass through many stages into the infinite particularization of chaotic animals and plants, kinds of rock, or metals, earths, and so on that must first be produced by force and art. In this realm of the universal's indeterminacy, particularization approaches singularity again and here and there sinks completely back into it. An inexhaustible supply is opened up for observing and describing. But here, where an immense field opens before it, at the boundary of the universal, observation may have found only the limit of nature and its own activity rather than immeasurable wealth. It can no longer know whether what seems to be in itself is not a contingency. Anything bearing the stamp of a confused or immature, weak formation, barely developing out of elemental indeterminacy, cannot claim even to be described.

246 Though this searching and describing seems concerned only with things, we see that it does not actually follow sensory perception. What enables things to be recognized matters more to it than the remaining range of sensory properties. The 1807 180 thing itself may be unable to do without these, but consciousness dispenses with them. Through this distinction between the essential and inessential, the concept rises from sensory dispersion. Knowing thereby declares that it is at least as essentially concerned with itself as with things. With this double essentiality it begins to waver: is what is essential and necessary for knowing also essential and necessary in things? On one side, distinguishing marks are merely to serve knowing in telling things apart. On the other, what is to be known is not the inessential in things, but that through which they themselves break away from the universal continuity of being in general, separate themselves from others, and are for themselves. Distinguishing marks are to relate essentially not only to knowing. They must also be the essential determinations of things. The artificial system must conform to nature's own system and express only that. This follows necessarily from the concept of reason. Reason's instinct—for in this observing it acts only as instinct—has also reached this unity in its systems where its objects themselves are constituted so as to have essentiality, or being-for-itself, within them, rather than being mere accidents of this moment or this here. The distinguishing marks 1807 181 of animals, for example, are taken from claws and teeth. For not only does knowing distinguish one animal from another by these; the animal itself separates itself by them. Through these weapons it maintains itself for itself and apart from the universal. The plant, by contrast, does not reach being-for-itself but only touches the boundary of individuality. It has therefore been taken up and distinguished at this boundary, where it displays the appearance of division into sexes. What stands lower still can no longer distinguish itself from others, but is lost on entering opposition. Being at rest and being in relationship conflict: in the latter the thing is something different from what it is in the former. The individual, by contrast, is precisely what preserves itself in relation to others. But what cannot do this, and becomes chemically something other than what it is empirically, confuses knowing and draws it into the same conflict over which side to follow. The thing itself is nothing self-constant, and these sides fall apart within it.

247 In such systems of the universal that remains self-identical, this universal thus means what remains self-identical both in knowing and in things themselves. But this spread of constant determinations, each 1807 182 calmly tracing the series of its progression and receiving room to operate for itself, also essentially passes into its opposite: the confusion of these determinations. For the distinguishing mark, the universal determination, is the unity of opposites: the determinate and what is universal in itself. It must therefore divide into this opposition. On one side, determinacy defeats the universal in which it has its essence. On the other, however, the universal equally maintains its rule over determinacy, drives it to its limit, and there mixes its differences and essential features together. Observation had kept these neatly apart and thought it had something fixed in them. Now it sees other principles encroach on a given principle, transitions and confusions develop, what it first took as absolutely separate become joined, and what it grouped together become separated. Thus this attachment to quiet, self-identical being must find itself tormented, precisely in its most universal determinations—for example, the essential distinguishing marks of animal and plant—by instances that rob it of every determination. These silence the universality to which it had risen and throw it back into thoughtless observation and description.

248 This observation, which confines itself to the simple, or limits sensory dispersion through the universal, 1807 183 thus finds in its object the confusion of its principle. For the determinate must, by its nature, lose itself in its opposite. Reason must therefore advance from the inert determinacy that seemed permanent to observing determinacy as it truly is: relating itself to its opposite. What are called essential distinguishing marks are resting determinations. As expressed and grasped as simple, they do not present what constitutes their nature: being vanishing moments of the movement that takes itself back into itself. The instinct of reason now comes to seek determinacy according to its nature: essentially not being for itself, but passing into its opposite. It therefore seeks the law and its concept. Admittedly, it seeks these too as existing actuality. But this actuality will in fact disappear for it, and the sides of the law become pure moments, or abstractions. The law thus emerges in the nature of the concept, which has destroyed within itself the indifferent subsistence of sensory actuality.

249 For observing consciousness, the truth of the law lies in experience, in the way sensory being exists for it, not in and for itself. Yet if the law does not have its truth in the concept, it is something contingent, 1807 184 not a necessity, or in fact not a law. But its being essentially a concept does not conflict with its being available to observation. Rather, for that very reason it has necessary existence and is for observation. What is universal in the sense of reason's universality is also universal in observation's sense: it presents itself for consciousness as present and actual, or the concept presents itself in the form of thinghood and sensory being. Yet it does so without losing its nature and falling into inert subsistence or indifferent succession. What has universal validity also holds universally. What ought to be is in fact also, and what only ought to be without being has no truth. Reason's instinct rightly holds firmly to this. It does not let itself be confused by thought-entities that only ought to be and are supposed to have truth as oughts, though never encountered in experience: neither by hypotheses nor by any other invisible things belonging to an everlasting ought. For reason is precisely this certainty of having reality. What does not exist for consciousness as an essence in its own right—that is, what does not appear—is nothing at all for it.

250 For this consciousness that remains with observation, the truth of the law being essentially reality becomes, again, an opposition 1807 185 to the concept and to what is universal in itself. Something like its law is not, for it, an essence of reason. It thinks it is obtaining something alien in it. But its activity refutes this view. In practice it does not take universality to mean that all individual sensory things must have shown it the law's appearance before it can assert its truth. To establish that stones lifted from the earth and released fall, it does not demand that the experiment be performed with every stone. It may say the test must at least have been made with very many, allowing an inference about the rest with the greatest probability, or with full justification by analogy. But analogy not only gives no full justification. By its nature it so often refutes itself that, to infer by analogy itself, analogy rather permits no inference. The probability to which its result would reduce loses all distinction between greater and lesser probability when measured against truth. However great it may be, it is nothing compared with truth. Yet reason's instinct actually accepts such laws as truth. Only in relation to their necessity, which it does not recognize, does it fall into this 1807 186 distinction and reduce the truth of the matter itself to probability. It does this to indicate the imperfect way truth is present for consciousness that has not yet attained insight into the pure concept. For universality is present only as simple, immediate universality. But it is also because of this universality that the law has truth for consciousness. That the stone falls is true for it because the stone is heavy: because in gravity it has in and for itself the essential relationship to the earth expressed as falling. Thus in experience consciousness has the being of the law, but equally has it as concept. The law is true for it only because of both circumstances together. It counts as law because it presents itself in appearance and is also concept in itself.

251 Because the law is also concept in itself, this consciousness's instinct of reason necessarily aims to purify the law and its moments into the concept, without knowing that this is what it wants. It performs experiments on the law. At first the law appears impure, wrapped in individual sensory being, with the concept that constitutes its nature submerged in empirical material. In its experiments, reason's instinct aims to find what happens under these or those circumstances. This seems 1807 187 to plunge the law still further into sensory being. But sensory being is instead lost in this. The inner meaning of this investigation is to find the law's pure conditions. This means nothing other than raising the law wholly into the form of the concept and erasing every bond of its moments to determinate being, even if consciousness using this expression thinks it means something else. Negative electricity, for example, may first present itself as resin electricity and positive electricity as glass electricity. Through experiments these entirely lose that meaning and become purely positive and negative electricity. Neither belongs any longer to a particular kind of thing. One can no longer say that some bodies are positively electric and others negatively electric. Likewise, the relationship of acid and base and their movement toward each other form a law in which these opposites appear as bodies. But these separate things have no actuality. The force that tears them apart cannot keep them from immediately entering a process again, for they are only this relationship. They cannot remain for themselves and be pointed out like a tooth or claw. Their essence is to pass immediately into a neutral product. This makes their being something sublated in itself, or something 1807 188 universal. Acid and base have truth only as universals. Just as glass and resin can be either positively or negatively electric, acidity and basicity are not properties bound to this or that actuality. Instead, each thing is acidic or basic only relatively. What seems a definite base or acid acquires the opposite meaning in relation to another in so-called synsomaties. The result of experiments thus sublates the moments, or animating qualities, as properties of determinate things and frees predicates from their subjects. These predicates are found as they truly are: only as universals. Because of this independence they receive the name matters, which are neither bodies nor properties. One is careful not to call oxygen and so forth, positive and negative electricity, heat, and so on, bodies.

252 Matter, however, is not an existing thing. It is being as universal, or in the form of the concept. Reason, still instinct, makes this correct distinction without being conscious that, in testing the law on all sensory being, it thereby sublates the law's merely sensory being. Nor is it conscious that, by grasping its moments as matters, their essentiality has become universal for it. In this expression, essentiality is stated as a nonsensory sensory something: a bodiless yet objective being.

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253 We must now see what turn its result takes for this instinct, and what new shape of its observation emerges with it. As the truth of this experimenting consciousness, we see the pure law freed from sensory being. We see it as concept, present in sensory being but moving independently and unbound within it; submerged in it yet free of it, and simple concept. What is truly the result and essence now appears for this consciousness itself, but as object. Since for it the object is not a result and has no relationship to the preceding movement, it appears as a particular kind of object, and consciousness's relationship to it as another kind of observation.

254 The object that contains the process within the simplicity of the concept is the organic. It is this absolute fluidity in which the determinacy that would make it only for another is dissolved. An inorganic thing has determinacy as its essence. It therefore forms the complete set of moments of the concept only together with another thing, and is lost when it enters movement. In the organic being, by contrast, all determinations through which it is open to another are bound under organic simple unity. None appears as essential that would relate freely 1807 190 to another. The organic therefore preserves itself in its relationship itself.

255 As follows from this determination, the sides of the law that reason's instinct here aims to observe are initially organic and inorganic nature in their relationship to each other. For organic nature, inorganic nature is precisely the freedom of unbound determinations opposed to its simple concept. In these determinations individual nature is at once dissolved, while at the same time it separates itself from their continuity and is for itself. Air, water, earth, zones, and climate are such universal elements. They make up the indeterminate, simple essence of individualities, which are also reflected into themselves within these elements. Neither individuality nor the elemental is absolutely in and for itself. Rather, in the independent freedom in which they confront each other for observation, they also behave as essential relationships. Yet their independence and indifference toward each other dominate, and pass only partly into abstraction. Here, then, law is present as the relationship of an element to the formation of the organic. The organic at one time has elemental being facing it, and at another presents it within its organic reflection. But such laws—that animals belonging to air have the constitution of birds, those 1807 191 belonging to water that of fish, northern animals have thick, hairy coats, and so forth—immediately show a poverty that does not match organic variety. Besides organic freedom's ability to withdraw its forms from these determinations, necessarily offering exceptions everywhere to such laws or rules, the determination remains so superficial even in things that fall under it that its necessity can be expressed no better. It never gets beyond great influence, leaving us ignorant of what actually belongs to this influence and what does not. Such relationships of the organic to the elemental therefore cannot really be called laws. As noted, the content of such a relationship does not remotely exhaust the scope of the organic. Moreover, the moments of the relationship themselves remain indifferent to each other and express no necessity. The concept of base lies in the concept of acid, just as negative electricity lies in the concept of positive electricity. But however often thick hair and the north, the structure of fish and water, or the structure of birds and air may be found together, the concept of thick hair does not lie in the concept of the north, nor the structure of fish in that of the sea, 1807 192 nor the structure of birds in that of air. Because the two sides are free toward each other, there are also land animals with the essential characteristics of a bird or fish, and so on. Since necessity cannot be grasped as internal to the essence, it also ceases to have sensory existence and can no longer be observed in actuality. It has stepped outside actuality. Not being found in the real essence itself, it is what is called a teleological relationship: a relationship external to what is related, and therefore rather the opposite of a law. It is thought completely freed from necessary nature, leaving nature behind and moving for itself above it.

256 Although the relationship just discussed between the organic and elemental nature does not express the organic's essence, that essence is contained in the concept of purpose. For this observing consciousness, admittedly, the concept of purpose is not the organic's own essence. It falls outside it and is then only that external, teleological relationship. But as the organic was determined earlier, it is in fact real purpose itself. For by preserving itself in relation to another, it is precisely the natural being in which nature reflects itself into the concept. The moments spread apart in necessity—cause 1807 193 and effect, something active and something passive—are brought together into one. Thus something appears here not merely as a result of necessity. Because it has returned into itself, the last, or result, is equally the first that begins the movement, and is for itself the purpose it actualizes. The organic does not produce something; it only preserves itself. Or, what is produced is already present just as much as it is produced.

257 We must discuss this determination more closely, both as it is in itself and as it is for reason's instinct. This will show how the instinct finds itself in it but does not recognize itself in what it finds. The concept of purpose to which observing reason rises, while being reason's conscious concept, is just as much present as something actual. It is not merely actuality's external relationship, but its essence. Saying that this actuality, itself a purpose, relates purposefully to another means that their relationship is contingent according to what both immediately are. Immediately, both are independent and indifferent to each other. But the essence of their relationship differs from what they thus seem to be, and their activity has a meaning different from what it immediately has for sense-perception. Necessity is hidden in what happens and shows itself only at the end, but in such a way that this very end shows it was also the first. 1807 194 The end shows its own priority because the change made by the activity produces nothing other than what was already there. Or, if we start from the first, then at its end, or in the result of its activity, it only returns to itself. This proves it to be something that has itself as its end, and so as first has already returned into itself, or is in and for itself. What it reaches through the movement of its activity is thus itself. Its reaching only itself is its self-feeling. There is therefore a difference between what it is and what it seeks, but this is only the appearance of a difference. In this way it is concept within itself.

258 Self-consciousness is likewise constituted so as to distinguish itself from itself in a way that produces no difference. In observing organic nature it therefore finds nothing but this essence. It finds itself as a thing, as a life, yet still makes a distinction between what it itself is and what it has found—a distinction that is none. Just as the animal's instinct seeks and consumes food but thereby produces nothing other than itself, reason's instinct in its search finds only reason itself. The animal ends with self-feeling. Reason's instinct, by contrast, is 1807 195 also self-consciousness. But because it is only instinct, it is placed on one side over against consciousness and has its opposite in consciousness. Its satisfaction is therefore split by this. It does find itself, namely purpose, and equally this purpose as thing. But first, purpose falls outside the thing that presents itself as purpose. Second, this purpose as purpose is also objective. So for the instinct, purpose does not fall within itself as consciousness either, but into another understanding.

259 Considered more closely, this determination lies equally in the concept of the thing as purpose within itself. It preserves itself. This also means that its nature is to conceal necessity and present it in the form of a contingent relationship. For its freedom, or being-for-itself, is precisely its indifferent attitude toward what is necessary to it. It thus presents itself as something whose concept falls outside its being. Likewise, reason must intuit its own concept as falling outside itself, and hence as a thing: something toward which reason is indifferent, and which is therefore in turn indifferent toward reason and its own concept. As instinct, reason also stops within this being, or indifference. The thing expressing the concept remains for it something other than this concept, and the concept something 1807 196 other than the thing. Thus the organic thing is purpose within itself for reason only in this sense: the necessity that presents itself as hidden in its activity falls outside the organic itself, since the agent behaves in this activity as something indifferent, existing for itself. But because the organic, as purpose within itself, can behave only in this way, its being purpose within itself also appears and is sensibly present. It is observed as such. The organic shows itself as preserving itself, returning into itself, and having returned into itself. But observing consciousness does not recognize the concept of purpose in this being. It does not recognize that the concept of purpose exists not somewhere else in an understanding but precisely here, as a thing. It makes a distinction between the concept of purpose and being-for-itself and self-preservation—a distinction that is none. Consciousness does not see that it is none. Instead, it sees an activity that appears contingent and indifferent toward what it brings about. The unity that nevertheless joins the two—this activity and this purpose—falls apart for it.

260 On this view, what belongs to the organic itself is the activity lying between its first and last, insofar as that activity has the character of individuality. Activity with the character of universality, 1807 197 where the agent is equated with what it produces—purposeful activity as such—would not belong to the organic. That individual activity, which is only a means, falls through its individuality under a wholly individual or contingent necessity. What the organic does to preserve itself as individual or as genus is therefore, in this immediate content, entirely lawless, since the universal and concept fall outside it. Its activity would thus be empty operation with no content of its own. It would not even be a machine's operation, since a machine has a purpose, giving its operation a determinate content. Abandoned by the universal in this way, it would be the activity merely of something existing as existing, not also reflected into itself—like the activity of an acid or base. Such operation could neither detach itself from its immediate existence nor give up that existence, which is lost in relation to its opposite, while preserving itself. But the being whose operation is considered here is posited as a thing that preserves itself in relation to its opposite. Activity as such is only the pure, essenceless form of its being-for-itself. Its substance, which is not merely determinate being but the universal—its purpose—does not fall outside it. It is activity returning into itself by its own nature, not 1807 198 directed back into itself by something alien.

261 This unity of universality and activity does not exist for observing consciousness because it is essentially the organic's inner movement and can be grasped only as concept. Observation, however, seeks the moments in the form of being and permanence. Since the organic whole essentially does not contain its moments in this way or allow them to be found in it this way, consciousness transforms the opposition in its view into one that suits that view.

262 In this way organic being arises for it as a relationship between two existing, fixed moments: an opposition whose two sides seem, on one hand, to be given to it in observation, while on the other their content expresses the opposition between the organic concept of purpose and actuality. But because the concept as such has been erased in them, they express this darkly and superficially, with thought sunk into representation. Thus we see the first meant roughly by the inner and the other by the outer. Their relationship produces the law that the outer is the expression of the inner.

263 A closer look at this inner, its opposite, and their relationship shows 1807 199 first that the law's two sides no longer have the form they had in earlier laws, where they appeared as independent things, each a separate body. Nor, second, is the universal supposed to exist somewhere else, outside what exists. Instead, undivided organic being in general is laid down as the content of inner and outer, the same for both. The opposition is therefore now purely formal. Its real sides have the same in-itself as their essence. Yet because inner and outer are also opposed realities and different beings for observation, each seems to observation to have its own content. But since this particular content is the same substance, or organic unity, it can in fact only be a different form of that unity. Observing consciousness indicates this by saying that the outer is only the expression of the inner. We saw these same determinations of the relationship in the concept of purpose: the indifferent independence of the distinct sides, and within this their unity, in which they disappear.

264 We must now see what shape inner and outer have in their being. The inner as such must have an outward being and shape just as much as the outer as such does. For it 1807 200 is posited as object, or as itself existing and available to observation.

265 As inner, organic substance is the simple soul, the pure concept of purpose, or the universal that remains equally universal fluidity in its division. In its being, it therefore appears as the activity or movement of vanishing actuality. By contrast, the outer, opposed to this existing inner, consists in the organic's resting being. The law as the relationship of this inner to this outer thus expresses its content once by presenting universal moments or simple essentialities, and again by presenting actualized essentiality, or shape. Those first simple organic properties, to call them that, are sensibility, irritability, and reproduction. These properties, at least the first two, admittedly seem to refer not to the organism in general but only to the animal organism. The plant organism does in fact express only the simple concept of the organism, which does not develop its moments. In considering these moments insofar as they are to exist for observation, we must therefore stick to the organism that presents their developed existence.

266 As for these properties themselves, they follow immediately from the concept of being a purpose to oneself. Sensibility expresses in general the simple 1807 201 concept of organic reflection into itself, or its universal fluidity. Irritability expresses organic elasticity: behaving reactively within reflection, and the actualization opposed to that first, quiet being-within-itself. In this actualization, that abstract being-for-itself is a being for another. Reproduction, however, is the action of this whole organism reflected into itself, its activity as purpose in itself or as genus. In it, the individual repels itself from itself and repeats itself by producing either its organic parts or the whole individual. Taken as self-preservation in general, reproduction expresses the formal concept of the organic, or sensibility. But properly it is the real organic concept, or the whole that returns into itself either as individual by producing its particular parts, or as genus by producing individuals.

267 The other meaning of these organic elements, namely as the outer, is their shaped form. In this form they are present as actual yet also universal parts, or organic systems: sensibility, perhaps, as nervous system; irritability as muscular system; reproduction as the internal organs that preserve the individual and genus.

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268 Specific organic laws would therefore concern a relationship between organic moments in their double meaning: once as a part of organic structure, and again as a universal, fluid determinacy passing through all those systems. In such a law, for example, a determinate sensibility as a moment of the whole organism would find expression in a definitely formed nervous system. Or it would be linked with a determinate reproduction of the individual's organic parts, or propagation of the whole, and so on. Both sides of such a law can be observed. In its concept, the outer is being for another. Sensibility, for example, has its immediately actualized form in the sensitive system. As a universal property, it is likewise objective in its manifestations. The side called the inner has its own outward side, distinct from what is called the outer in the whole.

269 The two sides of an organic law could therefore indeed be observed, but not laws of their relationship. Observation is not inadequate because, as observation, it is too shortsighted, so that we should abandon empirical procedure and start from the idea. For if such laws were something real, they would indeed have to be actually present and hence 1807 203 observable. Rather, observation is inadequate because the thought of laws of this kind proves to have no truth.

270 The relationship that emerged for a law was that the universal organic property would have made itself into a thing in an organic system, finding its shaped imprint there. Both would thus be the same essence, present once as universal moment, and again as thing. But the inner side is also itself a relationship between several sides. The thought of a law therefore first presents itself as a relationship of universal organic activities or properties to each other. Whether such a law is possible must be decided from the nature of such a property. As universal fluidity, it is not something confined like a thing and remaining within the distinction of an existence that would constitute its shape. Instead, sensibility passes beyond the nervous system and through all the organism's other systems. Moreover, it is a universal moment, essentially undivided and inseparable from reaction, or irritability, and reproduction. For as reflection into itself, it absolutely contains reaction. Merely being reflected into itself is passivity or dead being, not sensibility, just as action—which is the same as reaction—without reflection into itself is not irritability. Reflection in action or 1807 204 reaction, and action or reaction in reflection, are precisely what form the organic in their unity. This unity means the same as organic reproduction. Thus in every form of actuality there must be the same magnitude of sensibility as of irritability, considering first their relationship to each other. An organic appearance can be grasped and determined—or explained, if one wishes—equally in terms of either. What one person takes as high sensibility, another can just as well regard as high irritability, irritability of the same degree. If they are called factors, and this is not to be a meaningless word, this says precisely that they are moments of the concept. The real object whose essence is this concept therefore contains them equally. If it is determined one way as very sensitive, it must equally be described the other way as just as irritable.

271 If they are distinguished, as they necessarily must be, they are distinguished according to the concept, and their opposition is qualitative. But if, beyond this true difference, they are also posited as existing and as different for representation, so that they could be sides of a law, they appear in quantitative difference. Their characteristic qualitative 1807 205 opposition thus passes into magnitude. Laws arise stating, for example, that sensibility and irritability stand in inverse proportion in magnitude, so that as one increases the other decreases. Or, better, taking magnitude itself as content straightaway: something's magnitude increases as its smallness decreases. If this law is given determinate content—for instance, that a hole's size increases the more what fills it decreases—this inverse proportion can equally be converted into a direct one: the hole's size increases directly with the amount removed. Whether expressed as direct or inverse proportion, this is a tautological statement. In its proper expression it means only that a magnitude increases as this magnitude increases. The hole and what fills it and is removed are qualitatively opposed. But their reality and its determinate magnitude are one and the same in both. Likewise, increasing magnitude and decreasing smallness are the same, and their meaningless opposition ends in tautology. So too the organic moments are equally inseparable in their reality and magnitude, which is the magnitude of that same reality. One decreases only with the other and increases only with it, for one has meaning absolutely only insofar as the 1807 206 other is present. Or rather, it is indifferent whether an organic appearance is considered as irritability or sensibility, both in general and when discussing its magnitude. It is equally indifferent whether one describes a hole's increase as an increase of its emptiness or of the fullness removed. Or a number, for example three, stays equally large whether taken positively or negatively. If I increase three to four, the positive and negative have both become four. Similarly, a magnet's south pole is exactly as strong as its north pole, or positive electricity or an acid exactly as strong as its negative electricity or the base on which it acts. Organic existence is such a magnitude, like that three, or a magnet, and so forth. It is what is increased and decreased. When it increases, both its factors increase, just as both poles of a magnet, or both electricities, increase when a magnet and so forth is strengthened. The same concept of empty opposition applies to distinguishing them by intensity and extension: one cannot decrease in extension while increasing in intensity, as the other supposedly reduces its intensity but increases its extension. Real intensity is likewise 1807 207 absolutely as great as extension, and conversely.

272 Clearly, then, this lawmaking actually proceeds as follows. First, irritability and sensibility constitute the determinate organic opposition. But this content is lost, and the opposition runs out into the formal opposition of increasing and decreasing magnitude, or different intensity and extension. This opposition no longer concerns or expresses the nature of sensibility and irritability. Such an empty game of lawmaking is therefore not tied to organic moments. It can be played everywhere with anything, and rests in general on ignorance of the logical nature of these oppositions.

273 Finally, if reproduction is related to either sensibility or irritability instead of relating those two, even the occasion for this lawmaking disappears. Reproduction is not opposed to those moments as they are to each other. Since this lawmaking rests on that opposition, even the appearance of its taking place disappears here.

274 The lawmaking just considered contains the organism's differences as moments of its concept, and was properly supposed to be a priori lawmaking. Yet it 1807 208 essentially contains the thought that they have the meaning of things present. Merely observing consciousness must in any case stick to their existence. Organic actuality necessarily contains an opposition of the kind expressed by its concept, which can be determined as irritability and sensibility, while both in turn appear distinct from reproduction. The externality in which the moments of the organic concept are considered here is the inner's own immediate externality. It is not the outer that is outer in the whole and is shape, with which the inner is subsequently to be considered in relationship.

275 But when the opposition of the moments is grasped as it exists, sensibility, irritability, and reproduction sink into ordinary properties. These are universalities as indifferent to each other as specific gravity, color, hardness, and so on. In this sense one can certainly observe that one organic being is more sensitive, more irritable, or has greater reproductive power than another. One can also observe that the sensibility and so forth of one differs in kind from another's, that one responds differently to particular stimuli—for instance, a horse differently to oats than to hay, and a dog differently again to both, and so on—just as one can observe that one body is harder than 1807 209 another. But these sensory properties—hardness, color, and so on—like the appearances of responsiveness to oats, irritability to loads, or the number of young born and the manner of giving birth, essentially resist lawfulness when related and compared with each other. For the determinacy of their sensory being consists precisely in existing completely indifferently to each other. They display nature's freedom released from the concept rather than the unity of a relationship: its irrational play back and forth on the scale of contingent magnitude between the concept's moments, rather than those moments themselves.

276 The other side, on which the simple moments of the organic concept are compared with the moments of structure, would first provide the proper law expressing the true outer as an imprint of the inner. Since those simple moments are penetrating, fluid properties, they do not have in the organic thing the kind of separate, real expression found in what is called an individual structural system. Or, if the abstract idea of the organism is truly expressed in those three moments only because they are nothing fixed, but only moments of the concept and movement, then as structure the organism is not contained in three determinate systems 1807 210 of the kind anatomy separates out. Insofar as such systems are to be found in actuality and justified by this finding, we must also recall that anatomy shows not just three such systems, but many more. Apart from this, the sensitive system must mean something altogether different from what is called the nervous system; likewise, the irritable system differs from the muscular system, and the reproductive system from the reproductive organs. In systems of structure as such, the organism is grasped from the abstract side of dead existence. Taken this way, its moments belong to anatomy and the corpse, not to knowledge and the living organism. As such parts, they have rather ceased to be, since they cease to be processes. Since the organism's being is essentially universality or reflection into itself, the being of its whole and its moments cannot consist in an anatomical system. Rather, their actual expression and externality are present only as a movement running through the different structural parts. In this movement, what is torn out and fixed as an individual system presents itself essentially as a fluid moment. Thus the actuality anatomy finds cannot count as their reality. Only actuality 1807 211 as process can do so, and only within that process do the anatomical parts themselves have meaning.

277 It follows that the moments of the organic inner, taken by themselves, cannot supply the sides of a law of being. For in such a law, stated of an existence, they would have to be distinguished from each other, and one could not be named just as well in place of another. Nor can they be placed on one side and have their realization on the other in a fixed system. For such a system has neither organic truth in general nor the status of expressing those inner moments. Since the organic is in itself the universal, its essential character is instead to have its moments equally universal in actuality: as processes running through it, not as an image of the universal in an isolated thing.

278 In this way the representation of a law in general is lost in the organic. Law seeks to grasp and express opposition as resting sides, and the determinacy in them that is their relationship to each other. The inner, to which appearing universality belongs, and the outer, to which the parts of resting structure belong, were supposed to form the corresponding sides of the law. But held apart this way, they lose their organic meaning. The representation of law takes precisely this as 1807 212 its basis: that its two sides have an indifferent subsistence for themselves, and that the relationship is divided between them as a doubled, corresponding determinacy. Instead, each side of the organic is in itself simple universality, in which all determinations are dissolved, and the movement of this dissolution.

279 Understanding the difference between this lawmaking and earlier forms will fully clarify its nature. Look back at the movement of perception and of the understanding that reflects into itself within perception and thereby determines its object. Understanding does not there confront, in its object, the relationship of these abstract determinations: universal and individual, essential and external. Instead, it is itself the transition, without this transition becoming objective for it. Here, by contrast, organic unity—that is, precisely the relationship of those opposites, a relationship that is pure transition—is itself the object. In its simplicity this transition is immediately universality. As universality enters the difference whose relationship the law is to express, its moments as universals are objects of this consciousness. The law states that the outer is the expression of the inner. Here understanding has grasped the thought of law itself. Previously 1807 213 it only sought laws in general, with their moments before it as a determinate content, not as their thoughts. As regards content, then, the laws sought here are not merely a quiet gathering of differences that simply exist into the form of universality. They are laws that immediately contain within these differences the concept's unrest, and with it the necessity of the sides' relationship. But the object, organic unity, immediately unites infinite sublation, or absolute negation of being, with resting being. Its moments are essentially pure transition. Thus no existing sides of the kind required for a law result.

280 To obtain such sides, understanding must hold to the other moment of the organic relationship: organic existence's being reflected into itself. But this being is so completely reflected into itself that no determinacy over against another remains. Immediate sensory being is immediately one with determinacy as such and therefore expresses a qualitative difference within itself: blue against red, acid against alkaline, and so forth. But organic being that has returned into itself is completely indifferent toward another. Its existence is simple universality and denies 1807 214 observation lasting sensory differences. Or, what is the same, it shows its essential determinacy only as the change of existing determinations. When difference is expressed as existing, it is precisely an indifferent difference—that is, magnitude. But here the concept is erased and necessity has disappeared. The content filling this indifferent being—the change of sensory determinations, gathered into the simplicity of an organic determination—also expresses precisely that it lacks that determinacy of an immediate property. The qualitative falls solely into magnitude, as we saw above.

281 Thus the objective something grasped as organic determinacy does contain the concept within itself. It thereby differs from the object of an understanding that behaves as merely perceiving when grasping the content of its laws. Yet this grasping falls entirely back into the principle and manner of merely perceiving understanding, because what is grasped is used as the moments of a law. It thereby acquires the character of a fixed determinacy, the form of an immediate property or resting appearance. It is then taken into the determination of magnitude, and the nature of the concept is suppressed. Exchanging something merely perceived for 1807 215 something reflected into itself, a merely sensory determinacy for an organic one, thus loses its value again, precisely because understanding has not yet sublated lawmaking.

282 To compare this exchange through a few examples: what perception sees as an animal with strong muscles is determined as an animal organism with high irritability. What perception sees as a state of great weakness is determined as a state of high sensibility, or, if preferred, an abnormal affection, specifically an intensification of it. These expressions translate the sensory into German-Latin instead of into the concept. Understanding can also express the animal's having strong muscles by saying that it possesses great muscular force, just as great weakness can be expressed as slight force. Determination through irritability has an advantage over determination as force: force expresses indeterminate reflection into itself, irritability determinate reflection. For the muscle's specific force is precisely irritability. It also has an advantage over determination as strong muscles, since, as already in force, reflection into itself is also included. Likewise, weakness or slight force, organic passivity, is determinately expressed through sensibility. But when sensibility is taken and fixed by itself, then also joined to 1807 216 magnitude, and opposed as greater or lesser sensibility to greater or lesser irritability, each has been reduced entirely to the sensory element and the ordinary form of a property. Their relationship is not the concept but, on the contrary, magnitude, into which the opposition now falls and becomes a thoughtless difference. Although the indeterminacy of the expressions force, strength, and weakness has been removed, we now get an equally empty and indeterminate wandering among the oppositions of higher and lower sensibility and irritability, rising and falling in themselves and against each other. Greater or lesser sensibility and irritability are sensory appearances grasped and expressed thoughtlessly, no less than strength and weakness are wholly sensory, thoughtless determinations. The concept has not replaced those nonconceptual expressions. Instead, strength and weakness have been filled with a determination that, taken alone, rests on the concept and has it as its content, but entirely loses this origin and character. Thus through the form of simplicity and immediacy in which this content is made one side of a law, and through magnitude as the element differentiating such determinations, the essence originally existing and posited as concept retains 1807 217 the manner of sensory perception. It remains as far from knowledge as when determined through strength and weakness of force, or immediate sensory properties.

283 We still have to consider by itself what constitutes the organic's outer, and how the opposition of its inner and outer is determined there, just as we first considered the inner of the whole in relation to its own outer.

284 Considered by itself, the outer is structure in general: the system of life articulating itself in the element of being. It is also essentially organic being's being for another: objective essence in its being-for-itself. This other first appears as its external inorganic nature. Considering these two in relation to a law, we saw above that inorganic nature cannot form one side of a law facing organic being. For the organic is also absolutely for itself and has a universal, free relationship to inorganic nature.

285 Determining the relationship of these two sides more closely within organic structure itself: on one side it is turned toward inorganic nature, while on the other it is for itself and reflected into itself. Actual organic being is the middle term joining life's being-for-itself with the outer in general, or being-in-itself. 1807 218 The extreme of being-for-itself, however, is the inner as infinite one. It takes the moments of structure back into itself from their subsistence and connection with the outer. It is contentless, giving itself content in the structure and appearing in it as its process. In this extreme, as simple negativity or pure individuality, the organic has its absolute freedom. Through this it is indifferent and secure toward being for another and toward the determinacy of the structural moments. This freedom is also the freedom of the moments themselves. It is their possibility of appearing and being grasped as existent. In it they are freed and indifferent toward each other as well as toward the external, since the simplicity of this freedom is being, or their simple substance. This concept, or pure freedom, is one and the same life, however varied the play in which structure or being for another may wander. This stream of life is indifferent to what kinds of mills it drives. First, we must note that the concept here is not to be grasped in the form of process, or the development of its moments, as it was earlier when considering the inner properly so called. It is to be grasped as simple inner, constituting the purely universal side facing the actual living being, or as the element in which the existing members of the 1807 219 structure subsist. For it is structure that we consider here, and in it life's essence is the simplicity of subsistence. Next, being for another, or the determinacy of actual structure, taken into this simple universality that is its essence, is an equally simple, universal, nonsensory determinacy. It can only be the determinacy expressed as number. Number is the middle term of structure, joining indeterminate life with actual life: simple like the former and determinate like the latter. What would exist as number in the former, the inner, the outer would have to express in its own way as many-shaped actuality, manner of life, color, and so forth—in general, as the whole range of differences developing in appearance.

286 Compare the two sides of the organic whole—one the inner, the other the outer, each in turn having an inner and outer of its own—according to their respective inner. The first side's inner was the concept as the unrest of abstraction. The second has as its inner resting universality, and within it also resting determinacy: number. The first therefore deceptively promised laws through the appearance of necessity in the relationship, because the concept develops its moments within it. The second immediately renounces this promise, since number proves to be the determination of one side of its laws. 1807 220 For number is precisely wholly resting, dead, indifferent determinacy. All movement and relationship are extinguished in it. It has broken the bridge to the living character of drives, manner of life, and other sensory existence.

287 But considering organic structure as such, and the inner as an inner merely of structure, is in fact no longer considering the organic. The two sides meant to be related are posited only as indifferent to each other. Reflection into itself, which constitutes the organic's essence, is thereby sublated. Instead, the attempted comparison of inner and outer is transferred here to inorganic nature. The infinite concept is here only the essence, hidden inside or falling outside into self-consciousness. It no longer has objective presence as it does in the organic. This relationship of inner and outer must therefore still be considered in its proper sphere.

288 First, this inner of structure, as the simple individuality of an inorganic thing, is specific gravity. As simple being it can be observed, as can the numerical determinacy of which alone it is capable—or properly, found by comparing observations. It thus seems to provide one side of the law. 1807 221 Shape, color, hardness, toughness, and countless other properties would together make up the outer side and would have to express the inner's determinacy, number, so that one had its counterpart in the other.

289 Since negativity is grasped here not as the movement of process but as quieted unity, or simple being-for-itself, it appears instead as what enables the thing to resist process and preserve itself within itself, indifferent to process. But because this simple being-for-itself is a quiet indifference toward another, specific gravity appears as a property alongside others. This ends every necessary relationship between it and this multiplicity, and all lawfulness. Specific gravity, as this simple inner, has no difference within itself, or has only inessential difference. For precisely its pure simplicity sublates every essential distinction. This inessential difference, magnitude, would therefore have to find its counterpart or other on the other side, the multiplicity of properties. Only through this is it difference at all. If this multiplicity is itself gathered into the simplicity of an opposition and determined, say, as cohesion—cohesion being being-for-itself in otherness, while specific gravity is pure being-for-itself—then this 1807 222 cohesion is first this pure determinacy posited in the concept over against the other determinacy. The manner of lawmaking would be the one considered above in the relationship of sensibility to irritability. Further, as the concept of being-for-itself in otherness, cohesion is only the abstraction of the side facing specific gravity and has no existence as such. For being-for-itself in otherness is the process in which the inorganic would have to express its being-for-itself as self-preservation, keeping it from emerging from the process as a moment of a product. But this is precisely contrary to its nature, which does not contain purpose or universality within itself. Its process is instead only the determinate behavior through which its being-for-itself, its specific gravity, sublates itself. This determinate behavior itself, in which cohesion in its true concept would consist, and the determinate magnitude of specific gravity are wholly indifferent concepts toward each other. If the manner of behavior were entirely ignored and restricted to the representation of magnitude, one might think that greater specific weight, as a higher being-within-itself, would resist entering the process more than lesser weight. But conversely, the freedom of being-for-itself proves itself only in the ease of engaging with everything and preserving itself in 1807 223 this variety. That intensity without extension of relationships is an empty abstraction, since extension constitutes intensity's existence. Yet, as noted, self-preservation of the inorganic within its relationship falls outside its nature. It does not contain the principle of movement within itself, or its being is not absolute negativity and concept.

290 If, instead, this other side of the inorganic is considered not as process but as resting being, it is ordinary cohesion: a simple sensory property placed on one side against the released moment of otherness, which lies dispersed in many indifferent properties. Cohesion itself joins these properties, as specific gravity does. Their collection then makes up the other side facing it. But in cohesion, as in the others, number is the only determinacy. Number not only fails to express a relationship and transition between these properties. Its essential character is precisely to have no necessary relationship, and instead to present the destruction of all lawfulness, since it expresses determinacy as inessential. Thus a series of bodies expressing difference as the numerical difference of their specific gravities runs in no way parallel to a series of differences in the other 1807 224 properties, even if only one or a few are selected to simplify matters. In fact, only the whole bundle of properties could constitute the other side of this parallel. To order this bundle within itself and unite it into a whole, observation has on one hand the magnitudes of these various properties. On the other, their differences enter as qualitative. What in this heap would have to be designated positive or negative and mutually cancel out—in general, the internal formation and exposition of the very complex formula—would belong to the concept. But the concept is precisely excluded by the way the properties are supposed to lie there and be taken up as existing. In this being, no property shows the character of a negative against another. One is just as much as another, and none otherwise indicates its place in the arrangement of the whole. In a series with parallel differences—whether the relationship is imagined as increasing on both sides together, or increasing on one and decreasing on the other—what matters is only the final simple expression of this gathered whole, which would form one side of the law over against specific gravity. But this side as an existing result is nothing other than what has already been 1807 225 mentioned: an individual property, such as ordinary cohesion, alongside which the others, including specific gravity, exist indifferently. Any other property can be chosen with equal right—that is, equal wrong—as representative of the whole other side. Each would merely represent the essence, put plainly, stand for it, rather than be the thing itself. The attempt to find series of bodies running along the simple parallel of two sides and expressing the essential nature of bodies according to a law of these sides must therefore be regarded as a thought ignorant of its task and the means of carrying it out.

291 Earlier, the relationship of outer and inner in the structure supposed to present itself to observation was immediately transferred into the inorganic sphere. We can now specify more closely the determination that draws it here. Another form and relationship of this relation also results. In the organic, what seems to offer the possibility of such comparison between inner and outer in the inorganic disappears altogether. The inorganic inner is a simple inner presenting itself to perception as an existing property. Its determinacy is 1807 226 therefore essentially magnitude. As an existing property it appears indifferent to the outer, or the many other sensory properties. But the being-for-itself of organic life does not take its place on one side against its outer. It contains the principle of otherness within itself. If we determine being-for-itself as a simple, self-preserving relationship to itself, its otherness is simple negativity. Organic unity is the unity of self-identical self-relation and pure negativity. As unity, this unity is the organic's inner. Through it, the organic is universal in itself, or is genus. But the freedom of the genus toward its actuality differs from the freedom of specific gravity toward structure. The latter is an existing freedom: specific gravity takes its place on one side as a particular property. But because it is existing freedom, it is also only one determinacy that essentially belongs to this structure, or through which this structure is determinate as essence. The genus's freedom, however, is universal and indifferent to this structure or its actuality. The determinacy belonging to the being-for-itself of the inorganic as such therefore falls in the organic under its being-for-itself, whereas in the inorganic it falls only under its being. Although in the inorganic it is also only a property, 1807 227 it still has the dignity of essence, because as the simple negative it confronts existence as being for another. In its final individual determinacy this simple negative is a number. But the organic is an individuality that is itself pure negativity, and so destroys within itself number's fixed determinacy, which belongs to indifferent being. Insofar as it contains the moment of indifferent being and therefore number, number can be taken only as a play within it, not as the essence of its life.

292 Pure negativity, the principle of process, does not fall outside the organic. The organic therefore does not contain it as a determinacy in its essence; rather, individuality itself is universal in itself. Nevertheless, this pure individuality is not developed and actual in the organic through moments that are themselves abstract or universal. Instead, this expression falls outside that universality, which retreats into inwardness. Between actuality or structure—that is, self-developing individuality—and the organic universal, or genus, stands the determinate universal, the species. The existence reached by the negativity of the universal or genus is only the developed movement of a process running through the parts of the existing structure. If the genus, 1807 228 as resting simplicity, contained the differentiated parts within itself, and its simple negativity as such were also movement running through equally simple parts immediately universal in themselves—parts actually existing here as such moments—then the organic genus would be consciousness. Instead, simple determinacy as the determinacy of species is present in it in a spiritless way. Actuality begins from this determinacy. What enters actuality is not genus as such, and thus not thought at all. As actual organic being, genus is represented only by a representative. This representative is number, which seems to mark the transition from genus to individual structure and to give observation both sides of necessity: once as simple determinacy, and again as determinacy developed into a structure born out into multiplicity. But number instead marks the mutual indifference and freedom of universal and individual. The individual is surrendered by the genus to the inessential difference of magnitude, yet as living also proves free of this difference. True universality, as determined earlier, is here only inner essence. As determinacy of species, it is formal universality. Facing this, that true universality takes the side of individuality, which is thereby alive and through its inner rises above its 1807 229 determinacy as species. But this individuality is not also universal individual, in which universality would equally have external actuality. That falls outside organic life. Yet this universal individual, as immediately the individual of natural structures, is not consciousness itself. To be consciousness, its existence as a single organic living individual would have to fall within, not outside, it.

293 We therefore see a syllogism whose one extreme is universal life as universal, or as genus, and whose other extreme is the same life as individual, or as universal individual. The middle term is composed of both. The first seems to enter it as determinate universality, or species; the other as proper, or individual, individuality. Since this syllogism belongs in general to the side of structure, it also includes what is distinguished as inorganic nature.

294 Universal life, as the simple essence of genus, must on its side develop the concept's differences and present them as a series of simple determinations. This is a system of differences posited indifferently, or a numerical series. Earlier, the organic in the form of individuality was opposed to this inessential difference, which neither expresses nor contains its 1807 230 living nature. The same must be said of the inorganic in its whole existence developed in its many properties. Now it is the universal individual that must be considered not only free from every articulation of genus but also as the power over it. The genus divides into species according to the universal determinacy of number, or may use particular determinations of its existence—shape, color, and so forth—as its basis of division. In this quiet business, it suffers violence from the universal individual, the earth. As universal negativity, the earth asserts against the genus's systematizing the differences as it contains them itself. Because of the substance to which they belong, their nature differs from that of those other differences. The genus's activity becomes a wholly restricted business, which it may pursue only within those powerful elements. Their unrestrained force interrupts it everywhere, leaving it incomplete and stunted.

295 It follows that in structured existence, reason can become available to observation only as life in general. But in differentiating itself, this life has no actual rational series and articulation within itself, and is not a system of shapes grounded in itself. If, 1807 231 in the syllogism of organic structure, the middle term—containing species and its actuality as single individuality—contained within itself the extremes of inner universality and universal individuality, then in the movement of its actuality this middle would express and have the nature of universality. It would be development that systematizes itself. Thus consciousness has as its middle, between universal spirit and its individuality or sensory consciousness, the system of shapes of consciousness: a life of spirit ordering itself into a whole. This is the system considered here, whose objective existence is world history. But organic nature has no history. It falls immediately from its universal, life, into the individuality of existence. The moments of simple determinacy and individual vitality united in this actuality produce becoming only as contingent movement, in which each is active in its own part and the whole is preserved. But for itself this activity is confined to its own point, because the whole is not present in it. The whole is not present because it is not here for itself as a whole.

296 Thus, beyond intuiting itself in organic nature only as universal life in general, 1807 232 observing reason intuits life's development and realization only according to systems distinguished quite generally. The essence of their determination lies not in the organic as such but in the universal individual; and within these differences of the earth, reason intuits the series attempted by the genus.

297 Since in its actuality the universality of organic life lets itself fall immediately into the extreme of individuality, without true mediation that is for itself, observing consciousness confronts only meaning as a thing. If reason can take an idle interest in observing this meaning, it is limited to describing and recounting nature's opinions and fancies. This spiritless freedom of meaning will indeed offer everywhere beginnings of laws, traces of necessity, hints of order and sequence, ingenious and plausible relationships. But in the organic's relationship to the existing differences of the inorganic—elements, zones, and climates—observation gets no further regarding law and necessity than great influence. On the other side, individuality means not the earth but the one immanent in organic life. In immediate unity with the universal, this one does constitute the genus. 1807 233 But precisely for that reason the genus's simple unity is determined only as number and therefore leaves qualitative appearance free. Here observation can get no further than clever remarks, interesting relationships, friendly gestures toward the concept. But clever remarks are not knowledge of necessity. Interesting relationships stop at interest, and interest is still only an opinion about reason. The individual thing's friendliness in alluding to a concept is a child's friendliness, which becomes childish if it claims, or is expected, to count for something in and for itself.

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b. Observation of Self-Consciousness in Its Purity and in Its Relationship to External Actuality; Logical and Psychological Laws.

298 Observation of nature finds the concept realized in inorganic nature: laws whose moments are things that also behave as abstractions. But this concept is not a simplicity reflected into itself. By contrast, the life of organic nature is only this simplicity reflected into itself. Its opposition to itself as universal and individual does not divide within the essence of this life itself. The essence is not the genus that would separate and move within its undifferentiated element while also being undifferentiated for itself in its opposition. Observation finds this free concept, whose universality equally contains developed individuality absolutely within itself, only in the concept itself existing as concept, or in self-consciousness.

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299 Turning into itself and directing itself toward the concept actual as free concept, observation first finds the laws of thinking. This individuality, which thinking is within itself, is the abstract movement of the negative, taken entirely back into simplicity. The laws stand outside reality. Having no reality means nothing other than having no truth. Admittedly, they are supposed to be not whole truth but formal truth. Yet the purely formal without reality is a thought-entity, or empty abstraction without the division within it that would be nothing other than content. On the other hand, they are laws of pure thinking, and pure thinking is what is universal in itself: a knowledge immediately containing being and therefore all reality. These laws are thus absolute concepts, inseparably the essentialities of form and of things. Universality moving within itself is the divided simple concept. In this way it has content within itself, a content that is all content, though not sensory being. This content neither contradicts form nor is separated from it at all. Instead, it is essentially form itself, since form is nothing but the universal separating itself into its pure moments.

300 But as this form or content exists for observation as observation, it acquires the 1807 236 determination of a found, given—that is, merely existing—content. It becomes a resting being of relationships, a collection of separate necessities supposed to have truth as a fixed content in and for themselves, in their determinacy. They are thus in fact withdrawn from form. But this absolute truth of fixed determinations, or many different laws, contradicts the unity of self-consciousness, or of thinking and form in general. What is stated as a fixed law remaining in itself can only be a moment of unity reflecting into itself, and appear only as a vanishing magnitude. When consideration tears them from this connected movement and sets them up individually, what they lack is not content—they have determinate content—but form, which is their essence. These laws are not the truth of thinking, not because they are supposed to be merely formal and without content, but precisely for the opposite reason: in their determinacy, or as a content deprived of form, they are supposed to count as absolute. In their truth, as moments vanishing within the unity of thinking, they would have to be taken as knowledge, or thinking movement, not as laws of knowledge. But observation is not knowledge itself and does not know it. Instead, it reverses knowledge's nature into the 1807 237 shape of being: it grasps its negativity only as its laws. It is enough here to have demonstrated the invalidity of the so-called laws of thinking from the general nature of the matter. Their fuller development belongs to speculative philosophy. There they show themselves as what they truly are: individual vanishing moments whose truth is only the whole of thinking movement, knowledge itself.

301 This negative unity of thinking is for itself, or rather it is being-for-itself: the principle of individuality, and in its reality, active consciousness. By the nature of the matter, observing consciousness is therefore carried forward to active consciousness as the reality of those laws. Since it does not see this connection, it thinks thinking remains on one side in its laws, while on the other it obtains a different being in its present object: active consciousness. This consciousness is for itself in such a way that it sublates otherness and has its actuality in this intuition of itself as the negative.

302 Thus a new field opens for observation in consciousness's acting actuality. Psychology contains the collection of laws according to which spirit relates differently to the various ways of its actuality as an 1807 238 *otherness found before it. In part, it receives this otherness into itself and conforms to the habits, customs, and way of thinking it finds, in which it is its own object as actuality. In part, it knows itself as acting on its own against them, selecting only particular things from them through inclination and passion and making the objective conform to itself. In the first case it relates negatively to itself as individuality; in the second, to itself as universal being. On the first side, independence gives what is found only the form of conscious individuality in general, while remaining, as regards content, within the universal actuality it finds. On the other side, it at least gives this actuality a distinctive modification that does not contradict its essential content. Or it modifies it so that the individual, as particular actuality and distinctive content, sets itself against it. The individual then becomes criminal by sublating actuality in a merely individual way, or, by doing this universally and thus for everyone, brings another world, another right, law, and customs into the place of those that exist.

303 Observing psychology first reports its perceptions of the general ways it encounters in active consciousness. It finds all sorts of faculties, inclinations, and passions. As it 1807 239 recounts this collection, it cannot suppress the memory of self-consciousness's unity. It must at least advance to amazement that so many varied and heterogeneous things, contingent to each other, can be together in spirit as in a sack—especially since they show themselves not as dead, resting things but as restless movements.

304 In recounting these different faculties, observation occupies the universal side. The unity of these manifold capacities is the opposite side: actual individuality. But to grasp and recount distinct actual individualities by saying that one person has more inclination toward this, another toward that, one more understanding than another, is far less interesting than even listing species of insects, mosses, and so forth. These give observation the right to take them individually and without a concept, since they essentially belong to the element of contingent singularity. By contrast, taking conscious individuality spiritlessly as an individually existing appearance is contradictory, since its essence is the universal of spirit. But when apprehension also brings individuality into the form of universality, it finds its law and now seems to have a rational purpose and pursue a necessary task.

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305 The moments making up the law's content are, on one side, individuality itself, and on the other, its universal inorganic nature: the circumstances, situation, habits, customs, religion, and so forth that it finds. From these, determinate individuality is to be comprehended. They contain the determinate as well as the universal. They are also things present, offering themselves to observation and expressing themselves on the other side in the form of individuality.

306 The law of this relationship between the two sides would have to state what effect and influence these determinate circumstances exercise on individuality. But individuality is precisely both the universal, and hence calmly and immediately merges with the present universal—customs, habits, and so forth—and conforms to them, and opposes them and instead reverses them. It can also remain completely indifferent toward them in its individuality, neither letting them affect it nor acting against them. What is to influence individuality and what kind of influence it is to have—which really mean the same thing—therefore depend only on individuality itself. Saying that through this, this individuality became this determinate individuality means nothing other than that it already was this. Circumstances, situation, customs, and so forth, shown on one side 1807 241 as present and on the other within this determinate individuality, express only its indeterminate essence, which is not the issue. If these circumstances, way of thinking, customs, and general state of the world had not existed, the individual would indeed not have become what it is. For everyone situated in this state of the world is this universal substance. But to explain how that state particularized itself in this individual—and this is what must be comprehended—it would have had to particularize itself in and for itself, and act on an individual in the determinacy it gave itself. Only so would it have made the individual the determinate individual it is. If the external had in and for itself the constitution it displays in individuality, individuality would be comprehended from it. We would have a double gallery of pictures, one the reflection of the other: one gallery showing the complete determination and delimitation of external circumstances, the other translating these into the way they exist in the conscious being; the former the sphere's surface, the latter its center, which represents that surface within itself.

307 But the sphere's surface, the individual's world, immediately has an ambiguous meaning. It is a world and situation existing in and for itself, and the individual's world either because the individual merely merged with it, let it enter itself just as it 1807 242 is, and behaved toward it only as formal consciousness; or it is the individual's world as what is present has been reversed by the individual. Because this freedom makes actuality capable of this double meaning, the individual's world can be comprehended only from the individual itself. Through the individual, the influence of actuality represented as existing in and for itself receives the absolutely opposed meaning that the individual either lets the inflowing stream of actuality take its course within it, or interrupts and reverses it. But this makes psychological necessity so empty a phrase that whatever is supposed to have had this influence has the absolute possibility of not having had it.

308 Thus the being that would exist in and for itself and form one side—the universal side—of a law falls away. Individuality is what its world is as its own. Individuality itself is the circle of its activity, in which it has displayed itself as actuality. It is absolutely only the unity of being found present and being made. The sides of this unity do not fall apart, as in the representation of psychological law, into a world present in itself and an individuality existing for itself. Or if each is considered separately this way, there is no necessity or law of their relationship to each other.

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c. Observation of Self-Consciousness's Relationship to Its Immediate Actuality; Physiognomy and the Study of the Skull.

309 Psychological observation finds no law governing self-consciousness's relationship to actuality, or to the world opposed to it. Their mutual indifference drives it back to the distinctive determinacy of real individuality. This individuality is in and for itself, or contains the opposition of being-for-itself and being-in-itself erased in their absolute mediation. It is the object observation has now acquired, or toward which it passes.

310 The individual is in and for itself. It is for itself, or free activity; but it is also in itself. It itself has an original, determinate being: a determinacy conceptually the same as what psychology wanted to find outside it. The opposition thus emerges within the individual itself: it is this doubled thing, the movement of 1807 244 consciousness and the fixed being of an appearing actuality—an actuality immediately its own within itself. This being, the body of determinate individuality, is its originality, what it has not done. But since the individual is also only what it has done, its body is also the expression of itself produced by it. It is also a sign that has not remained an immediate thing, but through which the individual only makes known what it is in the sense of putting its original nature to work.

311 Relating the moments present here to the preceding view, we have here a general human shape, or at least the general shape of a climate, continent, or people, just as previously we had the same general customs and cultivation. Added to this are particular circumstances and situation within universal actuality. Here this particular actuality exists as the particular formation of the individual's shape. On the other side, just as the individual's free activity and actuality as its own were previously set against what was already present, here stands shape as the expression of its actualization, posited through itself: the features and forms of its self-active essence. But the universal and particular actuality that observation previously found outside the individual is here its own actuality, its inborn body. Into this same body 1807 245 falls the expression belonging to its activity. In the psychological view, actuality existing in and for itself and determinate individuality were to be related to each other. Here, however, the whole determinate individuality is observation's object, and each side of its opposition is itself this whole. Thus the outward whole includes not only original being, the inborn body, but also its formation belonging to inward activity. It is the unity of unformed and formed being, the individual's actuality permeated by being-for-itself. This whole, encompassing both the determinate, original, fixed parts and the features arising only through activity, is. This being is the expression of the inner, of the individual posited as consciousness and movement. Likewise, this inner is no longer formal, contentless, or indeterminate self-activity whose content and determinacy would lie, as before, in external circumstances. It is an original character determinate in itself, of which activity is only the form. We therefore consider the relationship between these two sides: how it should be determined, and what is meant by this expression of the inner in the outer.

312 Initially, this outer does not make the inner visible, or a being for another, as an organ. For the inner, insofar as it is in the 1807 246 organ, is activity itself. The speaking mouth, the working hand, and, if one wishes, the legs as well, are organs of actualization and accomplishment. They contain activity as activity, or the inner as such. But the externality the inner gains through them is the deed, as an actuality separated from the individual. Language and work are expressions in which the individual no longer keeps and possesses itself within itself, but lets the inner come wholly outside itself and surrenders it to another. One can therefore say equally that these expressions express the inner too much and too little. Too much: because the inner itself breaks out in them, no opposition remains between them and it. They give not merely an expression of the inner, but the inner itself immediately. Too little: because in language and action the inner makes itself into another, it surrenders itself to the element of transformation. This reverses the spoken word and accomplished deed, making them something other than what they are in and for themselves as actions of this determinate individual. Through this externality and others' intervention, the works of actions lose the character of something lasting over against other individualities. Moreover, since they relate to the inner they contain as a separate, indifferent outer, 1807 247 through the individual itself they can inwardly be other than they appear. Either the individual intentionally makes them appear something different from what they truly are, or it is too unskilled to give itself the outward side it really wanted and to fix it so that others cannot distort its work. Activity as accomplished work thus has a double, opposed meaning: either it is inner individuality and not its expression, or as outer it is an actuality free of the inner, something wholly different from it. Because of this ambiguity, we must look for the inner as it still is in the individual itself, but visibly or outwardly. In the organ, however, it is only immediate activity itself, gaining its externality in the deed, which may or may not represent the inner. Considered according to this opposition, the organ thus does not provide the expression sought.

313 If outward shape could express inward individuality only insofar as it is not organ or activity, and thus is a resting whole, it would behave as a subsisting thing. It would quietly receive the inner as something alien into its passive existence and thereby become its sign: an external, contingent expression whose actual side is 1807 248 meaningless by itself—a language whose sounds and combinations of sounds are not the thing itself but are joined to it by free choice and contingent in relation to it.

314 Such an arbitrary connection between things external to each other yields no law. Physiognomy, however, is supposed to differ from other worthless arts and pernicious studies by considering determinate individuality in the necessary opposition of inner and outer: character as conscious essence and that same character as existing shape. It relates these moments as their concept relates them, so that they must constitute a law's content. In astrology, palmistry, and similar sciences, by contrast, only outer seems related to outer, something to something alien to it. This constellation at birth, or, bringing the external closer to the body itself, these lines of the hand, are external moments in relation to long or short life and the individual's fate in general. As externalities they are indifferent to each other and lack the mutual necessity that is supposed to lie in the relationship of outer and inner.

315 Admittedly, the hand seems not so much external to fate as 1807 249 inwardly related to it. For fate is itself only the appearance of what determinate individuality is in itself as inner original determinacy. To know what individuality is in itself, the palmist and physiognomist take a shorter route than, for example, Solon. Solon thought this could be known only from and after the course of the whole life. He considered appearance; they consider the in-itself. But it is easy to see why the hand must present individuality's in-itself regarding its fate. Next to the organ of speech, it is chiefly through the hand that a person brings themselves into appearance and actualization. It is the animated craftsman of their fortune. One can say that it is what the person does. For in the hand as the active organ of self-accomplishment, the person is present as its animating force. And since the person is originally their own fate, the hand will express this in-itself.

316 This determination—that the organ of activity is as much being as the activity within it, or that inward being-in-itself is itself present in it and has a being for others—yields a view different from the preceding one. Organs in general previously proved incapable of being taken as expressions of the inner because activity as activity 1807 250 is present in them, whereas activity as deed is merely external. Inner and outer thus fall apart and are or can be alien to each other. But according to the determination just considered, the organ must also be taken as the middle between them. For the very fact that activity is present in it also constitutes an externality of that activity, and one different from the deed: this externality remains with and in the individual. This middle and unity of inner and outer is itself, first, also external. But then this externality is also taken back into the inner. As simple externality it stands opposed to dispersed externality: either merely an individual work or state, contingent for the whole individuality, or, as total externality, fate splintered into a multiplicity of works and states. The simple lines of the hand, then, likewise the tone and range of the voice as the individual determinacy of speech, and speech again as it gains a firmer existence through the hand than through the voice—writing, specifically handwriting—all this is expression of the inner. As simple externality, it relates in turn to the manifold externality of action and fate as something inner. Thus, if the individual's determinate nature and inborn distinctiveness, 1807 251 together with what it has become through cultivation, are initially taken as the inner, the essence of action and fate, this inner has its appearance and externality first in mouth, hand, voice, handwriting, and the other organs and their lasting determinations. Only then does it express itself further outward in its actuality in the world.

317 Since this middle is determined as expression that is also taken back into the inner, its existence is not restricted to the immediate organ of activity. It is rather the movement and form of the face and of bodily shape generally that accomplish nothing. According to this concept, these features and their movement are activity held back and remaining in the individual. In relation to actual activity, they are the individual's own supervision and observation of it: expression as reflection on actual expression. The individual is not mute toward and during its outward activity because it is also reflected into itself within that activity, and expresses this reflection. This theoretical activity, or the individual's talk with itself about its activity, is perceptible to others too, since it is itself an expression.

318 In this inner that remains inner in its expression, we thus observe the individual's being reflected 1807 252 out of its actuality. We must see what becomes of the necessity posited in this unity. This reflected being is first distinct from the deed itself. It can therefore be something other than the deed is, and be taken as such. One can see in someone's face whether they are serious about what they say or do. Conversely, however, what is supposed to express the inner is also an existing expression. It thus itself sinks into the determination of being, which is absolutely contingent for the self-conscious essence. It is indeed expression, but also only like a sign, so that the constitution of what expresses the content is completely indifferent to that content. In this appearance the inner is indeed visible invisibility, but is not bound to it. It can equally exist in another appearance, just as a different inner can exist in the same appearance. Lichtenberg therefore rightly says: "Suppose the physiognomist once caught hold of the human being: it would take only a bold decision to become incomprehensible again for thousands of years." In the previous relationship, the circumstances present were something existing from which individuality took what it could and wanted, either submitting to it or reversing it. They therefore did not contain individuality's necessity and essence. 1807 253 Likewise, individuality's immediate appearing being here either expresses its reflection out of actuality and its being-within-itself, or is only a sign for it, indifferent to what it signifies and therefore truly signifying nothing. It is as much its face as its mask, which it can remove. Individuality permeates its shape, moves and speaks in it. But this whole existence equally turns into an indifferent being over against will and action. Individuality erases its former significance of containing its reflection into itself or its true essence, and instead places that essence in will and deed.

319 Individuality gives up the reflection into itself expressed in its features and places its essence in the work. In this it contradicts the relationship established by reason's instinct, when it takes to observing self-conscious individuality, concerning what is to count as individuality's inner and outer. This viewpoint leads us to the actual thought underlying physiognomic science, if one wishes to call it that. The opposition this observation has reached is formally that of practical and theoretical, both posited within the practical itself: individuality 1807 254 actualizing itself in action, in the broadest sense, and that same individuality as, within this action, it also reflects out of it into itself and makes action its object. Observation takes up this opposition in the same inverted relationship in which it is determined in appearance. It regards the deed itself and the work, whether in language or firmer actuality, as the inessential outer. It regards individuality's being-within-itself as the essential inner. Of the two sides practical consciousness contains—intention and deed, its opinion about its action and the action itself—observation chooses the former as the true inner. This inner is supposed to have its more or less inessential expression in the deed, but its true expression in bodily shape. The latter expression is the individual spirit's immediate sensory presence. The inwardness supposed to be true is the particularity of intention and the individuality of being-for-itself: both are meant spirit. Observation's objects are therefore meant existence, and it seeks laws between things of this kind.

320 Immediate opinion about spirit's supposed presence is natural physiognomy: a hasty judgment of inner nature and character from the first sight of its shape. The object of this opinion is 1807 255 of a kind whose essence is truly to be something other than merely immediate sensory being. Admittedly, what is present is precisely this reflection into itself out of the sensory, within the sensory. Observation's object is visibility as visibility of the invisible. But this immediate sensory presence is spirit's actuality as it exists only for opinion. On this side observation busies itself with its meant existence, with physiognomy, handwriting, tone of voice, and so forth. It relates such existence to an equally meant inner. What is to be recognized is not the murderer or thief, but the capacity to be one. Fixed abstract determinacy is thereby lost in the concrete, infinite determinacy of the single individual, now requiring more elaborate portraits than those labels. Such elaborate portraits certainly say more than classification as murderer, thief, kindhearted, unspoiled, and so forth. But they fall far short of their purpose of expressing meant being, or single individuality—just as descriptions of shape that go beyond flat forehead, long nose, and so forth do. For individual shape, like individual self-consciousness, is inexpressible as meant being. A science of human knowledge aimed at the supposed person, and 1807 256 physiognomy aimed at the person's supposed actuality, seeking to raise natural physiognomy's unconscious judgment into knowledge, are therefore endless and groundless. They can never say what they mean, because they only mean, and their content is only meant.

321 The laws this science sets out to find are relationships between these two meant sides. They can therefore themselves be nothing but empty opinion. Moreover, this supposed knowledge, concerned with spirit's actuality, has precisely this as its object: spirit reflects out of its sensory existence into itself, and determinate existence is an indifferent contingency for it. Thus, when it finds its laws, it must immediately know that they say nothing, but are really pure chatter or only an opinion of its own. This expression truthfully says that these are the same: stating one's opinion and thereby offering not the matter itself but merely an opinion of oneself. In content, however, these observations cannot differ from the following: "It always rains when we have a fair," says the shopkeeper; "and whenever I dry laundry," says the housewife.

322 Lichtenberg, who characterizes physiognomic observation this way, also says: "If someone said, 'You act like an honest 1807 257 man, but I can see from your figure that you are forcing yourself and are a scoundrel at heart,' truly, every decent fellow will, until the end of the world, answer such an address with a slap in the face." This response hits the mark because it refutes the first presupposition of such a science of opinion: that a person's actuality is their face and so forth. A person's true being is instead their deed. In it individuality is actual, and the deed sublates the meant in both its aspects. First, it sublates the meant as bodily, resting being. In action, individuality instead presents itself as the negative essence that only is insofar as it sublates being. Then the deed also sublates opinion's inexpressibility regarding self-conscious individuality, which in opinion is infinitely determinate and determinable. In the accomplished deed, this bad infinity is destroyed. The deed is something simply determinate and universal, graspable in an abstraction. It is murder, theft, a benefit, a brave deed, and so forth. One can say what it is. It is this, and its being is not merely a sign but the thing itself. It is this, and the individual person is what it is. In the simplicity of this being, the person is a universal essence existing for others and ceases to be merely meant. 1807 258 Admittedly, the person is not thereby posited as spirit. But we are discussing their being as being. On one side, the twofold being of shape and deed confront each other, and both are supposed to be their actuality. Here only the deed must be asserted as their genuine being, not their figure, supposedly expressing what they think about their deeds, or what one thought they merely could do. Likewise, on the other side, when their work and their inner possibility, capacity, or intention are opposed, the work alone must count as their true actuality. This remains so even if they deceive themselves about it and, turning from their action into themselves, think they are inwardly something other than they are in the deed. In becoming a work, individuality entrusts itself to the objective element and does surrender itself to being altered and reversed. But precisely what determines the deed's character is whether it is an actual being that holds its ground or only an intended work that passes away, inherently nothing. Objectivity does not alter the deed itself. It merely shows what it is: whether it is or is nothing. Analyzing this being into intentions and similar subtleties, to explain the actual person—that is, their deed—back into meant being, must be left to the idleness of opinion. The person too may invent special intentions concerning their actuality. 1807 259 If this idleness wishes to put its deedless wisdom to work, deny the agent the character of reason, and mistreat them by declaring their figure and features rather than their deed to be their being, it must fear the response above. That response proves that figure is not the in-itself, but can instead be an object of treatment.

323 Looking at the full range of relationships in which self-conscious individuality can be observed standing toward its outer, one remains for observation to make its object. In psychology it is the external actuality of things, supposed to have its conscious counterpart in spirit and make spirit comprehensible. In physiognomy, by contrast, spirit is to be known in its own outer as a being that is its language: the visible invisibility of its essence. There remains the determination of actuality's side in which individuality expresses its essence in its immediate, fixed actuality that simply exists. This last relationship therefore differs from the physiognomic one. The latter is the individual's speaking presence. In its acting expression, the individual also presents its presence as reflecting into and contemplating itself: an expression 1807 260 that is itself movement, resting features that are themselves essentially mediated being. But in the determination still to be considered, the outer is finally a wholly resting actuality. It is not in itself a speaking sign, but presents itself for itself, separate from self-conscious movement, and is a mere thing.

324 Concerning the inner's relationship to this outer, it first seems clear that it must be comprehended as a causal relationship. For a necessary relationship of one thing existing in itself to another thing existing in itself is this relationship.

325 For spiritual individuality to affect the body, it must itself be bodily as cause. The bodily element in which it exists as cause is the organ—not of activity directed at external actuality, but of the self-conscious essence's activity within itself, directed outward only toward its own body. It is not immediately clear which organs these could be. If we thought only of organs in general, the organ of work would easily be at hand, as would the organ of sexual drive, and so forth. But such organs are instruments or parts that spirit as one extreme uses as middle terms toward the other extreme, the external object. 1807 261 Here, however, an organ is meant in which the self-conscious individual, as extreme facing its own opposed actuality, preserves itself for itself. It is not also turned outward but is reflected within its action, and its side of being is not a being for another. In the physiognomic relationship, the organ is also considered as existence reflected into itself and commenting on activity. But this being is objective, and the result of physiognomic observation is that self-consciousness confronts precisely this actuality of its own as something indifferent. This indifference disappears when reflection into itself is itself effective. Existence thereby receives a necessary relationship to it. But to act on existence, this reflection must itself have a being, though not properly an objective being. It is to be pointed out as this organ.

326 In ordinary life, anger, for example, as such an inward activity, is located in the liver. Plato even grants the liver something higher, which some consider the highest: prophecy, or the gift of expressing the holy and eternal irrationally. But the movement the individual has in the liver, heart, and so forth cannot be regarded as its movement wholly reflected into itself. 1807 262 Rather, in these it has already struck into the body and has an animal existence turning outward toward externality.

327 The nervous system, by contrast, is the organic's immediate rest within its movement. The nerves themselves are admittedly organs of consciousness already immersed in its outward direction. But brain and spinal cord may be considered the immediate presence of self-consciousness that remains within itself: neither objective nor going outward. Insofar as this organ's moment of being is a being for another, an existence, it is dead being, no longer self-consciousness's presence. Yet in its concept, this being within itself is a fluidity in which circles thrown into it immediately dissolve and no difference expresses itself as existing. Meanwhile, spirit itself is not abstractly simple but a system of movements in which it differentiates itself into moments while remaining free in this differentiation. It articulates its body generally for different functions, assigning each individual part to only one. So one can also imagine the fluid being of its being-within-itself as articulated. Indeed, it seems necessary to imagine it this way, since spirit's being reflected into itself in 1807 263 the brain is itself only a middle between its pure essence and its bodily articulation. This middle must therefore share the nature of both, and so, on the latter side, also contain existing articulation.

328 Spiritual-organic being also has the necessary side of a resting, subsisting existence. The former must withdraw as the extreme of being-for-itself and confront this other extreme as the object on which it acts as cause. If brain and spinal cord are spirit's bodily being-for-itself, skull and vertebral column are the other, separated extreme: the fixed, resting thing. But when thinking of spirit's proper dwelling, everyone thinks not of the back but only of the head. In investigating knowledge of the kind before us, we can be satisfied with this reason—not too poor for it—to limit this existence to the skull. Someone might think of the back because knowledge and activity are sometimes partly beaten into, partly beaten out of a person through it. But this would prove nothing toward including the spinal cord as spirit's dwelling and the column as its corresponding existence, since it would prove too much. One can equally recall that 1807 264 other external ways are favored for getting at spirit's activity, to awaken or restrain it. The vertebral column is thus, if one wishes, rightly excluded. It is constructed as well as many other doctrines of natural philosophy that only the skull is left, though admittedly it does not contain spirit's organs. That was excluded earlier by the concept of this relationship, which placed the skull on the side of existence. Or, if we may not recall the matter's concept, experience teaches that, whereas one sees with the eye as organ, one does not murder, steal, write poetry, and so forth with the skull. The expression organ must therefore be avoided for the skull's meaning still to be discussed. Although people commonly say rational people care not about the word but the matter, this does not license naming a thing with a word that does not belong to it. That is both clumsiness and deception, thinking and pretending that only the right word is missing, while concealing that the matter—that is, the concept—is actually lacking. If the concept were present, it would also have its right word. So far, all that has been determined is that, as the brain is the living head, the skull is the caput mortuum.

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329 In this dead being, then, spiritual movements and the brain's determinate ways would have to present themselves as external actuality, though still in the individual itself. For their relationship to the skull, which as dead being has no spirit dwelling within it, the external mechanical relationship established above first offers itself. The actual organs—and these are in the brain—would push the skull out round here, hammer it broad there, or press it flat, or whatever other way one imagines this action. As itself part of the organism, the skull, like every bone, must admittedly be thought to form itself in a living way. Viewed thus, it would instead press upon the brain and set its external limit, for which, being harder, it is better equipped. But the same relationship would still govern their activity toward each other. Whether skull determines or is determined changes nothing in the causal connection generally. Only then the skull would become self-consciousness's immediate organ, since as cause it would contain the side of being-for-itself. Yet insofar as being-for-itself as organic vitality belongs equally to both, the causal connection between them actually disappears. Their further formation would instead be inwardly connected 1807 266 as an organic, preestablished harmony. This leaves the two related sides free toward each other and each with its own shape, which need not correspond to the other's shape. Still more are shape and quality free toward each other, as a grape's shape and wine's taste are. But insofar as being-for-itself falls on the brain's side and existence on the skull's, a causal connection between them must also be posited within organic unity: a necessary relationship between them as external to each other, itself external, through which their shapes would determine each other.

330 But one can talk back and forth in many ways about how the organ of self-consciousness would act as cause on the opposite side. For we are discussing the constitution of a cause considered according to its indifferent existence, shape, and size: a cause whose inner and being-for-itself are supposed to be precisely something that does not concern immediate existence. First, the skull's organic self-formation is indifferent to mechanical action. Since the former is self-relation, the relationship between these two relationships is precisely indeterminacy and 1807 267 boundlessness itself. Further, even if the brain took spirit's differences into itself as existing differences and were a multiplicity of internal organs occupying different spaces—contrary to nature, which gives the concept's moments their own existence and therefore places the fluid simplicity of organic life purely on one side, and its articulation and division in its differences on the other, so that they appear as separate anatomical things, as they are to be grasped here—it would remain indeterminate whether an originally stronger spiritual moment must have a more expanded brain organ and a weaker one a more contracted organ, or exactly the reverse. It would be equally uncertain whether its development enlarged or diminished the organ, made it bulkier and thicker or finer. Since the cause's constitution remains indeterminate, so does its effect on the skull: whether it expands it or narrows and collapses it. If this effect is given the finer name stimulation, it remains uncertain whether it swells like a blistering plaster made with cantharides or shrivels like vinegar. Plausible reasons can be offered for all such views. For the organic relationship, 1807 268 which intervenes just as much, lets one pass as readily as another and is indifferent to all this reasoning.

331 But observing consciousness is not concerned with determining this relationship. For what stands on one side is not the brain as an animal part, but the brain as being of self-conscious individuality. As settled character and moving conscious activity, individuality is for itself and within itself. Opposed to this is its actuality and existence for another. Being-for-and-within-itself is the essence and subject that has in the brain a being subsumed under it, receiving its value only through the meaning dwelling in it. But the other side of self-conscious individuality, the side of its existence, is being as independent and as subject, or as a thing: namely a bone. A person's actuality and existence is their skull-bone. This is the relationship and understanding the two sides have in the consciousness observing them.

332 That consciousness now wants the more determinate relationship of these sides. The skull-bone does have the general meaning of being spirit's immediate actuality. But spirit's many-sidedness gives its existence an equally manifold meaning. What must be obtained is the 1807 269 determinate meaning of the individual locations into which this existence is divided. We must see how these locations point to it within themselves.

333 The skull-bone is neither an organ of activity nor a speaking movement. One neither steals nor murders and so forth with it, nor does it alter its expression in the slightest for such deeds, to become an expressive gesture. Nor does this existing thing have the value of a sign. Facial expression, gesture, tone, even a column or a post driven into a deserted island, immediately announce that something else is meant by them beyond what they immediately merely are. They immediately declare themselves signs by containing a determinacy that points to something else because it does not properly belong to them. A skull, too, may suggest many thoughts, as Yorick's did to Hamlet. But the skull-bone by itself is so indifferent and unconcerned a thing that immediately nothing can be seen or meant in it except itself. It may call to mind the brain and its determinacy, or differently formed skulls, but not a conscious movement. It contains neither facial expression nor gesture, nor an impression announcing its origin in conscious activity. For it is the actuality that was supposed to present, within individuality, 1807 270 another side: no longer being reflecting into itself, but purely immediate being.

334 Since the skull does not itself feel either, perhaps a more determinate meaning could still arise from particular sensations indicating, through proximity, what is meant by it. If a conscious way of spirit has its feeling at a particular location, perhaps that location's shape would indicate it and its particularity. Just as some complain of a painful tension somewhere in the head during strenuous thought, or even during thinking in general, so stealing, murdering, writing poetry, and so forth might each be accompanied by its own sensation, which would also have to possess its own special location. This more stirred and active place in the brain would probably further develop the adjacent place in the bone. Or through sympathy or consensus, the bone too would not remain idle, but enlarge, diminish, or otherwise form itself. What makes this hypothesis improbable, however, is that feeling in general is indeterminate, and feeling in the head as center might be a general shared feeling of all suffering. Other sensations would then mingle with the thief's, murderer's, or poet's 1807 271 tickle or pain in the head. They would be as hard to distinguish from one another and from merely bodily sensations as it is to determine a disease from the symptom of headache, even when restricting its meaning to the bodily.

335 In fact, from whichever side we consider the matter, every necessary mutual relationship disappears, as does any indication of it that speaks for itself. If the relationship is nevertheless to occur, what remains, necessarily, is a free, preestablished harmony without a concept between the corresponding determinations of both sides. For one side is supposed to be spiritless actuality, a mere thing. Thus on one side stands a collection of resting skull locations, and on the other a collection of spiritual properties whose multiplicity and determination will depend on the state of psychology. The poorer the representation of spirit, the easier the matter becomes on this side. The properties become both fewer and more separated, fixed, and bony, hence more similar to and comparable with bone determinations. But although a poor representation of spirit makes much easier, a very large collection still remains on both sides. For observation, their relationship remains wholly contingent. If each of the children of Israel 1807 272 had to select from the sand by the sea, to which they are supposed to correspond, the grain of which they are the sign, the indifference and arbitrariness assigning each their grain would be just as great as that assigning skull locations and bone shapes to each mental faculty and passion, and also to the shades of character that finer psychology and human knowledge discuss, which would likewise have to be considered here. The murderer's skull has this—not organ, nor sign, but bump. Yet this murderer has many other properties, and other bumps, as well as hollows. We may choose among bumps and hollows. His murderous disposition can in turn be related to any bump or hollow, and these to any property. For the murderer is neither merely this abstraction of a murderer nor has only one elevation and one depression. Observations made here must therefore sound just like the shopkeeper's and housewife's rain at the fair and on laundry day. Shopkeeper and housewife could equally observe that it always rains when this neighbor passes or roast pork is eaten. Just as rain is indifferent to these circumstances, so for observation this 1807 273 spiritual determination is indifferent to this determinate being of the skull. For of the two objects of this observation, one is a dry being-for-itself, a bony property of spirit, and the other a dry being-in-itself. A thing as bony as either is completely indifferent to everything else. The high bump is as indifferent to a murderer nearby as the murderer is to a flat place near him.

336 The possibility that some property, passion, and so forth is connected with a bump in some location does, of course, remain irrefutable. One can imagine a murderer with a high bump at this skull location, a thief with one there. From this side the science of the skull can still expand greatly. At first it seems limited to joining a bump and property in the same individual, so that the individual possesses both. But natural skull science—for there must be one just as there is natural physiognomy—already goes beyond this limit. It judges not only that a sly person has a fist-sized bump behind the ears, but also imagines that the bumps on the forehead belong not to the unfaithful wife herself but to her spouse. 1807 274 Equally, one can imagine the person living under the same roof as the murderer, or his neighbor, and further his fellow citizens and so forth, with high bumps somewhere on their skulls, just as one can imagine the flying cow first caressed by the crab riding a donkey, and afterward, and so forth. But if possibility means not the possibility of imagining but inner possibility, or the concept, then the object is an actuality that is, and is supposed to be, pure thing without such meaning. It can therefore possess that meaning only in representation.

337 Despite the two sides' indifference, the observer may proceed to determine relationships. He is partly encouraged by the general rational principle that the outer expresses the inner, partly supported by analogy with animal skulls. Animals may indeed have simpler characters than humans, but it is correspondingly harder to say what character they have, since not everyone's imagination can easily enter properly into an animal's nature. In asserting the laws he claims to have discovered, the observer finds special help in a distinction that must necessarily occur to us here too. The being of 1807 275 spirit at least cannot be taken as absolutely fixed and unalterable. A person is free. It is admitted that original being consists only of predispositions over which the person has considerable power, or which require favorable circumstances to develop. That is, spirit's original being must equally be described as something that does not exist as being. Suppose observations contradict what someone happens to assert as law: if the weather is fine at the fair or on laundry day, shopkeeper and housewife could say that it really ought to rain and the predisposition is nevertheless present. Similarly, skull observation could say this individual really ought to be as the skull declares according to the law and has an original predisposition that, however, has not developed. This quality is not present, but it ought to be. The law and ought rest on observing actual rain and actual disposition together with this skull determination. But if actuality is absent, empty possibility counts for just as much. This possibility—that is, the proposed law's nonactuality—and hence observations contradicting it, must enter precisely because the individual's freedom and the developing circumstances are indifferent to being 1807 276 in general, both as original inner being and as outward bony being. The individual can be something other than it originally is inwardly, and still more other than what it is as a bone.

338 We thus obtain the possibility that this skull bump or hollow indicates either something actual or only a predisposition, and an indeterminate predisposition to anything at all—that it indicates something nonactual. We see a poor excuse meet its usual fate: it can itself be used against what it was meant to support. We see opinion brought by the nature of the matter to say, thoughtlessly, the opposite of what it holds fast: that this bone indicates something, but equally does not.

339 What hovers before opinion in this excuse is the true thought that precisely destroys it: being as such is not at all spirit's truth. A predisposition is already an original being that has no share in spirit's activity, and the bone is just such a being on its side. What exists without spiritual activity is a thing for consciousness. Far from being consciousness's essence, it is rather its opposite. Consciousness is actual for itself only through negating and destroying such being. 1807 277 From this side, passing off a bone as consciousness's actual existence must be considered a complete denial of reason. Yet it is passed off as this by being considered spirit's outer, since the outer is precisely existing actuality. It is no use saying that one merely infers from this outer to an inner that is something else, and that the outer is not the inner itself but only its expression. For in their relationship, the determination of actuality thinking itself and thought falls on the inner's side, while that of existing actuality falls on the outer's. Thus telling someone, "You—your inner—are this because your bone is constituted so," means nothing other than, "I regard a bone as your actuality." The response to such a judgment mentioned in physiognomy, a slap in the face, initially displaces the soft parts from their appearance and position. It proves only that these are no true in-itself, not spirit's actuality. Here the response would properly have to go so far as smashing the judge's skull, to prove as palpably as his wisdom that a bone is nothing in itself for a person, much less their true actuality.

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340 The crude instinct of self-conscious reason will reject such skull science without examination: this other observing instinct of reason that has reached a presentiment of knowledge, but grasped it spiritlessly as the outer expressing the inner. Yet sometimes the worse a thought is, the less obvious its precise fault and the harder it is to explain. A thought is called worse the purer and emptier the abstraction it takes as essence. The opposition at issue here has as its members self-aware individuality and the abstraction of externality that has become wholly a thing: spirit's inner being grasped as fixed, spiritless being, opposed to just such being. Yet observing reason seems thereby to have reached its highest point, from which it must abandon itself and turn over. For only what is utterly bad contains the immediate necessity of reversing itself. Thus one can say of the Jewish people that precisely because they stand immediately before salvation's gate, they are and have been the most rejected. What they ought to be in and for themselves, this self-essentiality, they are not for themselves, but place it beyond themselves. Through this alienation they make a higher 1807 279 existence possible—if they could take their object back into themselves—than if they had remained within the immediacy of being. For spirit is greater the greater the opposition from which it returns into itself. It creates this opposition by sublating its immediate unity and alienating its being-for-itself. But if such a consciousness does not reflect itself, the middle in which it stands is an unhappy void, since what should fill it has become a fixed extreme. Thus this last stage of observing reason is its worst, but for that reason its reversal is necessary.

341 For an overview of the series of relationships considered so far, which make up observation's content and object, shows that in observation's first mode, observing inorganic nature's relationships, sensory being already disappears for it. The moments of its relationship present themselves as pure abstractions and simple concepts. These were supposed to be firmly bound to the existence of things, but that existence is lost, so the moment proves to be pure movement and universal. This free process, complete within itself, retains the meaning of something objective, but now appears as a one. In the inorganic process, the one is the nonexistent inner. Existing as one, however, the process is the 1807 280 organic. As being-for-itself or negative essence, the one stands against the universal, withdraws from it, and remains free for itself. Thus the concept, realized only in the element of absolute singularity, does not find in organic existence its true expression of being there as universal. It remains external to organic nature or, what is the same, an inner of organic nature. The organic process is free only in itself, not for itself. In purpose, the being-for-itself of its freedom enters; it exists as another being, a self-conscious wisdom outside the organic process. Observing reason therefore turns to this wisdom, to spirit, the concept existing as universality, or purpose existing as purpose. Its own essence is now its object.

342 First it turns to spirit's purity. But because observation grasps the object moving in its differences as something existing, laws of thinking arise for it: relationships of something permanent to something permanent. Yet since these laws' content consists only of moments, they run together into the one of self-consciousness. Taken likewise as existing, this new object is individual, contingent self-consciousness. Observation therefore remains within meant spirit and the contingent relationship of conscious to unconscious actuality. Only spirit within itself 1807 281 is the necessity of this relationship. Observation therefore moves closer to its body and compares its willing and active actuality with its actuality reflected into itself and contemplating, which is itself objective. Though a language the individual has within itself, this outer is also, as sign, indifferent to the content it was supposed to signify, just as what posits the sign is indifferent to it.

343 Observation therefore finally returns from this changing language to fixed being. According to its concept, it declares that externality—not as organ, nor as language and sign, but as a dead thing—is spirit's external and immediate actuality. What the very first observation of inorganic nature sublated, namely that the concept should be present as thing, this last mode restores by making spirit's actuality itself into a thing, or conversely, by giving dead being the meaning of spirit. Observation has thereby come to state what our concept of it was: that reason's certainty seeks itself as objective actuality. Admittedly, one probably does not mean that spirit, represented by a skull, is thereby declared a thing. This thought is supposed to contain no 1807 282 materialism, as it is called; spirit is still supposed to be something other than these bones. But saying that it is itself means nothing other than that it is a thing. If being as such, or thinghood, is predicated of spirit, the true expression of this is that spirit is something like a bone. It must therefore count as highly important that the true expression has been found for saying purely of spirit that it is. Otherwise, when spirit is said to be, to have a being, to be a thing, a single actuality, one does not mean something that can be seen, taken in hand, pushed, and so forth. But that is what is said. What is truly said is thus expressed as: spirit's being is a bone.

344 This result now has a double meaning. First, its true meaning supplements the result of self-consciousness's previous movement. Unhappy self-consciousness alienated its independence and wrested its being-for-itself out into a thing. It thereby returned from self-consciousness into consciousness: the consciousness for which the object is a being, a thing. But what is thing is self-consciousness. It is thus the unity of I and being, the category. When its object is 1807 283 determined in this way, consciousness has reason. Consciousness, like self-consciousness, properly is reason in itself. But only consciousness for which the object has been determined as category can be said to have reason. Knowing what reason is remains distinct from this. The category, the immediate unity of being and its-own, must pass through both forms. Observing consciousness is precisely that consciousness to which it presents itself in the form of being. In its result, consciousness states as a proposition what it is unconsciously certain of: the proposition contained in reason's concept. This is the infinite judgment that the self is a thing—a judgment that sublates itself. This result has therefore added this definite feature to the category: it is this self-sublating opposition. The pure category, existing for consciousness in the form of being or immediacy, is the still unmediated, merely present object, while consciousness relates to it equally without mediation. The moment of that infinite judgment is the transition from immediacy to mediation or negativity. The present object is therefore determined as negative, and consciousness as self-consciousness facing it. Or the category, having passed through the form of being in observation, is now posited in the form of 1807 284 being-for-itself. Consciousness no longer wants to find itself immediately, but to produce itself through its activity. It itself is for itself the purpose of its activity, just as in observing it was concerned only with things.

345 The result's other meaning is that of nonconceptual observation, already considered. It can grasp and express itself only by innocently declaring the bone, found as a sensory thing that does not also lose its objectivity for consciousness, to be self-consciousness's actuality. But it has no clarity of consciousness about its saying this. It does not grasp its proposition in the determinacy of subject and predicate and their relationship, much less as the infinite, self-dissolving judgment and concept. Instead, from a deeper self-consciousness of spirit, appearing here as natural decency, it conceals the disgrace of the naked, nonconceptual thought that takes a bone as self-consciousness's actuality. It whitewashes this thought through thoughtlessness itself, mixing in various relationships of cause and effect, sign, organ, and so on, which have no meaning here, and hiding the proposition's glaring character through distinctions borrowed from them.

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346 Brain fibers and the like, considered as spirit's being, are already something thought and merely hypothetical—not something existent, felt, or seen, not true actuality. When they are there, when seen, they are dead objects and no longer count as spirit's being. But proper objectivity must be immediate and sensory, so that spirit is posited as actual in this dead objectivity—for bone is the dead insofar as it exists in the living being itself. The concept of this representation is that reason is for itself all thinghood, even pure objectivity itself. But it is this in the concept: only the concept is its truth. The purer the concept itself, the more foolish the representation into which it sinks when its content exists not as concept but as representation. This happens when the self-sublating judgment is taken not with consciousness of its infinity but as a permanent proposition, its subject and predicate each valid by itself: self fixed as self and thing as thing, yet one supposed to be the other. Reason, essentially concept, is immediately divided into itself and its opposite, an opposition just as immediately sublated for that very reason. But when it offers itself as itself and its opposite and is held fast in the wholly isolated moment of this 1807 286 separation, it is grasped irrationally. The purer its moments, the more glaring is the appearance of this content, which alone exists for consciousness or alone is innocently stated by it. The depth that spirit drives outward from within, but only as far as its representing consciousness, leaving it there, and this consciousness's ignorance of what it says, form the same union of high and low that nature naively expresses in the living being by joining the organ of its highest completion, the organ of procreation, with the organ of pissing. The infinite judgment as infinite would be the completion of life comprehending itself. But consciousness of it that remains within representation behaves as pissing.

B. The Actualization of Rational Self-Consciousness through Itself.

347 Self-consciousness found the thing as itself and itself as thing. That is, it is for it that in itself it is objective actuality. It is no longer the immediate certainty of being all reality. Instead, for it the immediate in general has the form of something sublated, so that its objectivity counts only as a surface whose inner and essence is self-consciousness itself. The object to which it relates positively is therefore a self-consciousness. It has the form of thinghood: it is independent. But self-consciousness is certain that this independent object is nothing alien to it. It thus knows that in itself it is recognized by the object. It is spirit, certain that in the doubling of its self-consciousness and the independence of both, it has unity with itself. This certainty must now rise to truth for it. What it takes itself to be in itself and in its 1807 288 *inner certainty must enter its consciousness and become for it.

348 A comparison with the path so far already indicates in general the main stages of this actualization. Observing reason repeated, within the element of the category, the movement of consciousness: sense-certainty, perception, and understanding. Similarly, this reason will again traverse the double movement of self-consciousness and pass from independence into its freedom. At first this active reason is aware of itself only as an individual. As such, it must demand and produce its actuality in the other. Then, as its consciousness rises to universality, it becomes universal reason. It is conscious of itself as reason, as already recognized in and for itself, uniting all self-consciousness within its pure consciousness. It is the simple spiritual essence, which, also coming to consciousness, is the real substance into which earlier forms return as their ground. Compared with this ground they are only individual moments of its becoming. They do tear themselves loose and appear as shapes of their own, but in fact have existence and actuality only as sustained by it, and their truth only insofar as they are and remain within it.

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349 Take this goal, the concept that has already emerged for us: recognized self-consciousness, which has the certainty of itself in another free self-consciousness, and precisely therein its truth. Taking it in its reality, or bringing out this still inward spirit as substance already advanced into existence, opens up within this concept the realm of ethical life. For ethical life is nothing other than the absolute spiritual unity of individuals' essence within their independent actuality. It is a self-consciousness universal in itself, so actual for itself in another consciousness that this other has complete independence, or is a thing for it. Precisely in this, it is conscious of unity with the other, and only in this unity with the objective essence is it self-consciousness. This ethical substance, in the abstraction of universality, is merely law in thought. But it is just as much immediately actual self-consciousness, or custom. Conversely, individual consciousness is this existing one only insofar as, in its individuality, it is aware of universal consciousness as its being, insofar as its activity and existence are universal custom.

350 In a people's life, the concept of self-conscious reason's actualization has its completed reality: intuiting complete unity with the other in the other's independence, or having as my object this 1807 290 free thinghood of another that I find before me, which is the negative of myself, as my being for me. Reason is present as fluid, universal substance, as unchanging, simple thinghood. It also breaks into many completely independent beings, as light breaks into stars as innumerable points shining for themselves. In their absolute being-for-itself, these beings are dissolved in simple independent substance not only in themselves but for themselves. They are conscious of being these single independent beings because they sacrifice their individuality and this universal substance is their soul and essence. Equally, this universal is in turn their activity as individuals, or the work they produce.

351 The individual's purely individual activity and pursuits concern the needs it has as a natural being—that is, as existing individuality. Even its most ordinary functions do not come to nothing but have actuality through the universal preserving medium, the power of the whole people. Yet in universal substance the individual has not only this form of its activity's subsistence in general, but equally its content. What it does is the universal skill and custom of all. Even when this content becomes completely 1807 291 individualized, in its actuality it is interwoven with everyone's activity. The individual's work for its needs satisfies others' needs as much as its own, and it satisfies its own needs only through others' work. Just as the individual already unconsciously performs universal work in its individual work, it also performs universal work as its conscious object. The whole as a whole becomes its work, for which it sacrifices itself and thereby receives itself back from the whole. Nothing here is not reciprocal. In everything, the individual's independence gives itself its positive meaning of being for itself through dissolving its being-for-itself, through negating itself. This unity of being for another, or making oneself a thing, and being-for-itself—this universal substance—speaks its universal language in the customs and laws of its people. But this existing, unchanging essence is nothing other than the expression of individuality itself in its singular form, which seems opposed to it. The laws state what each individual is and does. The individual recognizes them not only as its universal objective thinghood, but equally recognizes itself in this thinghood, or as individualized in its own individuality and in each fellow citizen. Thus in universal spirit each has only the 1807 292 certainty of finding nothing in existing actuality but itself. Each is as certain of others as of itself. I intuit in everyone that they are for themselves only these independent beings just as I am. I intuit free unity with others in them as a unity existing through them themselves just as through me. Them as me, me as them.

352 In a free people, then, reason is truly actualized. It is present, living spirit, in which the individual finds its vocation—its universal and individual essence—not merely stated and present as thinghood. The individual itself is this essence and has also fulfilled its vocation. The wisest men of antiquity therefore declared: "Wisdom and virtue consist in living according to the customs of one's people."

353 But self-consciousness, initially spirit only immediately and according to the concept, has stepped out of this happiness of having fulfilled its vocation and living within it. Or it has not yet reached this happiness. Both can equally be said.

354 Reason must step out of this happiness. For the life of a free people is real ethical life only in itself, or immediately. Ethical life is something existing, and thus this universal spirit is itself also individual. The whole of 1807 293 customs and laws is a determinate ethical substance. Only in the higher moment, consciousness of its essence, does it shed this limitation. Only in this knowing does it have its absolute truth, not immediately in its being. In its being it is partly limited; and partly its absolute limitation is precisely that spirit has the form of being.

355 Accordingly, individual consciousness, as it immediately exists in real ethical life or in the people, is solid trust. For it, spirit has not dissolved into its abstract moments. Thus it does not know itself as being for itself as pure individuality either. But once it reaches this thought, as it must, this immediate unity with spirit, or its being within spirit—its trust—is lost. Isolated for itself, it now takes itself, no longer universal spirit, as essence. The moment of this individuality of self-consciousness does indeed exist within universal spirit itself, but only as a vanishing magnitude. As soon as it appears for itself, it immediately dissolves within spirit and comes to consciousness only as trust. When it fixes itself—and every moment, because it is a moment of essence, must itself come to present itself as essence—the individual has set itself against laws and customs. These are merely a thought without absolute essentiality, an abstract 1807 294 theory without actuality. But the individual, as this I, regards itself as living truth.

356 Or self-consciousness has not yet attained this happiness of being ethical substance, the spirit of a people. For after returning from observation, spirit is not at first actualized through itself as spirit. It is posited only as inner essence or abstraction. Or it is only immediately. But as immediately existing, it is individual. It is practical consciousness entering the world it finds with the purpose of doubling itself in this determinacy of an individual: producing itself as this individual, as its existing counterpart and becoming conscious of this unity of its actuality with objective essence. It has the certainty of this unity. It takes the unity to exist in itself, or the agreement of itself and thinghood to be already present, needing only to become for it through its own activity. Its making is equally the finding of this unity. Since this unity is called happiness, the individual is sent out into the world by its spirit to seek its happiness.

357 Thus, although the truth of this rational self-consciousness is for us ethical substance, for it this is the beginning of its ethical experience of the world. Viewed as not yet having become that substance, this movement presses toward it. What sublates itself within the movement is the individual 1807 295 moments it regards as valid in isolation. They have the form of immediate willing, or natural drive, which reaches its satisfaction, and this satisfaction itself becomes a new drive's content. But viewed as self-consciousness having lost the happiness of being within substance, these natural drives are joined to consciousness of their purpose as true vocation and essentiality. Ethical substance has sunk to a selfless predicate whose living subjects are individuals. These must fulfill their universality through themselves and provide from themselves for their vocation. In the first meaning, then, these shapes are ethical substance's becoming and precede it. In the second, they follow it and work out for self-consciousness what its vocation is. On the first side, in the movement through which the drives experience their truth, their immediacy or crudeness is lost and their content passes into a higher one. On the second, what is lost is consciousness's false representation that places its vocation in them. In the first case, the goal reached is immediate ethical substance. In the second, it is consciousness of that substance, specifically a consciousness knowing it as its own essence. Insofar as this is so, the movement would be morality's becoming, a higher shape than that first one. Yet these shapes also constitute only one side of its becoming: 1807 296 the side falling within being-for-itself, or in which consciousness sublates its purposes, not the side on which morality emerges from substance itself. Since these moments cannot yet mean purposes set up in opposition to lost ethical life, they count here in their unselfconscious content, and the goal they press toward is ethical substance. But nearer to our times is the form in which they appear after consciousness has lost its ethical life and repeats these forms in searching for it. They may therefore be presented more in the expression of this latter mode.

358 Self-consciousness, still only the concept of spirit, enters this path with the determination that it, as individual spirit, is its own essence. Its purpose is therefore to give itself actualization as an individual and, as this individual, to enjoy itself in that actualization.

359 In taking itself as essence in its being-for-itself, it is the negativity of the other. In its consciousness, it therefore faces, as the positive, something that indeed is but has for it the meaning of not being in itself. Consciousness appears divided into this actuality found before it and the purpose it accomplishes by sublating that actuality, making its purpose actual in place of it. Yet its 1807 297 first purpose is its immediate, abstract being-for-itself: intuiting itself as this individual in another, or another self-consciousness as itself. Experiencing this purpose's truth raises self-consciousness higher. It now takes itself as purpose insofar as it is also universal and has the law immediately within it. But in carrying out this law of its heart, it experiences that the individual essence cannot preserve itself in the process. The good can be carried out only by sacrificing it. It becomes virtue. Virtue's experience can only be that its purpose is already accomplished in itself, happiness is found immediately in activity itself, and activity itself is the good. Through its movement, the concept of this whole sphere becomes available to self-consciousness: thinghood is spirit's own being-for-itself. Having found this concept, self-consciousness is reality for itself as individuality immediately expressing itself. It encounters no further resistance in an opposed actuality, and has only this self-expression itself as object and purpose.

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a. Pleasure and Necessity.

360 Self-consciousness, which in general regards itself as reality, has its object within itself. But it has this object only for itself, not yet as existing. Being faces it as an actuality different from its own. It aims, by carrying out its being-for-itself, to intuit itself as another independent essence. Its first purpose is to become conscious of itself as individual essence in another self-consciousness, or to make this other into itself. It is certain that in itself this other is already itself. Insofar as it has risen out of ethical substance and the quiet being of thought into its being-for-itself, it has behind it the law of custom and existence, observational knowledge, and theory, like a gray shadow already vanishing. For these are instead knowledge of something whose being-for-itself and actuality differ from those of self-consciousness. Instead of the seemingly heavenly spirit of universality in knowledge and activity, in which individual feeling and enjoyment are silent, the earth spirit has entered it. This spirit takes only the being that is individual consciousness's actuality as true actuality.

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It despises understanding and science,The highest gifts of humankind—It has surrendered to the devilAnd must go to ruin.

361 It therefore plunges into life and carries out the pure individuality in which it appears. It does not so much make its happiness as immediately take and enjoy it. The shadows of science, laws, and principles, which alone stand between it and its own actuality, vanish like a lifeless mist unable to withstand the certainty of its reality. It takes life as one picks a ripe fruit, which offers itself just as much as it is taken.

362 Its activity is an activity of desire in only one moment. It aims not to destroy the whole objective essence, but only its form of otherness or independence, which is an essenceless appearance. For in itself it regards the other as the same essence, or its own selfhood. The element in which desire and its object subsist independently and indifferently to each other is living existence. Desire's enjoyment sublates this existence insofar as it belongs to its object. Here, however, the element giving both their separate actuality is instead the category: 1807 300 a being that is essentially represented. It is therefore consciousness of independence, whether natural consciousness or consciousness developed into a system of laws that preserves each individual for itself. For the self-consciousness that knows the other as its own selfhood, this separation does not exist in itself. Thus it attains the enjoyment of pleasure: consciousness of its actualization in a consciousness appearing independent, or intuition of the unity of both independent self-consciousnesses. It reaches its purpose, but precisely in this experiences its truth. It comprehends itself as this individual essence existing for itself. Yet actualizing this purpose is itself the purpose's sublation. For it becomes its own object not as this individual, but as unity of itself and the other self-consciousness, hence as sublated individual, or universal.

363 The pleasure enjoyed has the positive meaning of having become itself as objective self-consciousness, but equally the negative meaning of having sublated itself. Since it comprehended its actualization only in the first meaning, its experience enters consciousness as contradiction. In this contradiction, the attained actuality of its individuality sees itself destroyed by the negative essence that 1807 301 stands empty and without actuality against it, yet is its consuming power. This essence is nothing but the concept of what this individuality is in itself. But it is still the poorest shape of self-actualizing spirit. For it regards itself only as the abstraction of reason, or the immediacy of the unity of being-for-itself and being-in-itself. Its essence is therefore only the abstract category. Yet the category no longer has the form of immediate, simple being it had for observing spirit, where it is abstract being, or, posited as alien, thinghood in general. Here being-for-itself and mediation have entered this thinghood. It therefore appears as a circle whose content is the developed, pure relationship of simple essentialities. The actualization attained by this individuality thus consists only in casting this circle of abstractions out of the enclosure of simple self-consciousness into the element of being for it, or objective extension. What becomes object for self-consciousness as its essence in enjoying pleasure is therefore the spread of those empty essentialities: pure unity, pure difference, and their relationship. Beyond this, the object individuality experiences as its essence has no content. It is what is called necessity. For necessity, 1807 302 *fate, and the like are precisely that of which one cannot say what it does, what its definite laws and positive content are. For it is the absolute pure concept itself intuited as being: the simple and empty but irresistible and undisturbable relationship whose work is only individuality's nothingness. It is this fixed connection because what is connected consists of pure essentialities, or empty abstractions. Unity, difference, and relationship are categories, each of which is nothing in and for itself, but only in relation to its opposite. They therefore cannot come apart. They are related through their concept, since they are pure concepts themselves. This absolute relationship and abstract movement constitute necessity. Thus merely individual individuality, whose content is still only reason's pure concept, has not plunged from dead theory into life. Instead it has plunged only into consciousness of its own lifelessness. It receives itself only as empty, alien necessity, as dead actuality.

364 The transition takes place from the form of the one into universality, from one absolute abstraction into another: from the purpose of pure being-for-itself, which has cast off community with others, into its pure opposite, being-in-itself, 1807 303 therefore equally abstract. It thus appears that the individual has merely perished, the absolute brittleness of individuality shattered against an equally hard but continuous actuality. Since, as consciousness, it is the unity of itself and its opposite, this destruction still exists for it: its purpose and actualization, and the contradiction between what it took as essence and what is essence in itself. It experiences the double meaning in what it did: it took its life. It took life, but in doing so it instead grasped death.