The Idea, the unity of the Notion and objectivity, is the true.

The reality that does not correspond to the Notion is mere Appearance, the subjective, contingent, capricious element that is not the truth.

The Idea being the unity of Notion and reality, being has attained the significance of truth.

Finite things are finite because they do not possess the complete reality of their Notion within themselves, but require other things to complete it.
That actual things are not congruous with the Idea is the side of their finitude and untruth.

That the Idea has not completely leavened its reality, has imperfectly subdued it to the Notion, this is a possibility arising from the fact that the Idea itself has a restricted content.

Though the Idea is essentially the unity of Notion and reality, it is no less essentially their difference; for only the object is their immediate, implicit unity. But if an object, for example the State in politics, does not correspond at all to its Idea, that is, if in fact it is not the Idea of the state at all, if its reality, which is the self-conscious individuals, does not correspond at all to the Notion, its soul and its body would have parted; the soul would escape into the solitary regions of thought, and the body would have broken up into the single individualities.
The worst State, one whose reality least corresponds to the Notion, in so far as it still exists, is still Idea; the individuals still obey a dominant Notion.


The Notion, having truly attained its reality, is this absolute judgment whose subject, as self-related negative unity, distinguishes itself from its objectivity and is the latter's being-in-and-for-self, but essentially relates itself to it through itself; it is therefore its own end and the urge to realize it.


Objectivity has, in itself, the moment of the externality of the Notion and is therefore in general the side of finitude, change and Appearance.
A side, however, which meets with extinction in its retraction into the negative unity of the Notion; losing in the process its unessential character.

The Idea is, therefore, in spite of this objectivity utterly simple and immaterial, for the externality exists only as determined by the Notion and as taken up into its negative unity.

Although therefore the Idea has its reality in a material externality, this is not an abstract being subsisting on its own account over against the Notion; on the contrary, it exists only as a becoming through the negativity of indifferent being, as a simple determinateness of the Notion.

This yields the following more precise definitions of the Idea:

- First, it is the simple truth, the identity of the Notion and objectivity as a universal, in which the opposition and subsistence of the particular, is dissolved into its self-identical negativity and is equality with itself.

- Secondly, it is the relation between, on one side, the explicit subjectivity of the simple Notion and, on the other side, its objectivity (the subsistence that is in and for itself null,) which is distinguished therefrom.
As this relation, the Idea is the process of sundering itself into individuality and its inorganic nature, and again of bringing this inorganic nature under the power of the subject and returning to the first simple universality.

In the first instance, the Idea is only immediate or only in its Notion.
Objective reality is, it is true, conformable to the Notion, but it is not yet liberated into the Notion, and the latter does not exist explicitly for itself as Notion.
It does not possess its objective reality within itself.
At this first stage, the Idea is Life: the Notion is distinguished from its objectivity, is simple within itself, and pervades its objectivity. As its own end, the Notion possesses its means in the objectivity and posits this objectivity as its means. And as the Notion is immanent in this means, it is therein the realized end that is identical with itself.
This Idea, on account of its immediacy, has individuality for the form of its existence.
But the reflection-into-self of its absolute process is the sublating, the surpassing of this immediate individuality.
Because of that, the Notion which, as universality in this individuality, is the inwardness of the latter, converts the externality into universality, or posits its objectivity as being the same as itself.
The Notion has, in this first instance, liberated itself into itself and as yet given itself only an abstract objectivity for its reality.

In the second instance, the initially abstract universality must convert itself into a totality, whereby it becomes a complete objectivity.
What is just a presupposition of an objective world, must be converted into a positedness; a real objective world.
In this way its reality is, for it, the objective world; or conversely, the objective world is the ideality in which it cognizes itself.