The Notion is the truth of Being and Essence.

It has two aspects:
- Firstly, it has been developed out of Being as its ground.
- Secondly, it is the ground to which the regress of Being and Essence leads.

The first aspect of the advance may be regarded as an issuing of the more perfect from the less perfect.
While the second aspect of the advance may be regarded as a concentration of being into its depth, thereby disclosing its inner nature.

The superficial thoughts of more imperfect and more perfect is to indicate the distinction of Being, as an immediate unity with itself, from Notion, as a free mediation with itself.
Since being has shown that it is an element in the Notion, the latter has thus exhibited itself as the truth of Being.

As a reflection in itself, and as an absorption of the mediation, the Notion is the pre-supposition of the return to self. It is the notion alone which, in the act of supposing itself, makes its pre-supposition; as has been made apparent in causality in general and especially in reciprocal action.

Thus in reference to Being and Essence, the Notion is defined as Essence reverted to the simple immediacy of Being; the shining or show of Essence thereby having actuality, and its actuality, being at the same time a free shining or show in itself.
In this manner the notion has being as its simple self-relation, or as the immediacy of its immanent unity.
Being is so poor a category that it is the least thing which can be shown to be found in the notion.

The passage from necessity to freedom, or from actuality into the notion, is the very hardest, because it proposes that independent actuality shall be thought as having all its substantiality in the getting across; and its identity with the other independent actuality.

The notion, too, is extremely hard, because it is itself just this very identity.

But the actual substance as such, the cause, which in its exclusiveness resists all invasion, is, by the fact itself, subjected to necessity or the destiny of passing into dependency. And it is this subjection rather where the chief hardness lies.
To think necessity, on the contrary, rather tends to melt that hardness. For thinking means that, in the other, one meets with one's self. It means a liberation, which is not the flight of abstraction, but consists in that which is actual having itself not as something else, but as its own being and creation, in the other actuality with which it is bound up by the force of necessity.

The notion itself realizes, for its own, both the power of necessity and actual freedom.

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

The position taken up by the notion is that of absolute idealism.

The notion is the principle of all life, and thus possesses at the same time a attribute of thorough concreteness.

The notion, in short, is what contains all the earlier categories of thought merged in it. It certainly is a form, but an infinite and creative form, which includes, but at the same time releases from itself, the fullness of all content.
The notion may be styled abstract, if the name concrete is restricted to the concrete facts of sense or of immediate perception. For the notion is not palpable to the touch, and when we are engaged with it, hearing and seeing must quite fail us. And yet, as it was before remarked, the notion is a true concrete; for the reason that it involves Being and Essence, and the total wealth of these two spheres with them, merged in the unity of thought.


The onward movement of the notion is no longer either a transition into, or a reflection on something else, but Development. For in the notion, the elements distinguished are declared to be identical with one another and with the whole, and the specific attribute of each is a free being of the whole notion.

Transition into something else is the dialectical process within the range of Being; Reflection within the range of Essence.
The movement of the Notion is
Development; by which, that only is explicit, which is already implicitly present.
In the world of nature it is organic life that corresponds to the grade of the notion. Thus the plant is developed from its germ. The germ virtually involves the whole plant, but does so only ideally or in thought; and it would therefore be a mistake to regard the development of the root, stem,
leaves, and other different parts of the plant, as meaning that they were present, even in a very minute form, in the germ.
Notion is the development of its own self.


_________


The doctrine of the notion is divided into three parts,
- (A) The doctrine of the Subjective Notion.
- (B) The doctrine of the notion invested with the attribute of immediacy, or Objectivity.
- (C) The doctrine of the Idea, the subject-object, the unity of notion and objectivity, the absolute truth.


A. The Subjective Notion.

(a) The Notion as Notion.

The Notion as Notion contains the three following 'moments' or functional parts,
(i) The first is Universality meaning that it is in free
equality with itself in its specific attribute.
(ii) The second is Particularity that is, the specific attribute, in which the universal continues serenely equal to itself.
(iii) The third is Individuality meaning, the reflection-into-self of the specific attributes of universality and particularity; which negative self-unity has complete and original determinateness; without any loss to its self identity or universality.
Individual and actual are, in a way, the same thing.
Only the individual has issued from the notion, and is thus, as a universal, stated expressly as a negative identity with itself.
While the actual, because it is at
first no more than a potential or immediate unity of essence and existence, may possibly have effect. But the individuality of the notion is the very source of effectiveness; effective no longer as the cause is, with a show of effecting something else, but effective of itself.
Individuality, however, is not to be understood to mean the immediate or natural individual, as when we speak of individual things or individual men; but the individual or subject is the notion expressly put as a totality.

Universality:
The notion is generally associated in our minds with abstract generality, and on that account it is often described as a general conception. We speak, accordingly, of the notions of color, plant, animal, etc. They are supposed to be arrived at by neglecting the particular features which distinguish the different colors, plants, and animals from each other, and by retaining those common to them all. This is the aspect of the notion which is familiar to understanding; and feeling is in the right when it stigmatizes such hollow and empty notions as mere phantoms and shadows.

But the universal of the notion is not a mere sum of features common to several things, confronted by a particular which enjoys an existence of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularizing or self-specifying, and with undimmed clearness finds itself at home in its antithesis. For the sake of both, cognition, and of our practical conduct, it is of the utmost importance that the real
universal should not be confused with what is merely held in common. All those charges which the devotees of feeling make against thought, and the
reiterated statement that it is dangerous to carry thought
to what they call too great lengths, originate in the confusion of these two things.



Now, the notion is not something which is originated at all.
No doubt the notion is not mere Being, or the immediate. It involves mediation, but the mediation lies in itself. In other words, the notion is what is mediated through itself and with itself.
It is a mistake to imagine that the objects which form the content of our mental ideas come first; and that our subjective agency then supervenes, and by the aforesaid operation of abstraction, and by linking the points possessed in common by the objects, we frame notions of them.
Rather the notion is the genuine first; and things are what they are through the action of the notion, immanent in them, and revealing itself in them.

The notion is concrete out and out; because the negative unity with itself, as characterization pure and entire, which is individuality, is just what constitutes its self-relation, its
universality. The functions or 'moments' of the notion are to this extent indissoluble.

Universality, particularity, and individuality, taken in the abstract, are the same as identity, difference, and ground.
But the universal is the self-identical, with the express qualification, that it simultaneously contains the particular and the individual.

Again, the particular is the different or the specific attribute, but with the qualification that it is in itself universal and is as an individual.

Similarly the individual must be understood to be a subject or substratum, which involves the genus and species in itself and possesses a substantial existence.

Such is the explicit or realized inseparability of the functions of the notion in their difference; what may be called the clearness of the notion.

The true distinctions in the notion, namely; universal, particular, and individual, may be said to constitute species of it, but only when they are kept severed from each other by external reflection.

Notions are, ordinary, classified as: clear - distinct - and adequate.
- a clear notion is an abstract simple representation.
- a distinct notion is one where, in addition to the simplicity, there is a 'mark' or attribute emphasized, as a sign for subjective cognition.
- an adequate notion comes nearer to the notion proper, or even the Idea. It expresses the formal circumstance that a notion agrees with its object; that is, with an external thing.

No complaint is oftener made against the notion than that it is abstract. Of course it is abstract, if abstract means that the medium in which the notion exists is thought and not the sensible thing in its empirical concreteness. It is abstract also, because the notion falls short of the idea.

To this extent the subjective notion is still formal. This however does not mean that
it ought to have or receive another content than its own. It is itself the absolute form, and so is all specific attribute, but as that attribute is in its truth.
Although it be abstract therefore, it is the concrete, concrete altogether, the subject as such. The absolutely concrete is the mind.


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

The immanent differentiating and specifying of the notion come to sight in the Judgment; for to judge is to specify the notion.



The Judgment.

The Judgment is the notion in its particularity.

By saying 'This rose is red,' or 'This picture is beautiful,' we declare, that it is not we who from outside attach beauty to the picture or redness to the
rose, but that these are the characteristics proper to these objects.

The notion does not stand still in its own immobility. It is rather an infinite form, of boundless activity, and thereby self-differentiating.
This disruption of the notion into the difference of its constituent functions, is the judgment.

A judgment therefore means the particularizing of the notion.
The notion is implicitly the particular. But in the notion, the particular is not yet explicit, and still remains in transparent unity with the universal. Thus, for example, the germ of a plant contains its particular, such as root, branches, leaves, etc.; but these details are at first present only potentially, and are not realized till the germ uncloses. This unclosing is the judgment of the plant.

The illustration may also serve to show how neither the notion nor the judgment are merely found in our head, or merely framed by us. The notion is the very
heart of things, and makes them what they are.
To form a notion of an object means therefore to become aware of its notion; and when we proceed to a criticism or judgment of the object, we are not performing a subjective act, and merely ascribing this or that predicate to the object. We are, on the contrary, observing the object in the specific attribute imposed by its notion.

The Judgment is usually taken in a subjective sense as an operation and a form, occurring merely in self-conscious thought.

Universality and individuality are distinguished, but the one is at the same time identical with the other.


The judgment is an expression of finitude.
Things are said to be finite, because their definite being and their universal nature, are elements in the constitution which are different and separable.

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

However, to define the subject as that of which something is said, and the predicate as what is said about it, gives no information about the distinction between the two.
In point of thought, the subject is primarily the individual, and the predicate the universal.

As the judgment receives further development, the subject ceases to be merely the immediate individual, and the predicate merely the abstract universal. The subject acquires the additional significations of particular and universal; and the predicate, the additional significations of particular and individual.
Thus, while the same names are given to the two terms of the judgment, their meaning passes through a series of changes.

We now go closer into the specialty of subject and predicate.
The subject as negative self-relation is the stable substratum in which the predicate has its subsistence and where it is ideally present.
Further, as the subject is immediately concrete, the specific connotation of the predicate is only one of the numerous attributes of the subject. Thus the subject is ampler and wider than the predicate. 

Conversely, the predicate as universal is self-subsistent, and indifferent whether this subject is or not. The predicate outdoes the subject, containing it under itself; and hence, is wider than the subject. 

The specific content of the predicate alone constitutes the identity of the two. 

At first, subject, predicate, and the specific content or the identity are put in the judgment as different and divergent.
In their notion, however, they are identical.
For the subject is a concrete totality, individuality alone; the particular and the universal in an identity. And the predicate too is the very same unity.
The copula ‘is’, even while stating the identity of subject and predicate, does so at first only by an abstract 'is.'

Conformably to such an
identity the subject has to be put also in the characteristic of the predicate. By this means the latter also receives the characteristic of the former. So that the copula receives its full
complement and full force. Such is the continuous specification by which the judgment, through a copula charged with content, comes to be a syllogism.

As it is primarily exhibited in the judgment, this gradual specification consists in giving to an originally abstract, sensuous universality the specific attribute of allness, of species, of genus, and finally of the developed universality of the notion.

The judgment passes through different stages to come to be a syllogism; the last one being the judgment of the Notion.

The Judgment of the Notion has for its content the notion, the totality in simple form, the universal with its complete specialty.

First the subject is asserted:
"This house, being so and so constituted, is good or bad."
This is the Assertory judgment.
It is, as well, a Problematical judgment.

But when we attach the objective particularity to the subject and make its specialty the constitutive feature of its existence, the subject then expresses the connection of that objective particularity with its constitution, its genus; and thus expresses what forms the content of the predicate. [This (the immediate individuality) house (the genus), being so and so constituted (particularity), is good or bad.]
This is the Apodictic judgment.
All things are a genus (in other words, they have a meaning and purpose) in an individual actuality of a particular constitution.
And they are finite, because the particular in them may and also may not conform to the universal.

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


The Syllogism.

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

The Syllogism is the reasonable.

What is a Syllogism but a realizing of the notion, at first in form only.
Accordingly the Syllogism is the essential ground of whatever is
true.

Everything is a notion, the existence of which is the differentiation of its members or functions, so that the universal nature of the Notion gives itself external reality by means of particularity, and thereby, and as a negative reflection-into-self, makes itself an individual.
Or, conversely, the actual thing isan individual, which by means of particularity rises to universality and makes itself identical with itself.

The actual is one; but it is also the divergence from each other of the constituent elements of the notion; and the Syllogism represents the orbit of intermediation of its elements, by which it realizes its unity.

The Syllogism, like the notion and the judgment, is usually described as a form merely of our subjectivethinking.
The Syllogism, it is said, is the process of proving the judgment. And certainly the judgment does in every case refer us to the Syllogism.
The step from the one to the other however is not brought about by our subjective action, but by the judgment itself which puts itself as Syllogism, and in the conclusion returns to the unity of the notion.

The precise point by which we pass to the Syllogism is found in the Apodictic judgment. In it we have an individual which by means of its qualities connects itself with its universal or notion.
This (individual) house (universal), being so and so constituted (particularity), is good.
Here we see the particular becoming the mediating mean between the individual and the universal. This gives the fundamental form of the Syllogism, the gradual specification of which, formally considered, consists in the fact that universal and individual also occupy this place of mean. This again paves the way for the passage from subjectivity to objectivity.

This passage has the following stages:
(a) Qualitative Syllogism.
(b) Quantitative Syllogism.
(c) Syllogism of Reflection.
(d) Syllogism of Necessity.


Here, for simplicity sake, we will only deal with the first syllogism; namely, the Qualitative Syllogism.

The first syllogism is a syllogism of definite being, a Qualitative Syllogism.
(1) Its form is:

I P U

A subject as (I)ndividual is coupled with a (U)niversal attribute by means of a (P)articular quality.

Through the immediate syllogism I P U, the Individual is mediated (through a Particular) with the Universal, and in this conclusion put as a universal.
It follows that the individual subject, becoming itself a universal, serves to unite the two extremes, and to form their ground of intermediation.

This gives the second figure of the syllogism,
(2) its form is:

U I P

A (U)niversal is coupled with a (P)articular by means of an (I)ndividual.

It expresses the truth of the first; it shows in other words that the intermediation has taken place in the individual, and is thus something contingent.

The universal, which in the first conclusion was specified through individuality, passes over into the second figure and there now occupies the place that belonged to the immediate subject.
In the second figure it is concluded with the particular.

By this conclusion therefore the universal is explicitly put as particular and is now made to mediate between the two extremes, the places
of which are occupied by the two others (the particular and the individual).

This is the third figure of the syllogism:
(3) its form is:

P U I

A (P)articular is coupled with an (I)ndividual by means of a (U)niversal .


In their objective sense, the three figures of the syllogism declare that everything rational is manifested as a triple syllogism; that is to say, each one of the members takes in turn the place
of the extremes, as well as of the mean which reconciles them.

Such, for example, is the case with the three branches of philosophy; the Logical Idea, Nature, and Mind.

At first, Nature is the middle term which acknowledges the others together.
Nature, the totality immediately before us, unfolds itself into the two extremes of the Logical Idea and Mind . But Mind is Mind only when it is mediated through nature.

Then, Mind, which we know as the principle of individuality, or as the actualizing principle, is the mean; and Nature and the Logical Idea are the extremes. It is Mind which knows the Logical Idea in Nature and which thus raises Nature to its essence.

At last, the Logical Idea itself becomes the mean; it is the absolute substance both of mind and of nature, the universal and all-pervading principle. These are the members of the Absolute Syllogism.

This example of the Qualitative syllogism shows us how the syllogism performs.
Through the other stages of the evolution of the syllogism (although we have not covered them), namely the Quantitative syllogism, the syllogism of Reflection and the syllogism of Necessity; we arrive at the following conclusion:

The distinctions which the syllogism contains; and the general result of the course of their evolution has been to show that these differences work out their own abolition and destroy the notion's outwardness to its own self.
(i) Each of the dynamic elements has proved itself the systematic whole of these elements, in
short a whole syllogism, they are consequently implicitly identical. In the second place,
(ii) The negation of their distinctions and of the mediation of one through another constitutes independency; so that it is one and the same universal which is in these forms, and which is in this way also explicitly put as their identity.

The syllogistic process may be described as essentially involving the negation of the attributes through which its course runs. As being a mediative process through the
suspension of mediation. As coupling the subject not with another, but with a suspended other, in one word, with itself.

We might therefore say that, it is subjectivity itself which, in the syllogistic process, as
dialectical, breaks through its own barriers and opens out into objectivity by means of the syllogism.

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



B. The Object.

This transition from the Subject, the notion in general, and especially the syllogism, to the Object, may, at the first glance, appear strange, particularly if we suppose syllogizing to be only an act of consciousness.

By 'object' is commonly
understood not an abstract being, or an existing thing merely, or any sort of actuality, but something independent, concrete, and self-complete, this completeness being the totality of the notion.

That the object is also an object to us and is external to something else, will be more precisely seen, when it puts itself in contrast with the subjective.

At present, as that into which the notion has passed from its mediation, it is only immediate object and nothing more, just as the notion is not describable as subjective, previous to the subsequent contrast with objectivity.

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

It is evident that in all these transitions there is a further purpose than merely to show the indissoluble connection between the notion or thought and being. It has been more than once remarked that being is nothing more than simple self-relation, and this meager category is certainly implied in the notion, or even in thought.

What such a transition does, is to take the notion, as it ought to be primarily characterized per se as a notion, with which this remote abstraction of being, or even of
objectivity, has as yet nothing to do, and looking at its specific attribute as a notional attribute alone, to see when and whether it passes over into a form which is different from the attribute
as it belongs to the notion and appears in it.

If the Object, the product of this transition, be brought into relation with the notion, which, so far as its special form is concerned, has vanished in it, we may give a correct expression to the result, by saying that notion (or, if it be preferred, subjectivity) and object are implicitly the same. But it is equally correct to say that they are different. In short, the two modes of expression are equally correct and incorrect.


The Object is immediate being, because insensible to difference, which in it has suspended itself. It is, further, a totality in itself, while at the same time, it is equally indifferent to its immediate unity. It thus breaks up into distinct parts, each of which is itself the totality. Hence the object is the absolute contradiction between a complete independence of the multiplicity, and the equally complete non-independence of the different pieces.

The object is not rigid and processless. Its process is to show itself as what is at the same time subjective, and thus form the step onwards to the idea.

The object in its immediacy is the notion only potentially.
The notion as subjective is primarily outside it; and all its specific attribute is imposed from without.
As a unity of differents, it is a composite, an aggregate; and its capacity of acting on anything else continues to be an external relation.
In this connection and non-independence, the objects remain independent and offer resistance, external to each other.
These are mechanical relations; like pressure or impact.

Knowledge can be mechanical too; when, in the habit of memorization by repetition, our words have no meaning for us, but continue external to sense, conception and thought; and when, being similarly external to each other, they form a meaningless sequence. Conduct, piety, etc., are in the same way mechanical, when a man' s behavior is settled for him by ceremonial laws, by rites, by a spiritual adviser, etc. In short, when his own mind and will are not in his actions, which in this way are extraneous to himself.

Mechanism, the first form of objectivity, is also the category which primarily offers itself to reflection, as it examines the objective world. It is also the category beyond which reflection
seldom goes.
It is a shallow and superficial mode of observation; one that cannot carry us through in connection with Nature and still less in connection with the world of Mind.

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


Therefore comes the second form of objectivity; namely that the object is no more an indifferent reference to self, but an object that is completely in reference to something else.
Objects are, in this way, the absolute impulse towards integration by and in one another. This second form of objectivity, we will call Chemism.

The process consists in passing to and fro from one form to another; which forms continue to be as external as before.
In the neutral product the specific properties, which the extremes bore towards each other, are merged.
But although the product is conformable to the notion, the inspiring principle of active differentiation does not exist in it; for it has sunk back to immediacy. The neutral
body is therefore capable of disintegration.
The process does not rise above a conditioned and finite process.

Each of these two processes (mechanical and chemism,) the reduction of the not-indifferent to the neutral, and the differentiation of the indifferent or neutral, goes its own way without hindrance from the other. But that want of inner connection shows that they are finite, by their passage into products in which they are merged and lost.

Conversely the process exhibits the nonentity of the pre-supposed immediacy of the not-indifferent objects. By this negation of immediacy and of externalism in which the notion as object was sunk, it is liberated and invested with independent being in face of that externalism and immediacy. In these circumstances it is the End (Final Cause).

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

In the End, the notion has entered on free existence and has a being of its own, by means of the negation of immediate objectivity. It is characterized as subjective, seeing that this negation is, in the first place, abstract, and hence at first the relation between it and objectivity still one of contrast. This attribute of subjectivity, compared with the totality of the notion, is one-sided for the End itself; in which all specific attributes have been put as subordinated and merged.

For it has only hypothetical (ideal) reality, essentially no-reality.
The End in short is a contradiction of its self-identity against the negation stated in it, that is to say, its antithesis to objectivity, and being so, contains the eliminative or destructive activity which negates the antithesis and renders it identical with itself.

This is the realization of the End;
in which, while it turns itself into the other of its subjectivity and objectifies itself, thus canceling the distinction between the two, it has only closed with itself, and retained itself.

The notion of End, is the rational notion, and contrasted with the abstract universal of understanding. The latter only contains the particular, and so connects it with itself; but has it not in its own nature.

The End requires to be speculatively apprehended as the notion, which itself in the proper unity and ideality of its characteristics, contains the judgment or negation; the antithesis of subjective and objective, and which to an equal extent suspends that antithesis.

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

The development from End to Idea ensues by three stages:
- First: Subjective End;
- Second: End in process of accomplishment;
- Third: End accomplished.

What virtually happens in the realizing of the End, is that the one-sided subjectivity of the universal and the show of objective independence of the individual confronting it, are both canceled.
In laying hold of the means, the notion constitutes itself the very implicit essence of the object. In the mechanical and chemical processes the independence of the object has been already dissipated implicitly, and in
the course of their movement under the dominion of the End, the show of that independence, the negative which confronts the notion, is got rid of.

But in the fact that the End achieved is characterized only as a Means and a material, this object, namely the teleological, is there and then put as implicitly nil, and only 'ideal.'
This being so, the antithesis between form and content has also vanished.
While the End by the removal and absorption of all form-characteristics blends with itself; the form as self-identical is thereby put as the content, so that the notion, which is the action of 'form,' has only itself for content.
Through this process, therefore, there is made explicitly manifest what was the notion of End; namely the implicit unity of subjective and objective is now realized. And this is the Idea.



C. The Idea.

The Idea is truth in itself and for itself, the absolute unity of the notion and objectivity.
Its 'ideal' content is the notion in its detailed terms.
Its 'real' content is the exhibition which the notion gives itself in the form of external existence.

The Absolute is the Idea.

The Idea is the Truth; for Truth is the correspondence of objectivity with the notion.
Not of course the correspondence of external things with my conceptions, for these are only correct conceptions held by me, as an individual person. In the idea we have nothing to do
with the individual, nor with figurative conceptions, nor with external things.

Every individual being is some one aspect of the Idea; for which, therefore, yet other actualities are needed, which in their turn appear to have a self-subsistence of their own. It is only in them altogether and in their relation that the notion is
realized.
The individual by itself does not correspond to its notion. It is this limitation of its existence which constitutes the finitude and the ruin of the individual.

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

Because it has no existence, it is no less false to imagine the Idea to be mere abstraction. It
is abstract certainly, in so far as everything untrue is consumed in it; but in its own self it is essentially concrete, because it is the free notion giving attribute to itself, and that attribute is reality.
It would be an abstract form, only if the notion, which is its principle, were taken as an abstract unity, and not as the negative return of it into self and as the subjectivity which it really is.


Truth is at first taken to mean that I know how something is. This is truth, however, only in reference to consciousness; it is formal truth, bare correctness.
Truth in the deeper sense consists in the identity between objectivity and the notion. It is in this deeper sense of truth that we speak of a true work of art, for instance. These objects are true, if they are as they ought to be; in other words, if their reality corresponds to their notion.

When thus viewed, to be untrue means much the same as
to be bad. A bad man is an untrue man, a man who does not behave as his notion or his vocation requires.
Nothing however can subsist, if it be wholly devoid of identity between the notion and
reality. Even bad and untrue things have being, in so far as their reality still, somehow, conforms to their notion. Whatever is thoroughly bad or contrary to the notion, is for that very reason on the way to ruin.

It is by the notion alone that the things in the world have their subsistence.


The intellectual ascertainment of the Idea has constantly been based on the consciousness of an absolute unity; whereas the understanding sees and accepts only separation.

The Idea is not mediated through something else than itself. It is rather its own result, and being so, is no less immediate than mediate.

The stages considered so far, namely those of Being and Essence, as well as those of Notion and of Objectivity, are not something permanent, resting upon themselves. They have proved to be dialectical; and their only truth is that they are dynamic elements of the idea.

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

Since this double movement is not separate or distinct in time, the Idea is the eternal vision of itself in the other, notion which in its objectivity has carried out
itself. Object which is inward design, essential subjectivity.


The Idea is the infinite judgment, of which the terms are the independent totality; and in which, as each grows to the fulness of its own nature, passes into the other.

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

As the idea is (a) a process, it follows that such an expression for the Absolute as unity of thought and being, of finite and infinite, etc. is false; for unity expresses an abstract and merely quiescent identity. As the Idea is (b) subjectivity, it follows that the expression is equally false on another account. That unity of which it speaks expresses a merely virtual or underlying presence of the genuine unity.

The infinite would thus seem to be merely neutralized by the finite, the subjective by the objective, thought by being.

But in the negative unity of the Idea, the infinite overlaps and includes the finite, thought overlaps being, subjectivity overlaps objectivity.
The unity of the Idea is thought, infinity, and subjectivity, and is in
consequence to be essentially distinguished from the Idea as substance, just as this overlapping subjectivity, thought, or infinity is to be distinguished from the one-sided subjectivity, one-sided thought, one-sided infinity to which it descends in judging and defining.

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


Life.

The immediate idea is Life. As soul, the notion is realized in a body of whose externality the soul is the immediate self-relating universality. But the soul is also its particularization, so
that the body expresses no other distinctions than follow from the characterizations of its notion. And finally it is the Individuality of the body as infinite negativity, the dialectic of that bodily objectivity, with its parts lying out of one another, conveying them away from the semblance of independent subsistence, back into subjectivity; so that all the members are reciprocally
momentary means as well as momentary ends. Thus as life is the initial particularization, so it results in the negative self-asserting unity. In the dialectic of its corporeality, it only coalesces
with itself.

The living individual, which in its first process comports itself as intrinsically subject and notion, through its second process, assimilates its external objectivity and thus puts the attribute of reality into itself.

It is now therefore implicitly a Kind, with essential universality of nature.

The living being dies, because it is a contradiction. Implicitly it is the universal or Kind, and yet immediately it exists as an individual only.
In the process of Kind the immediate living being mediates itself with itself, and thus rises above its immediacy, only however to sink back into it again.
Life thus runs away, in the first instance, only into the false infinity of the progress ad infinitum. The real result, however, of the process of life, in the point of its notion, is to merge and overcome that immediacy with which the idea, in the shape of life, is still beset.

Cognition in general.

The idea exists free for itself, in so far as it has universality for the medium of its existence.

For the subjective idea, the objective is the immediate world found ready to hand, or the idea, as life, is in the phenomenon of individual existence.
At the same time, in so far as this judgment is pure distinguishing within its own limits, the idea realizes in one, both itself and its other.
Consequently, it is the certitude of the virtual identity between itself and the objective world. Reason comes to the world with an absolute faith in its ability to make the identity actual, and to raise its certitude to truth; and with the instinct of realizing explicitly the nility of that contrast which it sees to be implicitly nil.

This process is in general terms Cognition. In Cognition, in a single act, the contrast is virtually superseded, as regards both the one-sidedness of subjectivity and the one-sidedness of
objectivity. At first, however, the supersession of the contrast is but implicit. The process as such is in consequence immediately infected with the finitude of this sphere, and splits into the
twofold movement of the instinct of reason, presented as two different movements.

On the one hand it supersedes the one-sidedness of the Idea's subjectivity, by receiving the existing world into itself; into subjective conception and thought; and with this objectivity, which is thus taken to be real and true for its content, it fills up the abstract certitude of itself.

On the other hand, it supersedes the one-sidedness of the objective world, which is now, on the contrary, estimated as only a mere semblance; a collection of contingencies and shapes at bottom visionary. It modifies
and informs that world, by the inward nature of the subjective, which is here taken to be the genuine objective.

The former is Cognition; the Theoretical action of the idea.

The latter is the instinct of the Good to fulfill the same; the Practical activity of the idea or Volition.

Volition:

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

This action of the Will is finite; and its finitude lies in the contradiction that the End of the Good is just as much not executed as executed; the end in question is put as unessential as much as essential; as actual and at the same time as merely possible. This contradiction presents itself to imagination as an endless progress in the actualizing of the Good; which is therefore set up and fixed as a mere 'ought,' or goal of perfection.

This contradiction vanishes when the action supersedes the subjectivity of the purpose, (and along with it the objectivity,) with the contrast which makes both finite; abolishing subjectivity as a whole and not merely the one-sidedness of this form of it.

This return into itself is, at the same time, the content's own
'recollection' that it is the Good and the implicit identity of the two sides. It is a 'recollection' of the pre-supposition of the theoretical attitude of mind that the objective world is its own truth and substantiality.

While Intelligence merely proposes to take the world as it is, Will takes steps to make the world what it ought to be.

Will looks upon the immediate and given present, not as solid being, but as mere semblance without reality. It is here that we meet those contradictions which are so bewildering from the standpoint of abstract morality. This position in its 'practical' bearings is the one taken by the philosophy of Kant. The Good, he says, has to be realized; we have to work in order to produce it; and Will is only the Good actualizing itself.

If the world then were as it ought to be, the action of Will would be at an end. The Will itself therefore requires that its End should not be realized.
In these words, a correct expression is given to the finitude of Will. But finitude was not meant to be the ultimate point; and it is the process of Will itself which abolishes finitude and the contradiction it involves.

The reconciliation is achieved,
when Will, in its result, returns to the pre-supposition made by cognition. In other words, it consists in the unity of the theoretical and practical idea. Will knows the end to be its own, and Intelligence apprehends the world as the notion actual.
This is the right attitude of rational cognition.


Nility and transitoriness constitute only the superficial features and not the real
essence of the world.
All unsatisfied endeavor ceases, when we recognize that the final purpose of the world is accomplished no less than ever accomplishing itself.

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



The Absolute Idea.

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

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


Seeing that there is in it no transition, or presupposition, and in general no specific attribute other than what is fluid and transparent, the Absolute Idea is for itself the pure form of
the notion, which contemplates its content as its own self. It is its own content, in so far as it ideally distinguishes itself from itself, and the one of the two things distinguished is a self-identity in which however, is contained the totality of the form, as the system of terms describing its content. This content is the system of Logic or Thinking.

The true content of the Absolute Idea is only the whole system of which we have been studying the development so far.
It may also be said that the absolute idea is the universal, but the universal not merely as an abstract form to which the particular content is a stranger, but as the absolute form, into which all the categories, the whole fullness of the content it has given being to, have retired. The absolute idea may in this respect be compared to the old man who utters the same creed as the child, but for whom it is pregnant with the significance of a lifetime.

The same may be said to be the case with human life as a whole and the occurrences with which it is fraught. All work is directed only to the aim or end; and when it is attained, people are surprised to find nothing else but just the very thing which they had wished for.
The interest lies in the whole movement.
When a man traces up the steps of his life, the end may appear to him very restricted; but in it the whole process of his life is comprehended.
So, too, the content of the absolute idea is the whole breadth of ground which has passed under our view up
to this point.

Last of all comes the discovery that the whole evolution is what constitutes the content and the interest. We have now the knowledge that the content is the living development of the idea. This simple retrospect is contained in the form of the idea. Each of the stages is an image of the absolute, but at first in a limited mode, and thus it is forced onwards to the whole, the evolution of which is what is termed Method.

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

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

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



The abstract form of the advance is:
- in Being, an other and transition into an other.
- in Essence showing (Reflection,) in the opposite.
- in Notion, the distinction of individual from universality, which continues itself as such into, and is as an identity with, what is distinguished from it.

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

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


(c) The third stage is The End.

The second sphere (reflection,) develops the relation of the differents to what it primarily is, to the contradiction in its own nature.

That contradiction which is seen in the infinite progress is
resolved into the End, where the "differenced" is explicitly stated as what it is in notion. The end is the negative of the first, and as the identity with that, is the negativity of itself. It is consequently the unity in which both of these Firsts, the immediate and the real First, are made constituent stages in thought, merged, and at the same time preserved in the unity.

The notion, which from its implicitness thus comes by means of its differentiation and the merging of that differentiation to close with itself, is the realized notion; the notion which contains
the relativity, or dependence of its special features, in its own independence.
It is the idea which, as absolutely first, regards this end as merely the disappearance of the
show or semblance, which made the beginning appear immediate, and made itself seem a result. It is the knowledge that the idea is the one systematic whole.

The idea is a systematic totality which is only one idea, of which the several elements are each implicitly the idea, while they equally, by the dialectic of the notion, produce the simple independence of the idea.

It is the pure idea for which the idea is.

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