Specific Law and General Law

1. Specific Law and General Law

¹⁵¹ The Law of Universal Attraction is the bare conception of law. It is in contrast to the determinate laws.

In so far as this pure conception is looked on as the essentially real, or as the true inner being, the determinateness characterizing the specific law itself belongs still to the sphere of appearance, or rather to sensible existence.

But the pure conception of law transcends not merely the law, which, being itself a determinate law, stands contrasted with other determinate laws, but also transcends law as such.

That determinateness is itself strictly a mere vanishing moment which can no longer come forward here as an essential entity (Wesenheit). This is because it is only the law which is the truth here.

But the conception of law is turned against the law itself.

• In the law, distinction itself is immediately apprehended and taken up into the universal.
• This expresses relation as moments.
• These moments subsist as mutually indifferent and inherently real entities.

These parts of the distinction found in the law are, however, at the same time determinate aspects themselves.

The pure concept of law, as universal attraction, must, to get its true significance, be so apprehended that in it, as the absolutely single and simple, the distinctions which are present in law as such, return again themselves into the inner being, qua bare and simple unity.

This unity is the inner “necessity” of the law.

2. Law and Force

¹⁵² The law is thereby present in a twofold form.

In one case, the differences are expressed as independent moments.

In the other, it is in the form of a simple withdrawal into itself, which again can be called Force.

But it is in the sense not of repressed force [spoken of above], but force in general, or the concept of force, an abstraction which absorbs the distinctions involved in what attracts and is attracted.

In this sense, e.g., simple electricity is force; the expression of difference falls, however, within the law; this difference is positive and negative electricity.

In the case of the motion of falling bodies force is the simple element, gravity, which has the law that the magnitudes of the different factors in the motion, the time spent, and the space traversed, are to one another in the relation of root and square.

Electricity itself is not difference. It is not in its essential nature a twofold entity consisting of positive and negative electricity.

Hence it is often said it has the law of being so and so in the way indicated, or again, that it has the property of expressing itself in this fashion.

This property is the essential and peculiar property of this force, i.e. it belongs to it necessarily.

But necessity is here an empty phrase. Force must, just because it must, duplicate itself in this manner.

If positive electricity is given, negative electricity is inherently necessary. For the positive element only is by being related to a negative.

In other words, the positive element in its very self involves difference from itself, just in the same way as the negative does.

But that electricity as such should break itself up into parts in this way – this is not in itself a necessity.

Electricity qua simple force is indifferent to its law – to be in the form of positive and negative. If we call the former its notion and the latter its being, then its notion is indifferent to its being. It merely has this as a property, which just means that this is not per se necessary to it.

This indifference takes another form when it is said that to be positive and negative is involved in the definition of electricity, or that this is neither more nor less than its notion and its essence.

Its being in that case would mean its existence in general. But in that definition the necessity of its existence is not contained; it exists either because we find it, i.e. its existence is not necessary at all, or else it exists through other forces, i.e. the necessity of its existence is an external necessity.

But in that the determinateness of being through another is what the necessity consists in, we are back again to the plurality of determinate laws, which we have just left in order to consider law, as law. It is only with the latter that we can compare its notion as notion, or its necessity. This necessity, however, has in all these forms shown itself to be just an empty phrase.

¹⁵³ There is still another way than that just indicated in which the indifference of law and force, or of notion and being, is found.

In the law of motion, e.g., it is necessary for motion to be broken up into the elements time and space, or again, into distance and velocity.

Since motion is merely the relation of these f actors, motion, the universal, has in this way certainly distinct parts in its own self. But now these parts, time and space, or distance and velocity, do not express in themselves this origination from a single unity.

They are indifferent the one to the other. Space is thought of as able to be without. time, time without space, and distance at least without velocity – just as their magnitudes are indifferent the one to the other, since they are not related like positive and negative, and consequently do not refer to one another by their very nature. The necessity of partition into distinct factors, then, we certainly do have here; but not the necessity of the parts as such for one another.

On that account, however, that first necessity too is itself a merely delusory false necessity.

For motion is not itself thought of as something simple or as bare essence, but as, from the first, divided into elements; time and space are in themselves its independent parts or its real elements: in other words, distance and velocity are modes of being, or ways of thinking, each of which can very well be without the other.

Motion is consequently no more than their superficial relation, not their true nature. If it is represented as simple essence or as force, motion is no doubt gravity; but this does not contain these distinctions at all.