Matter is not a thing that exists

²⁴⁹ To the consciousness observing, the truth of the law is given in “experience” i.e. sense existence is object for consciousness. The truth is not given in and itself.

If, however, the law does not have its truth for in the notion, it is something contingent, not a necessity, in fact, not a law.

But its being essentially in the form of a notion does not merely not contradict its being present for observation to deal with, but really gives it on that account necessary existence, and makes it an object for observation.

The universal in the sense of a rational universality is also universal in the sense implied in the above notion: its being is for consciousness, it presents itself there as the real, the objective present; the notion sets itself forth in the form of thinghood and sensuous existence.

But it does not, on that account, lose its nature and fall into the condition of immovable subsisting passivity, or mere adventitious (gleichgültig) succession.

What is universally valid is also universally effective:

• what should be, as a matter of fact, is too
• what merely should be, and is not, has no real truth.

The instinct of reason is entirely within its rights when it stands firm on this point. It refuses to be led astray by entia intellectus which merely should be and, qua ought, should be allowed to have truth even though they are to be met with nowhere in experience.

It declines to be turned aside by the hypothetical suggestions and all the other impalpable unrealities designed in the interest of an everlasting “ought to be” which never is. (1)

For reason is just this certainty of having reality. What consciousness is not aware of as a real self (Selbstwesen), i.e. what does not appear, is nothing for consciousness at all.

^'250' The true nature of law is that law essentially is reality.

It again assumes for consciousness (which remains at the level of observation), the form of an opposite of the notion and the inherently universal.

In other words, this consciousness does not take such an object as its law to be a reality of reason. It thinks it has got there something external and foreign.

But it contradicts its own idea by actually and in fact not taking its universality to mean that all individual things of sense must have given evidence of the law to enable the truth of the law to be asserted.

The assertion that stones, when raised from the ground and lot go, fall, does not at all require us to make the experiment with all stones.

It means most likely that this experiment must have been tried at least with a good many, and from that we can by analogy draw an inference about the rest with the greatest probability or with perfect right.

Yet analogy not only gives no perfect right, but, on account of its nature, contradicts itself so often that the inference to be drawn from analogy itself rather is that analogy does not permit an inference to be drawn.

Probability, which is what analogy would come to, loses, when face to face with truth, every distinction of less and greater; be the probability as great as it may it is nothing as against truth. The instinct of reason, however, takes, as a matter of fact, laws of that sort for truth.

It is when reason does not find necessity in them that it resorts to making this distinction, and lowers the truth of the matter to the level of probability, in order to bring out the imperfect way in which truth is presented to the consciousness that as yet has no insight into the pure notion; for universality is before it there merely in the form of simple immediate universality.

But, at the same time, on account of this universality, the law has truth for consciousness. That a stone falls is true for consciousness, because it is aware of the stone being heavy, i.e. because in weight, taken by itself as such, the stone has that essential relation to the earth expressed in the fact of falling.

Consciousness thus finds in experience the objective being of the law, but has it there in the form of a notion as well; and only because of both factors together is the law true for consciousness.

The law, therefore, is accepted as a law because it presents itself in the sphere of appearance and is, at the same time, in its very nature a notion.

^'251' The instinct of reason in this type of consciousness, because the law is at the same time inherently a notion, proceeds to give the law and its moments a purely conceptual form; and proceeds to do this of necessity, but without knowing that this is what it seeks to do.

It puts the law to the test of experiment.

As the law first appears, it is enveloped in particulars of sense, and the notion constituting its nature is involved with empirical elements.

The instinct of reason sets to work to find out by experiment what follows in such and such circumstances. By so doing the law seems only to be plunged still further into sense; but sense existence really gets lost in the process.

The inner purport of this investigation is to find pure conditions of the law; and this means nothing else (even if the consciousness stating the fact were to think it meant something different) than completely to bring out the law in conceptual shape and detach its moments entirely from determinate specific existence.

For example, negative electricity is in the form of resin-electricity, while positive electricity comes before us as glass-electricity.

These, by means of experiments, lose such a significance, and become purely positive and negative electricity. Neither of which is bound up any longer with things of a particular kind.

We can no longer say that there are bodies which are electrical positively, others electrical negatively.

In the same way the relationship of acid and base and their reaction constitute a law in which these opposite factors appear as bodies.

Yet these sundered things have no reality; the power which tears them apart cannot prevent them from entering forthwith into a process; for they are merely this relation.

They cannot subsist and be indicated by themselves apart, like a tooth or a claw.

That it is their very nature to pass over directly into a neutral product makes their existence lie in being cancelled and superseded, or makes it into a universal.

Acid and base possess truth merely qua Universal.

Just, then, as glass and resin can be equally well positively as negatively electrified, in the same way acid and base are not attached as properties or qualities to this or that reality; each thing is only relatively acidulate and basic.

What seems to be an absolute base or an absolute acid gets in the so-called Synsomates (2) the opposite significance in relation to an other.

The result of the experiments is in this way to:

• cancel the moments or inner significations as properties of specific things, and
• free the predicates from their subjects.

These predicates are found merely as universal, and in truth that is what they are.

Because of this self-subsistence they get the name of kinds of “matter”, which is neither a body nor a property of a body. No one would call acid, positive and negative electricity, heat, (3) etc., bodies.

^'252' Matter, on the contrary, is not a thing that exists.

It is being in the sense of universal being, or being in the way the concept is being.

Reason, still instinctive, correctly draws this distinction without being conscious that reason, by its testing the law in every sense-particular, cancels the mere sensuous existence of the law.

When it construes the moments of the law as forms of matter, their essential nature is taken to be something universal, and specifically expressed as a non-sensuous element of sense, an incorporeal and yet objective existence.

^'253' What turn does its result take?

What new shape this activity of observation will, in consequence, assume?

The outcome and truth of this experimentation we find pure law, which is freed from sensuous elements; we see it as a concept, which, while present in sense, operates there independently and unrestrained, while enveloped in sense, is detached from it and is a concept bare and simple.

This, which is in truth result and essence, now comes before this consciousness itself, but as an object; moreover, since the object is not exactly a result for it and is unrelated to the preceding process, the object is a specific kind of object, and the relation of consciousness to it takes the form of another kind of observation.

^'254' Such an object which sustains the procedure in the simple activity of the notion is an organism.

Organic existence is this absolutely fluid condition wherein determinateness, which would only put it in relation to an other, is dissolved.

Inorganic things involve determinateness in their very essence. On that account, a thing realizes the completeness of the moments of the notion only along with another thing, and hence gets lost when it enters the dialectic movement.

In the case of an organic being, on the other hand, all determinate characteristics, by means of “which it is palpable to another, are held under the control of the simple organic unity.

None of them comes forward as essential and capable of detaching itself from the rest and relating itself to an other being. What is organic, therefore, preserves itself in its very relation.

^'255' The aspects of law on which the instinct of reason directs its observation here are, as we see from the above, in the first instance organic nature and inorganic nature in their relation to one another.

The latter means for organic nature just the free play-a freedom opposed to the simple notion of organic nature — loosely connected characteristics in which individuated nature is at once dissolved, and out of the continuity of which the individuated unit of nature at the same time breaks away and exists separately.

Air, water, earth, zones and climate are universal elements of this sort, which make up the indeterminate simple being of natural individualities, and in which these are at the same time reflected into themselves.

Neither the individuality nor the natural element is absolutely self-contained. On the contrary: in the independent detachment, which observation finds these assuming towards one another, they stand at the same time in essential relation to one another, but in such a way that their independence and mutual indifference form the predominating feature, and only in part become abstractions.

Here, then, law appears as the relation of an element to the formative process of the organic being, which at one moment has the element over against itself, at another exhibits it within its own self-determining organic structure.

But laws like these: animals belonging to the air are of the nature of birds, those belonging to water have the constitution of fish, animals in northerly latitudes have thick coats of hair, and so on-such laws exhibit a degree of poverty which does not do justice to the manifold variety of organic nature.

The free activity of organic nature:

• can readily divest its forms of determinate characters like theses
• everywhere presents exceptions to such laws or rules

The characterization of those very animals to which they do apply is so very superficial that even the necessity of the “laws” can be nothing else but superficial to. It does not carry us further than what is implied in speaking of the “great influence” of environment on the organism.

This does not tell us what properly is due to that influence and what is not.

Such like relations of organic beings to the elements they live in cannot therefore be strictly called laws at all.

For, on the one hand, such a relation, when we look at its content, does not exhaust, as we saw, the range of the organic beings considered, and on the other, the terms of the relation itself stand indifferently apart from one another and express no necessity.

In the concept of an acid lies the notion of a base, just as the notion of positive electricity implies that of negative; but even though we do find as a fact a thick coat of hair associated with northerly latitudes, the structure of a fish with water, or that of birds with air, there is nothing in the notion of the north implying the notion of a thick covering of hair, the notion of the structure of fish does not lie in the notion of the sea, nor that of birds in that of the air.

Because of this free detachment of the two notions from one another there are, as a fact also land animals with the essential characters of a bird, of fish, and so on.

The necessity, just because it cannot be conceived to be an inner necessity of the object, ceases also to have a foothold in sense, and can be no longer observed in actual reality, but has quitted the sphere of reality.

Finding thus no place in the real object itself, it becomes what is called a “teleological relation”, a relation which is external to what is related, and consequently the very reverse of a law of its constitution.

It is an idea entirely detached from the necessity of nature, a thought which leaves this necessity of nature behind and floats above it all by itself. (4)