The foregoing consideration of the Notion shows it to be the unity of being and essence. Essence is the first negation of being, which has thereby become illusory being; the Notion is the second negation or the negation of this negation, and is therefore being once more, but being that has been restored as the infinite mediation and negativity of being within itself. Consequently, being and essence in the Notion no longer have the same determination that they had as being and essence, nor are they merely in a unity such that each has an illusory being in the other. Therefore the Notion does not differentiate itself into these determinations. It is the truth of the relationship of substance in which being and essence achieve the fulfilment of their self-subsistence and their determination through each other. The truth of substantiality proved to be the substantial identity which is no less a positedness and only as such is substantial identity. The positedness is a determinate being and differentiation; consequently, in the Notion, being-in-and-for-itself has attained a true and adequate reality, for the positedness is itself being-in-and-for-itself. This positedness constitutes the difference of the Notion within itself; because the positedness is immediately being-in-and-for-itself, the different moments of the Notion are themselves the whole Notion, universal in their determinateness and identical with their negation.
This, now, is the very Notion of the Notion. But it is as yet only its Notion; or, this Notion is itself only the Notion. Because it is equally being-in-and-for-self and also a positedness, or the absolute substance that manifests the necessity of distinct substances as an identity, this identity must itself posit what it is. The moments of the movement of the relationship of substantiality through which the Notion has come to be and the reality thereby exhibited are still only in transition into the Notion; this reality does not yet possess the determination of being the Notion's own, self-evolved determination; it fell in the sphere of necessity; but the Notion's own determination can only be the result of its free determining, a determinate being in which the Notion is identical with itself, its moments also being Notions and posited by the Notion itself.
At first, therefore, the Notion is only in itself or implicitly the truth; because it is only something inner, it is equally only outer. It is at first simply an immediate and in this guise its moments have the form of immediate, fixed determinations. It appears as the determinate Notion, as the sphere of the mere understanding. Because this form of immediacy is still inadequate to the nature of the Notion, for this is free, being in relation only with itself, it is an external form in which the Notion cannot count as a being-in-and-for-self, but only as something posited or subjective. The Notion in the guise of immediacy constitutes the point of view for which the Notion is a subjective thinking, a reflection external to the subject matter. This stage, therefore, constitutes subjectivity, or the formal Notion. Its externality is manifested in the fixed being of its determinations each of which appears independently as an isolated, qualitative something which is only externally related to its other. But the identity of the Notion, which is precisely their inner or subjective essence, sets them dialectically in movement, with the result that their separatedness vanishes and with it the separation of the Notion from the object, and there emerges as their truth the totality which is the objective Notion.
Secondly, the Notion in its objectivity is the subject matter in and for itself. Through its necessary, progressive determination the formal Notion makes itself its subject matter and in this way is rid of the relation of subjectivity and externality to the object. Or, conversely, objectivity is the real Notion that has emerged from its inwardness and passed over into determinate being. In this identity with the object, the Notion thus has a free determinate being of its own. But this freedom is still only an immediate, not yet a negative, freedom. As one with the object, the Notion is submerged in it; its distinct moments are objective existences in which it is itself again only the inner. As the soul [Seele] of objective reality it must give itself the form of subjectivity which, as formal Notion, belonged to it immediately; thus, in the form of the free Notion, a form which in objectivity it still lacked, it opposes itself to that objectivity and in so doing makes the identity with it which, as objective Notion it possesses in and for itself, also a posited identity.
In this consummation in which it has the form of freedom even in its objectivity, the adequate Notion is the Idea. Reason, which is the sphere of the Idea, is the self-revealed truth in which the Notion possesses the realisation that is wholly adequate to it, and is free, inasmuch as it cognises this its objective world in its subjectivity and its subjectivity in its objective world.