As objectivity is the totality of the Notion withdrawn into its unity, an immediate is thereby posited that is in and for itself this totality, and is also posited as such, although in it the negative unity of the Notion has not as yet detached itself from the immediacy of this totality; in other words, objectivity is not yet posited as judgment. In so far as it has the Notion immanent in it, it contains the difference of the Notion, but on account of the objective totality, the differentiated moments are complete and self-subsistent objects which consequently, even in their relation, stand to one another only as self-subsistent things and remain external to one another in every combination. This is what constitutes the character of mechanism, namely, that whatever relation obtains between the things combined, this relation is one extraneous to them that does not concern their nature at all, and even if it is accompanied by a semblance of unity it remains nothing more than composition, mixture, aggregation and the like. Spiritual mechanism also, like material, consists in this, that the things related in the spirit remain external to one another and to spirit itself. A mechanical style of thinking, a mechanical memory, habit, a mechanical way of acting, signify that the peculiar pervasion and presence of spirit is lacking in what spirit apprehends or does. Although its theoretical or practical mechanism cannot take place without its self-activity, without an impulse and consciousness, yet there is lacking in it the freedom of individuality, and because this freedom is not manifest in it such action appears as a merely external one.
The object is, as we have seen, the syllogism, whose mediation has been sublated [ausgeglichen] and has therefore become an immediate identity. It is therefore in and for itself a universal — universality not in the sense of a community of properties, but a universality that pervades the particularity and in it is immediate individuality.
1. In the first place therefore the object does not differentiate itself into matter and form — a matter as the self-subsistent universal side of the object and a form as the particular and individual side; such an abstract difference of individuality and universality is excluded by the Notion of object; if it is regarded as matter it must be taken as in principle formed matter. Similarly, it may be defined as a thing with properties, as a whole consisting of parts, as a substance with accidents, or in terms of other relationships of reflection; but these relationships have been altogether superseded already in the Notion; the object therefore has neither properties nor accidents, for these are separable from the thing or the substance, whereas in the object the particularity is absolutely reflected into the totality. In the parts of a whole, there is indeed present that self-subsistence which belongs to the differences of the object, but these differences are themselves directly and essentially objects, totalities, that are not, like parts, determined as such in contrast to the whole.
The object is therefore in the first instance indeterminate, in so far as it has no determinate opposition in it; for it is the mediation that has collapsed into immediate identity. In so far as the Notion is essentially determinate, the object possesses determinateness as a manifoldness which though complete is otherwise indeterminate, that is, contains no relationships, and which constitutes a totality that at first is similarly no further determined; sides or parts that may be distinguished in it belong to an external reflection. This quite indeterminate difference therefore means only that there are a number of objects, each of which only contains its determinateness reflected into its universality and does not reflect itself outwards. Because this indeterminate determinateness is essential to the object, the latter is within itself a plurality of this kind, and must therefore be regarded as a composite or aggregate. It does not however consist of atoms, for these are not objects because they are not totalities. The Leibnizian monad would be more of an object since it is a total representation of the world, but confined within its intensive subjectivity it is supposed at least to be essentially one within itself. Nevertheless, the monad determined as an exclusive one is only a principle that reflection assumes. Yet the monad is an object, partly in that the ground of its manifold representations — of the developed, that is, the posited determinations of its merely implicit totality lies outside it, and partly also in that it is indifferent to the monad that it constitutes an object along with others; it is thus in fact not exclusive or determined for itself.
2. As the object, then, in its determined being is a totality and yet on account of its indeterminateness and immediacy is not the negative unity of that determined being, it is indifferent to the determinations as individual, as determined in and for themselves, just as these latter are themselves indifferent to one another. These, therefore, are not comprehensible from it nor from one another; its totality is the form of general reflectedness of its manifoldness into individuality in general which is in its own self indeterminate. The determinatenesses, therefore, that it contains, do indeed belong to it, but the form that constitutes their difference and combines them into a unity is an external, indifferent one; whether it be a mixture, or again an order, a certain arrangement of parts and sides, all these are combinations that are indifferent to what is so related.
Thus the object, like any determinate being in general, has the determinateness of its totality outside it in other objects, and these in turn have theirs outside them, and so on to infinity. The return-into-self of this progression to infinity must indeed likewise be assumed and represented as a totality, a world; but that world is nothing but the universality that is confined within itself by indeterminate individuality, that is, a universe.
The object, therefore, being in its determinateness equally indifferent to it, it is the object's own nature that points it outside and beyond itself to other objects for its determination; but to these others, their determinant function is similarly a matter of indifference. Consequently, a principle of self-determination is nowhere to be found; determinism — the standpoint occupied by cognition when it takes the object, just as we have found it here, to be the truth — assigns for each determination of the object that of another object; but this other is likewise indifferent both to its being determined and to its active determining. For this reason determinism itself is also indeterminate in the sense that it involves the progression to infinity; it can halt and be satisfied at any point at will, because the object it has reached in its progress, being a formal totality, is shut up within itself and indifferent to its being determined by another. Consequently, the explanation of the determination of an object and the progressive determining of the object made for the purpose of the explanation, is only an empty word, since in the other object to which it advances there resides no self-determination.
3. Now as the determinateness of an object lies in an other, no determinate difference is to be found between them; the determinateness is merely doubled, once in one object and again in the other, something utterly identical, so that the explanation or comprehension is tautological. This tautology is an external futile see-saw; since the determinateness obtains from the objects which are indifferent to it no peculiar distinctiveness and is therefore only identical, there is before us only one determinateness; and its being doubled expresses just this externality and nullity of a difference. But at the same time the objects are self-subsistent in regard to one another; therefore in the identity above-mentioned they remain absolutely external to one another. Here, then, we have the manifest contradiction between the complete mutual indifference of the objects and the identity of their determinateness, or the contradiction of their complete externality in the identity of their determinateness. This contradiction is, therefore, the negative unity of a number of objects which, in that unity, simply repel one another: this is the mechanical process.
If objects are regarded merely as self-enclosed totalities, they cannot act on one another. In this determination they are the same thing as the monads, which for this very reason were thought of as exercising no influence whatever on one another. But the concept of a monad is, just for this reason, a defective reflection. For first it is a determinate conception of the monad's merely implicit totality; as a certain degree of the development and positedness of its representation of the world, it is determinate; now while it is a self-enclosed totality, it is also indifferent to this determinateness; therefore the determinateness is not its own, but one that is posited by another object. Secondly it is an immediate in general, in so far as it is supposed to be merely a mirroring entity; its relation to itself is therefore abstract universality; hence it is a determinate being open to others. To gain the freedom of substance it is not sufficient to represent it as a totality that is complete within itself and has nothing to receive from without. On the contrary, the mechanical [begrifflose], merely mirrored relation to itself is precisely a passivity towards another. Similarly determinateness, whether taken as the determinateness of something that is or of a mirroring entity, that is a degree of the monad's own spontaneous development, is something external; the degree that the development reaches has its limit in an other. To shift the reciprocity of substances on to a predetermined harmony means nothing more than to convert it into a presupposition, that is, to withdraw it from the Notion. The need to avoid the interaction of substances was based on the moment of absolute self-subsistence and originality which was made a fundamental assumption. But since the positedness, the degree of development, does not correspond to this in-itself, it has for that very reason its ground in an other.
When treating of the relationship of substantiality, we showed that it passes over into the causal relationship. But here what is, no longer has the determination of a substance, but of an object; the causal relationship has been superseded in the Notion; the originality of one substance in relation to the other has shown itself to be illusory, its action to be transition into the opposed substance. This relationship therefore has no objectivity. Hence in so far as the one object is posited in the form of subjective unity as active cause, this no longer counts as an original determination but as something mediated; the active object has this its determination only by means of another object. Mechanism, since it belongs to the sphere of the Notion, has that posited within it which proved to be the truth of the causal relationship, namely that the cause, which is supposed to be the original and self-subsistent factor is essentially effect, positedness, as well. In mechanism therefore the causality of the object is immediately a non-originality; it is indifferent to this its determination, therefore its being cause is for it something contingent. To this extent, one might indeed say that the causality of substances is only a subjective conception. But this causality as thus represented is precisely mechanism; for mechanism is this, that causality as identical determinateness of different substances and hence as the extinction of their self-subsistence in this identity, is a mere positedness; the objects are indifferent to this unity and maintain themselves in face of it. But, no less is this their indifferent self-subsistence also a mere positedness; they are therefore capable of mixing and aggregating and of becoming, as an aggregate, one object. Through this indifference both to their transition and to their self-subsistence, substances are objects.
The mechanical process is the positing of what is contained in the Notion of mechanism, and therefore, in the first instance, of a contradiction.
1. It follows from the Notion just indicated that the interaction of objects takes the form of the positing of the identical relation of the objects. This consists merely in giving to the determinateness that is determined, the form of universality; this is communication, which does not involve transition into an opposite. Spiritual communication, which moreover takes place in that element which is the universal in the form of universality, is explicitly an ideal relation in which a determinateness continues itself from one person into another unimpaired, and universalises itself without any alteration whatever-as a scent freely spreads in the unresisting atmosphere. But even in communication between material objects, their determinateness spreads, so to speak, in a similarly ideal manner; personality is an infinitely more intense impenetrability [Harte] than objects possess. The formal totality of the object in general, which is indifferent to the determinateness and hence is not a self-determination, makes it undistinguished from the other object and thus renders the interaction primarily an unimpeded continuation of the determinateness of the one in the other.
Now in the spiritual sphere there is an infinitely manifold content that is communicable; for being taken up into intelligence it receives this form of universality in which it becomes communicable. But the universal that is such not merely through the form but in and for itself, is the objective as such, both in the spiritual and in the material sphere; as against which the individuality of outer objects as well as of persons is an unessential element that can offer it no resistance. Laws, morals, rational conceptions in general, are in the spiritual sphere such communicable entities which penetrate individuals in an unconscious manner and exert their influence on them. In the material sphere the communicable entities are motion, heat, magnetism, electricity and the like-which, even if people insist on representing them as stuffs or matters, must be characterised as imponderable agents — agents lacking that element of materiality which is the foundation of matter's individualised existence.
2. Now if in the interaction of objects their identical universality is first posited, it is equally necessary to posit the other moment of the Notion, particularity; objects accordingly demonstrate also their self-subsistence, maintain themselves as mutually external and establish an individuality in that universality. This establishing is reaction in general. To begin with, reaction is not to be conceived as a mere suspension of the action and of the communicated determinateness; what is communicated is, as a universal, positive in the particular objects and only particularises itself in their diversity. So far, then, what is communicated remains what it is; it merely distributes itself to the objects or is determined by their particularity. The cause gets lost in its other, the effect, the activity of the causal substance in its action; but the active object only becomes a universal; its action is primarily not a loss of its determinateness but a particularisation, whereby the object which at first was the whole of that individual determinateness in it, is now a species of it, and through this the determinateness is posited for the first time as a universal. The two processes, the raising of the individual determinateness into universality in communication, and the particularisation of it, or the reduction of what was solely a one to a species, in distribution, are one and the same.
Now reaction is equal to action. The manner in which this first appears, is that the second object has taken up into itself the entire universal, and so is now active against the first. Thus its reaction is the same as the action, a reciprocal repulsion of the impulse. Secondly, what is communicated is the objective element; it therefore remains the substantial determination of the objects along with the presupposition of their diversity; thus the universal specifies itself at the same time in them, and each object therefore does not merely give back the whole action, but has its specific share. But thirdly, reaction is a wholly negative action in so far as each object through the elasticity of its self-subsistence expels the positedness of an other in it and maintains its relation-to-self. The specific particularity of the communicated determinateness in the objects, what was before called a species, returns to individuality, and the object asserts its externality in face of the communicated universality. The action thereby passes over into rest. It shows itself to be a merely superficial, transient alteration in the self-enclosed indifferent totality of the object.
3. This return constitutes the product of the mechanical process. Immediately, the object is presupposed as an individual; further, it is a particular in relation to others; and again thirdly, as something indifferent to its particularity, as a universal. The product is that presupposed totality of the Notion now posited as a totality. It is the conclusion in which the communicated universal is united with individuality through the particularity of the object; but at the same time in rest the mediation is posited as a mediation that has sublated itself; in other words, it is posited that the product is indifferent to this determining of it, and that the determinateness it has received is an external one in it.
Accordingly the product is the same as the object that first enters into the process. But at the same time it is through this movement that it is first determined; in general, it is only as a product that the mechanical object is an object; because it is only through the mediation of an other in it that it is what it is. Thus in being a product it is what it is supposed to be in and for itself, a compound or mixture, a certain order and arrangement of parts, in general, something whose determinateness is not a self-determination but one that is posited.
On the other hand, it is no less true that the result of the mechanical process does not already exist before that process; its end is not in its beginning as in the case of the teleological end. The product is a determinateness in the object as an externally posited one. Therefore, as regards its Notion, this product is indeed the same thing as the object already is from the beginning. But in the beginning the external determinateness does not yet appear as posited. To this extent the result is something quite other than the first determinate being of the object for which it is something utterly contingent.
The mechanical process passes over into rest. That is to say the determinateness which the object obtains through the process is only an external one. Equally external to it is this rest itself, since rest is the opposite determinateness to the action of the object, but every determinateness is indifferent to the object; rest can therefore be regarded as produced by an external cause, just as much as it was indifferent to the object to be active.
Now further, since the determinateness is a posited one and the Notion of the object has returned to itself through mediation, the object contains the determinateness as one that is reflected into itself. Hence in the mechanical process the objects and the process itself have a more precisely determined relationship. They are not merely diverse, but are now specifically distinguished as against one another. The result of the formal process which on the one hand is determinationless rest, is therefore, on the other hand, through the reflection into self of the determinateness, the distribution of the opposition which the object as such contains, among several objects standing in a mechanical relationship to one another. The object that on the one hand lacks all determination whatever and is neither elastic nor self-subsistent in its relationships, has on the other hand a self-subsistence that is impenetrable to other objects. Objects now also have as against one another this more specific opposition of self-subsistent individuality and a universality that lacks self-subsistence. The precise difference may be conceived as a merely quantitative one, as a difference of the magnitude of mass in the bodies, or as a difference of intensity, or in various other ways. But in general the difference is not to be adhered to in that abstraction; as objects, both are also positively self-subsistent.
Now the first moment of this real process is, as before, communication. The weaker can be seized and penetrated by the stronger only in so far as it accepts the latter and constitutes one sphere with it. Just as in the material sphere the weak is secured against the disproportionately strong (as a sheet hanging free in the air is not pierced by a musket ball, or a weak organic receptivity is less susceptible to strong, than to weak, stimuli), so the wholly feeble spirit is safer from the strong spirit than one that stands nearer to the strong. Imagine if you like someone quite dull-witted and ignoble, then on such a person lofty intelligence and nobility can make no impression. The only consistent defence against reason is to have no dealings with it at all. Where the object that is not self-subsistent cannot make contact with one that is and no communication can take place between them, the latter can also offer no resistance, that is, cannot specify the communicated universal for itself. If they were not in the same sphere, their relation to one another would be an infinite judgment, and no process between them would be possible.
Resistance is the precise moment of the overpowering of the one object by the other, for it is the incipient moment of the distribution of the communicated universal and of the positing of the self-related negativity, of the individuality to be established. Resistance is overcome where the determinateness of the object is inadequate to the communicated universal that has been taken up by the object and is supposed to individualise itself in it. The object's relative lack of self-subsistence manifests itself in the fact that its individuality lacks the capacity for what is communicated and therefore is disrupted by it, because it cannot constitute itself as subject in this universal, or make this latter its predicate. It is only in this second aspect that the violence [Gewalt] exercised on an object is something extraneous to it. What turns power [Macht] into violence is this, that though power, an objective universality, is identical with the nature of the object, its determinateness or negativity is not its own negative reflection into itself by which it is an individual. In so far as the negativity of the object is not reflected into itself in the power, and the power is not the object's own self-relation, it is, as against the power, only abstract negativity whose manifestation is extinction.
Power, as objective universality and as violence directed against the object, is what is called fate — a conception that falls within mechanism in so far as it is called blind, that is, its objective universality is not recognised by the subject in its specific peculiarity. To make a few observations on this point: the fate of the living being is in general the genus, which manifests itself through the perishableness of the living individuals, which in their actual individuality do not possess the genus as genus. As mere objects, merely animate natures, like all other things of a lower grade, have no fate; what befalls them is a contingency; but in their Notion as objects they are external to themselves; therefore the alien power of fate is nothing else but their own immediate nature, externality and contingency itself. Only self-consciousness has a fate in the proper meaning of the word, because it is free, and therefore in the individuality of its ego possesses a being that is absolutely in and for itself and can oppose itself to its objective universality and estrange itself from it. By this very separation, however, it excites against itself the mechanical relationship of a fate. In order therefore that this fate should be able to have power over it, it must have given itself some determinateness or other conflicting with the essential universality; it must have committed a deed. By this, it has made itself into a particular, and this existence as abstract universality, is at the same time the side open to the communication of its estranged essence; it is on this side that it is drawn into the process. The nation without deeds is without blame; it is wrapped in objective moral universality and dissolved in it and lacks that individuality which, while it moves the unmoved, and gives itself a determinateness outwards and an abstract universality separated from the objective universality, yet in so doing converts the subject into something estranged from its essence, into an object, and brings it into the relationship of externality towards its nature, into that of mechanism.
The product of formal mechanism is the object in general, an indifferent totality in which determinateness appears as posited. The object having hereby entered the process as a determinate thing, the extinction of the process results on the one hand in rest, as the original formalism of the object, the negativity of its being determined for itself. But on the other hand the sublating of the determinedness as the positive reflection of it into itself, is the determinateness that has withdrawn into itself or the posited totality of the Notion-the true individuality of the object. The object, determined at first in its indeterminate universality then as a particular, is now determined as objectively an individual, so that in it that mere semblance of individuality which is only a self-subsistence opposing itself to the substantial universality, has been sublated.
This reflection into self then is, as we have seen, the objective oneness of the objects, a oneness which is an individual self-subsistence — the centre. Secondly, the reflection of negativity is a universality that is not a fate confronting the determinateness, but a fate immanently determined and rational-a universality that particularises itself from within, the difference that is at rest and is constant in the unstable particularity of objects and in their process; in other words, the law. This result is the truth, and therefore also the foundation, of the mechanical process.
In the first place then the empty manifoldness of objects is gathered into objective individuality, into the simple self-determining centre. Secondly, in so far as the object as an immediate totality retains its indifference to determinateness, the latter is present in it also as unessential or as a mutual externality of many objects. The prior, the essential determinateness, on the other hand, constitutes the real middle term between the many mechanically interacting bodies, by which they are united in and for themselves, and is their objective universality. Universality exhibited itself at first in the relationship of communication as present only through positing; but as objective universality it is the pervading immanent essence of the objects.
In the material world it is the central body that is the genus, but it is the individual universality of the single objects and their mechanical process. The relationship in which the unessential single bodies stand to one another is one of mutual thrust and pressure; this kind of relationship does not hold between the central body and the objects whose essence it is, for their externality no longer constitutes their basic determination. Their identity with the central body is, therefore, rather rest, namely, the being in their centre; this unity is their absolute Notion. It remains, however, merely an ought-to-be, since the externality of the objects which is still also posited does not correspond to that unity. Their consequent striving towards the centre is their absolute universality, not a universality posited by communication; it constitutes the true rest that is itself concrete and not posited from outside, into which the process of the non-self-subsistent bodies must return. That is why it is an empty abstraction to assume in mechanics that a body set in motion would continue to move in a straight line to infinity if external resistance did not rob it of its motion. Friction, or whatever other form resistance takes, is only the manifestation of centrality; for it is centrality that in an absolute manner brings the body back to itself; for the thing in contact with which the moving body meets friction has the power of resistance solely through its union with the centre. In the spiritual sphere the centre and unity with the centre assume higher forms; but the unity of the Notion and its reality which here, to begin with, is mechanical centrality, must there too constitute the basic determination.
Thus the central body has ceased to be a mere object, for in the latter the determinateness is an unessential element; for the central body no longer possesses the objective totality only implicitly but also explicitly. It can therefore be regarded as an individual. Its determinateness is essentially different from a mere order or arrangement and external connection of parts; as determinateness in and for itself it is an immanent form, a self-determining principle in which the objects inhere and by which they are bound together into a genuine One.
But this central individual is thus at first only a middle term which as yet has no true extremes; but as negative unity of the total Notion it sunders itself into such. Or in other words the previously non-self-subsistent, self-external objects are likewise by the regress of the Notion determined into individuals; the identity of the central body with itself which is still a striving, is infected with externality which, being taken up into the centra body's objective individuality, has this latter determination communicated to it. Through this centrality of their own, these individuals placed outside that first centre, are themselves centres for the non-self-subsistent objects. These second centres and the non-self-subsistent objects are brought into unity by the above absolute middle term.
But the relative individual centres themselves also constitute the middle term of a second syllogism, a middle term that on the one hand is subsumed under a higher extreme, namely the objective universality and power of the absolute centre, and on the other hand subsumes under itself the non-self-subsistent objects whose superficial or formal individualisation is supported by it. Again, these non-self-subsistent objects are the middle term of a third, the formal syllogism, in that they are the link between the absolute and the relative central individuality to the extent that the latter has in them its externality by virtue of which the relation-to-self is at the same time a striving towards an absolute centre. The formal objects have for their essence the identical gravity of their immediate central body in which they inhere as in their subject and the extreme of individuality; through the externality which they constitute, that body is subsumed under the absolute central body; they are, therefore, the formal middle term of particularity. But the absolute individual is the objectively universal middle term which brings into unity and holds fast the being-within-self or inwardness of the relative individual and its externality. Similarly, too, the government, the individual citizens and the needs or external life of the individuals, are three terms, each of which is the middle of the other two. The government is the absolute centre in which the extreme of the individuals is united with their external existence; similarly, the individuals are the middle term that activate that universal individual into external concrete existence and translate their moral essence into the extreme of actuality. The third syllogism is the formal syllogism, that of an illusory show, in which the individuals purport to be linked to this universal absolute individuality by their needs and external existence; a syllogism which, as merely subjective, passes over into the others and in them has its truth.
This totality, whose moments are themselves the complete relationships of the Notion, the syllogisms in which each of the three different objects runs through the determination of middle term and of extremes, constitutes free mechanism. In it the different objects have for their basic determination the objective universality, the pervasive gravity that maintains its identity in the particularisation. The relations of pressure, thrust, attraction and the like, as also aggregations or mixtures, belong to the relationship of externality which forms the basis of the third of this group of syllogisms. Order, which is the merely external determinateness of objects, has passed over into the determination that is immanent and objective; this is Law.
In law, the more specific difference between the ideal reality of objectivity and its external reality is made prominent. The object, as immediate totality of the Notion, does not yet possess externality as distinct from the Notion which is not yet posited for itself. The object, being withdrawn into itself through the process, there has arisen the opposition of simple centrality against an externality which is now determined as externality, that is, is posited as that which is not in and for itself. That identical or ideal aspect of individuality is, on account of the relation to externality, an ought-to-be; it is that unity of the Notion, absolutely determined and self-determining, to which that external reality does not correspond, and therefore gets no further than a striving towards it. But individuality is in and for itself the concrete principle of negative unity, and as such itself totality, a unity that sunders itself into the specific differences of the Notion and abides within its self-identical universality; it is thus the centre expanded within its pure ideality by difference.
This reality which corresponds to the Notion is the ideal reality that is distinct from the reality that was merely a striving; it is the difference, not as in the first instance a plurality of objects, but difference in its essential nature and taken up into pure universality. This real ideality is the soul of the previously developed objective totality, the absolutely determined identity of the system.
The objective being-in-and-for-self appears therefore more specifically in its totality as the negative unity of the centre, which divides itself into subjective individuality and external objectivity, maintains the former in the latter and determines it in an ideal difference. This self-determining unity that absolutely reduces external objectivity to ideality is the principle of self-movement the determinateness of this animating principle, which is the difference of the Notion itself, is law. Dead mechanism was the mechanical process considered above of objects that appeared immediately as self-subsistent but which for that very reason are, in truth, not self-subsistent and have their centre outside themselves; this process, which passes over into rest, exhibits either contingency and indeterminate dissimilarity or formal uniformity. This uniformity is indeed a rule, but not a law. Only free mechanism has a law, the spontaneous determination of pure individuality or of the explicated Notion; as difference, it is in its own self the imperishable source of self-kindling movement, and since in the ideality of its difference it relates itself to itself alone, it is free necessity.
This soul, however, is still submerged in its body: the Notion of the objective totality, determinate now but inner, is free necessity — the law has not yet confronted its object; it is the concrete centrality as universality immediately expanded into its objectivity. This ideality, therefore, has not the objects themselves for its determinate difference; these are self-subsistent individuals of the totality, or also, if we look back to the formal stage, non-individual, external objects. Law is indeed immanent in them and constitutes their nature and power; but its difference is confined within its ideality, and the objects are not themselves differentiated into the ideal difference of the law. But it is solely in the ideal centrality and its laws that the object possesses its essential self-subsistence; it is therefore powerless to resist the judgment of the Notion and to maintain itself in abstract, indeterminate self-subsistence and aloofness. By virtue of the ideal difference immanent in it, its existence is a determinateness posited by the Notion. Its lack of self-subsistence is in this way no longer merely a striving towards the centre, as against which, just because its relation to it is only a striving, it still has the appearance of a self-subsistent external object; on the contrary, it is a striving towards the object specifically opposed to it; and similarly the centre itself has in consequence fallen asunder and its negative unity passed has over into objectified opposition. Centrality is, therefore, now a relation of these reciprocally negative objectivities in a state of mutual tension. Thus free mechanism determines itself into chemism.