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HEGEL'S TREATMENT OF THE OBJECTIVE NOTION. 41 by similarity had been dealt with. It was not merely due, as might have been previously supposed, to the impossibility of considering two things at once. On the contrary, there was the positive and definite reason that, until the inner nature of objects had been developed, it would be impossible to pass out of the simplest and crudest form of connexion by determination. In the earlier stages of Essence there would have been no contradiction in such a category as Mechanism. For there the Essence and the Appearance were conceived as realities which, though connected, possessed independent qualities. 'To determine the Appearance would not be to determine the Essence, and thus the inner nature of a thing could remain unaffected by its outer relations. Even when the category of Reciprocity was reached, all we could have said of the assertion of the independence of the inner and the outer was not that it was false, but that it was unmeaning. For things, looked at under the category of Reciprocity, had no inner nature at all. It is true that they had those relations of Likeness and Unlikeness, out of which, as the Subjective Notion progressed, an inner nature developed. But at the end of Essence and the beginning of the Notion these relations also were purely external. They did not become an inner nature of the things that possessed them until the justification of Universal Judgments, in the course of the Subjective Notion, showed us that they were not accidents of Individuals, but, on the contrary, essential to the existence of those Individuals. At the point which we have now reached, however, the matter is entirely different. Every Object, the Subjective Notion has taught us, must have an inner nature. And in the course of the Doctrine of Essence we learned that, if anything has an inner nature at all, it cannot be merely inner, that it, and the whole of it, must be manifested by the out- side of the object that is, by its external relations. And, conversely, no outer nature can be entirely outer. There can no more be anything in appearance which has not its root in Essence, than there can be anything in Essence which does not manifest itself in appearance. And thus the category of Formal Mechanism contains a clear contradiction. The inner nature of an Object, it de- mands, shall be indifferent to its external relations of deter- mination. These external relations belong somehow, and in some respects, to the Object, or there would be no mean- ing in calling them the external relations of that Object. 'They are not its inner nature. They must therefore be its