which have emerged. Substance, we saw, appeared in its accidents and exercised power over them; but it was faulty because it could not give an adequate account of difference, and because it did not really determine itself in its accidents. It constituted or posited its accidents, but presupposed its own nature. The first of these defects was partly removed by causality and reciprocity, where substance divided itself into manifestations which were themselves substantial. Reciprocity, however, is an imperfect category, for it sets the negative element on equal terms with the positive and dissipates everything it touches. When thought leaves the seemingly solid standing-ground of the particular, it demands some support on which it may stand and find rest. Reciprocity has turned out to be a veritable flux, and endless movement into externality. The step which thought now takes brings it out of this infinite relativity. There is only one thing stable, and that is the whole; and whenever thought lays hold of experience as a self-articulating principle, the negative element—relativity—becomes subordinated to the positive. This is the point of view of the notion. To revert to our former terminology, experience has ceased to be merely one and many, a one that is also many, and has become one because of its multiplicity and difference. The notion is a principle which owns its differences, and in developing an opposite brings into explicit being a unity strong enough to sustain and include the opposition within it.
By over-reaching the relativity of its content and including difference and externality within itself, thought has transcended the second flaw in the conception of substance, viz. the mere presupposition of the essence. The system is an organism. It appears in its members; their acts are its acts, and in their mutual determination of one another it determines itself. If we regard the nature of the principle and of each of its manifestations as private and self-centred, as something which stays at home with itself and is purely self-contained, then the notion is unintelligible. In order to understand it we must see that the nature of each member is found in an outgoing activity, and that what it establishes is not merely alien but is also itself. The inward nature of the thing and its outward reference are not merely conjoined, as in essence; they are identical. This is also true of the
