BECOMING XV: ACTUALITY, POSSIBILITY

With the identification of Inward and Outward a pure or absolute Idealism is reached that is at one and
the same time a total Realism with nothing “behind” it. There are no partial views, the Whole is
attained and every possibility is as such realised, not in separate “universes” but in one infinite whole
(this is actually, it has now emerged, a contradictory expression) or system where, however,
composition is “put by” (aufgehoben) along with the category of the whole and its parts. This is not as
such an endorsement of “simplicity” as rather a positing of multiple identity in infinite differentiation.
Again, infinite potentia excludes unrealised or “hidden” potentialities. Here though we must notice
that the Absolute has to be hidden in the sense that we never could so to say catch it unawares. It is
fundament and ground of all our being and all our perception or it is chimerical, self-cancelling. It is in
this sense that it was affirmed that “no man can see God” or, later, “No one has ever seen God; it is the
only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (John 1, 18). This text is
exactly equivalent, in religious mode, to Hegel’s philosophy, which in this way of course results from
it, as does the Absolute Idea from the dialectic, apotheosising method. This multiple identity
overcomes the divorce between the only Son, between the representative, and the others, the sons by
adoption, in Scripture’s clumsy phrase. It is more than an adoption as foreknown from the foundation
of the world, as Scripture also makes clear. The trappings of an unreflected realist epistemology are no
part of revelation and so we must learn to “understand spiritual things spiritually”.

Besides Inward and Outward, however, Actuality is primarily the unity of essence with existence,
“become immediate”. Hegel here says (142). “The utterance (Äusserung) of the actual is the actual
itself.” “In this utterance it remains just as essential, and only is essential, in so far as it is in immediate
external existence.” This does not merely parallel but recapitulates Hegel’s recent affirmation of the
“essence of nature” as not being analogous to some inward part or any part at all but as the
manifestation of its own self mit einem Male. Actuality here fuses and “puts by” (aufhebt) essence and
existence as the Notion will fuse and put by Essence and Being, with their “doctrines”. Being and
Existence are “forms of the immediate”. Being is, in general, “unreflected immediacy and transition
into another”, i.e. transition into, not identity with, which succeeds and absorbs transition (111, Zus.).
“Existence is immediate unity of being and reflection; hence appearance: it comes from the ground
and falls to the ground.” Here we may see the futility of much discussion of “the existence of God”.
“In actuality this unity is explicitly put”, becomes immediate (142). “Hence the actual is exempted
from transition and its externality”, its externalising, rather, “is its energising”, its token, we might say.
It is this manifesting, just in that it manifests nothing other. This is Hegel’s “take” on the unreflectedly
presented doctrine of “creation”. Rather, creation itself, the Notion, and not we, imposes itself in just
this way. Hence it is from within the Notion, and not within Being or Essence, that the Idea “goes
forth as Nature”. So “in that energising it is reflected into itself”, in this act which it, Actuality, is. Its
existence is manifestation, as prior in concept, but to and in self, since there is none other. How
though, or how then, are we to understand manifestation unless as existence, existence unless as
manifestation, “showing off”, “uttering”? This shows, again, the paradox of the “hidden God”. What
Moses experienced must in some sense be experienced by all, qua centres of consciousness, and the
narrative “stands for” or reflects that, if it is to speak to and nourish us. The “burning bush”, a
common and lowly plant, as place of epiphany, underscores this while as Moses manifests himself as
leader so each one, to be, must thus lead and manifest himself and, again, not something other or alien.
We must renounce as “absurd” the unreflected “hard and fast line of contrast” between Thought and
actuality “made synonymous with external and sensible existence”, therefore, along with such pairs as
theory and practice taken absolutely, or truth and “functionality”.

Ideas are not confined to our heads merely, nor is the Idea, upon the whole, so feeble as
to leave the question of its actualisation or non-actualisation dependent upon our will.
The Idea is rather the absolutely active as well as actual... So far is actuality, as
distinguished from mere appearance, and primarily presenting a unity of inward and
outward, from being in contrariety with reason, that it is rather thoroughly reasonable...
(142, Zus)

So Hegel remarks, it is not educated, or it necessarily becomes ironical, to call anyone poet or
statesman “who can do nothing really meritorious or reasonable.” This remark, including the equation
of merit and reason, evokes again the Platonic vision of the superior reality of the forms and so he
appends a remark on “the wide-spread prejudice” opposing Aristotle to Plato here, today being called
“vulgar Aristotelianism”, as popularised by many Catholic apologists, for example, eager to defend
their misconceived “ontological discontinuity” of “creation”.1 Aristotle’s actuality, he says, “is not the
vulgar actuality of what is immediately at hand, but the idea as actuality.” He goes on to identify his
own work, and these sections here in particular, with Aristotle’s vision as promoting “the Platonic
idea” from “a mere dynamis” to “an energeia”, as he has just remarked, “as the inward which is quite
to the fore, or as the unity of inner and outer, or as actuality, in the emphatic sense here given to the
word” (Ibid., my stress). The opposition he concedes is yet within a larger continuity.

Hegel cannot stress enough the absolute identity of the outward and the inward (141). Actuality
“develops” (we would have expected “reduces”) “the characteristics aforesaid and their difference”,
the “correlations”, to the point where, “as it has them, they are at the same time plainly understood to
be a show” or seeming, a semblance rather than the Appearance he had been discussing. As such they
are “assumed or imposed”, by our finitude he surely means. In the Philosophy of Spirit he will specify
this imposition further, the semiotics of language, the dark pit of memory and so on.

“Viewed as an identity in general, Actuality is first of all Possibility”, as we have already touched
upon. Here, at first, “in contrast with the concrete unity of the actual”, actuality, as actual possibility,
is “made an abstract and unessential essentiality”. “Possibility is what is essential to reality, but in
such a way that it is at the same time only a possibility.” Note that he does not speak of “possible”, of
“the possibles” (possibilia) still less, but of possibility, an infinite potentiality as, simply as such,
“essential to reality” and so actual, the indeed supremely actual potentia absoluta Dei which, however,
cannot be other than entirely actualised and so actual, a power, however, as fully actualised in
negation as in affirmation. God, or the Absolute, is not potential in the sense of in potentia to what is
not freely willed in the first or eternal place. This freedom, too, itself, we shall see, gives the character
of necessity to what is thus “actualised”, so that it can be traced out by Mind or, in principle, by Logic.
This is anyhow virtually conceded in probability theory. Thus he gives further body to the dream of
Leibniz. Sole possibilities, “only a possibility”, this finite notion is only a moment, in what is “first”
thought. He refers back to Kant here, deprecating his treating possibility, necessity and actuality as
Modalities, since, says Kant, “these categories do not in the least increase the notion as object, but
only express its relation to the faculty of knowledge.” Such a relation is of course not the whole of
Modality necessarily, while Hegel thinks rather to abolish all separation of this conception, Modality,
from the “matter” of thought in general or, which is the same, to identify thought with it. Possibility is

1
Cf. Stephen Theron, ”Creation stricto sensu”, New Blackfriars, 2005.
really “the bare abstraction of Reflection-into-self. – what was formerly called the Inward”, i.e. here.
But now it is made “the external inward, lifted out of reality and with the being of a mere supposition,
and is thus, sure enough, supposed only as a bare modality, an abstraction which... belongs only to
subjective thought.” A certain anger seems to fuel Hegel’s brilliant language of triumphant oxymoron,
and not mere wistful paradox, here. He is conscious of saying it as it is.

Even less should Actuality and Necessity be taken as mere modes. “They are anything but a mere sort
and mode for something else: in fact the very reverse of that.” It is as if he is frankly disgusted with a
certain impiety he finds in Kant, leading to, implicating, stupidity, blindness. These are supposed, yes,
but “as the concrete, not merely supposititious, but intrinsically complete.” By “complete” he seems to
mean without relation to, say, “subjective thought” in the negative or finite sense.

Since Possibility is properly “the mere form of identity-with-self (as compared with the concrete
which is actual), the rule for it is merely that a thing must not be self-contradictory.” “Thus everything
is possible”, by an “act of abstraction” giving “this form of identity”. For this reason, “Everything... is
as impossible as it is possible” and “Nothing therefore can be more meaningless than to speak of such
possibility and impossibility.” For “In every content, - which is and must be concrete, - the speciality
of its nature may be viewed as a specialised contrariety and in that way as a contradiction.” We need a
reference here. So we should not adopt such phraseology as “It is conceivable”, e.g. that a woman give
birth to kittens. To every empty or perverse injunction to “Suppose” we should rejoin, “No, we will
not suppose”. Distinction is required here, from workmanlike or even imaginative assumptions in the
process of demonstration or simply of thinking and the “fantastic ingenuity of suggesting possibilities
and lots of possibilities.” This is perhaps supremely exemplified in the “what would have happened
if”, said counterfactually, of what “could have” occurred in other circumstances, spoken regretfully as
of a real loss.

Our picture-thought is at first disposed to see in possibility the richer and more
comprehensive, in actuality the poorer and narrower category. Everything, it is said, is
possible, but everything which is possible is not on that account actual. In real truth,
however, if we deal with them as thoughts, actuality is the more comprehensive,
because it is the concrete thought which includes possibility as an abstract element.
(143 Zus.)

Here we have the ground reason why evolutionary theory, precisely in its opposition of practice, of
“survival-value”, to theory, to truth, is not on a par with philosophy. Time, the illusion of it, is the
reification of abstract possibility (upon which our theory of a finite freedom is constructed) and with
evolution this form of Time is exposed. Just therefore is it an error to absolutise it. As form of time it
is also its matter. It is what was bound to be arrived at within investigation of the phenomenon and so
it is the final contradiction thereof, knowledge of the impossibility of knowledge, eerily prefigured in
Kant’s philosophy (of the eerie). At this point finite science begins to transcend or supersede itself,
incidentally exposing the abstractness of the division of men into scientists and philosophers, say. The
putting by (Aufhebung) of the correlation of whole and parts is involved here. No one, no
consciousness rather, can be confined to an aspect or part of reality, prescinding absolutely from the
rest. The Absolute is rather prescission itself, negating or destroying what it looses itself (ab-solvere)
from. “That upward spring of the mind signifies, that the being which the world has is only a
semblance, no real being, no absolute truth... Unless the being of the world is nullified, the point
d’appui for the exaltation is lost. In this way the apparent means vanishes, and the process of
derivation is cancelled in the very act by which it proceeds” (50). This observation applies to the
dialectic as a whole as characterising its essence. Essential thought “cancels the mediation in the very
act of mediating”, cancels mediation, that is to say.

Possibility is often said to consist in a thing’s being thinkable. ‘Think’, however, in this
use of the word, only means to conceive any content under the form of an abstract
identity. Now every content can be brought under this form, since nothing is required
except to separate it from the relation in which it stands. Hence any content, however
absurd and nonsensical, can be viewed as possible.

Hence the old adage that whatever is actual is also a fortiori possible. In fact “there is as good reason
for taking everything to be impossible, as to be possible”:

Nothing is so impossible, for instance, as this, that I am: for ‘I’ is at the same time
simple self-relation and, as undoubtedly, relation to something else... Whether a thing is
possible or impossible, depends altogether on the subject-matter: that is, on the sum
total of the elements in actuality, which, as it opens itself out, discloses itself to be
necessity.

These, or “everything”, matter, life, law, freedom, God “as the true”, are to be rejected in the same
sense as the “abstract ‘Enlightenment’ of Understanding” rejected “the triune God” as “contradictory
in thought”. It is to this “empty understanding”, of “these empty forms”, that possibility along with
impossibility belongs. Philosophy must show them to be “null and meaningless”. Here we have
Hegel’s ground for criticising unreflected use of the name “God” in philosophy, as found in the
rationalist metaphysicians of early modernity. Only the Absolute, sheer Actuality, escapes these
strictures, whereby God himself as it were re-affirms his namelessness, the paradox of the “I am” of
Exodus made actual and perfect in form in philosophy, and not merely either in “philosophy of
religion”. Philosophy is itself the more perfect form of what there receives “worship and service”.

Hegel now says, “But the Actual in its distinction from possibility (which is reflection-into-self) is
itself only the outward concrete, the unessential immediate” (144). This is what he had previously said
of Possibility (143). They must, that is, be taken together in the concrete. It is only that the Actual is
the outward concrete, taken in this abstract way, abstract since Outward has been, after all,
superseded. As thus distinguished it is not “concrete unity”, but understood cum praecisione, with
something essential to it cut off or abstracted (as when we consider humanity without this flesh, these
bones2). It is at once the “merely immediate unity of Inward and Outward” and an “unessential
outward” in the sense that the Outward is the Inward, i.e. they are identical, as we saw. It is still in
some way abstract, as making an abscission from the (merely) Possible. Hence, he now adds, “it is
itself... a merely possible”. That is, it is necessarily posited as a possibility, even though it happen to
be, as contingent. It is “a Contingent or Accidental”. Yet, “conversely, possibility is mere Accident
itself or Chance.”

In further explanation of this extremely difficult, densely thought-out passus, he says that “Possibility
and Contingency are the two factors of Actuality”, not as such but when considered through the
Inward/Outward polarity, where, always, they are “put as mere forms which constitute the externality
of the actual.” Really nothing is outward, nothing inward. Yet these forms “have their reflection-into-
self on the body of actual fact.” They are, that is, the more abstract when consciously posited as
immediate and “external”. This “content” of “actual fact” is not the true or ultimate content. It has an
“intrinsic definiteness”, a finiteness indeed, which gives ground for such characterisations. This
2
Cf. Aquinas, De ente et essential, comparing humanitas and homo.
finitude, of the contingent and the possible, “lies in the distinction of the form-determination from the
content.” Hegel says we now see this. The content, reality, has no essential relation to spatial ideas,
e.g. of inward and outward. No more does Being. Conversely though, it must depend “on the content”
alone whether anything, anything at all, “is contingent and possible”.

As possibility is the mere inside of actuality, it is for that reason a mere outside
actuality, in other words, Contingency. The contingent, roughly speaking, is what has
the ground of its being not in itself but in somewhat else. Such is the aspect under
which actuality first comes before consciousness, and which is often mistaken for
actuality itself.

Hegel here (145, Zus.) considers conventional theological and empiricist language under one hat.
“Everything has a cause.” This means, though, that this “everything” is not entirely the Actual, but
only “one side” of it, viz. that of “reflection on somewhat else”. “It is the actual, in the signification of
something merely possible.” This is the ipse fecit nos of Augustine, where, however, unlike eighteenth
century deism, Hegel’s real target, these Hegelian resonances, these “mystical” re-statements of
reality, are to a great extent pre-empted. “There is one closer to me than I am to myself.” Non aliquo
modo est, sed est, est... Hegel sets out to disentangle the philosophical from the religious form, too
close to the pictorial language of everyday, of the Content common to him and his predecessors. This,
he considers, is by and large only half-heartedly done by Theology: “until Theology is something
more than a bare enumeration and compilation of these doctrines ab extra, it has no right to the title of
science... Genuine theology is thus at the same time a real theology of religion, as it was, we may add,
in the Middle Ages” (36, Zus.). Later theologians have by and large absorbed this lesson; their
philosophy of religion, all the same, is not as impressive as Hegel’s for the most part, being often
journalistic, compromising, needlessly mystifying (as distinct from difficult) or frankly paradoxical.
Hegelian oxymoron is superior to this. It is rationality taken to its last consequence, where the
paradoxical is a giving up on just this. Where the theologian will show that there is no contradiction in
God becoming man Hegel shows that man is God or, which is the same, man is not, but only God, in
continuity therefore with St. Catherine’s “I am he who is; you are she who is not” or Eckhart’s “The
eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see God”, open though this may seem to
Feuerbachian deconstruction. Feuerbach simply applies the “empty forms” of the Understanding,
which is why his followers have little claim to be reckoned Hegelians. “This also is thou; neither is
this thou.” Such is Hegel’s philosophy of “identity in difference”, in deepest continuity with mystical
or ascetical theology, as indeed, to avoid misunderstanding, was Aristotle’s Metaphysics or First
Philosophy, called by him theologia.3

Certain aspects of recent “possible worlds” doctrines seem to reflect Hegel’s exposure of the complex
relations between actual and possible, thereby coming closer to Absolute Idealism or, in short, to
Philosophy or to the absolute point of view. Both actual and possible are abstract formalities when not
taken and understood together, with the actual as paramount. Sheer possibility is finally relegated to
abstraction. God, we might say, never merely supposes. Similarly, in Jungian thought, each (finite)
person has his “shadow” contradicting him. He really has it and, Hegel might add, the shadow has
him!

We “consider the contingent to be what may or not be” and it is the problem of science to overcome
this, showing things as necessarily in their causes. This is the ancient and medieval description of
3
The frequently encountered suggestion that Hegel’s references to God are a sop to the authorities guaranteeing
his professorial chair seems speciously blind to the profundity or, which is the same, profound honesty of his
thought.
“science”, scientia, knowledge or “understanding”, not yet sapientia, having its root in words
signifying both knowing and tasting, savoir, savour. This, in fact, is the note of mysticism, that to
know is to taste, to touch (in identification) or experience. It has nothing to do with mystification (82,
Zus.). If thinking is to be called a will to power then this kind of power, knowing as union, is the
highest incentive to that will and, as Plato or Boethius showed, profoundly and nobly erotic (159).4
Similarly, in action, we strive, in our finite measure, to rise above contingency and caprice, as when
we might make a principle or necessity of caprice itself. This though might be the option of which
Hegel complains, that “contingency has been unwarrantably elevated” in his times, in both Nature and
Mind. Thus Nature is admired for its “richness and variety”, really “the spectacle of a contingency
losing itself in vagueness”. He couples “the chequered scene presented by the several varieties of
animals and plants, conditioned as it is by outward circumstances” with “the complex changes in the
figuration and grouping of clouds” as “not to be ranked higher than the equally casual fancies of the
mind which surrenders itself to its own caprices.” One might wish to remind this comically stern
philosopher of his later statement, in harmony with the Book of Proverbs, that “the Notion is pure
play”. These caprices have been, since his time, exhaustively documented and studied. Yet it is in
mere agreement with this development that he adds, again comically, that this “most abstract frame of
mind”, the “wonderment with which such phenomena are welcomed”, should motivate “advance to a
closer insight into the inner harmony and uniformity of nature.” Darwinianism, for example, offers us
a synthesis between this very capriciousness and the inner harmony and uniformity.

Regarding Mind, he sees this unwarranted elevation of contingency in a certain theory of the Freedom
of the Will. Here again he echoes Augustine and Aquinas in locating it in rationality, and not in the
late medieval libertas indifferentiae. Reason itself is ad opposita and thus free (of prejudice, as we
say). Hegel is thus in line with the Dominican and Franciscan tradition, rejecting the late-medieval
nominalist and, in great part, Jesuit tradition culminating in Kantian formalist ethics as a self-
dissolving and interested ideology, not philosophical at all. Here freedom is reduced to an inexplicable
free choice, lacking motive or cause, “standing on the grade of option”. This is a contradiction, arising
out of this misplaced admiration of contingency. The “matter of choice” is given from outside as a
content contradicting this mere “form” of freedom, since the choice is then anyhow determined or
cancelled in its freedom by this content as apprehended. This account of freedom is incoherent and
freedom becomes effectively denied in shallow doctrines of determinism or, at best, “compatibilism”.
Freedom then “lies only in the form of choosing”, freedom, that is, “only in supposition” or, as they
say, as epiphenomenon.

Yet Contingency is a genuine category, at this moment of the dialectic. It is “not to be mistaken for
actuality itself”, yet “it has no less than the rest of the forms of the idea its due office in the world of
objects.” It is a “form of the Idea”, as such coming after or within Actuality as first introduced as
Possibility. It is seen first “in Nature”, where “Chance ranges unchecked”, on the surface at least,
though the surface is the whole and the inward, we saw. So it must be recognised, as also “in the world
of Mind”. Contingent phenomena cannot be a priori construed in their contingency. This would be to
render the Hegelian project as itself abstract5, as not able to recognise its own opposite. One must
rather elicit “the necessity concealed under the semblance of contingency.” This does not mean that
contingency must be “simply set aside” though it will certainly be “put by” in the inclusive sense of
being absorbed (aufgehoben).

4
Nobilis, as used frequently by Aquinas, is transparently linked to gnobilis, knowable.
5
The danger into which Existentialism falls.
Contingency “is the self-identical”, a s opposed to the self-in-other pattern of the true, infinite and
necessary. It is actualit “in its immediact... essentially only as a supposition which is no sooner made
than it is revoked” (146). This is the pattern of the inauthentic understanding of free will just
described. It is “something pre-supposed, the immediate existence of which is at the same time a
possibility.” It “has the vocation to be suspended, to be the possibility of something else.” This, says
Hegel, is the Condition.

What is now added here (146, Zus.) can well be read as Hegel’s account of the elements of this
necessary dialectical category which in Nature, to which the dialectic infallibly leads, appears as Time.
Nonetheless Time is not a “logical” but rather a “cosmological” category (in a Hegelian sense6) and so
he sedulously avoids here all mention of it except as implied in the normal use of tensed verbs. The
Contingent, he says, “is at the same time the possibility of somewhat else” (my stress). This is “no
longer... that abstract possibility which we had at first, but the possibility which is.” Where is Hegel
going? Such a “possible existent is a Condition”, surely for something else, as just said. Yet he adds
that by it “we mean first, an existent, in short, an immediate”, as when perhaps we speak of the
condition of an animal or country. Yet the conditionality, for something else, he seems to mean, is
here built in, whether we think of it or not. So, secondly, we mean, i.e. is meant, “the vocation of this
immediate to be suspended and subserve the actualising of something else.” There he catches exactly
the nature of Time as the controlling dimension of experience. It is not likely to be a coincidence, but
this should be viewed as fitting in as confirming the rightness of the dialectic rather than as suggesting
some invalidating “hidden agenda”.

“Immediate actuality is in general as such never what it ought to be.” As such! This is a profound if
daunting statement. The reason though is merely Hegel ground-insight, or, rather, conclusion, that
“everything finite is false.” Immediate actuality “is a finite actuality with an inherent flaw, and its
vocation is to be consumed” (my italics). To be “suspended” he had said in 146, main text. Time
indeed both consumes and yet, on account of memory, suspends.

The other aspect of actuality, he now goes on, is its essentiality. That is the inward as opposed to the
“outward” aspect, not forgetting that actuality is primarily the “immediate unity” of inward and
outward. Thus the inside too, “as a mere possibility is no less destined to be suspended.” Why is it a
mere possibility? Certainly, as actual, “it is first of all Possibility.” Simply, it could be otherwise.
Anyhow, possibility, “thus suspended is the issuing of a new actuality, of which the first immediate
actuality was the presupposition.” If it is fine today it may rain tomorrow. This is the “alternation...
involved in the notion of a condition... an immediate actuality of this kind includes in it the germ of
something else altogether.” “New every morning is the light”, as they sing in church.

“This new actuality thus issuing is the very inside of the immediate actuality which it uses up”, or it all
comes out in the wash, as we say. “Thus there comes into being quite an other shape of things, and yet
it is not another” (my stress). The “first actuality is only put as what it in essence was”, i.e. at first.

6
Cf. J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge University Press, 1901, explains
Hegelian cosmology as “the application, to subject-matter empirically known, of a priori conclusions derived
from the investigation of the nature of pure thought. On the other hand, it is clearly to be distinguished from the
empirical conclusions of science and everyday life. These also, it is true, involve an a priori element, since no
knowledge is possible without the categories, but they do not depend on an explicit affirmation of a priori
truths” (Preface, first paragraph). One might want to say that “pure thought” actualizes itself in and with
“experience”, along the lines of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics II 16. The senses deliver to thought what they do
not themselves understand and it is in that delivering that consciousness subsists. In that case all that Hegel has
to say about the ingratitude of spirit, nullifying “the being of the world” (50), remains doubly relevant. It implies
in the end that even that deliverance, taken immediately, is misconceived.
This recalls what he had said about the child, that it has, so to say, become what it is, and hence was
(this is the essential, there are no transitions here), even as child. The “conditions.... which fall to the
ground and are spent, only unite with themselves in the other actuality.” The key word is “only”.
Although this passage gives the ground rationale of Time and thus takes on a parousial hue this is
merely accidental to it as an analysis in Logic. Conversely, the eternity touched upon is not, cannot be
seen as at the end of time, as if it were itself temporal. Rather, it is at the end of the dialectic that all is
not united but seen as ever one, a unity which each and all have within themselves. Rather, self as
concept does not belong here (McTaggart notwithstanding), but rather the “constituent functions”
Hegel speaks of at 160. McTaggart’s discussion of self and its “immortality” belongs to Hegelian or
McTaggartian cosmology rather. Each of the “functions”, rather, “is the very total which the notion is,
and is put as indissolubly one with it.” The Development or “onward movement” of the Notion Hegel
mentions in 161 is thus not an incitement to some kind of “process theology” but purely logical, in the
sense in which logic, thinking, is finally seen to encompass all as being it. It is by analogy with our
temporal experience that the culmination of the dialectic is called a Result. Within this didactic and
Method which is Absolute are encompassed Nature and Spirit. They are truly within it and emerge
from it in our finite perception as Nature and Spirit emerge from the Logic, i.e. they add nothing to it
ontologically. “In God we live and move and have our being.” This saying, therefore, itself makes an
identical type of translation (into the imperfect form of the “religious” rendering of the Content: we
are one with the Absolute idea, itself infinitely differentiated into the various centres of consciousness,
which may be seen indifferently either as many or one, as separate or identified, and so on. Nothing is
ölost thereby, since this is the perfect form for the content more “naturally” grasped, in the context of
living, in religion or, indeed, art. “The actual is no mere case of immediate being,” not the mixture as
before, “but, as essential Being, a suspension of its own immediacy, and thereby mediating itself with
itself.” “We know what we are, but we know not what we shall be” (I John), i.e. as eschewing the
finitude of Time, we do not know what “we” are.