thinking from a being (of the nature of the thing) to another being (of the manifestation of this nature under certain conditions), and this progression of your thinking describes a steady series of being. Expressing the same subjectively, your contemplation is always tied down, is always merely passively observing, and there is not a moment in the series when it might become self-productive; and this condition of your thinking is precisely that which you call the thinking of necessity, and through which you deny all freedom to the object of such thinking.

We have, therefore, discovered the ground why you find it absolutely impossible to think freedom in our present case, and in all similar cases. Expressing it objectively, all being which flows itself from a being is a necessary being, and not a product of freedom. Expressing it subjectively, the conception of a necessary being arises in us through the connecting of one being with another being.

From this you will now be able to conclude, through opposition, what it is you require in order to think freedom, which you surely can think, and always have thought.

You require a being which shall have, not no ground at all — for such you cannot think - but a ground in something which is not again a being. Now, besides being, we only have thinking. Hence, a being which you may be able to think as product of freedom must proceed from a thinking. Let us see whether this presupposition makes freedom comprehensible.

Something which is not determined, but determines itself, is to be called force. Is this active determining comprehensible when presupposed as occurring through a thinking? Undoubtedly, provided we are but able to think thinking itself, and do not again make a thing out of our conception. The reason why we could not derive freedom from a being was because the conception of a being involved that of a fixed permanency. But such permanent being does not hinder us when we derive freedom from thinking, since thinking is not posited as something permanent, remaining, etc., but as agility [agilita=producing activity], and only as agility, of the intelligence.

To be posited as free, something must be posited as determin

ing itself. Such was your assertion. (It must not only be not determined through an external other, but also not through its own nature.) What does that Itself mean? It doubtless involves the thought of a twofold. The free is to be before it is determined ; it is to have an existence independent of its determinedness. A thing cannot be thought as determining itself precisely because it has not being in advance of its nature, or of the system of its determinedness. But the intelligence, with its conception of real being, is in advance of that real being, and the former contains the ground of the latter. The conception of a certain being precedes that being, and the latter is dependent upon the former.

Our assertion is, therefore, that only the intelligence can be thought as free, and that the intelligence becomes free only through thus seizing itself as intelligence, for only thus does it subsume its being under something which is higher than all being, namely, the conception. Somebody might object that in our own argumentation (in the preceding chapter) the absoluteness is presupposed as a being; and that the reflection which is now to achieve such great wonders is evidently itself conditioned through that absoluteness, having it for its object, and is neither reflection in general nor this particular reflection, unless an object in general and this particular object are presupposed. To this objection we reply that it will appear hereafter how this absoluteness itself is required for, and results from, the possibility of an intelligence in general, and that hence the above proposition may also be reversed as follows: only that which is free can be thought as an intelligence; an intelligence is necessarily free.

B. The Ego, in contemplating that tendency to absolute activity as itself, posits itself as free, i. e., as a power to have causality through the mere conception.

EXPLANATORY

Freedom is, according to Kant, the power to absolutely begin a condition or being. This is an excellent nominal explanation; and yet it seems to have been of little value in effecting a better insight

into freedom. For that explanation did not answer the higher question: how a condition or being could have an absolute beginning, or how such an absolute beginning could be thought; by which answer a genetical conception of freedom would have been generated before our very eyes. Now this we have just done. The absolutely beginning condition is not connected with nothingness for the finite rational being necessarily thinks through mediation and connection. But it begins with thinking itself— not with a being but with thinking.

In order to establish the conception in this manner, it is certainly necessary to walk, and to be able to walk, the path of the science of knowledge, to be able to abstract from all being, as such (or from the fact), and to start from that which is higher than all being, from contemplating and thinking, or from the acting of the intelligence in general. The same path, which alone leads to the right end in the theoretical philosophy in explaining being, is the path which also alone makes practical philosophy possible. This likewise makes more clear our previous expression: "The Ego posits itself as independent." The first view of this proposition, namely, "The Ego gathers up all it originally is — and originally it is nothing unless free - in the contemplation and conception of itself," we have already explained completely. But that proposition involves something more. For all that the Ego can be in actuality, when the conception becomes cognition, and when the intelligence is the mere passive observer of the external world, originally depends, after all, upon the conception. Whatsoever the Ego is to become, the Ego must first make itself to be through the conception, and whatsoever the Ego will be in the future, it most surely will have made itself through the conception. Hence the Ego is its own ground in every respect, and absolutely posits itself even in a practical significance.

But the Ego only posits itself as a faculty or power.

This must, and can, be strictly proven. For the tendency to have absolute activity comes under the authority of the intelligence, as we have seen. But the intelligence, as such, is as each one must discover in contemplating himself as intelligence, and as cannot be demonstrated to anybody - absolutely determining

itself a mere pure activity, in opposition to all permanent and posited being, however finely conceived; hence it is capable of no determination through its nature or essence, or through a tendency, impulse, or inclination in it. Hence also such an inclination, however finely conceived, is not possible in that power of activity which is under the control of the intelligence, in so far as it is under such control; which active power is therefore to be thought as a mere pure faculty, i. e., as merely a conception, to which an actuality can, in thinking, be connected as to its ground, although there is not in it the least datum to show what sort of an actuality it will be.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

(1770-1831)

PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT

Translated from the German by

S. W. DYDE

INTRODUCTION

1. THE philosophic science of right has as its object the idea of right, i. e., the conception of right and the realization of the conception.

Note. Philosophy has to do with ideas or realized thoughts, and hence not with what we have been accustomed to call mere conceptions. It has indeed to exhibit the onesidedness and untruth of these mere conceptions, and to show that, while that which commonly bears the name "conception," is only an abstract product of the understanding, the true conception alone has reality and gives this reality to itself. Everything, other than the reality which is established by the conception, is transient surface existence, external accident, opinion, appearance void of essence, untruth, delusion, and so forth. Through the actual shape, which it takes upon itself in actuality, is the conception itself understood. This shape is the other essential element of the idea, and is to be distinguished from the form, which exists only as conception.

Addition. The conception and its existence are two sides, distinct yet united, like soul and body. The body is the same life as the soul, and yet the two can be named independently. Soul without a body would not be a living thing, and vice versa. Thus the visible existence of the conception is its body, just as the body obeys the soul which produced it. Seeds contain the tree and its

* From G. W. F. Hegel's Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Berlin, 1820. Reprinted from Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. by S. W. Dyde, London, G. Bell & Sons, 1896.