83.] Logic is subdivided into three parts:--
I. The Doctrine of Being:
II. The Doctrine of Essence:
III. The Doctrine of Notion and Idea.
That is, into the Theory of Thought:
I. In its immediacy: the notion implicit and in germ.
II. In its reflection and mediation: the being-for-self and show of the
notion.
III. In its return into itself, and its developed abiding by itself:
the notion in and for itself.
The division of Logic now given, as well as the whole of the previous
discussion on the nature of thought, is anticipatory: and the
justification, or proof of it, can only result from the detailed
treatment of thought itself. For in philosophy, to prove means to
show how the subject by and from itself makes itself what it is. The
relation in which these three leading grades of thought, or of the
logical Idea, stand to each other must be conceived as follows. Truth
comes only with the notion: or, more precisely, the notion is the
truth of being and essence, both of which, when separately maintained
in their isolation, cannot but be untrue, the former because it is
exclusively immediate, and the latter because it is exclusively
mediate. Why then, it may be asked, begin with the false and not at
once with the true? To which we answer that truth, to deserve the name,
must authenticate its own truth: which authentication, here within the
sphere of logic, is given, when the notion demonstrates itself to be
what is mediated by and with itself, and thus at the same time to be
truly immediate. This relation between the three stages of the logical
Idea appears in a real and concrete shape thus: God, who is the truth,
is known by us in His truth, that is, as absolute spirit, only in so
far as we at the same time recognise that the world which He created,
nature and the finite spirit, are, in their difference from God,
untrue.
CHAPTER VII.
FIRST SUB-DIVISION OF LOGIC.
THE DOCTRINE OF BEING.
84.] Being is the notion implicit only: its special forms have the
predicate 'is'; when they are distinguished they are each of them an
'other': and the shape which dialectic takes in them, _i.e._ their
further specialisation, is a passing over into another. This further
determination, or specialisation, is at once a forth-putting and in
that way a disengaging of the notion implicit in being; and at the
same time the withdrawing of being inwards, its sinking deeper into
itself. Thus the explication of the notion in the sphere of being does
two things: it brings out the totality of being, and it abolishes the
immediacy of being, or the form of being as such.
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