With this principle comes the determination of an understanding as of self-determining activity; this has hitherto been wanting, for the Becoming of Heraclitus, which is only process, is not yet as fate, the independently self-determining. By this we must not represent to ourselves subjective thought; in thinking we think immediately of our thought as it is in consciousness. Here, on the contrary, quite objective thought is meant, active understanding—as we say, there is reason in the world, or we speak of genera in nature which are the universal. The genus animal is the substantial of the dog; the dog itself is this; the laws of nature are themselves nature’s immanent essence. The nature is not formed from without as men make a table; this is also made with understanding, but through an understanding outside of this wood. This external form, which is called the understanding, immediately occurs to us in speaking of the understanding; but here the universal is meant, that which is the immanent nature of the object itself. The _νοῦς_ is thus not a thinking existence from without which regulates the world; by such the meaning present to Anaxagoras would be quite destroyed and all its philosophic interest taken away. For to speak of an individual, a unit from without, is to fall into the ordinary conception and its dualism; a so-called thinking principle is no longer a thought, but is a subject. But still the true universal is for all that not abstract, but the universal is just the determining in and out of itself of the particular in and for itself. In this activity, which is independently self-determining, the fact is at once implied that the activity, because it constitutes process, retains itself as the universal self-identical. Fire, which, according to Heraclitus, was process, dies away and merely passes over, without independent existence, into the opposite; it is certainly also a circle and a return to fire, but the principle does not retain itself in its determinateness as the universal, seeing that a simple passing into the opposite takes place. This relation to itself in determination which we see appearing in Anaxagoras, now, however, contains the determination of the universal though it is not formally expressed, and therein we have the end or the Good.