heroes of history had been actuated by subjective and formal interests
alone, they would never have accomplished what they have. And if we
have due regard to the unity between the inner and the outer, we must
own that great men willed what they did, and did what they willed.
141.] The empty abstractions, by means of which the one identical
content perforce continues in the two correlatives, suspend themselves
in the immediate transition, the one in the other. The content is
itself nothing but their identity (§ 138): and these abstractions are
the seeming of essence, put as seeming. By the manifestation of force
the inward is put into existence: but this putting is the mediation by
empty abstractions. In its own self the intermediating process vanishes
to the immediacy, in which the inward and the outward are absolutely
identical and their difference is distinctly no more than assumed and
imposed. This identity is Actuality.
C.--ACTUALITY.
142.] Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of essence with
existence, or of inward with outward. The utterance of the actual
is the actual itself: so that in this utterance it remains just as
essential, and only is essential, in so far as it is in immediate
external existence.
We have ere this met Being and Existence as forms of the immediate.
Being is, in general, unreflected immediacy and transition into
another. Existence is immediate unity of being and reflection; hence
appearance: it comes from the ground, and falls to the ground. In
actuality this unity is explicitly put, and the two sides of the
relation identified. Hence the actual is exempted from transition, and
its externality is its energising. In that energising it is reflected
into itself: its existence is only the manifestation of itself, not of
an other.