The passage from necessity to freedom, or from actuality into the notion, is the very hardest, because it proposes that independent actuality shall be thought as having all its substantiality in the passing over and identity with the other independent actuality. The notion, too, is extremely hard, because it is itself just this very identity. But the actual substance as such, the cause, which in its exclusiveness resists all invasion, is _ipso facto_ subjected to necessity or the destiny of passing into dependency: and it is this subjection rather where the chief hardness lies. To think necessity, on the contrary, rather tends to melt that hardness. For thinking means that, in the other, one meets with one's self.--It means a liberation, which is not the flight of abstraction, but consists in that which is actual having itself not as something else, but as its own being and creation, in the other actuality with which it is bound up by the force of necessity. As existing in an individual form, this liberation is called I: as developed to its totality, it is free Spirit; as feeling, it is Love; and as enjoyment, it is Blessedness.--The great vision of substance in Spinoza is only a potential liberation from finite exclusiveness and egoism: but the notion itself realises for its own both the power of necessity and actual freedom. * * * * * When, as now, the notion is called the truth of Being and Essence, we must expect to be asked, why we do not begin with the notion? The answer is that, where knowledge by thought is our aim, we cannot begin with the truth, because the truth, when it forms the beginning, must rest on mere assertion. The truth when it is thought must as such verify itself to thought. If the notion were put at the head of Logic, and defined, quite correctly in point of content, as the unity of Being and Essence, the following question would come up: What are we to think under the terms 'Being' and 'Essence,' and how do they come to be embraced in the unity of the Notion? But if we answered these questions, then our beginning with the notion would be merely nominal. The real start would be made with Being, as we have here done: with this difference, that the characteristics of Being as well as those of Essence would have to be accepted uncritically from figurate conception, whereas we have observed Being and Essence in their own dialectical development and learnt how they lose themselves in the unity of the notion. [1] Compare Goethe's indignant outcry--'To Natural Science,' vol. i. pt. 3: Das hör' ich sechzig Jahre wiederholen, Und fluche drauf, aber verstohlen,-- Natur hat weder Kern noch Schaale, Alles ist sie mit einem Male. CHAPTER IX. THIRD SUB-DIVISION OF LOGIC. THE DOCTRINE OF THE NOTION.