It is evident that in all these transitions there is a further purpose than merely to show the indissoluble connexion between the notion or thought and being. It has been more than once remarked that being is nothing more than simple self-relation, and this meagre category is certainly implied in the notion, or even in thought. But the meaning of these transitions is not to accept characteristics or categories, as only implied;--a fault which mars even the Ontological argument for God's existence, when it is stated that being is one among realities. What such a transition does, is to take the notion, as it ought to be primarily characterised _per se_ as a notion, with which this remote abstraction of being, or eve of objectivity, has as yet nothing to do, and looking at its specific character as a notional character alone, to see when and whether it passes over into a form which is different from the character as it belongs to the notion and appears in it. If the Object, the product of this transition, be brought into relation with the notion, which, so far as its special form is concerned, has vanished in it, we may give a correct expression to the result, by saying that notion or, if it be preferred, subjectivity and object are _implicitly_ the same. But it is equally correct to say that they are different. In short, the two modes of expression are equally correct and incorrect. The true state of the case can be presented in no expressions of this kind. The 'implicit' is an abstraction, still more partial and inadequate than the notion itself, of which the inadequacy is upon the whole suspended, by suspending itself to the object with its opposite inadequacy. Hence that implicitness also must, by its negation, give itself the character of explicitness. As in every case, speculative identity is not the above-mentioned triviality of an _implicit_ identity of subject and object. This has been said often enough. Yet it could not be too often repeated, if the intention were really to put an end to the stale and purely malicious misconception in regard to this identity:--of which however there can be no reasonable expectation.