The Logic of Hegel · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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.
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