BECOMING XVII. SUBSTANCE.

The necessary, Hegel now says, “is in itself an absolute correlation of elements”
(150), i.e. as in the threefold process of condition, fact and activity just
developed. Yet in this process “the correlation also suspends itself to absolute
identity.” This, i.e. the actual transition, “is the identity of substance, regarded as
form-activity”. This, that is, is the sense given here to what Hegel has chosen to
call substance, a term by no means just “lifted” from Spinoza, however, where it
has in some respects a different sense. The expression “form-activity”, as
“absolute identity”, refers here to that which is itself and nothing other, neither
passing, by activity, into anything other since it is its own activity. In that way
Substance is “the totality of Accidents”. This term does not get a definition
here or, hardly, a description, apart from its being referred to, implicitly at least,
as an “outward thing”, to which the relatedness of Substance, in “absolute
identity” gives the negative, as it also does, however, “to this form of
inwardness”. Inward and Outward, we recall, were identified immediately
previous to Actuality.

The bottom line, here (though we are really saying there is no “bottom”, no
inward distinct from outward) is that the revelation which is “the totality of the
Accidents” is at one and the same time, in one and the same “act”, itself
revealed as a or the revealing. The accidents are revealed as Substance, as
“their absolute negativity”. They are nothing apart from Substance. We cannot
speak of “this” substance because for Hegel, as for Spinoza, mutatis mutandis,
there is and can be just one substance. Substance is Unity and identity and
absolutely so. That is to say, again, that the “content” of the revelation is nothing
but that very revelation”, that very revealing. It is not a revelation of anything
else. It is, we saw already, only the Content's self-externalisation as such, to the
“outward”, which gives or creates this impression of an alien and “limited
content”. It is not this absolutely or even abstractly. It is not, in its self-
externalisation, truthfully abstracted from this inward necessity or, rather, as we
are now told, Substance. Substance and necessity are one and the same,
however we rate the choice of just this term here.

From this it follows that Substance (and Accidents as identical in toto) is actually
derived from Inner and Outer, not from Necessity, which is not really, nor ought
to be made to be, a category here. The treatment, namely, of Possibility,
Contingency and Necessity in the Encyclopaedia here, using Greek lettering for
subdivisions, is in point of form an Excursus appended to the presentation of
Actuality. Substance is the first division of this, to be followed by Causality and
Reciprocity, leading into the Notion (143 to 149). This is the position of
McTaggart, who criticises Hegel for not making clear that these three are outside
the chain of categories, as they must be, since Necessity is actually nothing other
than Causality, which cannot imply Substance if it is then itself immediately
deduced from it. The fact remains that these, or similar intermediary categories,
such as “the Absolute”, are developed in the earlier The Science of Logic, called
"greater" (GL). Hegel’s true and final schema, however, McTaggart argues, is one
where Substance or, rather, Substantiality (as a relation of absolute identity
between Substance and Accidents) is derived immediately from Inner and Outer.
That it is or may be identical, as a relation, with these two, with that relation, is
only to be expected as we approach to the Notion. For there all lesser concepts
are identified, the Notion (or Concept) being the Concept, which is Thought as
such thinking no other thought, the same structure we find in this revelation
which is revealing which is Substance. Given identity, an of has no place. The
identity of B with A means that there is no B other than A. It is, that is, a
“relation of reason”. Yet here, differently from most Scholastic thought, the
relation of reason overarches, contains and is finally identical with all of the so-
called real relations which, as these are finite, it absorbs.

Hegel speaks of “the form which passes away in the power of substance” (151).
The inevitable “character” of the Content as “outward” or, less metaphorically,
“external to itself”, even “self-externalised” (148), this “aspect” of limitedness, is
“only a passing stage”. Substance expresses Form. Absolute negativity, of the
Outward, the Accidents (which it yet is), reveals “absolute power”, which just is,
in turn, this Act, revealing. “I am myself”, seen from the point now of absolute
Subjectivity, which Substance is (147, Zus.). “Substantiality is the absolute form-
activity" (151), not devoid of content but identical with content, in what is
negativity of negativity and hence absolute positivity. This, however, may just as
well be named negativity, excluding nothing, i.e. what it does exclude is
effectively Nothing with a capital N, the Nothing or limits absolutely considered
as not absorbed in, ultimately, the Notion. On Hegel’s premises, McTaggart
remarks, “no mind working in time could ever completely explain anything”, on
account of the finitude or falsity of time.

At this stage necessity “is a correlation”. “This is the correlation of Causality”

(152). What is being called Substance is “the self-relating power (itself a merely
inner possibility)” determining itself to accidentality as external and so
“distinguished” from it. McTaggart’s criticisms, which are yet simultaneously
clarifications, of Hegel’s dialectical passage through these parts of the Doctrine
of Essence, merit consideration here. He bases himself upon The Science of Logic
(GL) before comparing this text with the account given in the Encyclopaedia,
which he regards as by and large an improvement.

************************************

McTaggart, then, is critical of the categorial interpolation of Necessity between

Inner and Outer on the one hand and Substance on the other. He thus interprets
its presentation in the Encyclopaedia, along with Possibility and Contingency, as
an excursus. The finite, Hegel had written, "is a medium which is absorbed by
that which shines through it" (GLii, 188). Yet, McTaggart points out when
criticising the making of the Absolute as a category in GL, "in order to disappear
the finite must have some reality". Even its being there so as to be destroyed "is
incompatible with the supremacy of the Absolute". For then, as a pure unity, the
latter could not be the whole of reality, could not be ab-solute. It would be "the
Absolute of an external reflection. It is therefore not the Absolute-Absolute, but
the Absolute in a determination, or it is an Attribute" (cf. GL ii, 189):
 If we were to take the unity of the Absolute no longer as a pure unity
but as a unity which contained multiplicity and was more of a unity
because it did so, we should certainly have transcended the difficulty,
but I cannot find so advanced a conception in Hegel's words.1

It, the conception, is "not reached at this point". The category of substance,
McTaggart continues here, "should have been reached directly from Inner and
Outer", without this premature introduction of the Absolute:

In the first place it can be reached from Inner and Outer. For it is
simply the restatement of that category, as a new Thesis should be of
the previous Synthesis. All that we have said (in 166) of Substance
and Accident is equally true of Inner and Outer.2

Further, "of Inner and Outer… we must say, as of its predecessor Whole and Part,
that with such a conception all existents can be grouped in a single unity" (166).
This refers us back to McTaggart's mention, cited above, of a unity containing
multiplicity. "There is then only one substance", McTaggart writes. Yet for
Spinoza the Accidents, as finite, are unreal while for Hegel they are "as real as
the Substance" (168). So McTaggart finds Hegel's remarks on Spinoza here in the
GL "inappropriate". He adds that "Hegel never regarded personality or
consciousness as essentially characteristics of God…" By "God" Hegel means "the
Absolute Reality, whatever that reality might be" or "Absolute Reality conceived
as a unity."3

He asserts that "the transition… from Absolute Necessity (sc. to Substance) is

intrinsically invalid. For… Necessity is really that of Causality", which is later itself
derived from Substance." Such a reciprocity of entailment in the dialectic's
structure (as opposed to the material it considers) would contradict the whole
premise of dialectical advance.

That "Substance, relative to Accident, is to be conceived as power" implies

Causality. Substance, that is, determines the Accidents, now in and for
themselves, - themselves Substantial (sic McTaggart, 169). The Substance
Accidents relation itself implies a relation between two substances, implies
Causality. One may be reminded here of the scholastic doctrine that the premises
themselves "cause" the conclusion, a stance much deprecated in Analytical
Philosophy among those there at least who know of it.4

1
J.M.E. McTaggart, A Commentary on Hegel's Logic, CUP Cambridge, 1910, 160, my
stress. For an outline of the more advanced conception see McTaggart's own Studies in
the Hegelian Cosmology, CUP 1903, Chapter Two, "Immortality".
2
Cf. Hegel, Enc. 151.
3
But cp. Enc. 147, Zus.
4
Analytical philosophy itself arose largely in reaction to McTaggart's work, in the person
of his one-time admirer Bertrand Russell and the use he was later to make, along with his
colleague G.E. Moore, of Wittgenstein's early work. The latter had roots in Schopenhauer
rather than in Hegel (whom Schopenhauer had frankly professed himself unable to read).
In the Encyclopaedia "Hegel omits all the categories of the Absolute" in so far as
these include the conceptions "within Actuality in the narrower sense"
(introduced in GL exclusively).

McTaggart finds himself "able to accept very little of the treatment of the subject
(of Causality? Of Essence?) in the GL" (181). He is "in closer agreement with the
Encyclopaedia." In the latter "Hegel omits all the categories of the Absolute." As
for these conceptions, treated in GL "within Actuality in the narrower sense" (as
distinguished in GL exclusively), he "treats of them indeed" (at Enc. 143-149),
"but only in a preliminary discussion", i.e. before a), b) and c), viz. Substance,
Causality, Reciprocity. He treats of them, that is, "before… development of the
categories" into these three immediate divisions, as they here become, "instead
of subdivisions of its (Actuality's) final division." They are thus, says McTaggart,
of the third instead of the fourth order of categories. His analysis supports the
point he makes in Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, of 1897, that the validity of
Hegel's dialectical philosophy does not depend upon an absolute correctness of
the deriving and placing of each and every category. For no such absolute (in the
sense of either/or) place exists. One should take the categories in accord with the
superior inclusive power of Reason over Understanding disclosed by their own
development.

Possibility, Contingency and Necessity, then, are justifiably treated in an

excursus but not as "categories of the dialectical process". For "necessity and
causality are the same conception", nor is the relation to Possibility and
Contingency to Necessity and Causality "required" to reach necessity "or to
transcend it".

Yet the Encyclopaedia inconsistently (sic McTaggart, taking necesssity, possibility

and contingency as belonging, again, to an excursus under Actuality) makes the
transition to Substantiality from Necessity. Since these three notions "are not a
triad in the chain of categories" Substance, if in truth derived therefrom, "would
thus have no connexion with the earlier part of the chain", which would then be
"hopelessly broken". Yet the category immediately before Substance is "Inner
and Outer" and from this it "must be deduced", as is "easily done". McTaggart
thus distinguishes implicitly between Hegel's text as imperfectly reporting or
"embodying" a mental or spiritual reality and that reality itself of which the
(imperfect) text makes us aware. In this sense the accomplishment transcends
the text as an "activity" of thought anteriorly achieved, to which the text bears
finite witness and in which all readers may participate. Reading, that is, is
"intentional" and not a mere skimming of the eye over words. It is the ideas
which are purely themselves and hence not intentional. They are, that is, not
identifiable with the verba cordis of realist scholastic logic, the concepts as
"intentional species"5, but rather with absolute mind itself, the Concept in which
they "result". We will see later on that Hegel all the same finds place in reality for
the so-called "subjective concept", the id quo or that through which the res is
Russell was not open to this side of Wittgenstein, who complained to him that "you never
understood me".
5
Cf. Aquinas, Summa theol. Ia, 85, 2.
known. The res, however, the reality, is itself concept or idea and finally the
Concept, in which all are contained or to which all are indifferently material.

McTaggart continues his criticism, finding that in both texts there is an equal
"failure with the category of causality", in that it has "no subdivisions", even
thought the transition to it is "through the conception of the Substance as the
cause of its Accidents". "Substance is Cause" and this causality, "though so far
assumed only as a sequence, is… at the same time necessary" (Enc.153), i.e. the
Effect is necessary. This is the same transition as in GL, but since it omits
mention of Formal Causality specifically McTaggart judges it yet more "obscure"
(McTaggart 176). But of course one need not take Hegel as implying (temporal)
succession in his mention of "sequence", whatever one finds in Hume.

The Encyclopaedia maintains an identity of Cause and Effect, just as in GL. The
possibility is also allowed, as not contradictory, of an Infinite series of Cause and
Effect. This contrasts with the Infinite Qualitative Series of the Encyclopaedia,
where "each term was found in its other, and not in itself." A, say, has "its nature"
always in its other and this in its other and so on and so on. Thus it has it
nowhere. Yet it is "already established", writes McTaggart at 177, that A "has a
nature".

So he is in agreement with Aquinas that no first temporal cause is necessary. By

his distinction against the text from the Doctrine of Being just cited he would
seem to be taking Hegel after all as considering causality in Humean fashion, viz.
as a relation of temporal causality. For Aquinas all such causality is accidental.
Even the father could be considered as more "substantially" cause of his son
(though this would be erroneous in point of fact) than the accidental connection
of the father's engendering activity of some time previously. There may of course
be incoherence here. As "first" cause Aquinas posits God (or Absolute Mind) here
and now, along with such things as the sun or the earth's atmosphere. The more
primitive viewing of persons as in the one chain or network of ancestors ("as in
Adam" etc.) is a variant upon this, denying time in the act of assimilating it, as
we find with music considered generally.

McTaggart adds here, again, the remark that "no mind working in time could ever
completely explain anything." So he is, as himself denying time, really committed
to taking Hegel's "sequence" as a supra-temporal conception. The endless
succession is no contradiction but it is a "False Infinite" (schlechte Unendliche).
We have "endless succession (as distinguished from the True Infinity of self-
determination)". It is bad whether contradictory or not and this situation arises, of
course, from the finitude of causality as a category. It will be transcended and
"absorbed". The transition, anyhow, to be made from Causality to Action and
Reaction (Enc. 155) "does not depend on any contradiction being found in the
infinite series".

Yet, McTaggart now asks (178), "if A produces different effects in different things,
what becomes of the identity of cause and effect?" This difficulty, however, only
seems to have effect for the Understanding (and not, that is, for the Reason) as
holding that "Everything is itself and not another thing." This is a position one
may suspect McTaggart, from the Hegelian point of view, of never surmounting
as he might, largely perhaps on account of the strong commitment he seems to
exhibit to the separate identity of persons.

Substance, he says, transcends the Essence relation of Substratum and Surface

(in GL). We are, after all, "near the end" of the Doctrine of Essence (McTaggart
166). Substance is Whole, Force, Inner (the "substratum"), if we refer to the
immediately preceding categories. Accidents then are Parts, Manifestation, Outer
(Surfaces). Nature, we remember, had no surface and substratum dichotomy.
There is, again, only one Substance, in Hegel's sense of Absolute Necessity which
"connects the whole universe in one". Following on from Inner and Outer, as from
Whole and Parts, "all existents can be grouped in a single unity". This is the
insight of Parmenides that "Being has no parts". Substance, again (167), "should
have been reached directly from Inner and Outer, for "it is simply the
restatement of that category, as a new Thesis should be of the previous
Synthesis" (cp. McTaggart 151). So Hegel was "wrong" to insert two triads in
between without any advance. Yet we might ask whether every category is not a
"restatement" of the very first one, while "advance" remains an evaluation. Still,
we clearly do not "advance" where we derive concepts in vicious circularity as
distinct from reciprocity (a distinction not always easy to identify in the reality
represented by or identified with the dialectic).

The transition from Necessity is invalid because Necessity "is really causality".
But suppose I said Being "is really" the Absolute Idea, thinking itself? This would
not make the whole dialectic from the one to the other invalid but it would force
us to refine our notion of a "transition". Necessity thus means much more than
"that reality is certainly determined". It is more specific than that. Otherwise "we
should have had Necessity early among the categories of Being, and the relation
between Surface and Substratum… would have been Necessity throughout." For
Hegel "Necessity… involves two characteristics." The first is that what it
necessitates "must be a Thing (cf. Enc. 125) - not the mere Somethings of the
earlier categories." Secondly, what determines it, the Thing, "must not be its own
Substratum - its Ground, Matter, Law or Force - but some other Thing." We
recognise the features of ordinary causality, yet here in Hegel's system, one may
object to McTaggart, there must be nuances to any such use of "other". Is God
"other"? Is Non-Being other than Being?

**********************************************************

In any case McTaggart appears incorrect on the matter of fact. Thus Hegel refers,
at 153, when he comes to Causality as the next category, to understanding's
"readiness to use the relation of cause and effect". He explicitly contrasts this
with how it "bristles up against the idea of substance." Is McTaggart, in
commenting, too much on the side of analytical reason, not allowing sufficient
rope to synthetic Reason? Thus

Whenever it is proposed to view any sum of fact as necessary, it is

especially the relation of causality to which the reflective
 understanding makes a point of tracing it back. (153, Zus., my
stress).

This "relation does undoubtedly belong to necessity", yet "it forms only one
aspect in the process of that category." Here Hegel, in contradiction of
McTaggart, denominates necessity as a category, and just here, retaining
simultaneously his emphasis upon it as a process. The category itself, apart from
our naming of it, both is and has a process. In fact this is true of every category
insofar as it emerges and disappears in a continuum, which yet does not imply
denial or suppression of the discreteness of concepts (cf. 100(1)).

That process equally requires the suspension of the mediation

involved in causality and the exhibition of it as simple self-relation. If
we stick to causality as such, we have it not in its truth. Such a
causality is merely finite, and its finitude lies in retaining the
distinction between cause and effect unassimilated.

It looks as if McTaggart should rather have said that Causality is Necessity, when
truly viewed, and not, if genuinely interpreting, have reduced the latter to the
former. The distinction is only thus far or finitely valid while "these two terms, if
they are distinct, are also identical." But this is to anticipate. Yet in a similar way
Necessity unfolds the contours of the originally posited Being. The Causality
which Necessity later emerges as is a causality more profoundly understood
through being thus derived. It is not only the final category of the dialectic which,
then inexplicably, is essentially Result. This applies to every step of it as Advance
(239(b)) from the Beginning (238(a)). These are stages of the Speculative or
Synthetic Method in process of becoming identical with the Speculative or
Absolute Idea. This category of Method, the "reception of the object into the
forms of this notion" which is the Notion, is a subdivision of "Cognition proper".
This, in turn, along with Volition, forms part of "Cognition in General". This, again,
differentiates the category of Life, as formally its antithesis, so as to form the
final synthesis of The Absolute Idea. This, in turn, is the perfection of the category
of THE IDEA, the final one, after THE SUBJECTIVE NOTION and THE OBJECT. These
are the three categories making up the Doctrine of the Notion, which succeeds
this of Essence. As final the Idea, essentially ab-soluta, is no longer confined to
the specifications for a category and so of necessity (cf. 157, Zus.) will go forth in
free self-alienation as what we call Nature (244). That very going forth, however,
is one with as essentially prefacing a more complete Return (the parousial
moment) to a self-interiority, which is not a mere interiorisation, including all in
unity. This, of course, is Hegel's interpretation of the Delphic advice to Socrates
to "know thyself". This could not possibly be taken as a call for self-limitation,
hostile to the very essence of philosophy as perfecting, again, (the form of)
religion, which it may yet unconditionally respect as "the highest praxis" (liturgy,
leitourgia, service) and not, as sometimes is asserted, as "handmaid" (ancilla) to
it. A handmaid does not formally perfect the lady or, here, represent the Content
more perfectly than he. Philosophy, rather, is the Lady and supreme consolatrix,
as we find in the martyr-theologian Boethius.

*************************************************************
The import of these categories of Substance and hence of Causality is that the
formal Actuality and Possibility (of the Thing in isolation, praecisio) implies the
real Actuality and Possibility of the thing as connected with others.6 This is just
Causality and there is indeed a circle, as we move from Causality to Substance
and back again, whether or not Hegel may legitimately reflect it in the dialectic
without invalidating it.

McTaggart, anyhow, asserts (157-161) that the Absolute, as a category of the GL

exclusively, is "not properly deduced" from Inner and Outer, "nor is Contingency
properly deduced from the Modus of the Absolute". It would have been better to
leave out the Absolute and (narrow) Actuality as found in the GL. Thus in the
Encyclopaedia we have a valid transition from Inner and Outer (to Substance).
This, however, makes the remarks on Spinoza less appropriate in the
Encyclopaedia here under Substance (than in GL under Absolute, but cf. Enc.
151, Zus.) in view again of the different senses of substance for the two thinkers.
For Hegel its whole nature is in the Accidents, which for Spinoza are unreal.

If necessity is causality, anyhow, then Substance has to cause. Causality is

categorical to Actuality and so to its actuality. Yet the "accidents" which thus
proceed are indeed accidents. They are contingent, that is to say, with a
contingency necessarily determined to be such within necessity as the actual,
that which manifests itself as nought other than Manifestation and Revelation
itself or as such, as "show", to borrow and maybe analogically transform an
earlier term. We know from Hegel's philosophy of religion, inclusive of religion's
treatment in The Phenomenology of Mind, that there is continuity here with the
main positive tenets of what he calls, accordingly, "the absolute religion". The
hypostatic union of Absolute Mind with an individual human nature, in which it
takes death to itself or rather, again, manifests that death too is not outside of it
(nothing is nor could be), runs through the whole of rational humanity. That is to
say, one misunderstands if one racks the sources to determine whether or not
that One is the One. All are in all. Each, as identical with absolute subjectivity, is
the One, having the unity of all within herself. The one chosen, the one sent,
these are religious categories of imperfect form, taken from a religious or
prophetic culture only implicitly philosophical. Thus the ancient Jews especially,
as taking this implication as far as it could go while staying within its own
religious limits, could be called "a nation of philosophers", as Porphyry perceived
them. As chosen therefore they at the same time chose themselves as,
differently, Eckhart, whom Hegel quotes, was later to say that "the eye with
which God sees me is the eye with which I see God." This, again, was a
6
We may think here, as an example and maybe more than that (if McTaggart the atheist
is right in deducing that only persons exist), of the concept of the Mystical Body of Christ.
There, as in Christo, where one receives (communion) all or a thousand receive it, the
common life, its substance (sumit unus sumunt mille). This is striking confirmation of
Hegel's doctrine that the content of religion and of philosophy is the same, under a
different form (as it is, thirdly, the content of Art). A reading of the eighteenth century
text, Self-Abandonment to Divine Providence (J.-P. de Caussade), reinforces the
impression, as do other correspondences I have cited here. One may also consult the
physicist-philosopher Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, Basic Books, Inc. 1979, in
regard to philosophy and art on this matter of a common Content.
perception within absolute religion laying the ground for absolute idealism within
or as philosophy, perfect as to form. One should not see this as a denial of the
dogmatic on the level with the dogmatic or religious sphere where it belongs,
since it is precisely the transcendence, as to form, of that sphere. In just such a
way Hegel explains without denying the Fall of Man or that God created the world
or God as believed in as existing. Themes, like those of election or mission, are
themselves here "thematised" and thus find their fulfilment. Mystery, like the
Contingent, is integrated into Necessity.

So to be dogmatic about this transcendence of dogma would be straight

contradiction. Therefore the Content itself must be brought under the rubric of
Freedom. This will not be to reduce it to the aesthetic mode but to save or finally
reunite the aesthetic with the ethical and, here, with transcendental religious
claims. In this sense it was said, "Believe me for the very work's sake", not, that
is, by a mere causal inference but as seeing the personal, absolute personality
indeed, in the "work" as beautiful or "glorious". To behold "the glory of the Lord"
is to step beyond argument, beyond the piecemeal assembling of what has no
parts, since it is perfectly whole. Faith, it was said, is "the substance of things
hoped for", not a remedy for subjective uncertainty.

Substance anyhow, Hegel reminds us, is met with "as the principle of Spinoza's
system" (151, Zus.), as, in Aristotle too, Being is Substance (ousia as
transcending hypokeimenon or sub-stratum). McTaggart really has no good
reason not to accept the choice to comment just here upon a monistic
predecessor. Thus Hegel himself emphasises the great differences between
Spinoza's system and his own, as touching Substance particularly and the place
which it "takes in the system of the logical idea", property of no or, rather, of
every philosopher. It is "an essential stage in the evolution of the idea" though
"not the same with absolute Idea". It is, again, the idea "under the still limited
form of necessity". This may make one wonder again if McTaggart has rightly
denied (limited) necessity to be a category within the "chain" of categories,
despite the appearance of circularity with respect to causality. This is only a
circle, after all, if Necessity and Causality, as named in the dialectic, are strictly
identified. Yet such "empty" or "formal" identifications are specifically excluded
and transcended in the very method which is dialectic itself, which discovers
"identity in difference" or actual contradiction, demanding a negation, at every
step.

So "it is true that God is necessity" or even "the absolute Thing". Yet, and beyond
such genuine identifications, God is "no less the absolute Person", for Hegel, in
view of his Trinitarian philosophy (of religion), the same as absolute Personality.
"That he is the absolute Person however is a point which the philosophy of
Spinoza never reached" as it is implied that Hegel, following upon Leibniz, does.
So it

falls short of the true notion of God which forms the content of
religious consciousness in Christianity.
As forming the true notion (of God) this religious consciousness is implicitly itself
philosophical. Only thus can Hegel consistently encapsulate this assertion within
his philosophy, as there is no doubt that he does. The "ecumenical" difficulties
this may present are extrinsic to the matter in hand and so may not legitimately
deflect our gaze. Yet we may note that Hegel does not explicitly deny that this
true notion is found in "religious consciousness" as such, where worthy of the
name. Implicit here, anyhow, would be the judgement that a philosopher, in his
particular apprehension of the content in his religious consciousness, which as
human he ought to have, it is surely implied, apprehends precisely this one and
only Content. This will hold, whatever the imperfections or perfections inherent in
the form of his religious formation and consciousness.

It may surprise that Hegel finds limitation in "the Oriental" or even "Jewish" view
of the frailty and transience of "the finite world". He himself, after all, repeatedly
affirms of it not merely frailty and transience but actual falsity, where seen, that
is, in abstraction from the Absolute (taking shape now from Substance to the
Idea). The illusion or maya, that is, is itself illusion, to be literally "seen through".
This is Hegel's position as stated at the end of the Philosophy of Spirit, in explicit
dialogue with Oriental tradition as he knew it. The finite is, again, a kind of
signum formale, not perceivable as such, i.e. intrinsically, since not itself having
being. This is the essence of absolute sign, that it is negatively absolute. In the
end it is nothing other than the relation not of sign but of that to which the
signification is made, viz. a consciousness, to what is signified, the res, in this
case the Infinite or Absolute. Nor is it implied that such an Absolute must have
the reciprocal relation to the particular consciousness relating to it. Such a denial,
however, may provoke denial of the reality of such a finite consciousness or
subject considered on its own or abstractly, cum praecisione, as is implicit in the
saying of Eckhart's above and, arguably, in the whole philosophic and religious
tradition of the one intimior me mihi.

Yet this "Oriental view of the unity of substance certainly gives the basis for all
real further development." It is, however, "marked by the absence of the
principle of the Western world, the principle of individuality." This, he says, first
"appeared under a philosophic shape, contemporaneously with Spinoza, in the
Monadology of Leibniz." He could hardly be more "ecumenical". What he is
thinking of, under Leibniz, is surely the theory that each monad contains or gives
a window upon all the others, has the unity of all within itself as McTaggart will
later express the same insight without referring to Leibniz. Leibniz thus
"thematises" the dignity of personality proclaimed in the Christian (and yet
Judaic) Gospel, "what you do to the least of these you do to me" and later
universalised by the man Paul ("Who suffers and I do not suffer?"). This process is
later completed in Kant's characterisation of the person (persona) as an End in
herself, masking all that is particular, contingent or perishable.

From all these points of view Hegel can make short work of the malicious and/or
stupid charge of atheism brought against Spinoza. Rather, theism itself
modulates into "atheism" intrinsically. God becomes man as man is seen to be
God, the one enabling the other as a famous liturgical orayer expresses it when
the wine and the water are mingled or "exchanged", as at the wedding at Cana in
Galilee, according to the story. It is unworthy of a philosopher not to think of
these things, these associations and resonances. He will be pretending.

So what Spinoza is saying is that God "alone really is", a strange form of atheism
maybe. Here Hegel urges that "the true God" is known, truly if imperfectly,
outside the bounds of Christendom, just as many Christians know him equally
imperfectly and so "are as much atheists as Spinoza". All this was distasteful to
McTaggart no doubt as calling in question his own (professed) atheism, but it is
essential to Hegel all the same. There is no invitation or call to "skip a line" where
God is mentioned, if it is Hegel we profess to expound and study. Still, Spinoza
"defrauds the principle of difference or finitude of its due." His system "holds that
there is properly speaking no world" and "should rather be styled Acosmism."
Hegel then appears to say, in the next few lines, that Spinoza is free of "the crime
of Pantheism" but that "the philosophy which is Acosmism" (Spinoza's) "is for that
reason certainly pantheistic". He seems to mean, if we prescind from a possible
"tongue in cheek" mood, that for Spinoza, or himself surely, God is, qua God,
everything, All (panta). Pantheism, however, as meaning that "finite things in
their finitude" and "in the complex of them" just are as such God, is too absurd
ever to have been believed by anyone.

He ends by deprecating Spinoza's putting substance "at the head of" his system
as "a shortcoming in respect of form". "The defect of the content is that the form
is not known as immanent in it", but is, rather, "geometrical". Thus Substance in
Spinoza, only approached by this "outer and subjective" form, remains "a dark
shapeless abyss which engulfs all definite content" and "produces from itself
nothing", since creation is "radically null", i.e. not manifestation, as in Hegel. Still,
Spinoza too would have recited the Psalm declaring that "the heavens declare
the glory of God… his handiwork", would he not? Substance, "intuitively accepted
by Spinoza", requires all the same "a previous mediation by dialectic", such as it
finds here in Hegel.