more directly. We must take our stand on the distinction between idea and reality.
Error is the same as false appearance,[1] or (if the reader objects to this) it is at any rate one kind of false appearance. Now appearance is content not atone with its existence, a “what” loosened from its “that.” And in this sense we have seen that every truth is appearance, since in it we have divorce of quality from being (p. 163). The idea which is true is the adjective of reality so far as its content goes. It, so far, is restored, and belongs, to existence. But an idea has also another side, its own private being as something which is and happens. And an idea, as content, is alienated from this its own existence as an event. Even where you take a presented whole, and predicate one or more features, our account still holds good. For the content predicated has now become alien to its existence. On the one side it has not been left in simple unity with the whole, nor again is it predicated so far as changed from a mere feature into another and separate fact. In “sugar is sweet” the sweetness asserted of the sugar is not the sweetness so far as divided from it and turned into a second thing in our minds. This thing has its own being there, and to predicate it, as such, of the sugar would clearly be absurd. In respect of its own existence the idea is therefore always a mere appearance. But this character of divorce from its private reality becomes usually still more patent, where the idea is not taken from presentation but supplied by reproduction. Wherever the predicate is seen to be supplied from an image, the existence of that image can be seen at once not to be the predicate. It is something clearly left outside of the judgment and quite disregarded.[2]
Appearance then will be the looseness of char-
