but by its immanent principle. Substance thus is to be identified with merely inner necessity, and has not yet developed into a system of inter-acting parts. But substance can have necessary power over its accidents only if its power appear in the accident itself, for substance exists only in appearing. The necessity of the whole ought to have an adequate manifestation, and should appear in each accident as the power modifying and determining the others. That is to say, the inward necessity must also appear outwardly. Since the accidents manifest substance they ought to show in themselves the power of substance, i.e. they ought to determine one another. Hegel puts the point thus: ‘The show, or accidentality, is intrinsically substance through the power; but it is not posited as this self-identical show. [The accidental is the evanescent.] Thus substance has as its actual shape or positivity only the accidental, and not itself; it is not substance as substance. The relation of substantiality reduces itself to substance which reveals itself as formal power, but whose differences are not substantial; in fact, it is only the inward of the accidents, and the latter are only in substance.’[1]
Hegel’s general meaning may be expressed in another way which will apply more directly to the ethical questions we have to consider afterwards. Substance is conceived as the underived and supreme, but the thought is one-sided. Substance is the ground of the accidents, and they receive their justification and truth from it; their immediate appearance is traced back to substance and based on it. But, on the other hand, substance does not ground itself in its accidents, it is prior to them and does not develop through their change. What is posited is the accident and not substance: substance is the original, the underived. Now this conception has, perhaps unwittingly, been used by many thinkers who treat of freedom. Freedom is represented by them as that which is not bound, that which acts in the world but is not enthralled by it. Time, change, and accident, they say, do not enter into freedom; and the attempt to explain a man by his time, his parentage, his training, and so forth, they regard as a weak surrender to the forces of determinism. The inward freedom of the will, on this view, cannot be bound by the
- ↑ Larger Logic, WW. IV. p. 223.
