above which it ought to be. Still, if Essence or Substance itself were merely an abstraction, things would have an independent existence of concrete individuality outside of it. It must at the same time be characterised as the force of these things, the negative principle which makes its validity felt in them, and by means of which they represent what is perishing and transitory and has merely a phenomenal existence. We have seen how this negative element represents the peculiar nature of contingent things. They have thus this force within themselves, and do not represent manifestation in general, but the manifestation of necessity. This necessity contains things, or rather it contains them in their stage of mediation. It is not, however, mediated by something other than itself, but it is the direct mediation of itself with itself. It is the variable element or alternation of its absolute unity whereby it determines itself as mediation, that is, as external necessity, a relation of an Other to an Other, that is, whereby it spreads itself out into infinite multiplicity, into the absolutely conditioned world, but in such a way that it degrades external mediation, the contingent world to the condition of a world of appearance, and in this nullity comes into harmony with itself, posits itself as equal to itself, and does this in the world as representing its force. Everything is thus included in it, and it is immediately present in everything. It is the Being, as it also is the changeable and variable element of the world.
The determination of necessity as unfolded in the philosophical conception of it, is, speaking generally, the standpoint which we are in the habit of calling Pantheism, and sometimes in a more developed and definite form, sometimes in a more superficial form, it is what expresses the relation indicated. The very fact of the interest which this name has again awakened in modern times, and still more the interest of the principle itself, render it necessary that we should direct our attention to it.
