animal or a plant -- to see itself tormented with instances, which rob it of every determination, silence the universality it reached, and reduce it again to unreflective observation and description. Observation, which confines itself in this way to what is simple, or restricts the sensuously dispersed elements by the universal, thus finds its principle confused by its object, because what is determined must by its very nature get lost in its opposite. Reason, therefore, must pass from that inert characteristic which had the semblance of stability, and go on to observe it as it really is in truth, viz. as relating itself to its opposite. What are called essential marks, are passive characteristics, which, when expressed and apprehended as simple, do not bring out what constitutes their real nature -- which is to be vanishing moments of its process of withdrawing and betaking itself into itself. Since the instinct of reason now arrives at the point of looking for the characteristic in the light of its true nature -- that of essentially passing over into its opposite and not existing apart by itself and for its own sake -- it seeks after the Law and the notion of law. It seeks for them, moreover, as existing reality; but this feature of concrete reality will in point of fact disappear before reason, and the aspects of the law will become for it mere moments or abstractions, so that the law comes to light in the nature of the notion, which has destroyed within itself the indifferent subsistence of sensuous reality. To the consciousness observing, the truth of the law is given in " experience," in the way that sense existence is object for consciousness ; the truth is not given iu and for itself. If, however, the law does not have its truth in the notion, it is something contingent, not a necessity, in fact, not a law. But its being essentially in the form of a notion does not merely not contradict its being present for observation to deal with, but really gives it on that account necessary existence, and makes it an object for observation. The universal in the sense of a rational universality, is also universal in the sense imlied in the above notion : -- its being is for consciousness, it presents itself there as the real, the objective present ; the notion sets itself forth in the form of thinghood and sensuous existence. But it does not, on that account, lose its nature and fall into the condition of immovable subsisting passivity, or mere adventitious succession. What is universally normal is also universally valid : what ought to be,