force rather maintains itself as the essence in its very actuality : force when actual exists wholly and only in its expression ; and this, at the same time, is nothing else than a process of cancelling itself. This actual force, when represented as detached from its expression and existing by itself, is force driven back into itself ; but this feature is itself, in point of fact, as appears from the foregoing, merely a moment in the expression of force. The true nature of force thus remains merely the thought or idea of force ; the moments in its realisation, its substantial independence and its process, rush, without let or hindrance, together into one single undivided unity, a unity which is not force withdrawn into itself (for this is merely one of those moments), but is its notion qua notion. The realisation of force is, then, at the same time dissipation or loss of reality; it has thereby become something quite different, viz. this universality, which understanding knows from the start or immediately to be its essential nature, and which shows itself, too, to be the essence of it in what is supposed to be its reality, in the actual substances. So far as we look on the first universal as the notion of understanding, where force does not yet exist for itself, the second is now its essential reality, as it is revealed in and for itself. Or, conversely, if we look on the first universal as the immediate, which should be an actual object for consciousness, then this second has the characteristic of being the negative of sensuously objective force : it is force, in the form in which, in its true being, force exists merely as object for understanding. The first Vt^ould be force withdrawn into itself, i.e. force as substance ; the second, however, is the inner being of things qua imier, which is one and the same with the notion qua notion. This true being of things has here the characteristic that it does not exist immediately for consciousness ; rather, consciousness takes up a mediated relation to the inner ; in the form of understanding it looks through the intervening play of forces into the real and true backgromid of things. The middle term combining the two extremes, understanding and the inner of things, is the explicitly evolved being of force, which is now and henceforth a vanishing process for understanding itself. Hence it is called Appearance ; for being which is per se straightway non-being we call a show, a semblance. It is, however, not merely a show, but appearance