Chapter 17 (a) Observations of Nature I.Observation on Inorganic Matter

1.description If thoughtless consciousness says that observation and experience are the sources of truth, it is likely to give the impression that only sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch are the sources of truth; When it feels, it forgets to account for the equally essential fact that when it feels, it already determines for itself the object of sense.And this regulation, for consciousness, is at least not as important as that for feeling.At the same time, it must be admitted that this consciousness is not just a general perception. For example, I saw this knife next to the cigarette case. This feeling is not a kind of observation.Because the meaning of what is perceived should be at least a universal (or universal) rather than a perceptual one.

The universal is thus first of all only persistent in its identity; its movement is only the same repetition of the same action.When consciousness finds only the universal or the abstract I in the object, it must assume for itself the movement of the object itself, and since it is not yet the comprehension of the object, it must at least be the understanding of the object. Memory, and the so-called memory is to express in a universal form what exists only in individual forms in reality.This same detachment which frees the sensuous individual from its individuality, and the same apparent universality which merely contains the sensuous without making the sensuous in essence universal, i.e., this The description is not yet a dialectical movement in the object itself; rather, the movement exists only in this description.So once the object has been described, it loses interest; so having described one, one must describe another, and always seek the object in order to describe it endlessly.When it is not easy to discover a whole new thing, it is necessary to return to the things that have already been discovered, and further divide and dismantle it, so as to discover new aspects of things in them.This instinct, which is never resting and never quiet, is never short of material.Of course, it cannot but be admitted to good luck if a new prominent species can be discovered, or even a new star (a star which is an individual, but has universal or universal properties).

But, like the species and genus marked by elephants, castor trees, gold, etc., their boundaries also pass through many levels, through the chaos of animals, plants, minerals, and metals and genus refined by artificial technology. Transitional through infinite differentiation of soil, etc.In this vast field of universal indetermination, differentiation again approaches individuation, and sometimes descends completely to individuation again, and in this vast field, there is an inexhaustible treasure of observation and description.But when observation and description are faced with a boundless wilderness, that is, when description stands on the frontier of the universal, what description can discover is not an immeasurable wealth, but only nature and itself. the limits of action; it is no longer able to know whether what appears to exist in itself is not an accident; and the image of things bears the marks of confusion or immaturity, weakness, and not yet free from its rudimentary indeterminacy. It has no right to even be described.

2.feature If this kind of seeking and describing seems to be only related to things, then we must know that seeking and describing do not go all the way along the road of perceptual perception. Things are rather more important than the rest of the sensuous attributes, which, indeed, are indispensable for things themselves, but are not absolutely necessary for consciousness.Through this distinction between the essential and the non-essential, the concept emerges from the bewilderment of sensibility, and cognition thus declares that knowing itself is at least as essential as knowing things.Facing this double essentiality, cognition is in a state of hesitation, not knowing whether what is essential and necessary for cognition is also the same for things.On the one hand, characteristics should serve only for cognition, by which it can distinguish things; but on the other hand, what should be known should not be the non-essential things of things, but the universal continuity by which things themselves separate themselves from existence in general. That which separates itself from other things should be that which separates itself from other things and becomes a being-for-itself.Features should not only have an essential relationship with cognition, but should also be related to the essential stipulation of things; moreover, man-made systems should conform to natural systems and only express natural systems.According to the concept of reason, this is necessary; and the instinct of reason (for in this observation reason only identifies itself as instinct) has already obtained this unity in its system, that is to say, In the system, the objects constituted by rationality have an essence or an existence for themselves in themselves, not just an accident of this time or this place.Animals, for example, are characterized by claws, because in fact not only cognition depends on the difference in claws to distinguish one animal from another, but the animal itself separates itself by them; The ground maintains itself and differentiates itself from the general.As for the plant, it has not become a being for itself at all, but only touches the edge of individuality, on which it expresses the phenomenon of gender difference, and is therefore known and distinguished by this gender.But what is lower can no longer distinguish itself from others of its kind; having entered into opposition, it disappears entirely.Being at rest and being in relation are at odds with each other; and things in relation are different from things at rest, for what is called an individual is that which maintains itself in relation to other things. , but everything that does not thus maintain itself in relation, everything that is one thing empirically and becomes something different chemically, throws knowledge into confusion, strife, and uncertainty. Which side should I stick to, because since the thing itself is not what remains equal, two sides are split off from it.

Thus, in such a system of universal self-identity, self-identity has a double meaning.It is both the self-identity of cognition or knowledge and the self-identity of things.However, each of the stipulations that maintain the same is certainly describing its development sequence calmly, so that each can find its place and follow its own characteristics, but in essence, these stipulations that maintain the same must be expanded after such expansion. To turn into their opposites leads to confusion of these determinations.Since the characteristic, the universal determinateness, is the unity of the opposite, the unity of what is determined and what is universal in itself, it is therefore necessarily split into this opposition.If now, on the one hand, determinateness overcomes the universal on which its own essence rests, then, conversely, on the other hand, the general likewise continues to rule over determinateness, pushing it to its margins. , so that its difference and essentiality are there confused.Observing what one thinks is a clear distinction between difference and essence, and who thinks to find something fixed in them, now finds that one principle is superimposed on another, overlapping, and transitioning to each other everywhere. , everywhere is disordered and confused; and finds in them that which was supposed to be separate is now united, and what could have been united is now separated; Determination and persistence, here, precisely in its most general determinations, as in the essential characteristics of plants and animals, cannot but feel everywhere refuted; it is thus deprived of all determinations, and the universality it had previously acquired Sex is forced into silence, and it itself is driven back into thoughtless observation and description.

3.Regular discovery (1) Concept and law experience Such an observation, since it regards only the simple as its object, or since it restrains the confusion of sensibility in general, must find in the objects it observes that its own principle is confusion, because it is What is determined is by its very nature bound to disappear in its opposite; reason, therefore, would rather leave that inert determination which appears to remain unchanged, and proceed in its truth, that is, in its Observation of prescriptiveness in relation to its opposite.As for the so-called signs of essence, they are all static determinations, and since the static determinations express themselves as simple and are understood as simple, they do not represent at all that which constitutes their nature, according to their nature. That is to say, they are all links of the dialectical movement returning to itself that tend to disappear or cannot be maintained.Now that the rational instinct sets out to search for a determination that does not lose its nature, that is, a determination that is not essentially for itself but transitions to its opposite, what it is looking for is law and the concept of law; of course When it seeks the law and its concept, it also seeks them as the existing reality, but in fact the existing reality will tend to disappear in front of the rational instinct, and all aspects of the law will become some pure links or abstractions, so Laws have the quality of concepts, and concepts have purged themselves of the insignificant existence of sensuous reality.

The truth of law also appears to the observing consciousness to exist in experience, not as something in itself and for itself, as sensuous beings are objects of consciousness.But if the truth of the law does not exist in the concept, then the law is a contingent thing, not a necessity, so in fact it is not a law.However, we say that the law is essentially a concept, which not only does not conflict with its being an object of observation, but precisely because of this, it has the necessary reality and becomes an object of observation.The universal or universal which is called the universality of reason is the universal which is implied in the concept itself, that is to say, the universal is present for the conscious, as present and actual, or in other words , the concept is presented in the form of things and perceptual existence; it just doesn't lose its nature, so that it degenerates into an inert, constant or irrelevant continuous appearance.What is universally valuable is also universally efficient; what should exist, in fact exists, but what should exist but does not exist has no truth.The rational instinct insists on this with good reason; the rational instinct is not deluded by things in thought which merely ought to exist and have truth as oughts, which in fact do not exist. , is something not to be found in experience; the rational instinct never allows itself to be misled by hypotheses and all other unreality that grows out of oughts, for reason is precisely the belief that it has the certainty of reality, What is not a self-essence (Selbstweser) to consciousness, that is to say, that which does not manifest itself, is to consciousness nothing at all.

To say that the truth of a law is essentially its reality is, again, for this consciousness that remains at the stage of observation, a way of saying that is opposed to the generality of concepts and in-itself, or in other words, in this consciousness It seems that something like its laws is not a rational essence, and it thinks there is something foreign in it.However, the fact that consciousness manifests itself refutes its view, because in fact consciousness itself does not think that in order to prove the truth of the law, all individual perceptual things must show the law phenomenon before it, and this is considered to have the law. universality.For example, the law that a stone that was lifted off the ground falls to the ground after letting go, does not require all the stones to be used for this experiment before it is established.Consciousness might say that this law must at least have been experimented with a large number of stones before it can be inferred by analogy with the greatest probability or full right that the same holds true for the rest of the stones.But not only does analogy confer no right to draw such inferences, but it is often, by its very nature, opposed to inferences by analogy, and analogy is rather a method from which no conclusions can be drawn.The result of analogy is, in the final analysis, only probability, but no matter whether the probability is greater or lesser, once it is treated with truth, it can be said to be irrelevant whether it is large or small. difference; however great it may be, so long as it is probabilistic, it is nothing compared with truth.However, in fact, rational instinct regards such probable laws as truths, and only when it cannot find the necessity in the laws, it makes such a distinction, reducing the truth itself of things to probabilities, using That truth which is admitted by a consciousness which has not yet recognized pure concepts is incomplete; for to a consciousness which has not yet recognized pure concepts, universality is only simple, immediate universality.But at the same time it is precisely because of this simple and immediate universality that the law has truth for consciousness; for the stone falling to the ground is true for consciousness only because the stone is immediately heavy for it, which is true for consciousness. That is to say, the weight of the stone has its own essential relationship with the ground, and the weight itself contains "falling to the ground".Consciousness, therefore, experiences laws as beings, but equally experiences laws as concepts, and laws are true to consciousness only when these two conditions are combined, that is, as both beings and concepts;

A law is a law because it appears as a phenomenon and at the same time is itself a concept. (2) Experiment Since the law is also a concept in itself, the rational instinct of this consciousness must but not consciously purify the law and its links to make it a concept.Rational instincts experiment with laws.The law that first appears is very impure, entangled in individual perceptual existence, and the concept that constitutes the nature of the law is immersed in the empirical material.When rational instinct is doing experiments, it wants to discover what will happen under what circumstances. Therefore, on the surface, it seems that the law will only sink deeper and deeper into the perceptual existence because of the experiment; but the perceptual existence Rather it disappeared during the experiment.Because the intrinsic significance of this kind of experiment lies in the discovery of the pure conditions of the laws, but what does it mean to discover the pure conditions of the laws?Although the consciousness that said this sentence may think that this sentence has other meanings, in fact, it just means that the experiment is to purify the law as a whole into the law of the concept form and to make the connection between the link of the law and the specific existence. All connections are completely eliminated.For example, negative electricity was originally considered to be resin electricity, and positive electricity was considered to be glass electricity. After the experiment, the original meaning of resin electricity and glass electricity was completely lost, and they became pure and pure electricity that no longer belonged to any special object. Yin electricity and Yang electricity: At the same time, it can no longer be said that there are objects exclusively for Yang electricity and other objects exclusively for Yin electricity.In the same way, the relationship between acidity and alkalinity and the law formed by their mutual motion is also a law that expresses their opposite relationship with objects.However, the two sorts of things that have been resolved have no reality; we can separate them by force, but we cannot prevent them from reappearing immediately in a chemical process; for they are only this opposite relationship; A tooth or a paw exists for itself, and we cannot indicate them in this way.They take a direct transition into a neutral product as their essence, which means that their existence is a self-sublated existence or a universal existence; and acidity and alkalinity have truth only as two universal existences sex.So, just as both resin and glass can be both positive and negative, neither acidity nor alkalinity is a property attached to any one reality, and everything is only relatively acidic or alkaline; we What is supposed to be absolutely acidic or absolutely basic may, in what is called admixture, have the exact opposite properties with respect to the other. —The result of the experiment thus sublates the moment as a property of certain objects, and liberates the predicates from their subjects.These predicates, as they really are, exist only as universals; and because of their independent existence they acquire a title; they are not called bodies, nor properties, but substances. ; such things as oxygen (acidic substances), as well as negative and positive electricity and heat, etc., are generally avoided as objects.

① Mixture (Synsomatien) is a term used by the chemist Winterl in the early nineteenth century to express the combination phenomenon between physical mixing and chemical combination.This so-called mixing effect causes objects to undergo changes in color, density, and even weight. These changes do not occur in the mixing action, but they cannot be regarded as chemical changes.For example, the mixing of water and alcohol is a common example of the phenomenon of mixing. - translator (3) Substance Matter, in contrast to body, is not a being, but a being like a universal or a being as a concept.Reason makes such a correct distinction.However, when the rationality that has not surpassed the instinct stage makes this distinction, it does not realize that it uses all perceptual existence to test the law, and in the end what it sublates is precisely the perceptual existence of the law, and it does not realize that, Because it understands the links of law as matter, the essence of these links has become universal or universal, and since it is called universal, it can be said to be a non-sensual perceptual existence, a non-physical but Rather, it exists as an object.

We can now see with what transformation the activity of the rational instinct results and in what new form its observations take place.We see that the truth of this consciousness engaged in experimental work is to liberate the pure law from the sensuous existence. The concept of self-existence, of free movement, is the simple concept of being immersed in sensuous existence without being bound by it.This thing, which is really the result and the essence, now itself appears before the consciousness, but it appears as an object, and since this object is not a result in the consciousness of the consciousness, and has no relationship with the previous activities of the consciousness, it It appears as a special kind of object; the relation of consciousness to this special kind of object is another kind of observation.