1.  Nature observation finds the concept realized in inorganic nature, laws whose moments are things behaving simultaneously as abstractions; but this concept is not a kind of simplicity reflected into itself [a. Observing nature §§8-10].  ²In contrast, the life of organic nature is nothing other than such simplicity reflected into itself.  Internal opposition, universal against particular, singular, does not emerge by itself within the essence of this life.  The essence is not the genus that would divide itself and move within its undifferentiated element, while simultaneously for itself remaining undifferentiated in its antithesis.  ³Observation finds this free concept, whose universality developed singularity has just as absolute within it, only in the concept existing as concept itself, namely in self-consciousness.

2.  Laws of thought are the first thing observation comes across as it now turns into itself focussing upon the free concept, i.e. the actual concept.  ²This singularity, which is thought within itself, is the abstract motion of the negative taken completely back into simplicity, and the laws are outside reality.

– ³They have no reality means nothing other than: they have no truth!  ⁴While they're not supposed to be the whole truth, they should at least be the formal kind.  ⁵Unfortunately, being purely formal and without reality amounts to that infamous figment of thought, an empty abstraction devoid of the inherent splitting without which there is no content.

– ⁶But wait!  We are talking about laws of pure thought here.  Pure thought is, after all, the universal in itself.  This makes it a knowledge immediately containing being and along with that all reality.  So these laws are indeed absolute concepts, essences simultaneously and inseparably of form just as of things.  ⁷Internally automotive universality is the split, simple concept, so this ensures it has content; indeed, one that is all content, but just not sensuous being.  ⁸This content neither falls into contradiction with the form nor is it separated from it; rather, it is essentially form itself, for form is nothing other than the universal self-dividing into its pure moments.

3.  As an observation, this form, the content, is regarded by observation in terms of something found, given, i.e. just existing content.  ²This content is then a collection of separate necessities, connections with being at rest, which, as fixed content in and for itself supposedly have truth in their defining characteristics.  Now, this, in fact, deprives them of form.

– ³This absolute truth of fixed definitions or many different laws completely contradicts the unity of self-consciousness, of thought and form.  ⁴What is declared to be a firm, inherently abiding law can only be a moment of the unity reflecting itself into itself, it can only emerge as a vanishing magnitude.  ⁵Torn out of this context of motion by us and set up on their own, what they lack is not content, for they do possess a determinate content.  What they lack is form, which is their essence.  ⁶The reason why these laws are not the truth of thought has nothing to do with the fact that they are supposed to be merely formal and without content.  Indeed, the opposite is the case.  It's because they are supposed to be absolutely valid precisely as content deprived of form.  ⁷In their truth vanishing moments in the unity of thought, they ought to be taken as knowledge, thinking motion, but not as laws of knowledge.  ⁸Observation is not knowledge itself and is not familiar with it.  Observation distorts the nature of knowledge into the pattern of being, i.e. grasps its negativity only as laws of being.

– ⁹It is sufficient here to have demonstrated from the general nature of the matter that the so-called laws of thought are invalid.  ¹⁰More detailed development belongs in speculative philosophy [i.e. logic], in which they reveal themselves to be what they are in truth, namely singular vanishing moments, whose truth is only the whole of that thinking motion that is knowledge itself.

4.  This negative unity of thought is autonomous, or rather its is being for its self, autonomy as such, the principle of individuality and, in the reality of that autonomy, acting consciousness.  ²Thus, observing consciousness is driven on by the nature of the matter to it as the reality of those laws.  ³Since this context is not explicit for it, observing consciousness fancies that thought in its laws remains standing to one side, while on the other side it acquires another being in what is now its object, acting consciousness for itself in such a way that it overcomes otherness finding its actual reality in this intuition of itself as the negative.

5.  A new field opens up to observation: the actual activity of consciousness.  ²Psychology includes the collection of laws describing the various forms of behaviour of the mind with respect to the different modes of reality it confronts as pre-existing otherness.  The mind embraces that reality in order to conform to the given habits, customs and ways of thinking it finds therein, the reality in which it is also an actual object to itself.  As such, the mind also seeks to know itself as autonomously active against that reality, exercising its inclinations and passions in taking only particulars for itself from it all and reforming objective reality in conformity with itself.  The mind behaves negatively against itself as, in the former, singularity and, in the latter, universal being.

– ³In the first case, independence confers on pre-existing reality only the form of conscious individuality as such, standing still in terms of content within that pre-existing universal actual reality.  In the second case, however, independence gives that actual reality at least a characteristic modification not contradicting its essential content.  Alternatively, the individual may assert his particularity and characteristic content by setting himself against that reality, i.e. committing a crime.  Here the individual overcomes that reality in only one single way, but he can also do it in universal terms, for everyone, replacing the pre-existing world with a different one, with different rights, laws, customs.

6.  Observational psychology, when initially expressing its perceptions about the general modes of mental behaviour it finds in active consciousness comes up with a variety of capabilities, dispositions and passions.  Since the memory of the unity of self-consciousness resists suppression in the narration of this collection, psychology must soon fall into amazement at the fact that in the mind, like in a sack, such an enormous diversity and such heterogeneous things that have nothing to do with each other can come together, especially considering that they are clearly not dead or at rest at all, but, on the contrary, very restless motions indeed.

7.  In the narration of these various capabilities, observation finds itself on the universal side; the unity of these diverse capabilities is that of the side opposed to this universality: actual individuality.

– ²One person has a greater disposition to this, the other leans more to that.  This person has greater understanding than another.  There is something more profoundly uninteresting about discussing actual individuals in these terms than even reciting the species of insects, mosses and so on.  At least these allow observation its right to take them individually and without concept, because they belong essentially to the element of contingent individuation.  ³Taking conscious individuality without mind in this way as a singular given phenomenon is self-contradictory because its essence is the universal of spirit/mind.  ⁴In its reception, observation itself translates conscious individuality immediately into the form of universality; finding its law soon enough, it now appears to have a rational purpose, to be pursuing a necessary undertaking.

8.  The moments making up the content of the law are, on one side, individuality itself and, on the other, individuality's universal inorganic nature, namely the pre-existing conditions, location, habits, customs, religion and so on; determinate individuality is to be conceptually comprehended from these.  ²They contain determinate features as well as universal ones and are at the same time present, offering themselves up to observation, while on the other side they are expressed in the form of individuality.

9.  The law of this relation between the two sides would now have to include the effects and influences these determinate conditions exercise on individuality.  ²This individuality, however, is precisely what is also universal, flowing together steadily and directly with the given universals of customs, habits etc. and becoming compatible with them.  At the same time it is just as capable of behaving in opposition to them and even of overturning them completely.  It can isolate itself and behave with indifference to them, declining their effects and declining to enter into action against them.  ³What does have influence on individuality and what kind of influence that should have – which amount to the same thing – thus depends only on the individuality itself.  That such and such an individuality has become determinate in such and such a manner in fact means nothing other than: it was already this in the first place.  ⁴Conditions, location, customs and so on, which on one side are shown as pre-existing and on the other side in this determinate individuality, express only the indeterminate essence of that individuality, which is of no interest at all.  ⁵If these conditions, ways of thinking, customs and state of the world did not exist, then the individual would certainly not have become what it is; for all things in this state of the world are this universal substance.

– ⁶That state of the world has particularized itself in this individual – which is, after all, what is to be comprehended – so it must have particularized itself in and for itself and exerted its effect on the individual within this definition it has given itself.  Only in this way could the state of the world have made the individual into this determinate something that it is.  ⁷If external reality had composed itself in and for itself as it appears in the individual, then the latter could be comprehended from the former.  ⁸This would give us two galleries of pictures, all mirror reflections of each other.  The one would be the gallery of complete definition and delimitation of external conditions; the other the same translated into the mode in which they are present in conscious essence; the former the sphere surface, the latter the midpoint, the sphere's centre, it imagines within it.

10.  But the sphere surface, the world of the individual, has immediately the double meaning of world and location in and for itself on the one hand and, on the other, world of the individual in one of the following two senses: either the individual moves together with the pre-existing world, letting the world enter into him just as it is, so that he behaves as formal consciousness towards it; or else he makes it into the world of his individuality by inverting, overturning the pre-existing world.

– ²Since actual reality is capable of such double meaning precisely because of this freedom, the world of the individual can only be conceptually comprehended from the individual himself.  The influence of reality, imagined as being in and for itself, on the individual acquires through him the absolutely antithetical meaning that he either does not stop the stream of incoming reality or he interrupts it and overturns it.  This reduces psychological necessity to such an empty word that what supposedly had this influence includes the absolute possibility that it could just as well not have had it.

11.  With this the being that's supposed to be in and for itself and constitute the one side of a law, the universal side at that, falls away.  ²Individuality is what makes its world its own: the cycle of its own actions in which it has established itself as actual reality, the unity of pre-existing being and what has been made into being.  This is a unity whose sides are not those that are distinguished in the notion of the psychological law, namely pre-existing world in itself and given individuality for itself.  Taken separately and independently in this way means there exists here no necessity and lawfulness in their relation to each other.