1.  Psychological observation fails in its efforts to find a law for the relationship of self-consciousness to actual reality, the world confronting it.  Their indifference to each other drives it back to the characteristic definition of real individuality, which is in and for itself in the sense that it includes the opposition of being for itself and being in itself eliminated within it by their absolute mediation.  ²Real individuality is observation's new object to which it now turns.

2.  The individual is in and for himself.  Being for himself gives the individual freedom of action.  He is also in himself: he has his own original determinate being, which is, in terms of the concept, just what psychology wanted to find outside him.  ²Opposition now becomes pronounced within himself.  He is doubled.  It consists of the motion of consciousness and the fixed being of an appearing actual reality.  This reality is immediately his own.  ³The fixed being is the body of the given individuality, its original aspect, all that it has not done itself.  ⁴That said, the individual is also the product of his own action, so his body is the self-expression he brings forth too: a sign, something that does not remain an immediate fact, a statement in which he makes known what he is in the sense of putting his original nature to work.

3.  If we look at these moments in relation to the previous perspective, clearly we have here a general human form, or at least general in terms of climate, continent and nation just as before we had the general conditions of customs, education and culture.  ²This human form also includes the particular conditions and location within the general reality; the particular here is the individual's specific bodily formation and structure.

– ³Previously, the individual's free action and actual reality as his own stood against pre-existing reality.  Now this other side is occupied by bodily structure as the expression of the individual's own process of realization, the features and forms of his autonomously active essence.  ⁴Observation formerly found that actual reality, universal as well as particular, outside the individual, but here it is his own reality, the body he was born with, which is now the medium of the expression contained in his action.  ⁵Psychological observation wanted to bring given actual reality in and for itself and determinate individuality into relation with each other.  Here, however, the whole determinate individuality is the object of observation and each side of this object's opposition is this whole.  ⁶Thus, not only original being, the body the individual was born with, belongs to the outer whole, but just as much the body's formation, which belongs to the activity of its inside.  The body is the unity of formed and unformed being, the individual's vital reality thoroughly permeated with being for itself.  ⁷This whole comprising the specific original fixed parts and those features that only emerge through action is and this being is an expression of the inside, of the individual as consciousness and motion.

– ⁸This inside is similarly no longer formal, indeterminate autonomous action devoid of its own content, whose definition and content would, as before, would lie in external conditions.  What we now have is an original character determinate in itself, whose form is only activity.  ⁹We shall now consider how the relation between these two sides is to be defined and how we are to understand this expression: the inside within the outside.

4.  This outside initially makes the inside visible only as an organ, just a being for another; for the inside, within the organ at least, is activity as such.  ²The speaking mouth, the working hand – you can throw in the legs too if you like – are the organs of performance and realization that have the action as action, the inside as such within them.  The externalization, however, which the action gains through the organ is the act, an actual reality separated from the individual.  ³Language and labour are modes of expression in which the individual no longer maintains and possesses himself within himself; instead he lets the inside totally come out, abandoning it to others.  ⁴One can say here that such expression externalizes, outputs the inside too much rather than too little.  Too much: because the inside itself breaks out in the expression removing all opposition between the inside and its externalization; it's no longer an expression of the inside, but rather the entire inside itself.  Too little: because the inside turns itself into something other in language and behaviour, abandoning itself to the element of transformation distorting the spoken word and the accomplished act, making it into something other than it is in and for itself as behaviour of this specific individual.  ⁵The character of being something enduring against other individuals is removed from the results of the behaviour in this externalization through interference by those others.  Moreover, the results now relate to that inside, which they still contain, as separated, indifferent externals making it possible for them, as the inside of the individual, to be something other than what they appear to be.  Either the individual makes them intentionally into something other in appearance than what they in truth are; or he may be just too clumsy to give himself the outward expression he really wants to, much less to establish his works firmly so that they cannot be distorted by others.  ⁶Thus, the action as an accomplished fact has the double, antithetical significance of being either the inner individuality and not its expression or an external, actual reality free from that inside, something completely different from it.

– ⁷Given this ambiguity, we have to scrutinize the inside carefully and see how it looks in the individual, but visible, external.  ⁸In the organ, however, his outside only becomes an act, which either reveals the inside or does not, in immediate action.  ⁸Considered in terms of this opposition, then, the organ does not necessarily produce the expression sought.

5.  If the external structure could only express inner individuality, at least if that outer structure is not an organ or an action, rather a whole at rest, then it would behave in fact like an abiding thing that calmly received the inside as something alien into its passive existence, thereby becoming its sign.  The sign is an external, contingent expression, whose actual reality has no meaning, a language whose tones and sound combinations are not the matter itself  [V.A.a. Observing nature §47.7], but only freely, arbitrarily linked to the external form and coincidental to it.

6.  No law can emerge from such an arbitrary connection between things that are external to each other.  ²Physiognomy supposedly distinguishes itself from bad arts and worse research, so we are told, by considering determinate individuality in terms of the necessary opposition between inside and outside, between character as conscious essence and as given formation; further, by relating these moments to each other as they are related through their concept, so that they must constitute the content of a law.  ³In astrology, palmistry and other such sciences, in contrast, it appears that only externals are related to externals, that things are related to others quite foreign to them.  ⁴The particular constellation at birth or, coming closer to the body, the particular features of the hand, offer external moments indicating long or short life and the destiny of the individual person.  ⁵Externals, they relate indifferently to each other and do not have the necessity for each other that is supposed to lie in the relationship of an outside and an inside.

7.  The hand doesn't seem to be that external to destiny; it could be intimately related to it.  ²For destiny is also after all just the appearance of what determinate individuality is in itself, its inner original definition.

– ³To know, then, how individuality is in itself, palmists and physiognomists take a short cut.  Shorter than, say, Solon did, who thought it only possible to acquire such knowledge looking back on the whole course of a long life.  Solon worked with destiny's appearances, they, however, go straight for the in itself.  ⁴It is easy to understand how the hand represents the in itself of individuality in terms of destiny given that, after the organ of language, the hand is the body part most used by man to enter into appearance and realization.  ⁵The hand is the animated, soulful engineer of his happiness.  One can say of the hand that it is what man does, for in this active organ of his self-realization he animates his own here and now, spreading soul.  Man is originally his own destiny so the hand will express this in itself.

8.  So the organ of activity is just as much a being as it is the action within it.  The inner being in itself is present in that organ while also having being for another.  A view of this situation quite distinct from the previous one emerges from this result.  ²As accomplished act the action is only external, sundering outside and inside, making them (possibly) alien to each other. If this situation disqualified the organs as expressions of the inside then, according to this view, the organ must again be taken as the midpoint of the two – inside and outside – precisely because the action is present within it and simultaneously constitutes something external, distinct from the act, remaining to the individual, within him.

– ³This midpoint and unity of inside and outside is now initially also external.  Then again, its external character is taken into the inside.  It stands as a simple external opposed to the scattered kind that is either just a single contingent production, a state of the whole individuality, or the whole of that external character, the destiny fragmented into a multitude of productions and states.  ⁴The simple features of the hand, then, also the sound and range of the voice among the individual's defining features of his language – these again as they acquire a more firm existence through the hand than through the voice, i.e. the script, here in its particularity as handwriting – all this is expression, output of the inner such that, a simple externalization, it is behaviour conducted as an inside within, and contrasted with, the varied externalizations of interpersonal activity and destiny.

– ⁵If, then, initially the determinate nature and in-born uniqueness of the individual is taken with what he has become through education as the inside, as the essence of his social action and destiny, then it has its appearance and externality initially in his mouth, hand, voice, handwriting, in the other organs and their enduring defining features.  Only on this basis does his essence, his inside, go on to express itself outwardly in his actual reality in the world.

9.  Since now this midpoint has determined itself as the externalization, output that is simultaneously taken back into the inside, its existence is not restricted to the immediate organ of action.  Facial expression and body language as such don't do anything.  ²These features and their motion are, in terms of this concept, the action held back in the individual and remaining there, while in terms of his relation to actual action, they amount to his own oversight and observation of his activity: expression as reflection on the actual expression.

– ³The individual is thus not silent on and in his external action in being reflected into himself within that and expressing it explicitly.  This theoretical action, the language of the individual with himself, can also be observed by others, for it too is an expression, an externalization, an output.

10.  Thus, the individual's self-reflection from out of his actual reality is observable on this inside, which remains an inside through all his externalizations, outputs.  Now we have to consider what relation it has to the necessity established by this unity.

– ²This state of self-reflection is initially distinct from the act it accompanies and can thus be taken for something other and, indeed, actually be something other than the act itself.  You can see it in a person's face, whether he is really serious about what he says or does.

– ³Conversely, what is supposed to be an expression of the inside is also a given expression, dropping into the condition of being, which is absolutely coincidental for self-conscious essence.  ⁴It is thus certainly expression, but only like a sign.  The expressed content is completely irrelevant to the composition of that through which it is expressed.  ⁵The inside in this appearance is certainly something invisible rendered visible without being bound to it; the inside can just as well be rendered visible in a different appearance and a different inside can occupy the same appearance.

– ⁶Thus [Georg Christoph] Lichtenberg [1742-99, Über Physiognomik, wider die Physiognomen, (On physiognomy, against the physiognomists) 1778 etc.] says correctly, "If the physiognomist ever did take the measure of man, all that would be required is a courageous resolution for him to make himself incomprehensible again for thousands of years."

– ⁷In the last scenario pre-existing circumstances were a given and the individual took what he wanted and what he could get, either conforming to it or reforming it.  There was nothing of the necessity and essence of his individuality to it.  Here also the appearing, immediate being of individuality either expresses its self-reflection withdrawn from actual reality as introversion or else it is merely a sign oblivious to what it signifies, which means that in truth it signifies nothing at all.  That appearing immediate being is the individual's face, but also his mask, which he can take off.

– ⁸Individuality permeates its embodied form, moves and speaks in it.  This whole existence, however, also shifts to being oblivious to will and social action.  In this, individuality destroys the meaning being formerly had, i.e. of encompassing its reflection into itself, its true essence; now instead it transfers that to the will and the act.

11.  Individuality abandons that self-reflection expressed in facial and bodily features and places its essence in its completed work.  ²In this it contradicts the relation firmly established by the reason instinct that focussed on observing self-conscious individuality in order to ascertain what its inside and outside are.  ³This point of view brings us to the genuine insight lying at the foundation of the science, if one may call it that, of physiognomy.  ⁴The antithesis this kind of observation runs into is, in terms of form, that of practical and theoretical within practice: individuality realizing itself in social action, in the most general sense of the term, confronting individuality immersed in this social action and simultaneously withdrawn from it, reflected into itself pondering the action as its object.  ⁵Observation receives this antithesis in terms of the same inverted relation the antithesis takes in appearance.  ⁶It regards the act itself and the completed work as an inessential outside – whether that is language or a more fixed, more actual reality – but it takes the interiority of individuality as the essential inside.  ⁷From the two sides inherent to practical consciousness, the process of intention formation and the action – intentions, meanings, opinions about his social action and the action itself – observation chooses the former as the true inside.  This, then, should find its more or less inessential expression in the act, but its true expression in its embodied form.  ⁸As such, this expression is the immediate sensuous presence of the individual's spirit and mind.  The interiority that is supposed to be the true one lies in the idiosyncrasy of his intention and the singularity of his being for himself and both are intended, meant spirit/mind.  ⁹Thus, observation's objects are all intentional, fancied existence riddled with opinion and it seeks laws obtaining among them.

12.  Natural physiognomy is immediate opinion on the fancied presence of the spirit and the mind, hasty judgement on the inner nature and character of an embodied form at the first look.  ²The object of this opinion is essentially something other than merely sensuous immediate being.  ³As such, it is certainly also present as that state of being within the sensuous, only now reflected out of that into itself; it is visibility, the visibility of what is invisible, and this is the object of observation.  ⁴Moreover, this sensuous immediate presence is the actual reality of spirit/mind only for intended meaning, opinion; and observation operates, on this side, with intended existence, with physiognomy, handwriting, sound of voice and so on.

– ⁵Observation refers this existence precisely to such intended, meant interiority.  ⁶It is not the murderer, the thief, who should be detected, but the capability to commit such crimes.  Fixed, abstract definition gets lost here in the concrete, infinitely determinate character of the particular individual, which demands now more elaborate descriptions than those fixed qualifications can provide.  ⁷Such elaborate descriptions say much more than qualifications like murderer, thief, good hearted, unspoilt, etc.  When it comes to serving their purpose, speaking for the intended being, his particular individuality, however, they don't say nearly enough.  As little, indeed, as the description of features goes beyond flat forehead, long nose and so on.  ⁸For, as intended being, the individual feature is, just like the individual self-consciousness, inexpressible.  ⁹This science of the knowledge of man, dealing with the meant, supposed human being, which fancies itself a scientific physiognomy addressing his supposed reality and seeking to elevate the intuitive judgement of a natural physiognomy to a form of knowledge, thus has no end in sight and no ground beneath it, for it never arrives at the point where it can say what it means, precisely because it only means and its content is merely something meant, intended.

13.  The laws this science seeks to establish are relations between these two supposed sides, so they cannot be anything other than empty supposition.  ²More, since this fancied knowledge, claiming to deal with the actual reality of the spirit and the mind, is indeed addressing that as it reflects itself into itself from out of its determinate sensuous existence, itself regarded as an irrelevant coincidence, so it must know that the laws it finds don't really say anything.  Opinion at best, not really serious at all, they're more likely to be pure drivel.  ³In terms of content, these observations are no different from those of the following kind.  "It always rains on the annual fair," says the grocer; "Whenever I put out washing to dry too," says the housewife.

14.  Lichtenberg, who characterizes observation in physiognomy in this way, also states "When someone says, 'You act like an honest man, but I can see in your face that you're just forcing yourself and in your heart you're a knave', why, such a statement would be met by any honest man to the end of the world with the back of his hand."

– ²The back of his hand has one thing going for it: it briskly refutes the first assumption of this science of opinion, that the true reality of a man lies in his face etc.

– ³The true being of man lies, rather, in his act.  Individuality is actual in the act.  It is the act that overcomes what is intended or meant on both sides.  ⁴One side is bodily being at rest; but individuality is more than this. It is social action as the negative essence that only is by overcoming being.  ⁵On the other side, the act overcomes the inexpressibility of opinion also in terms of self-conscious individuality, which opinion regards as infinitely determined and perfectly capable of being further determined endlessly.  ⁶This bad infinity is destroyed by accomplishing the act.  ⁷The act is simple and determinate, a universal, something to be grasped in an abstraction.  The act may be murder, theft or an act of kindness, courage etc. and it's easy to say of it exactly what it is.  ⁸It is this; and its being is not just a sign, but the matter itself [§5 above].  ⁹It is this; and the individual human being is what it is.  In the simplicity of this being he is given, existing, universal essence for others and ceases to be merely an intention.  ¹⁰The individual is certainly not asserted in the act as spirit/mind, but when considering his doubled being – embodied form and act set in opposition to one another, both supposedly his actual reality – then only the act can claim genuine being.  Certainly not his body language, which supposedly expresses what he thinks his intention is in his act, or else what people believe him capable of.  ¹¹Similarly, when, on the other hand, his accomplished act and his inner possibilities, capabilities or intentions are opposed to each other, then the former is to be regarded alone as his true reality.  This even when he deceives himself about the act and, turned inward out of his action, fancies he has something other in this inside than what he has in the act.  ¹²When individuality entrusts itself to the objective element and becomes an accomplished act, it in fact abandons itself to that element to be changed by it and even completely turned around.  ¹³But the character of the act comes down to whether it is actual being that maintains itself or is merely intended, frivolous and vanishing.  ¹⁴Objectivity does not change the act itself, but only shows what it is; i.e. whether it is or is not nothing.

– ¹⁵Breaking this being down into components, intentions and other delicate nuances, with which the actual human being, i.e. his act, is again driven back and explained away as an intended being; how he may create for himself particular intentions over and above his actual reality; all this must be left to the musings of opinion.  When such musing puts its armchair wisdom to work, it mishandles the person engaged in social action by denying the character of reason in him.  Instead of the act, it seeks to have body language and features given the status of his being.  It cannot, however, avoid the response described above, which demonstrates to it that body language is not the in itself, although it can be a part of the analysis.

15.  When we consider the full range of relations in which self-conscious individuality can be observed in relation to its external aspects, we find that one has been left behind that observation has yet to turn its attention to.  ²In psychology it is the external reality of things that have a self-conscious counterpart in the mind and should make it comprehensible [V. A. b. Observing self-consciousness §5.2].  ³Physiognomy, in contrast, views the mind determined by its own external aspects, such as language – the invisibility of its essence rendered visible.  ⁴That leaves open determination of the side of actual reality: that individuality declares its essence in its immediate, fixed, purely existing reality.

– ⁵This departs from physiognomy, for it is the speaking presence of the individual, whose active expression includes self-contemplation, the individual reflecting itself into itself, an expression which is itself motion, stable facial and bodily features, which themselves essentially constitute mediated being.  ⁶But in the definition feature to be considered next, we finally have the external aspect as an actual reality fully at rest, which is not inherently a speaking sign, but establishes itself separated from the self-conscious motion as a mere thing.

16.  It seems here that the inside's relationship to this as its outside must be conceptually comprehended as one of causal connection, for it seems to be a necessary relationship of something given in itself to something else given in itself.

17.  If spiritual/mental individuality exerts an effect on the body, if it is a cause here, then it must itself be bodily.  ²The bodily form in which it is present as cause is the organ.  Not organ of action on external reality, but self-conscious essence's organ of action into itself, directed outward only against its body.  It is not immediately clear which of the organs this could be.  ³When it comes to organs in general, then, of course, it's easy to see the organ of work in the hand and just as easy too to find the organ of sex and so on.  ⁴However, such organs are to be regarded as tools or as parts, which spirited mind as one extreme employs as the midpoint against the other extreme, the external object.  ⁵Here, however, we have an organ in which the self-conscious individual maintains himself for himself as one extreme against his own reality that he is confronting.  This is not something directed to the outside, but is reflected into itself within his behaviour and in it the side of being is not being for another.  ⁶In physiognomy, the organ is certainly also understood as something actually existing reflected into itself and reviewing the action.  Its being is objective and the result of observation in physiognomy is this: that self-consciousness remains indifferent in its confrontation with this its own actual reality.  ⁷The indifference vanishes because this state of being reflected into itself is itself effective and it establishes a necessary relation with that existence.  Since, however, it is supposed to be effective with respect to that existence, it must itself have a being, but not one that is genuinely objective and it must now be demonstrated to be such an organ.

18.  In common parlance anger, for example, as such an inner action, is located in the liver.  Plato ascribes something higher than anger to the liver, which some interpreters regard as the highest, namely prophecy or the gift of uttering the holy and eternal independent of reason [Plato, Timaeus 71c-e].  ²Unfortunately, the motions the individual has in his liver, heart, and so on, cannot be regarded as wholly reflected into itself, rather they are bodily motions, animal, directed outwards.

19.  The nervous system, in contrast, is the immediate state of rest of the organism in its motion.  ²In the nerves we encounter once again the organs of consciousness already immersed in its orientation towards the outside: brain and spinal cord may be regarded as the immediate presence of self-consciousness remaining within itself, not objective and not moving outwards.  ³If this organ's moment of being is being for another, outer existence, then it is dead being, no longer the presence of self-consciousness.  ⁴This being within itself, inherent being, is, in terms of its concept, a flux in which the circles thrown into it immediately dissolve and no difference is expressed as a given, existing difference.  ⁵Meanwhile, spirit is not abstract and simple, but a system of motions in which it distinguishes itself into moments while remaining within this differentiation free of it.  Spirit organizes its body into various functional subsystems assigning only one function to each single part.  It is not hard to imagine, then, that the fluid being of its interiority is also articulated into members.  In fact, it seems that it must be imagined in this way, because spirit's being reflected into itself in the brain is again just a midpoint between its pure essence and its bodily articulation; a midpoint which must partake of the nature of both and thus must have the given articulation of the corporeal side.

20.  Spiritual/mental organic being also necessarily has the side of persistent existence at rest, so it must, as the extreme of being for itself, withdraw, confronting this side as the other extreme, which then becomes the object on which it acts as cause.  ²If now brain and spinal cord constitute that corporeal being for itself of spirit/mind, then the skull and vertebral column correlate to it as the other separated extreme, namely the hard and fast, motionless thing.

– ³Anyone who ponders the real location of the mind's existence thinks not of the back, but of the head.  So we can satisfy ourselves, in an investigation of knowledge like this one, with this reason – for this knowledge, not such a poor one at all – in order to restrict this existence to the skull.  ⁴If anyone thinks more of the back, since knowledge and action can be input and partly even output by it, then, in fact, this would still not prove that the spinal column would have to be included in the bodily seat of spirit/mind, the spinal column itself taken as symbolic of its existence, because it proves too much.  Indeed, we can easily think of other very popular external approaches to the activity of the mind, to stimulate or inhibit it.

– ⁵One can say, then, that the spinal column is excluded and rightly so.  This demonstrates, as well as many other doctrines in the philosophy of nature, that the skull alone does not contain the organs of spirit/mind.  ⁶It was excluded above from the concept of this relation and that's why the skull was taken as the side of existence.  If, however, it is not permissible to refer to the concept of the matter, then experience teaches that we do not murder, steal, write poetry and so on with the skull as we see with the eye, the organ of sight.

– ⁷Thus the term 'organ' should not be employed for the skull.  More will be said on this matter below.  ⁸One might say that rational people are not so concerned with the word as with the matter.  Still, that does not give anyone the right to designate a matter with a word that does not belong to it.  This is not only crude, but also deceptive, just pretending not to have the right word; anyone who speaks this way is really concealing the fact that what he lacks is the matter, i.e. the concept.  If he did have the concept, he would also have the correct word for it.

– ⁹All we have established here is that just as the brain is the living head, the skull is the caput mortuum, the dead head.

21.  Thus, the spiritual/mental motions and determinate modes of the brain would have to lay their representations of external reality in this dead being, the skull, while that actual reality is also there in the individual himself.  ²For the relation of that actual reality to the skull, which, as dead being, does not have spirit/mind dwelling within it, the first option is what was determined above, external mechanism, so that the real organs – and these are in the brain – press the skull out here, rounding it, while widening it over there, flattening it, or however one wants to describe all the actions on it.  ³Even organism too must at least be partly included as the vital regeneration process found in all bones.  So the skull itself would also be pressing on the brain setting its external limits; something it would be better capable of as the harder of the two.  ⁴This keeps us, however, still firmly in the same relation determining the activity of the two with respect to each other.  For whether the skull is the determining factor or the determined, this changes nothing in the causal connection.  All that happens is that the skull is made into the immediate organ of self-consciousness, because the side of being for itself is located in it as the cause.  ⁵Unfortunately, since being for itself as organic vitality falls to both equally, in fact the causal connection between them falls away.  ⁶This continuing development of the two, however, would be inwardly connected, constituting an organic pre-established harmony that leaves the two sides referring to each other still free from and independent of each other, each with its own formation that would not need to correspond to the formation of the other.  Moreover, not just the form but the quality too – as the form of the grape and the taste of the wine are independent of each other.

– ⁷When the factor of being for itself falls to the brain, existence, however, falling to the skull, then this must establish a causal connection between the two within the organic unity; a necessary relation of the two as being external for each other; i.e. a relation itself external, in which then their embodied forms would be determined by each other.

22.  Statements can be made back and forth, pro and con in various ways concerning the connection in which the organ of self-consciousness would be active cause with respect to the opposing side.  For we are talking here of indifferent existence, structure and magnitude, the constitution in short, of a cause considered in these terms.  A cause whose inside and being for itself has to be the kind that is not concerned with immediate existence.  ²Organic self-development of the skull is initially oblivious to mechanical influence and the relation between these two is, given that the former is one of a relation of itself to itself, precisely the lack of definition and limitation itself.  ³What if the brain would take over the differences of spirited mind as existing differences, making it a plurality of inner organs each occupying its own space?  This contradicts nature.  Nature gives the moments of the concept their own existence, setting up the fluid simplicity of organic life pure on one side and its articulation and separation in its differences on the other side, differences, as they are understood here, manifesting as particular anatomical parts.  The proposal would not in any case determine whether a spiritual/mental moment would possess a more expanded brain organ if it was originally stronger and a more contracted one if weaker, or the reverse.

– ⁴This is also true for questions as to whether its formation would make the organ bigger or smaller, thicker or finer.  ⁵So long as composition of the cause remains undefined, the effect produced on the skull remains undefined too, whether it is a matter of broadening or narrowing, or even of the skull falling in.  ⁶The effect can, perhaps more ostentatiously, be designated an excitation, but that still leaves the question open as to whether this works by swelling it, as with a cantharidine plaster, or shrinking it, as with vinegar.

– ⁷Plausible reasons can be adduced for all such views, for the organic relation that intervenes can let the one happen just as much as the other remaining oblivious to all this ingenuity of the understanding.

23.  Observing consciousness doesn't really need to determine this relation.  ²For, what stands on the one side is in any case not the brain as animal part; but rather, the brain as the being of self-conscious individuality.

– ³Self-conscious individuality as standing character and dynamic conscious action is for itself and in itself.  Against these two stand its actual reality and its existence for another.  Being for itself and being in itself here constitute the essence, the subject with being in the brain that is subsumed under it and acquires its value solely through its indwelling significance.  ⁴On the other side of self-conscious individuality, however, the side of its existence, that being is independent and is subject, but only as a thing, a bone.  The actual reality and existence of man is his skull bone!

– ⁵This is the relation and the way the two sides of the relationship are understood in the consciousness observing it.

24.  That consciousness needs now to determine the relationship between these sides.  The skull bone is generally taken as the immediate reality of spirit/mind.  ²Now, the many aspects of the spirit and the mind lend their existence a similar variety of meanings.  We now have to define the meanings of the particular regions into which this existence is divided and determine how they refer to their meanings.

25.  The skull bone is not an organ of activity, neither is it a question of the motion of speech here.  Theft, murder, etc. are not committed with the skull bone; neither does it in any way betray such deeds by a change of countenance or a tone of voice.

– ²Neither, indeed, does this given thing have the value of a sign.  ³Facial expression, gesture, tone of voice, or even a column, a stake standing on a deserted island tell us immediately that something else is meant by them than what they merely are.  ⁴They establish themselves immediately as signs with a definition feature to them that refers to something else simply by the fact that it is not characteristic to them.  ⁵One can, of course, come up with any number of clever associations contemplating a skull bone, like Hamlet with Yorick's skull [Act V, Sc. I].  No, for itself, the skull bone is such an indifferent, impartial thing that nothing is to be seen in or meant by it other than simply itself.  It suggests the brain, of course, and its contours bring skulls of different formations to mind, but there's no suggestion of a conscious motion to it, for it has neither countenance nor gesture, nor anything else impressed in it indicating an origin in conscious action.  Indeed, the skull is precisely the kind of reality that should represent the different side to individuality, namely one that is no longer being reflecting itself into itself, but just pure, immediate being.

26.  The skull has no feeling either, so perhaps a more definite meaning for it could emerge from the specific feelings in its neighbourhood; perhaps they might tell us what it expresses.  Now, if a conscious state in the mind has its associated feeling in a definite location of the skull, then this location and its shape should indicate that mode and its characteristic.  ²Many people complain of painful tension somewhere or other in the head when they have stress in thinking, some when they think at all; so it could be that stealing, murdering, writing poetry and so on would be accompanied by their own feeling, which would also have to have its particular location.  ³This location in the brain, which would thus be more active and stimulated, would probably lead to development in the neighbouring location of the bone.  The particular area of the bone would not be sluggish from sympathy or agreement, but would expand or contract or whatever to form itself in response.

– ⁴What makes this hypothesis improbable, however, is that feeling is inherently indeterminate and feeling in the head as the centre would rather be a kind of universal sympathy for all suffering so that other feelings mix in with the itching or pains in the head accompanying theft, murder, or poetry.  These could then be as little differentiated from each other as they are from those that are called simply bodily sensations.  Indeed, as little differentiated from each other as it is possible to determine the disease from a symptom like headache when its meaning is restricted to the corporeal aspect.

27.  All sense of a necessary mutual relationship, along with any indication it might bear in itself, thus falls away no matter from what side the issue is considered.  ²If the relationship should nevertheless stand, all that remains necessary is a free pre-established harmony devoid of concept between the corresponding definitions on the two sides, for one of them is supposed to be mindless reality, mere thing.

– ³On one side, then, we have a number of passive skull locations and on the other, a number of mental properties, whose number and definition will be dependent upon the state of psychology.  ⁴The cruder the model of the mind, the easier life is for psychology.  The mental properties will be fewer and more clearly distinguished, more rigid and bony, corresponding better with bone features.  ⁵Poverty of imagination makes a lot of things easier, but there still remains a large number on both sides, leaving the nature of their relationship still a matter of pure coincidence for observation.  ⁶If the children of Israel, who were likened in number to the sands of the sea-shore, should take, each for himself, the grain of sand which stood for him, the procedure would be obviously arbitrary, even if it did assign to each his own.  But no more arbitrary than the procedure that assigns each faculty of the mind and passion its own skull areas and bone forms.  The same goes for the rest of the nuances of character on which the finer psychology and knowledge of man likes to puff itself up.

– ⁷The skull of the murderer has something that is not an organ, also not a sign, but a bump on his head; a given particular murderer also happens to have a lot of other properties as well as other bumps on his head.  Not just bumps either, dents too.  The choice seems to be between bumps and dents.  ⁸And again, his disposition to murder can be assigned to any bump or dent and in turn these to whatever property; for neither is the murder merely this abstraction of a murderer nor does he have only one bump and only one dent.  ⁹The observations indulged in on these matters must therefore sound just as reasonable as those of that grocer at the annual fair or the housewife on wash day when they were complaining of the rain [§13.3 above].  ¹⁰Grocer and housewife could make the observation that it always rains when a certain neighbour walks by or when they eat roast pork.  ¹¹Observation of certain features of the mind is quite as oblivious to any particular definite being of the skull as the rain is oblivious to such observations.  ¹²Of the two objects of this kind of observation, the one is a dried-out being for itself, a bony property of mind, just as the other is a dried-out being in itself.  Anything as bony as these two is completely oblivious to everything else.  The head's big bump doesn't care if a murderer is in the neighbourhood; neither does the murderer care if the dry humour of this joke falls flat anywhere near him.

28.  Still, there remains a residual possibility that a bump at a given location will be linked with some personality feature, passion, etc.  ²One can imagine the murderer with a big bump at a given skull location and the thief with one somewhere else.  ³Skull science, phrenology, could be expanded much further along these lines.  It might seem, at first, to restrict itself to the link between bump and feature in the same individual if he possesses both.  ⁴But natural phrenology – there must be such a thing, like natural physiognomy – has already moved beyond this limitation.  It does not just make judgements such as: a cheat has a bump as big as fist behind the ear; it also imagines that the adulterous wife does not have a bump on the forehead but the other marriage partner does.

– ⁵One can just as easily imagine somebody with big bumps at a given skull location sharing the thief's abode, his neighbour, perhaps.  Somebody living in the same town?  This all sounds like the flying cow, that was first caressed by the crab, that was riding on the donkey, etc., etc.

– ⁶If, however, possibility here is not taken in the sense of mere imagination but in the sense of inner possibility, the possibility of the concept, then the object has the actual reality of a pure thing.  It does not, and should not, have this kind of significance.  Indeed, it can only have this kind of significance in the imagination.

29.  Let's assume the observer gets down to determining relationships without regard for the indifference of the two sides.  He has the universal rational principle that the outside is the expression of the inside and proceeds by analogy with the skulls of animals.  They may be simpler than human skulls, but no less difficult to characterize, since it will not be easy for anyone to enter in imagination fully into the nature of the animal.  Still, there is one difference that must occur to us all here, which will prove of great assistance to the observer, giving him confidence in the laws he claims to have discovered.

– ²Clearly, the being of spirit/mind can in no way be taken as something fixed and immovable.  ³Man is free.  We can all accept that his original being amounts to no more than dispositions, inclinations, with which he can do much, or perhaps which require favourable conditions to develop.  The point is that spirit/mind's original being has no more claim to be accepted than something that does not exist as being.  ⁴What happens if observations contradict what it occurs to somebody to guarantee us is a law?  If the weather is good at the annual fair or on wash day, then the grocer and the housewife could say that it should really rain, for the inclination to rain is certainly there.  A particular individual really should be and do what the skull indicates according to the law, which assures us he has an original disposition even if that disposition has actually developed.  In this case all the phrenologist can say is that this quality is not available, but it should be.

– ⁵The law and the 'should' are based on observation of actual rain and observation with the actual senses according to this characteristic of the skull.  If that actual reality is not available, then the empty possibility counts here for just as much.

– ⁶This possibility, i.e. the non-reality of the stated law and hence the observations contradicting it, inevitably emerges from the fact that the freedom of the individual and those developing conditions are oblivious to being as such, as much to the being of that original inside as it is to external and bony being.  The possibility arises because the individual can be something other than he is inside, originally, and much more than his bones.

30.  Any given bump or hollow could indicate something actual or it could just as easily indicate a disposition to something undefined, something not actual at all.  Unfortunately, this all suffers the fate common to bad excuses: they turn out to be very useful against the claim they're supposed to support.  ²Opinion is once again brought by the nature of the matter to mindlessly expressing the opposite of what it claims to be saying.  Something is indicated by a given bone, but it might just as well indicate nothing at all.

31.  Being is not the truth of the spirit or the mind!  Opinion has an inkling of this true insight even in its excuses; but this insight in fact destroys it.  ²The disposition is an original being playing no part whatsoever in the activity of spirit/mind and that's exactly what the bone is too.  ³Given being without spiritual/mental activity is just a thing for consciousness and, far from being its essence, is rather the exact opposite.  Consciousness is only really actual to itself through the negation and destruction of such being.

– ⁴Passing off a bone as the actual existence of consciousness amounts to the complete renunciation of reason.  That's exactly what happens when a bone is regarded as the outside of the mind, for the outside is precisely actual reality as given being.  ⁵It's no use saying here that from this outside the inside, something different from it, is only being inferred, or that the outside is not the inside itself, but only its expression.  ⁶For in the relation between the two, what we have inside is actual reality that has been thought and is still thinking itself.  Given reality is all there is to the outside.

– ⁷When I say 'You (your inner self) are thus and so', because your bone is so composed, this means nothing other than that I regard one of your bones as your entire reality.  ⁸Giving me a box on the ears as your reply to such a judgement, as in the discussion of physiognomy above [§14.1], deprives the soft tissue of its importance and position, which at least proves that it is no true in itself, not the reality of spirit/mind at all.  Unfortunately for me, the only really appropriate response to such a judgement would be to go far beyond the ear, all the way to cracking the skull in order to demonstrate in as palpable, indeed as crude, a manner as this wisdom, that no bone is an in itself for the human being, much less his true reality.

32.  Self-conscious reason's raw instinct rejects the skull science of phrenology out of hand – its other observational instinct has at least progressed to an inkling of the process of knowledge, if only in a mindless way with the outside as expression of the inside.  ²Unfortunately, the more dreadful a thought, the less frequently anyone notices in what precisely its dreadfulness consists and the more difficult it becomes to dismantle it.  ³For a thought is the more dreadful, the purer and emptier the abstraction it takes to be the essence.  ⁴The crucial opposition here has for its members self-conscious individuality and this abstraction: externality that has become wholly thing.  That inner being of spirit/mind taken as fixed, mindless being confronts just such being outside.

– ⁵Observing reason really does appear to have reached its peak at this point.  It must now take its leave from itself and get over itself; for only what is wholly bad has the immediate necessity in itself to invert itself.

– ⁶Just as it can be said of the Jewish people that, stopping right in front of the gates of salvation is precisely what makes it, in the present and in the past, the most rejected and unrighteous of peoples.  It is not what it should be in and for itself; its own self is not its essential quality, but is projected out into a beyond.  This alienation gives it a chance at a higher existence, if it could only take it back into itself instead of remaining stuck within the immediacy of being.  Spirit is the greater, the greater the antithesis from which it returns back into itself.  Spirit produces the opposition itself when it overcomes its immediate unity thereby alienating its own being for itself.  ⁷Unfortunately, when such a consciousness does not reflect on itself, the midpoint in which it stands is the unhappy emptiness left when what is supposed to fill it becomes a fixed extreme.  ⁸Here we have in a nutshell precisely what makes this last level of observing reason the worst of all, but at least that's what makes its reversal so necessary.

33.  Indeed, our review of the series of relations constituting the content and object of observation revealed that sensuous being vanished from it already in the first mode, observation of inorganic nature [V.A.a. Observing nature §9.2].  There the moments emerged as pure abstractions, simple concepts supposedly firmly linked to the existence of things, but that existence got lost and the moment as such turned out to be just pure motion and universal.  ²This free, internally complete process had the significance of something objective, emerging, however, as a one.  In the inorganic process, one is the non-existing inside; but when the process itself exists as one, then it is organism.

– ³As being for itself or negative essence, the one stands opposed to the universal, withdrawing from it and remaining free for itself.  As a result, the concept, realized only in the element of absolute isolation, absolute individuation, does not find its true expression – i.e. being there as a universal – within organic existence and remains merely external or, what amounts to the same thing, something internal to organic nature.

– ⁴Organic process is only free in itself, but it is not free for itself.  The being for itself of its freedom emerges first in a purpose and it exists as another essence, a wisdom aware of its own self lying outside the process.  ⁵Observing reason thus turns to this, to the spirit, the concept existing as universality or the purpose existing as purpose so that now its own essence is its object [V.A.b. Logical and psychological laws §1.3-§4 M].

34.  It turns first to the purity of spirit; but as reception of the object moving within its differences as an existing object, for it laws of thought become relations between persistent moments.  Since, however, the content of these laws are only moments, they all run into the one of self-consciousness.

– ²Even taking this new object as something given makes no difference, it is still a single, contingent self-consciousness: observation remains standing within meant, fancied spirit and the contingent relation of conscious reality to the unconscious variety.  ³Only in itself is spirit/mind the necessity of this relation; that's why observation pulls it closer to the body, comparing spirit's willing and acting reality with the reality of its reflection and contemplation of itself into itself, which too is objective.  ⁴This outer, although it is an internal language of that individual, is simultaneously as sign something oblivious to the content it is supposed to signify, just as the individual who sets the sign is indifferent to it [² to ⁴: V.A.b. Logical and psychological laws §5 to §14 above M].

35.  From this variable language observation returns at last back to firm being and announces, following its own concept, that externality is the external and immediate actual reality of spirit/mind not as organ, nor as language and sign, but as dead thing [§15 to §31 above, especially §25 M].  ²What we kept from the very first observation of inorganic nature, that the concept should be present as thing, is produced by this last mode in such a way that it makes that reality of spirit/mind itself into a thing, or, expressed the other way round, it endows dead being with the significance of spirit and mind [V.A.a. Observing nature §§8, 9 M].

– ³Observation has now arrived at the point where it can state what our concept of it was, that the certainty of reason seeks itself as objective, actual reality [V.A. Observing reason §1.5 ff. M].

– ⁴No one intends this to mean that the spirit or the mind suggested by a skull should be declared to be a thing.  There should be no materialism, as it is called, in this thought, rather the spirit should be something else again than these bones.  However, the statement 'it is' itself here means nothing other than that it is a thing.  ⁵If being as such, thinghood, is predicated of the spirit, that means that the true expression of this is that it is something like a bone.  ⁶It must therefore be seen as of the highest importance that the true expression of that, the pure statement on spirit, 'it is', has been found.  ⁷When otherwise the statement is made of the spirit 'it: is, has a being, is a thing, a single reality', then what is not meant here is that one can see it, hold it in the hand, push it and so on, although that is what is said and what is said in truth expresses the claim that the being of spirit is a bone.

36.  This result has a double meaning.  The first is its true meaning, in so far as it completes the results of the immediately preceding motion of self-consciousness.  ²Unhappy self-consciousness divested itself of its independence and struggled to make its being for itself into a thing [IV.B. Soticism, scepticism etc. §33.1 M].  ³With this it returned from self-consciousness back into consciousness, i.e. into the consciousness whose object of interest is an inert being, a thing; but this, this thing, is self-consciousness, which therefore means it is the unity of the ego, I, and such being, i.e. it is the category [V. Reason §§5-8].  ⁴When the object is determined in this way for consciousness, it has reason.  ⁵Consciousness, as well as self-consciousness, is in itself actually reason; but it can only be said of that consciousness for which the object has determined itself as the category that it has reason.  The knowledge of what reason is, however, remains quite distinct from that.

– ⁶The category is the immediate unity of inert being [des Seins] and ego, I [des Seinen] and must pass through both forms.  Observing consciousness is precisely that to which the category presents itself in the form of inert being.  ⁷In its result, consciousness gives expression in a proposition to that of which consciousness is the unconscious certainty – the sentence that lies in the concept of reason.  ⁸It is this infinite proposition: the self is a thing – a statement that overcomes itself [VIII. Absolute knowledge §3.3].

– ⁹This result definitely adds to the category that it is this self-overcoming opposition.  ¹⁰The pure category, given for consciousness in the form of being or immediacy, is the still unmediated object that is merely there and consciousness is equally unmediated in its relation to it.  ¹¹The moment of that infinite judgement is the transition of immediacy into mediation or negativity.  ¹²The given object of interest is now determined as something negative with consciousness now determined as self-consciousness confronting it.  This comes down to the same thing as saying that the category, which has passed through the form of being in the process of observation, is now given in the form of being for itself.  Consciousness no longer wants to find itself immediately, but now wants to produce itself through its own activity.  ¹³It is itself the goal of its own action, just as in the process of observation it was only concerned with things.

37.  The other meaning of the result is the one already considered, that of the process of observation devoid of the concept.  ²This has no other way to grasp and express itself than impartially, by declaring the bone – as a sensuous thing that doesn't immediately lose its objectivity for consciousness – to be the reality of self-consciousness [§23.4 above M].  ³It has, however, no clear consciousness that this is what it is saying and does not grasp the specific definition in subject and predicate and the relation between them in its statement, much less in the sense of the infinite self-overturning proposition and of the concept.

– ⁴Rather, out of a profounder self-consciousness of spirit, which appears here as a natural honesty [§§20, 22 and 25 above M], it conceals from itself the ignominy of the naked thought bereft of concept that takes a bone for the reality of self-consciousness, touching up this thought with more thoughtlessness, various relations of cause and effect, signs, organs and so on that make no sense in this mix, just hiding the glaring inadequacy of the proposition with distinctions drawn from that mix.

38.  Brain fibres and such like regarded as the being of spirit are just hypothetical notions, not existing, felt, or seen, not true realities.  When they lie there before us, they can be actually seen, but only as dead specimens and cannot in that state be taken as the being of spirit.  ²But real objectivity must be immediate and sensuous, so the spirit is asserted to be actual in this as dead objectivity – for the bone is the dead thing insofar as it is in the living thing.

– ³The concept of this notion is that reason takes itself to be all thinghood, even purely objective thinghood; but it is this in the concept, only the concept is its truth and the purer the concept, the more foolish a notion it descends to when its content is not taken as concept but only as notion, when the self-overcoming judgement is not grasped with the consciousness of its infinity, but rather as an abiding proposition with subject and predicate fixed and valid in isolation, the self fixed as self, the thing as thing and yet each is also supposed to be the other.

– ⁴Reason, essentially the concept, is immediately split within itself into itself and its opposite, an opposition that, precisely because of that, is just as immediately overcome.  ⁵But reason would be understood irrationally if fixed in the totally isolated moment when it appears separated into itself and its opposite; and the purer its moments, the cruder the appearance of this content that is either given for consciousness or stated naively in isolation by consciousness.

– ⁶The depth the spirit pushes from inside out, but only into its imaging consciousness, leaving it standing arrested there, along with the ignorance of this consciousness of what it is really saying, is the same kind of linkage of high and low that nature naively expresses in the living body by combining the organ of its highest completion, the organ of reproduction, with the organ of pissing.

– ⁷The infinite proposition in its infinity would be the perfection of life grasping itself [VIII. Absolute knowledge §3.3]; the consciousness of such life that remains but a pictorial image, in stark contrast, behaves more like pissing.