Any mention of Essence implies that we distinguish it from Being: the latter is immediate, and, compared with the Essence, we look upon it as mere seeming. But this seeming is not an utter nonentity and nothing at all, but Being superseded and put by. The point of view given by the Essence is in general the standpoint of 'Reflection.' This word 'reflection' is originally applied, when a ray of light in a straight line impinging upon the surface of a mirror is thrown back from it. In this phenomenon we have two things,—first an immediate fact which is, and secondly the deputed, derivated, or transmitted phase of the same.—Something of this sort takes place when we reflect, or think upon an object; for here we want to know the object, not in its immediacy, but as derivative or mediated. The problem or aim of philosophy is often represented as the ascertainment of the essence of things: a phrase which only means that things instead of being left in their immediacy, must be shown to be mediated by, or based upon, something else. The immediate Being of things is thus conceived under the image of a rind or curtain behind which the Essence lies hidden.
Everything, it is said, has an Essence; that is, things really are not what they immediately show themselves. There is therefore something more to be done than merely rove from one quality to another, and merely to advance from qualitative to quantitative, and vice versâ: there is a permanent in things, and that permanent is in the first instance their Essence. With respect to other meanings and uses of the category of Essence, we may note that in the German auxiliary verb 'sein' the past tense is expressed by the term for Essence (Wesen): we designate past being as gewesen. This anomaly of language implies to some extent a correct perception of the relation between Being and Essence. Essence we may certainly regard as past Being, remembering however meanwhile that the past is not utterly denied, but only laid aside and thus at the same time preserved. Thus, to say, Caesar was in Gaul, only denies the immediacy of the event, but not his sojourn in Gaul altogether. That sojourn is just what forms the import of the proposition, in which however it is represented as over and gone.—'Wesen' in ordinary life frequently means only a collection or aggregate: Zeitungswesen (the Press), Postwesen (the Post-Office), Steuerwesen (the Revenue). All that these terms mean is that the things in question are not to be taken single, in their immediacy, but as a complex, and then, perhaps, in addition, in their various bearings. This usage of the term is not very different in its implication from our own.
People also speak of finite Essences, such as man. But the very term Essence implies that we have made a step beyond finitude: and the title as applied to man is so far inexact. It is often added that there is a supreme Essence (Being): by which is meant God. On this two remarks may be made. In the first place the phrase 'there is' suggests a finite only: as when we say, there are so many planets, or, there are plants of such a constitution and plants of such an other. In these cases we are speaking of something which has other things beyond and beside it. But God, the absolutely infinite, is not something outside and beside whom there are other essences. All else outside f God, if separated from Him, possesses no essentiality: in its I isolation it becomes a mere show or seeming, without stay or essence of its own. But, secondly, it is a poor way of talking to call God the highest or supreme Essence. The category of quantity which the phrase employs has its proper place within the compass of the finite. When we call one mountain the highest on the earth, we have a vision of other high mountains beside it. So too when we call any one the richest or most learned in his country. But God, far from being a Being, even the highest, is the Being. This definition, however, though such a representation of God is an important and necessary stage in the growth of the religious consciousness, does not by any means exhaust the depth of the ordinary Christian idea of God. If we consider God as the Essence only, and nothing more, we know Him only as the universal and irresistible Power; in other words, as the Lord. Now the fear of the Lord is, doubtless, the beginning,—but only the beginning, of wisdom. To look at God in this light, as the Lord, and the Lord alone, is especially characteristic of Judaism and also of Mohammedanism. The defect of these religions lies in their scant recognition of the finite, which, be it as natural things or as finite phases of mind, it is characteristic of the heathen and (as they also for that reason are) polytheistic religions to maintain intact. Another not uncommon assertion is that God, as the supreme Being, cannot be known. Such is the view taken by modern 'enlightenment' and abstract understanding, which is content to say, Il y a un être suprême: and there lets the matter rest. To speak thus, and treat God merely as the supreme other-world Being, implies that we look upon the world before us in its immediacy as something permanent and positive, and forget that true Being is just the superseding of all that is immediate. If God be the abstract super-sensible Being, outside whom therefore lies all difference and all specific character, He is only a bare name, a mere caput mortuum of abstracting understanding. The true knowledge of God begins when we know that things, as they immediately are, have no truth.
In reference also to other subjects besides God the category of Essence is often liable to an abstract use, by which, in the study of anything, its Essence is held to be something unaffected by, and subsisting in independence of, its definite phenomenal embodiment. Thus we say, for example, of people, that the great thing is not what they do or how they behave, but what they are. This is correct, if it means that a man's conduct should be looked at, not in its immediacy, but only as it is explained by his inner self, and as a revelation of that inner self. Still it should be remembered that the only means by which the Essence and the inner self can be verified, is their appearance in outward reality; whereas the appeal which men make to the essential life, as distinct from the material facts of conduct, is generally prompted by a desire to assert their own subjectivity and to elude an absolute and objective judgment.
113.] Self-relation in Essence is the form of Identity or of reflection-into-self, which has here taken the place of the immediacy of Being. They are both the same abstraction,—self-relation.
The unintelligence of sense, to take everything limited and finite for Being, passes into the obstinacy of understanding, which views the finite as self-identical, not inherently self-contradictory.
114.] This identity, as it has descended from Being, appears in the first place only charged with the characteristics of Being, and referred to Being as to something external. This external Being, if taken in separation from the true Being (of Essence), is called the Unessential. But that turns out a mistake. Because Essence is Being-in-self, it is essential only to the extent that it has in itself its negative, e. reference to another, or mediation. Consequently, it has the unessential as its own proper seeming (reflection) in itself. But in seeming or mediation there is distinction involved: and since what is distinguished (as distinguished from the identity out of which it arises, and in which it is not, or lies as seeming,) receives itself the form of identity, the semblance is still in the mode of Being, or of self-related immediacy. The sphere of Essence thus turns out to be a still imperfect combination of immediacy and mediation. In it every term is expressly invested with the character of self-relatedness, while yet at the same time one is forced beyond it. It has Being,—reflected being, a being in which another shows, and which shows in another. And so it is also the sphere in which the contradiction, still implicit in the sphere of Being, is made explicit.
As the one notion is the common principle underlying all logic, there appear in the development of Essence the same attributes or terms as in the development of Being, but in a reflex form. Instead of Being and Nought we have now the forms of Positive and Negative; the former at first as Identity corresponding to pure and uncontrasted Being, the latter developed (showing in itself) as Difference. So also, we have Becoming represented by the Ground of determinate Being: which itself, when reflected upon the Ground, is Existence.
The theory of Essence is the most difficult branch of Logic. It includes the categories of metaphysic and of the sciences in general. These are products of reflective understanding, which, while it assumes the differences to possess a footing of their own, and at the same time also expressly affirms their relativity, still combines the two statements, side by side, or one after the other, by an 'Also,' without bringing these thoughts into one, or unifying them into the notion.