(b) That the evolution of Nature should take place with finite rapidity, and thus become an object of intuition, is not thinkable without an original limitation (a being limited) of the productivity.
(c) But if Nature be absolute productivity, then the ground of this limitation may lie outside of it. Nature is originally only productivity; there can, therefore, be nothing determined in this productivity (all determination is negation) and so products can never be reached by it. If products are to be reached, the productivity must pass from being undetermined to being determined—that is, it must, as pure productivity, be cancelled. If now the ground of determination of productivity lay outside of Nature, Nature would not be originally absolutely productivity. Determination, that is, negation, must certainly come into Nature; but this negation, viewed from a higher stand-point, must again be positivity.
(d) But if the ground of this limitation lies within Nature itself, then Nature ceases to be pure identity. (Nature, in so far as it is only productivity, is pure identity, and there is in it absolutely nothing capable of being distinguished. In order that anything may be distinguished in it, its identity must be cancelled—Nature must not be identity, but duplicity.)
Nature must originally be an object to itself; this change of the pure subject into a self-object is unthinkable without an original sundering in Nature itself.
This duplicity cannot therefore be further deduced physically; for, as the condition of all Nature generally, it is the principle of all physical explanation, and all physical explanation can only have for its aim the reduction of all the antitheses which appear in Nature to that original antithesis in the heart of Nature, which does not, however, itself appear. Why is there no original phenomenon of Nature without this duplicity, if in Nature all things are not mutually subject and object to each other ad infinitum, and Nature even, in its origin, at once product and productive?
(e) If Nature is originally duplicity, there must be opposite tendencies even in the original productivity of Nature. (The positive tendency must be opposed by another, which is, as it were, anti-productive—retarding production; not as the contradictory, but as the negative—the really opposite of the former.) It is only then that, in spite of its being limited, there is no passivity in Nature, when even that which limits it is again positive, and its original duplicity is a contest of really opposite tendencies.
(f) In order to arrive at a product, these opposite tendencies must concur. But as they are supposed equal, (for there is no ground for supposing them unequal,) wherever they meet they will annihilate each other; the product is therefore = 0, and once more no product is reached.
This inevitable, though hitherto not very closely remarked contradiction (namely, that a product can arise only through the concurrence of opposite tendencies, while at the same time these opposite tendencies mutually annihilate each other) is capable of being solved only in the following manner: There is absolutely no subsistence of a product thinkable, without a continual process of being reproduced. The product must be thought as annihilated at every step, and at every step reproduced anew. We do not really see the subsisting of a product, but only the continual process of being reproduced.
(It is of course very conceivable how the series 1-1+1-1... on to infinity is thought as equal neither to 1 nor to 0. The reason however why this series is thought as =1/2 lies deeper. There is one absolute magnitude (=1), which, though continually annihilated in this series, continually recurs, and by this recurrence produces, not itself, but the mean between itself and nothing.—Nature, as object, is that which comes to pass in such an infinite series, and is = a fraction of the original unit, to which the never cancelled duplicity supplies the numerator.)
(g) If the subsistence of the product is a continual process of being reproduced, then all persistence also is only in nature as object; in nature as subject there is only infinite activity.