(c) It is asked:
(α) By what means such change can be fixed at all; it cannot be fixed by anything that is contained as a link in change itself, and must therefore be fixed by a tertium quid.
(β) But this tertium quid must be able to invade that original antithesis; but outside of that antithesis nothing is[[27]]; it (that tertium quid) must therefore be primarily contained in it, as something which is mediated by the antithesis, and by which in turn the antithesis is mediated; for otherwise there is no ground why it should be primarily contained in that antithesis.
The antithesis is dissolution of identity. But nature is primarily identity. In that antithesis, therefore, there must again be a struggle after identity. This struggle is immediately conditioned through the antithesis; for if there was no antithesis, there would be identity, absolute rest, and therefore no struggle toward identity. If, on the other hand, there were not identity in the antithesis, the antithesis itself could not endure.
Identity produced out of difference is indifference; that tertium quid is therefore a struggle towards indifference—a struggle which is conditioned, by the difference itself, and by which it, on the other hand, is conditioned.—(The difference must not be looked upon as a difference at all, and is nothing for the intuition, except through a third, which sustains it—to which change itself adheres.)
This tertium quid, therefore, is all that is substrate in that primal change. But substrate posits change as much as change posits substrate; and there is here no first and no second; but difference and struggle towards indifference, are, as far time is concerned, one and contemporary.
Axiom. No identity in Nature is absolute, but all is only indifference.
Since that tertium quid itself presupposes the primary antithesis, the antithesis itself cannot be absolutely removed by it; the condition of the continuance of that tertium quid [of that third activity, or of Nature] is the perpetual continuance of the antithesis, just as, conversely, the continuance of the antithesis is conditioned by the continuance of the tertium quid.
But how, then, shall the antithesis be thought as continuing?
We have one primary antithesis, between the limits of which all Nature must lie; if we assume that the factors of this antithesis can really pass over into each other, or go together absolutely in some tertium quid (some individual product), then the antithesis is removed, and along with it the struggle, and so all the activity of nature. But that the antithesis should endure, is thinkable only by its being infinite—by the extreme limits being held asunder in infinitum—so that always only the mediating links of the synthesis, never the last and absolute synthesis itself, can be produced, in which case it is only relative points of indifference that are always attained, never absolute ones, and every successively originated difference leaves behind a new and still unremoved antithesis, and this again goes over into indifference, which, in its turn, partially removes the primary antithesis. Through the original antithesis and the struggle towards indifference, there arises a product, but the product partially does away with the antithesis; through the doing away of that part—that is, through the origination of the product itself—there arises a new antithesis, different from the one that has been done away with, and through it, a product different from the first; but even this leaves the absolute antithesis unremoved, duality therefore, and through it a product, will arise anew, and so on to infinity.