Actuality, though it comes under the general head of Essence, tends to pass away into another sphere. Here, as elsewhere, we see that the general rubric of a sphere is only partially applicable to some of its subordinate sections. In essence proper there were, or were assumed to be, two grades of being—a real or essential, and an unessential or seeming: or being was regarded (contradictorily) both as ideal (as one thing) and real (as having several properties). In Appearance or Manifestation the aspects of being are supposed to lie on a level; but they are always a pair of aspects, one side of which is entirely dependent for its explanation on a reflection from the other, e. g. whole and parts, the favourite category for explaining the larger unities. But in the category of actuality there is nothing so merely potential, so unessential as mere essence recognised: and each actual is something firm and self-supporting which does not, like a phenomenon, merely borrow its reality from its antithesis or correlative. Thus we have, in a way, got back to the characteristics of immediate being: only, as we find it, we have this affirmation of the self-subsistence of reals contradictorily accompanied with the conviction of their necessary interdependence. It is a reflective (or correlated), not an immediate reality. There is no other world of being to have recourse to for explanation now: nor can we play back and forward from aspect to aspect of a reality which never comes forward itself, but only as a reflection on or from another. The world of reality is a self-contained world: its parts and phases are each hard realities: and for that reason they bear hard upon each other in the bond of necessity.
The total actuality falls naturally in our conception into three elements. We separate first the central fact—the nucleus of the business, the concentrated reality in reality: the fact in its mere identity and inner abstractness: the ultimate drift or inner possibility of things. Then we turn to the rest of the concrete fact—all without which the fact would not be itself—the detail and particularity: this we treat as a sort of materials or passive conditions from which the real fact is to be produced, on which it is dependent and which precede it in time. Lastly, in order to get back the unity of the fact from these two unconnected elements, we refer to some agency which puts them together. The End—or thing to be realised—(so to speak) has to be brought out by a motive agency (efficient cause) which imposes the form (or general character) on the matter and makes these one. By this analysis, however, we have only put asunder what is one experience and introduced a mechanical (external) unifier needlessly. The name of conditions is given to the particulars or details, considered apart from the rest of the fact, and hypothetically invested with an existence anterior to it, with the implication, first, that they are self-subsistent, and secondly, that they to some extent involve the rest of it. Again, the general fact, the fact in its mere nominal or abstract generality or essence, its mere possibility, does not exist separately: every fact when in thought completed has its so-called conditions not outside it, but as constituent elements, aspects, or factors in it. Lastly, the so-called agency is the active element itself in the act, an aspect or factor in the totality: the aspect which keeps actuality together as a self-energising fact—a Thathandlung and not a mere Thatsache (to quote Fichte's phrase). Our practical and technical habits, where the agent is other than his materials and aims, lead us to draw the same distinctions in the realm of total Nature: they are aspects useful in ordine ad hominem which we, without due modification, apply in ordine ad Universum.
It is originally in our practical operations that the distinctions of necessary and possible emerge,—with a view to the accomplishment of our desires and purposes. That is necessary which is required and needed if some bare plan is projected and is to be actualised: it is the condition or conditions without which the end cannot be attained. It is an epithet of the means. Possible, on the contrary, is an epithet of the end or plan, and denotes that there are means for its attainment, without however always specifying that this is known of the present or given instance. It is clear that everything as regards the application of these terms will depend on the definiteness with which the plan is conceived, both in itself so to speak and in its relations with the rest of the circumstances. On the other hand, when a result emerges without being included in the purpose, and without any means having been employed for attaining it, it is said to be a chance, accident, or contingency.
These terms are applied by analogy to the uses of theoretical explanation. Just as in will you have a general aim to begin with, which becomes more and more determinate as it moves forward in the volitional process to execution; so in the attempt to understand the world you suppose it first of all the mere shadow or phantom of itself, a promise and potentiality of things to come: a next-to-nothing, which however you credit with a magic wealth of potential being. So much indeed may this possibility be emphasised that nothing more is needed: it is possible, and, without a thought of difficulties and counteractives, you could swear that it is actual[3]. Being removed above this solid land of actuality, cut off from the ties and bonds of conditions, it fancies itself moving in its vacuum; and being free from all bonds of actuality fancies itself actually free, or self-disposing, whereas it can only claim this liberum arbitrium indifferentiae, so long as it remains bare and powerless possibility—a mere may-be, which, apart from all conditions, would exist only by a mere contingency, or freak of chance. This mere potentiality—being only an ante-dated, presupposed, and hypothetical actuality—being only a substance or substratum—must be raised out of its supposititious existence into reality by means of appropriate conditions. These conditions are necessary to its resuming its place or reaching a place in actuality. Thus each object becomes actual or real from a presupposed possibility by means of an external necessity. As in the former case the possibility was identified with power, and conditions were left out of sight as comparatively unimportant: so here the possibility—taken to lie at the root of the thing—is made a mere susceptibility, which would be nothing actual unless stimulated and necessitated from outside. This necessity in the very heart of actuality (which is its characteristic to the reflectional mode of mind) thus arises from the separation and hypostatisation of its elements into independent powers which are so far in stress and opposition. This is the climax of metaphysics—if metaphysics be the investiture of the dynamic factors of the notion with the power and character of supposed agents or forces. It appears in three phases, with the three categories of substance, cause, and reciprocity. To the first, reality is regarded as dominated by its mere underlying potentiality: the reality of the mere superficial contingents is controlled by the necessity of its latent or substantial being. To explain event or incident, here, is merely to bind it to the generic nature or the intrinsic doom, which—unexplained and inexplicable—manifests itself in an extrinsically fluctuating appearance of facts: e. g. the single crime is explained as the product of social conditions. Under the conception of Causality, each thing is a mere might-be which owes all its actuality to a definite antecedent or cause,—an antecedent termed for the moment unconditional, but anon reduced to dependence on further conditions. The effect is as a fact: but would not have been so unless for an earlier fact—i. e. unless the effect in a supposed earlier stage of its growth had been helped on by certain conditions or circumstances to acquire actual and full being in the effect. And cause and conditions can change places, according to what we happen to regard as the central nucleus or inner possibility of the effect. Lastly, the conception of reciprocity recognises that causality is rather an arbitrary simplification of reality into strands of rectilinear event; it remembers that Substance emphasises the dependence of each non-independent element on the supposed totality which they grow from, and doing so, it lays down the reversibility and essential elasticity of the causal relation. The cause in causing re-acts upon itself, and the effect is itself a cause of the effect, active as well as passive. The dependence in short is all-environing: nowhere is there any loop-hole to escape from necessity. Motives act on purpose, and purpose acts on motives: the stone hurls back the hand that hurled it.
Explanation is thus baffled and thus forced to recognise its own limitations. The simplest fact is beyond all the powers of explanatory science to do full justice to: for to know fully the 'flower in the crannied wall' after this method of explanation would involve endless multiples of action and re-action. The antinomy between necessity and contingency arose by following out the antithesis, so natural to us, between selfsame and different, essence and existence, substance and accidents, till they were invested with a right to independent place and function. But the separation of the abstract receptacle of possibility, self-same and essential, from the equally abstract conditions which fill it up and make it actual, is only the great human instrumentality of comprehension, which however is not reached until each thing is realised and idealised as an individual, which has universality and has particularity, but never either alone. Its universality is possibility—its particularity the aspect of contingency: but these aspects are in submission to an inclusive unity. The real when ill known seems contingent; when somewhat better known it seems necessary by external (physical) compulsion; in its truth to intelligence, the real is a self-active, a causa sui, or it is necessary by that self-determination which is the freedom of autonomy.
The view of the world under the category of actuality (Reality), and as dominated by the law of causality, is the culminating stand-point of scientific or reflective realism. It began with a mere descriptive science, naming and qualifying the successive aspects of being,—with description which passed through numeration into the definiteness of measurement. But all such determination was found to imply the existence of a permanent reality, or at least to involve the reference of one reality to another, outside of it, and yet not independent of relations to it, which had to make part of its nature. To the scientific realist the sum of fact presents itself independent of consciousness, as a complicated mass of real elements governed by laws and subject to necessities. Each thing or state of a thing is explained by reference to something outside it, which is its cause, and measured by something inside it which is its unit or atomic standard. Alternately the reference, and the unit are designated arbitrary (contingent) and necessary (essential): i. e. they are sometimes considered as only a way of looking at reality[4]—and sometimes as inevitable implications and conditions of reality.
All this is Objective Logic: or, so far as it does not realise its implications, it is Metaphysics. Its terms of thought[5] are in practice treated as elements of a reality which is what it is, apart from thought-conditions, apart from consciousness. As Hegel exhibits them in their interdependence, they hint their underlying thought-nature, which in their empirical applications is hardly apparent. For to the realistic stand-point mind and subjectivity are left out of account as only passive onlookers. The realist may no doubt speak of a Subject: but he means a real, a corporeal self, an actual amongst other actuals. If he speaks of mind and will, such mind and will are parts and ingredients in a general scheme of causes and effects; they are points of transition through which passes the moving stream of event. They also are things and substances. They are agents and patients, always both, no doubt but the chief circumstance to note is that they are actuals, and that even knowledge and will are regarded as species of action and motion.
When Protagoras laid down his maxim that Man is the measure of all things, he stated, apparently in an ambiguous manner, that the fact of measure (and all that mensuration implies), and (we may add) the existence of correlation in actuality, presupposed for their explanation the assumption of Mind and subjectivity. Mind thus became the basis of all actuality which claimed to be objective—claimed, in short, to be actual. The truth and objectivity of the objective lies in the subjective; Mind is its own measure, i. e. the absolute measure, and it is self-relation. So Kant had taught and Fichte enforced. The basis of objectivity is the subjective; but a subjective different from that so-called by the plain man or by the naive psychologist. By the subjective he does not, as the plain man, understand the compound of body and soul, the living and breathing organism amid outer objects—nor, as the psychological idealist does, a psychical process, a series or bundle of states of consciousness, always contrasted with a reality, the reality outside consciousness. It is true that his language resembles the language of psychology: as Herbart and others have said, that is to be expected, for he talks of mind and consciousness. But the consciousness he speaks of is a unity that includes all space and all time: it is one and all-embracing, infinite, because not as individual (psychological) consciousness set in antithesis to reality, as the other half of the duality of existence. It is consciousness generalised—Bewusstsein überhaupt—an eternal, i. e. a timeless consciousness, an universal i. e. not a localised, mind:—a necessary Idea, but with an inward self-regulating necessity. Such a consciousness Fichte called the Absolute Ego: but as we saw before, the adjective transforms the substantive. Such a consciousness, which is absolute self-consciousness, is the Idea:—no psychical event, but the logical condition and explanation of reality whether physical or psychical. The Idea is the presupposition of epistemology, but of an epistemology which claims to occupy the place of old usurped by metaphysics. Metaphysics has no higher category than actuality: transcendental logic shows that actuality rests in the Idea,—reality conceived and conception realised.
[1] Existence, as opposed to Dasein, should thus imply the emergence into efficient being from a state of quietude or passive latency (Wesen).