and derivative, or however else one likes to name them, lie side by side in the categories of essence. They are both present, but they are not harmonized. The terms are correlative, and each has a nature of its own. Substance is the permanent and powerful, the accidental is the unstable and impotent; and their mutual implication is merely another factor along side the others, on equal terms with them. Each term, as it were, falls into two; on one side it is private, on the other it has outward relations: but the two aspects are not reconciled, they merely go together.
In the effort to find more adequate principles of thought we have to do two things. Firstly, we have to incorporate the element of difference more thoroughly within the positive principle; secondly, we have to regard the positive principle not merely as underived, but as self-derived. Hegel begins to perform the first of these tasks within the realm of essence itself, and thereby provides the transition to the third and last main section of the dialectic where the second task is also accomplished.
Substance is present in each of its shapes; in a sense, then, each accident is substance. Hegel at this stage takes the identity of substance with its accidents in full earnestness, and treats it as something else than a mere phase added to the others. Substance is inner necessity, the immanent power over the accidents; but if this inner necessity is to be intelligible it must come out, and the accidents must become in their external character what they are inherently. That is to say, we must surrender that aspect of the conception of substance according to which the accidents do not determine one another, and must grant to them as to substance manifest, power over one another. This gives us the category of causality. In pure substance the accidents merely pass into one another;[1] in causality they determine one another. In the relation of substantiality A follows B because of the
- ↑ ‘The accidents, as such, . . . have no power over one another. . . . In so far as such an accident seems to exercise a power over another, it is the power of substance which grasps both in itself, as negativity [i.e. as negating power] posits an unequal value, and determines the one as the passing, gives the other another content and determines it as the subsisting, or, in other words, determines the former as lapsing into its possibility and the latter as coming into reality’ (Larger Logic, WW. IV. p. 222).
