we now see that we have not said the complete truth when we affirm that a thing is itself—it is also bound up with the rest of the universe and contains implications of the whole within the four corners of its being. We may take ‘thinghood’ as our first example of these principles of essence.
This is a very common category of ordinary thought, but it is not so simple as it may appear at first sight;[1] and Hegel identifies it with the principle of sensible perception. We may note that a thing is not a simple quality, it is a totality of some sort standing in relation to differences; it is a thing with many properties. Each of these properties is distinct from the others, each has a being of its own and does not modify the others. The properties lie side by side, as it were, untouched by one another, and their relation is that of indifference. But at the same time they all come together; a thing is not a mere name given to a random collection of entirely unrelated qualities. In the Phenomenology Hegel points out that the unity in question is found chiefly in space and time. The treatment of thinghood in the two Logics is naturally more abstract, and Hegel speaks of the form of unity without pointing to the mode of concrete experience in which it is primarily manifested. Since we are not concerned with logic purely on its own account, it seems permissible to introduce here the type of experience which Hegel mentions in the Phenomenology, and has in mind in his discussion in the purely logical analysis. ‘This salt’, he says, ‘is a simple “Here” and at the same time manifold; it is white and also pungent, also cubical in shape, also of a specific weight, and so on. All these many properties exist in a simple “Here” where they inter-penetrate one another. None of these has a different “Here” from the others; each is everywhere in the same “Here” where the others are. At the same time, without being divided by different “Heres”, they do not affect each other in their interpenetration; its being white does not affect or alter the cubical shape it has, and neither affects its sharp outline, and so on. On the contrary each is simple relation-to-self, it leaves the others alone and is related to these merely by
- ↑ There are three accounts of the nature of thinghood; Phenomenology, WW. II. pp. 84-99; Larger Logic, WW. IV. Abschnitt 2, Kap. I; Encyclopaedia, WW. VI. § 125 ff.
