Volume 1 / Part 3 — CHAPTER V. NECESSITY, CHANCE, FREEDOM.

I.

All things are necessitated; each is necessitated by the totality of conditions; hence, whatever is must be so, and under the conditions cannot be otherwise.

Remark.—This is the most exhaustive statement of the position of the “understanding.” Nothing seems more clear than this to the thinker who has advanced beyond the sensuous grade of consciousness and the stages of Perception.

II.

But things change—something new begins and something old ceases; but, still, in each case, the first principle must apply, and the new thing—like the old—be 188so “because necessitated by the totality of conditions.”

Remark.—The reader will notice that with the conception of change there enters a second stage of mediation. First, we have simple mediation in which the ground and grounded are both real. Secondly, we have the passage of a potentiality into a reality, and vice versa. Therefore, with the consideration of change we have encountered a contradiction which becomes apparent upon further attempt to adjust the idea of necessity to it.

III.

If the same totality of conditions necessitates both states of the thing—the new and the old—it follows that this totality of conditions is adapted to both, and hence is indifferent to either, i. e. it allows either, and hence cannot be said to necessitate one to the exclusion of the other, for it allows one to pass over into the other, thereby demonstrating that it did not restrict or confine the first to be what it was. Hence it now appears that chance or contingency participated in the state of the thing.

IV.

But the states of the thing belong to the totality, and hence when the thing changes the totality also changes, and we are forced to admit two different totalities as the conditions of the two different states of the thing.

Remark.—Here we have returned to our starting-point, and carried back our contradiction with us. In our zeal to relieve the thing from the difficulty presented—that of changing spontaneously—we have posited duality in the original totality, and pushed our change into it. But it is the same contradiction as before, and we must continue to repeat the same process forever in the foolish endeavor to go round a circle until we arrive at its end, or, what is the same, its beginning.

V.

If it requires a different totality of conditions to render possible the change of a thing from one state to another, then if a somewhat changes the totality changes. But there is nothing outside of the totality to necessitate it, and it therefore must necessitate itself.

VI.

Thus necessity and necessitated have proved in the last analysis to be one. This, however, is necessity no longer, but spontaneity, for it begins with itself and ends with itself. (a) As necessitating it is the active determiner which of course contains the potentiality upon which it acts. Had it no potentiality it could not change. (b) As necessitated it is the potentiality plus the limit which its activity has fixed there. (c) But we have here self-determination, and thus the existence of the Universal in and for itself, which is the Ego.

Remark.—It cannot be any other mode of existence than the Ego, for that which dissolves all determinations and is the universal potentiality is only one and cannot be distinguished into modes, for it creates and destroys these. The ego can abstract all else and yet abide—it is the actus purus—its negativity annulling all determinations and finitudes, while it is directed full on itself, and is in that very act complete self-recognition. (See proof of this in Chapter IV., III., 3.)

VII.

Thus the doctrine of necessity presupposes self-determination or Freedom as the form of the Total, and necessity is only one side—the realized or determined side—of the process isolated and regarded in this state of isolation. Against this side stands the potentiality which, if isolated in like manner, is called Chance or Contingency.