Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God

In the previous Lecture the notion or conception of absolute necessity was explained-of absolute necessity, I repeat. Very often absolute means nothing more than abstract, and very frequently, too, it is imagined that when the word absolute is used everything is said that is necessary, and that no further definition can or ought to be given. As a matter of fact it is just with this definition that we are chiefly concerned. Absolute necessity is abstract, the abstract pure and simple, inasmuch as it depends on itself and does not subsist in or from or through an Other. But we have seen that it is not only adequate to its notion or conception, whatever that notion be, so that we were able to compare this notion and its external existence; but that it represents this very adequacy itself. Thus what might be taken as the external aspect is contained in itself, so that this very fact that it depends on itself, this identity or reference to self which constitutes the isolation of things in virtue of which they are contingent, is a form of independence which again is really a want of independence. Possibility is an abstraction of the same kind. A thing is possible if it does not contradict itself, that is, it is what is merely identical with itself, something in which there is no kind of identity with an Other, while, on the other hand, it has not its Other within itself. Contingency and possibility differ only in this, that the contingent has in addition a definite existence. The possible has only the possibility of existence. But the contingent itself has an existence which has absolutely no value beyond being a possibility; it is, but quite as much it is not. In the case of contingency, the nature of determinate Being or existence belonging to it is, as has been already remarked, so far evident that it is seen at the same time to have the character of something which is virtually a nullity, and consequently the transition to its Other, to the Necessary, is already expressed in that existence itself. It is an instance of the same thing as we have in abstract identity, which is a simple reference to self; it is known as a possibility, and being a possibility it is recognised that it is not yet anything. The fact that something is possible does not really imply anything. Identity is characterised as sterility, and that is what it really is.

What is wanting in this characteristic finds its complement, as we have seen, in the characteristic which is its antithesis. Necessity is not abstract, but truly absolute, solely in virtue of the fact that it contains the connection with an Other in itself, that it is self-differentiation, but a differentiation which has disappeared in something higher and is ideal. It consequently contains what belongs to necessity in general, but it is distinguished from this latter as being external and finite, and as involving a connection having reference to something else which remains Being and has the value of Being, and so is merely dependence. It goes by the name of necessity too, inasmuch as mediation is in general essential to necessity. The connection of its Other with something else, which is what constitutes it, does not get support from the ends for which it exists. Absolute necessity, on the other hand, transforms any such relation to an Other into a relation to itself, and consequently produces what is really inner harmony with itself.