V.A. Observation of the Relation of Self-Consciousness to Its Immediate Actuality: Physiognomy and Phrenology

Psychological observation discovers no law for the relation of self-consciousness to actuality or the world over against it; and owing to their mutual indifference and independence it is forced to fall back on the peculiar determinate characteristic of real individuality, which has a being in and for itself or contains the opposition of subjective self-existence (Fürsichseyn) and objective inherent existence (Ansichseyn) dissolved and extinguished within its own process of absolute mediation. Individuality alone is now the object for observation, or the object to which observation now passes.

The individual exists in himself and for himself. He is for himself, or is a free activity; he is, however, also in himself, or has himself an original determinate being of his own—a characteristic which is in principle the same as what psychology sought to find outside him. Opposition thus breaks out in his own self; it has this twofold nature, it is a process or movement of consciousness, and it is the fixed being of a reality with a phenomenal character, a reality which in it is directly its own. This being, the “body” of the determinate individuality, is its ultimate and original source or condition, that in the making of which it has had nothing to do. But since the individual at the same time merely is what he has done, his body is also an “expression” of himself which he has brought about; a sign and indication as well, which has not remained a bare immediate fact, but only points to and lets us see what is meant by his setting his original nature to work.

If we consider the moments we have here in relation to the view previously indicated, we find a general human shape and form, or at least the general character of a climate, of a portion of the world, of a people, just as formerly we found in the same way general customs and culture. In addition, too, the particular circumstances and situation come within the universal reality; here this particular reality is a particular formation of the shape and mould of the individual. On the other side, just as the free activity of the individual and reality in the sense of his own reality were formerly placed in contrast and opposition to reality as given, here the shape assumed by the individual stands as an expression of his own actualisation established by the individual himself, it bears the lineaments and forms of his spontaneously active being. But the universal as well as particular reality, which observation formerly met with outside the individual, is here the reality of the individual, his connate body, and within this very body the expression due to his own action appears. From the psychological point of view objective reality in and for itself and determinate individuality had to be brought into relation to one another; here, however, it is the whole determinate individuality that is the object for observation, and each aspect of the opposition it entails is itself this whole. Thus, to the outer whole belongs not merely the original primordial being, the connate body, but the formation of the body as well, which is due to activity from the inner side; the body is a unity of unformed and formed existence, and is the reality of the individual pervaded and permeated by his reference to self. This whole embraces the definite and specific parts fixed originally and from the first, and also the lines or lineaments which only arise as the result of action; this whole so formed is, and this being is an expression of what is inner and within, of the individual constituted as a consciousness and as a process.

This inner is, too, no longer formal, spontaneous activity without any content or determinateness of its own, an activity with its content and specific nature, as in the former case, lying in external circumstances; it is an original inherently determinate Character, whose form is just the activity. What, then, we have to consider here is the relation subsisting between the two sides; the point to observe is how this relation is determined, and what is to be understood by the inner finding expression in the outer.

This outer, in the first place, does not act as an organ making the inner visible, or, in general terms, a being for another; for the inner, so far as it is in the organ, is the activity itself. The mouth that speaks, the hand that works, with the bones too, if we care to add them, are the operative organs effecting the actual realisation, and they contain the action qua action, or the inner as such; the externality, however, which the inner obtains by their means is the deed, the act, in the sense of a reality separated and cut off from the individual. Language and labour are outer expressions in which the individual no longer retains possession of himself per se, but lets the inner get right outside him, and puts it in the hands of another. For that reason we might just as truly say that these outer expressions express the inner too much as that they do so too little: too much—because the inner itself breaks out in them, and there remains no opposition between them and it; they not merely give an expression of the inner, they give the inner itself directly and immediately: too little—because in speech and action the inner turns itself into something else, into an other, and thereby puts itself at the mercy of change and alteration, which transmute and distort the spoken word and the accomplished act, and make something else out of them than they are in and for themselves as actions of a particular determinate individual. Not only do the products of actions, owing to this externality, lose by the influence of others the character of being something constant as regards other individualities; but by their assuming towards the inner which they contain, the attitude of something external, separate, independent, and indifferent, they can, through the individual himself, be qua inner something other than they seem. Either the individual intentionally makes them to all appearance something else than they are in truth, or he is too incompetent to give himself the outer aspect he really wanted, and to give them such fixity and permanence that the product of his action cannot become transformed and distorted by others. The action, then, in the form of a completed product has the double and opposite significance of being either the inner individuality and not its expression, or qua external a reality detached from the inner, a reality which is something quite different from the former. On account of this twofold meaning, we must look about for the inner as it still is within the individual himself, but in a visible or external form. In the organ, however, it exists merely as immediate activity as such, which attains its externalization in the act or deed, that either does or again does not represent the inner. The organ, in the light of this opposition, thus does not afford the expression which is sought.

If now the external shape and form were able to express the inner individuality only in so far as that shape is neither an organ nor action, hence only in so far as it is an inert passive whole, it would then play the rôle of a persisting or subsistent thing, which received undisturbed the inner as an alien element into its own passive being, and thereby became the sign and symbol of it—an external contingent expression, whose actual concrete aspect has no meaning of its own—a language whose accents and combinations are not the real fact itself, but are arbitrarily and capriciously connected with it and a mere accident so far as it is concerned.

Such a capricious association of factors that are external for one another does not give a law. Physiognomy, however, would claim distinction from other spurious arts and unwholesome studies on the ground that in dealing with determinate individuality it considers the necessary opposition of an inner and an outer, of character as a conscious nature and character as a definitely embodied organic shape, and relates these moments to one another in the way they are related to one another by their very conception, and hence must constitute the content of a law. In astrology, on the other hand, in palmistry and such like kinds of knowledge, there appears merely external element related to external element, anything whatsoever to an element alien to it. A given constellation at birth, and, when the external element is brought closer to the body itself, certain given lines on the hand, are external factors making for long or short life, and the fate in general of the particular person. Being externalities they are indifferent towards one another, and have none of the necessity for one another which ought to lie in the relation of what is outer to what is inner.

The hand, to be sure, does not seem to be such a very external thing for fate; it seems rather to stand to it as something inner. For fate again is also merely the phenomenal manifestation of what the specifically determinate individuality inherently is as having an inner determinate constitution originally and from the start. Now to find out what this individuality is in itself, the palmist, as well as the physiognomist, takes a shorter cut than, e.g., Solon, who thought he could only know this from and after the course of the whole life: the latter looked at the phenomenal explicit reality, while the former considers the implicit nature (das Ansich). That the hand, however, must exhibit and reveal the inherent nature of individuality as regards its fate, is easily seen from the fact that after the organ of speech it is the hand most of all by which a man actualises and manifests himself. It is the lively artificer of his fortune: we may say of the hand it is what a man does, for in it as the effective organ of his self-fulfilment he is there present as the animating soul; and since he is ultimately and originally his own fate, the hand will thus express this innate inherent nature.

From this peculiarity, that the organ of activity is at once a form of being and the operation effected within it, or again that the inner inherent being is itself explicitly present in it and has a being for others, we come upon a further aspect of it different from the preceding. For if the organs in general proved to be incapable of being taken as expressions of the inner for the reason that in them the operation is present as a process, while the operation as a deed or act is merely external, and inner and outer in this way fall apart and are or can be alien to one another, the organ must, in view of the peculiarity now considered, be again taken as also a middle term for both, since this very fact, that the operation takes place and is present in it, constitutes eo ipso an external attribute of it, and indeed one that is different from the deed or act; for the former holds by the individual and remains with him.

This mediating term uniting inner and outer is in the first place itself external too. But then this externality is at the same time taken up into the inner; it stands in the form of simple unbroken externality opposed to dispersed and disintegrated externality, which either is a single performance or condition contingent for the individuality as a whole, or else, in the form of a total externality, is fate or destiny, split up into a plurality of performances and conditions. The mere lines of the hand, then, the ring and compass of the voice, as also the individual peculiarity of the language used: or again this idiosyncracy of language, as expressed where the hand gives it more durable existence than the voice can do, viz.: in writing, especially in the particular style of “handwriting”—all this is an expression of the inner, so that, as against the multifarious externality of action and fate, this expression again stands in the position of simple mere externality, plays the part of an inner in relation to the externality of action and fate. Thus, then, if at first the specific nature and innate peculiarity of the individual along with what these become as the result of cultivation and development, are regarded as the inner reality, as the essence of action and of fate, this inner being gets its appearance in external fashion to begin with from the mouth, hand, voice, handwriting, and the other organs and their permanent characteristics. Thereafter and not till then does it give itself further outward expression, when realised in the world.

Now because this middle term assumes the nature of an outer expression, which is at the same time taken back into the inner, its existence is not confined to the immediate organ carrying out the action; this middle term is rather the movement and form of countenance and figure in general which perform no outward act. These lineaments and their movements on this principle are the checked and restrained action that stops at the individual and, as regards his relation to what he actually does, constitute his own personal inspection and observation of the action—expression in the sense of reflection upon the actual expression.

The individual is therefore not a mute and silent spectator on the occasion of his external action, since he is there reflected into himself at the same time, and gives articulate expression to this self-reflection. This theoretical activity, the individual’s conversing with himself on the matter, is also perceptible to others, for his speaking is itself an outer expression.

In this inner, then, which in being expressed remains an inner, observation finds the individual reflected out of his actual reality; and we have to see how the case stands with this necessity involved in the unity here.

His being thus reflected is to begin with different from the act itself, and therefore can be, and be taken for something other than the deed is. We look at a man’s face and see whether he is in earnest with what he says or does. Conversely, however, what is here intended to be an expression of the inner is at the same time an existent objective expression, and hence itself falls to the level of mere existence, which is absolutely contingent for the self-conscious individual. It is therefore no doubt an expression, but at the same time only in the sense of a sign or symbol, so that to the content expressed the peculiar nature of that by which it is expressed is completely indifferent. The inner in thus appearing is doubtless an invisible made visible, but without being itself attached to this appearance. It can just as well make use of some other appearance as another inner can adopt the same kind of appearance. Lichtenberg, therefore, is right in saying: “Suppose the physiognomist ever did have a man in his grasp, it would merely require a courageous resolution on the man’s part to make himself again incomprehensible for centuries.”

In the previous case the immediately given circumstances formed a sphere of existence from which individuality selected what it could or what it wanted, either submitting to or transmuting this given existence, for which reason this did not contain the necessity and inner nature of individuality. Similarly here the immediate being in which individuality clothes its appearance is one which either expresses the fact of its being reflected back out of reality and existing within itself, or which is for it merely a sign indifferent to what is signified, and therefore signifying in reality nothing; it is as much its countenance as its mask, which can be put off when it likes. Individuality permeates its own shape, moves, speaks in the shape assumed; but this entire mode of existence equally well passes over into a state of being indifferent to the will and the act. Individuality effaces from it the significance it formerly had—of being that wherein individuality is reflected into itself, or has its true nature—and instead puts its real nature rather in the will and the deed.

Individuality abandons that condition of being reflected into self which finds expression in lines and lineaments, and places its real nature in the performance, the work done. Herein it contradicts the relationship which the instinct of reason, engaged in observing self-conscious individuality, establishes in regard to what its inner and outer should be. This point of view brings us to the special idea at the basis of the science of physiognomy—if we care to call it so. The opposition this form of observation comes upon is in form the opposition of practical and theoretical, both falling inside the practical aspect itself—the opposition of individuality, making itself real in action (in the most general sense of action), and individuality as being in this action at the same time reflected thence into self, and taking the action for its object. Observation apprehends and accepts this opposition in the same inverted form in which it is when it makes its appearance. To observation, the deed itself and the performance, whether it be that of speech or a more solid reality, stand for the contingent, non-essential outer while the individuality’s existence within itself passes for the essential inner. Of the two aspects which the practical mind involves, intention and act, (the pondering over the action and the action itself,) observation selects the former as the true inner; the latter is to have its more or less unessential externalisation in the act, its true outer expression, however, is to be had in the form in which the individual is embodied. This latter expression is the sensuous immediate presence of the individual self-conscious agent: the inwardness which is to be the true and internal aspect, is the personal peculiarity of the intention, and the individual singleness of his self-existence—both together the mind as subjectively “meant.” Thus, what observation takes for its object is an existence that is “meant”; and there it looks for laws.

The primary way of thinking about and giving the “meaning” of the “presumptive” presence of mind, is that of natural physiognomy, hasty judgment formed at a glance regarding the inner nature and the character of its form and shape. The object of this kind of guesswork thinking is so constituted that its very nature involves its being in truth something other than merely sensuous and immediate. Certainly what is really present is just this condition of being in sensuous form reflected out of sense into self; it is the visible as a sensuous presentment of the invisible, which constitutes the object of observation. But this very sensuous immediate presence is an actuality of mind only as it is for subjective conjecture (Meinung); and observation from this point of view occupies itself with its “presumed” (gemeint) existence, with physiognomy, handwriting, sound of voice, etc.

This sort of existence refers to just such a supposed or presumed (gemeintes) inner. It is not the murderer, the thief that is to be known; it is the capacity to be a murderer, a thief. The definitely marked abstract attribute is thereby lost in the particular individual’s concrete infinite characteristic nature, which now demands more skilful delineations than the former qualifications supply. Such skilful delineations no doubt say more than the qualification, “murderer,” “thief,” or “good-hearted,” “unspoiled,” and so on; but are a long way short of their aim, which is to express the existence that is “meant,” the single individuality, as far short as the delineations of the form and shape, which go further than a “flat brow,” a “long nose,” etc. For the individual shape and form, like the individual self-consciousness, is, qua “presumed” existence, inexpressible. The “science of knowing men” which takes to do with a supposititious human being, like the science of physiognomy, which deals with its presumptive reality and seeks to raise to the level of demonstrable knowledge those uncritical assertions of natural physiognomy, is therefore something with neither foundation nor finality; it cannot manage to say what it “means” because it merely “means” or “presumes,” and its content is merely what is “presumed” or “meant.”

The so-called “laws,” this kind of science sets out to find, are relations holding between these two presumed or supposed aspects, and hence can amount to no more than an empty “fancying.” Again, too, since this pretence at knowledge, which takes upon itself to deal with the reality of mind, finds its object to be just the fact that mind is reflected from sense existence back into self, and determinate existence is an indifferent accident for it, it is bound to be aware at once that by the so-called “laws” discovered it really means nothing at all, but that, strictly speaking, all this is mere chatter, or merely a “fancy” or “opinion” of its own,—an expression which brings out the truth that to state one’s “opinion,” one’s “fancy,” and not to convey thereby the fact itself, but merely a “fancy of one’s own,” are one and the same thing. In content, however, such observations cannot differ from these: “It always rains at our annual fair,” says the dealer; “And every time, too,” says the housewife, “when I am drying my washing.”

Lichtenberg, who characterises physiognomic observation in this way, makes this remark: “If any one says, ‘You act, certainly, like an honest man, but I can see from your figure you are forcing yourself to do so, and are a rogue at heart,’ without a doubt every brave fellow to the end of time when accosted in that fashion will retort with a box in the ear.”

This retort is very striking, for the reason that it refutes the fundamental assumption of such a guesswork method of “conjecture” (meinen), viz. that the reality of a man is his face, etc.

The true being of a man is rather his act; individuality is real in the deed, and a deed it is which cancels both the aspects of what is “meant” or “presumed” to be. In the one aspect where what is “presumed” or “imagined” takes the form of a passive bodily being, individuality puts itself forward in action as the negative essence which only is so far as it cancels being. Then furthermore the act does away with the inexpressibleness of what self-conscious individuality really “means”; in regard to such “meaning,” this individuality is endlessly determined and determinable. This false infinite, this endless determining, is abolished in the performance of the act. The act is something simply determinate, universal, to be grasped as an abstract, distinctive whole; it is murder, theft, a benefit, a deed of bravery, and so on, and what it is can be said of it. It is such and such, and its being is not merely a symbol, it is the fact itself. It is this, and the individual human being is what the act is. In the bare simplicity of this being, the individual has for others a definite essential nature of a certain general kind, and ceases to be merely something that is “meant” or “presumed” to be this or that. No doubt he is not there put forward in the form of mind; but when it is a question of his being qua being, and the twofold being of bodily shape and act are pitted against one another, each claiming to be his true reality, the deed alone is to be affirmed as his genuine being—not his figure or shape, which would express what he “means” to convey by his acts, or what any one might “conjecture” he merely could do. In the same way again when his performance and his inner possibility, capacity, or intention are opposed, the former alone is to be regarded as his true reality, even if he finds things turn out different from what he expected, and “fancies,” when he turns from the act to what is in his “mind,” that he is something else in his “inner mind” than what he is in the act. Individuality which commits itself to the objective element, when it sets out to do something, no doubt puts itself at the mercy of that element, to be altered and perverted as the latter decides. But what settles the character of the act is just this,—whether the deed is a real thing that holds together, or whether it is merely a pretended or “supposed” performance, which is in itself null and void and passes away. Objectification does not alter the act itself, it merely shows what the deed is, i.e. whether it is or whether it is nothing.

The breaking up of this being into intentions, and subtleties of that sort, by which the real man, i.e. his deed, is to be reduced again to, and explained in terms of, his “conjectured” being, as even the individual himself may produce particular intentions to explain his own reality,—all this must be left to idle “fancying” and “presuming” to furnish at its leisure. If this idle thinking will set its ineffective wisdom to work, and will deny the agent the character of reason, and use him so badly as to want to declare his figure and his lineaments to be his real being instead of his act, then it may expect to get the retort above spoken of, a retort which shows that figure is not the inherent being, but is at any rate an object that can be pretty roughly handled.

If we look now at the range of relations as a whole in which self-conscious individuality can be observed standing towards its outer aspect, there will be one left which has still to come before observation as an object. In psychology it is the external reality of things which in the life of mind is to have its counterpart conscious of itself and make the mind intelligible. In physiognomy, on the other hand, mind or spirit is to be known in its own proper outer (physical) aspect, a form of being which may be called the language or utterance of mind—the visible invisibility of its inner nature. There is still left the further character of the aspect of reality,—that individuality expresses its nature in its immediate actuality, an actuality that is definitely fixed and purely existent.

This last relation [of mind to its reality] is distinguished from the physiognomic by the fact that this is the speaking presence of the individual, who in his practical active outer expression brings to light and manifests at the same time the expression wherein he reflects himself into himself and contemplates himself, an expression which is itself a movement, passive lineaments which are themselves essentially a mediated form of existence. In the feature still to be considered, however, the outer phase is in the end an entirely inactive objectivity, which is not in itself a speaking sign, but presents itself on its own account, separate from the self-conscious process, and has the form of a bare thing.

In the first place in regard to the relation of the inner to this its outer, it is clear that that relation seems bound to be understood in the sense of a causal connection, since the relation of one immanent and inherent entity to another, qua a necessary relation, is causal connection.

Now, for spiritual individuality to have an effect on the body, it must qua cause be itself corporeal. The corporeal aspect, however, wherein it acts as a cause, is the organ, not the organ of action on external reality, but of the action of the self-conscious being within itself, operating outward only on its own body. It is at the same time not easy to see what these organs can be. If we merely think of organs in general, the organ for work and toil would at once occur to us, so, too, the organ of sex, and so on. But organs of that sort are to be considered as instruments or parts which mind qua one extreme possesses as a means for dealing with the other extreme, which is an outer object. In the present case, however, an organ is to be understood to be one wherein the self-conscious individual, as an extreme, maintains himself on his own account and for himself against his own proper actuality which is opposed to him, the individual not being at the same time turned upon the outer world, but reflected in his own action, and where, further, his aspect of existence is not an existence objective for some other individual. In the case of physiognomy, too, the organ is no doubt considered as an existence reflected into self and criticising the action. But in this case the existence is objective in character, and the outcome of the physiognomical treatment is that self-consciousness treats its own reality as something to which it can be indifferent. This indifference disappears in the fact that this very state of being reflected into self is directly active: thereby that existence occupies and maintains a necessary relation to it. But to operate effectually on that existence it must itself have a being, though not properly speaking an objective being, and it must be shown to be an organ in this sense.

In ordinary life, anger, e.g. as an internal action of that sort, is located in the liver. Plato even assigns the liver something still higher, something which to many is even the highest function of all, viz. prophecying, or the gift of uttering in an irrational manner things sacred and eternal. But the process which goes on in the individual’s liver, heart, and so on, cannot be regarded as one wholly internal to the individual, wholly reflected into his self; rather it is there in such a form that his Body is from the first smitten with it, and the process assumes a physical existence, becomes an animal force, reacting on and directed towards external reality.

The nervous system, on the other hand, is the immediate stability of the organism in its process of movement. The nerves themselves, no doubt, are again organs of that consciousness which from the first is immersed in its outward impulses. Brain and spinal cord, however, may be looked at as the immediate presence of self-consciousness, a presence self-contained, not an object and also not transient. In so far as the moment of being, which this organ has, is a being for another, is an objective existence, it is a being that is dead, and is no longer the presence of self-consciousness. This self-contained existence, however, is by its very nature a fluent stream, wherein the circles that are made in it immediately break up and dissolve, and where no distinction is expressed as permanent, or real. Meanwhile, as mind itself is not an abstractly simple entity, but a system of processes, wherein it distinguishes itself into moments, but in the very act of distinguishing remains free and detached; and as mind articulates its body as a whole into a variety of functions, and designates one particular part of the body for only one function:—so too one can represent to oneself the fluent state of its internal existence [its existence within itself] as something that is articulated into parts. Moreover, it seems bound to be thought of in this way, because the self-reflected being of mind in the brain itself is again merely a middle term between its pure essential nature and its bodily articulation, an intermediate link, which thereby forms the nature of both, and thus from the side of the latter, must also again have in it the actual articulation.

The psycho-organic being has at the same time the necessary aspect of a stable subsistent existence. The former must retire, qua extreme of self-existence, and have this latter as the other extreme over against it, an extreme which is then the object on which the former acts as a cause. If now brain and spinal cord are that bodily self-existence of mind, the skull and vertebral column form the other extreme separated off, viz. the solid fixed stable thing.

When, however, any one thinks of the proper place where mind exists, it is not the back that occurs to him, but merely the head. Since this is so, we can, in examining a form of knowledge like what we are at present dealing with, content ourselves with this reason,—not a very bad one in the present case,—in order to confine the existence of mind to the skull. Should it strike any one to take the vertebral column for the seat of mind, in so far as by it too knowledge and action doubtless are sometimes partly induced and partly educed, this would prove nothing in defence of the view that the spinal cord must be taken as well for the indwelling seat of mind, and the vertebral column for the existential counterpart, because this proves too much. For we may bear in mind that there are also other approved external ways for succouring the activity of mind in order to stimulate or inhibit its activity.

The vertebral column, then, drops—“rightly,” if we like—out of account; and our “construing” that the skull alone does not in fact contain the “organs” of mind is just as good as many other doctrines “construed” by “philosophy of nature.” For this was previously excluded from the notion of this relation, and on that account the skull was adopted as the aspect of existence; or, if we may not recall what the state of the case essentially and in principle involves, even experience teaches us clearly that, as we do not see with the eye qua organ, so it is not with the skull that we commit murder, steal, write poetry, etc.

We must on that account refrain too from using the expression “organ” when speaking of that significance of the skull which we have still to mention. For although it is a common thing to hear people say, that to reasonable men it is not words but facts that really matter, yet that does not give us permission to describe a thing in terms not appropriate to it. For this is at once stupidity and deceit, pretending merely not to have the right “word,” and hiding from itself that in reality it has not got hold of the fact itself, the notion. If the latter were there, it would soon find the right word.

What has been here determined is, in the first instance, merely that just as the brain is the caput vivum, the skull is the caput mortuum.

It is in this ens mortuum, then, that the mental processes and specific functions of the brain would have to find their external reality manifested and set forth, a reality which is none the less in the individual himself. For the relation of those processes and functions to what, being an ens mortuum, does not contain mind indwelling within it, there is offered, in the first instance, the external and mechanical factor, the fixed solid element above mentioned, so that the organs proper—and these are in the brain—here press the skull out round, there make it broad, or force it flat, or in whatever way we care to state the effect thus exerted. Being itself a part of the organism, it must be supposed to have in it too, as is the case in every bone, an active, living, formative influence, so that, from this point of view, it really, from its side, presses the brain, and fixes its external boundary,—which it is the better able to do being the harder. In that shape, however, the relation of the activity of the one to the other would always maintain the same character; for whether the skull is the determining factor or the factor determined, this would effect no alteration in the general causal connection, only that the skull would then be made the immediate organ of self-consciousness, because its aspect of existence-for-self would find expression in its causal function. But, since self-existence in the sense of organic living activity belongs to both in the same manner, the causal connection between them in point of fact drops altogether.

This development of the two, however, would be inwardly connected, and would be an organic pre-established harmony, which leaves the two interrelated aspects free as regards one another, each with its own proper form and shape, without this shape needing to correspond to that of the other; and still more so as regards the relation of the shape and the quality—just as the form of the grape and the taste of wine are mutually independent of one another.

Since, however, the character of self-existence turns on the brain, while that of existence turns on the feature of skull, there is also a causal connection to be set up between them inside the organic unity—a necessary relation between them as external for one another, i.e. a relation itself external, whereby their form and shape is determined the one through the other.

As regards the characteristic, however, in virtue of which the organ of self-consciousness would operate causally on the opposite aspect, all sorts of statements can be made. For the question concerns the peculiarity of a cause which is considered in regard to what for it is indifferent, its formal shape and quantity, a cause whose inner nature and self-existence are to be precisely what leave quite unaffected the immediately existing aspect. The organic self-formation of the skull is, to begin with, indifferent to the mechanical influence exerted, and the relationship in which these two processes stand, since the former consists in relating itself to itself, is just this very indeterminateness and boundlessness. Furthermore, even though the brain accepted the distinctions of mind, and took them into itself as existential distinctions, and were a plurality of inner organs occupying each a different space, it would be left undecided whether a mental element would, according as it was originally stronger or weaker, either be bound to possess in the first case a more expanded brain-organ, or in the latter case a more contracted brain-organ, or just the other way about. But it is contradictory to nature for the brain to be such a plurality of internal organs; for nature gives the moments of the notion an existence of their own, and hence puts the fluent simplicity of organic life clear on one side, and its articulation and division with its distinctions on the other, so that, in the way they have to be taken here, they assume the form of particular anatomical facts.

The same holds good in regard to the question whether the improvement of the brain would enlarge or diminish the organ, whether it would make it coarser and thicker or finer. By the fact that it remains undetermined how the cause is constituted, it is left in the same way undecided how the effect exerted on the skull comes about, whether it is a widening or a narrowing and shrinking of it. Suppose this effect is named in perhaps more distinguished phrase a “solicitation,” we cannot say whether this takes place by swelling, like the action of a cantharides-plaster, or by shrivelling like the action of vinegar.

In defence of all views of that kind plausible reasons can be adduced; for the organic relation, which quite as much exerts its influence, finds one fit as well as another, and is indifferent to all this wit of mere understanding.

It is, however, not the interest of observation to seek to determine this relation. For it is in any case not the brain in the sense of a physical part which takes its stand on one side, but brain in the sense of the existential form of self-conscious individuality. This individuality qua abiding character, and self-moving conscious activity exists for itself and within itself. Opposed to this existence within itself and on its own account, stand its reality and its existence for another. Its own peculiar existence is the essential nature, and is subject, having a being in the brain; this being is subsumed under it, and gets its value and worth merely through its inherent and indwelling significance. The other aspect of self-conscious individuality, however, that of its existence, is being qua independent and subject, or qua a thing, viz. a bone: the real existence of man is his skull-bone. This is the relationship and the sense which the two aspects of this relation have when the mind adopts the attitude of observation.

Observation has now to deal with the more specific and determinate relation of these aspects. The skull-bone doubtless in general has the significance of being the immediate reality of mind. But the many-sidedness of mind gives its existence a corresponding variety of meanings. What we have to find out is the specific meaning of the particular regions into which this existence is divided; and we have to see how the reference to mind is denoted in them.

The skull-bone is not an organ of activity, nor even a process of utterance. We neither commit theft, murder, etc., with the skull-bone, nor does it in the least contort the face to suit the deed in such cases, so that the skull should express the meaning in the language of gesture. Nor does this existential form possess the value even of a sign and symbol. Look and gesture, tone, even a pillar or a post, stuck up on a desert island, proclaim at once that they stand for something else than what they merely are at first sight. They forthwith profess to be signs, since they have in them a characteristic which points to something else by the fact that it does not belong peculiarly to them. Doubtless, too, in the case of a skull there is many an idea that may occur to us, like those of Hamlet over Yorick’s skull; but the skull-bone by itself is such an indifferent object, such a harmless thing, that there is nothing else to be seen in it or to be thought about it directly as it is, except simply the fact of its being a skull. It no doubt reminds us of the brain and its specific nature, and skulls with other formations, but it does not recall a conscious process, since there is impressed on it neither a look or gesture, nor anything which would show traces of derivation from a conscious activity. For it is that form of reality which in the case of individuality is intended to set forth and make manifest another aspect of a kind that would no longer be an existence reflecting itself into itself, but bare immediate existence.

While, further, the skull does not itself feel, there seems still a possibility of providing it with a more determinate significance in the fact that specific feelings or sensations might enable us, through their being contiguous or in proximity to it, to find out what the skull may mean to convey; and since a conscious mode of mind has its feeling in a specific region of the skull, it may be thought perhaps that this localisation on the shape of the skull may indicate what that mode is and what its peculiar nature. Just as, e.g., many people complain of feeling a painful tension somewhere in the head when thinking intensely, or even when thinking at all, so it might be that stealing, committing murder, writing poetry, and so on, could each be accompanied with its own proper feeling, which would over and above be bound to have its peculiar localisation. This locality of the brain, which would in this manner be more disturbed and exercised, would also most likely modify further the contiguous locality of the bone of the skull; or again this latter locality would, from sympathy or conformity, not be inert, but would enlarge or diminish or in some other way assume a corresponding form.

What, however, makes such a hypothesis improbable is this: feeling in general is something indeterminate, and that feeling in the head as the centre might well be the general feeling that accompanies all suffering; so that mixed up with the thief’s, murderer’s, poet’s tickling or pain in the head there would be other feelings too, and they would permit of being distinguished from one another, or from those we may call bodily feelings, as little as an illness can be determined from the symptom of headache, if we restrict its meaning merely to the bodily element.

In point of fact, from whatever side we look at the matter, all necessary reciprocal relation between them ceases to be of any account; and so too any intimation the one might give of the other, in virtue of such a relation. If the relation is still to hold, what is left to form a sort of necessary relation is a pre-established harmony of the corresponding features of the two sides, a harmony which leaves the factors in question quite detached and rests on no inherent principle; for one of the aspects has to be a non-mental reality, a bare thing.

Thus then, on one side we have a number of passive regions of the skull, on the other a number of mental properties, the variety and character of which will depend on the condition of psychological investigation. The poorer the idea we have of mind, the easier the matter becomes in this respect; for, in part, the fewer become the mental properties, and, in part, the more detached, fixed, and ossified, and consequently more akin to features of the bone and more comparable with them. But, while much is doubtless made easier by this miserable representation of the mind, there still remains a very great deal to be found on both sides: there remains for observation to deal with the entire contingency of their relation. When every faculty of the soul, every passion and (for this, too, must be considered here) the various shades of characters, which hyper-subtle psychology and “knowledge of mankind” are accustomed to talk about, are each and all assigned their place on the skull, and their contour on the skull-bone, the arbitrariness and artificiality of this procedure are just as glaring as if the children of Israel, who had been likened to “the sand by the seashore for multitude,” had each assigned and taken to himself his own symbolic grain of sand!

The skull of a murderer has—not this organ or sign—but this “bump.” But this murderer has in addition a lot of other properties, and other bumps too, and along with the bumps hollows as well. Bumps and hollows, there is room for selection! And again his murderous propensity can be referred to some bump or hollow or another, and this in turn to some mental quality or another; for the murderer is neither this abstract of a murderer, nor does he have merely one protuberance and one depression. The observations offered on this point must therefore sound just about as sensible as those of the dealer about the rain at the annual fair, and of the housewife at her washing time. Dealer and housewife might as well make the observation that it always rains when some neighbour passes by, or when they have roast pork. From the point of view of observation a given determinate characteristic of mind is just as indifferent to and independent of a given specific formation of the skull as the rain in regard to circumstances like these. For of the two objects thus under observation, the one is an arid entity existing on its own account, an ossified quality of mind, as the other is an arid entity inherently existing in itself. Such an ossified entity, as they both are, is completely indifferent to everything else. It is just as much a matter of indifference to a high bump whether a murderer is in close proximity, as to the murderer whether flatness is near him.

There is, of course, no getting over the possibility that still remains, that a bump at a certain place is connected with a certain property, passion, etc. We can think of the murderer with a high bump here at this place on the skull, the thief with one there. From this point of view phrenology is capable of much greater extension than it has yet had. For in the first instance it seems to be restricted merely to the connection of a bump with a property in one and the same individual, in the sense that this individual possesses both. But phrenology per naturam—for there must be such a subject as well as a physiognomy per naturam—goes a long way beyond this restriction. It does not merely affirm that a cunning fellow has a bump like a fist lying behind the ear, but also puts forward the view that not the unfaithful wife herself, but the other party to this conjugal transaction has a bump on the brow.

In the same way one may too “imagine” and “conjecture” the man living under the same roof with the murderer, or even one’s own neighbour, or, going still further afield, “conjecture” one’s fellow-citizens, etc., with high bumps on some part of the skull, just as well as one may picture to oneself the flying cow, that was caressed by the crab riding on a donkey, and afterwards, etc. etc. But if possibility is taken not in the sense of a possibility of “imagining” and “conjecturing” and “picturing,” but in the sense of inner possibility or possibility of conceiving, then the object is a reality of the kind which is a mere thing and is, and should be, deprived of the significance of reality, and can thus only have the sense of it for imaginative or figurative thinking.

The observer may, in spite of the indifference of the two sides to one another, set to work to determine correlations, supported partly by the general rational principle that the outer is the expression of the inner, and partly by the analogy of the skulls of animals—which may doubtless have a simpler character than men, but of which at the same time it becomes just so much the more difficult to say what character they do have, in that it cannot be so easy for any man’s imagination to think himself really into the nature of an animal. Should the observer do so, he will find, in giving out for certain the laws he maintains he has discovered, a first-rate means of assistance in a distinction which we too must necessarily take note of at this point.

The being of mind cannot be taken at any rate to be something completely rigid and immovable. Man is free. It will be admitted that the mind’s original primordial being consists merely in dispositions, which mind has to a large extent under its control, or which require favourable circumstances to draw them out; i.e. an original being of mind can be equally well spoken of as a being which does not as such exist at all. Were observations to conflict with what strikes any one as a law, which he is sure of and can give out for certain—should it happen to be fine weather at the annual fair or on the housewife’s washing day—then dealer and housewife might say that it, properly speaking, should rain, and the conditions are really all that way. So too in the case of observing the skull, it might be said when those contradictory observations occur, that the given individual ought properly to be what according to the law his skull proclaims him to be, and that he has an original disposition which, however, has not been brought out and fulfilled: this quality is not really present, but it should be there. The “law” and the “ought-to-be” rest on observation of actual showers of rain, and observation of the actual sense and meaning in the case of the given specific character of the skull; but if the reality is not present, the empty possibility is of just as much significance.

This mere possibility, i.e. the non-actuality, of the law proposed, and hence the observations conflicting with the law, are bound to come out just for the reason that the freedom of the individual and the circumstances gradually evolved are indifferent towards what merely is, both in the sense of the original inner as well as the external ossiform structure, and also because the individual can be something else than he is in his original internal nature, and still more than what he is as a skull-bone.

We get, then, the possibility that a given bump or hollow on the skull may denote both something actual as well as a mere disposition, one indeed so little determined in any given direction as to denote something that is not actual at all. We find the excuse made, which comes off badly, as a prevarication always does, that it is itself there for use against what it ought to assist. We see the thinking that merely “means” and “conjectures” brought by the very force of facts to say in unintelligent fashion the very opposite of what it holds to—to say that there is something indicated and signified by such and such a bone, but also just as truly not indicated at all.

What hovers before this way of “conjecturing” when it makes this shift is the true thought,—a thought, however, which abolishes that way of “conjecturing,”—that being as such is not at all the truth of spirit. As the disposition is an original primordial being, having no share in the activity of mind, just such a being is the skull-bone on its side. What merely is, without participating in spiritual activity, is for consciousness a thing, and so little is it the essence of mind that it is rather the very opposite of it, and consciousness is only actual and concrete by the negation and abolition of such a being.

From this point of view it must be regarded as a thorough denial and flaunting of reason to give out a skull-bone as the actual existence of conscious life, and that is what it is given out to be when it is regarded as the outer form of spirit; for the external shape is just the existent reality. It is no use to say we merely draw an inference from the outer as to the inner, which is something different, or to say that the outer is not the inner itself but merely its expression. For in the relation of the two to one another the character of self-reflecting and self-reflected reality falls just on the side of the inner, while the outer has the character of existent reality.

When, therefore, a man is told, “You (your inner being) are so and so, because your skull-bone is so constituted,” this means nothing else than that we regard a bone as the man’s reality. To retort upon such a statement with a box in the ear—in the way mentioned above when dealing with physiognomy—brings out primarily the “soft” parts of his head from their apparent state and position, and proves merely that these are no true inherent nature, are not the reality of mind; the retort here had better go the length of breaking the skull of the person who makes a statement like that, in order to demonstrate to him quite as palpably as his own wisdom that a bone is nothing of an inherent nature at all for a man, still less his true reality.

The untutored instinct of self-conscious reason will reject without examination a phrenology—this other instinct of self-conscious reason, its instinct for observation, which, having got scarcely within sight of knowledge, has grasped the subject in the soulless form that the outer is an expression of the inner. But the worse the thought, the less sometimes does it strike us where its badness definitely lies, and the more difficult is it to put one’s finger on it. For a thought is said to be the worse, the barer and emptier the abstraction which thought takes to be the essential truth. But in the antithesis here in question the component parts are individuality conscious of itself, and the abstraction of a bare thing, to which externality has been reduced—the inner being of mind taken in the sense of a fixed soulless existence and in opposition to that abstract being.

With the attainment of this, however, rational observation seems in fact to have also reached its culminating point, at which it must take leave of itself and turn right about; for it is only when anything is entirely bad that there is an inherent and immediate necessity in it to wheel round completely into its opposite. Just so it may be said of the Jews that it is precisely because they stand directly before the door of salvation, that they are and have been the most reprobate and abandoned:—what the nation should be in and for itself, this, the true inner nature of its self, it is not conscious of being, but puts away beyond itself. By this process of deprivation and renunciation it creates for itself the possibility of a higher level of existence, if once it could get the object thus renounced back again to itself, than if it had never left its natural immediate state of existence,—because spirit is all the greater the greater the opposition out of which it returns into itself; and such an opposition spirit brings about for itself, by doing away with its immediate unity, and laying aside its self-existence, the possession of a separate life of its own. But if such a consciousness does not mediate and reflect itself, the middle position or term where it has a determinate existence is the fatal unholy void, since what should give it substance and filling has been turned into a rigidly fixed extreme. It is thus that this last stage of reason’s function of observation is its very worst, and for that reason its complete reversal becomes necessary.

For the survey of the series of relations dealt with up to this point, which constitute the content and object of observation, shows that even in its first form, in observation of the relations of inorganic nature, sensuous being vanished from its ken. The moments of natures’ condition present themselves as pure abstractions and as bare and simple notions, which should be kept connected with the existence of things, but this gets lost, so that the abstract moment proves to be a pure movement and a universal. This free, self-complete process retains the significance of something objective; but now appears as a unit. In the process of the inorganic the unit is the inner with no existence. When the process does have existence qua unit, as one and single, it is an organism.

The unit qua self-existent or negative entity stands in antithesis to the universal, throws off its control, and remains independent by itself, so that the notion, being only realised in the condition of absolute dissociation, fails to find in organic existence its genuine expression, in the sense that it is not there in the form of a universal; it remains an “outer,” or, what is the same thing, an “inner” of organic nature.

The organic process is merely free implicitly; it is not so explicitly, “for itself.” The explicit phase of its freedom appears in the idea of purpose, has its existence in the form of something else, of a self-directing aim and guidance, that lies outside the mere process. Reason’s function of observation thus turns its attention to this aim and guidance, to mind, to the notion actually existing as universality, or to the purpose existing in the form of purpose; and what constitutes its own essential nature is now the object before it.

Reason here in the activity of observation is directed first to the pure abstract form of its essential nature. But since reason, in its apprehension of the object thus working and moving amidst its own distinctions takes this object as something that exists, observation becomes aware of laws of thought, relations of one constant factor to another constant element. The content of these laws being, however, merely moments, they pass away into the single one of self-consciousness.

This new object taken in the same way as existent, is the contingent individual self-consciousness. The process of observation, therefore, keeps within the “conjectured” meaning of mind, and within the contingent relation of conscious to unconscious reality. Mind alone in itself is the necessity of this relation. Observation, therefore, attacks it at closer quarters, and compares its realisation through will and action with its reality when it contemplates and is reflected into itself, a reality which is itself objective. This external aspect, although an utterance of the individual which he himself contains, is at the same time, qua symbol, something indifferent to the content which it is intended to denote, just as what finds for itself the symbol is indifferent to this symbol.

For this reason, observation finally passes from this variable form of utterance back to the permanent fixed being, and in principle declares that externality is the outer immediate reality of mind, not in the sense of an organ, and not like a language or a symbol, but in the sense of a lifeless thing. What the very first form of observation of inorganic nature did away with and superseded, viz. the idea that the notion should appear in the shape of a thing, this last form of observation reinstates so as to turn the reality of mind itself into a thing, or expressing it the other way about, so as to give lifeless being the significance of mind.

Observation has thus reached the point of explicitly expressing what our notion of observation was at the outset, viz. that rational certainty means objectivity of reason, that the certainty of reason seeks itself as an objective reality.

This does not, indeed, mean that mind, which is represented by a skull, is defined as a thing. There shall be no materialism, as it is called, in this idea; mind rather must be something very different from these bones of the skull. But that mind is, means nothing else than that it is a thing. When being as such, or thingness, is predicated of the mind, the true and genuine expression for this is, therefore, that mind is such an entity as a bone is. Hence it must be considered as supremely important that the true expression has been found for the bare statement regarding mind—that it is. When the statement is ever made about mind, that it is, has a being, is a thing, an individual reality, we do not mean it is something we can see, or knock about, or take in our hands, and so on, but that is what we say, and what the statement really amounts to is consequently conveyed in the expression that the existence of mind is a bone.

This result has now a twofold significance: one is its true meaning, in so far as the result is a completion of the outcome of the preceding movement of self-consciousness. The unhappy self-consciousness renounced its self-sufficiency, its independence, and wrung out its distinctive self-existence into the shape of a thing. By doing so, it left the level of self-consciousness and reverted to the condition of mere consciousness, i.e. to that phase of conscious life for which the object is an existent, a thing. But what is “thing” in this case is self-consciousness; “thing” here is the unity of ego and being—-the Category. When the object before consciousness is determined thus, consciousness possesses reason. Consciousness, as well as self-consciousness, is in itself properly reason in an implicit form; but only that consciousness can be said to have reason whose object has the character of being the category. From this, however, the knowledge of what is reason is still distinct.

The category, which is the immediate unity of being and self (Seyn und Seinen), must traverse both forms, and the conscious attitude of observation is just where the category is set forth in the form of being. In its result, consciousness expresses that, whose unconscious implicit certainty it is, in the shape of a proposition—the proposition which lies in the very notion of reason. This proposition is the infinite judgment that the self is a thing—a judgment that cancels and transcends itself.

Through this result, then, the category gets the added characteristic of being this self-cancelling opposition. The “pure” category, which is present to consciousness in the form of being or immediacy, is still an unmediated, a merely given object, and the attitude of consciousness is also direct, has no mediation in it. That infinite judgment is the moment which brings about the transition of immediacy into mediation or negativity. The given present object is therefore characterised as a negative object, while consciousness in its relation towards it assumes the form of self-consciousness; or the category, which traversed the form of being in the process of observation, is now set up in the form of self-existence, has now a distinctive being for its own sake. Consciousness no longer seeks to find itself immediately, but to produce itself by its own activity. Consciousness itself is the purpose and end of its own action, as in the process of observation it has to do merely with things.

The other meaning of the result is the one already considered, that of unsystematic (begrifflos) observation. This has no other way of understanding and expressing what it is about than by declaring the reality of self-consciousness to consist in the skull-bone, just as it appears in the form of a thing of sense, still retaining its character as an object for consciousness. In stating this, however, it has no clear consciousness as to what the statement involves, and does not grasp the determinate character of the subject and predicate in the proposition and of their relation to one another, still less does it grasp the proposition in the sense of a self-resolving infinite judgment and a notion. Rather, in virtue of a deeper lying self-consciousness of mind, which has the appearance here of being an innate sincerity and honesty of nature, the ignominiousness of such an irrational crude thought as that of taking a bone for the reality of self-consciousness, is concealed; and the very senselessness of introducing all sorts of relations of cause and effect, “symbol,” “organ,” etc., which are perfectly meaningless here, and of hiding away the glaring folly of the proposition behind distinctions derived from them—all this puts a gloss on that thought and whitewashes its naked absurdity.

Brain-fibres and the like, looked at as forms of the being of mind, are from the first an imagined, a merely hypothetical actuality—not an existent reality, not felt, seen, in short not true reality. If they do exist, if they are seen, they are lifeless objects, and then no longer pass for the being of mind. But objectivity proper must take an immediate, a sensuous form, so that in this objectivity qua lifeless—for the bone is lifeless so far as it is in the living being itself—mind is definitely established as real, as actual.

The principle involved in this idea is that reason claims to be all thinghood, even thinghood of a purely objective kind. It is this, however, in conceptu: only the notion is its truth; and the purer the notion itself is, the more silly an idea does it become, if its content does not take the shape of a notion (Begriff), but of a mere presentation or idea (Vorstellung)—if the self-superseding judgment is not taken with the consciousness of its infinity, but is taken as a stable and permanent proposition, the subject and predicate of which hold good each on its own account, self fixed as self, thing as thing, while one has to be the other all the same.

Reason, essentially the notion, is immediately parted asunder into itself and its opposite, an opposition which just for that reason is immediately again superseded. But by presenting itself in this way as both itself and its opposite, and when held fast in the entirely particular moment of this disintegration, reason is apprehended in an irrational form; and the purer the moments of this opposition are, the more glaring is the appearance of this content, which is either solely a content for consciousness, or solely expressed by consciousness in a naive form.

The “depth” which mind brings out from within, but carries no further than to make it a presentation (Vorstellung), and let it remain at this level—and the “ignorance” on the part of this consciousness as to what it really says, are the same kind of connection of higher and lower which, in the case of the living being, nature naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfilment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination. The infinite judgment qua infinite would correspond to the fulfilment of life that comprehends itself, while the consciousness of life that remains at the level of presentation would correspond to urination.