[p. 214]
|214| in itself. In speech a certain sound is sensuously present. We have therein the intuition of a sound. We do not stop at this impression, but our imagination attaches to it the representation of an object that is not present. There are thus two things present here, a sensuous determination and another representation attached to it. The representation counts here solely as the essence and as the meaning of what is sensuously present, which thereby is a mere sign. The given content stands opposed to a content produced by us.
§ 6
In common life one confuses representation and thinking, and we also call thinking what is only representation of imagination. In representation we have a thing before us also according to its external, inessential existence. In thinking, on the other hand, we separate off from the thing the external, merely inessential, and bring out the thing only in its essence. Thinking penetrates through the external appearance to the inner nature of the thing and makes it its object. It leaves out what is contingent in a thing. It does not take a thing as it is as immediate appearance, but divides the inessential from the essential and thus abstracts from the former. – In intuition we have individual objects before us. Thinking relates them to one another or compares them. In comparison it picks out what they have in common with one another and leaves out that through which they differ from one another, and thereby obtains universal representations. – The universal representation contains less determinateness than the single object which falls under this universal, because one obtains the universal precisely only by leaving out the individual. On the other hand, the universal comprehends under itself more or has a far greater extent. Insofar as thinking produces a universal object, the
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