[p. 208]
|208| its shape, size, weight, colour, through the more or less firm cohesion of its parts, through the purpose for which it is used, etc. If one now leaves out the determinations of an object in representation, this is called abstracting. A less determinate object, or an abstract object, is left over. If, however, I pick out in representation only a single such determination, this too is an abstract representation. The object, left in the completeness of its determinations, is called a concrete object. If I abstract from all determinations, there remains to me merely the representation of the wholly abstract object. When one says “thing”, one does mean something determinate, but one speaks of something wholly indeterminate, since it is our thought that makes an actual thing into this abstraction of a mere thing.
Sensuous perception is partly external, partly internal. Through the external we perceive things which are in space and time outside us and which we at the same time distinguish from ourselves. Through internal sensuous perception we notice states partly of our body, partly of our soul. A part of the sensuous world contains such objects and their determinations as, e.g., the colours, which have the sensuous as their ground and have received a spiritual form. When I say “this table is black”, I speak, first, of this single concrete object; second, the predicate black, which I assert of it, is a universal, which no longer holds merely of this single one but pertains to several objects. The black is a simple representation. – Of a proper concrete object we know immediately. The immediate becoming-conscious is intuition. A universal abstract representation, on the other hand, is a mediated representation, because I know of it by means of another, namely through abstraction or the leaving out of other determinations which in the
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