ABSTRACT
Throughout his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel sets the holistic model of the object that he adopted in the Logic against the reductionist and atomistic picture of reality offered by physics and chemistry. His claim is that the individual is the embodiment of a substance-universal; he therefore develops an ontology in which objects are taken to have an intrinsic unity that cannot be reduced to the plurality of atomistic entities which are treated as fundamental by Newtonian science. In this way, as we have seen, it is important to contrast Hegel's metaphysics to the pluralistic view, which takes all things to be constituted out of a manifold of distinct and self-subsistent elements.
