ABSTRACT
A mechanical style of thinking, a mechanical memory, habit, a mechanical way of acting, signify that the peculiar pervasion and presence of spirit is lacking in what spirit apprehends or does. Although its theoretical or practical mechanism cannot take place without its self-activity, without an impulse and consciousness, yet there is lacking in it the freedom of individuality, and because this freedom is not manifest in it such action appears as a merely external one. The object is the syllogism, whose mediation has been sublated and has therefore become an immediate identity. The product of formal mechanism is the object in general, an indifferent totality in which determinateness appears as posited. The object having hereby entered the process as a determinate thing, the extinction of the process results on the one hand in rest, as the original formalism of the object, the negativity of its being determined for itself.
