Encyclopedia of the Philosophical SciencesG.W.F. Hegel

The Encyclopedia is Hegel's attempt to present his entire system in compressed form. It divides into three parts: the Logic, the Philosophy of Nature, and the Philosophy of Spirit. Each recapitulates at a different level the movement from abstract immediacy through contradiction to concrete resolution that Hegel calls dialectic.

The Philosophy of Nature, the second part and the portion most frequently cited in discussions of space, time, and matter, traces the Idea's externalization in the natural world. Nature for Hegel is not a self-subsisting reality but the Idea in the form of otherness. Space is the most abstract natural determination, pure externality without qualitative difference. Time negates space by introducing succession and change. Matter arises as the unity of space and time, and the progression continues through mechanics, physics, and organics until nature produces life, which points beyond itself to spirit.

The work is deliberately schematic. Hegel intended it as a textbook for his lectures, and each numbered paragraph (Paragraph plus Remark plus Addition) compresses arguments that the Science of Logic, the Philosophy of Right, and the Phenomenology of Spirit develop at length. Its value is architectural: it shows how Hegel conceived the relation of logic to nature to spirit as a single self-developing whole, not three separate subjects but one movement of thought returning to itself through its own otherness.