The method Hegel employs here, determinate negation, is often compared with Spinoza’s principle that “all determination is negation”, but while Hegel’s is related to Spinoza’s thought, it cannot be identified with or reduced to it.  Spinoza’s top-down determination starts with a single category (in his case, divine substance) that is then progressively divided by the application of concepts—the model being Plato’s method of division in which a genus concept is divided into particular species by the presence or absence of some differentiating property. From Hegel’s point of view, however, this cannot capture individuals as other than parts of that greater whole—a metaphysical picture in relation to Spinoza he refers to as acosmism. So Hegel will balance this type of determination by negation, with a different type of negation modeled on that which holds between incompatible properties of some object (for example, red and blue as incompatible colors) and that is reflected in the term negation of Aristotle’s logic. This allows Hegel to go beyond the determination of something as particular (suggesting the part-whole relation) to a more robust sense of singularity [Einzelheit]—the sense of the pure thisness seen initially in the Phenomenology’s Sense-certainty chapter, the truth of which was then shown to be Aristotle’s idea of an individual thing’s substantial form in the Perception chapter. It is in terms of this category that we can think, along with Aristotle, of a thing having an underlying substrate within which properties inhere and which, unlike the properties themselves, cannot be thought in general terms, but only in terms of the category of singularity. And yet this will encounter a problem for the determinacy of this underlying substrate—it will have to find determining contrasts that allow it to be determinately conceived. (In Book 2 of the Logic we will learn that the category of singularity will rely on particularity just as particularity has been shown to rely on singularlity. Singular substrates or “essences” can only be known in relation to the general properties that constitute their appearances.)