'hidden essence' is a correct and usable part of a sentence in written English.
You can use it to refer to something that is not immediately obvious and is subtly expressed. For example: "The book has a hidden essence of wisdom beneath its lighthearted surface."
Haggling over the "outer envelope of permissibility," as Whitmarsh put it, is the hidden essence of Formula One.
By this he means, no doubt, both deliverance from and deliverance to -- deliverance from the noise of daily life, and deliverance to its hidden essence, its secret language.
Huxley probably believed that LSD provided a window onto the hidden essence of things as a matter of conviction, and Leary probably believed it as a matter of convenience.
Shame is our hidden essence; the ugliest part of a thing is its truest part; being decent or kind or liberal is a sign of self-suppression or weakness; cynicism is knowledge.
After shedding the conventions of painting -- the image, the line, the frame and finally the canvas itself -- in a disciplined evolution from the late 1950's through the 1970's, Mr. Irwin reached a point where, he said, making art was simply a way to amplify some hidden essence he saw in the world, not the dead end of a stylistic or political agenda.
In other words, a zone where events, teetering toward interfering" — I briefly felt that I was a child again, falling asleep on our scratchy blue sofa while my coughing father watched reruns of "Twilight Zone" — "with a fixed future, are pressured into revealing their hidden essences".
While we are asked to know God understood by Ibn Gabirol in tripart terms as a hidden First Essence and as an active, manifesting Will and Wisdom we are cautioned a few lines later that it is impossible to truly know the First Essence, and that we can only aspire to know the things which He makes and sustains (Fons Vitae 1.4, p. 6, lines 19 22).
Of course, in the case of intentionality, unlike the case of water, the hidden nature or essence cannot be an inner structure, if a teleological theory is correct.
"This is in essence a hidden tax on solar," Mr. Button said.
"For what my work is aiming at is, above all, realism: I pursue the inner, hidden reality, the very essence of objects in their own intrinsic findamental nature; this is my only deep preoccupation".
