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In the demand for the purification of the drives lies the general idea that they are freed from the form of their immediate natural determinacy and from the subjective and contingent nature of their content, and are led back to their substantial essence. The truth of this indeterminate demand is that the drives should be the rational system of the will’s determination; to grasp them as such from the Concept is the content of the science of Right.

The content of this science can be presented in all its individual moments—e.g., Right, property, morality, family, state, etc.—in the form that man has by nature the drive to Right, also the drive to property, to morality, also the drive of sexual love, the drive to sociability, etc. If one wants to have a philosophical guise in a more distinguished manner instead of this form of empirical psychology, this is—according to what has passed and still passes for philosophy in recent times, as noted before—cheaply obtained by saying that man finds in himself as a fact of his consciousness that he wills Right, property, the state, etc. Later, another form of the same content, which appears here in the shape of drives, namely that of duties, will emerge.

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