Empirical psychology recounts and describes these drives and inclinations and the needs based upon them, as it finds them, or supposes it finds them, in experience, and seeks in the usual manner to classify this given material. What the objective aspect of these drives is, and how it is in its truth without the form of irrationality in which it is a drive, and how it is at the same time configured in its existence, will be discussed below.

Instead of resolving upon something, i.e., sublating the indeterminacy in which the one content as well as the other is initially only a possible one, our language also has the expression: to resolve oneself cf. “But the absolute freedom of the idea is that it does not merely pass over into life, nor as finite cognition let life shine within itself, but in the absolute truth of itself resolves to freely release out of itself the moment of its particularity or of the first determining and otherness, the immediate idea as its reflection, as nature.“ (§ 244 Enc. 1830) [sich entschließen], in that the indeterminacy of the will itself, as the neutral but infinitely fertilized entity, the primal germ of all existence, contains the determinations and purposes within itself and brings them forth only out of itself.

For intelligence as thinking, the object and content remain universal, and it itself behaves as a universal activity. In the will, the universal has at the same time essentially the meaning of what is mine, as singularity; and in the immediate, i.e., formal will, as abstract singularity, not yet filled with its free universality. In the will, therefore, the proper finitude of intelligence begins, and only by the will elevating itself again to thinking and giving its purposes immanent universality does it sublate the difference between form and content and make itself into the objective, infinite will. Therefore, those understand little of the nature of thinking and willing who suppose that man is infinite in the will in general, but that in thinking he, or even reason itself, is limited. Insofar as thinking and willing are still distinguished, the reverse is rather the truth, and thinking reason, as will, is just this: to resolve itself to finitude.

The most common notion of freedom is that of arbitrariness—the midpoint of reflection between the will as determined merely by natural drives and the will which is free in and for itself. When one hears it said that freedom in general consists in being able to do what one wants, such a notion can only be taken as a complete lack of intellectual cultivation, in which there is as yet not the slightest inkling of what the will that is free in and for itself, Right, Ethical Life [Sittlichkeit], etc., actually are. Reflection—the formal universality and unity of self-consciousness—is the will’s abstract certainty of its freedom, but it is not yet the truth of that freedom, because it does not yet have itself as its own content and end; the subjective side is therefore still something different from the objective side; the content of this self-determination remains, for that reason, purely finite. Arbitrariness, instead of being the will in its truth, is rather the will as contradiction. — In the controversy carried on especially at the time of Wolffian metaphysics, as to whether the will is actually free or whether the knowledge of its freedom is only a delusion, it was arbitrariness that was kept in view. Determinism correctly countered the certainty of that abstract self-determination with the content which, as something found at hand [vorgefundener], is not contained within that certainty and therefore comes to it from the outside—even if this ‘outside’ is drive, representation, or a consciousness filled in such a way that the content is not the product of the self-determining activity as such. Since only the formal element of free self-determination is immanent in arbitrariness, while the other element is a given, arbitrariness may indeed be called a delusion if it is supposed to be freedom itself. Freedom in all reflection-philosophy—as in the Kantian and then the Friesian total shallowing [Verseichtigung] of the Kantian—is nothing other than that formal self-activity.

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.