We have accused scientific empiricism, insofar as it is scientific, of the positive nullity and untruth of its principles, laws, and so on, because it confers upon determinacies, through the formal unity into which it translates them, the negative absoluteness of the concept, and pronounces them as positively absolute and as being in themselves — as purpose and determination, principle, law, duty and right, forms which signify something absolute; but in order to preserve the unity of an organic relation, which offers up a multitude of such concepts to this qualitative determining, dominance over the other determinacies of the manifold must be given to one determinacy expressed as purpose, determination, or law, and the others must be posited before it as unreal and null. It is in this application and consistency that intuition, as inner totality, is annihilated; inconsistency is therefore what can correct that reception of determinacies into the concept and sublate the violence done to intuition; for inconsistency immediately annihilates the absoluteness previously conferred upon a determinacy. From this side, the old, thoroughly inconsistent empiricism must be justified — not in relation to absolute science as such, but in relation to the consistency of the empirical scientificity that has been under discussion so far. A great and pure intuition is thus able, in the purely architectonic character of its presentation — in which the connectedness of necessity and the dominance of form do not step forth into visibility — to express the truly ethical; like a building that mutely presents the spirit of its architect in its scattered mass, without that image itself, gathered into one, being set up within it as a figure. In such a presentation, made with the aid of concepts, it is only an awkwardness of reason that it does not raise what it encompasses and permeates into ideal form and become conscious of it as Idea; if intuition only remains true to itself, and does not let itself be led astray by the understanding, then, insofar as it cannot dispense with concepts for its expression, it will conduct itself awkwardly with regard to them, will assume distorted shapes in its passage through consciousness, and will be, for the concept, both incoherent and contradictory; but the arrangement of the parts and of the self-modifying determinacies allows the — invisible, yet inward — rational spirit to be divined, and insofar as this appearance of it is regarded as product and result, it will agree perfectly with the Idea as product. For the understanding, nothing is easier here than to fall upon this empiricism, to set other grounds against those awkward ones, to point out the confusion and contradiction of the concepts, to draw from the isolated propositions consequences that express the harshest and most unreasonable things, and to expose, in manifold ways, the unscientific character of empiricism — whereby justice is done to it, especially when it either has the pretension of being scientific, or is polemical against science as such. If, on the other hand, determinacies are fixed, and their law is carried through with consistency across the sides thrown up by empiricism, intuition is subjected to them, and what is generally accustomed to being called theory is thereby formed, then empiricism rightly accuses this of one-sidedness; and through the completeness of the determinacies it asserts, it is in its power to force that theory, by instances, into a universality that becomes wholly empty. That confinement of concepts, the fixing of determinacies, the elevation of a seized-upon side of appearance into universality, and the dominance conferred upon it over the others — this is what, in recent times, has called itself no longer theory but philosophy, and — insofar as it soared up to empty abstractions and took possession of purer negations such as freedom, pure will, humanity, and so on — metaphysics; and believed itself to have brought about philosophical revolutions both in natural right and, especially, in political and criminal right, whenever it dragged these sciences back and forth with such essenceless abstractions and positively expressed negations as freedom, equality, the pure state, and so on, or with determinacies picked up from common empiricism that are just as essenceless as those — such as compulsion, especially psychological compulsion, with its whole retinue of the opposition between practical reason and sensuous incentives, and whatever else is native to this psychology — and likewise forced such null concepts, with greater or lesser consistency, through an entire science, as absolute purposes of reason, principles of reason, and laws. Empiricism rightly demands that such philosophizing must orient itself by experience; it rightly insists on its tenacity against such a scaffolding and artifice of principles; and it prefers its own empirical inconsistency — grounded, even if only in a dim intuition of a whole — to the consistency of such philosophizing, and prefers its own confusion, for example, of ethical life, morality, legality, or, in a single case, in punishment, the confusion of revenge, security of the state, reform, execution of the threat, deterrence, prevention, and so on, whether in a scientific respect or in practical life, to the absolute keeping-apart of these different sides of one and the same intuition and to the determining of the whole of it through a single one of these qualities; it rightly maintains that theory, and that which calls itself philosophy and metaphysics, has no application, and contradicts necessary practice — an inapplicability that would be better expressed by saying that in that theory and philosophy there is nothing absolute, no reality and truth. Empiricism, finally, rightly reproaches such philosophizing also with its ingratitude toward it, inasmuch as it is empiricism that supplies it with the content of its concepts, and must see this content corrupted and distorted by that philosophizing; for empiricism presents the determinacy of the content in an entanglement and connectedness with other determinacies which, in their essence, form a whole, organic and living — something that is killed by that dismemberment, and by that elevation of essenceless abstractions and particulars to absoluteness.

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