An empiricism would assert itself against such theory and philosophy with the greatest right, and would regard the multitude of principles, purposes, laws, duties, and rights not as something absolute, but as distinctions important for the cultivation through which its own intuition becomes clearer to it — if it were itself pure, and remained so. But when empiricism seems to enter into combat with theory, it usually turns out that the one, like the other, is an intuition already contaminated and sublated beforehand by reflection, and a distorted reason; and that what passes itself off as empiricism is only the weaker party in abstraction, and is that which, with less self-activity, has not itself extracted, distinguished, and fixed its own limitations, but is caught up in such limitations as have become fixed in general culture, are present as common sense, and therefore seem to have been taken up immediately from experience. Between such a fixed distortion of intuition and the abstractions only now being fixed, the picture of the conflict is necessarily just as motley as they themselves are; each uses against the other now an abstraction, now a so-called experience, and on both sides it is empiricism breaking itself against empiricism, and limitation shattering itself against limitation — now a great show of principles and laws against philosophy, and its exclusion as an incompetent judge over such absolute truths in which the understanding has become firmly lodged, now an abuse of it for the sake of ratiocination and an appeal to it.
This relative right, which has been conceded to empiricism — when intuition is what rules within it — against the mixing of the empirical and the reflected, refers, as will be recalled, to its unconscious inward aspect; but the middle between the two, between that inward aspect and its outward aspect, consciousness, is the side on which its deficiency, and therefore its one-sidedness, lies; and its drive toward the scientific, and its incomplete linkage and mere contact with the concept — through which it thereby only contaminates itself — stems from the necessity that plurality and finitude absolutely submerge themselves in infinity, or in universality.
It is, however, the side of infinity that constitutes the principle of the apriority opposed to the empirical — to a consideration of which we now turn.
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