It does not belong here to present the nature of infinity and its manifold transformations; for just as it is the principle of movement and change, so its essence itself is nothing other than to be the unmediated opposite of itself; or it is the negatively absolute, the abstraction of form, which, in being pure identity, is immediately pure non-identity or absolute opposition; in being pure ideality, is just as immediately pure reality; in being the infinite, is the absolutely finite; in being the indeterminate, is absolute determinacy. The absolute passage into the opposite, which is its essence, and the vanishing of every reality into its opposite, can be arrested only by fixing, in an empirical manner, one side of it — namely the reality, or the subsistence of the opposed terms — and abstracting from the opposite, the nothingness of this subsistence. This real opposed term is, on one side, manifold being, or finitude, and, over against it, infinity as negation of plurality and, positively, as pure unity; and the absolute concept, constituted in this way, gives, in this unity, that which has been called pure reason. But the relation of this pure unity to the manifold being standing over against it is itself, in turn, likewise a doubled relation — either the positive relation of the subsistence of both, or that of the annihilatedness of both; but both this subsistence and this annihilatedness are to be understood only as partial, for were the subsistence of both absolute, there would be no relation between the two at all, and were the complete annihilatedness of both posited, there would be no subsistence of either; this partial subsistence and partial negatedness of both — the opposing of a divisible I to a divisible not-I within the I, that is, within the relation which is for that very reason likewise partial — is the absolute principle of this philosophy. In the first, the positive relation, the pure unity is called theoretical reason; in the negative relation, practical reason; and because in the latter the negation of the opposition is the first — and hence unity is what subsists more — while in the former the subsistence of the opposition is the first — and hence plurality is what first and more subsists — practical reason accordingly appears here as the real, and theoretical reason as the ideal. One sees, however, that this determination belongs entirely to the opposition and to appearance; for the pure unity that is posited as reason is, to be sure, negative, ideal, if the opposed many — which is thereby the unreasonable — simply has subsistence; just as it appears as more subsisting and more real when the many is posited as negated, or rather as to-be-negated. But that unreasonable many — as nature is posited over against reason, the pure unity — is unreasonable only because it is posited as the essenceless abstraction of the many, while reason, conversely, is posited as the essenceless abstraction of the one; considered in itself, however, that many is just as much the absolute unity of the one and the many as this unity is; and nature, or theoretical reason, which is the many, must, as absolute unity of the one and the many, rather conversely be determined as the real reason, while ethical reason, which is the unity, must, as absolute unity of the one and the many, be determined as the ideal — because in the opposition, reality lies in plurality, but ideality lies in unity.

It is only with what is called practical reason that the formal Idea of the identity of the ideal and the real is to be recognized, and this Idea was supposed to be the absolute point of indifference in these systems; but that Idea does not emerge from difference, nor does the ideal attain to reality; for although in this practical reason the ideal and the real are identical, the real nonetheless remains simply opposed; this real is essentially posited as outside reason, and practical reason exists only in its difference from it; its essence is conceived as a relation of causality to the many; as an identity that is absolutely affected by a difference, and does not go beyond appearance. This science of the ethical, which speaks of the absolute identity of the ideal and the real, thus does not act according to its own words; rather, its ethical reason is, in truth and in its essence, a non-identity of the ideal and the real. — Ethical reason was determined above as the Absolute in the form of unity, and thereby, since it is itself posited as a determinacy, it seems immediately, in this very determination, to be posited just as essentially with an opposition. The difference, however, is that true reality and its Absolute are wholly free of this opposition to nature, and that it is the absolute identity of the ideal and the real. The Absolute is cognized, according to its Idea, as this identity of what is different, whose determinacy is to be, for the one, unity, and for the other, multiplicity, and this determinacy is ideal, that is, it exists only within infinity according to the concept of infinity set forth above: this determinacy is just as much sublated as it is posited; each — both the unity and the multiplicity, whose identity is the Absolute — is itself a unity of the one and the many. But the one, whose ideal determination is multiplicity, is the subsistence of what is opposed, positive reality, and therefore it itself necessarily has an opposed, doubled relation-

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