The empirical and popular expression through which this conception — which grasps ethical nature solely from the side of its relative identity — has so greatly recommended itself, is that the real, under the names of sensibility, inclinations, the faculty of desire, and so forth (the moment of the multiplicity of the relation), does not accord with reason (the moment of the pure unity of the relation) (the moment of the opposition of unity and multiplicity), and that reason consists in willing out of its own absolute self-activity and autonomy, and in restricting and mastering that sensibility (the moment of the determinacy of this relation, namely that in it unity, or the negation of multiplicity, is the first term). The reality of this conception is grounded in empirical consciousness and in everyone’s general experience of finding within themselves both that dissension and this pure unity of practical reason, or the abstraction of the I. Nor can there be any question of denying this standpoint; rather, it was determined above as the side of relative identity, of the being of the infinite within the finite; but this must be maintained: that it is not the absolute standpoint, since, as has been shown, the relation proves to be only one side, and the isolating of it therefore something one-sided, and that, because ethical life is something absolute, that standpoint is not the standpoint of ethical life, but rather that there is no ethical life within it. And as for the appeal to common consciousness, ethical life itself must occur within that very consciousness just as necessarily as that standpoint which — since the relation, isolated for itself, is posited as existing in itself and not as a moment — is the principle of unethical conduct; empirical consciousness is empirical precisely because the moments of the Absolute appear within it scattered, side by side, successive, fragmented; but it would not even be a common consciousness if ethical life did not likewise occur within it; among these manifold appearances of the ethical and the unethical that occur within empirical consciousness, that formal philosophy had a choice, and it is not the fault of common consciousness, but of philosophy, that it chose the appearance of the unethical and believed it possessed the true Absolute in negative absoluteness, or in infinity.

The exposition of this practical philosophy rests upon setting forth what this negative absoluteness is capable of, and we must trace, in its principal moments, the mistaken attempt to exhibit a true Absolute within the negatively Absolute.

It follows at once that, since pure unity constitutes the essence of practical reason, there can be so little talk of a system of ethical life that not even a plurality of laws is possible; for whatever goes beyond the

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