pure concept — or rather, because this concept, insofar as it is posited as negating the manifold, that is, as practical, is duty — whatever goes beyond the pure concept of duty and the abstraction of a law no longer belongs to this pure reason; as Kant, who presented this abstraction of the concept in its absolute purity, quite rightly recognizes, that practical reason lacks all matter for the law, and that it can make nothing more than the form of the fitness of the maxim of the arbitrary will into the supreme law. The maxim of the arbitrary will has a content, and includes within itself a determinacy; the pure will, by contrast, is free of determinacies; the absolute law of practical reason is to raise that determinacy into the form of pure unity, and the expression of this determinacy taken up into the form is the law. If it is possible for the determinacy to be taken up into the form of the pure concept, and if it is not sublated through this form, then it is justified, and has, through negative absoluteness itself, become absolute — law, and right, or duty. But the matter of the maxim remains what it is, a determinacy or a particularity; and the universality that the reception into the form confers upon it is thus a purely analytic unity; and when the unity conferred upon it is expressed purely as what it is, in a proposition, then the proposition is an analytic one and a tautology. And it is in the production of tautologies that, in truth, the sublime capacity of the autonomy of the legislation of pure practical reason consists; the pure identity of the understanding, expressed in the theoretical realm as the principle of contradiction, remains, when turned to the practical form, one and the same thing. If the question, what is truth, put to logic and answered by it, presents Kant with the laughable spectacle of one man milking a billy-goat while the other holds a sieve underneath, then the question, what is right and duty, put to that pure practical reason and answered by it, is in the very same case. When Kant recognizes that a general criterion of truth would have to be one valid for all items of cognition without regard to the difference of their objects; but that it is clear that, since in doing so one abstracts from all content of cognition, while truth concerns precisely this content, it is wholly impossible and absurd to ask after a mark of the truth of this content of cognitions, given that the mark is at the same time supposed not to concern the content of cognitions — in saying this he thereby pronounces judgment upon the very principle of duty and right that is set up by practical reason. For that reason is the absolute abstraction from all matter of the will; through a content a heteronomy of the arbitrary will is posited; but now it is precisely the interest at stake to know what right and duty actually are; the question is asked after the content of the moral law, and it is solely this content that is at issue; but the essence of pure

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