will and of pure practical reason is that it abstracts from all content; and it is therefore inherently contradictory to seek a moral legislation — since it would have to have a content — in this absolute practical reason, given that its essence consists in having no content.

For this formalism to be able to pronounce a law at all, it is necessary that some matter, some determinacy, be posited that constitutes the content of the law; and the form that is added to this determinacy is unity, or universality; that a maxim of your will must at the same time be valid as the principle of a universal legislation — this fundamental law of pure practical reason expresses that some determinacy, which constitutes the content of the maxim of the particular will, is posited as concept, as universal.

But every determinacy is capable of being taken up into the form of the concept and posited as a quality, and there is nothing at all that could not in this way be made into an ethical law. Yet every determinacy is in itself something particular and not something universal; it has the opposed determinacy standing over against it, and it is a determinacy only insofar as such an opposite stands over against it. Either of the two determinacies is equally capable of being thought; which of the two it should be — which is taken up into unity, or thought, and which is to be abstracted from — this is wholly undetermined and free; if the one is fixed as subsisting in and for itself, then the other, to be sure, cannot be posited; but this other can just as well be thought, and, since this form of thinking is the essence, be pronounced as an absolute moral law. That the most ordinary understanding, without instruction, can perform that easy operation and distinguish which form in the maxim is fit for universal legislation and which is not, Kant demonstrates by the example, the question of whether the maxim of increasing my fortune by every safe means — should such a means present itself in a deposit — could hold as a universal practical law, a maxim whose content would then be that everyone may deny a deposit whose having been entrusted to him no one can prove; this question, he says, decides itself, since such a principle, as a law, would annihilate itself, because it would bring it about that there would be no deposits at all; — but that there would be no deposits at all, what contradiction would lie in that? That there be no deposit will contradict other necessary determinacies; just as, that a deposit be possible, will hang together with other necessary determinacies, and will thereby itself be necessary; but it is not other purposes and material grounds that are to be called upon here, but rather the immediate form of the concept that is supposed to decide the correctness of the first or the second assumption; but for the form, the one of the

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