opposed determinacies is just as indifferent as the other; either can be conceived as a quality, and this conceiving pronounced as a law. If the determinacy of property in general is posited, then the tautological proposition can be made from it: property is property and nothing else; this tautological production is the legislating done by this practical reason: property, if property exists, must be property; but if the opposed determinacy — the negation of property — is posited, then the legislating of that very same practical reason yields the tautology: non-property is non-property; if there is no property, then that which would be property must be sublated. But it is precisely what is at issue to demonstrate that property must exist; the whole matter turns solely on that which lies outside the capacity of this practical legislating of pure reason, namely, deciding which of two opposed determinacies must be posited; but that this should already have occurred beforehand, and one of the opposed determinacies already be posited in advance, is what pure reason demands, and only then can it carry out its now-superfluous legislating.

But the analytic unity and tautology of practical reason is not merely something superfluous, but, in the turn it is given, something false, and it must be recognized as the principle of unethical conduct. Through the mere taking up of a determinacy into the form of unity, the nature of that determinacy’s being is supposed to change; and the determinacy, which by its very nature has another determinacy opposed to it — of which one is the negation of the other, and for that very reason neither is something absolute (and it is a matter of indifference to the function of practical reason which of the two it is, since it supplies only the empty form) — is supposed, through this conjoining with the form of pure unity, to be itself made into something absolute, into law and duty; but wherever a determinacy and particularity is elevated into something in-itself, there is a violation of reason, and, in relation to the ethical, unethical conduct is posited. — This transformation of the conditioned, unreal into something unconditioned and absolute is easy to recognize in its illegitimacy, and to track down along its devious path. The determinacy, taken up into the form of pure unity, or of formal identity, yields, when the determinate concept is expressed as a proposition, the tautology of the formal proposition: determinacy A is determinacy A. The form, or, in the proposition, the identity of subject and predicate, is something absolute, but only a negative or formal absolute, which does not concern determinacy A itself in the least; this content is, for the form, something utterly hypothetical. But the absoluteness that belongs to the proposition according to its form acquires, in practical reason, a wholly different meaning; for it is now also transferred onto

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