[p. 452]
|452| such philosophising, and its own confusion, e.g. of ethical life, morality, legality or, in a more particular case, in punishment, the confusion of revenge, security of the state, improvement, carrying out of the threat, deterrence, prevention, etc., whether in a scientific regard or in practical life, to the absolute holding apart of these different sides of one and the same intuition and the determining of the whole of it by a single one of these qualities, – asserts with right that theory and that which calls itself philosophy and metaphysics have no application and contradict necessary practice, – which non-applicability would be better expressed by saying that in that theory and philosophy there is nothing absolute, no reality and truth. Finally empiricism rightly also reproaches such philosophising with its ingratitude towards it, in that it is what supplies it with the content of its concepts and must see the same spoilt and perverted by it; for empiricism offers the determinacy of the content in an entanglement and connectedness with other determinacies, which in its essence is a whole, organic and living, which is killed by that dismemberment and by that elevation of essenceless abstractions and individual items to absoluteness.
An empiricism would assert itself against such theory and philosophy with the greatest right, and would regard the multitude of principles, purposes, laws, duties, rights not as something absolute, but as distinctions that are important for the culture through which its own intuition becomes clearer to it, if it were and remained pure itself. But when empiricism appears to enter the struggle with theory, it usually turns out that the one as well as the other is an intuition already contaminated and sublated beforehand by reflection, and a perverted reason, and that what passes itself off as empiricism is only the weaker in abstraction, and is that which, with less self-activity,
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