the content, which by its nature is something conditioned, and this non-absolute, conditioned content is, contrary to its own essence, elevated into something absolute through that admixture. It is not the practical interest to produce a tautology, and for the sake of this idle form — which is, after all, its only power — practical reason would not make such a great fuss; but through the admixture of the absolute form with the conditioned matter, the absoluteness of the form is unnoticedly smuggled in under the unreal, conditioned content, and in this inversion and sleight of hand lies the very nerve of this practical legislation of pure reason; to the proposition, property is property, there is smuggled in, in place of its true meaning — namely, that the identity which this proposition expresses in its form is absolute — the meaning that its matter, namely property, is absolute, whereupon any determinacy whatever can be made into a duty. The arbitrary will has the choice among opposed determinacies, and it would only be a piece of clumsiness if, for any action whatsoever, no such ground could be found that assumes not merely the form of a probable ground, as with the Jesuits, but the form of right and duty; and this moral formalism does not go beyond the moral art of the Jesuits and the principles of the doctrine of happiness, which coincide with it.

It should be carefully noted here that the taking up of the determinacy into the concept is understood in such a way that this taking-up is something merely formal, that is, that the determinacy is supposed to remain, so that matter and form contradict one another, the one being determinate, the other infinite. But were the content truly equated with the form — the determinacy with unity — then no practical legislating would take place at all, but only an annihilation of the determinacy. Thus property itself is immediately opposed to universality; equated with it, it is sublated. — This annihilation of the determinacy through its being taken up into infinity, into universality, immediately proves troublesome for practical legislating as well; for if the determinacy is of such a kind that it itself expresses the sublation of a determinacy, then, through the elevation of this sublating into universality, or into being-sublated, both the determinacy that is to be sublated and the sublating itself are annihilated; so that a maxim referring to such a determinacy — one that, thought in its universality, annihilates itself — would be incapable of becoming the principle of a universal legislation, and would thus be immoral. Or: the content of the maxim, which is the sublation of a determinacy, contradicts itself once raised into the concept; if the determinacy is thought as sublated, then its sublation falls away; or else this determinacy is supposed to remain, in which case the sublation posited in the maxim is in turn not posited; and so, whether the determinacy remains

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