or does not remain, its sublation is in no case possible. But a maxim that, on this principle, is immoral because it contradicts itself, is, precisely because it expresses the sublation of a determinacy, absolutely rational, and therefore absolutely moral; for the rational, on its negative side, is the indifference of determinacies, the being-sublated of the conditioned. Thus the determinacy of helping the poor expresses the sublation of the determinacy that is poverty; the maxim whose content is that determinacy, when tested by raising it to the principle of a universal legislation, will prove to be false, for it annihilates itself. If it is thought that the poor are universally helped, then either there are no longer any poor at all, or else there is nothing but poor people, in which case none remain who could help; and so in both cases help would drop away; the maxim, thought as universal, thus sublates itself; but should the determinacy that is the condition of this sublation — namely, poverty — remain, then the possibility of help remains, but only as possibility, not as actuality, as the maxim asserts; if poverty is to remain so that the duty of helping the poor can be exercised, then this very allowing poverty to persist immediately fails to fulfill the duty. So too the maxim of defending one’s fatherland against enemies with honor, and countless others, sublate themselves when thought as the principle of a universal legislation; for that maxim, for instance, so extended, sublates the determinacy of a fatherland as much as that of enemies, and of defense itself.

Just as little as unity has the purely negative meaning of the mere sublation of determinacies, just as little is it the true unity of intuition, or the positive indifference of determinacies; and the comparison with this will make the perverse nature of that unity clearer from another side. For that unity of practical reason is essentially affected by a difference: whether it is posited as the fixing of a determinacy, in which case other determinacies are immediately excluded by it, posited negatively; or as an analytic proposition, in which case its identity, this its form, contradicts its content. This can also be grasped as follows: as a proposition, it contradicts, with its content, the demand made on a proposition that it be a judgment; something was supposed to be said with the proposition, but with the identical proposition nothing is said, for it is no judgment, because the relation of subject to predicate is merely formal, and no difference between them whatsoever is posited. Or let unity be taken as universality: then it has its bearing entirely on an empirical manifold, and the determinacy is opposed, as a present one, to an infinite multitude of empirically other ones. The unity of intuition, by contrast, is the indifference of the determinacies that make up a whole, not a fixing of them as separated and opposed,

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