bound up, and a possibility separated from it, or a being-otherwise, is unconditionally annihilated—it being precisely in this possible being-otherwise that the unethical lies.

Now if the unity of practical reason were not this positive unity of intuition, but had merely the negative meaning of annihilating the determinate, then it would purely express the essence of negative reason, or of infinity, of the absolute concept. But because infinity is fixed and separated off from the absolute, it shows itself, in its essence, to be the opposite of itself, and it mocks the reflection that wants to hold it fast and grasp an absolute unity within it, in that it just as unconditionally brings about the opposite of that, a difference and a plurality, and thus, between this opposition, which reproduces itself infinitely, permits only a relative identity—and thus, even as infinity, is itself the opposite of itself, absolute finitude. And in being thus isolated, it is itself merely the powerless form, abandoned by the truly annihilating might of reason, which takes the determinacies up into itself and harbors them without annihilating them—rather, on the contrary, perpetuating them.

It is on the opposition set forth, the fixing of it as a reality, and its incomplete connection as a relative identity, that the more recent determination of the concept of natural right, and of its relation within the whole science of the ethical, depends; and we must consider what has so far been set out in general terms in this closer connection, examining how the once-posited insurmountable separation appears, in its own peculiar way, in the science of natural right.

The absolute concept, which is the principle of opposition and the opposition itself, presents itself, once fixed, within the separation, such that, as pure unity, it is opposed to itself as plurality; so that it remains the absolute concept both under the form of pure unity and of pure plurality; thus, in the form of plurality, it is not a manifold of differently determined concepts, but is subsumed under plurality just as it is subsumed under unity; in many determinate concepts it subsumes, and is not a many, but a one. The absolute concept, as itself a plurality, is a multitude of subjects; and to these it is opposed, in the form of pure unity, as absolute quantity, over against this its qualitative positedness. Both, then, are posited: an inner being-one of the opposed terms, which is the essence of both, the absolute concept, and a being-separated of this same concept under the form of unity, in which it is right and duty, and under the form of plurality, in which it is the thinking and willing subject. That first side, according to which the essence of right and duty—and the essence of the thinking and willing subject—are unconditionally one, is—as in general the higher abstraction of infinity—the great side of the Kantian and Fichtean philosophy; but it has not remained faithful to this being-one,

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