more so does arithmetic, and most of all the union of the two, give the greatest examples of science groping about in the dark at its boundaries.

If critical philosophy has had the important negative effect, upon the theoretical sciences, of demonstrating that what is scientific in them belongs not to something objective but to the middle thing between nothing and reality, to the mixture of being and non-being, and of bringing about their confession that they exist only in empirical opinion, then its positive contribution on this side has turned out all the poorer, and it has not been able to give those sciences back to philosophy. By contrast, it has placed the Absolute entirely in practical philosophy, and in this domain it is positive or dogmatic knowledge. We must regard critical philosophy, which also calls itself transcendental idealism, in general, and particularly in natural right, as the culminating point of that opposition which — like the circles on the surface of water spreading out concentrically from the point where it is set in motion, until in ever smaller movements they lose their relation to a center point and become infinite — grew ever greater in earlier scientific endeavors, out of the seclusion of barbarism, from weaker beginnings, until in critical philosophy it came to an understanding of itself through the absolute concept of infinity, and, as infinity, also sublates itself. The earlier ways of treating natural right, and what would have to be regarded as its various principles, must therefore be denied all significance for the essence of science; for although they are in opposition and in negativity, they are not in absolute negativity, or in the infinity which alone is for science, but possess neither the positive nor the negative in pure form, and are mixtures of both. It would only be the interest of a curiosity concerning the history of science that could linger over them, both in order to compare them with the absolute Idea, and to discern, in its very distortion, the necessity with which — distorted through a determinacy that functions as principle — the moments of the absolute form present themselves and, even under the dominion of a restricted principle, nonetheless govern these attempts; and also to see the empirical condition of the world reflected in the ideal mirror of science.

For as regards the latter point, in the interconnection of all things the empirical existence and condition of all sciences will indeed likewise express the condition of the world, but the condition of natural right does so most closely, because it relates immediately to the ethical, the mover of all human affairs, and insofar as the science of it has an existence, belongs to the necessity of being one with the empirical shape of the ethical, which is likewise within necessity,

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