and must, as a science, express that same shape in the form of universality.

As regards the first point, the only true distinction of the principle of a science that can be recognized is whether it is within the Absolute, or whether it is outside the absolute unity, in opposition; in the latter case, however, it could not be a science at all, unless its principle were at least some incomplete and relative unity, or the concept of a relation — even if it were only the empty abstraction of the relation itself, under the name of attractive force, or the force of being-one. For sciences whose principle is not a concept of relation but merely the empty force of being-one, nothing ideal remains but the first, ideal relation according to which the child differs from the world — the form of representation into which they place empirical qualities and whose manifold they can merely enumerate; such sciences would properly be called empirical sciences. But because practical sciences, by their nature, are directed toward something really universal, or toward a unity that is the unity of what is different, in practical empiricism, too, the feelings must involve not pure qualities but relations — whether negative ones, such as the drive of self-preservation, or positive ones, such as love and hatred, sociability, and the like; and the more scientific empiricism is distinguished from that pure empiricism not, in general, by having relations rather than qualities as its object, but by fixing these relations in the form of the concept and holding fast to this negative absoluteness, without, however, separating this form of unity from its content; we shall call this empirical science; whereas that form of science in which the opposition is absolute and the pure unity, or infinity — the negatively absolute — is separated purely from the content and posited on its own, we shall call a purely formal science.

Although a specific distinction has thus been established between the two inauthentic ways of scientifically treating natural right, according to which the principle of the one is relations and mixtures of empirical intuition and the universal, while that of the other is absolute opposition and absolute universality, it is nevertheless self-evident that the ingredients of both — empirical intuition and concept — are the same, and that formalism, in passing over from its pure negation to a content, likewise can arrive at nothing other than relations, or relative identities; because, since the purely ideal, or the opposition, is posited as absolute, the absolute Idea and unity cannot be present; and with regard to intuition, since, along with the principle of absolute opposition or of the purely ideal’s being-absolute, the absolute principle of empiricism

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