[p. 473]
|473| for the same; both must therefore be reciprocally coerced with equal power and coerce one another. Yet if in this way action and reaction, stand and resistance, are equally strong, then the power on both sides reduces itself to equilibrium; all activity, expression of will and acting is hereby sublated – whether the reduction be thought positively or negatively, that action and reaction are as being, as operative, or that they are posited negatively and the equilibrium consists in there being as little an acting as a reacting present. To want to remedy this death by extending the immediate standing-opposite into a circle of effects, and thus having the middle of contact, and the point in which the reduction of the opposed appears, seemingly sublated through the deceptive leaving-empty of this middle, is just as little a true expedient. Against the hierarchy of coercion descending from the supreme power through its ramifications down to all individualities, there is to rise again from these a pyramid of the same kind upward to a supreme apex of counter-pressure against the descending one, and thus the whole is to curve itself in a circle in which the immediacy of contact would vanish, the forces, insofar as they make up a mass, would be held apart and that artificial difference be brought about by intermediate members, and so no member would react immediately upon that by which it is moved (whereby the reduction to equilibrium arises), but always upon another than that by which it is moved – so that the first would move the last and this last in turn that first. But such a perpetuum mobile, whose parts are all to move in turn around the series, sets itself, instead of moving, at once in perfect equilibrium and becomes a perfect perpetuum quietum, for pressure and counter-pressure, coercing and being coerced, are

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