In the first place, then, the positive sciences comprehend, under the actuality to which they profess to relate, not only what is historical, but also concepts, fundamental principles, relations, and in general much that belongs in itself to reason and is supposed to express an inner truth and necessity. To appeal to actuality and experience regarding such matters, and to maintain it as something positive over against philosophy, must in and for itself be recognized as inadmissible. What philosophy demonstrates to be not real cannot possibly truly occur in experience; and if the positive science appeals to actuality and experience, philosophy can likewise express its demonstration of the non-reality of a concept asserted by the positive science in terms of that same empirical relation, and deny that what the positive science claims to find in experience and actuality is in fact found there. Philosophy will readily grant the opinion that such a thing is experienced as a contingent, subjective view; but the positive science, when it professes to find and exhibit its representations and fundamental concepts in experience, thereby means to assert something real, necessary, and objective, not a subjective view. Whether something is a subjective view or an objective representation, an opinion or a truth, only philosophy can decide. It can turn the positive science’s own manner of proceeding against it ad hominem, and, besides denying to it the fact that a representation of its own occurs in experience, can conversely maintain that only philosophy’s representation is to be found in experience. The ground on which philosophy is able to exhibit its representation in experience lies immediately in the ambiguous nature of what is called experience. For what counts as experience is not immediate intuition itself, but that same intuition raised into the intellectual, thought and explained, taken out of its singularity and pronounced as necessity. Hence, in what is exhibited in experience and as experience, what matters is not that in it which we could call actuality in relation to the separation that thinking introduces into intuition. But once intuition has been drawn into the field of thought, opinion must give way to the truth of philosophy. That distinction, then, between what the positive science supposes itself to have taken immediately from intuition — but which it has itself determined as a relation and concept of that intuition — and what does not belong to thought at all, is in every case very easy to exhibit, and thus to demonstrate philosophy’s complete entitlement to take possession of it. Now, because a thinking of this kind, which appeals to actuality, tends in its opinion to be truly positive precisely by being caught in opposition and holding fast to determinacies — thus taking figments of thought or products of imagination as absolute, and deriving its fundamental principles from them — it is exposed to having the opposite determinacy demonstrated against it at every determinacy, and to having, from what it assumes, rather the very opposite derived. Just as, when an increased density or specific weight

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