namely coercion and the sensuous incentive by which it is supposed to be posited as something external, has, in turn, no meaning at all without its opposite, the inner, or freedom, and that this latter simply cannot be separated from coercion. The action that constitutes a crime, considered from the side on which something determinate is willed contrary to the threatened punishment and the sensuous incentive that the law sets up through this threat, is, under this determinacy, called something sensuous, and one will say that it is a sensuous stimulus from which the crime derives; but considered from the side on which the action is a willing, and there lies within it the possibility of abstracting from the sensuous incentive of the law, it appears as free; and neither view — neither that determinacy nor this possibility — can be left out, but the one is simply bound up with the other, so that each can immediately be derived from its opposite. But the logic of opinion supposes that, once one determinacy, one opposite, is posited, one can in truth abstract from and dispense with the other, opposed determinacy; just as that logic, by virtue of the nature of its principle of contradiction, is altogether unable to comprehend that, in such determinacies, the opposite of each is wholly indifferent for the determination of intuition, and that, in this abstracting and negative nature, the opposite is entirely equal to its own opposite; still less can it comprehend that both together — the freedom that stands opposed to sensuousness, and sensuousness and coercion — are simply nothing real at all, but mere figments of thought and beings of the imagination.

Insofar, then, as a science of right is positive by virtue of holding to opinion and to insubstantial abstractions, its appeal to experience, or to its determination of applicability to actuality, or to common sense and the general mode of representation, or even its appeal to philosophy, has not the slightest sense.

If we now consider more closely the ground by which the science becomes positive in the manner indicated, and reflect in general on the ground of semblance and of opinion, it emerges that it lies in the form; namely, in that what is ideal, an opposed and one-sided moment, and has reality only in absolute identity with its opposite, is isolated, posited as being-for-itself, and pronounced to be something real. It is this form through which intuition is immediately sublated, and the whole dissolved, ceasing to be a whole and something real; this distinction between the positive and the not-positive thus does not concern the content. Through this form it is possible not only, as indicated above, that a purely formal abstraction be fixed and falsely

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63