now reminding constitutional right of its determinacy through a slight preponderance of civil right, now making breaches and cracks in the latter through the preponderance of the former, and thus, on the one hand, renewing each system for a time through a more vigorous indwelling, while at the same time reminding all of them, in their separation, of their temporality and dependence – and, on the other hand, destroying their rank overgrowth and their self-organizing by confounding them all at once in individual moments, presenting them drawn together into itself, and, reborn out of this unity, letting them go forth again with the memory of this dependence and with the feeling of their weakness when they wish to be for themselves.

This character of the positivity of the legal sciences concerns the form through which a power isolates and posits itself as absolute; and from this side, just like religion or whatever else, every philosophical science too can be perverted and contaminated. But we must also consider positivity from the side of matter. For although both what we previously called positive and what we now regard as matter are both something particular, we previously considered the external connection of the form of universality with particularity and determinacy, whereas now we consider the particular as such.

And in this regard we must above all take up, against formalism, the cause of that which, in respect of its matter, can be posited as positive; for formalism tears apart intuition and its identity of the universal and the particular, sets the abstractions of the universal and the particular over against one another, and whatever it can exclude from that emptiness, yet subsume under the abstraction of particularity, counts for it as positive – without considering that through this opposition the universal becomes just as much a positive as the particular; for it becomes positive, as was shown above, through the form of opposition in which it is present within that abstraction. But the real is simply an identity of the universal and the particular, and for that reason that abstraction, and the positing of one of the opposites arising through abstraction – the universal – as something existing in itself, cannot take place. In general, if formal thinking is consistent, then, in comprehending the particular as positive, it must have absolutely no content at all; in the pure reason of formal thinking every plurality and distinguishability must utterly fall away, and it is quite impossible to see how it should arrive even at the most meager plurality of rubrics and chapters; just as those who comprehend the essence of the organism as the abstraction of a life-force must actually regard the limbs and the brain and the heart and all the viscera as something particular, contingent, and positive, and must leave them out.

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