whereby it naturally follows that, because such a determinacy stands in no necessary connection with the other determinacies still to be dug up and distinguished, an endless tormented struggle arises to find the necessary relation and dominance of the one over the others; and that, because the inner necessity, which is not to be found in singularity, is lacking, each determinacy can very well vindicate its independence from the others. — Such qualities, seized from the multitude of relations into which the organic is splintered by empirical or imperfectly reflected intuition, and set into the form of conceptual unity, are what that kind of knowledge calls the essence and the purposes, and, since their form as concept is expressed as the absolute being of the determinacy which constitutes the content of the concept, they are set up as principles, laws, duties, and so on; more will be said about this transformation of the absoluteness of the pure form — which, however, is the negative absoluteness, or pure identity, the pure concept, infinity — into the absoluteness of the content and of the determinacy taken up into the form, when we come to the principle of critical philosophy, which undertakes that same transformation — one that occurs unconsciously in the empirical knowledge here under discussion — with reflection upon it, and as absolute reason and duty.

It is this formal unity, into which determinacy is posited by thought, that at the same time gives the semblance of the necessity which science seeks; for the unity of opposites, considered in relation to these as real, is their necessity. But because the matter of the formal unity here spoken of is not the whole of the opposites but only one of the opposites, a mere determinacy, the necessity too is only a formal, analytic one, and relates merely to the form of an identical or analytic proposition in which the determinacy can be presented; and it is through the absoluteness of this proposition that an absoluteness of content is also surreptitiously obtained, and laws and principles are thereby constituted.

But since this empirical science finds itself amid the manifold of such principles, laws, purposes, duties, and rights, none of which is absolute, the image and the need of the absolute unity of all these disconnected determinacies, and of an original, simple necessity, must at the same time hover before it; and we shall consider how it will satisfy this demand, which stems from reason, or how the absolute Idea of reason will be presented in its moments under the dominion of the opposition of the many and the one — an opposition insuperable for this empirical knowledge; it is in part interesting in itself to discern, in this scientific endeavor, and in the murky

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