medium of this endeavor, the reflection and dominion of the Absolute, even while at the same time perceiving its perversion; and in part, the forms which the moments of the Absolute have taken on within it have become a kind of prejudice — thoughts held to be beyond doubt and universally valid — whose nullity critique must expose in order to justify science’s taking no account of them; and this demonstration of their nullity is accomplished most evidently by exposing the reality-less ground and soil out of which they have grown, and whose taste and nature has grown into them.

In the first place, what hovers before empirical science is scientific totality as a totality of the manifold, or as completeness, whereas what hovers before formalism proper is consistency; the former can raise its experiences into universality as it pleases, and carry on the consistency of its thought-out determinacies just so far, until other empirical material, which contradicts the former but has just as much right to be thought and pronounced as a principle, no longer permits the consistency of the preceding determinacy but forces it to be abandoned; formalism can extend its consistency as far as the emptiness of its principle allows at all, or as far as a content which it has surreptitiously acquired allows; but in return it is also entitled proudly to exclude, from its apriority and its science, whatever completeness lacks, under the contemptuous name of the empirical; for it asserts its formal principles as the a priori and the absolute, and hence regards whatever it cannot master by means of them as not absolute and as contingent — unless it knows how to help itself otherwise, by finding, in passing to the empirical in general, and from one determinacy back to another, the formal transition of advancing from the conditioned to the condition, and, since this condition is again something conditioned, so on into infinity; whereby, however, it not only forfeits every advantage over what it calls empiricism, but, since in the connection of the conditioned with the condition these opposites are posited as subsisting absolutely, itself sinks entirely into empirical necessity, and lends to this necessity, through the formal identity or the negative-absolute by which it holds them together, the semblance of true absoluteness.

This combination of consistency with completeness of the image — whether it be the latter’s complete, formal, and empty consistency, or the former’s, which, with determinate concepts as principles, passing from one to another, is consistent only in its inconsistency — immediately displaces, however, the position of the manifold as it is for pure empiricism; for which every item has equal right with every other, and which prefers no determinacy, each as real as the next, over another; to which we shall return below, when comparing pure empiricism

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