[p. 511]
|511| be established and determined through which they are positive sciences.
In the first place, then, the positive sciences comprehend under the actuality to which they pretend to relate not only the historical but also the concepts, principles, relations and in general much that in itself belongs to reason and is supposed to express an inner truth and necessity. To appeal, with regard to such things, to actuality and experience and to hold them fast as a positive against philosophy must be recognised in and for itself as inadmissible. What philosophy proves to be not real, of that it is impossible that it should truly occur in experience; and if positive science appeals to actuality and experience, philosophy can equally, according to the empirical relation, pronounce its proof of the non-reality of a concept asserted by positive science and deny that what positive science pretends to find in experience and actuality is found in them. The opining that such a thing is experienced, a contingent subjective view, philosophy will indeed concede; but positive science, when it pretends to find and to point out its representations and basic concepts in experience, wants thereby to assert something real, necessary and objective, not a subjective view. Whether something is a subjective view or an objective representation, an opining or truth, philosophy alone can decide. To positive science it can, ad hominem, pay back its own way, and besides denying it the fact that a representation of it occurs in experience, assert on the contrary that only the representation of philosophy is to be found in experience. That philosophy can point out its representation in experience, the ground of this lies immediately in the ambiguous nature of what is called experience. For it is not immediate intuition

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