with this more scientific kind here under discussion.

After this formal totality, we must consider how the absolute unity appears in the reflection of empirical knowledge — both as simple unity, which we may call the original unity, and as totality; both unities, which in the Absolute are one, and whose identity is the Absolute, must appear in that knowledge as separated and as something different.

As regards, in the first place, that original unity, empiricism cannot be concerned with it as the essence of necessity, which for appearance is an external bond of the manifold; for in the unity that is essential, the manifold is immediately annihilated and is nothing; because manifold being is the principle of empiricism, it is denied to it to press through to the absolute nothing of its qualities, which for it are absolute, and, moreover, through the concept according to which they are simply many, are infinitely many; that original unity can therefore only mean a — as far as possible — simple and small quantity of qualities, with which it believes itself able to suffice for the cognition of the rest. This ideal, in which what more or less counts as arbitrary and contingent is blotted out, and the least necessary quantity of the manifold is posited, is, for empiricism, in the physical realm as much as in the ethical, the chaos, which in the latter realm is presented now more under the image of being, through fantasy, as the state of nature, now more under the form of possibility and abstraction, presented — as an enumeration, through empirical psychology, of the faculties found in man — as the nature and destiny of man; and in this way what is, on the one hand, asserted as simply necessary, in itself, absolute, is at the same time, on the other hand, acknowledged as something not real, merely imagined, and a thing of thought — there as a fiction, here as a mere possibility — which is the harshest contradiction.

For the common understanding, which abides in the murky mixture of what is in itself and what is transient, nothing is more intelligible than that it should be able to find what is in itself in the following way: that if it separates out from the mixed image of the condition of right everything arbitrary and contingent, then through this abstraction what is absolutely necessary must immediately remain over; if one thinks away everything that a dim intimation can count as belonging to the particular and transient — such as particular customs, history, culture, and also what belongs to the state — then man remains, under the image of the bare state of nature, or the abstraction thereof, together with his essential possibilities, and one need only look in order to find what is necessary; — accordingly, whatever is recognized as standing in relation to the state must therefore also be sepa-

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