…for, because the chaotic image of the necessary can contain not the absolute unity, but only the simple manifold — the atoms with the fewest possible properties — so that whatever might fall under the concept of a connecting and ordering of these, as the weakest unity of which the principle of plurality is capable, is thereby excluded from it as something first later and added on to that manifold. Now, in that division, empiricism lacks, in the first place, any criterion at all as to where the boundary between the contingent and the necessary runs — that is, what must remain in the chaos of the state of nature, or in the abstraction of man, and what must be left out; the guiding determination here can be nothing other than that just as much be contained in it as is needed for presenting what is found in actuality; the judging principle for that a priori is the a posteriori. In order to demonstrate the connection of what is to be made valid in the representation of the condition of right with the original and necessary — and thus to demonstrate it itself as necessary — one has, for this purpose, only to place a particular quality or faculty into the chaos; following the manner, common to the sciences that proceed from the empirical in general, of making hypotheses for the so-called explanation of actuality, in which this actuality, in the very same determinacy, is posited only in a wholly formal-ideal shape, as force, matter, faculty — so that the one is thereby also very easily comprehensible and explicable from the other.

On one side, this dim presentiment of an original and absolute unity, which expresses itself in the chaos of the state of nature and in the abstraction from faculties and inclinations, does not carry through to absolute negative unity, but goes only so far as the extinguishing of a great multitude of particularities and oppositions; yet there remains in it an indeterminable multitude of qualitative determinacies which, taken by themselves, have no necessity other than an empirical one, and among one another have no inner necessity; they stand only in the relation of a many, and, because this many is for one another yet without unity, are determined as opposed to one another and in absolute conflict with one another; and the separated energies of the ethical must, in the state of nature or in the abstractum of man, be thought as in a mutually annihilating war. But it is for this very reason easy to show that, since these qualities are simply opposed to one another and hence purely ideal, they cannot, in this ideality and separateness, subsist as they are supposed to, but rather sublate themselves and are reduced to nothing; empiricism, however, is unable to arrive at this absolute reflection and at the insight into the nothingness of the determinacies within the absolutely simple, so that for it the many nothing remains a multitude of realities.

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