B. Continuous and Discrete Magnitude

1. The two moments, continuity and discreteness, are what quantity holds within it. In both, as its determinations, quantity is to be posited. – Their immediate unity it already is at once, which is to say that at first it is itself posited in only the one of its determinations, in continuity, and is thus continuous magnitude.

Or, put otherwise: continuity counts, to be sure, as one moment of quantity, and quantity reaches its completion only with the other moment, discreteness. Concrete unity, however, quantity is only to the extent that the moments whose unity it is are differentiated ones. Hence they too must be taken as differentiated, though without being resolved back into attraction and repulsion; each is rather to be kept, in accordance with its truth, within its unity with the other, that is, as the whole. Continuity is nothing but the cohering, solid unity, the unity of the discrete; posited thus, it is no longer moment merely, but quantity entire; continuous magnitude.

2. Continuous magnitude is what immediate quantity is. Yet quantity is nothing immediate at all; immediacy is a determinateness whose sublatedness quantity itself constitutes. In the determinateness immanent to it, then, quantity is to be posited, and this determinateness is the one. Quantity is discrete magnitude.

Discreteness is a moment of quantity, as continuity is, yet it too is quantity entire, precisely because it is moment within quantity, within the whole, and so, being differentiated, does not step out of that whole, out of its unity with the other moment. – Being-outside-one-another in itself is what quantity is, and continuous magnitude is that being-outside-one-another as prolonging itself without negation, as a cohesion self-same within itself. Discrete magnitude, by contrast, is that outside-one-another as non-continuous, as broken off. Yet with this multitude of ones there is not present again the multitude of atoms and the void, repulsion as such. Since quantity is what discrete magnitude is, its discreteness is itself continuous. Wherein this continuity in the discrete consists is that the ones are what is equal to one another, or that one and the same unit belongs to them. Discrete magnitude is accordingly the outside-one-another of the many ones as of the equal, not the many ones simply, but posited as the many of a unit.

Remark

Overlooked in the ordinary representations of continuous and of discrete magnitude is the fact that both moments, continuity as well as discreteness, attach to each of these magnitudes, and that what constitutes their difference is nothing but which of the two moments counts as the posited determinateness and which as the one that merely is in itself. Steady magnitudes are space, time, matter and the like, in that they are repulsions of their own selves, a streaming issuing-out-of-self which is at the same time no passing over, no comporting toward something qualitatively other. Absolute possibility belongs to them that the one be posited upon them at any point whatever; not the empty possibility of a bare otherness (one says, for instance, that a tree might just as well be standing where this stone stands), for the principle of the one is contained in their own selves, being the one determination among those out of which they are constituted. Continuity, conversely, is not to be overlooked in [the] discrete magnitude; that moment, as has been shown, is the one taken as unit.

As species of quantity the continuous and the discrete magnitude may indeed be considered, though only insofar as magnitude stands posited under no determinateness foreign to it but under the determinatenesses of its own moments; the customary passage from genus to species brings external determinations to the genus in accordance with some ground of division external to it. Neither the continuous nor the discrete magnitude is as yet a quantum in all this; each is only quantity itself in one of its two forms. Magnitudes they are called, more or less, insofar as they share with quantum this much in general, that of being a determinateness upon quantity.

C. Limitation of Quantity

The one is, in the first place, the principle of discrete magnitude; in the second place, such magnitude amounts to a plurality of ones; in the third place it is essentially continuous, being at once the one as sublated, as unity, the self-continuing as such amid the discreteness of the ones. It stands posited, accordingly, as one magnitude, and what determines it is the one, which upon this positedness and existence counts as an excluding one, a limit upon the unity. Immediately, discrete magnitude as such is not supposed to be limited; but once marked off from the continuous, it is there as an existence and a something, and what determines it is the one, which, standing within an existence, amounts also to first negation and to limit.

Referred to the unity and constituting the negation upon it, this limit is besides that, being a one, referred to itself as well; so it is a limit that encloses and encompasses. What the limit is here does not first mark itself off from the something of its existence; being a one, it is rather this negative point immediately. Yet the being that undergoes limiting here is essentially continuity, and by virtue of continuity it reaches past the limit, past this one, remaining indifferent toward it. So it is that discrete quantity in its reality amounts to one quantity, or quantum – to quantity in the shape of an existence and a something.

Since the one that serves as limit gathers into itself the many ones belonging to discrete quantity, that limit posits them equally as sublated within it; upon continuity in general as such does it stand as limit, and with that the difference between continuous and discrete magnitude counts here for nothing; more precisely, it is limit upon the continuity of the one no less than upon that of the other; into being quanta do both pass over.

Chapter 2. Quantum

Quantum – initially quantity carrying a determinateness or a limit as such – is, in the completeness of its determinateness, number. Quantum becomes distinguished,

secondly, at the outset into extensive quantum, upon which the limit is as limitation of the plurality that exists, and thereafter, this existence passing over into being-for-itself, – into intensive quantum, degree, which, being for itself and therein an indifferent limit, is with equal immediacy outside itself, holding its determinateness upon an other. As this posited contradiction – of being determined thus simply within, while holding its determinateness outside and referring outside itself for it – quantum passes,

thirdly, posited as that which is external to its own self, over into quantitative infinity.

A. Number

Quantity is quantum, that is, it has a limit — and this holds of it as continuous magnitude quite as much as discrete. Between these kinds the difference carries, for the moment, no weight here.

Since quantity is being-for-itself sublated, it stands of itself, in and for its own self, indifferent toward the limit it has. Not indifferent to it, however, is that limit for all that, or the being of a quantum; for within itself, as a moment of its own, quantity holds the one, absolute being-determined, and this one, posited upon quantity's continuity or unity, constitutes its limit — a limit enduring nonetheless as the one which quantity has, generally speaking, become. Principle of the quantum, then, is this one, though the one as the one of quantity. On that account it is, first, continuous, it is unity; secondly it is discrete — a plurality of the ones, in-itself in continuous and posited in discrete magnitude, ones equal among themselves, having that continuity, that same unity. Thirdly, as simple limit this one is negation too of the many ones, a shutting-out of its otherness from itself, a determining of itself over against other quanta. So far, then, the one is a limit α) referring to itself, β) enclosing, and γ) excluding other.

Posited in full in these determinations, quantum is number. Wherein the full positedness lies is the limit's existence as plurality, and therewith its being differentiated from the unity. Hence number shows itself as discrete magnitude, though upon the unity it possesses continuity all the same. That is why it is also quantum in perfect determinateness; for in number the limit is a determinate plurality whose principle is the one, the utterly determinate. Whereas continuity, that wherein the one is merely in itself, as something sublated, – posited as unity, – is the form indeterminateness takes.

Merely as such, quantum is limited in general; abstract, simple determinateness of it is what its limit is. Being number, however, it has this limit posited as manifold within its own self. Within it lie the many ones that constitute its existence, and they lie within it not indeterminately; rather the determinateness of the limit falls into them – other existence, other manys, the limit shuts out, and the ones it holds enclosed are a determinate multitude, the amount, whose other, as against the discreteness that number displays, is the unity, the continuity of that discreteness. The moments of number are made up by amount and unity.

How the many ones out of which the amount consists stand within the limit is what still calls for closer inspection; of the amount the expression holds good that out of the many it consists, since the ones are present in it not as sublated: they are in it, posited merely along with the excluding limit, toward which they behave indifferently. Toward them, though, that limit is not indifferent. In the case of existence, the relation of limit to it had first taken this shape: existence, the affirmative, went on subsisting this side of its limit, the limit — negation — lying outside upon its edge; just so, with the many ones, their breaking off and the shutting out of further ones looks like a determination that falls beyond the ones held enclosed. There, however, the outcome was that limit permeates existence, extends as far as existence extends, and that something is thereby limited in respect of its determination, hence finite. – In the quantitative sphere one pictures the number hundred, for instance, as though the hundredth one alone did the limiting of the many so as to make them a hundred. In one respect this holds; in another, though, no one among the hundred ones enjoys any precedence, all being merely equal; each is quite as much the hundredth; to the limit through which the number is a hundred they therefore all belong; not one of them can the number spare for its determinateness; as against the hundredth one, then, the rest constitute no existence lying beyond the limit, or only within it, no existence at all distinguishable from it. Rather than a plurality over against the enclosing, limiting one, the amount is itself what constitutes this limitation, and that is a determinate quantum; the many constitute a number, one two, one ten, one hundred, and so forth.

Being-determined over against another, the marking off of number from others — that is what the limiting one now is. This marking off does not turn into qualitative determinateness, though, but stays quantitative, falling merely to the comparing external reflection; number stays a one returned into itself, indifferent toward others. An essential determination of number is this indifference of it toward others; it constitutes its being-determined-in-itself and, in one and the same stroke, its own externality. – Thus it is a numerical one, the absolutely determinate, which carries at once the form of simple immediacy, so that reference to another is for it wholly external. Being a one that is number, it further carries the determinateness, insofar as this is reference to another, as moments within its own self, in its difference of unity and amount, and the amount is itself a plurality of ones, which is to say that this absolute externality is within its own self. – The quality of quantum is this contradiction of number, or of quantum generally, within itself, and in the further determinations of that quality the contradiction unfolds.

Remark 1

Spatial magnitude and numerical magnitude tend to be treated as two kinds, on the assumption that spatial magnitude would for itself be determinate magnitude no less than numerical magnitude is; the difference between them would rest solely upon the differing determinations of continuity and discreteness; qua quantum, though, both would occupy one and the same level. What geometry has before it, broadly speaking, is continuous magnitude in the shape of spatial magnitude, and what arithmetic has before it is discrete magnitude in the shape of numerical magnitude. With this unlikeness in their object, however, goes an unlikeness in the manner and completeness of the limitation, or of the being-determined, that each admits. Limitation as such is all that spatial magnitude has; wherever it is to be treated as a quantum utterly determined, number becomes indispensable to it. Spatial figures geometry as such does not measure — it is no art of mensuration; it merely compares them. Even in its definitions the determinations are drawn partly from the equality of sides, of angles, from the equal distance. The circle, for instance, resting as it does purely upon the equality of distance from a mid-point of every point possible within it, calls for no number to determine it. Determinations of this sort, founded upon equality or inequality, are geometrical through and through. Adequate they are not, however, and for others — triangle, quadrangle, e.g. — number becomes requisite, since number carries in its principle, the one, a being-determined-for-itself rather than a being-determined by aid of an other, hence not by comparison. True, spatial magnitude does have in the point the determinateness answering to the one; the point, however, once it comes outside itself, turns into an other, turns into the line; since essentially it is only as a one of space, in the reference it turns into a continuity wherein punctuality — being-determined-for-itself, the one — is sublated. For being-determined-for-itself to be preserved within being-outside-itself, the line has to be represented as a multitude of ones and has to take into itself the limit, the determination of the many ones; which means that the line's magnitude — and likewise that of the remaining spatial determinations — has to be taken as number.

Number and its figures are what arithmetic considers — or rather it does not consider them, it operates upon them. For number is determinateness of the indifferent sort, inert; activating it and bringing it into connection has to come from without. Those modes of connection are the kinds of calculation. Arithmetic lists them one after another, and one plainly hangs upon another. What thread guides their sequence is nevertheless never lifted out in arithmetic. Out of number's own conceptual determination, though, the systematic arrangement falls readily into place — an arrangement to which any account of these elements in the textbooks has a fair claim. Briefly these guiding determinations shall be pointed out here.

Owing to its principle, the one, number is throughout something gathered together from without, an utterly analytic figure harbouring no inner coherence. Being thus a product merely of external making, all calculation comes down to the production of numbers, to a counting, or more determinately: a counting-together. Any diversity in this external producing, which forever does one and the same thing, can rest only upon a difference among the numbers that are to be counted together; and such a difference has itself to be drawn from elsewhere, out of an external determining.

That qualitative difference which constitutes number's determinateness is the one already seen, the difference of unity and amount; to it, therefore, shrinks every conceptual determinateness that the kinds of calculation can exhibit. What difference belongs to numbers qua quanta, on the other hand, is external identity and external difference, equality and inequality — moments of reflection these, to be treated among the determinations of essence, under difference.

One thing more must be sent ahead: numbers admit in general of being produced in two ways, either by gathering together or by parting what has already been gathered; – both taking place within one and the same manner of counting, a gathering-together of numbers answers to what may be styled a positive kind of calculation, a parting to what may be styled a negative one; the determination of the kind of calculation itself owes nothing to this opposition.

These remarks made, the enumeration of the modes of calculation follows herewith. Number's first generation lies in gathering together many as such, each of them posited only as one, – numbering. The ones being external to each other, they present themselves under a sensuous picture, and the operation that generates number consists in a counting off upon fingers, upon dots, and so forth. What four, five, and so forth is admits of nothing but being shown. Where to break off, how much shall be gathered in — that, the limit being external, is contingent, a matter of choice. – Out of the difference of amount and unity, which comes in as the kinds of calculation advance, arises a system of numbers — dyadic, decadic, and so forth; and such a system rests wholly upon the choice as to which amount shall constantly be taken over again as unity.

Numbers that have arisen through numbering are numbered once more; and being posited thus immediately, they are as yet determined without any reference to one another, indifferent toward equality and inequality, of contingent magnitude relative to each other, – hence unequal in general; – adding. – That 7 and 5 amount to twelve is something one finds out by numbering onto the 7 a further 5 ones upon the fingers or otherwise, – whereupon the result is retained in memory, by heart; for nothing inward attaches to it. In the same way one knows that 7 × 5 = 35 by counting off upon the fingers and so forth, one being numbered onto a seven, this done five times over, and the result again retained by heart. All the labour of such numbering, of hitting upon the sums and products, is got rid of by the ready-made one-and-one, or once-one-is-one, which one need only learn by heart.

Kant has (in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason V.) taken the proposition: 7 + 5 = 12, for a synthetic proposition. »One would,« he says, »to begin with certainly think (indeed!) that it is a merely analytic proposition, issuing from the concept of a sum of seven and five in accordance with the principle of contradiction.« Nothing more is meant by the concept of the sum than the abstract determination that these two numbers are to be gathered together, and gathered as numbers, in an external, i.e. conceptless way, – that from seven onward the numbering is to proceed until the ones to be added, five being their fixed amount, are used up; the result goes by the name, familiar enough otherwise, of twelve. »Yet,« Kant goes on, »on closer inspection one finds the concept of the sum of 7 and 5 to contain nothing beyond the union of the two numbers into a single one, whereby nothing whatever is thought as to which single number it is that gathers the two together;« – »let me dissect my concept of such a possible sum as I please, the twelve I shall still not come upon in it.« With the thinking of the sum, with dissection of the concept, the passage from that task to the result has, to be sure, nothing [to] do; »one must step beyond these concepts and take intuition to one's aid, five fingers and so forth, thus adding the units of the five given in intuition to the concept of seven,« he appends. Five, admittedly, is given in intuition, i.e. as a thoroughly external having-been-joined-together of the thought one arbitrarily repeated; but seven is no more a concept than five; concepts that one might step beyond are simply not at hand. By the sum of 5 and 7 is meant the conceptless linking of the two numbers; the numbering carried on thus conceptlessly from seven until the fives run out may be styled a joining-together, a synthesizing, quite as much as the numbering from one onward may – a synthesizing, however, of altogether analytic nature, the coherence being one wholly contrived, with nothing in it, and nothing entering it, that does not lie wholly outwardly before us. As the postulate of prolonging a straight line stands to the postulate of drawing one, so stands the postulate of adding 5 to 7 to the postulate of numbering at all.

Empty as the expression synthesizing is, just as empty is the determination that it takes place à priori. Counting, admittedly, is no determination of sensation — the one thing left over for the à posteriori on Kant's determination of intuition — and counting is doubtless a business carried on upon the ground of abstract intuiting, i.e. an intuiting determined through the category of the one, with every other determination of sensation abstracted from, and concepts abstracted from no less. Vague, on the whole, is what the à priori amounts to; the determination of feeling, as drive, sense, and so forth, harbours the moment of apriority within it quite as much as space and time, as existing — the temporal, the spatial — is determined à posteriori.

Bound up with this, one may add that Kant's claim about the synthetic character of the fundamental propositions of pure geometry holds just as little of substance. Granting as he does that several of them are genuinely analytic, the sole fundamental proposition he brings forward for that representation is the one saying the straight line between two points is the shortest. »My concept of the straight, namely, holds nothing of magnitude but a quality only; wholly added, therefore, is the concept of the shortest, nor can any dissection draw it out of the concept of the straight line; intuition must accordingly be taken to one's aid here, through whose means alone the synthesis is possible.« – Yet here too what is at issue is no concept of the straight in general but the straight line, and that is already something spatial, something intuited. Surely the determination (or the concept, if one likes) of the straight line is none other than this, that it is the utterly simple line, i.e. that in its coming outside itself (the so-called movement of the point) it refers utterly to itself, keeping in its extension no sort of diversity of determination posited, no reference to another point, or to a line beyond it; – the utterly in itself simple direction. Its quality is indeed this simplicity, and should the straight line seem hard to define analytically, that would be owing merely to the determination of simplicity, of self-reference, and merely because reflection, when it determines, has before it first and foremost a manifoldness, a determining through others; taken by itself, though, there is utterly nothing hard in grasping this determination — simplicity of extension within itself, absence of determination through another; – nothing else than this simplicity does Euclid's definition contain. – But the passage now from this quality to the quantitative determination (of the shortest), which was supposed to constitute the synthetic, is altogether analytic and nothing more. Being spatial, the line is quantity as such; the simplest, said of quantum, is the least, and said of a line this comes to the shortest. Geometry may admit such determinations as a corollary to the definition; Archimedes, however, in his books upon sphere and cylinder (see Hauber's transl., p. 4), did the most fitting thing in setting that determination of the straight line up as a fundamental proposition, with the same rightness of sense with which Euclid placed the determination touching parallel lines among the fundamental propositions, since to develop this determination into a definition would equally have called for determinations not immediately native to spatiality but more abstractly qualitative — simplicity, as above, equality of direction, and the like. These ancients also gave their sciences a plastic character, keeping their exposition strictly within the peculiarity of their material, and so shutting out whatever would have been of alien kind for it.

That concept which Kant set up in the synthetic judgments à priori, – the concept of a differentiated that is at the same time inseparable, of an identical that upon its own self is undivided difference, ranks among the great and imperishable things in his philosophy. In intuiting, of course, this concept is likewise present, seeing that it is the concept itself and everything is in itself the concept; but the determinations lifted out in those examples do not exhibit it; number and counting are rather an identity, a producing of an identity, that is utterly external only, a synthesis merely on the surface, a unity of ones, and of ones posited rather as not identical with one another upon themselves, as external instead, sundered for themselves; and in the straight line, the determination of being smallest between two points has for its ground rather the moment of the abstractly identical alone, devoid of difference upon its own self.

From this interruption I turn back to adding itself. Corresponding to it as the negative kind of calculation, subtracting is the equally quite analytic parting into numbers which, as in adding, stand determined relative to one another merely as unequal in general.

2. Next in determination comes the equality of the numbers that are to be numbered. Through such equality they form a unity, and herewith the difference of unity and amount makes its entrance upon number. The task set by multiplication is to count together an amount of units that are themselves an amount. Which of the two numbers gets given as unity and which as amount makes no difference here — whether one says four times three, four being the amount and three the unity, or the other way round, three times four. – Already stated above was that the product is originally found through plain numbering, i.e. counting off upon the fingers and so forth; being able to state the product immediately, later on, rests upon the collection of those products, the multiplication table, and upon knowing that by heart.

By the same determination of difference, division is the negative kind of calculation. Which of the two factors, divisor or quotient, gets determined as unity and which as amount is likewise a matter of indifference. Determined as unity is the divisor, and the quotient as amount, when division's task is pronounced thus, that one would see how often (amount) one number (unity) is contained in a given one; conversely, amount is what the divisor is taken for and unity what the quotient is, when it is said that a number shall be divided into a given amount of equal parts and the magnitude of such a part (the unity) found.

3. The two numbers standing determined relative to one another as unity and amount are, qua number, still immediate toward each other, and therefore unequal in general. Equality of a further sort is that of unity and amount themselves; so completed is the advance toward equality of the determinations that lie within the determination of number. Counting according to this complete equality is raising to a power, (the negative kind of calculation being extraction of roots) – at first, indeed, raising a number to the square, – numbering's perfect being-determined within its own self, where 1) the many numbers being added are the same, and 2) their plurality, their amount, is itself the same as the number posited many times over, the number that is the unity. No other determinations lie in the concept of number that could yield a difference; nor can any further equalizing of the difference which number harbours take place. Raising to powers above the square is a formal continuation, partly – with the even exponents – a mere repetition of squaring, partly – with the odd powers – a place where inequality re-enters; for given the formal equality (with the cube, say, to start with) of the new factor with amount as well as with unity, that factor, qua unity, is something unequal over against the amount (the square, 3 over against 3 · 3); and still more so with the cube of four, where the amount, 3, by which the number that is unity has to be multiplied with itself, differs from that number. – These determinations are in themselves at hand as the concept's essential difference, amount and unity, and they are what has to be equalized if the going-outside-itself is to return completely into itself. In what has just been set out lies further the ground why, on the one hand, solving the higher equations must consist in leading them back to the quadratic, and why, on the other, equations of odd exponents determine themselves only formally, so that precisely where the roots are rational they admit of being found in no other way than through an imaginary expression, i.e. one that is the opposite of what the roots are and express. – Arithmetic's square holds within itself, by what has been stated, the utter-being-determined alone; which is why equations with further formal powers have to be led back to it, just as geometry's right-angled triangle holds the utter-being-determined-within-itself set forth in the Pythagorean theorem, which is why all other geometrical figurations have likewise to be reduced to it for total determination.

Teaching that proceeds by a logically formed judgment deals with the doctrine of powers before the doctrine of proportions; the latter do indeed attach to the difference of unity and amount which constitutes the determination of the second kind of calculation, yet they step outside the one of immediate quantum, wherein unity and amount are moments only; and further determining along these lines stays external to that quantum as well. Number within the ratio is no longer immediate quantum; its determinateness it then has as mediation; the quantitative ratio comes up for consideration in what follows.

Of the further determining of the kinds of calculation here given it may be said that it is no philosophy of them, no laying-out, say, of their inner significance, since in fact it is not an immanent development of the concept. But philosophy must be able to tell apart what by its nature is a material external to itself, and to see that upon such a material the concept's advance can proceed only in external fashion, its moments too being able to exist only in the peculiar form of their externality — here equality and inequality. Telling apart the spheres to which a determinate form of the concept belongs, i.e. wherein it is at hand as concrete existence, is an essential requirement for philosophizing upon real objects, so that the external and contingent may not be disturbed in its peculiarity by ideas, nor these ideas be disfigured and made formal through the material's inadequacy. That externality, however, wherein the concept's moments make their appearance upon that external material, number, is here the adequate form; and inasmuch as they exhibit the object in its understanding, and since besides they carry no speculative demand and therefore look easy, they deserve to find application in the textbooks of the elements.

Remark 2

Pythagoras, as is well known, set forth relations of reason or philosophemes in numbers, and more recent times too have seen philosophy make use of numbers and of the forms of their connection, powers and so on, whether to regulate thoughts by them or to express thoughts through them. – Pedagogically considered, number has been held for the object best suited to inner intuition, and the calculative occupation with number's relations for that activity of spirit in which spirit brings before intuition its ownmost relations and, generally, essence in its fundamental relations. – How far so high a worth can accrue to number issues from number's concept, in the shape in which that concept has come out.

Number, we saw, is the absolute determinateness of quantity, its element being difference become indifferent; – determinateness in itself, posited at the same time wholly and only externally. An analytic science is what arithmetic is, since every linking and every difference occurring at its object lies not within the object itself but is inflicted upon it from wholly without. No concrete object belongs to arithmetic, none possessing inner relations in itself, relations at first hidden from knowledge, not given along with the immediate representation of the object, but such as have first to be brought out by the exertion of cognition. Far from containing the concept, and with it the task set for conceptualizing thinking, arithmetic is that thinking's opposite. Owing to the indifference of what gets linked toward the linking, a linking that wants necessity, thinking finds itself here caught up in an activity that is at once the extreme divestment of its own self, in the violent activity of moving within thoughtlessness and of linking what is capable of no necessity. The abstract thought of externality itself: that is the object.

Being this thought of externality, number is likewise the abstraction from sensuous manifoldness; out of the sensuous it has kept nothing but the abstract determination of externality as such; the sensuous is thereby brought, in number, nearest of all to thought; the pure thought of thought's own divestment is what number is.

Hence spirit, in rising above the sensuous world and knowing its own essence, may light upon number, this inward, abstract externality, as its choice, while it casts about for an element in which to have its pure representation, the expression of its essence, and before it seizes thought itself as that element and wins the purely spiritual expression for thought's presentation. That is why, early in the history of science, we find number put to use for the expression of philosophemes. The final stage of imperfection in grasping the universal, grasping it still encumbered with the sensuous, is what number makes up. Definite consciousness the ancients had of number's standing midway between the sensuous and thought. Aristotle reports of Plato (Metaphys. I.5.) his saying that, alongside the sensuous and the ideas, the mathematical determinations of things stand between the two, marked off from the sensuous in being invisible (eternal) and unmoved, and from the ideas in being a many and an alike, whereas the idea is simply and solely self-identical and within itself one. – Cited in Malchi Vita Pythagorae ed. Rittershus. p. 30 f. is a fuller and thoroughly thought-out reflection on this by Moderatus of Cadiz; that the Pythagoreans hit upon numbers he puts down to their inability as yet to seize the fundamental ideas and first principles clearly in reason, those principles being hard to think and hard to utter; for purposes of designation numbers do good service in instruction; therein they imitated, among others, the geometers, who, unable to render the corporeal in thoughts, avail themselves of figures and say, this is a triangle, intending nonetheless that the drawing which meets the eye not be taken for the triangle, but that only the thought of the triangle be represented thereby. It was in this way that the Pythagoreans pronounced the thought of unity, of selfsameness and likeness, together with the ground of concord, of coherence and of the conservation of all things, of what is self-identical, to be one, and so on. – Needless to remark, the Pythagoreans went over from the numerical expression to the expression in thought as well, to the explicit categories of like and unlike, of limit and of infinity; already regarding those numerical expressions it is reported (ibid. in the notes to p. 31. 1. 5. out of a Vita of Pythagoras in Photius p. 722) that a distinction was drawn by the Pythagoreans between the monas and the one; for the thought they took the monas, but for the number the one; likewise the two for the arithmetical item, the dyas (for so it must presumably be read there) for the thought of the indeterminate. – In the first place these ancients discerned quite rightly how inadequate the numerical forms are for determinations of thought, and quite as rightly they went on to require, in place of that first stopgap, the expression proper to thoughts; how much further along in their reflecting they were than those who nowadays reckon it something praiseworthy, thorough even and profound, to set in the place of determinations of thought numbers themselves and numerical determinations, such as powers, then the infinitely large, the infinitely small, one divided by the infinite and further determinations of the sort, themselves often no better than a perverse mathematical formalism, and so to revert to that impotent childhood.

Since the expression was adduced above that number stands between the sensuous and thought, in that number has this at once from the sensuous, namely to bear the many, the mutual outsideness, upon it, one must remark that this many itself, the sensuous as taken up into thought, is that category belonging to the sensuous of being external in its own self. Transposed into this very element of being-outside-itself, the further, concrete, true thoughts, what is most alive and most mobile, comprehended only in relating, turn into determinations dead and immobile. The richer thoughts grow in determinateness and therewith in relation, the more confused on the one side, and on the other the more arbitrary and drained of sense, does their presentation in forms of the sort numbers are become. The one, the two, the three and the four, henas or monas, dyas, trias, tetraktys, still lie near the wholly simple abstract concepts; but where numbers are to pass over into concrete relations, wanting to keep them still near the concept is futile.

Should the determinations of thought now be designated by one, two, three, four for the movement of the concept, through which alone the concept is concept, then here is the hardest thing exacted of thinking. In the element of its opposite, of relationlessness, thinking moves; the labor of derangement is its business. Comprehending that one is three, say, and three one, is a demand so hard because the one is what is relationless and so does not display upon its own self that determination whereby it passes over into what is opposed to it, being rather just this, to shut out and refuse such relation outright. Conversely the understanding exploits this against speculative truth (against the truth, for instance, deposited in the doctrine that goes by the name of the Trinity) and counts that truth's determinations, which make up one unity, so as to parade it as sheer nonsense, – which is to say, the understanding itself perpetrates the nonsense of turning what is relation outright into something relationless. In the name Trinity it was of course not reckoned upon that the one and number would be looked on by the understanding as the content's essential determinateness. Contempt toward the understanding is what that name gives voice to, though the understanding has firmly established its vanity of holding to the one and to number as such and has pitted them against reason.

To take numbers, geometrical figures, as has often been done with the circle, the triangle etc., for mere symbols (the circle standing, say, for eternity, the triangle for the Trinity) – is on the one side innocuous enough; foolish, on the other side, is supposing that more gets expressed thereby than thought is able to grasp and to express. If in such symbols, as in others engendered by fantasy in the mythologies of peoples and in poetry at large, beside which the fantasy-less geometrical figures cut a meagre figure anyway, and if in these too a profound wisdom, a profound meaning is supposed to reside, then thinking's one and only concern is to bring out into the open the wisdom that lies therein and lies not in symbols alone but in nature and in spirit as well; within symbols the sensuous element still leaves truth clouded and shrouded; only in the form of thought does truth grow wholly manifest to consciousness; the meaning is nothing other than the thought itself.

But fetching in mathematical categories with a view to determining from them something for the method or the content of philosophical science shows itself essentially perverse for this reason: that insofar as mathematical formulas signify thoughts and differences of the concept, it is rather philosophy that has first to state, determine and justify this their signification. Philosophy, in its concrete sciences, has to take what is logical out of logic, not out of mathematics; taking refuge, for philosophy's logical dimension, in the shapes which the logical assumes in other sciences, many of them mere intimations of it and others stuntings of it as well, can be nothing but a stopgap of philosophical incapacity. Merely applying such borrowed formulas is in any case an external comportment; the application would itself have to be preceded by a consciousness of their worth as much as of their meaning; but such consciousness is yielded by thinking consideration alone, not by the authority these formulas carry out of mathematics. Consciousness of that kind about them is logic itself, and this consciousness strips their particular form away, makes that form superfluous and useless, sets it right, and alone procures for them their warrant, their sense and their worth.

How matters stand with the use of number and of calculation, insofar as it is supposed to make up a pedagogical mainstay, emerges of itself from what has gone before. A non-sensuous object is number, and a non-sensuous business the occupation with number and its combinations; spirit is thereby held to reflection into itself and to an inward abstract labor, a matter of great, yet one-sided, importance. On the other side, after all, since nothing underlies number but external, thoughtless difference, that business turns thoughtless and mechanical. The straining of effort consists chiefly in holding fast to what is void of concept and in combining it without concept. The content is the empty one; the solid substance of ethical and spiritual life and of its individual shapings, the noblest nourishment with which education is to rear the youthful spirit, is to be crowded out by the contentless one; where such exercises are made the main thing and the main occupation, no other effect can follow than that spirit gets hollowed out and blunted in form as in content. So very external, and hence mechanical, a business is calculating that machines have been built which carry out arithmetical operations to perfection. Knew one nothing of the nature of calculating beyond this single circumstance, there would lie in it the verdict upon what that bright idea came to, of making calculation the chief means of cultivating spirit and of racking spirit into perfecting itself as a machine.

B. Extensive and Intensive Quantum

a. Their Difference

1. Its determinateness as limit the quantum has, as was seen just now, in the amount. Discrete within itself it is, a many possessing no being that would differ from its limit and hold that limit outside it. Thus taken along with its limit, a limit manifold in its own self, the quantum is extensive magnitude.

Extensive magnitude must be kept apart from the continuous; over against the extensive there stands directly not the discrete but the intensive. Determinatenesses of the quantitative limit itself are what extensive and intensive magnitude are, the quantum being identical with its limit; whereas continuous and discrete magnitude are determinations of magnitude in itself, i.e. of quantity as such, once abstraction is made in the quantum from the limit. – Upon its own self and within its limit extensive magnitude bears the moment of continuity, seeing that its many is throughout a continuous many; to that extent the limit, qua negation, shows itself at this equality of the many, as a delimiting of the unit. Quantity carrying itself onward with no regard for a limit is continuous magnitude, and where it is represented as having one, that limit is a delimiting in general, without discreteness being posited in it. Merely as continuous magnitude, the quantum has yet to be truly determined for itself, lacking as it does the one, wherein being-determined-for-itself resides, and lacking number too. Discrete magnitude, likewise, is immediately no more than a differentiated many in general, one which, were it as such to have a limit, would amount to a mere multitude, i.e. to something bounded indeterminately; for it to be as determinate quantum there is required that gathering of the many into one whereby the many get posited as identical with the limit. Of the two sides, each magnitude, the continuous and the discrete alike, has as quantum in general only one posited upon it, the side through which it is completely determined and is as number. Immediately, number is extensive quantum, – the simple determinateness which essentially is as amount, though as amount of one and the selfsame unit; from number it differs in this alone, that in number the determinateness stands expressly posited as plurality.

2. Yet no difference from some other large thing is needed for determining, by way of number, how large something is, as though this large thing required for its determinateness both itself and another large thing, since determinateness of magnitude generally is a limit determined for itself, indifferent, related simply to itself; and within number such a limit stands posited as shut up inside the one that is for itself, having externality, the reference-to-other, within its own self. Moreover, this many of the limit itself, like the many in general, is nothing unequal within itself but rather something continuous; whatever one of the many is, so is the other; hence its being a many that lies apart or discrete does not make up the determinateness as such. Of its own accord, therefore, this many falls back together into its continuity and turns into simple unit. – Only a moment of number is the amount; but it does not, as a multitude of numerical ones, constitute number's determinateness; on the contrary, those ones, indifferent and external to themselves, stand sublated once number has gone back into itself; whatever externality made up the ones of plurality disappears within the one, taken as the reference of number to itself.

So the limit of the quantum, which qua extensive had its existent determinateness as amount external to itself, passes over into simple determinateness. Within this simple determination of the limit, intensive magnitude is what the quantum is; and the limit or determinateness identical with the quantum now stands posited likewise as something simple, – the degree.

Determinate magnitude, quantum, is accordingly what degree is, yet not at once a multitude, or something plural within its own self; a multiplicity is all it is; and the multiplicity is the several gathered up into the simple determination, existence gone back into being-for-itself. By a number its determinateness must indeed find expression, number being the complete being-determined of the quantum, yet not as amount but simply, as one single degree. Where 10, 20 degrees get spoken of, the quantum having so many degrees is the tenth, the twentieth degree, not their amount and sum; on that reckoning it would be an extensive one; rather it is only a single one, the tenth, the twentieth degree. Whatever determinateness lies in the amount ten, twenty it does hold, yet holds it not as several ones but is number qua sublated amount, qua simple determinateness.

3. Within number the quantum stands posited in its full determinateness; qua intensive quantum, though, as within its being-for-itself, what it is posited as is what it is according to its concept, or in itself. For the form of reference-to-self that belongs to it in degree is at once its own being-external-to-itself. Qua extensive quantum, number is numerical plurality, and thus carries externality inside it. Such externality, being many in general, falls together into undifferentiatedness and sublates itself within the one of number, number's reference to itself. Amount, though, is how the quantum has its determinateness; amount it contains, as was shown just now, notwithstanding that amount is no longer posited upon it. Degree, therefore, simple within its own self and no longer holding this external otherness in it, holds that otherness outside it, referring itself thereto as to its determinateness. What makes up the determinateness of the simple limit that degree is for itself is a plurality external to degree. That the amount, insofar as it was supposed to be found in number within the extensive quantum, sublated itself there, thus works out to this: outside number is where it stands posited. Posited as one, as reference-to-self reflected into itself, number shuts out of itself the indifference and externality of amount, and is reference to itself as reference through itself to something external.

Herein the quantum possesses the reality conformable to its concept. Its quality is constituted by the indifference of the determinateness; that is, by the determinateness which upon its own self is a determinateness external to itself. – Degree, accordingly, is a simple determinateness of magnitude among a multiplicity of such intensities, diverse from one another, each a merely simple reference to itself, yet standing at once in essential reference to one another, such that within this continuity with the rest each one gets its determinateness. This reference of degree through itself to its other turns ascent and descent along the scale of degrees into a steady advance, a flowing that is alteration uninterrupted and indivisible; of the several ones distinguished therein not one is cut off from the rest, each having its being-determined only in them. Qua determination of magnitude referring itself to itself, every degree is indifferent toward the others; but no less is it in itself referred to this externality, being only by means of that externality what it is, its reference to itself being in one stroke the non-indifferent reference to what is external, and having therein its quality.

b. Identity of Extensive and Intensive Magnitude

Nothing external to itself lies within degree. Still, degree is not on that account the indeterminate one, the principle of number generally, whose sole amount is the negative one of being no amount whatever. To begin with, what intensive magnitude comes to is a simple one of the several; degrees there are, several of them; determinate, however, they are neither qua simple one nor qua several, but solely within the reference of this being-outside-itself, that is, within the identity of one and multiplicity. Granted that the several as such fall outside the simple degree, still it is in the degree's reference to them that its determinateness consists; the amount is accordingly harbored within it. Just as twenty, taken extensively, keeps the twenty ones within itself in discrete fashion, so the determinate degree keeps them as continuity, being in simple fashion this determinate multiplicity; such a degree is the twentieth; and the twentieth degree it is only by mediation of that amount, which qua amount falls outside it.

Two sides, then, call for consideration in the determinateness of intensive magnitude. Other intensive quanta determine it, and with its otherness it stands in continuity, its determinateness consisting precisely in that reference to the otherness. Now insofar as, first, it is the simple determinateness, its determination is one against other degrees; those it shuts out of itself, and in this shutting out its determinateness lies. Secondly, however, determinate it is in its own self; such it is in the amount, taken as its own amount, not in an amount excluded from it, nor in the amount belonging to other degrees. Within its own self the twentieth degree keeps the twenty; being marked off from the nineteenth, the twenty-first etc. is not all that determines it, for its amount is what its determinateness consists in. Once the amount counts as belonging to the degree, though, and the determinateness has essentially the shape of amount, extensive quantum is what the degree turns out to be.

One and the same determinateness of the quantum, then, is what extensive and intensive magnitude both are; nothing sets them apart save this, that in the former the amount lies within, in the latter that very amount lies without. Because its many, in and for itself, falls together into the unit, and the many then steps outside that unit, extensive magnitude passes over into the intensive. Conversely, though, what this simple thing owes its determinateness to is nothing but the amount, and indeed the amount as its own; indifferent as it is toward intensities determined otherwise, it bears the externality of amount upon its own self; and so intensive magnitude proves no less essentially to be extensive.

Along with this identity the qualitative something makes its entrance; for the identity is a unity referring itself to itself by way of the negation of its differences, while those differences are what the existent determinateness of magnitude consists in; hence this negative identity is something, and indeed a something to which its quantitative determinateness is a matter of indifference. A quantum is what something is, yet by now qualitative existence, such as it is in itself, stands posited as indifferent toward that quantum. Talk of quantum, of number as such etc. had been possible with no something to serve them as substrate. By now, however, something steps over against these determinations of its own, mediated with itself through their negation, as existing for itself, and, in possessing a quantum, as one and the same possessor of an extensive and of an intensive one. That one determinateness which something has qua quantum stands posited in the differentiated moments of unit and of amount; nor is that determinateness merely in itself one and the same, for its being posited in these differences, as extensive and as intensive quantum, amounts to the return into this unity, a unity which, being negative, is the something posited as indifferent toward it.

Remark 1

In the ordinary way of representing things, extensive and intensive quantum are apt to get distinguished as kinds of magnitude, as though certain objects possessed intensive magnitude only, others extensive only. To this there has been added the representation belonging to a philosophical natural science that converted the plural, the extensive, in the fundamental determination of matter, say, of filling a space, and likewise in other concepts, into an intensive, in the sense that the intensive, qua dynamic, is the genuine determination, and that density or specific filling of space, for example, must essentially be grasped not as a certain multitude and amount of material parts occupying a quantum of space, but rather as a certain degree of matter's space-filling force.

Determinations of two sorts require distinguishing here. Where one speaks of the conversion of the mechanical manner of consideration into the dynamic, there occur the concept of self-subsistent parts subsisting outside one another, joined into a whole only externally, and, distinct from it, the concept of force. What in the filling of space counts on the one side as nothing but a multitude of mutually external atoms is on the other side taken for the expression of a simple force lying at the ground. – Now the relation of whole to parts, and that of force to its expression, which here come to confront each other, belong not yet in this place but will be considered further on. This much may be recalled at once: that the relation of force to its expression, corresponding as it does to the intensive, is at first indeed the truer of the two as against the relation of whole and parts; but that force is on that account no less one-sided than the intensive, and the expression, the externality of the extensive, is from force just as inseparable, so that in both forms alike, the intensive and the extensive, one and the same content is at hand.

The other determinateness cropping up here is the quantitative as such, sublated as extensive quantum and converted into degree, this being taken for the determination that alone should truly be; though it has already been shown that this degree contains the former quite as much, so that each form is essential to the other, and hence that every existence exhibits its determination of magnitude no less as extensive than as intensive quantum. Anything whatever therefore serves as an example of this, insofar as it makes its appearance in a determination of magnitude. Number itself necessarily bears this doubled form immediately upon it. An amount it is, and to that extent extensive magnitude; but it is also one, a ten, a hundred; to that extent it stands upon the transition to intensive magnitude, since within this unit the manifold goes together into what is simple. One is extensive magnitude in itself, being representable as any amount of parts one pleases. Thus the tenth, the hundredth is this simple, intensive thing, whose determinateness lies at the several that fall outside it, i.e. at the extensive. Ten, a hundred is what number is, and simultaneously the tenth, the hundredth within the number system; the determinateness is in both cases the same.

Within the circle the one goes by the name of degree, because what the part of the circle owes its determinateness to is essentially the several lying outside it, the part being determined as one out of a closed amount of such ones. Regarded as mere magnitude of space, the circle's degree is nothing but an ordinary number; regarded as degree, it is intensive magnitude, having sense only insofar as it is determined by the amount of degrees the circle is divided into, much as number in general has its sense only within the number series.

A more concrete object's magnitude exhibits its doubled side, that of being extensive and intensive, at the doubled determinations of the object's existence, in the one of which the object appears as something external, in the other as something internal. A mass, for instance, is as weight something extensively large insofar as it makes up an amount of pounds, hundredweights etc.; something intensively large insofar as it exerts a certain pressure; and the magnitude of that pressure is a simple thing, a degree whose determinateness lies at a scale of degrees of pressure. In exerting pressure the mass shows itself as a being-within-itself, as a subject to which the intensive difference of magnitude accrues. – Conversely, whatever exerts this degree of pressure is capable of shifting a certain amount of pounds etc. from their place, and measures its own magnitude thereby.

Or heat has a degree; the degree of warmth, whether the 10th, the 20th etc. is a simple sensation, subjective in kind. Yet just as much is this degree at hand as extensive magnitude, namely as the expansion of a fluid, of the mercury in the thermometer, of air or of clay etc. As a taller column of mercury, or as a narrower cylinder of clay, a higher degree of temperature expresses itself; a larger space it warms in the same way in which a lesser degree warms only the smaller space.

Being the more intensive one, the higher tone is at the same time a greater multitude of vibrations, or a louder tone, one to which a higher degree gets ascribed, makes itself audible across a larger space. – A larger surface can be coloured in like manner with the more intensive color than with a weaker one; or what is brighter, another sort of intensity, is visible from farther off than what is less bright etc.

Just so within the realm of spirit: the high intensity of character, of talent, of genius goes together with an existence equally far-reaching, an effect equally extended, a contact equally many-sided. The deepest concept has the most universal significance and application.

Remark 2

A peculiar use has Kant made of the application of the determinateness of intensive quantum to a metaphysical determination of the soul. Where he criticizes the metaphysical propositions concerning the soul – paralogisms of pure reason, as he names them – he comes upon the consideration of the inference drawn from the soul's simplicity to its permanence. Against that inference he sets (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 414) »that, even granting the soul this simple nature, seeing that it contains no manifold outside one another and therefore no extensive magnitude, one could nonetheless as little deny it, as one could any existing thing, intensive magnitude, i.e. a degree of reality as regards the whole of its faculties, indeed the whole of what constitutes existence, a degree that may decrease through all the infinitely many smaller degrees, whereby the supposed substance might be turned into nothing, though not through partition, yet through a gradual slackening (remissio) of its powers; for even consciousness possesses at all times a degree open to still further lessening, and consequently so does the faculty of being conscious of oneself, and so do all the remaining faculties.« – Within rational psychology, such as that abstract metaphysics was, the soul counts not as spirit but as something that merely immediately is, as a soul-thing. Kant is thus within his right in applying to it the category of quantum, »as to anything existing whatever«, and, insofar as this immediate being stands determined as simple, that of intensive quantum. To spirit, admittedly, being does belong, though of a wholly other intensity than that of intensive quantum – rather of an intensity wherein the form of the merely immediate being, and every category thereof, count as sublated. It was not only the removal of the category of extensive quantum that had to be conceded; that of quantum in general had to be removed. Yet something further still awaits recognition: how, in the eternal nature of spirit, existence, consciousness, finitude are, and how they proceed from it without spirit thereby turning into a thing.

c. The Alteration of the Quantum

Towards the determinateness of quantum as such, the difference between extensive and intensive quantum is a matter of indifference. Quantum in general, however, just is determinateness in the shape of being posited as sublated – limit grown indifferent, determinateness that is no less its own negation. Within extensive magnitude this difference stands developed, while intensive magnitude constitutes the existence of that externality which quantum inwardly is. Posited within itself as quantum's contradiction, the difference amounts to this: to be the simple determinateness relating itself to itself which negates its own self, and to hold its determinateness not at it but in a further quantum.

A quantum accordingly stands posited, by its quality, in absolute continuity with what is external to it, with its otherness. Every determinateness of magnitude, therefore, not merely can be overstepped, not merely can be altered; it stands posited that alter itself it must. The determination of magnitude continues itself into its otherness in such fashion that only within this continuity with an other does it possess its being; a limit that is it therefore is not, but one that becomes.

Infinite is the one, or the negation that relates to itself, and hence repulsion of it away from its own self. Quantum too is infinite, posited as negativity relating to itself; away from itself it repels itself. Yet a determinate one it is, the one gone over into existence and into limit, and so repulsion of determinateness away from its own self – no generating of what is self-same, such as the repulsion of the one gives, but generating of its otherness; at it itself there now stands posited the task to send [itself] out beyond itself and to turn into an other. Increasing or diminishing itself is what it consists in; it is the externality of determinateness at it itself.

Beyond its own self, then, quantum sends itself; this other, into which it becomes, is at first a quantum likewise, yet no less a limit that, rather than merely being, drives itself out past itself. Hence the limit arisen anew in this going-out is utterly nothing else than one which sublates itself once more and passes itself along to a further one, and so on into infinity.

C. Quantitative Infinity

a. Its Concept

Quantum alters and turns into another quantum; that this alteration presses on into infinity – its further determination – has its ground in quantum's being set down as contradicting itself at it itself. – An other is what quantum becomes; but into its otherness it continues itself; a quantum, then, is what the other is too. This, however, is the other not of some quantum merely, but of the quantum itself, the negative of quantum as something limited, and thus quantum's unlimitedness, its infinity. Quantum is an ought; what it holds within it is to be determined for itself, and such being-determined-for-itself is rather a being determined in an other; conversely again it is that being-determined-in-an-other sublated, an indifferent subsisting-for-itself.

Thereby finitude and infinity each acquire at once, at it itself, a doubled and indeed opposed signification. Finite the quantum is, first as something limited in general, second as the sending of itself out past itself, as the being determined in an other. Its infinity, on the other hand, is first its not-being-limited, second its having-returned-into-itself, that indifferent being-for-itself. Set these moments side by side at once, and it emerges that quantum's determination of finitude – the sending of itself past itself to an other wherein its determination is supposed to lie – counts equally as determination of the infinite; negating the limit is that very same passing out beyond determinateness, so that in this negation, in the infinite, quantum would hold its last determinateness. Infinity's other moment is the being-for-itself indifferent towards the limit; quantum itself, however, is limited in just this way, that towards its limit, and thereby towards other quanta and towards its own going-beyond, it is what is for itself indifferent. In the case of quantum, finitude and the (bad) infinity supposed to stand apart from it each already carry the other's moment at it.

Qualitative and quantitative infinite part company in this, that with the former the opposition of finite and infinite is qualitative, and that the passing of the finite into the infinite, or the relating of the two to one another, lies only in the in-itself, in their concept. As immediate is qualitative determinateness, and it relates to otherness essentially as to a being other than itself; that it has its negation, its other, at it itself is not posited of it. Magnitude, by contrast, is as such determinateness sublated; posited it is as unequal with itself, indifferent towards its own self, and therefore as the alterable. Absolutely, i.e. abstractly, do the qualitative finite and infinite therefore stand over against each other; their unity is the inward relation lying at the ground; only in itself, then, and not at it, does the finite continue itself into its other. The quantitative finite, conversely, relates itself at it itself into its infinite, wherein its absolute determinateness is supposed to reside. What first exhibits this relation of theirs is the quantitatively infinite process.

b. The Quantitative Infinite Progress

Contradiction generally is what the progress into infinity expresses – here the contradiction contained in the quantitatively finite, in quantum as such. It is that reciprocal determining of finite and infinite already considered within the qualitative sphere, save for this difference, just recalled, that in the quantitative the limit sends and continues itself at it itself into its beyond, so that conversely the quantitatively infinite too stands posited as having quantum at it itself; for quantum in its being-outside-itself is at once its own self, its externality belonging to its determination.

Merely the expression of this contradiction is the infinite progress, not its resolution; yet because the one determinateness is continuous into its other, it brings about an apparent resolution in a unification of the two. In its first positing it is the task of the infinite, not the reaching of it – the perennial generating of the infinite, without ever getting past quantum itself, and without the infinite becoming anything positive and present. It lies in quantum's concept to have a beyond of itself. Such a beyond is, first, the abstract moment of quantum's non-being; quantum dissolves in its own self; so does it relate to its beyond as to its infinity, following the qualitative moment of the opposition. Second, however, quantum stands in continuity with that beyond; for quantum consists precisely in being the other of its own self, external to itself; this external, accordingly, is just as much not an other than quantum; hence the beyond, the infinite, is itself a quantum. Called back thereby out of its flight is the beyond, and the infinite is reached. But since what has come over to this side is a quantum again, nothing has been posited except a new limit once more; and this limit, being quantum, has fled from its own self again, is as such out past itself, and has repelled itself away into its non-being, into that beyond of its own self, which becomes quantum just as perennially as quantum thrusts itself away from itself towards the beyond.

Quantum's continuity into its other yields the linking of the two in the expression of an infinitely great or an infinitely small. Because both still bear the determination of quantum at them, alterable they remain, and the absolute determinateness that would amount to a being-for-itself is thus not reached. In the doubled infinite, opposed to itself according to more and less, in the infinitely great and the infinitely small, this being-outside-itself of the determination stands posited. At each of them quantum stays preserved in perennial opposition against its beyond. Widen the great as far as you will, it collapses into insignificance; in relating to the infinite as to its own non-being it renders the opposition qualitative; nothing, then, has the widened quantum wrested from the infinite, which stays, now as before, its non-being. Or again, magnifying the quantum brings no approach to the infinite, since the difference between quantum and its infinity carries essentially also the moment of not being a quantitative difference. Only the contradiction driven into narrower compass is thereby expressed: a great it is supposed to be, i.e. a quantum, and infinite, i.e. no quantum. – Likewise the infinitely small, being small, is a quantum, and stays therefore absolutely, i.e. qualitatively, too great for the infinite, standing opposed to it. Preserved in both is the contradiction of the infinite progress that was supposed to have found its goal in them.

Such infinity, persistently determined as the finite's beyond, deserves the name of the bad quantitative infinity. Like the qualitative bad infinity it is the perennial passing across and back from one member of the persisting contradiction over to the other, from limit to limit's non-being, and from that back once more to the very same, to the limit. In the quantitative progress, what is advanced to is indeed no abstract other in general, but a quantum posited as diverse; still, it stands in opposition to its negation just the same. Not an advancing and getting further on, therefore, is this progress, but a repeating of one and the very same – positing, sublating, positing again and sublating again; an impotence of the negative, which through its own sublating sees what it sublates return as something continuous. Two are so knotted together that they flee one another utterly; and in fleeing one another they cannot part, but are tied together in their mutual flight.

Remark 1

Chiefly in the form of the progress of the quantitative into infinity – this ongoing overflying of the limit, which is the impotence to sublate it, and the perennial relapse into it – is the bad infinity apt to be held for something sublime and for a kind of divine service, just as in philosophy that progress has been looked upon as an ultimate. Many a tirade has this progress served, tirades that have won admiration as sublime productions. What this modern sublimity in fact magnifies, however, is not the object, which rather flees away, but only the subject, which gulps down such great quantities into itself. The paltriness of this elevation, remaining as it does subjective and climbing the ladder of the quantitative, announces itself in the very fact that amid futile labor it confesses not to come nearer the infinite goal, a goal that, if it is to be reached, must of course be tackled quite otherwise.

In the following tirades of this kind there is expressed at the same time what such elevation passes over into and where it ceases. Kant for instance presents as sublime (Kr. d. pract. V. Schl.) »the case where the subject in thought lifts itself above the place it occupies in the world of sense and widens the linkage into the infinitely great, a linkage with stars above stars, with worlds above worlds, systems above systems, and beyond that into boundless times of their periodic motion, of its beginning and its endurance. – Representing succumbs to this advance into the immeasurably remote, where the remotest world still has one remoter yet, the past traced back so far has yet a further one behind it, the future carried out ever so far has still always another before it; thought succumbs to this representation of the immeasurable; as a dream in which one walks a long passage ever further and unforeseeably further, without descrying an end, closes with a fall or with dizziness.«

Besides compressing the content of quantitative elevation into a richly furnished picture, this presentation deserves praise above all for the truthfulness with which it states how this elevation fares at the end: thought succumbs, the end is falling and dizziness. What makes thought succumb, and brings forth its falling and the dizziness, is nothing other than the tedium of the repetition, which lets a limit vanish and appear again and vanish again – so always the one for the other, and each in the other, in the beyond the this-side, in the this-side the beyond, perennially coming to be and ceasing to be – and which yields no more than the feeling of impotence in this infinite or this ought, which wants to become master over the finite and cannot.

Haller's horrifying description of eternity, as Kant called it, is likewise apt to be particularly admired, though often precisely not on account of that side which constitutes its genuine merit:

»Monstrous numbers I heap up, mountains of millions I raise, Time upon time I set, and world on world I lay, And when from that grim height With reeling eyes I look back to you, All the power of number, multiplied a thousandfold, Is not yet one part of you.«

»I take them away, and you lie wholly before me.« When value is set upon that heaping and towering of numbers and worlds as upon a description of eternity, then it goes unnoticed that the poet himself pronounces this so-called horrifying going-beyond futile and hollow, and that he closes by saying that only through the abandoning of this empty infinite progress does the genuine infinite itself come into presence before him.

There have been astronomers who liked to pride themselves greatly on the sublimity of their science, and this because it has to do with an immeasurable multitude of stars, with spaces and times so immeasurable that within them distances and periods already so great in themselves serve as units which, taken ever so many times over, shrink back once more into insignificance. The stale astonishment to which they abandon themselves in this, the insipid hopes of travelling one day in that other life from one star to another and of acquiring the like new knowledge onward into the immeasurable – these they passed off as a chief moment in their science's excellence, a science admirable not on account of any such quantitative infinity, but on the contrary on account of the ratios of measure and the laws that reason cognizes in these objects, laws which are the rational infinite as against that irrational infinity.

To the infinity that relates to outer sensuous intuition Kant opposes the other infinity, when

»the individual goes back into its invisible I, and sets the absolute freedom of its will, as a pure I, against all the terrors of fate and of tyranny, beginning with its nearest surroundings, lets these vanish for it, lets likewise what appears as enduring, worlds upon worlds, collapse into rubble, and, alone, cognizes itself as equal to itself.«

The I in this solitude with itself is indeed the beyond attained; it has come to its own self, is with itself, on this side; in pure self-consciousness the absolute negativity is brought to affirmation and presence, the very negativity which in that advance beyond the sensuous quantum does nothing but flee. But in fixing itself in its abstraction and lack of content, this pure I finds existence in general, the whole fullness of the natural and of the spiritual universe, standing over against it as a beyond. There presents itself the same contradiction that lies at the ground of the infinite progress: namely a having-returned-into-itself which is immediately at the same time a being-outside-itself, a relating to its other as to its own non-being; and such relating stays a longing, because the I has fixed for itself its own contentless, untenable emptiness on the one hand, and on the other, as its beyond, that fullness which in the negation nonetheless stays present.

To these two sublimities Kant appends the remark »that admiration (for the first, the outer) and respect (for the second, the inner) sublimity do indeed stimulate inquiry, but cannot make good the want of it«. – He thereby declares those elevations unsatisfying for reason, which cannot come to rest with them and with the sentiments bound up with them, nor let the beyond and the empty pass for the ultimate.

As an ultimate, however, the infinite progress has been taken above all in its application to morality. The second opposition of finite and infinite just adduced, that of the manifold world and of the I raised into its freedom, is at first qualitative. The self-determining of the I aims at once at determining nature and at freeing itself from nature; thus through its own self it relates to its other, which as outer existence is something manifold and also something quantitative. The relation to something quantitative itself becomes quantitative; the negative relation of the I to it, the power of the I over the not-I, over sensibility and outer nature, is therefore represented in such a way that morality can and ought to become ever greater, the power of sensibility ever smaller. As for the will's complete adequacy to the moral law, that gets displaced into the progress running on into infinity, i.e. represented as an absolute unattainable beyond, and just this unattainability is supposed to yield the true anchor and the right consolation; for morality is supposed to be as struggle, and struggle there is only where the will fails to match the law, the law thereby being utterly a beyond for it.

Within this opposition, I and not-I – or the pure will and the moral law, and again the will's nature and sensibility – count as presupposed, each perfectly self-subsistent and indifferent towards the other. The pure will has its own peculiar law standing in essential relation to sensibility; and nature and sensibility have for their part laws that are neither drawn from the will nor answerable to it, nor would even, though different from it, have in themselves an essential relation to it, but are determined altogether for themselves, complete and closed within themselves. Both, however, are at once moments of one and the same simple essence, namely of the I; over against nature the will stands determined as the negative, so that it only is insofar as something distinct from it is there for sublating by it, something by which it is in this very act touched and itself affected. To nature, and to nature as the sensibility of the human being, taken as a self-subsistent system of laws, the being limited by an other is a matter of indifference; it maintains itself in this being limited, enters self-subsistently into the relation, and sets a limit to the will of the law no less than that will sets one to it. – It is one act, that the will determines itself and sublates the otherness of a nature, and that this otherness is posited as existent, continues itself into its being sublated, and is not sublated. The contradiction lying in this is not resolved in the infinite progress but on the contrary is set forth and asserted as unresolved and unresolvable; the struggle of morality and sensibility is represented as the absolute relation that is in and for itself.

The impotence to master the qualitative opposition of the finite and the infinite, and to grasp the idea of the genuine will, of substantial freedom, takes refuge in magnitude, so as to employ it as the mediatrix, magnitude being the qualitative sublated, difference grown indifferent. Yet since both members of the opposition remain lying at the ground as qualitatively diverse, the very fact that in their mutual relation they behave as quanta rather posits each of them at once as indifferent towards this alteration. Nature is determined by the I, sensibility by the will of the good; the alteration brought about at nature by that will is only a quantitative difference, one that lets nature subsist as what it is.

Within the more abstract presentation of the Kantian philosophy, or at any rate of its principles – Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre – the infinite progress makes up, in the same way, both foundation and ultimate. Upon the first principle of that presentation, I=I, there follows a second independent of it, the opposing of the not-I; the relation of the two is at once likewise assumed as a quantitative difference, in that the not-I is in part determined by the I and in part not. In this manner the not-I continues itself into its non-being so as to stay opposed to that non-being, as something unsublated. After the contradictions lying therein have accordingly been developed within the system, the final result is that very relation which was the beginning; the not-I remains an infinite check, an absolute other; the last relation of it and the I to one another is the infinite progress, longing and striving – the very contradiction with which the start was made.

Since the quantitative is determinateness in the shape of being posited as sublated, people believed that much – rather, that everything – had been gained for the absolute's unity, for the One substantiality, once opposition as such was demoted to a difference merely quantitative. All opposition is merely quantitative was for a time a chief proposition of the more recent philosophy; one essence, one content belongs to the opposed determinations, which are real sides of the opposition insofar as each of them carries both its determinations, both factors, in it, save that on the one side the one factor and on the other the other is preponderant, in the one side the one factor, a matter or an activity, being at hand in greater amount or in stronger degree than in the other. Wherever different materials or activities are presupposed, what the quantitative difference does is rather to confirm and complete their externality, their indifference towards each other and towards the unity they have. Merely quantitative, so it is said, is the difference of the absolute unity; the quantitative is indeed immediate determinateness sublated, yet only imperfectly so, being as yet the first negation only, not the infinite one, not negation of the negation. – In being represented as quantitative determinations of absolute substance, being and thinking too become, as quanta, perfectly external and relationless to each other, as carbon, nitrogen and so forth do in a subordinate sphere. It is a third thing, an external reflection, that abstracts from their difference and cognizes their inner unity, a unity merely in-itself and not equally for-itself. Thus in fact this unity gets represented merely as a first immediate one, or merely as being that in its quantitative difference stays equal to itself without positing itself equal through its own self; grasped as negation of the negation, as infinite unity, it accordingly is not. Only in qualitative opposition does the posited infinity, being-for-itself, come forth, and the quantitative determination itself passes over, as will shortly appear more closely, into the qualitative.

Remark 2

Recalled above already was the fact that the Kantian antinomies present the opposition of finite and infinite in a more concrete shape, brought to bear on more special substrates of representation. Qualitative finitude and infinity in their opposition — that was the content of the antinomy dealt with there. Another of them, the first among the four cosmological antinomies, has rather the quantitative limit for what it examines in its conflict. For that reason I take up the investigation of this antinomy here.

At issue in it is the limitedness or unlimitedness of the world in time and space. – One might with equal right have examined this opposition in regard to time and space taken by themselves, since nothing about the antinomic character of limitedness or unlimitedness in them turns on whether time and space are relations belonging to things themselves or nothing but forms of intuition.

That the two propositions, along with the proofs of them — apagogically conducted, as were those of the antinomy just examined — issue in nothing beyond two plain and mutually opposed claims will emerge equally from a closer unfolding of this antinomy: there is a limit, and: the limit must be gone beyond.

The thesis runs:

»The world has a beginning in time, and in respect of space it is likewise shut in within limits.«

The one part of the proof, the one bearing on time, supposes the contrary,

»that as regards time the world has no beginning; then up to any given instant of time an eternity has run out, and consequently an infinite series of states of things in the world, one following upon another, has elapsed. Now the very infinity of a series lies in this, that by successive synthesis it can never reach completion. Thus an infinite elapsed world-series is impossible, and a beginning of the world accordingly a necessary condition for its existence; which is what had to be demonstrated.«

The other part of the proof, the one dealing with space, gets traced back to time. An infinite time would be required for gathering together the parts of a world infinite in space, and that time would have to count as run out, given that a world in space is to count not as something in the making but as something finished and given. Yet with respect to time the first part of the proof established the impossibility of supposing an infinite time to have run out.

One notices straightaway, however, that dressing the proof up apagogically, or mounting any proof whatever, was quite unnecessary, seeing that what the proof itself rests on immediately is the very claim that was to be established. Some particular or any given instant of time is posited, namely, up to which an eternity (–eternity carries here only the paltry sense of a badly infinite time) is supposed to have run out. But a given instant of time signifies nothing other than a determinate limit within time. A limit of time is thus presupposed in the proof as something actual; and this is exactly what was to be established. For what the thesis maintains is that the world has a beginning in time.

The sole difference to be found is that the temporal limit assumed is a now serving as end of the time already run out, while the one to be established is a now serving as beginning of a future. This difference, though, carries no weight. As the point at which an infinite series of states of things in time, one succeeding another, is supposed to have elapsed, the now gets posited — hence as an end, as qualitative limit. Suppose this now were taken merely for a quantitative limit, one that flows and that is not only to be surpassed but is rather nothing but this, to surpass itself: then within it the infinite series of time would not stand elapsed but would go on flowing, and the reasoning of the proof would collapse. The instant of time is instead supposed as qualitative limit for the past, yet just so it is at once beginning for the future, – since in itself every instant of time is the connecting of past with future, – and it is moreover an absolute, which is to say abstract, beginning for that future, hence exactly what was to be established. That a past already is, lying before this future of its and before that beginning of the future, has no bearing on the matter; for inasmuch as this instant of time is qualitative limit – and taking it as qualitative is what the determination of the completed, the run-out, hence non-self-continuing, involves – time stands broken off in it, while that past, bearing no connection to the time that could be styled future only in respect of this past, and thus, lacking such connection, being simply time as such, possesses an absolute beginning. Were that time, though, – (as in fact it does –) to stand by way of the now, the given instant of time, in a connection with the past, and were it thereby determined as future, then from the other side this instant too would be no limit, the infinite series of time would carry itself on in what went by the name of future, and would not, as was supposed, be completed.

Time is in truth pure quantity; and the instant of time deployed in the proof, at which time was to suffer interruption, is rather only the self-sublating being-for-itself of the now. All the proof achieves is to set before representation, as a given instant of time, the absolute limit of time that the thesis maintains, and then flatly to suppose it a finished, that is abstract, point, – a popular determination that sensuous representing readily waves through as a limit, thereby letting stand within the proof as supposition what had earlier been put forward as the thing to be established.

The antithesis states:

»The world has no beginning and no limits in space; rather, in respect of time as of space alike, it is infinite.«

Its proof likewise posits the contrary:

»Let the world have a beginning. A beginning being an existence ahead of which there goes a time wherein the thing is not, some time must have gone before in which the world was not — an empty time, namely. But within an empty time no coming-to-be of anything at all is possible; for one part of such a time possesses in itself, over against another, no distinguishing condition favouring existence rather than non-existence. So while many a series of things may well begin within the world, the world itself can take no beginning, and with respect to elapsed time it is infinite.«

Like the others, this apagogic proof harbours the direct, unproved affirmation of what it was meant to establish. For it first supposes a beyond of worldly existence, an empty time; but then it equally continues worldly existence out beyond itself into this empty time, sublating the latter thereby, and so carries existence on into infinity. An existence is what the world is; and that this existence comes to be, its coming-to-be having a preceding condition in time, is what the proof presupposes. Yet just in this the antithesis itself consists, that no existence is unconditioned and no limit absolute, worldly existence always calling instead for a preceding condition. So the thing to be demonstrated turns up inside the proof as supposition. – The condition is then looked for, further, in empty time, which comes to saying that it is supposed as temporal and hence as existence, as something limited. Quite generally, then, the supposition has been made that the world, as existence, presupposes some other conditioned existence in time, and this onward into infinity.

With the infinity of the world in space the proof runs just the same. Apagogically the spatial finitude of the world gets posited; »the world would then be situated in an empty unlimited space and would bear a relation to it; but a relation of the world such as this, to no object, is nothing.«

Here too what should have been proved is presupposed outright within the proof. Outright supposed it is that a limited spatial world be situated in an empty space and bear a relation to it, which means that the world must be passed beyond, – towards the void on the one hand, towards the beyond and non-being of the world, but on the other hand that it stands therewith in relation to that void, that is, continues itself into it, so that the beyond has to be represented as filled with worldly existence. What the antithesis maintains as the world's infinity in space amounts to nothing but empty space on the one side and, on the other, the world's relation to that space, which is to say its continuity within it, or its filling of it; and this contradiction — space at once empty and at once filled — is what the infinite progress of existence in space is. This very contradiction, the world's relation to empty space, has been laid down directly as the basis in the proof.

Nothing else, therefore, do thesis and antithesis with their proofs set forth than these mutually opposed claims: that a limit is, and that this same limit is no less a merely sublated one; that the limit has a beyond standing nonetheless in connection with it, towards which one is to pass out beyond the limit, but wherein a limit of that same kind arises once more, a limit that is none.

Transcendental, like the resolution of the previous antinomy, is the resolution of these — which is to say that it lies in maintaining that space and time, qua forms of intuition, are ideal, in the sense that the world in its own self stands in no contradiction with itself and is nothing self-sublating, and that only consciousness, in its intuiting and in the bearing of intuition on understanding and reason, is an essence contradicting itself. To banish contradiction from the world and shift it instead into spirit, into reason, leaving it there to subsist unresolved, is an excess of tenderness towards the world. Spirit is in fact what has the strength to bear contradiction, but it is likewise spirit that understands how to resolve it. The so-called world, however (call it the objective, real world, or, on transcendental idealism's showing, subjective intuiting plus a sensibility determined through the category of understanding), does not on that account lack contradiction anywhere, but is incapable of bearing it and is for that reason given over to coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.

c. The Infinity of the Quantum

As infinitely great or infinitely small, the infinite quantum is itself in itself the infinite progress; a great or a small it is, quantum therefore, and simultaneously non-being of quantum. Pictures of representation, accordingly, are what the infinitely great and the infinitely small come to, pictures that on closer inspection prove to be null mist and shadow. Within the infinite progress, by contrast, that contradiction stands explicitly at hand, and with it whatever belongs to the nature of quantum — of quantum which, as intensive magnitude, has reached its reality and stands posited now in its existence just as it stands in its concept. It is this identity that calls for consideration.

Simple is quantum as degree, self-referred, and determined as at its own self. Because through such simplicity otherness and determinateness stand sublated at it, determinateness falls outside it; beyond itself quantum has its determinateness. To begin with, this being-outside-itself of quantum is the abstract non-being of quantum as such, bad infinity. Further, though, that non-being is a great as well, quantum carries itself on into its non-being, having its determinateness precisely in its externality; and so this externality of quantum's is itself quite as much quantum; hence a limit falls to that non-being of quantum, to the infinity, which means that the beyond gets sublated, since the beyond is determined as quantum itself, quantum being thereby with itself in its own negation.

But that is what quantum as such is in itself. For through being external is precisely how it is it itself; what makes it quantum, with itself, is constituted by externality. Within the infinite progress, then, quantum's concept stands posited.

Taking it first in the abstract determinations it comes with, then what lies in it is the sublating of quantum, but quite as much of its beyond, hence both the negation of quantum and the negation of that negation. Their unity is its truth, and in that unity they are, though as moments. – The unity dissolves the contradiction whose expression the progress is, and its nearest sense is accordingly the restoration of the concept of magnitude, magnitude being an indifferent or external limit. Where the infinite progress as such is concerned, reflection habitually settles only on this, that any quantum, be it ever so great or small, vanishes, that going out beyond it must be possible; not, however, on this, that the sublating of quantum, the beyond, the bad infinite itself, vanishes too.

Even the first sublating, the negation of quality as such whereby quantum gets posited, is in itself a sublating of negation, – quantum being a sublated qualitative limit and hence a sublated negation, – yet only in itself is it this; posited, it is an existence, and then its negation stands fixed as the infinite, as quantum's beyond, quantum itself standing over here as a this-side, as something immediate; the infinite is on that footing determined merely as first negation, and in the infinite progress that is how it shows up. More than this, however, has been shown to lie within the progress, namely negation of negation, or what the infinite truly is. Just now this was viewed as amounting to the concept of quantum being restored thereby; and such restoration means first of all that quantum's existence has acquired its closer determination; there has arisen, that is, the quantum determined after its own concept, distinct from immediate quantum, while externality has now become the opposite of itself, posited as a moment belonging to magnitude itself, – quantum posited so that through its non-being, through infinity, its determinateness lies in another quantum, so that qualitatively it is what it is. Holding quantum's concept against its existence belongs rather to our reflection, though, to a relation not yet on hand at this stage. Nearest to hand as determination is that quantum, having gone back to quality, is henceforth qualitatively determined. For what is peculiar to it, its quality, is externality, the indifference of determinateness; and it now stands posited as being, rather, itself within its externality, as referring itself therein to itself, in simple unity with itself, hence as qualitatively determined. – Closer still is this qualitative element determined, namely as being-for-itself; for the self-reference at which quantum has arrived issued out of mediation, out of negation of negation. Infinity, being-determined-for-itself, quantum no longer has outside it but at its own self.

In the infinite progress the infinite carries only the empty significance of a non-being, of a beyond sought yet never reached, whereas it is in fact quality and nothing else. As indifferent limit quantum passes out beyond itself into infinity; what it seeks in doing so is simply being-determined-for-itself, the qualitative moment — which, taken so, remains a mere ought. Its indifference towards the limit, and with that its want of a determinateness that would be for itself, together with its passing out beyond itself, is what makes quantum quantum; and that passing beyond is to be negated, quantum finding its absolute determinateness in the infinite.

Quite generally: sublated quality is what quantum is; but quantum is infinite, passes out beyond itself, is negation of itself; so this passing beyond is in itself negation of the negated quality, restoring that quality; and what stands posited is this, that the externality which showed up as beyond is determined as quantum's own moment.

Posited hereby as repelled from itself, quantum yields two quanta, which nonetheless, being sublated, are only moments of one unity, and the determinateness of quantum is this unity. – Quantum thus referred to itself within its externality as indifferent limit, and hereby posited qualitatively, is quantitative ratio. – Within ratio quantum stands external to itself, distinct from itself; that externality of its is one quantum's reference to another quantum, each counting only in this its reference to its other; and the determinateness of quantum, which is as such a unity, is constituted by that reference. Therein it holds a determination not indifferent but qualitative; within this externality of its it has gone back into itself, and in that same externality it is what it is.

Remark 1. The Conceptual Determinateness of the Mathematical Infinite

On the one side, the mathematical infinite holds interest through the expansion of mathematics and through the great results that its introduction into that science has brought forth; on the other side, however, it is remarkable in that this science has not yet succeeded in justifying its use of it by way of the concept (concept taken in its proper sense). In the end the justifications rest on the correctness of the results that come out with the help of that determination, which is demonstrated on other grounds; they do not rest on any clarity in the object and in the operation whereby those results get brought out – so little, indeed, that the operation is rather admitted to be itself incorrect.

In and for itself this is already a defect; a procedure of that sort is unscientific. Yet it carries a further disadvantage with it, namely that mathematics, not knowing the nature of this instrument of its own – for it has not come to terms with the metaphysics and the critique of that instrument – could neither determine the range of its application nor secure itself against misuses of it.

In a philosophical respect, however, the mathematical infinite is important precisely because the concept of the genuine infinite does in fact lie at its base, and because it stands far higher than what is ordinarily called the metaphysical infinite, from which the objections against the former are launched. Against these objections the science of mathematics frequently knows no other rescue than to reject the competence of metaphysics, maintaining that it has nothing to settle with that science and need give no thought to its concepts, provided only that it proceeds consistently upon its own ground. Not what is true in itself, so it says, but what is true on its own field is what it has to consider. Metaphysics, contradicting the mathematical infinite as it does, cannot manage to deny or overturn the brilliant results yielded by its use, while mathematics cannot manage to get clear about the metaphysics of its own concept and hence about the derivation of the procedures which the use of the infinite makes necessary.

If the sole difficulty pressing upon mathematics were the difficulty of the concept as such, it might let this lie aside without further ado – insofar, that is, as the concept is more than the mere specification of the essential determinatenesses, i.e. of the determinations of the understanding, of a matter, and in the sharpness of these determinatenesses it has let nothing be wanting; for it is not a science that has to do with the concepts of its objects and would have to generate its content through the development of the concept, even if only by way of ratiocination. In the method of its infinite, however, it encounters the principal contradiction at the very distinctive method upon which, as a science, it rests altogether. For the calculus of the infinite permits and requires procedures that mathematics is bound utterly to repudiate in operations with finite magnitudes, and at the same time it treats its infinite magnitudes like finite quanta and would apply to the former the very procedures that hold good for the latter; a principal aspect of the elaboration of this science consists in having won, for the transcendent determinations and their treatment, the form of the ordinary calculus.

In this conflict of its operations mathematics shows that results found by that route agree entirely with those found by the properly mathematical route, the geometrical and analytic. But for one thing this does not concern all results, and the purpose of introducing the infinite is not merely to abbreviate the ordinary path but to reach results that cannot be achieved along it. For another, success does not of itself justify the manner of the path. This manner of calculating the infinite, moreover, shows itself burdened with the semblance of inexactitude that it gives itself when it augments finite magnitudes by an infinitely small magnitude on the one occasion, retains part of that increment in the further operation, and yet also neglects a part of it. There lies in this procedure the oddity that, the admitted inexactitude notwithstanding, a result emerges that is not merely tolerable and so close that the difference could be left out of account, but perfectly exact. In the operation itself, though, which precedes the result, the representation cannot be dispensed with that something or other is not equal to zero yet is so inconsiderable as to admit of being left out of account. All difference of greater or lesser exactitude drops away entirely, however, once we ask what is to be understood by mathematical determinateness, just as in philosophy there can be no talk of greater or lesser probability but only of truth. Granted that the method and the use of the infinite are justified by success, it is nonetheless not so superfluous to demand a justification of them as it seems superfluous, in the case of one's nose, to ask for proof of the right to make use of it. For with mathematical cognition, being a scientific cognition, everything essentially turns on proof, and even with regard to the results it is the case that the strictly mathematical method does not supply for all of them the corroboration of success, which is in any event only an external corroboration.

It is worth the trouble to look more closely at the mathematical concept of the infinite and at the most remarkable attempts whose aim is to justify its use and to remove the difficulty by which the method feels itself pressed. Consideration of these justifications and determinations of the mathematical infinite, which I mean to carry out at greater length in this Remark, will at the same time cast the clearest light upon what the true concept itself is by nature, and will show how it has hovered before them and lain at their ground.

The customary determination of the mathematical infinite is that it is a magnitude beyond which, – if it is determined as the infinitely great – there is no greater, or, – if it is determined as the infinitely small – no smaller one, or which, in the former case, is greater and, in the latter case, smaller than any magnitude one pleases. – The true concept, to be sure, finds no expression in this definition; rather, as already remarked, only that same contradiction which the infinite progress harbours; but let us see what it contains in itself. A magnitude is defined in mathematics as being something that admits of increase and decrease; hence, quite generally, as a limit that is indifferent. And since the infinitely great or the infinitely small is such as admits of no further increase or decrease, it is in fact no quantum any longer as such.

This consequence is necessary and immediate. But the reflection that the quantum – and by quantum in this Remark I mean quantum in general, as it is, the finite quantum – is sublated is the one that people are not in the habit of making, and it is this that makes the difficulty for ordinary comprehension, since the quantum, in being infinite, is required to be thought as something sublated, as one that is not a quantum and whose quantitative determinateness nevertheless remains.

To cite how Kant appraises that determination⁹, he finds it out of agreement with what is understood by an infinite whole. »On the ordinary concept, a magnitude is infinite beyond which none greater (i.e. beyond the multitude, contained in it, of a given unit) is possible; but no multitude is the greatest, since one or more units can always still be added. – By an infinite whole, on the contrary, there is no representation of how great it is; its concept, accordingly, is not the concept of a maximum (or minimum), but by it there is thought only its ratio to a unit that may be assumed at will, in respect of which the whole is greater than any number. According as this unit were assumed greater or smaller, the infinite would be greater or smaller; yet infinity, consisting as it does merely in the ratio to this given unit, would always remain the same, though of course the absolute magnitude of the whole would thereby not be cognized at all.«

What Kant censures is that infinite wholes should be viewed as a maximum, as a completed multitude of a given unit. Maximum or minimum as such still appears as a quantum, a multitude. A representation of that sort cannot fend off the consequence Kant adduces, which leads to a greater or a smaller infinite. Generally, so long as the infinite is represented as quantum, the difference of a greater and a smaller still holds good for it. This criticism, however, does not strike the concept of the genuine mathematical infinite, of the infinite difference, for that difference is no longer a finite quantum.

Kant's own concept of infinity, by contrast, the one he calls the true transcendental concept, is »that the successive synthesis of the unit in the measuring-through of a quantum can never be completed.« A quantum in general is presupposed as given; through the synthesizing of the unit it is to be made into an amount, into a quantum that can be definitely specified, but this synthesizing can never be brought to completion. With this, as is evident, nothing but the progress into infinity is enunciated, only transcendentally, i.e. represented in a way that is properly subjective and psychological. In itself, to be sure, the quantum is to be complete; transcendentally, however – namely within the subject, which confers on it a ratio to a unit – there arises only such a determination of the quantum as is uncompleted and simply afflicted with a beyond. Here, then, one comes to a halt at the contradiction that magnitude contains, but the contradiction is parcelled out to object and subject, so that to the former falls limitedness, to the latter the going out beyond every determinateness it has apprehended, into the bad infinite.

Against this it was said earlier that the determination of the mathematical infinite, and specifically as it is used in the higher analysis, answers to the concept of the genuine infinite; the collation of the two determinations shall now be undertaken in a fuller development. – Taking first the genuine infinite quantum, it determined itself as infinite in its own self; it is this because, as has emerged, the finite quantum, or quantum in general, and its beyond, the bad infinite, are sublated in the same way. The sublated quantum has thereby gone back into simplicity and into reference to itself, yet not merely in the manner of the extensive, which in passing over into intensive quantum has its determinateness only in itself at an external manifoldness, toward which it is nevertheless indifferent and from which it is supposed to be distinct. Rather, the infinite quantum contains, first, externality and, second, the negation of that externality at its own self; hence it is no longer some finite quantum, not a determinateness of magnitude that would have an existence as quantum, but is simple, and therefore only as moment; it is a determinateness of magnitude in qualitative form; its infinity consists in being a qualitative determinateness. – Being moment in this way, it stands in essential unity with its other, only as determined through this other of its, i.e. it has meaning only in reference to something standing in ratio with it. Outside this ratio it is zero; – whereas quantum as such is precisely supposed to be indifferent toward the ratio and, within it, still an immediate determination at rest. In the ratio, as only moment, it is nothing indifferent for itself; in infinity as being-for-itself, being at the same time a quantitative determinateness, it is only as a for-one.

The concept of the infinite, as it has exposed itself here in abstract fashion, will show itself [to] lie at the base of the mathematical infinite, and it will itself grow more distinct as we run through the various stages of the expression of quantum as a moment of ratio, beginning from the lowest, where it is still at the same time quantum as such, up to the higher, where it takes on the meaning and expression of infinite magnitude proper.

Let us take, then, first the quantum in the ratio, in the shape in which it is a fractional number. A fraction of this sort, 2/7 for instance, is not a quantum like 1, 2, 3, etc.; an ordinary finite number it certainly is, yet not an immediate one like the whole numbers, but as fraction is determined mediately through two other numbers which are amount and unit relative to each other, where the unit too is a determinate amount. But if we abstract from this closer determination of them relative to each other and look at them merely with respect to what befalls them as quanta in the qualitative reference in which they here stand, then 2 and 7 are otherwise indifferent quanta; since, however, they come on the scene here only as moments, each of the other and thereby of a third (of the quantum that is called the exponent), they count forthwith not as 2 and 7 but solely according to their determinateness relative to each other. For that reason 4 and 14, or 6 and 21, etc. into infinity, can just as well be posited in their stead. With this, accordingly, they begin to have a qualitative character. Were they to count as mere quanta, then of 2 and 7 the one is simply only 2 and the other simply only 7; 4, 14, 6, 21, etc. are simply something else than those numbers, and insofar as they were merely immediate quanta the one set could not be set in the place of the other. But insofar as 2 and 7 do not count according to the determinateness of being such quanta, their indifferent limit has been sublated; from this side, accordingly, they carry the moment of infinity at them, since they not merely are no longer just they themselves, but their quantitative determinateness remains, though as a qualitative one that is in itself, – namely according to what they count for in the ratio. Infinitely many others can be set in their place without the value of the fraction, the determinateness which the ratio has, thereby altering.

Yet the exhibition that infinity has at a numerical fraction is still imperfect, and imperfect for this reason, that the fraction's two sides, 2 and 7, admit of being taken out of the ratio and are ordinary indifferent quanta; their reference, that of being in a ratio and being moments, is to them something external and indifferent. Their reference itself is, in like manner, an ordinary quantum: the exponent of the ratio.

The letters operated with in general arithmetic, the nearest universality into which numbers are raised, do not have the property of being of a determinate numerical value; they are only universal signs and indeterminate possibilities of every determinate value. The fraction a/b therefore seems a more fitting expression for the infinite, seeing that a and b, once taken out of their reference to each other, remain indeterminate and, separated, have no particular value of their own either. – Yet although these letters are indeed posited as indeterminate magnitudes, their sense is that they be some finite quantum. Being thus the universal representation, but only of the determinate number, it is likewise indifferent to them to stand in the ratio, and outside it they keep this value.

If we look still more closely at what is present in the ratio, it has the two determinations at it: first, of being a quantum, but this is, second, not as an immediate quantum but as one having the qualitative opposition at it; within the ratio that determinate, indifferent quantum at the same time abides through the fact that, having returned into itself out of its otherness, out of the opposition, it is thereby also an infinite. In the following familiar form these two determinations exhibit themselves developed in their difference from each other.

As 0,285714 … the fraction 2/7 admits of being expressed, and 1/1−a as 1 + a + a² + a³ etc. So taken, it is an infinite series; the fraction itself bears the name sum, or finite expression, of that series. Set the two expressions side by side, and the one, the infinite series, exhibits it no longer as ratio but on the side that it is a quantum as a multitude of such quanta accruing to one another, as an amount. – That the magnitudes which are to constitute it as amount consist in turn of decimal fractions and hence themselves of ratios is here beside the point; for that circumstance bears on the particular sort of unit these magnitudes have, not on them insofar as they make up the amount; just as a whole number of the decimal system consisting of several digits counts essentially as an amount, and no notice is taken of its consisting of products of a number and the number ten and the powers of ten. Just as little does it matter here that there are fractions other than the 2/7 taken as example which, turned into decimal fractions, do not yield an infinite series; every one of them, however, can be expressed as such a series for a number system of another unit.

Now since in the infinite series, which is to exhibit the fraction as amount, the side of its being a ratio vanishes, there vanishes with it the side on which, as was shown just now, it had infinity at it. This latter, however, has come in in another manner; the series, namely, is itself infinite.

Of what sort the infinity of the series is, is evident of itself; it is the bad infinity of the progress. The series contains and exhibits the contradiction of exhibiting something that is a ratio and has qualitative nature in it as something ratioless, as a mere quantum, as amount. The upshot is that at the amount expressed in the series something is always lacking, so that one must always go out beyond what is posited in order to attain the required determinateness. The law of the advance is known; it lies in that determination of quantum which the fraction contains, and in the nature of the form wherein this determination is to be expressed. By continuing the series the amount can indeed be made as exact as one requires; but the exhibition through it always remains a mere ought; it is afflicted with a beyond that cannot be sublated, because to express as amount something resting on qualitative determinateness is the abiding contradiction.

In this infinite series that inexactitude is actually present of which, at the genuine mathematical infinite, only the semblance occurs. Confounding these two kinds of mathematical infinite is as little permissible as confounding the two kinds of philosophical infinite. In exhibiting the genuine mathematical infinite, the form of series was used at the start and has of late been called up again. Necessary for it, however, that form is not; quite the reverse, the infinite belonging to the infinite series differs essentially from the former, as the sequel is to show. This latter infinite even ranks below the expression of the fraction.

The infinite series, namely, harbours the bad infinity, since what the series is meant to express remains an ought, while what it does express is afflicted with a beyond that does not vanish and is different from what is to be expressed. Infinite it is not on account of the terms that are posited, but rather because they are incomplete, because the other that essentially belongs to them lies beyond them; what is there in it, be the posited terms as many as one pleases, is only a finite, in the proper sense, posited as finite, i.e. as one that is not what it ought to be. By contrast, what one calls the finite expression, or sum, of such a series is without defect; it contains in full the value that the series only seeks; the beyond has been called back from flight; there is no sundering here of what it is from what it ought to be – the two are the same.

What distinguishes the two lies more nearly to hand in this: within the infinite series the negative falls outside the terms, and these have presence in that they count only as parts of the amount. In the finite expression, on the other hand, which is a ratio, the negative is immanent, being the determinedness of the sides of the ratio through one another, a having-returned-into-self, a unity referring itself to itself, as negation of negation (both sides of the ratio are only as moments), and hence has the determination of infinity within itself. – In fact, then, what is usually called the sum, the 2/7 or the 1/1−a, is a ratio; and it is this so-called finite expression that is the genuinely infinite expression. The infinite series, conversely, is in truth sum; its purpose is to exhibit in the form of a sum what in itself is ratio, and the terms on hand in the series are terms not of a ratio but of an aggregate. It is, further, rather the finite expression; for it is the imperfect aggregate and remains essentially something defective. According to what is there in it, it is a determinate quantum, yet at the same time a lesser one than it ought to be; and then what it lacks is likewise a determinate quantum; this lacking part is in fact what is called the infinite at the series, on the merely formal side that it is something lacking, a non-being; in point of content it is a finite quantum. What is there in the series, taken together with what it lacks, is what first makes up what the fraction is, the determinate quantum that the series equally ought to be but is incapable of being. – The word infinite, even in the infinite series, is wont to pass for something lofty and exalted; this is a kind of superstition, the understanding's superstition; we have seen that it reduces rather to the determination of defectiveness.

That there are, it may still be remarked, infinite series which are not summable is, with respect to the form of series in general, an external and contingent circumstance. They contain a higher kind of infinity than the summable ones, namely an incommensurability, or the impossibility of exhibiting the quantitative ratio contained in them as a quantum, be it even as a fraction; the form of series as such, however, which they do have, contains the same determination of bad infinity that is present in the summable series.

The inversion just noted at the fraction and at its series, with respect to the expression, also takes place insofar as the mathematical infinite – namely not the one just named but the genuine one – has been called the relative infinite, whereas the ordinary metaphysical one, by which the abstract, bad infinite is understood, has been called the absolute. In fact it is rather this metaphysical infinite that is only the relative one, because the negation it expresses stands over against a limit only in such a way that this limit goes on subsisting apart from it and does not get sublated by it; the mathematical infinite, by contrast, has genuinely sublated the finite limit within itself, because the beyond of that limit is united with it.

It is preeminently in the sense established above – that the so-called sum, or finite expression, of an infinite series should rather count as the infinite one – that Spinoza sets up the concept of true infinity against that of the bad and elucidates it by examples. His concept gains most in light if I attach to the present development what he says on this head.

He defines the infinite, to begin with, as the absolute affirmation of the concrete existence of some nature, and the finite on the contrary as determinateness, as negation. The absolute affirmation of a concrete existence is, namely, to be taken as its reference to itself, as its not being by virtue of an other's being; the finite, by contrast, is negation, a ceasing as reference to an other that begins outside it. Now the absolute affirmation of a concrete existence does not indeed exhaust the concept of infinity; that concept implies that infinity is affirmation not in immediate fashion but only as reinstated by way of the other's reflection into itself, that is, as negation of the negative. With Spinoza, however, substance and its absolute unity have the form of an unmoved unity, i.e. of a unity not mediating itself with itself, of a rigidity in which the concept of the negative unity of the self, subjectivity, is not yet to be found.

The mathematical example by which he elucidates the true infinite (Epist. XXIX.) is a space between two unequal circles, one of which falls inside the other without touching it, and which are not concentric. So much, it seems, did he make of this figure and of the concept whose example he took it to be, that he set it as the motto of his Ethics. – »The mathematicians, he says, conclude that the inequalities which are possible within such a space are infinite, not on account of an infinite multitude of parts, for its magnitude is determinate and bounded, and I can posit greater and smaller spaces of the sort, but because the nature of the matter surpasses every determinateness.« – One sees that Spinoza rejects that representation of the infinite according to which it is represented as a multitude or as a series that is not completed, and recalls that here, at the space of the example, the infinite is not beyond but present and complete; this space is something bounded, yet for that very reason an infinite, »because the nature of the matter exceeds every determinateness,« because the determination of magnitude contained in it is at the same time not exhibitable as a quantum, or, in the Kantian expression cited above, because the synthesizing cannot be carried to completion into a – discrete – quantum. – In what way the opposition of continuous and discrete quantum leads over to the infinite generally is to be set forth in a later Remark. – That infinite of a series Spinoza calls the infinite of the imagination; the infinite as reference to itself, by contrast, the infinite of thinking, or infinitum actu. It is, namely, actu, it is actually infinite, because it is completed within itself and present. Thus the series 0,285714 … or 1 + a + a² + a³ … is the infinite merely of imagining or of supposing; for it has no actuality, something is simply lacking to it; whereas 2/7 or 1/1−a is that actually, being not only what the series is in its available terms but also, beyond that, what is wanting to it, what it merely ought to be. Like Spinoza's space enclosed between the two circles together with its inequalities, the 2/7 or 1/1−a is likewise a finite magnitude; and, like that space, it admits of being made greater or smaller. But no absurdity of a greater or a smaller infinite arises from this; for this quantum of the whole is no concern of the ratio of its moments, of the nature of the matter, i.e. of the qualitative determination of magnitude; what is there in the infinite series is equally a finite quantum, but is besides something defective. – Imagining, on the other hand, halts at quantum as such and gives no thought to the qualitative reference which makes up the ground of the incommensurability present.

The incommensurability lying in Spinoza's example takes in the functions of curved lines generally, and leads on more nearly to the infinite that mathematics has introduced in connection with such functions, in connection generally with the functions of variable magnitudes, and which is the genuine mathematical, quantitative infinite that Spinoza too had in mind. This determination shall now be discussed here more closely.

As regards first of all the category of variability, held to be so important, under which the magnitudes related in those functions are brought, they are for a start supposed to be variable not in the sense in which, in the fraction 2/7, the two numbers 2 and 7 are so, in that other numbers, 4 and 14, 6 and 21 and so on into infinity, can just as well be set in their place without altering the value posited in the fraction. Still more can any number one pleases be set in a/b in the place of a and b, without altering what a/b is meant to express. Only in the sense that in the place of x and y of a function too an infinite, i.e. inexhaustible, multitude of numbers can be set, are a and b variable magnitude just as much as those, x and y. The expression variable magnitudes is on that account very vague, and unhappily chosen for determinations of magnitude that have their interest and their mode of treatment in something quite other than their bare variability.

In order to make plain wherein the genuine determination of the moments of a function lies, the moments with which the interest of the higher analysis is occupied, we must run once more through the stages already brought to notice. Within 2/7 or a/b, 2 and 7 are, each for itself, determinate quanta, and the reference is not essential to them; a and b are likewise supposed to represent such quanta as outside the ratio too remain what they are. Further, 2/7 and a/b are also a fixed quantum, a quotient; the ratio makes up an amount whose unit the denominator, and the amount of these units the numerator, expresses – or the reverse; even if 4 and 14, etc. step into the place of 2 and 7, the ratio remains, as quantum too, the same. This alters essentially, however, in the function y²/x = p, for instance; here x and y do have the sense of being able to be determinate quanta; but it is not x and y, only x and y², that have a determinate quotient. Thereby these sides of the ratio, x and y, are, first, not merely no determinate quanta, but, second, their ratio is not a fixed quantum (nor is any such thing here meant, as it was with a and b), not a fixed quotient, but is as quantum simply variable. This, however, is contained solely in the fact that x stands in a ratio not to y but to the square of y. The ratio of a magnitude to the power is not a quantum but essentially a qualitative ratio; the power-ratio is the circumstance that is to be regarded as the fundamental determination. – In the function of the straight line y = a x, however, y/x = a is an ordinary fraction, an ordinary quotient; such a function is thus one of variable magnitudes only formally; here x and y stand as a and b do in a/b, and they do not occupy the determination under which the differential and integral calculus regards them. – Owing to the particular nature of the variable magnitudes in this way of considering them, it would have been to the purpose to introduce for them a particular name as well as designations other than the usual ones for the unknown magnitudes in any finite equation, determinate or indeterminate; and this for the sake of their essential diversity from such merely unknown magnitudes, which in themselves are perfectly determinate quanta, or a determinate range of determinate quanta. – Again, it is only for want of consciousness regarding the peculiarity of what makes up the interest of the higher analysis and has brought on both the need for the differential calculus and its invention, that functions of the first degree, such as the equation of the straight line, get drawn for their own sake into the treatment of this calculus; a further share in such formalism falls to the misunderstanding which supposes that the demand, correct in itself, for the generalization of a method is met by having the specific determinateness on which the need is founded left out, so that it passes for settled that in this field only variable magnitudes in general are at issue. Much formalism in the consideration of these objects, and in their treatment as well, would surely have been spared had it been seen that what is at stake is not variable magnitudes as such but determinations of powers.

But there is yet a further stage at which the mathematical infinite steps forth in its peculiarity. In an equation in which x and y are posited as determined in the first instance through a power-ratio, x and y as such are still to mean quanta; this meaning, however, is now lost altogether and completely in the so-called infinitely small differences. dx, dy are quanta no longer, nor are they supposed to signify such, but have a signification solely in their reference, a sense merely as moments. No longer are they something – something taken as quantum – nor finite differences; but they are also not nothing, not the determinationless zero. Outside their ratio they are pure zeros, yet they are to be taken only as moments of the ratio, as determinations of the differential coefficient dx/dy.

In this concept of the infinite, quantum has been genuinely completed into a qualitative existence; posited it is as actually infinite; sublated it is not merely as this or that quantum, but as quantum in general. There remains, however, the determinateness of quantity as element of quanta, as principle, or, as it has also been put, in its first concept.

It is against this concept that every attack has been directed which has been made upon the fundamental determination of the mathematics of this infinite, upon the differential and integral calculus. Incorrect representations on the part of the mathematicians themselves occasioned its going unrecognized; chiefly, however, the blame for these contestations lies with the incapacity to justify the subject matter as concept. Yet mathematics, as was recalled above, cannot here get around the concept; for being mathematics of the infinite, it does not restrict itself to that finite determinateness which its objects have – whereas in pure mathematics space and number, with their determinations, get considered and related to one another only according to their finitude –; it rather transposes a determination taken up from that quarter and treated by it into identity with its opposite, as when it turns a curved line into a straight, a circle into a polygon, and so on. The operations which it allows itself as differential and integral calculus therefore contradict outright the nature of merely finite determinations and their references, and would for that reason have their justification in the concept alone.

If the mathematics of the infinite held fast to this, that those determinations of quantity are vanishing magnitudes, i.e. such as are no longer any quantum whatever, yet are not nothing either, but are still a determinateness over against another, then nothing seemed clearer than that there is no such intermediate state, as it was called, between being and nothing. – What is to be made of this objection and of the so-called intermediate state has already been shown above, at Remark 4 to the category of becoming. Certainly the unity of being and nothing is no state; a state would be some determination of being and of nothing, one into which these moments were supposed to have slipped merely by accident, as into a sickness or an external affection, through an erroneous thinking; this middle and unity – the vanishing, or equally the becoming – is rather their truth and theirs alone.

It has further been said that what is infinite is not comparable as a greater or a smaller; that there can therefore be no ratio of infinites to infinites, nor orders or dignities of the infinite, whereas differences of the infinite differences do occur in the science of them. – Underlying this already mentioned objection there is always the representation that what is here to be spoken of are quanta compared as quanta; that determinations which are quanta no longer have no ratio to one another any more. On the contrary, what is only in the ratio is no quantum; quantum is a determination of the kind that outside its ratio is supposed to have a perfectly indifferent existence, one to which its difference from another is indifferent, whereas the qualitative is only what it is in its difference from an other. Those infinite magnitudes are accordingly not merely comparable; they are only as moments of the comparison, of the ratio.

I adduce the most important determinations that have been given in mathematics concerning this infinite; from them it will be evident that the thought of the matter lies at their base, in agreement with the concept developed here, but that their authors did not fathom it as concept and, in applying it, again stood in need of expedients contradicting their better cause.

The thought cannot be determined more correctly than Newton has given it. In doing so I set apart the determinations belonging to the representation of motion and velocity (from which he chiefly took the name fluxions), because in these the thought appears not in the requisite abstraction but concretely, mixed with inessential forms. Newton explains these fluxions (Princ. mathem. phil. nat. L. 1. Lemma XI. Schol.) to this effect: that by them he understands not indivisibles – a form employed by earlier mathematicians, Cavalleri among them, and one that contains the concept of a quantum determinate in itself – but vanishing divisibles. Further: not sums and ratios of determinate parts, but rather the limits (limites) of sums and of ratios. The objection is raised, he says, that vanishing magnitudes have no last ratio, because before they have vanished it is not the last, and when they have vanished there is none at all. But the ratio of vanishing magnitudes is to be taken as the ratio neither before they vanish nor afterwards, but that with which they vanish (quacum evanescunt). In the same way the first ratio of becoming magnitudes is that with which they become.

Given the state of scientific method at that time, all that was explained was what is to be understood by an expression; but that this or that is to be understood by it is properly a subjective demand, or else a historical requirement, where it goes unshown that such a concept is in and for itself necessary and possesses inner truth. Yet what has been adduced shows that the concept Newton set up answers to the way in which infinite magnitude issued, in the presentation given above, from the reflection of quantum into itself. Magnitudes are what is meant, in their vanishing, i.e. such as are quanta no longer; further, no ratios of determinate parts, but rather the limits of the ratio. Both the quanta for themselves, then, the sides of the ratio, and with them the ratio too, insofar as it would be a quantum, are to vanish; the limit of the ratio of magnitudes is that in which it is and is not; more precisely, this means that in which the quantum has vanished and with it the ratio is preserved only as qualitative ratio of quantity, and its sides likewise as qualitative moments of quantity. – Newton adds that from this, that there are last ratios of the vanishing magnitudes, one is not to conclude that there are last magnitudes, indivisibles. That would be, namely, once more a leap from the abstract ratio over to such of its sides as would be supposed to have a value for themselves outside their reference, as indivisibles, as something that would be a one, a ratioless thing.

Against that misunderstanding he further recalls that the last ratios are not ratios of last magnitudes, but limits which the ratios of magnitudes decreasing without limit approach more nearly than any given, i.e. finite, difference, yet which limit they do not overstep, so that they would become nothing. – By last magnitudes, namely, as was said, indivisibles or ones could have been understood. In the determination of the last ratio, however, the representation both of the indifferent one, the ratioless one, and of the finite quantum is set aside. Yet neither the decreasing without limit, into which Newton transposes quantum and which expresses only the progress into infinity, nor the determination of divisibility, which here has no immediate significance any more, would have been called for, had the determination demanded developed itself further into the concept of a determination of magnitude that is purely and only moment of the ratio.

In view of the preservation of the ratio amid the vanishing of the quanta one meets (elsewhere, as in Carnot, Reflexions sur la Métaphysique du Calcul Infinitésimal.) with the statement that by virtue of the law of continuity the vanishing magnitudes retain, before they vanish, the ratio out of which they come. – This representation expresses the true nature of the matter, provided that what is meant is not the continuity that quantum has in the infinite progress, of continuing itself into its vanishing in such a way that in the beyond of it there arises once again only a finite quantum, a new term of the series; a continuous advance, however, is always so represented that the values run through are ones which are still finite quanta. In that transition, by contrast, which is made into the genuine infinite, it is the ratio that is the continuous; so thoroughly continuous and self-preserving is it, that the transition consists rather solely in this, in lifting the ratio out purely and making the ratioless determination vanish, i.e. the determination that a quantum which is a side of the ratio, posited also outside this reference, is still quantum. – This purification of the quantitative ratio is to that extent nothing other than what occurs when an empirical existence is comprehended. By this it is so raised above itself that its concept contains the same determinations as it does itself, but grasped in their essentiality and taken up into the unity of the concept, wherein they have lost their indifferent, conceptless subsistence.

Equally interesting is the other form of the Newtonian presentation of the magnitudes in question, namely as generating magnitudes or principles. A magnitude that has been generated (genita) is a product or a quotient, roots, rectangles, squares, and also sides of rectangles and squares; – in general a finite magnitude. – »Considering it as variable, as increasing or decreasing in continual motion and flux, he understands its momentaneous increments or decrements under the name of moments. These, however, are not to be taken for particles of determinate magnitude (particulae finitae). Such are not themselves moments but magnitudes generated out of moments; what are to be understood are rather the becoming principles or beginnings of finite magnitudes.« – Quantum is here distinguished from itself, as it is qua product or existent thing, and as it is in its becoming, in its beginning and principle – that is, as it is in its concept, or, what here amounts to the same, in its qualitative determination; within the latter the quantitative differences – the infinite increments or decrements – count as moments merely; only that which has become is the quantum, the thing gone over into the indifference of existence and into externality. – But if these determinations of the infinite, adduced with respect to increments or decrements, must be acknowledged by the philosophy of the genuine concept, it is at once to be remarked as well that the forms of increments and the like themselves come within the category of the immediate quantum and of that continuous advance mentioned, and that the representations of increment, accretion, increase of x by dx or i and so forth are rather to be regarded as the fundamental evil present in the methods; – as the abiding obstacle to lifting purely out of the representation of ordinary quantum the determination of the qualitative moment of quantity.

Far behind the determinations given stands the representation of infinitely small magnitudes, a representation lurking in the increment or decrement itself as well. According to it they are supposed to be of such a constitution that not only they by comparison with finite magnitudes, but also their higher orders by comparison with the lower, or again the products of several by comparison with a single one, are to be neglected. – In Leibnitz the demand for this neglect, which the earlier inventors of methods bearing on this magnitude likewise let come into play, stands out more strikingly. It is chiefly this demand that, along with the gain in convenience, lends this calculus the semblance of inexactitude and of express incorrectness in the course of its operation. – Wolf sought to make it intelligible in his own way of popularizing things, i.e. of adulterating the concept and putting incorrect sensuous representations in its place. He compares, namely, the neglect of the infinite differences of higher orders by comparison with the lower to how a surveyor proceeds who, when he measures the height of a mountain, would have been no less exact if the wind had meanwhile blown a grain of sand from the summit, or to the neglect of the heights of houses and towers when lunar eclipses are computed (Element. Mathes. univ. Tom. I. El. Analys. math. P. II. C. I. s. Schol.).

Though the fair-mindedness of common human understanding permits an inexactitude of this sort, all geometers have by contrast rejected the representation. It presses itself upon one of its own accord that in the science of mathematics there is no question whatever of such empirical exactitude, that mathematical measuring by operations of the calculus, or by constructions and proofs of geometry, is wholly distinct from land-surveying, from the measuring of empirical lines, figures, and so forth. Besides, as was cited above, the analysts show by comparing the result as obtained on the strictly geometrical path with the result obtained by the method of infinite differences that the one comes out the same as the other, and that a more or a less of exactitude has no place at all. And it goes without saying that an absolutely exact result could not come from a procedure that were inexact. Yet again, on the other side, the procedure itself cannot do without that neglect on the ground of insignificance, protests against the manner of justification adduced notwithstanding. And this is the difficulty around which the efforts of the analysts revolve, the effort to make comprehensible the absurdity lying herein, and to remove it.

In this respect it is above all Euler's representation that is to be adduced. Laying the general Newtonian definition at the base, he presses the point that what the differential calculus considers are the ratios of the increments of a magnitude, while the infinite difference as such must be viewed wholly as zero (Institut. Calc. different. P. I. C. III.). – How this is to be understood lies in what precedes; the infinite difference is zero only of the quantum, not a qualitative zero, but, as zero of the quantum, rather pure moment only of the ratio. It is not a difference by a magnitude; yet for that very reason it is, on the one hand, altogether awry to enunciate those moments which are called infinitely small magnitudes also as increments or decrements and as differences. Underlying this determination is the idea that to the finite magnitude present at the start something is added or from it something subtracted, that a subtraction or an addition takes place, an arithmetical, external operation. The transition from the function of the variable magnitude into its differential, however, is to be viewed as being of a quite other nature, namely, as was discussed, as a leading back of the finite function to the qualitative ratio of its determinations of quantity. – On the other hand, the awry side strikes one of itself when it is said that the increments are for themselves zeros, that only their ratios are considered; for a zero has no determinateness left at all. This representation therefore does indeed reach as far as the negative of quantum and enunciates it determinately, but it does not at the same time grasp this negative in its positive meaning, that of qualitative determinations of quantity which, were they to be torn out of the ratio and taken as quanta, would be nothing but zeros. – Lagrange (Théorie des fonct. analyt. Introd.) judges of the representation of limits or last ratios that, however well one may represent to oneself two magnitudes' ratio while they remain finite, such a ratio yields the understanding no distinct and determinate concept as soon as its terms become zero together. – In fact the understanding must go out beyond this merely negative side, that the terms of the ratio are zeros as quanta, and apprehend them positively, as qualitative moments. – What Euler (at the place cited §. 84. ff.) further adds concerning the determination given, in order to show that two so-called infinitely small magnitudes, which are supposed to be nothing else than zeros, nevertheless have a ratio to each other and that for this reason not the sign of zero but other signs are in use for them, cannot be regarded as sufficient. He would ground this on the difference between arithmetical and geometrical ratio; in the former we look to the difference, in the latter to the quotient, and though the former, between two zeros, is equal, the geometrical is not equal on that account; if 2 : 1 = 0 : 0, then, by the nature of the proportion, since the first member is twice the second, the third member too must be twice the fourth; 0 : 0 is accordingly to be taken, on the strength of the proportion, as the ratio of 2 : 1 itself. – In common arithmetic too n · 0 = 0; hence n : 1 = 0 : 0. – Yet precisely because 2 : 1 or n : 1 is a ratio of quanta, there corresponds to it neither a ratio nor a designation of 0 : 0.

I refrain from multiplying the citations, since those considered have shown well enough that the genuine concept of the infinite does indeed lie in them, but that it has not been lifted out and grasped in its determinateness. Hence, when the advance is made to the operation itself, it cannot come about that the genuine conceptual determination should make itself count in it; the finite determinateness of quantity rather returns, and the operation cannot do without the representation of a merely relatively small. The calculus renders it necessary to subject the so-called infinite magnitudes to the ordinary arithmetical operations of adding and the like, which are grounded on the nature of finite magnitudes, and thus to let them count for a moment as finite magnitudes and to treat them as such. The calculus would have to justify itself for dragging them down on the one occasion into this sphere and treating them as increments or differences, and for neglecting them, on the other side, as quanta, after having just applied to them forms and laws of finite magnitudes.

Of the attempts of the geometers to remove these difficulties I adduce still the principal ones.

The older analysts made fewer scruples over the matter; but the efforts of the moderns went chiefly to bringing the calculus of the infinite back to the evidentness of the properly geometrical method and to attaining in it the rigour of the proofs of the ancients (– expressions of Lagrange –) in mathematics. Yet since the principle of the analysis of the infinite is of higher nature than that on which the mathematics of finite magnitudes rests, the former had at once, of itself, to renounce that sort of evidentness, just as philosophy too can lay no claim to the kind of distinctness that the sciences of the sensuous possess, natural history for example, and just as eating and drinking pass for a more intelligible business than thinking and comprehending. What is at issue, accordingly, will only be the effort to attain the rigour of the proofs of the ancients.

Several have attempted to dispense with the concept of the infinite altogether and to accomplish without it what seemed bound up with its use. – Lagrange speaks, for example, of the method invented by Landen, and says of it that it is purely analytic and does not employ the infinitely small differences, but first introduces different values of the variable magnitudes and subsequently sets them equal. He judges, moreover, that in this way the advantages proper to the differential calculus, simplicity of method and ease of operations, are lost. – This is, to be sure, a procedure having something answering to that from which Descartes' method of tangents starts out, a method still to be mentioned more closely further on. This much, it may be remarked here, is at once evident in general: that the procedure of assuming different values of the variable magnitudes and afterwards setting them equal belongs to another circle of mathematical treatment than does the method of the differential calculus itself, and that the peculiarity of the simple ratio, to be discussed more closely later on – the ratio to which its actual concrete determination leads back, namely that of the derived function to the original – is not lifted out.

The elder among the moderns, such as Fermat, Barrow and others, who first made use of the infinitely small in that application which was later elaborated into the differential and integral calculus, and then Leibnitz too and those who followed, Euler among them, have always openly believed themselves entitled to drop the products of infinite differences, and likewise their higher powers, on no other ground than that these vanish relatively over against the lower order. On this alone rests, with them, the fundamental theorem, namely the determination of what the differential of a product or of a power is, for to this the whole theoretical doctrine reduces itself. The rest is partly mechanism of development, partly application, into which, however, as is to be considered further on, the higher or rather the sole interest in fact falls. – With regard to the present matter, only the elementary point is to be adduced here, that on the same ground of insignificance the main proposition concerning curves is assumed, namely that the elements of the curves, that is to say the increments of the abscissa and of the ordinate, have to each other the ratio of the subtangent and the ordinate; with a view to obtaining similar triangles, the arc, which makes up a triangle's third side alongside the two increments – the triangle formerly and with good right called the characteristic one – counts as a straight line, as a piece of the tangent, and one of the increments accordingly as reaching right up to the tangent. These assumptions raise those determinations, on the one hand, above the nature of finite magnitudes; on the other hand, however, a procedure is applied to the moments now called infinite that holds only of finite magnitudes and in which nothing may be neglected out of regard for insignificance. With a manner of proceeding of this sort the difficulty pressing upon the method remains in its full force.

A remarkable procedure of Newton's is to be adduced here; (Princ. Math. phil. nat. Lib. II. Lemma II. Propos. VII.) – the invention of an ingenious artifice for getting rid of the arithmetically incorrect dropping of the products of infinite differences, or of their higher orders, in the finding of the differentials. The differential of the product – whence the differentials of quotients, powers and so forth then follow easily – he finds in the following manner. The product, if x and y are each taken smaller by half of its infinite difference, passes over into xy – xdy/2 – ydx/2 + dxdy/4; but if one lets x and y increase by just as much, into xy + xdy/2 + ydx/2 + dxdy/4. Now with the first product subtracted from this second one, ydx + xdy remains as excess, and this, he says, is the excess of the growth by a whole dx and dy, for it is by this growth that the two products are distinguished; it is therefore the differential of xy. – One sees that in this procedure the term making up the chief difficulty, the product of the two infinite differences, dxdy, falls away of itself. But the Newtonian name notwithstanding, it must be permitted to say that such an operation, elementary though it is, is incorrect; it is incorrect that (x + dx/2) (y + dy/2) – (x – dx/2) (y – dy/2) = (x + dx) (y + dy) – xy. Only the need to give the calculus of fluxions, in view of its importance, a foundation could have brought a Newton to practise upon himself the deception of such a proof.

Other forms which Newton employs in deriving the differential are tied to concrete significations of the elements and their powers, significations bearing on motion. – In his use of the series-form, which otherwise distinguishes his method, it lies too near at hand to say that it always stands in one's power, by adding further terms, to take the magnitude as exactly as one requires, and that the terms dropped are relatively insignificant, the result on the whole being only an approximation, for him not to have contented himself with this ground here as well, just as in his method for solving equations of higher degrees by approximation he drops, on the crude ground of their smallness, the higher powers arising when each value found, still inexact, is substituted into the given equation; see Lagrange Equations Numériques p. 125.

That error into which Newton lapsed when solving a problem, through dropping essential higher powers, an error that gave his opponents the occasion for a triumph of their method over his, and whose true origin Lagrange has exhibited in his recent investigation of it (Théorie des fonct. analyt. 3me P. Ch. IV.), proves the formalism and the uncertainty still present in the use of that instrument. Lagrange shows that Newton slipped into the error because he neglected the term of the series containing the power upon which everything turned in the determinate problem. Newton had held to that formal, superficial principle of dropping terms on account of their relative smallness. – It is well known, namely, that in mechanics the terms of the series developing the function of a motion are given a determinate signification, such that the first term, or first function, has reference to the moment of velocity, the second to accelerating force, the third to resistance of forces. Here, accordingly, the terms of the series are to be viewed not merely as parts belonging to a sum, but as qualitative moments of a whole of the concept. Thereby the dropping of the remaining terms, which belong to the badly infinite series, acquires a wholly different signification from the dropping of them on the ground of their relative smallness.¹⁰ The Newtonian solution contained that error, not because terms of the series were in it dropped merely qua parts of a sum, but because no heed was paid to the term containing the qualitative determination upon which everything turned.

In this example it is the qualitative sense on which the procedure has been made to depend. In connection with this the general assertion may at once be advanced that the entire difficulty of the principle would fall away if, in place of the formalism of putting the determination of the differential merely into the task that gives it its name – that of [specifying] the difference in general of a function from its alteration after its variable magnitude has received an increment – the qualitative meaning of the principle were specified and the operation were made dependent upon this. In this sense the differential of xⁿ shows itself entirely exhausted by the first term of the series that results from the development of (x + dx)ⁿ. That the remaining terms go unheeded does not, on this view, come from their relative smallness; – no inexactitude, no fault or error is presupposed here that would be compensated and corrected by another error, a view from which Carnot above all justifies the ordinary method of the infinitesimal calculus. Since it is not a sum but a ratio that is at issue, the differential is found completely through the first term; and where there is need of further terms, of differentials of higher orders, their determination involves not the continuation of a series as sum but the repetition of one and the same ratio – the ratio alone being wanted, and it stands already perfectly determined in the first term. Whatever need there is for the form of a series, for summing it, and whatever hangs together with that, must then be held entirely apart from that interest of the ratio.

The elucidations which Carnot gives concerning the method of infinite magnitudes contain in the most refined form, and exposed with the utmost clarity, what occurred in the representations cited above. But at the transition to the operation itself the ordinary representations, of the infinite smallness of the dropped terms relative to the others, come in more or less. He justifies the method rather by the fact that the results come out correct, and by the utility that accrues, for simplification and abbreviation of the calculus, from introducing imperfect equations, as he calls them, i.e. such as have had an arithmetically incorrect omission made in them, than by the nature of the matter itself.

Lagrange, as is well known, took up again Newton's original method, the method of series, in order to be relieved of the difficulties which the representation of the infinitely small carries with it, as well as of those carried by the method of first and last ratios and limits. Of his calculus of functions, whose other merits with respect to precision, abstraction and universality are recognized well enough, only this is to be adduced as belonging here, that it rests on the fundamental theorem that the difference, though it does not become zero, can be assumed so small that every term of the series exceeds in magnitude the sum of all those following. – Here too the start is made from the categories of increment and of difference of the function whose variable magnitude receives the increment, whereby the burdensome series of the original function comes in; just as in the sequel the terms of the series to be dropped come into consideration only in the respect that they constitute a sum, and the ground for dropping them is placed in the relativity of their quantum. Here too, then, the omission is not for the general case led back to the point of view which occurs partly in some applications where, as was recalled earlier, the series' terms are supposed to carry a determinate qualitative signification and terms are left out of account, not on the score of being insignificant in magnitude, but on the score of being insignificant in point of quality; while partly the omission itself then falls away in the essential point of view which, for the so-called differential coefficient, first emerges determinately in Lagrange's so-called application of the calculus, as the Remark that follows will set forth at greater length.

The qualitative character in general, which has here been shown at the form of magnitude in question in what is thereby called the infinitely small, is met with most immediately in the category of the limit of the ratio adduced above, whose implementation in the calculus has been stamped as a method of its own. Of what Lagrange judges of this method, that it wants ease in application and that the expression limit offers no determinate idea, we shall take up the second point here and look more closely at what is set up regarding its analytic meaning. In the representation of the limit there does indeed lie the genuine category, indicated above, of the qualitative determination of ratio of the variable magnitudes, for the forms in which these come in, dx and dy, are to be taken purely and only as moments of dy/dx, while dx/dy itself is to be regarded as a single indivisible sign. That there is thereby lost, for the mechanism of the calculus and especially in its application, the advantage which it draws from having the sides of the differential coefficient separated off from each other, is to be set aside here. That limit is now supposed to be limit of a given function; – it is to specify a certain value in relation to that function, a value determined by the manner of the derivation. With the bare category of limit, however, we should be no further than with what has been at issue in this Remark, namely to show that the infinitely small occurring in the differential calculus as dx and dy carries not merely the negative, empty sense of a magnitude that is not finite, not given – as when one says an infinite multitude, on into infinity and the like – but the determinate sense of the qualitative determinateness of the quantitative, of a moment of ratio as such. This category, however, taken so, still has no relation to what a given function is, and does not of itself reach into the treatment of such a function or into a use to be made of that determination at it; thus the representation of limit too, held back within this determinateness demonstrated of it, would lead to nothing. But the expression limit itself already contains this, that it is limit of something, i.e. that it gives voice to a certain value lying in the function of variable magnitude; and it is to be seen how this concrete dealing with it is constituted. – It is to be the limit of that ratio which the two increments bear to each other, the increments by which the two variable magnitudes, joined in an equation and the one of them regarded as function of the other, have been assumed to be increasing; – the increment is here taken indeterminately in general, and to that extent no use is made of the infinitely small. But in the first place the path to finding this limit brings on the same inconsistencies as lie in the other methods. This path, namely, is the following. If y = fx, then fx, when y passes over into y + k, is supposed to alter into fx + ph + qh² + rh³ etc.; hence k = ph + qh² etc. and k/h = p + qh + rh² etc. Now when k and h vanish, the second term vanishes apart from p, and this p is now supposed to be the limit of the ratio of the two increments. One sees that h as quantum is posited = 0, but that k/h is on that account not supposed to be at the same time = o/o but to remain still a ratio. The advantage of warding off the inconsistency lying herein is now supposed to be afforded by the representation of the limit; p is supposed at the same time not to be the actual ratio, which would be = o/o, but only the determinate value which the ratio can approach infinitely, i.e. so approach that the difference can become smaller than any given one. The more determinate sense of approximation with regard to what is properly supposed to approach what will be considered below. – But that a quantitative difference which has the determination not merely of being able to be smaller than any given one, but of being obliged to be so, is a quantitative difference no longer, this is clear of itself, as evident as anything in mathematics can be evident; with this, however, nothing beyond dy/dx = o/o has been reached. If, on the contrary, dy/dx = p is assumed, i.e. as a determinate quantitative ratio, as is in fact the case, then conversely the presupposition which has posited h = 0 lands in embarrassment, a presupposition through which alone k/h = p is found. But if one grants that k/h = 0, and with h = 0 in fact k = 0 of itself as well – for the increment k to y takes place only on the condition that the increment h is there – then it would be for one to say what p is then supposed to be, p being an altogether determinate quantitative value. On this the simple, dry answer offers itself at once, that it is a coefficient, and from what derivation it arises, – the first function of an original function, derived in a certain determinate manner. Were one to content oneself with that, as Lagrange has in fact contented himself with it so far as the matter goes, then the general part of this science of the differential calculus – and immediately this form of it which goes by the name theory of limits – would be freed from the increments, then from their infinite or arbitrary smallness, from the difficulty of getting rid again – apart from the first term, or rather only the coefficient of the first term – of the further terms of a series, terms which through the introduction of those increments unavoidably present themselves; and purified besides of what further hangs together with this, of the formal categories above all of the infinite, of infinite approximation, and of the further categories, here equally empty, of continuous magnitude¹¹ and of such as one otherwise deems necessary, like striving, becoming, occasion of an alteration. But then it would be required to show what meaning and worth p has, apart from the dry determination, quite sufficient for the theory, that it is nothing further than a function derived from the development of a binomial, i.e. what connection and use it has for further mathematical need; and of this the second Remark is to treat. – What follows here first, however, is the exposition of the confusion which has been brought into the apprehending of the proper, qualitative determinateness of the ratio, the thing at issue in the first place, through the cited use, so current in the presentations, of the representation of approximation.

It has been shown that what the so-called infinite differences express is the vanishing of the ratio's sides qua quanta, and that what stays behind is their ratio of quantity, purely insofar as this is determined in qualitative fashion; so little is the qualitative ratio lost in this that it is rather what results precisely through the conversion of finite magnitudes into infinite ones. In this, as we have seen, consists the entire nature of the matter. – Thus in the last ratio the quanta of the abscissa and the ordinate, for example, vanish; but the sides of this ratio remain essentially the one element [of the] ordinate, the other element of the abscissa. Where the manner of representation is used according to which one lets the one ordinate approach the other infinitely, then the ordinate previously distinguished passes over into the other ordinate, the abscissa previously distinguished into the other abscissa; essentially, however, no passing over of ordinate into abscissa, or of abscissa into ordinate, takes place. The element of the ordinate – to stay with this example of variable magnitudes – is to be taken not as the difference of one ordinate from another ordinate; it is rather the difference, the qualitative determination of magnitude, over against the element of the abscissa; the principle of the one variable magnitude over against that of the other stand in ratio with each other. The difference, in ceasing to be difference of finite magnitudes, has ceased to be a manifold within itself; it has collapsed into simple intensity, into the determinateness of one qualitative moment of ratio over against the other.

This constitution of the matter is, however, obscured by the fact that what has just been called element, of the ordinate for instance, gets grasped as difference or increment in such fashion that it is supposed to be nothing but the difference of the quantum of one ordinate between the quantum of another ordinate. The limit has here, accordingly, not the sense of the ratio; it counts only as the last value which another magnitude of like kind constantly so approaches that it can be distinguished from it by as little as one pleases, and so that the last ratio is a ratio of equality. Thus the infinite difference is the hovering of a difference of quantum from quantum, while the qualitative nature – whereby dx is essentially a determination of ratio not over against x but over against dy – recedes in the representation. One lets dx² vanish over against dx, but far more does dx vanish over against x, and this truly means: it has only a ratio to dy. – In presentations of this sort the geometers are always concerned above all to make the approximation of a magnitude to its limit comprehensible, and to keep hold of this side of quantum's difference from quantum, of how it is no difference and yet a difference still. But approximation is in any case a category for itself which says nothing and makes nothing comprehensible; dx has approximation already behind it, it is neither near nor a nearer; and infinitely near itself means the negation of nearness and of approaching.

Now since it has come about that the increments or infinite differences have been considered only on the side of the quantum that vanishes in them, and only as limit of the quantum, they are grasped in this way as ratioless moments. There would follow from this the inadmissible representation that it is permitted, in the last ratio, to set abscissa and ordinate, say, or even sine, cosine, tangent, versed sine and whatever else, equal to one another. – At first this representation seems to prevail wherever an arc gets treated as tangent; for the arc too is surely incommensurable with the straight line, and its element, in the first instance, of a quality other than that of the straight line's element. More absurd still and more impermissible it seems than the confounding of abscissa, ordinate, versed sine, cosine and so forth, when quadrata rotundis, when a part of the arc, infinitely small though it be, is taken for a piece of the tangent and thus treated as a straight line. – This treatment, however, is essentially to be kept apart from the confounding just censured; its justification lies in this, that within the triangle whose sides are the element of an arc together with the elements of its abscissa and of its ordinate, the ratio is the same as it would be were that arc-element the element of a straight line, of the tangent; and the angles making up the essential ratio – i.e. the ratio left over to these elements once one abstracts from the finite magnitudes that belong to them – are one and the same. – One can also put it thus, that straight lines, as infinitely small, have passed over into curved lines, and that the ratio of them in their infinity is a ratio of curves. Since by its definition the straight line is the shortest path between two points, its difference from the curved line is grounded on the determination of multitude, on the lesser multitude of what is distinguishable along this path, which is accordingly a determination of quantum. But this determination vanishes in it, once it is taken as intensive magnitude, as infinite moment, as element; and with it vanishes its difference from the curved line, a difference resting merely on the difference of quantum. – Thus, as infinite, straight line and arc retain no quantitative ratio, and with it, on the strength of the definition assumed, no qualitative diversity from each other either, but the former rather passes over into the latter.

Akin to the equating of heterogeneous determinations, yet at the same time distinct from it, is the assumption, for itself indeterminate and entirely indifferent, that infinitely small parts of the same whole are equal to one another; applied, however, to an object heterogeneous within itself, i.e. afflicted with an essential non-uniformity of the determination of magnitude, it brings forth that peculiar inversion contained in the proposition of higher mechanics, that in equal, and indeed infinitely small, times infinitely small parts of a curve are traversed in uniform motion, seeing that this gets asserted of a motion in which, within equal finite, i.e. existing, parts of time, finite, i.e. existing, unequal parts of the curve are traversed, i.e. therefore of a motion which as existing is non-uniform and is assumed to be so. This proposition is the expression in words of what an analytic term is supposed to signify, a term arising in the development, cited above as well, of the formula of a motion that is non-uniform though otherwise conformable to a law. Older mathematicians sought to express in words and propositions the findings of the newly invented infinitesimal calculus, which in any case always had to do with concrete objects, and to exhibit them in geometrical figures, essentially in order to use them for the theorems in the ordinary manner of proof. The terms of a mathematical formula into which analytic treatment had broken up the magnitude of the object – of motion, say – there acquired an objective signification, that of velocity, accelerating force and so forth; according to such signification they were supposed to yield correct propositions, physical laws, and, following the analytic connection, their objective linkages and ratios too were supposed to be determined, as for example precisely that in a uniformly accelerated motion a particular velocity proportional to the times exists, but that besides this an increment coming from the force of gravity is always added. Such propositions are in the modern, analytic shape of mechanics adduced throughout as findings of the calculus, without concern whether they have a real sense for themselves at them, i.e. one to which a concrete existence would correspond, and without concern for a proof of such; the difficulty of making comprehensible the connection of such determinations when they are taken in the pronounced real sense, for example the transition from that merely uniform velocity to a uniformly accelerated one, passes for being entirely removed by the analytic treatment, in which such connection is a simple consequence of the by now settled authority of the operations of the calculus. It is given out as a triumph of science to find, by mere calculus, beyond experience, laws, i.e. propositions of concrete existence which have no concrete existence. In the earlier, still naive period of the infinitesimal calculus, however, a real sense for themselves was to be specified for those determinations and propositions, represented in geometrical figures, and made plausible, and in such a sense they were to be applied to the proof of the principal theorems that were at issue (– see the Newtonian proof of his fundamental theorem of the theory of gravitation in the Princ. mathem. philosophiae naturalis lib. I. Sect. II. Prop. I. compared with Schubert's Astronomy (first ed. III. B. §. 20.), where it is conceded that matters do not stand exactly so, i.e. that at the point which is the nerve of the proof they do not stand as Newton assumes –).

It will not be deniable that in this field much has been put up with as proof, chiefly with the aid of the fog of the infinitely small, on no other ground than that what came out was always known beforehand anyway, and that the proof, contrived so that it should come out, at least brought off the semblance of a scaffolding of proof; – a semblance that was still preferred to mere faith or to knowledge from experience. For my part, however, I have no hesitation in regarding this manner as nothing more than a mere sleight of hand and charlatanry of proving, and in reckoning among such even Newtonian proofs, in particular those belonging to the one just cited, on account of which Newton has been exalted to the skies and above Keppler for having set out mathematically what the latter found merely through experience.

It was in order to prove physical laws that the empty scaffolding of such proofs got erected. But determinations of magnitude in physics, insofar as these are laws having the qualitative nature of the moments for their ground, mathematics is simply not in a position to prove; and this on the simple ground that this science is not philosophy and does not proceed from the concept, and that the qualitative therefore, insofar as it is not taken up lemmatically from experience, lies outside its sphere. The assertion of the honour of mathematics, that all propositions occurring in it should be rigorously proved, often made it forget its limit; thus it seemed against its honour to acknowledge, for propositions of experience, simply experience as source and as sole proof; later the consciousness of this became more cultivated; but until such consciousness gets clear about the difference between what is mathematically provable and what can only be taken from elsewhere, as about what are merely terms of an analytic development and what are physical concrete existences, scientific rigour cannot form itself into a strict and pure bearing. – That scaffolding of Newtonian proving, however, will doubtless yet meet with the same justice that has been done to another groundless Newtonian edifice of artifice built from optical experiments and the inferring bound up with them. Applied mathematics remains full of a similar brew of experience and reflection; yet just as, with that optics, one part after another has for a good while now begun to be factually ignored in science – with the inconsistency, however, of still letting the rest stand although it contradicts this – so too it is a fact that part of those deceptive proofs has already fallen of itself into oblivion or been replaced by others.