The opposition between empiricism and science rests therefore upon this: that the former regards its object in being—as something already prepared and accomplished; science, on the other hand, views its object in becoming, and as something that has yet to be accomplished. As science cannot set out from anything that is a product—that is, a thing—it must set out from the unconditioned; the first inquiry of speculative physics is that which relates to the unconditioned in natural science.
2.
As this inquiry is, in the Outlines, deduced from the highest principles, the following may be regarded as merely an illustration of those inquiries:
Inasmuch as everything of which we can say that it is, is of a conditioned nature, it is only being itself that can be the unconditioned. But seeing that individual being, as a conditioned, can be thought only as a particular limitation of the productive activity (the sole and last substrate of all reality) being itself is thought as the same productive activity in its unlimitedness. For the philosophy of nature, therefore, nature is originally only productivity, and from this as its principle science must set out.
So long as we know the totality of objects only as the sum of being, this totality is a mere world—that is, a mere product for us. It would certainly be impossible in the science of Nature to rise to a higher idea than that of being, if all permanence (which is thought in the idea of being) were not deceptive, and really a continuous and uniform reproduction.
In so far as we regard the totality of objects not merely as a product, but at the same time necessarily as productive, it rises into Nature for us, and this identity of the product and the productivity, and this alone is implied, even in the ordinary use of language by the idea of Nature.
Nature as a mere product (natura naturata) we call Nature as object (with this alone all empiricism deals). Nature as productivity (natura naturans) we call Nature as subject (with this alone all theory deals).
As the object is never unconditioned, something absolutely non-objective must be put into Nature; this absolutely non-objective is nothing else but that original productivity of Nature. In the ordinary view it vanishes in the product: conversely in the philosophic view the product vanishes in the productivity.
Such identity of the product and the productivity in the original conception of Nature is expressed by the ordinary views of Nature as a whole, which is at once the cause and the effect of itself, and is in its duplicity (which goes through all phenomena) again identical. Furthermore, with this idea the identity of the Real and the Ideal agrees—an identity which is thought in the idea of every product of Nature, and in view of which alone the nature of art can be placed in opposition thereto. For whereas in art the idea precedes the act—the execution—in Nature idea and act are rather contemporary and one; the idea passes immediately over into the product, and cannot be separated from it.
This identity is cancelled by the empirical view, which sees in Nature only the effect (although on account of the continual wandering of empiricism into the field of science, we have, even in purely empirical physics, maxims which presuppose an idea of Nature as subject—as, for example, Nature chooses the shortest way; Nature is sparing in causes and lavish in effects); it is also cancelled by speculation, which looks only at cause in Nature.