Now, if to bar this conclusion it were argued that so far from the moral law being an expression of mind, supreme or otherwise, it was merely the generalised experience of mankind which had discovered that certain acts were attended by pleasurable or useful results, and certain other acts by painful and mischievous consequences, which had led men to describe the first cla.s.s as good and the second as evil, one might reply that herein we have stated a truth but not the whole truth.
To us the fact that good living and well-being are so intimately a.s.sociated, and that "the way of the transgressor is hard," is only one more evidence of the main contention of our school. Surely, if man awakes to the discovery that the laws, neither of nature, health, nor of private or public life, can be violated with impunity, more than ever is he convinced that the universe is, in Emerson"s singularly expressive phrase, "so magically woven" that man must come to ruin if he sets himself to systematically disregard them. The word "woven" is an illumination in itself, showing how the warp of constant nature and life and the woof of man"s conduct are meant to work and must work harmoniously together. And if this be indeed so, if we adopt Bentham"s language and call "pleasure and pain our sovereign masters," what have we but a further indication that things are so ordained, that the universe is so constructed, so to speak, that you cannot get the good out of it unless you conform to moral law--in other words, that in the long run wrong, virtue and happiness are reconciled? Well, but the ordering of things, the ordaining of a course of things, what is this but the work of intelligence? And therefore Bentham, no less than Kant, contributes his quota to the universal conclusion that the moral law implies theism in the sense explained. Wherefore, it may be added, there is no reason whatsoever why a rational ethic such as has been sketched should not avail itself of the unquestionable services of experience in determining what is and what is not in conformity with morality. If a man sees the world as one, and all intelligence as one, he will be a.s.sured beforehand that things are so const.i.tuted that mischief cannot permanently or ultimately befall him if he lives what he knows to be _the life_. And, therefore, the considerations of pain and pleasure, utility and mischievousness, are extremely serviceable criteria whereby we are a.s.sisted in that codification of morality, in that determining of what is good and what is evil, only it must ever be pointed out that they are not the ultimate explanation or basis of morality, which is built, not on any hedonistic or utilitarian foundation, but on the reason in us, in the universe, which commands us to live as offspring of that reason, or as Paul puts it from his point of view, as "children of the light".
And, in explaining why pleasure and pain cannot be regarded as "the sovereign masters" of ethic, we may add to the evidence for our conclusion. It appears that Bentham and his school do not observe the proprieties of language in identifying the moral good, the moral right, with pleasure. The ideas are really incommensurate, as is well pointed out in Schurman"s monograph on the Kantian and the evolutionary ethics of Spencer. The ethical "ought," the word which gives the keynote to the whole science, does not and cannot mean what is "pleasurable,"
"serviceable," or "useful". The word essentially implies the "ideal,"
the conformity to a definite standard of right, the approximation towards a goal or standard of conduct implicitly recognised as absolute good. But the ideas of "pleasurable," "useful," and the like concern the moment only; they merely suggest that man should secure the advantage offered or avoid the pain which may befall him here and now, or some time subsequently to his contemplated action. Hence there is no obligatory force in this ethic. Prudential motives, suggestions of expediency, abundance of counsel, if you will; but we miss the note of authority, the commanding voice, the categorical imperative, the solemn injunction, "Thou canst, therefore thou must". Indeed, it seems difficult to see how one could convince a man on hedonistic or utilitarian grounds that a course of conduct on which he was bent, and to which he was allured by the overmastering impulse of a vehement nature, and which promised him sensible gratification, possibly even material advancement, was not legitimate. I do not press this, nor do I suggest that moral elevation of life is not discernible amongst professors of this interpretation of ethics equally with those who take an idealist view. All I say is, that the recognised terminology of the ethical life, the "ought," the "must," receive an ampler recognition, a fuller interpretation, in the rational schools than in those of Bentham and Spencer.
And, finally, we may approach the question from the point of view of evolution. Everybody knows the pitiless manner in which the late Professor Huxley contrasted the ethical man with the cosmical process, how he pointed out that the one hope of progress lay in man"s ability to successfully combat by ethical idealism the rude realism of the material order of which he is a part. The facts need no exposition.
Every man has the evidence of it in himself, in the periodical insurrection of the ape and tiger element in him against the authority of some mysterious power which in the course of his long sojourn here has been acquired, and to which he recognises that the allegiance of his life is due. That tearful, regretful expression of the _Grand Monarque_, after one of Ma.s.sillon"s searching, scathing sermons on the sensual and spiritual in every man, "_Ah, voila deux hommes que je connais tres bien!_" may be repeated with even greater truthfulness by every one of us, now that Darwin has superseded St. Paul in the explanation of the phenomenon.
Now, here we have a surprising contradiction in Nature, the startling apparition of an element in man so utterly opposed to all that is beneath him, that a scientific chieftain tells us that his only hope is to kill out that ape and tiger, or at any rate keep it under unceasing control. Whence is this extraordinary human element, and what explanation can be given of the contradiction unless there be some higher synthesis into which the antinomy is taken up and resolved into unity? If out of the primordial nebula both the cosmos and man, with all that he is, have been evolved, then it would appear, plain as the writing on the wall, that some extraordinary transformation has come over the scene as soon as man appeared, and that an element utterly irreconcilable with all that has appeared previously manifests itself in him, not as an accident or a fortuitous occurrence, but as an essential, nay, as _the_ essential law of his being.
How can we explain this? How can we account for this complete _volta face_ in Nature, which bids man turn his back on all that made the universe and him, and resolve to live by a law so irreconcilable with the methods of the cosmos, that I take it we should be justified in saying that had it been in operation before man Nature itself could not have been evolved?
We believe the contradiction receives its explanation in the synthesis already suggested, that above the two processes, the cosmical and ethical, there is another, that of absolute intelligence or mind, energising through them both from first to last, but in widely different ways. In the cosmos, by ways which we describe as non-moral; in us by law, which we recognise as moral. In every grade of being, in every stratum of Nature, the self-same ever-active Mind is manifest, nay, the very distinctions of Nature"s life are fixed by the intenser or remisser energy wherewith the eternal Mind functions in them. From first to last it is mind-power behind all and in all. "In the beginning was Mind; in the beginning was the Reason." Lao-tze is right; the Alexandrian mystic is right; _En arche ho Logos_, and the Mind was the light of man, the light of reason, the holier light of conscience, leading him if he will but follow it, in the way which has been described in language of philosophic precision by the Hebrew poet as "the way everlasting".
Man may sing a _Magnificat_, because mighty things have been done in him, such as a cosmos or an infinity of worlds never knew or shall know. And thus the very contradictions manifested by evolution do but contribute to the truth of the general conclusion, that there is a Power, not dead, dull, inert, but an ever-living, ever-energising Mind, whence the mighty procession set forth, unto which it is ever returning. There is a Power above the water floods and cosmic disasters which is bringing to fulfilment purposes known from everlasting, which we are compelled to acknowledge as beneficent. We see its workings in history, in the rise and fall of nations; we witness the morally, no less than the physically, unfit fall out of the ranks. Progress here and there may seem to stop, but the course of things is "never wholly retrograde". Is not that hope strong in every man of us, going before us as an unquenchable light, encouraging us to persevere even to the end, because we shall not be deprived of the fruits of our toil, and no demon power shall come to dash the cup of happiness which we have striven to fill?
And what is this but to confess that the Power manifested in the cosmos is identical with the Power manifested in life, that physical and psychical are ultimately one, that virtue and well-being are indissolubly a.s.sociated? What is this but to confess the supreme synthesis, embracing all apparent contradictions, the ultimate harmony in which all discords are ultimately merged and lost for ever? What is it finally but to proclaim our faith one with that of the most eloquent voice heard in this century, poet and philosopher in one, the sublime Victor Hugo: "_La loi du monde materiel, c"est l"equilibre, la loi du monde moral c"est la justice_"? Pindar"s words again! "Justice is rightful sovereign of the world." The Reason which is revealed as equilibrium in the spheres, reveals itself as justice among men. Both spring from one indefectible source. "_Dieu se retrouve a la fin de tout._"
[1] Lao-tze, quoted in Huc"s _China_, vol. ii., p. 177.
IV.
IMMANUEL KANT, THE ETHICAL PHILOSOPHER.
To think of what Immanuel Kant has been to the many men and women of this century, who, having unlearnt the old traditions, had not yet found a new inspiration--the souls that were athirst for the waters of life which the ancient wells could no longer supply--is to be reminded of the pious and generous tribute which the Jewish exiles, after their sad return from the Babylonian captivity, paid to Nehemiah and his brethren, the reorganisers of their race. "Let Nehemiah," they said, "be a long time remembered amongst us, who built up our walls that were cast down, who raised also the bars of the gates!" Precious indeed is the man who can recreate the shattered fabric of the Commonwealth, re-enkindle the pure flame of patriotism, and restore the inspiration of religion. A benefactor indeed is the thinker who can give us a glimpse of the Divine on rational terms, satisfy the exigencies of the intelligence without denying the cravings of the heart, and provide an idealism for the inspiration and guidance of life.
Perhaps it is not too much to say that the temporal dest.i.tution of the repatriated Jews was a symbol of the religious and ethical decay of the last century. Protestantism of the orthodox type, which essentially was and is nothing more than the subst.i.tution of a book for a Pope, the pruning of the tree dogmatical, the lopping off of some of its more reprehensible excrescences, had visibly failed to meet the necessities of "the irresistible maturing of the human mind," to quote an expression of Emerson"s. The older Church had prophesied accurately enough that Lutheranism would turn out but a half-way house to infidelity, and sure enough it did. Its thorough application of the principle of private judgment in matters of religion could no more justify the inspiration of Leviticus than the federal headship of Adam and the dogma of endless vindictive punishment. Hence Lutheranism necessarily meant the gradual disintegration of dogma, that is, of all super-rational truth, for every man "outside the sacred circle of those bound over not to think".
When we remember, in addition to the decay of Protestantism, that Roman Catholic countries afforded more than sufficient evidence of the inability of their own religion to meet the increasing needs of the age--how France, Spain, and Portugal were devastated by the sceptical disease; how they insisted on and carried the total suppression of the Jesuit Order, beyond compare the ablest body of men their Church had ever produced; how the French Revolution was in its inception profoundly anti-Christian, and in its progress even anti-religious--when, I say, we call to mind these facts, we are able to appreciate the accuracy of the statement that, through the maturing of the intelligence of man, the ancient traditions had lost their hold, not only of Protestant, but of Catholic, lands. Without leaving for a moment the eighteenth century, I think we are warranted in stating that the close of the nineteenth century does not witness a rehabilitation of those traditions. The truth is more obvious than ever that in the men of to-day,
The power is lost to self-deceive With shallow forms of make-believe.
Now, it would appear that Immanuel Kant was the man of destiny for the work of the reorganisation of ethical and religious life. I look upon him as the morning star of the New Reformation. He witnessed in his own day the very low-water mark of scepticism, reaching even to the gross atheism of Holbach in the _Systeme de la Nature_. He had the advantage of everything which David Hume, "the Prince of Agnostics," as Mr. Huxley styled him, found to say, and indeed Hume exercised a marked influence on his German brother-savant, as we may, perhaps, later see. The whole work of the _Encyclopaedia_ in France was done under his eyes; the galaxy of brilliant writers who composed that school were contemporaries of Immanuel Kant. He witnessed the crash which accompanied the downfall of the old regime in France, the enthronement of anarchy in the place of government, the complete eclipse of religion, and the worship of reason symbolised on the altar of Notre Dame as my tongue refuses to describe.
It was the era of the deluge: the water-flood had burst upon Europe; and there was nothing, no inst.i.tution of State or Church, no philosophy, no religion then extant that could stem the rush of the torrent. Never was the effeteness of ancient systems, the impotence of the old idealism, more conspicuous. In the midst of this wreckage the problem of reconstruction had to be faced. Immanuel Kant did face it, and his object was to provide against the recurrence of atheisms and anarchies, to make G.o.dlessness and revolutions impossible, to ensure religion"s being a help instead of a gross and deplorable hindrance to progress, and to provide man with an idealism and an enthusiasm which would satisfy his utmost desire for knowledge, and yet stir the pulses of his moral being by the suggestion of an irresistible emotion.
Such I conceive to have been the work which Immanuel Kant undertook in the system of the transcendental philosophy.
The name of this thinker is so famous, I had almost said so venerable, in the ethical Church, that I may be allowed to put before my readers, who may be unacquainted with the details, a few personal or biographical notices concerning him.
Immanuel Kant was born at Konigsberg, in Prussia, on 22nd April, 1724, of humble parentage. He was apparently destined for the Church, since his first efforts were directed towards the study of theology in the university of his native town. But natural science and philosophy proved of far more powerful attraction, and, abandoning Divinity, he earned his livelihood, first of all, by acting as a private tutor in the neighbourhood of Konigsberg, and afterwards by a.s.suming a similar office in his own university. He subsequently, at the age of forty-six, became a professor of the Philosophical Faculty, a post he retained till his death in 1804. The deep reverence and religious emotion which betrays itself in Kant"s ethical writings was probably due to the influence of his parents. His father was venerable in his eyes as a man of moral worth. Honesty, truth and domestic peace characterised his home. For his mother the philosopher cherished the tenderest of recollections, and to her religious feeling, detached as it was completely from formula and system, he probably owes the fervour with which he speaks--as do Emerson and Carlyle--of the sublimity of the moral laws, and of the infinite dignity of a life lived in harmony with them. When he lost his father at the age of twenty-two, he wrote in the family Bible: "On the 24th of March my dearest father was called away by a blessed death. May G.o.d, who has not vouchsafed him great pleasure in this life, grant him the joy eternal!"
After a youth spent under the spell of such surroundings, we are not surprised to learn that Kant was of a singularly grave, gentle and quiet demeanour, which in old age tended to deepen into austerity and increased conscientiousness, were that possible, in the fulfilment of his duties.
With the simple words, "It is the time," his servant Lampe called him every morning at five minutes to five, and never to the end, according to the testimony of his servant, was the summons disobeyed. In the thirty-four years of his professorship he was reported to have been only once absent from his chair, and that owing to indisposition.
Kant lived a solitary life; he never married. Like more than one eminent man in the past and present, absolute want prevented his inviting the woman he loved to share his lot. The world has just learnt that Tennyson was engaged to his wife for twenty years, from her seventeenth to her thirty-seventh year, owing again to stress of circ.u.mstances, and there is living now one eminent man for whom, as for Immanuel Kant, comfort, competence, and fame have come too late to allow of any share in the blessing and joy of home. Such things cannot but deepen the hold these elect spirits have and shall have upon men unto all time.
Of religion Kant conceived a n.o.ble idea, but he did not find it realised in the Churches of his day. Sacerdotalism, even in its mildest forms, was abhorrent to him. During his manhood he never entered a church door, a fact which is a source of deep pain to many of his most enthusiastic biographers. Once only did Kant take his place in the procession which made its way to the cathedral on an especial day in the year, and was joined by the rector and professors of the university, but on arriving at the door he turned back and spent the hour of service in the retirement of his rooms. To his free soul it was a performance, professional and sectarian, and in consequence, something of a profanation. His disciple Hegel must have been moved by similar feelings when he replied to the questioning of his old housekeeper why he did not attend Divine service, "Thinking is also a Divine service!"
Nature had an irresistible fascination for him. He learnt that also from his revered mother, whose joy it was to take her child into the world of Nature, where the Soul of the worlds is so conspicuously at work, and instil into his young heart a deep and tender love for the beautiful life around him. Thus he couples the impressive spectacle of the holy night, revealed in the shining of the eternal stars, with the supreme object of emotion, the moral law within the heart, as the most awful of realities.
But not only for Nature in her sublimer aspects did he conceive so reverential a feeling, the humbler exhibitions of beauty and wisdom were equally moving to his awakened spirit. Once he told his friends, whom he constantly had with him at his dinner-table, he had held a swallow in his hands and gazed into its eyes; "and as I gazed," he said, "it was as if I had seen heaven". The great lesson of Mind in Nature he had learnt well at his mother"s knee, and he never forgot it. Children, so recently come out from one eternity, their souls so well attuned to the wonderment and mystery there lies hid in things, are peculiarly susceptible to such beautiful influences. Nature is the temple in which their tender souls should learn their first lessons in worship and see the earliest glimpses of the Divine.
Kant lived into his eightieth year, surrounded by the homage of Europe, which made him, in a sense, the keeper of its conscience. His ethical treatises caused him to be consulted from the most distant lands on questions of moral import. It is on record that many of his correspondents paid insufficient postage upon their letters--a fact which meant considerable loss for the philosopher. Indeed, so habitual was the forgetfulness of these ethical sensitives that Kant at length refused to take their letters in. After some thirty years of professorship in his own university his marvellous powers began to fail; his memory served him no longer; his great mind could think no more the thoughts sublime. The keen senses grew dull, and the light of his "glad blue eyes" went out.
His bodily frame, which by a.s.siduous care he had maintained as a worthy organ of his mind, sank into weakness. His last years, his last hours even, are described by his well-beloved disciple and friend Wasianski with a faithful and pathetic minuteness which, in the view of some of the great thinker"s deepest admirers, might well have been less microscopic.
The spectacle of a great mind losing itself at length in the feebleness of age, almost the imbecility of second childhood, might well, they consider, have been withdrawn from the vulgar gaze. "Yet," as the late Prof. Wallace most truly remarks, "for those who remember, amid the decline of the flesh, the n.o.ble spirit which inhabited it, it is a sacred privilege to watch the failing life and visit the sick chamber of Immanuel Kant." [1]
On the 12th of February, 1804, in his eightieth year, he pa.s.sed away, the victim of no special ailment or disease, but exhausted by the life of deep and strenuous thought upon the most profound and sacred problems which can agitate the mind of man. Simple and unostentatious to a degree during his life, the great master left instructions that he was to be buried quietly in the early morning. But for once his wish was disregarded, and amid the mourning of his Alma Mater, his townsfolk and the neighbourhood around, he was laid to rest in the choir of the University Church, which during life he would never enter. As with Kant so with Darwin, all men instinctively feel--even the most narrow of sectarians--that the lives of such men were--I will not say religious--but religion, and so they lay them at last within the shadow of their altars as the worthiest and best of the race. It shows us how deeply seated is the ethical emotion in man; it shows us that the religion of every man at his best moments is such as Immanuel Kant described and realised in his calm and beautiful life--a religion based on the sublime realities of the moral law.
And now, perhaps, we may say something of the thoughts of our philosopher, though at present it cannot be more than of a fragmentary character. If the ethical movement is to prove enduring, the name and teaching of Immanuel Kant must be frequently before us, and numberless opportunities afforded for an ampler account of his doctrine. For the moment my purpose was rather to put before my readers some idea of the man himself whose teaching is now exercising so deep an influence on the religious tendencies of the hour.
Every time you read of the vicar of a parish changing pulpits with his Nonconformist brother; every philanthropic meeting you hear of as addressed by clergymen of all denominations; every garden party given by a bishop or a dean to a Dissenters" Conference; every advance you gratefully note towards a wise and patient tolerance of theological dissensions, the sinking of sectional differences in the interests of a higher and purer life--ascribe it all to the beneficent influence of Immanuel Kant. Before his day all these fraternisings would have been impossible; the ancestors of these reconciled brethren were ready to scourge and burn each other, until Kant came and shamed them out of their narrowness and bigotry. Men talk no more of "mere morality," as though it paled into positive insignificance by the side of the dogmatical majesty of articles and creeds. Kant has taught them "a more excellent way," and in so far as they have learnt that one lesson, they and we are members of the one great Church--the Church of the ethically redeemed, the Church of men to come--the idealism, the enthusiasm, of the ages to be. Never let it be forgotten. We are not concerned to controvert or to destroy. The message of Kant to the Churches is that in all essentials we are at one with them, and the trend of thought is now setting visibly towards the subst.i.tution of an ethical for a doctrinal basis of religion.
You are powerless to resist the times, we would urge. Whether the old names and formulae survive or not, "the irresistible maturing of the general mind" will make it impossible for men to acquiesce in any religious belief not grounded on the conviction that the sole test of a man"s status is not what he believes, but what he does. This is Kant, this is Christ, and this is the message of the ethical Church.
But to return to the teaching of the philosopher of ethics, I must remind my readers again that I am unable to do more than sketch the outlines of the great ethical system which he gave to the world. More than that will not be needed for the moment. But before undertaking even a synoptical account of the transcendental ethic, I think it advisable to remark that Kant"s t.i.tle to philosophical immortality rests upon his constructive work as an ethicist, and not on his critical work as a speculative thinker. It is well known that the two philosophies of Kant are not _prima facie_ harmonious, that he finds himself compelled to deny as a critic that of which he is most certain as a moralist. Thus the great facts of theism, immortality and the autonomy or freedom of the will, he professes himself unable to know save as revelations of the moral order.
His mind, or pure reason, can know nothing of them; it is his will or practical reason which discerns them as plain deductions from the overwhelming fact of the moral law. This fact has led some critics to describe Kant as a sceptic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We might almost quote of him what Browning wrote of Voltaire:--
Crowned by prose and verse, and wielding with wit"s bauble learning"s rod, He at least believes in soul and is very sure of G.o.d.
No one more so; yet as a thinker he professed himself unable to _demonstrate_ these high truths. In that sense Kant"s famous _Critique of the Pure Reason_ may be described as the forerunner of the systematic agnosticism which is set forth in the _First Principles_ of Mr. Spencer.
But there is this immense difference, that Kant was convinced of the reality of that which the mind of man could not demonstrate. The great facts were existent indeed, but he was powerless to reach them with the instruments at his command. In consequence, he laid it down as a principle that man must ever act as though it were actually demonstrated that we were free, our innermost being imperishable, and a supreme judge and dispenser of justice to administer the moral laws which are the guide of life. It would be out of place to state the arguments whereby Kant justified his belief in a controlling mind in the universe and in the spiritual nature of man, while avowing his inability to demonstrate those truths. It must suffice to state here that the truths which lie at the foundation of religion were a matter of profound conviction with the sage of Konigsberg, all the deeper perhaps because he would not claim to subject them to an intellectual dissection or to be able to measure out heaven and earth in the exiguous terms of human thought.
But as soon as he leaves the plane of the pure or speculative reason and rises to the level of the practical reason or the will, then the full truth bursts upon his astonished gaze, clearer than the meridian light.
He sees no more "half shade, half shine," but the truth pours itself "upon the new sense it now trusts with all its plenitude of power". It is the will, not the mind, which discloses the full revelation to Immanuel Kant, and makes him the deeply-reverent, religious man he ever was, the convinced theist, the believer in his power to control his acts by the independence of his will, and in the possibility, or rather the certainty, of his being one day morally perfect--not indeed within the limits of the life which now is, but in a future life of unlimited duration. That which to Wordsworth was an intimation was to Kant an intuition after the vision of the glory of the moral law had flooded his innermost soul.
And this we may, perhaps, briefly show before bringing the chapter to an end.
The fundamental principle of the Kantian system is the primacy of the will. The key to the mystery of man"s being Kant finds, not in the marvellous faculty of intelligence, but in that power of self-movement, that capacity for self-originated energy which we call the will. Reason is "regulative," he said, but not "creative" and "const.i.tutive," like the will. It is the latter faculty which makes us what we are, determines our life, fixes our character, and decides our destiny. As you act, so you are. This principle once conceded, the majestic system at once takes shape. What is it that governs the world of phenomena outside us?
Physical laws, and supreme amongst these laws, that of equilibrium or gravitation. What is it that governs the reason? The laws of thought, those aboriginal rules, none of man"s creation, but the essentially necessary guides which he was bound to discover and to follow if he is to think accurately, that is, if his thoughts are to be in conformity with fact. And what is it which governs the will of man? "Do you tell me,"
the master would urge, "that the inert ma.s.ses of the spheres have each their own movements regulated for them, that nothing from a stone to a star is shaped or moved without the intervention of eternal laws; that the lispings of children no less than the meditations of a philosopher must conform to law, and that the will of man, whereby he makes himself to be what he is, shapes his character, influences his surroundings, and fixes his destiny--do you venture to say that that is lawless in a world where all is law? No," he proclaims in words which burn conviction into his soul: "it, too, has its laws, the highest, holiest thing in all this universe, the law of laws which confronts man wherever he goes, fills all his sublimest thoughts, subdues his soul to the most reverent worship, and is the holiest inspiration of his religion. It is the moral law, the supreme concern of the will of man, a revelation to man alone of his own unspeakable dignity, the norm or standard whereby he is to regulate his life--this it is which is the law of his will. As gravitation rules the stars, so the moral law, the sanction of the eternal distinction between right and wrong, controls the will, not compulsorily, not arbitrarily, as though it could by any possibility be otherwise, but freely. So sovereign is its power, so authentic are its claims, that if it had might as it has right, it would rule the world." It is, therefore, to use Kant"s own language, a _categorical imperative_, that is, an unconditional command. "Thou canst, and therefore thou must." By the very manhood you possess you are bound wholly to surrender yourself in submission to what you know to be the right for the right"s sake alone.
You must make it your own law, and obey it as inflexibly as the stars keep their courses in the everlasting way.
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
We may see now how Kant bases his whole system upon the indestructible fact of ethical law, the primeval intuition of the awakened spirit of man into the eternal distinction between good and evil. Standing on that foundation, he is able to descry the world of transcendental realities--"the land which is very far off"--which the pure and critical reason could never behold. But though the eyes of the mind were holden, the intuition of the will enables him to gaze direct into the unseen and discern freedom, soul, immortality and G.o.d as eternal facts. For whence this sublime law of life unless we conceive mind, not blind chance, as the arbiter of things? Whence this constraining power within me, exerting itself to the uttermost to win my allegiance to the right, unless I am free to obey or disobey? How is not the very conception of morality entirely obliterated in the false philosophy that would fain persuade man that because he is _in_ the world he must needs be _of_ it, and because the tides rise and fall with the phases of the moon, that his actions are fixed and controlled by influences utterly beyond his power?
We have no room for the "man-machine" in the beautiful school of Immanuel Kant.
And, finally, the awful question of the future Kant solves in the light of the same sublime principle. "That law," he urges, "which is the essential law binding humanity must one day be fulfilled in every one of us. There is a moral as well as a physical evolution which you try in vain to confine to the limits of the life which now is. There is no argument known to science justifying such an attempt." Kant believes in the Eternities, because every man born of woman is destined to be at last in absolute conformity with that law of everlasting righteousness which is for us what the law of balance is to the infinite worlds. All life, that which now is and whatever is to be in the hereafter, is simply a never-ending progress towards an ideal whose dignity is infinite. Hence the command of Jesus, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is also perfect," would be endorsed by Kant as in strict harmony with the philosophy which does not teach that the physical act of dissolution called death fixes the moral state of man for ever, but that all life, whatsoever it may be and wheresoever it may be lived, is but an approach towards a goal of infinite value, the will of man absolutely conformed to justice, or the moral law.
As Kepler described the philosopher and the scientist as "thinking again the thoughts of G.o.d," even so does the Kantian ethic aspire to absolute conformity of will with that Will which is supreme and eternal, the moral order itself personified. This is immortality: this is everlasting life, even as the Christian disciple and philosopher describes it: "This world pa.s.seth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the Divine will endureth for ever". The phenomenal world is a pageant, a scene. Only "the good will" (Kant"s constant expression) in absolute harmony with the Supreme Will is real and eternal.