And an action is good not because it has good results, or because it is wise, but because it is done in obedience to this inner sense of duty, this moral law that does not come from our personal experience, but legislates imperiously and à priori for all our behavior, past, present, and future. The only thing unqualifiedly good in this world is a good will—the will to follow the moral law, regardless of profit or loss for ourselves. Never mind your happiness; do your duty. “Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”30 Let us seek the happiness in others; but for ourselves, perfection—whether it bring us happiness or pain.31 To achieve perfection in yourself and happiness in others, “so act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of another, in every case as an end, never only as a means”:32—this too, as we directly feel, is part of the categorical imperative. Let us live up to such a principle, and we shall soon create an ideal community of rational beings; to create it we need only act as if we already belonged to it; we must apply the perfect law in the imperfect state. It is a hard ethic, you say,—this placing of duty above beauty, of morality above happiness; but only so can we cease to be beasts, and begin to be gods.
Notice, meanwhile, that this absolute command to duty proves at last the freedom of our wills; how could we ever have conceived such a notion as duty if we had not felt ourselves free? We cannot prove this freedom by theoretical reason; we prove it by feeling it directly in the crisis of moral choice. We feel this freedom as the very essence of our inner selves, of the “pure Ego”; we feel within ourselves the spontaneous activity of a mind moulding experience and choosing goals. Our actions, once we initiate them, seem to follow fixed and invariable laws, but only because we perceive their results through sense, which clothes all that it transmits in the dress of that causal law which our minds themselves have made. Nevertheless, we are beyond and above the laws we make in order to understand the world of our experience; each of us is a center of initiative force and creative power. In a way which we feel but cannot prove, each of us is free.
And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people—in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. How could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel this life to be only a part of life, this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth, a new awakening; if we did not vaguely know that in that later and longer life the balance will be redressed, and not one cup of water given generously but shall be returned a hundredfold?
Finally, and by the same token, there is a God. If the sense of duty involves and justifies belief in rewards to come, “the postulate of immortality . . . must lead to the supposition of the existence of a cause adequate to this effect; in other words, it must postulate the existence of God.”33 This again is no proof by “reason”; the moral sense, which has to do with the world of our actions, must have priority over that theoretical logic, which was developed only to deal with sense-phenomena. Our reason leaves us free to believe that behind the thing-in-itself there is a just God; our moral sense commands us to believe it. Rousseau was right: above the logic of the head is the feeling in the heart. Pascal was right: the heart has reasons of its own, which the head can never understand.
V. On Religion and Reason
Does this appear trite, and timid, and conservative? But it was not so; on the contrary, this bold denial of “rational” theology, this frank reduction of religion to moral faith and hope, aroused all the orthodox of Germany to protests. To face this “forty-parson-power” (as Byron would have called it) required more courage than one usually associates with the name of Kant.
That he was brave enough appeared in all clarity when he published, at sixty-six, his Critique of Judgment, and, at sixty-nine, his Religion within the Limits of Pure Reason. In the earlier of these books Kant returns to the discussion of that argument from design which, in the first Critique, he had rejected as an insufficient proof of the existence of God. He begins by correlating design and beauty; the beautiful, he thinks, is anything which reveals symmetry and unity of structure, as if it had been designed by intelligence. He observes in passing (and Schopenhauer here helped himself to a good deal of his theory of art) that the contemplation of symmetrical design always gives us a disinterested pleasure; and that “an interest in the beauty of nature for its own sake is always a sign of goodness.”34 Many objects in nature show such beauty, such symmetry and unity, as almost to drive us to the notion of supernatural design. But on the other hand, says Kant, there are also in nature many instances of waste and chaos, of useless repetition and multiplication; nature preserves life, but at the cost of how much suffering and death! The appearance of external design, then, is not a conclusive proof of Providence. The theologians who use the idea so much should abandon it, and the scientists who have abandoned it should use it; it is a magnificent clue, and leads to hundreds of revelations. For there is design, undoubtedly; but it is internal design, the design of the parts by the whole; and if science will interpret the parts of an organism in terms of their meaning for the whole, it will have an admirable balance for that other heuristic principle—the mechanical conception of life—which also is fruitful for discovery, but which, alone, can never explain the growth of even a blade of grass.
The essay on religion is a remarkable production for a man of sixty-nine; it is perhaps the boldest of all the books of Kant. Since religion must be based not on the logic of theoretical reason but on the practical reason of the moral sense, it follows that any Bible or revelation must be judged by its value for morality, and cannot itself be the judge of a moral code. Churches and dogmas have value only in so far as they assist the moral development of the race. When mere creeds or ceremonies usurp priority over moral excellence as a test of religion, religion has disappeared. The real church is a community of people, however scattered and divided, who are united by devotion to the common moral law. It was to establish such a community that Christ lived and died; it was this real church which he held up in contrast to the ecclesiasticism of the Pharisees. But another ecclesiasticism has almost overwhelmed this noble conception. “Christ has brought the kingdom of God nearer to earth; but he has been misunderstood; and in place of God’s kingdom the kingdom of the priest has been established among us.”35 Creed and ritual have again replaced the good life; and instead of men being bound together by religion, they are divided into a thousand sects; and all manner of “pious nonsense” is inculcated as “a sort of heavenly court service by means of which one may win through flattery the favor of the ruler of heaven.”36—Again, miracles cannot prove a religion, for we can never quite rely on the testimony which supports them; and prayer is useless if it aims at a suspension of the natural laws that hold for all experience. Finally, the nadir of perversion is reached when the church becomes an instrument in the hands of a reactionary government; when the clergy, whose function it is to console and guide a harassed humanity with religious faith and hope and charity, are made the tools of theological obscurantism and political oppression.