The necessary revolution in man's thinking after Immanuel Kant

not illusory imaginings but incontrovertible realities, even though not susceptible to verification by experience. Just as the efficacy and achievements of scientific research provide conclusive evidence for the validity of the categories, so, too, the moral and religious life, as concretely embodied in the lives of persons who are its shining examples, demonstrates as conclusively as could be the validity of those regulative ideas of pure reasonthe soul, Nature, and God.

The proof that these characteristic expression-forms of human life are true to facts is to be found, therefore, not so much in the mythological or metaphysical imagery used by religions and by dogmatic science, but rather in the deepest need that man feels, a need. that is satisfied, according to time and place, by these expressional forms, which present themselves to us as unquestionably real and true. Historical events supply the clearest proof we have that these norms, these regulative ideas of pure reason, are secretly at work all the time and in the last analysis, provide confirmation, indirect perhaps, but detectable, that these ideas are necessary to our reason.

Thus the true basis of ethics is to be found, not in any dogmatic ethical formulas, to which we owe a superstitious reverence, but in this reality which testifies to the human significance of ethics. That is to say, ethics rests firmly on our genuine first-hand experience of its essence—on those attitudes of the soul which Kant, in “The Critique of Practical Reason’, calls the categorical imperatives of the moral life. These imperatives constitute pure forms of universal law that we can verify within ourselves. They would be impossible without that principle of freedom which operates within us, not as an abstract principle but as a living truth for man. In short, we may say that the only genuine necessity man experiences is his need to feel himself free: man is inescapably free. Thus Kant destroyed the whole speculative realm of absolute realities outside experience, but laid the foundation for a new world of human dignity and valuation within man’s experience.

Such, then is the kernel of Kant’s philosophy outlined in a few broad strokes. Even so, it is not an easy philosophy to grasp all in a hurry, considering that Bertrand Russell has declared he could never understand it fully, nor make out why it should have been rated so highly. Kant’s writings, of course, cover a far wider

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