can be affirmed without the least hypocrisy, that the moral precepts of the gospel were what first introduced purity of moral principle, and that they did at the same time, by their adaptation and fitness to the limits of finite beings, in placing all good conduct in man's subordination and subjection of his will to the discipline and training of a duty laid before his mental vision, first prevent him from fanatically disorienting himself among imagined moral excellencies and did, by thus putting a stop to ethical fanaticism, first assign limits of humility (i. e. of selfknowledge), equally to self-love and to self-conceit, both which are apt to overstep their barriers.

:

DUTY! Thou great, thou exalted name! Wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked law in the soul, aud so extorting for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience-before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly they rebel-whence thy original? and where find we the root of thy august descent, thus loftily disclaiming all kindred with appetite and want? to be in like manner descended from which root, is the unchanging condition of that worth which mankind can alone impart to themselves?

Verily it can be nothing less than what advances man, as part of the physical system, above himself,-connecting him with an order of things unapproached by sense, into which the force of reason can alone pierce; WHICH SUPERSENSIBLE has beneath it the phenomenal system, wherewith man has only a fortuitous and contingent connection, and so along with it THE WHOLE of his adventitiously-determinable existence in space and time. It is in fact nothing else than PERSONALITY, i. e. freedom and in

dependency on the mechanism of the whole physical system, always, however, considered as the property of a being subjected to peculiar laws emerging from his own reason, where the person, as belonging to the sensitive system, has imposed on him his own personality, in so far as this last is figured to reside in a cogitable system; upon which account we need not wonder how mankind, an inhabitant of both systems, cannot fail to venerate his higher nature, and to regard its laws with the great

est reverence.

On this celestial descent are founded many expressions denoting the worth of the objects of ethical ideas. The moral law is holy. Man no doubt is unholy enough, but the humanity inhabiting his person must be holy. In the whole creation every thing may be used as an end, man alone excepted. He is alone an END-IN-HIMSELF. He is the subject of the moral law, by force of the autonomy of his freedom, which law is holy. Upon the same account, every will, nay, every person's will when referring merely to himself, is restrained to the condition of its coincidence with the autonomy of an Intelligent Being, viz. that it be subjected to no end not possible under a law fit to emanate from the will of the subject himself, consequently to the condition of never using himself as a mean, but always as an end. Such a condition is ascribed even to the divine will in respect of the Intelligents in this world, who are his creatures, in so far as that condition rests on their personality, by force of which alone they

are ENDS-IN-THEMSElves.

This reverence-arousing idea of personality, showing us the august and sublime of our natural destiny, but showing us also the want of the adaptation of our deport

ment to it, and so casting down all self-conceit, is natural, and thrusts itself upon the most untutored reason, and is easily observable. Every tolerably honest man must at some time or another have felt that he emitted an harmless untruth, singly not to despise himself in his own eyes, although that lie might have produced signal advantages to a dear and well-deserving friend; and in the extremest exigencies of life, an upright, straightforward man, conscience sustains, by telling him that he declined to avoid those miseries by bartering his duty, that he never prostituted his humanity, that he honoured the inhabitancy of reason in his own person, so that he needs not to blush before himself, and has no cause to, shun, his own inward self-examination. This consolation is not happiness, is nothing like happiness, and no one would wish to be so situated, nor for a life in such conjunctures. But so long as man lives, he cannot endure to be in his own eyes unworthy of life. This inward peace is therefore merely negative, and contains nowhat positive to make life happy; it is merely a defence, warding off the danger man runs of sinking in the worth of his person, long after he has been despoiled of all worth in situation. THIS PEACE is the effect of reverence for somewhat quite different from life, in comparison and contrast with which, life, with all its amenities, has no value. Man in such case continues to live singly out of duty, not because he has the least taste for life.

Thus does the genuine spring of pure practical reason act. The spring is no other than the law itself letting us have a vista of the loftiness of our own supersensible existence, and so subjectively effecting in man, who is conscious of his sensitively-affected and dependent nature,

reverence for his higher destiny. Along with this spring may no doubt be combined so many graces and amenities of life, that, for the sake of these last alone, the most prudent choice of a judicious Epicurean might be given in favour of ethical deportment. And it may be advisable to combine the prospect of enjoying life with that other and prior and singly-sufficient determinator of the will: and yet, merely in order to counterbalance the incentives which vice ceases not to offer, not to use it as a spring, no, not in any wise, when question is made as to duty; for if otherwise, then is the moral sentiment polluted in its source. The awe of duty has nowhat in common with the enjoyment of life; and although they were to be taken and well shaken, and so handed mixed as an opiate for the sick soul, yet they would soon separate; or were this last not to happen, the former part would take no effect; and while man's physical existence might gain in force, his ethical would without stop fade away.

CHAPTER VI.

DILUCIDATION OF THE FOREGOING ANALYTIC.-ON FREEDOM

AND NECESSITY.

By the critical dilucidation of a science, or of a portion of it, I understand the inquiring and showing "why" it must assume precisely this and no other form when contrasted with some other system based on a like power of knowledge. Now the practical reason and speculative are at bottom "identic," in so far as both are pure reason; whence it will result, that the difference obtaining betwixt their systematic forms, will be found, as to its last ground, by comparing them both together.

But

The analytic of pure theoretic reason was conversant with the knowledge of objects given to the understanding, and so began at the intuitions; and since intuition is always sensitive, it started with the sensory, and arrived next at the notions (of the objects of intuition), and so, after premising both, ended with the principles. since, on the contrary, practical reason is not occupied about the knowledge of objects, but about her own power to make such objects "real," i. e. with a will, which is a cause so far forth as reason contains in itself the ground of its determination, and so has consequently to treat of no object of intuition, but of a law (because it is of the very essence of the notion CAUSALITY to refer to law, fixing and determining the relative existence of the multifarious), a Critique of practical reason has, upon these