Kant is remarkable among sincere philosophers for the pathetic
separation which existed between his personal beliefs and his official
discoveries. His personal beliefs were mild and half orthodox and
hardly differed from those of Leibniz; but officially he was entangled
in the subjective criticism of knowledge, and found that the process
of knowing was so complicated and so exquisitely contrived to make
knowledge impossible, that while the facts of the universe were there,
and we might have, like Leibniz, a shrewd and exact notion of what they
were, officially we had no right to call them facts or to allege that
we knew them. As there was much in Kant's personal belief which this
critical method of his could not sanction, so there were implications
and consequences latent in his critical method which he never absorbed,
being an old man when he adopted it. One of these latent implications
was egotism.
The fact that each spirit was confined to its own perceptions condemned
it to an initial subjectivity and agnosticism. What things might exist
besides his ideas he could never know. That such things [Pg 55]
existed was not doubted; Kant never accepted that amazing principle of
dogmatic egotism that nothing is able to exist unless I am able to know
it. On the contrary he assumed that human perceptions, with the moral
postulates which he added to them, were symbols of a real world of
forces or spirits existing beyond. This assumption reduced our initial
idiotism to a constitutional taint of our animal minds, not unlike
original sin, and excluded that romantic pride and self-sufficiency in
which a full-fledged transcendentalism always abounds.
To this contrite attitude of Kant's agnosticism his personal character
and ethics corresponded. A wizened little old bachelor, a sedentary
provincial scribe, scrupulous and punctual, a courteous moralist who
would have us treat humanity in the person of another as an end and
never merely as a means, a pacifist and humanitarian who so revered the
moral sense according to Shaftesbury and Adam Smith that, after having
abolished earth and heaven, he was entirely comforted by the sublime
truth that nevertheless it remained wrong to tell a lie--such a
figure has nothing in it of the officious egotist or the superman.
Yet his very love of exactitude and his scruples about knowledge,
misled by the psychological fallacy that nothing can be an object of
knowledge except some idea in the mind, led him [Pg 56] in the end
to subjectivism; while his rigid conscience, left standing in that
unnatural void, led him to attribute absoluteness to what he called the
categorical imperative. But this void outside and this absolute oracle
within are germs of egotism, and germs of the most virulent species.
The categorical imperative, or unmistakable voice of conscience, was
originally something external enough--too external, indeed, to
impose by itself a moral obligation. The thunders of Sinai and the
voice from the whirlwind in Job fetched their authority from the
suggestion of power; there spoke an overwhelming physical force of
which we were the creatures and the playthings, a voice which far from
interpreting our sense of justice, or our deepest hopes, threatened to
crush and to flout them. If some of its commandments were moral, others
were ritual or even barbarous; the only moral sanction common to them
all came from our natural prudence and love of life; our wisdom imposed
on us the fear of the Lord. The prophets and the gospel did much to
identify this external divine authority with the human conscience;
an identification which required a very elaborate theory of sin and
punishment and of existence in other worlds, since the actual procedure
of nature and history can never be squared with any ideal of right.
[Pg 57] In Kant, who in this matter followed Calvin, the independence
between the movement of nature, both within and without the soul, and
the ideal of right was exaggerated into an opposition. The categorical
imperative was always authoritative, but perhaps never obeyed. The
divine law was far from being like the absolute Will in Fichte, Hegel,
and Schopenhauer, a name for a universal metaphysical force, or even
for the flux of material substance. On the contrary the sublimity of
the categorical imperative lay precisely in the fact that, while matter
and life moved on in their own unregenerate way, a principle which they
_ought_ to follow, overarched and condemned them, and constrained them
to condemn themselves. Human nature was totally depraved and incapable
of the least merit, nor had it any power of itself to become righteous.
Its amiable spontaneous virtues, having but a natural motive, were
splendid vices. Moral worth began only when the will, transformed at
the touch of unmerited grace, surrendered every impulse in overwhelming
reverence for the divine law.
This Calvinistic doctrine might seem to rebuke all actual inclinations,
and far from making the will morally absolute, as egotism would, to
raise over against it an alien authority, what _ought_ to be willed.
Such was, of course, Kant's ostensible intention; but [Pg 58] sublime
as such a situation was declared to be, he felt rather dissatisfied in
its presence. A categorical imperative crying in the wilderness, a duty
which nobody need listen to, or suffer for disregarding, seemed rather
a forlorn authority. To save the face of absolute right another world
seemed to be required, as in orthodox Christianity, in which it might
be duly vindicated and obeyed.
Kant's scepticism, by which all knowledge of reality was denied us,
played conveniently into the hands of this pious requirement. If the
whole natural world, which we can learn something about by experience,
is merely an idea in our minds, nothing prevents any sort of real
but unknown world from lying about us unawares. What could be more
plausible and opportune than that the categorical imperative which the
human mind, the builder of this visible world, had rejected, should in
that other real world be the head stone of the corner?
This happy thought, had it stood alone, might have seemed a little
fantastic; but it was only a laboured means of re-establishing the
theology of Leibniz, in which Kant privately believed, behind the
transcendental idealism which he had put forward professorially. The
dogmatic system from which he started seemed to him, as it stood,
largely indefensible and a little oppressive. To purify it he [Pg 59]
adopted a fallacious principle of criticism, namely, that our ideas are
all we can know, a principle which, if carried out, would undermine
that whole system, and every other. He, therefore, hastened to adopt
a corrective principle of reconstruction, no less fallacious, namely,
that conscience bids us assume certain things to be realities which
reason and experience know nothing of. This brought him round to a
qualified and ambiguous form of his original dogmas, to the effect that
although there was no reason to think that God, heaven, and free-will
exist, we ought to act as if they existed, and might call that wilful
action of ours faith in their existence.
Thus in the philosophy of Kant there was a stimulating ambiguity in
the issue. He taught rather less than he secretly believed, and his
disciples, seizing the principle of his scepticism, but lacking his
conservative instincts, believed rather less than he taught them.
Doubtless in his private capacity Kant hoped, if he did not believe,
that God, free-will, and another life subsisted in fact, as every
believer had hitherto supposed; it was only the method of proving their
reality that had been illegitimate. For no matter how strong the usual
arguments might seem (and they did not seem very strong) they could
convey no transcendent assurance; on the contrary, the more proofs
you draw for anything from reason and [Pg 60] experience, the better
you prove that that thing is a mere idea in your mind. It was almost
prudent, so to speak, that God, freedom, and immortality, if they had
claims to reality, should remain without witness in the sphere of
"knowledge," as inadvertently or ironically it was still called; but to
circumvent this compulsory lack of evidence God had at least implanted
in us a veridical conscience, which if it took itself seriously (as it
ought to do, being a conscience) would constrain us to postulate what,
though we could never "know" it, happened to be the truth. Such was the
way in which the good Kant thought to play hide-and-seek with reality.
The momentum of his transcendental method, however, led to a
very different and quite egotistical conclusion. An adept in
transcendentalism can hardly suppose that God, free-will, and heaven,
even if he postulates them, need exist at all. Existence, for him, is
an altogether inferior category. Even a specific moral law, thundering
unalterable maxims, must seem to him a childish notion. What the ego
postulates is nothing fixed and already existing, but only such ideal
terms as, for the moment, express its attitude. If it is striving to
remember, it posits a past; if it is planning, it posits a future; if
it is consciously eloquent, it posits an audience. These things do not
and cannot exist otherwise than in [Pg 61] their capacity of things
posited by the ego. All, therefore, that the categorical imperative
can mean for the complete transcendentalist is that he should live
as if all things were real which are imaginatively requisite for
him, if he is to live hard: this intensity of life in him being
itself the only reality. At that stage of development at which Kant
found himself, God, freedom, and immortality may have been necessary
postulates of practical reason. But to suppose that these imagined
objects, therefore, existed apart from the excellent philosopher
whose conscience had not yet transcended them, would be not to have
profited by his teaching. It would be merely to repeat it. A later
and more advanced transcendentalist, instead of God, freedom, and
immortality, might just as dutifully posit matter, empire, and the
beauty of a warrior's death. His conscience might no longer be an echo
of Christianity, but the trumpet-blast of a new heathenism. It is for
the ego who posits to judge what it should posit.
The postulates of practical reason, by which Kant hoped to elude the
subjectivity which he attributed to knowledge, are no less subjective
than knowledge, and far more private and variable. The senses and
the intellect, if they deceive us, seem to deceive us all in much
the same way, and the dream they [Pg 62] plunge us into in common
seems to unite us; but what obscurity, diversity, hostility in the
ideals of our hearts! The postulates that were intended to save the
Kantian philosophy from egotism are the most egotistical part of it.
In the categorical imperative we see something native and inward to
the private soul, in some of its moods, quietly claiming to rule the
invisible world, to set God on his throne and open eternity to the
human spirit. The most subjective of feelings, the feeling of what
ought to be, legislates for the universe. Egotism could hardly go
further.
But this is not all. The categorical imperative, not satisfied with
proclaiming itself secretly omnipotent, proclaims itself openly
ruthless. Kant expressly repudiated as unworthy of a virtuous will any
consideration of happiness, or of consequences, either to oneself or to
others. He was personally as mild and kindly as the Vicar of Wakefield
(whose goodness he denied to be moral because it was natural), but his
moral doctrine was in principle a perfect frame for fanaticism. Give
back, as time was bound to give back, a little flesh to this skeleton
of duty, make it the voice not of a remote Mosaic decalogue, but of
a rich temperament and a young life, and you will have sanctified
beforehand every stubborn passion and every romantic crime. In the
guise of an infallible [Pg 63] conscience, before which nothing has a
right to stand, egotism is launched upon its irresponsible career.
The categorical imperative, as Kant personally conceived it, was
that of the conscience of the eighteenth century, which had become
humanitarian without ceasing to be Christian, the conscience of the
Puritans passing into that of Rousseau. But the categorical principle
in morals, like the ego in logic, can easily migrate. If to-day you are
right in obeying your private conscience against all considerations
of prudence or kindness (though you are prudent and kind by nature,
so that this loyalty to a ruthless Duty is a sacrifice for you),
to-morrow you may be right in obeying the categorical imperative
of your soul in another phase, and to carry out no matter what
irresponsible enterprise, though your heart may bleed at the victims
you are making. The principle of fanaticism is present in either case;
and Kant provides, in his transcendental agnosticism, a means of
cutting off all protests from experience or common sense, or a more
enlightened self-interest. These protests, he thinks, are not only
ignoble, but they come from a deluded mind, since the world they regard
is a creature of the imagination, whereas the categorical imperative,
revealed to the inner man, is a principle prior to all worlds and,
therefore, not to be corrected by any suasion which this particular
[Pg 64] world, now imagined by us, might try to exercise on our free
minds.
Thus it is from Kant, directly or indirectly, that the German
egotists draw the conviction which is their most tragic error. Their
self-assertion and ambition are ancient follies of the human race; but
they think these vulgar passions the creative spirit of the universe.
Kant, or that soul within Kant which was still somewhat cramped in its
expression, was the prophet and even the founder of the new German
religion.
[Pg 65] CHAPTER VI