Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/413

 THE MORAL POSTULATES. 391 men.* The former enjoin the preservation and develop- ment of our natural and moral powers, the latter are duties of obligation (of respect) or of merit (of love). Since no one can obligate me to feel, we are to understand by love not the pathological love of complacency, but only the active love of benevolence or practical sympathy. Since it is just as impossible that the increase of the evils in the world should be a duty, the enervating and useless excitation of pity, which adds to the pain of the sufferer the sympathetic pain of the spectator, is to be struck off the list of virtues, and active readiness to aid put in its place. In friendship love and respect unite in exact equipoise. Veracity is one of the duties toward self ; lying is an abandonment of human dignity and under no conditions allowable, not even if life depends on it. After it has been settled what the categorical imperative enjoins, the further problem awaits us of explaining how it is possible. The categorical imperative is possible only on the presupposition of oxr freedom. Only a free being gives laws to itself, just as an autonomous being alone is free. In theoretical philosophy the pure self-consciousness, the " I think," denoted a point where the thing in itself manifests to us not its nature, indeed, but its existence. The same holds true in practical philosophy of the moral law. • The incontestable fact of the moral law empowers me to rank myself in a higher order of things than the merely phenomenal order, and in another causal relation than that of the merely necessary (mechanical) causation of nature, to regard myself as a legislative member of an intelligible world, and one independent of sensuous impulses — in short, to regard myself as free. Freedom is the ratio essendi oi. the self-given moral law, the latter the ratio cognoscendi. of freedom. The law would have no meaning if we did not. possess the power to obey it: I can because I ought. It is That which we commonly term duties toward animals, likewise the so-called duties toward God, are in reality duties toward ourselyes. Cruelty to animals is immoral, because our sympathies are blunted by it. To have religion is a duty to ourselves, because the view of moral laws as laws of God is an aid to morality. /
 * All duties are toward men, not toward supra-human or infra-human beings.