Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/56

 MORAL OBLIGATION. 45 as self-determined, independently of the noumenal world. It is from this Kantian source that the undetermined will of Schelling and Schopenhauer is developed. Schelliug, making the distinction between the noumenal and sensible worlds, defines free actions as those which proceed from the former. But before the noumenal Ego acts it must be dis- posed or determined to a specific nature. This nature we do not assume in time, and nothing we do in time can remove one particle of any essential evils it contains. Our sensible actions are therefore all inevitably determined. But we feel remorse in respect of them just because we know that we might noumenally have assumed another nature. Beyond the useless revealing of this noumenal freedom the feeling has no rational function. Similarly Schopenhauer is related to Kant, whom indeed Hartmann calls the father of theo- retic as Schopenhauer is of practical pessimism. He lays the guilt of our actions on our character a blind will whose nature our actions reveal. We can never help acting as we do, seeing that willing always precedes knowing. Kegarded from an external point of view our actions might have been different that is, had our character been other than it is, or had we been some other person. When I regret it is my constitution I regret. I can only be sorry I am not another. Such doctrines of freedom are divorced from obligation, which nevertheless is the Kantian postulate for proving the exist- ence of freedom at all. The interpreter of Kant has two courses open to him. He may suppose either that Kant represents the sensible world as completely determined in itself, or that he makes it dependent on the noumenal world in some vital way. If the former, then to make Kant consistent, the interpreter must deprive him of the noumenal world (to which he held tenaciously) as an unwarrantable, because an unnecessary, assumption ; which is to deprive him of his whole doctrine of morals and leave him in intellectual agnosticism. In the other alternative, we must find in his work that he has some living connexion between the two worlds. If this be found, the latter can evidently be the only just interpretation. Causality is one of the scientific categories or categories of ordinary experience, and so has its full application in the sensible or phenomenal world. We cannot apply it in the same sense to anything else without dogmatism such dogmatism as is expressed in the current agnosticism which manipulates the common categories at will as in Mill's question, Who caused God ? From the standpoint of science or experience we know only that causality is be- coming, but in morals we find that becoming is only the