Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/174

 first of all by the Antinomies, on account of their oddity, but still more by his Practical Reason with its Categorical Imperative, nay even by the Moral Theory he placed on the top of it, though with this last he was never in earnest ; for a theoretical dogma which has only practical validity, is very like the wooden guns we allow our children to handle without fear of danger : properly speaking, it belongs to the same category as : "Wash my skin, but without wetting it." Now, as regards the Categorical Imperative, Kant never asserted it as a fact, but, on the contrary, protests repeatedly against this being done ; he merely served it up as the result of an exceedingly curious combination of thoughts, because he stood in need of a sheet-anchor for morality. Our professors of philosophy, however, never sifted the matter to the bottom, so that it seems as if no one before me had ever thoroughly investigated it. Instead of this, they made all haste to bring the Categorical Imperative into credit as a firmly established fact, calling it in their purism "the moral law"—which, by the way, always reminds me of Bürger's "Mam zelle Laregle;" indeed, they have made out of it something as massive as the stone tables of Moses, whose place it entirely takes, for them. Now in my Essay upon the Fundament of Morality, I have brought this same Practical Reason with its Categorical Imperative under the anatomical knife, and proved so clearly and conclusively that they never had any life or truth, that I should like to see the man who can refute me with reasons, and so help the Categorical Imperative honestly on its legs again. Meanwhile, our professors of philosophy do not allow themselves to be put out of countenance by this. They can no more dispense with their "moral law of practical Reason," as a convenient deus ex machina, on which to found their morality, than with Free Will : both are essential points in their old woman's philosophy. No matter if