Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/34

18 our actions appear to us under the form of events in time. For we have no other form under which we can present our actions as facts but that of time, and time we have seen to be inadequate to the presentation of the real. Thus a place is left open for freedom, and therefore for morality.

But freedom is not established by a mere "perhaps," and therefore Kant advances to his positive proof of it from the nature of the moral consciousness. The essence of morality lies in the idea of duty, an idea that by its very nature is possible only to a being that can take a point of view beyond the stream of events. The consciousness of what ought to be differs toto cœlo from the consciousness of a sensible fact. In it I conceive of myself as under a law which prescribes an ideal that refuses to be limited by what I am or have been. Many desires spring up in me independently of my will, but duty continues to affirm its claims absolutely, be those desires weak or strong. What I ought to be is thus opposed to what I am. Thus man conceives of himself as under a law that is independent of the world of sense. True, he cannot know himself as he is, but in the very possession of the idea of duty he learns that he must in his inner nature be capable of freedom, and that this freedom may be realized in the act of willing the moral law.

It is sufficiently obvious even from the hurried and imperfect statement just given of certain points in the philosophy of Kant, that a rough test of the adequacy of the Critical Philosophy may be made by asking how far we can accept the doctrine, that human knowledge can never be of reality as it truly is because it is limited by the inadequate forms of space and time. If that doctrine is found to be untenable, we shall then have to ask whether freedom and morality, as Kant maintains, stand and fall with it. In the remainder of this article we shall confine ourselves to these two points.

Kant, as we have seen, accepted the view of Leibnitz that the real must be individual and self-complete. Now, there is a sense in which this must be admitted to be true. It is a contradiction in terms to speak of more than one universe: beyond the