Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/529

No. 5. to all experience, this duty is involved as duty in the idea of a reason determining the will by a priori principles." And, again, Kant speaks of "a practical philosophy, where it is not the reasons of what happens that we have to ascertain, but the laws of what ought to happen, even although it never does."

It is this initial position which Schopenhauer characterizes as Kant's ethical. For, he cleverly asks: Who tells you that that 'ought' to take place, which in fact never does take place? Kant's 'moral law,' if it is to have any concrete significance, must derive its ultimate sanction from human experience. "Moral laws, apart from human institution, state ordinance, or religious doctrine, cannot rightly be assumed as existing without proof." 'Thou shalt not lie' is no a priori moral law, operating over and above experience; whatever its philosophical justification may be, its authority it derives from long centuries of actual human experience. And, as a matter of fact, a principle of law, of obligation, a 'thou shalt,' owes all its meaning and force to threatened punishment or promised reward. A 'thou shalt,' severed from its concomitant 'lest' or 'in order that,' is devoid of all significance. To Schopenhauer himself the inference is quite plain: "What ought to be done is therefore necessarily conditioned by punishment or reward; consequently, to use Kant's language, it is essentially and inevitably hypothetical, and never, as he maintains, categorical." All oughtness is hypothetical; an 'absolute obligation' is a contradictio in adjecto. If Kant does employ a 'thou shalt' in his ethics, then he must point to the ancestry of his principle and justify its use in his method; but he has no right to assume it at all; far less, to assume it as absolutely necessary and categorically imperative.

It should be carefully noted that, from Schopenhauer's point of view, Kant cannot, with justice to his starting point and method, posit the moral law and its categorical imperatives as experiential data. If the categorical imperative were an