Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/532

518 rewards and punishments; an Almighty, All-wise, and Eternal God, to adjust all ethical accounts in accordance with the rational necessity of the moral order; and Immortality of the Soul, to afford scope for the ethical adjustment of such individual accounts as are left unbalanced at man's death. Here, then, we see, in the first place, the real origin of Kant's austere ethics of duty. The theological doctrines of God, Freedom, and Immortality, are not corollaries following from the moral law; rather are they seen to be its real source and support. And the austere follower of the categorical imperative finds his moral resolution considerably strengthened when the realization of his purely rational nature reveals to him the fact that virtue, followed for virtue's sake and with no regard to consequences, does nevertheless, in the divine order of things, involve happiness. The apparently disinterested 'respect' (Achtung) for the moral law is thus seen to be in actuality the prudent 'obedience' (Gehorsam) to it for self-regarding considerations. Dies ist "des Pudels Kern." Kant himself virtually says: Lying is wrong because I could not will a general law to establish lying, inasmuch as people would no longer believe me, or else would pay me back in the same coin. Be just, therefore, else injustice will be heaped upon your own head; be kind, for if all are unkind, you shall fare ill yourself. This is 'reasonable' virtuous conduct; it pays in the long run. Honesty is the best policy. Thus, whether Schopenhauer's admittedly one-sided interpretation be accepted or not, whether the factor which makes me will or not will a certain maxim to become an universal law, be egoism or what not, in any case one thing is certain: Schopenhauer has demonstrated Kant's failure in his chief aim. The so-called Categorical Imperative turns out to be in reality hypothetical, and points behind and ahead to other considerations, be they what they may.

Objecting to Kant's entire way of attacking the problem of morals, Schopenhauer emphatically declares: "I say, in contradiction to Kant, that the student of Ethics ... must content himself with explaining and interpreting that which is given, in