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The demand of the moral law is more insistent and more authoritative simply because it represents a far more widespread and lasting need. Kant's "categorical imperative" is purely formal and empty. We OUGHT, we OUGHT-but what?
It was a repetition of the same thing that had happened in the case of Kant's works. The "Critique of Pure Reason" was adopted by the scientific crowd; but the "Critique of Applied Reason," that part which contains the gist of moral doctrine, was repudiated. In Kant's doctrine, that was accepted as scientific which subserved the existent evil.
I never resumed Lotze, though later, with two other students, I attended Trendelenburg's difficult course, and tried to comprehend Kant's "critiques." I first became familiar with Schopenhauer in Jena. On the other hand, I again devoted many leisure hours to Egyptological works. I felt that these studies suited my powers and would satisfy me.
Our intellect casts, in short, no ray of light on the processes by which experiences get made. Kant's monistic successors have in general found the data of immediate experience even more self-contradictory, when intellectually treated, than Kant did.
This would, naturally, give me an opportunity of crushing pitiably some of Kant's sophistries ... but, on taking out my writing materials to commence work, I discovered that I no longer owned a pencil: I had forgotten it in the pawn-office. My pencil was lying in my waistcoat pocket. Good Lord! how everything seems to take a delight in thwarting me today!
Lord Lytton, some time after this, wrote to him about his book, and he replies to the question, 'What is a good man? 'a man so constituted that the pleasure of doing a noble thing and the pain of doing a base thing are to him the greatest of pleasures and pains. He was fond, too, of quoting, with admiration, Kant's famous saying about the sublimity of the moral law and the starry heavens.
The actual facts of morality are too much on my side for me to fear that my theory can ever be replaced or upset by any other. However, so long as even my ethical system continues to be ignored by the professorial world, it is Kant's moral principle that prevails in the universities. Among its various forms the one which is most in favour at present is "the dignity of man."
He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet Kant's doctrines had not met with many admirers in England did not doubt but that we had too much wisdom to be duped by a writer who set at defiance the common sense and common understandings of men. We talked of tragedy.
We are by no means sure that we understand what Cosmic Emotion is even after leading an exposition of its nature by no ungifted hand. Its symbola so to speak are the feelings produced by the two objects of Kant's peculiar reverence the stars of heaven and the moral faculty of man. But after all these are only like anything else aggregations of molecules in a certain stage of evolution.
Practically, we need Kant's kind of sermonizing; we need to exalt abstract goodness and resist the appeal of immediate and sensuous goods. So Kant has been popular with earnest men more interested in right living than in theory. But as a theorist he is hopelessly inadequate. It is true that we admire good will without consideration of the effects it produces, and even when it leads to disaster.
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