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The law of practical reason is a "categorical imperative." What does this designation mean, and what is the basis of the formula of the moral law which has just been given? All prudential or technical rules are hypothetical imperatives, the moral law is a categorical imperative.
"And now, Moosseer Piggott," he said, settling back in his chair a little farther, "we're ready for the show." "What I have to tell you, sir," began M. Pigot, in a voice as hard as steel and cold as ice, "has, understand well, to be told in confidence. It must remain between ourselves until the criminal is secured." Grady's smile hardened a little. Perhaps he did not like the imperatives.
Modern Spaniards hadn't, thanks to taxation and the Church, been able to build a mental life for themselves; so, since the mind of man must have a little exercise, they repeated imitatively the actions by which their forefathers had responded to their quite real psychological imperatives.
More than about the automatic visceral reactions, these curiosities evoke the repressive imperatives of the associates, the mother and father especially. These repressive influences may be and often are the effects of ignorance, prudishness, vulgarity, or homosexuality, or the sex perversions that are known as sadism and masochism.
A French cynic counsels us to always deal with a friend to-day on the possibility that he may be an enemy to-morrow. And there is a wide and deeply-rooted prejudice in favour of holding the imperatives of integrity on the same terms. Our very language in this direction betrays us.
If it were only equally easy to give a definite conception of happiness, the imperatives of prudence would correspond exactly with those of skill, and would likewise be analytical. But, unfortunately, the notion of happiness is so indefinite that although every man wishes to attain it, yet he never can say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills.
In the previous imperatives, namely, that based on the conception of the conformity of actions to general laws, as in a physical system of nature, and that based on the universal prerogative of rational beings as ends in themselves these imperatives just because they were conceived as categorical, excluded from any share in their authority all admixture of any interest as a spring of action; they were however only assumed to be categorical, because such an assumption was necessary to explain the conception of duty.
You must keep off wellnigh all the grass on the island, but you are "requested" to keep off it, and not forbidden in the harsh imperatives of our brief authorities. It is again the difference between the social and the public, which is perhaps the main difference between an oligarchy and a democracy.
"Every sentence is alive to its finger tips," writes a modern critic; and though Carlyle often violates the rules of grammar and rhetoric, we can well afford to let an original genius express his own intense conviction in his own vivid and picturesque way. Carlyle's message may be summed up in two imperatives, labor, and be sincere.
To take a phrase from Professor Dewey, reason, for Spinoza, is reconstructive not constitutive. The power of the intellect is not some underived, original, independent power which can impose or, better, superimpose its categorical imperatives upon human conduct. The power of the intellect is wholly derivative, dependent upon the nature of the things that it understands.
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