Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason — trans. F. Max Müller
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principles, are called jnaxims. The criticism of morality, with regard to its purity and its results, takes place according to ideas, the practical observance of its laws, according to maxims.
It is necessary that the whole course of our life should be subject to moral maxims ; but this is impossible, unless reason connects with the moral law, which is a mere idea, an efficient cause, which assigns to all conduct, in accordance with the moral law, an issue accurately corresponding to our highest aims, whether in this or in another [p. 813] life. Thus without a God and without a world, not visible to us now, but hoped for, the glorious ideas of morality are indeed objects of applause and admiration, but not springs of purpose and action, because they fail to fulfil all the aims which are natural to every rational being, and which are determined a priori by the same pure reason, and therefore necessary.
Our reason does by no means consider happiness alone as the perfect good. It does not approve of it (however much inclination may desire it), except as united with desert, that is, with perfect moral conduct. Nor is morality alone, and with it mere desert of being happy, the perfect good. To make it perfect, he who has conducted himself as not unworthy of happiness, must be able to hope to participate in it. Even if freed from all private views and interests reason, were it to put itself in the place of a being that had to distribute all happiness to others, could not judge otherwise ; because in the practical idea both elements are essentially connected, though in such a way that our participation in happiness should be rendered possible by the moral character as a condition, and not conversely the moral character by the
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prospect of happiness. For, in the latter case, the [p. 814] character would not be moral, nor worthy therefore of complete happiness ; a happiness which, in the eyes of reason, admits of no limitation but such as arises from our own immoral conduct.
Happiness, therefore, in exact proportion with the morality of rational beings who are made worthy of happiness by it, constitutes alone the supreme good of a world into which we must necessarily place ourselves according to the commands of pure but practical reason. But this is an intelligible world only, and a sensible world never promises us such a systematical unity of ends as arising from the nature of things. Nor is the reality of this unity founded on anything but the admission of a supreme original good, so that independent reason, equipped with all the requirements of a supreme cause, founds, maintains, and completes, according to the most perfect design, the universal order of things which, in the world of sense, is almost completely hidden from our sight.
This moral theology has this peculiar advantage over speculative theology, that it leads inevitably to the concept of a sole^ most perfect^ and rational first Being, to which speculative theology does not even lead ns on, on objective grounds, much less give us a conviction of it. For neither in transcendental nor in natural theology, however far reason may carry us on, do we find any real ground for admitting even one sole being which we should be warranted in placing before all natural causes [p. 815] and on which we might make them in all respects to depend. On the other hand, if, from the point of view of moral unity as a necessary law of the universe, we consider what cause alone could give to it its adequate
654 Canon of Pjire Re as 071 « effect, and therefore its binding force with regard to ourselves, we find that it must be one sole supreme will which comprehends all these laws within itself. For how with different wills should we find complete unity of ends ? That will must be omnipotent, in order that the whole of nature and its relation to morality and the world may be subject to it ; omniscient, that it may know the most secret springs of our sentiments and their moral worth ; omnipresent, that it may be near for supplying immediately all that is required by the highest interests of the world ; eternal, that this harmony of nature and freedom may never fail, and so on.
But this systematical unity of ends in this world of intelligences which, if looked upon as mere nature, may be called a sensible world only, but which, if considered as a system of freedom, may be called an intelligible, that is, a moral world {regnmn gratiae)^ leads inevitably also to the admission of a unity of design in all things which constitute this great universe according to general natural laws, just as the former (unity) was according to general and necessary laws of morality. In this way practical and speculative reason become united. The world must be represented as having originated from an idea, if it is to harmonise with that employment of reason without which we should consider ourselves [p. 816] unworthy of reason, namely, with its moral employment, which is founded entirely on the idea of the supreme good. In this way the study of nature tends to assume the form of a teleological system, and becomes in its widest extension physico-theology. And this, as it starts from the moral order as a unity founded on the essence of freedom, and not accidentally brought about by exCanon of Pure Reason 655
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