Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/kantsprinciplesoOOkant_0 KANT'S PKINCIPLES OF POLITICS PRINTED BY J. MILLER AND SON, FOR , T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH. LONDON, .... HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO. NEW YORK, . . . CHARLES SCRIBNER's SONS. KANT'S PRINCIPLES OF POLITICS INCLUDING HIS ESSAY ON PERPETUAL PEACE Jl (Contribution to political (Science EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY W. HASTIE, B.D. TRANSLATOR OF KANT'S ' PHILOSOPHY OF LAW.' LIOY'S 'PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT,' ETC. EDINBURGH: T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET 1891 ' To suppose a reader thoroughly indifferent to Kant, is to suppose him thoroughly unintellectual.' — De Quincev. 'In the department of Politics Kant did away with the narrowness that otherwise attached to it and entered with his deep priestlike thought wholly into the great spirit of history, into its future, and into the progress of the liberty of the peoples.' — Rosenkranz. ' Kant is as yet a sealed book ; what he has been understood to teach, is exactly what he intended to eradicate.' — Fichte. CONTENTS. PAGE Translator's Introduction vii I. Idea of a Universal History from a COSMOPOLITICAL POINT OF VlEW . . I II. Principles of Political Right . . 31 III. The Principle of Progress ... 63 IV. Perpetual Peace . . . . . 77 TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION Immanuel Kant, viewed in his manifold relations and influences, is now very generally regarded as the greatest philosopher of the modern world. He was certainly the most profound and constructive thinker of the Eighteenth Century, and all the higher speculation of the Nineteenth Century has been more or less occasioned or modified by him. There were great thinkers before Kant who variously exhibited the independent insight and power of the modern self-consciousness — Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, Bacon and Locke, Berkeley and Hume — but none of them reached the universality of his conceptions, the subtlety of his analysis of the higher forms of thought, or the fertility of his principles of knowledge. There have been great thinkers since Kant who have striven to give expression to the con- tinued movement and aspiration of the purified reason — Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, Krause, Herbart, and Lotze, Rosmini and Gioberti, Comte, Mill, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer — but they have at the most only un- folded his seminal ideas, simplified his multiplicity, or viii translator's introduction applied in a one-sided way at the best the empirical side of his method. It is to the sceptred sovereigns of thought in the ancient world that we must return for the few who may justly be regarded as his peers. ' Immanuel Kant,' says a distinguished Italian writer, 1 holds in the German Philosophy the place which belongs to Socrates in the Greek Philosophy. Just as all the philosophical systems of Greece were only the develop- ment of one or other aspect of the thought of Socrates, so all the philosophical systems of Germany, from the idealism of Hegel to the contemporary experimental philosophy, seem to start from Kant, and when they believe they have surpassed him, they are constrained to turn back and seek their inspiration in him again.** Like Socrates, Kant created an epoch in the speculative — history of the world, and even more than the 'Pre- ceptor Germanise ' became the first teacher of Europe. And all this, extravagant as it still may seem, is no mere partial foreign estimate, but has now come to be generally acknowledged by our own literary critics and historians of thought. ' Measured by one test of power,' says De Quincey, who was himself the best judge for his time of that test, — 'namely, by the number of books written directly for or against himself, to say nothing of those which indirectly he has modified — there is no philosophic writer whatsoever, if we except Aristotle, Descartes and Locke, who can pretend to approach Kant in the extent or in the depth of influence which he has exercised over * Prof. Carle of Turin, 'La vita del diritto,' p. 374. translator's introduction ix the minds of men.'* ' There can be no doubt,' says Dr Hutchison Stirling, 'that at this moment the place of Kant as generally estimated is that of the greatest German philosopher, greatest modern philosopher, greatest philosopher of all, with only the usual excep- tions of Plato and Aristotle. Nor can there be any doubt that the like estimate will continue for some con- siderable time yet.'f This relative supremacy as a thinker Kant owes mainly to the exceptional development in his own think- ing of the pure Reason. By long years of assiduous discipline and a devotion to truth which had all the loftiness of a religious consecration, Kant attained the completest self-mastery and clarihed his mind until it became a pure mirror of the universal Reason which is involved in all our knowing. Descartes was not more thorough in his rejection of prejudice, or in his question- ing of first principles ; Spinoza did not reflect with more passionless purity or deeper intellectual love on the ultimate substance of things ; nor did Locke or Berkeley or Hume scan with keener vision the working and changes of the individual consciousness. This per- fection in the development of his philosophical genius and character was accompanied with a corresponding completeness of technical training and equipment for his task. He probably knew more than any other man of his time of the common material of knowledge, and * 'The Last Days of Kant.' Works, iii. p. 101. t Text-Book to Kant, p. xxviii. X translator's introduction he certainly controlled it by the highest intellectual mastery. Far from being a mere dreamer of transcen- dental visions, he kept more than any thinker before him ever did on the solid ground of positive reality and within the practical requirements and limitations of common life. This is seen all through his philosophical work and may be proved by reference to every part of it. His philosophical development was singularly natural, harmonious, and complete. It obviously passed through three periods — the scientific, the speculative, and the practical ; and any right understanding of Kant, or indeed of any side of his work, must be founded upon reference to all the three. Like other great thinkers he has suffered much from partial and one-sided interpreta- tion, and his fulness and many-sidedness can only be reduced to unity by taking into view his philosophical development as a whole.* Kant undoubtedly owed much to the fact that he was a thorough scientist before he became a speculative metaphysician. His own development was typical of the revolution in the method of thought which has pro- duced modern philosophy : that certain knowledge of the real world must be the basis of all true knowledge of the ideal world, or that Physics must precede Metaphysics. * See above all Rosenkranz's Gescliichte der Kanfschen Philosophic (in Kant's 'Werkc,' Bd. xii. 1841) in which Kant's philosophical development is divided into 1, The Heuristic Epoch (1746-1770) ; 2. The Speculative-systematic Epoch (1770-1790) ; and 3, The Practical Epoch (1790-1804). But this is not an absolute division, nor does it indicate the predominantly scientific character of the first period. translator's introduction xi He happily began his work by appropriating all the mathematical and physical science of his age, and he made it the stable foundation and criterion of all his subsequent thinking. He was a faithful disciple of Newton to whose principles and method he owed most of his formative power. He even applied the Newtonian mathematics to new physical problems with important new results. By mathematical speculation he confidently predicted the condition of Saturn's rings as afterwards verified by Sir W. Herschel, in the same way as the discovery of Neptune was calculated out by Adams and Leverrier. He investigated anew the laws of motion ; and he outlined the cosmogony of Laplace. The re- tardation of the rotation of the earth by the tides, the periodicity of the trade winds, the elasticity of the ether, the causes of eai'thquakes, the volcanoes in the moon, the origin of heat in the universe, and all the questions of Physical Geography and Anthropology, were eagerly studied and elucidated by him. With that divining insight which is only attained through patient service and ministration in the Temple of Nature, he saw deep into the struggle of the Cosmic Forces, and even formu- lated the Darwinian theory of the Origin of Species and the evolution of the Human Race. Had he never written anything but his ' Universal History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens,' he would have ranked as the first of the modern evolutionists and the founder of scientific cosmology. No great philosophical thinker was ever more entirely at home with the phenomena xii TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION and laws of empirical science than Irumanuel Kant * ButJ as all know, it was during the speculative period of his development that Kant achieved his most original and epoch-making work. He had hitherto rested all his knowledge and faith upon the traditional conceptions formulated in the Leibniz-Wolffian metaphysics, when, as he tells us his ' dogmatic slumber ' was interrupted by the sceptical doubt of David Hume, as to the validity of the accepted idea of causality. Hume assumed with his immediate predecessors that the idea is not innate, and he seemed to shew that it was neither necessary, nor universal, nor objective, but only a contingent, par- ticular and subjective product of our associated sen- sations. If so we have no right to carry the notion of causality outward beyond the inner play of our own individual minds. The idea that one thing causes another to be is merely an illusion begotten by custom, or 'a bastard of the imagination,' as Kant puts it ; and we have therefore no real knowledge of objective causation in itself, or of any essential connection of things with each other, or of any being transcending * See specially his ' Untersuchung der Frage ob die Erde in ihrer Umdrehung urn die Achse einige Veranderungen seit den ersten Zeitcn ihres Ursprunges erlitten habe,' 1754; 'Allgemeine Natur- geschichte u. Theorie des Himmels.' 1755; ' Meditationum quarundum de igne succincta delineatio,' 1755; 'You den Ursachen der Erder- schiitterungen,' 1755; 'Zur Erlauterung der Theorie der "SVinde, 1750 ; ' Neuer Lehrbegrifi der Bewegung u. Rune,' 1758 ; ' Ueber die Vulcane im Monde,' 1785 ; and cf. Dr K. Dietrich, Kant vnd Newton, Tiibir.gen 1870, and F. Shultze, Kant und Darwin, Jena 1875. Kant's merit as the originator of the Nebular Theory is now recognised by all scientific writers on Astronomy. TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION xiii mere appearances or phenomena. Kant at once gener- alised Hume's doubt ; and so he saw that it undermined all the old metaphysical assumptions, and that unless a new metaphysic were found to meet it the whole struc- ture of human knowledge would crumble to pieces. Like Reid, Kant felt deeply the disappointment and pain of this position, and he girded himself with all his power and knowledge to deal with it. Hume thus became negatively to him in the second period of his development what Newton had been to him positively in the first ; and it was Newton's science that carried him victoriously through the doubt of Hume. Kant was compelled to investigate anew the whole problem of the origin and extent of human knowledge, a problem which had been incidentally suggested to Locke but which, as Hume had proved, had been imperfectly solved by him. Kant thus put again to himself the question : 1 What can I know 1 ' in its deepest and widest sense, and the result was the Critical Philosophy.* The question ' What can I know 1 ' is identical with the question ' What can Reason know 1 ' and this question at once resolved itself into a Criticism of the capability of pure Reason as a faculty of knowledge. Kant, like all great thinkers, was the truest child of his age, arid his greatest philosophical work ' The Critique of Pure * The immense and ever growing literature on this subject in all the European languages cannot be referred to here, but too much praise could hardly be given to the latest and completest exposition of it in ' The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant,' by Professor Edward Caird, LL.D., 2 vols., 1889. xiv TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION Reason' (1781) was the philosophical culmination of the critical spirit of the Eighteenth Century, in its effort to turn upon and determine by inner scrutiny the con- ditions of Reason itself as the highest factor of know- ledge. In prosecuting his task Kant had a twofold purpose in view : to secure, on philosophical grounds, the certain knowledge already realised by the Under- standing in Mathematics and Physics, and to ascertain whether pure Reason was capable of attaining similar real knowledge of its proper objects in the higher sphere of thought. Kant did not directly answer Hume, but he indirectly repelled the application of his doubt to the sphere of knowledge cultivated by the Mathematicians, and so remarkably extended by Newton ; and in doing so he not only systematised philosophical Criticism as a new department of science, but laid the basis of a new Metaphysic. He had already laid it down that 'the genuine method of Metaphysics is one and the same in principle with that which Newton introduced into physical science,' * and he never lost sight of this criterion and point of view. In the possession so far of certain knowledge, he thinks as a Mathematician and Physicist, all through his criticism of the pure Reason, from beginning to end, and from his primary certainty to his final result. In the first part of this Critique he established the validity of pure Mathematics by basing them upon the a priori forms of space and time as necessarily and universally inherent in the faculty of * AVerke, I. 92. translator's INTRODUCTION xv Sensej and as thus furnishing the conditions for the indefinite extension of mathematical science. In the second part he logically vindicates the validity of Physical Science on the ground of the universal and necessary categories or thought-forms, such as causality, in- herent a priori in the Understanding, and combined with the material of sense through the plastic function of the imagination. Above and beyond the faculties of Sense and Understanding is the higher faculty of Reason proper ; and the crucial problem of the Critique was to determine whether the pure Reason, i.e. Reason viewed as the highest intellectual faculty and taken by itself, could attain objective knowledge in its own sphere akin or analogous to the scientific knowledge realised through the function of the lower faculties in mathematics and physics. Such knowledge would evidently constitute real scientific metaphysics. It is impossible to enter here on Kant's most ingenious and elaborate discussion of this the highest question of intellectual philosophy. The result of his discussion is familiar to all who know anything of modern speculation and need not be dwelt on ; but it still needs to be pointed out that Kant even here strictly adheres to the presuppositions and results of his mathematico-physical Science. Reason has threa- ajjyriqri Ideas or supreme forms, but it cannot apply them to the objects of which it is in search, namely, the Soul, the World, and God, because they are not directly presented as objects to it ; and it only feeds itself upon illusions when it takes its formal transcendental Ideas xvi translator's introduction for these real objects. All its attempts to make any speculative or transcendental use or application of those ideas only involve it in insoluble contradictions and paralogisms, as it has really nothing before it but the activity of the Understanding, evolving forms in which mere subjective processes are treated as objective realities. In dealing with these fictitious and self-destructive specu- lations, Kant displays all the methodical rigour and prac- tical realism of the trained scientist. Nothing can be evolved out of the pure Reason which could be fitted into a scientific system of knowledge of real things, or which could positively supplement the actual discoveries of the mathematician and the physicist. All real positive knowledge of existing things is thus limited to the objects of experience by the demonstrated sterility of reason in its own special activity, and reason struggles in vain to escape from the inner vacancy in which she is im- prisoned, or to manufacture a world of reality out of the projections of her own empty spectral forms. This limitation of human knowledge, this negation of all higher rational speculation regarding supersensible objects, this confinement of science to the phenomenal and finite, is the rigorous result of Kant's Critique ; and he only tempered its humiliation by conceding a certain regulative function to the ideas of pure Reason in the conceptional shaping and guiding of the rational life. But with all this taken at its utmost, it is evident that Kant did not really pass beyond the Natural Philosophy of Newton, nor did he scientifically vindicate the rational TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION xvii Ideas of God, Freedom, and Immortality, which he had always in view • and hence the results of his criticism, although differing in form and incomparably more deeply grounded, were thus far practically identical with the more recent positions of Positivism and Agnosticism. What then did Kant achieve by his criticism of pure Reason 1 He swept away the old abstract Metaphysics, and he cleared the ground for the new rational Realism ; and in this latter respect he made an advance on Hume. For he vindicated knowledge as such, gave it a positive basis, and even in limiting it established its deepest principle of certainty by representing it as conscious participation in reality. It is now easy to criticise the manner in which he did this : to point out how largely his method was still infected by the antiquated meta- physical formalism ; to show that he borrowed most of his weapons from the old scholastic armoury ; to prove that his psychology and logic were fundamentally medieval and unscientific; and to refute his own assump- tions by the issue of his own refutations. But with all this his merit remains ; and the irrefutable proof of it is supplied by the enduring work of the third period of his development in which he concentrated his matur- est power on the more practical problems of human life and action. It is with Kant's work in this practical period that we are here specially concerned, and more particularly with his contributions to Political Philosophy. No department of his work has, however, been so much b XV111 translator's introduction misunderstood, or at least has been so imperfectly repre- sented. This has arisen from the fact that a right estimate and understanding of it can only be found by taking it in connection with the method and work of the two former periods, and this has been too frequently overlooked. The concluding work of the practical period of Kant's development really completes and crowns the efforts of the two former periods. It is their positive complement, their constructive consum- mation, their harmonious synthesis in a higher unity. There is no essential inconsistency, no artificial intel- lectual somersault, no unnatural dialectic introduced into the intellectual process of his philosophising as it moves to its ultimate goal. Kant thinks straight on, the results he had already attained being kept firmly and clearly before him as permanent conquests and points of vantage ; and so he passes as by natural and necessary continuity from science and theoretical criti- cism into the moral world as the living realm of practice. He admitted that speculative philosophy could never under any method work out a system of knowledge that should be fit as one says ' for gods ; ' and the limits within which he was reluctantly compelled to confine the speculative ambition of pure Reason, only threw him with intenser earnestness into the exploration of the practical sphere. Like all great thinkers — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle — he came to see that knowledge is not the highest end of man ; and that even at its highest, knowledge is only a means to a higher end in practice. translator's introduction XIX His patient and elaborate investigation of the function of the pure theoretical Reason had only yielded an unsatisfied Ideal which yet necessarily hovers before man as his highest Good ; and he saw that it was only on the side of the practical Reason that the significance, as well as the satisfaction, of that Ideal could be truly realised. In the prosecution of his problem Kant came upon a new position, which is at once the most original, the most universal, and the most enduring conception of his philosophy. Disentangling himself from the fruitless abstractions of the 'mere vain dialectic art' in which the Critique of the pure Reason terminates, he grasps all the more firmly the profound conception of Humanity which was implicitly involved in all his former thinking, and he stands before its majesty and infinity with a new sense of awe. He now sees the whole*" purpose of the universe in the light of the practical Reason, and finds the order of the primary creation in nature (which had been the first subject of his scientific investigation), consummated by the creative function of man through the moral causality of his rational will. According to Kant the cosmic evolution of Nature is continued in the historic development of Humanity and completed in the moral perfection of the Individual. This is the largest, the most pregnant, and the most valuable thought in Kant's philosophy. It combines all the parts of his system into unity ; it enables us to distinguish the essential from the accidental in his xx translator's introduction development and expression ; and it furnishes the criterion by which his place is to be determined as the founder of a new epoch in the philosophical history of the world. Kant's work during his third period consisted mainly in the elucidation and application of this thought on its various sides and in its highest relations. It is the determining principle of his whole ethical philosophy. It receives its first clear expression in his essay entitled Idea for a Universal History in cosmo-political reference (1784) ; it underlies his Foundation for a Metaphysic of Morals (1785); and it obtains systematic expression in his Critique of the practical Reason (1788). It is subtly interwoven in his Critique of the Judgment (1790); it is consecrated in his Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason (1794) ; it is practically embodied in his Perpetual Peace (1795) ; and it is finally formulated in his Metaphysic of Morals (1797). In all these works Kant shows himself to be the universal philosopher of Humanity, the greatest of the modern moralists, and the initiator of a new era of political science. It is essential to note that during the third period of his development Kant was again stimulated by the influence of another great outstanding thinker. "What Newton was to him in his scientific period, and what Hume was to him in his abstract speculative period, Rousseau was to him in this third practical period.* * See Kant's 'AVerke,' vii., 374; ' Anthropologic,' 2G8, etc. Kant not only pays homage to the acuteness of Rousseau's intellect, ' the TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxi The fiery Prophet of the French Revolution stirred Kant to the very depths of his nature ; the theory of educa- tion so enthusiastically expounded by Rousseau in his Emile fascinated him like a spell ; and the bold assertion of the natural rights of man roused his deep moral energy as Hume's doubt had awakened his free intellec- tual activity. Kant dealt with the position of Rousseau very much as he had done with that of Hume. He generalised it, and he rectified it. Although he adopted the idea of the ' Social Contract' as a convenient mode of formally representing the rationality of the State, Kant saw clearly that it was a historical fiction, and with deeper insight he found the justification of history i in its progressive elaboration of right. Kant overcame the historical pessimism of Rousseau and his hatred of civilisation by a profounder apprehension of the purpose and method of the social struggle. The ceaseless an- tagonism, the apparent failures, and the forbidding unsociality of mankind, did yet, according to Kant, work out that ideal of perfection which Rousseau vainly dreamed of as pre-existing under conditions of barbarism. It was in the light of Rousseau's despair noble soaring of his genius,' and 'the magic power of his eloquence,' but he says explicitly : ' By inclination I am myself an enquirer. I feel all the thirst for knowledge and the eager unrest of striving to advance, as well as satisfaction with every kind of progress. There was a time when I thought all this could form the glory of mankind, and I despised the rabble who know nothing. Rousseau has brought me to the right view. This blinding superiority vanished ; 7" learned to honour men, and I would regard myself as much more useless than the common labourers did I not believe that this way of thinking could communicate a value to all others in establishing the Rights of Mankind.' Cf. Dr K. Dietrich, Kant und Rousseau, 1878. xxu translator's introduction that Kant's hope of a better humanity was kindled, and that he became reconciled to the pain and suffering of the historic process. He clearly saw that the highest human condition can only be attained through the struggle for life, and that the worst historical state is better than soft idyllic ease and enjoyment where there is no assertion of right. Man is what he makes himself to be ; he must rise through social conflict out of mere natural capacity to moral reality ; and the condition of this, both in the individual and the species, is progress. It is really to Kant that the world owes the first scientific conception of human Progress* Plato, Seneca, Augus- tine, Bacon, Pascal and Turgot, had caught glimpses of the historical Ideal, and the whole spirit of the Eighteenth Century was striving to grasp it ; but it was only faintly, waveringly and vaguely realised until Kant gave it definite and rational expression. It was the logical consequence of his profound conception of the development of the world as a whole, and of the purposive realisation of the moral Ideal in the form of history. The idea of historical progress was thus the necessary outcome of Kant's teleology, and it reduced the apparently irrational conflict and instability of * Janet has given a good account of the development of the idea of Perfectibility and Progress among the French thinkers of the Eighteenth Century. The merits of Turgot in his 'Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle,' 1750, are undoubtedly great. Ample justice has been done to them by Prof. Flint in his ' Philosophy of History in France.' Condorcet in his 'Esquisse dun Tableau Historique des Progres de l'Esprit Humain,' 1795, follows Turgot apparently without knowledge of Kant, although Sieyes had tried to draw the great philosopher into the vortex of the French discussions. TRANSLATORS INTRODUCTION xxiii the moral world to the harmony and permanence of the rational Ideal. Kant thus gave universal scientific form and validity to the conceptions of Order and Progress in the moral sphere. As Newton, following Copernicus and Kepler, had reduced all the seeming irregularities of the physical world to the order of one fundamental law, so Kant following Rousseau and the English and Scottish moralists,* aimed at reducing all the seeming anomalies of the moral world to unity in ac- cordance with law. His System of Morals which deals with the moral world as ' a second supersensible nature,' aim at formulating and demonstrating its highest laws, as the Principia of Newton had already done with regard to the primary sensible nature. Kant thus clearly recognised the universality of moral law for the first time on scientific grounds, as Newton had done in the case of physical law, and he set himself to formulate and demonstrate it after the example of his great master in Natural Philosophy. ^The truth which Kant found in Rousseau was the Principle of Freedom as the inalienable essence of the rational will.f ^Rousseau's error lay in apprehending this truth as antagonistic to the organic conditions of human society and putting it into a negative relation towards these conditions. Kant set himself to correct * Kant refers to Shaftesbury, Hutcbeson, and Hume as having carried farthest the attempts to investigate ' the first principles of all morality,' ' Werke ' i, 297. Hume's Utilitarianism had a relation to Kant's ethics somewhat similar to that of the sceptical theory of causality to his Metaphysics. t Cf. Stahl 'Philosophie des Rechts,' i. 210. xxiv translator's INTRODUCTION that error and to show that, on the contrary, the free- dom which constitutes the true nature of man can only become actual in society, and fulfil its purpose through the historical mediation of all the rational wills. ' The freedom that struggles against social necessity,' it has been well said, 'must ultimately discover that it is only in the social organism that the individual can be really free.' * "The true Ideal of man, according to Kant, is realised in the progressive unification of Reason and Nature, 'till perfect Art again becomes Nature, which is the ultimate goal of the moral destination of the human species.'f The resulting society is at any time incomplete and imperfect; and in any case it can only approach the realisation of the Ideal of freedom through a slow and toilsome process of antagonism and un- sociality. Kant was painfully conscious of the dualism that constantly asserts itself between the ^empirjc aljm- pulses of Nature: and the rational ideality of the pure will, the ' heteronomy ' of the other law in the members warring against the law of the mind ; and he perceived that it was only through the objective principle of de- velopment that the r autonomy'of the subjective will could be brought into harmony with the universal order. The historical synthesis of Nature and Reason seen in the progressive actualisation of that autonomy is, according to Kant, the fulfilment of the highest purpose of Nature, and at the same time the advancing * Prof. E. Caird, Op. cit. ii, 561. t ' Werke, ' vii, 376. translator's introduction XXV creation of the rational moral world and the realisation of freedom. The working out of civilisation is a dis- cipline which consists in ' the liberation of the will from the despotism of the desires.' Kant thus adopts and applies the law of development in its widest range, and by it he binds the physical and moral worlds into one. He does not shrink even from entertaining the possibility of the evolution of life from the mechanism of Nature, and the descent of all existing species from the lowest primordial germs.* Ignoring the idea of miraculous interferences with the order of Nature, and recognising the principle of continuity as holding throughout the whole sphere of finite modified existence, he virtually resolves the twofold order of Being into the primary process of Nature becoming Reason and the secondary process of Reason again becoming a transformed Nature, — 'a new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. 'f Nature is thus per- fected by the practical activity of Reason, and Reason consciously realises itself in all its relations through the spiritual product of this activity. Its causality is the creative principle of a new world of intelligible Being, whose conditions and relations are the objects of the new Metaphysic. Had Kant prosecuted this idea into a detailed investigation of the origin and development of Reason itself, he would have removed the many * 'Werke,' vi, 210, 'Anthrop.' 270, etc., 'Kritik der Urtheils- kraft,' 83. t This is the point of view developed by Schleiermacher in his Philosophical Ethics. xxvi TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION misunderstandings that have gathered around his Philosophy and made his doctrine of a priori cognition intelligible in the light of the primordial relations of Reason to Nature. For, as the great poet, under reference to the fairest products of Nature, puts it : ' There is an Art which in their piedness shares With great creating Nature. Say there be ; Yet Nature is made better by no mean But Nature makes that mean : so o'er that Art "Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an Art That Nature makes. . . You see we marry A gentle scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race : This is an Art Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but The Art itself is Nature.' * If Kant only indicated the solution of this cardinal problem of modern thought, he at least showed that the Science of Physics is in fact completed and crowned by the Philosophy of History as the moral Science of Humanity ; while by his definite con- ception of universal progressive development as deter- mined by inherent necessary conditions, he put the method of the Philosophy of History on a scientific basis. But his first attempt to formulate the Law of History could hardly be expected to be more than an empirical description of its elements or conditions. Thus he refers the whole movement of History to the l un- social sociality ' of man, a phrase which suggests analogy * 'The Winter's Tale,' iv, 4, 85. 1 TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION xxvii with the forces of attraction and repulsion in Nature, but makes no approach to the mathematical definiteness of the formula of the Law of Gravitation. At most it only points out the reality of the struggle for existence in the human world, and its analogy with the order of the lower world. Kant, however, definitely grasped the ultimate purpose of Nature in the moral struggle, and formulated it generally. He represents it in a re- markable and novel way as the development of all the capacities implanted in man, and the establishment 1 of a Universal Civil Society regulating through its per- fect constitution the rightful relations of men to each other in their realisation of these capacities. It was by this profound and pregnant conception of historical development and social organisation that Kant overcame the abstract universality and the social pessimism of Rousseau, and laid the basis of a new Political Philosophy inspired and animated by the optimism of eternal hope. Without further prosecuting his view of the historical process, and, unfortunately, thereafter leaving it almost entirely out of sight, Kant passed to the metaphysical formulation of the law of practical reason in its ideal state of development. It was certainly not Kant's view that reason is always present in the same completeness and potency in all men and at all stages, from the lowest barbarism to the highest civilisation; but while his An- thropology deals with its empirical modifications his Metaphysic rises to the highest point of view, and deals xxvm TRANSLATOR S INTRODUCTION with the formal perfection of pure reason in its idea and principle. As is well known Kant formulates the funda- mental law of the pure practical reason, or the cate- gorical imperative, in three forms : 1. Act so that the maxim of thy will may be capable of being made a universal law : 2. Act so that thou mayest use the humanity in thy own person, as well as in the person of every other, always as an end and never as a means : and 3. Act according to maxims which at the same time may be objectified as natural laws in a system of universal legislation. These three laws of moral action, like the three laws of motion in the physical system, are the fundamental principles that regulate the free will of man as autonomous, or as giving a law to itself, in the application of its activity to the sensible world. In so far as the material of the sensible world is embraced in the free activity of the will acting in accordance with these laws, it is lifted up into a higher sphere, and is gradually transformed into a higher world, which is the kingdom of nature transfigured into the Kingdom of Man. Although these three laws are only modified ex- pressions of the one fundamental principle of freedom, the centre of gravity, the ttov