GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

OBJECTIVE INTUITIONISM 2OI
the will, for if we could only do what is right, morality,
as we know it, would not exist. But equally it would not
exist if, having done wrong, and done wrong habitually,
we could not repent and reform, for the conception of
moral obligation implies that, if we ought to do a thing,
we always can do it. This conception we must now consider
in the form in which it was developed by its most forthright
exponent, Immanucl Kant (1724-1804), whom
many would consider to be the most important, not only
of the objective-intuitionists, but of all writers upon the
subject of ethics. The question of the possibility of human
freedom will be discussed in the next chapter.
III. KANT
Metaphysical Significance of Kant's Moral Theory.
Kant's moral philosophy is intimately bound up with
his metaphysics, nor can it be adequately understood
apart from his theory of the nature of the universe as a
whole. Those who wish to obtain a general understanding
of this theory, will find an outline of it in Chapter XIV
of my Guide to Philosophy. For the purpose of the present
discussion, the reader must be content with the bald statement
that Kant divides the universe into two parts or
worlds. There is, he holds, the world of things as they are
in themselves, aftd there is the world of things as they
appear to us. The second world is necessarily and always
different from the first, since in knowing things the human
mind changes them, imposing upon them a framework
of qualities and relations which they do not possess in
themselves. Just as a man who was born with a pair of blue
spectacles permanently affixed to his nose would assert
that everything was blue, and just as the blueness would,
nevertheleM, not belong to the things which he saw but
would be a quality imposed upon them by the conditions
under which he saw than that he should see them to
be blue would, in fact, be a condition of his seeing them
at all so, Kant held, everything we know possesses
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