THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY 85 



reason only. The world of moral conduct as such is a world 

 utterly beyond the scope of thought. The very fact that the 

 connection of theoretical and practical reason is found to lie in 

 such transcendent ideas as God, the world, and the soul, is a 

 denial of that intimate relationship of conceptual thought to con 

 duct, upon which pragmatism so earnestly insists. 



In the second place, we cannot refrain from pointing out the 

 absolutism involved in Kant s conception of the regulative ideas 

 as postulates of practical reason. It is true that their validity 

 lies in the service that they perform; but it is an indispensable 

 service. The validity of these concepts within the sphere of 

 practical reason is absolute. Morality is not a developing func 

 tion, the nature of which becomes modified with the modification 

 of other activities. The whole Kantian conception of it is 

 thoroughly rationalistic. The morality of any act is determined 

 by the nature of the act as such, and remains unaffected by the 

 relation which that act may have to other acts. The place of 

 the act in the phenomenal series of conditions is utterly irrelevant 

 to its moral value. Furthermore, its moral value remains wholly 

 unaffected, whether such an act has ever taken place or ever 

 will take place. In other w r ords, moral values are absolutely 

 independent of content on the one hand and of existence on the 

 other. 



