OF THE GOOD. 



149 



In the further elaboration of his ethical doctrine, le. 



Gap in 



Kant was, however, hardly more successful than he ^j.^^'?^^s 

 had been in his metaphysics. The 'Thing in itself,' 

 the Noumenon, had there remained as an empty 

 abstraction, useless for the purpose of any philosophy 

 which desired to understand existing things or pheno- 

 mena. The supreme idea of his ethics, the idea of the 

 self-restraining freedom of the Good Will, remained 

 likewise an empty conception. It had indeed a 

 character of its own, a peculiarity which separated it 

 from every other reality ; and that was, that it points 

 to something which ought to be, in opposition to that 

 which is. It finds its expression in language in the 

 imperative mood, the voice of command. Thus Kant 

 termed it the Categorical Imperative. And Kant went 

 a step further, he conceived it as a law binding on all 

 rational beings without regard for persons or circum- 

 stances. This constitutes its universality, and he 

 expressed it in the well - known formula : " Act so 

 that the maxims of your actions may be universally 

 applicable for others as well as for yourself." 



It has frequently been pointed out that the formula 

 of Kant may do very well as a regulative principle, as 

 a formal rule of conduct, but that it does not really 

 define what is intrinsically good, that it does not deal 



dividual aud creative spirit which 

 impressed the contemporaries of 

 Schiller and Goethe so much, more 

 than half a century earlier, in Ger- 

 many, — a time which Mill himself 

 mentions under the name of the 

 " Goethean and Fichtean " period 

 as ' ' one of the three periods which 

 have made Europe what it is " — 



the other two being the Reforma- 

 tion and the latter half of the 

 eighteenth century. Leslie Stephen 

 considers that Mill's individualism 

 is extreme, and that he attached 

 too little importance to the histori- 

 cal antecedents and surroundings 

 of great personalities. 



