PREFACE rO THE SECOND EDITION XXXvil 



not therefore sufficient, — is seen to involve, as the 

 complemental conditioi making tip sufficiency^ its 

 awareness of a whole society of minds, the genus 

 against which it spontaneously defines itself, per 

 differentiain, as individual. Thus the world of 

 minds, as the sole world of Ends presupposed in 

 all moral responsibility, the world of ultimate and 

 standard Objects, becomes at one and the same 

 stroke the warranting foundation of knowledge and 

 of good-will alike : to refuse good-will is to violate 

 the primary principle of each mind's own existence, 

 and is therefore to convict oneself, in one and the 

 same act, of irrationality and folly as well as of 

 indifference or of ill-will. In this light, duty is seen 

 to be the freedom of autonomy, instead of simply 

 the freedom of sharing in a good lot, — freedom in 

 a world of utter reality, where nothing is predestined 

 otherwise than by the self's own thinking, so that 

 each self thinks every other as an essential comple- 

 ment of himself, and sees that he cannot realise 

 himself except as he realises all the others. In fine, 

 the principle of self-recognition, as a condition of 

 any and all knowledge, not only turns out to be 

 the first principle of morality, but the first principle 

 of morality becomes at once the first principle of 

 knowledge and itself an act of knoivledge, not simply 

 a sentiment of obligation. Objective knowledge and 

 the intelligibly objective certainty of the moral judg- 



