ON HUMAN NATURE AND ITS CAPACITIES FOR VIRTUE. 115 



human nature. If they undertake to guide it, they 

 must begin by taking account of its moral forces and 

 capacities, of what it can do, of what it can only ap- 

 proximately do, of what it cannot do at all. If moral 

 systems are to furnish us with rules of conduct, -they 

 must be such as we can follow, and they must be such, 

 moreover, as it will be generally profitable to follow. 

 Above all, they must not be hopelessly above our power, 

 else we shall be disheartened by their impracticability, 

 no matter what the promises attached to obedience may 

 be ; and we shall end by neglecting them, having thrown 

 them over in despair of fulfilment. 



This is the defect and the danger in the ethical system 

 of Kant. This great thinker and master of system has 

 presented to mankind a wonderful system of morals, in- 

 ternally articulated, rigidly deduced from first principles, 

 and wanting only one thing but that a most important 

 thing to make the system perfect. It has no special 

 reference to human nature. He has founded his system 

 on principles, which are not principles of human nature, 

 not even as shown in the choicest moral specimens of 

 our species. Kant, indeed, avowedly did not build his 

 system on any psychological basis; on any theory of 

 man's actual mental and moral constitution. He did not 

 build it on " empirical," that is, actual human nature. 

 He built it upon a wholly hypothetical human nature, 

 possessed of a free, autonomous will, undetermined, as 

 ours is, by the stress of circumstances, by the strength 

 of internal impulses and forces, by the imperious coercion 

 of society ; upon a human nature whose asserted free- 

 will is not conceivable, as he himself admits, within 

 the sphere of phenomena, but only in the mysterious 

 region of " things-in-themselves " ; upon a human nature 

 that feels the unconditional imperative of duty, even 



