116 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



when duties are mutually conflicting ; in a word, upon a 

 hypothetical human nature, that, far from approximately 

 coinciding with our actual human nature, scarcely touches 

 it at a single point of contact. And the result has been 

 that human nature, and what science has shown to be 

 its general properties, being disregarded, while a heavy 

 and impossible burden of logically deduced duties and 

 precepts is imposed upon it, human nature has refused 

 to consider the moral message of Kant as specially in- 

 tended for it, and men have declined to be bound *by so 

 logically perfect but humanly inapplicable a system. 



In his anxiety to place the moral law quite outside 

 and above human nature ; in his laudable desire to give 

 it a more sacred authority by detaching it wholly from 

 men's interests and inclinations, he has overshot his mark, 

 and made it impossible for men to apply or to follow it. 

 In this last attempt to make fast to heaven the moral 

 law, which Kant, in spider fashion, had educed from his 

 own breast, the great modern moralist and law-giver has 

 orily cut its special connection with men on earth ; and 

 his wonderful ethical system has in consequence as 

 completely missed its mark in being addressed to men, as 

 if it had been sent to the wrong planet by mistake. It 

 should have -gone elsewhere to some other world, to 

 Jupiter or Uranus, where, according to another specu- 

 lation of the same philosopher, the inhabitants are of a 

 more ethereal and virtuous temper than we are. " For 

 the Earth " must have been written by mistake on the 

 transcendental tablets containing the new message of 

 the law which Kant received from the Absolute in the 

 terra incognita of the noumenal world. 



In conclusion, let me further add that the system of 

 ethics suitable for man, if any such system be possible, 

 remains to be written. Neither utilitarianism, nor trans- 



