THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



no metaphysical miracle in morality, but the action of 

 physiological functions. 



Our whole modem civilization clings to the erroneous 

 ideas which traditional morality, founded on revelation, 

 and closely connected with ecclesiastical teaching, has 

 iinposed upon it. Christianity has taken over the ten 

 commandments from Judaism, and blended them with a 

 mystical Platonism into a towering structure of ethics. 

 Kant especially lent support to it in recent years with 

 his Critique of Practical Reason, and his three central 

 dogmas. The close connection of these three dogmas 

 with each other, and their positive influence on ethics, 

 were particularly important through Kant formulating 

 the further dogma of the categorical imperative. 



The great authority which Kant's dualist philosophy 

 obtained is largely owing to the fact that he subordinated 

 pure reason to practical reason. The vague moral law 

 for which Kant claimed absolute universality is expressed 

 in his categorical imperative as follows: " So act that the 

 maxim (or the subjective principle of your will) may at 

 the same time serve as a general law." I have shown in 

 the nineteenth chapter of the Riddle that this categorical 

 imperative is, like the thing in itself, an outcome of dog- 

 matic, not critical, principles. As Schopenhauer says: 



Kant's categorical imperative is generally quoted in our day 

 under the more modest and convenient title of "the moral law." 

 The daily writers of compendiums think they have founded the 

 science of ethics when they appeal to this apparently innate 

 "moral law," and then build on it that wordy and confused 

 tissue of phrases with which they manage to make the simplest 

 and clearest features of life unintelligible, without having ever 

 seriously asked themselves whether there really is any such 

 convenient code of morality written in our head, breast, or 

 heart. This broad cushion is snatched from under morality 

 when we prove that Kant's categorical imperative of the 

 practical reason is a wholly unjustified, baseless, and imaginative 

 assumption. 



412 



