第34章 Letter XXIV(2)

Facts verify this supposition.Man raised on the wings of imagination leaves the narrow limits of the present,in which mere animality is enclosed,in order to strive on to an unlimited future.But while the limitless is unfolded to his dazed imagination,his heart has not ceased to live in the separate,and to serve the moment.The impulse towards the absolute seizes him suddenly in the midst of his animality,and as in this cloddish condition all his efforts aim only at the material and temporal,and are limited by his individuality,he is only led by that demand of the reason to extend his individuality into the infinite,instead of to abstract from it.He will be led to seek instead of form an inexhaustible matter,instead of the unchangeable an everlasting change and an absolute securing of his temporal existence.The same impulse which,directed to his thought and action,ought to lead to truth and morality,now directed to his passion and emotional state,produces nothing but an unlimited desire and an absolute want.The first fruits,therefore,that he reaps in the world of spirits,are cares and fear -both operations of the reason;not of sensuousness,but of a reason that mistakes its object and applies its categorical imperative to matter.All unconditional systems of happiness are fruits of this tree,whether they have for their object the present day or the whole of life,or what does not make them any more respectable,the whole of eternity,for their object.An unlimited duration of existence and of well-being is only an ideal of the desires;hence a demand which can only be put forth by an animality striving up to the absolute.Man,therefore,without gaining anything for his humanity by a rational expression of this sort,loses the happy limitation of the animal over which he now only possesses the unenviable superiority of losing the present for an endeavour after what is remote,yet without seeking in the limitless future anything but the present.

But even if the reason does not go astray in its object,or err in the question,sensuousness will continue to falsify the answer for a long time.

As soon as man has begun to use his understanding and to knit together phaenomena in cause and effect,the reason,according to its conception,presses on to an absolute knitting together and to an unconditional basis.

In order merely to be able to put forward this demand man must already have stepped beyond the sensuous,but the sensuous uses this very demand to bring back the fugitive.

In fact it is now that he ought to abandon entirely the world of sense in order to take his flight into the realm of ideas;for the intelligence remains eternally shut up in the finite and in the contingent,and does not cease putting questions without reaching the last link of the chain.

But as the man with whom we are engaged is not yet capable of such an abstraction,and does not find it in the sphere of sensuous knowledge,and because he does not look for it in pure reason,he will seek for it below in the region of sentiment,and will appear to find it.No doubt the sensuous shows him nothing that has its foundation in itself,and that legislates for itself,but it shows him something that does not care for foundation or law;therefore thus not being able to quiet the intelligence by showing it a final cause,he reduces it to silence by the conception which desires no cause;and being incapable of understanding the sublime necessity of reason,he keeps to the blind constraint of matter.As sensuousness knows no other end than its interest,and is determined by nothing except blind chance,it makes the former the motive of its actions,and the latter the master of the world.

Even the divine part in man,the moral law,in its first manifestation in the sensuous cannot avoid this perversion.As this moral law is only prohibited and combats in man the interest of sensuous egotism,it must appear to him as something strange until he has come to consider this self-love as the stranger,and the voice of reason as his true self.Therefore he confines himself to feeling the fetters which the latter impose on him,without having the consciousness of the infinite emancipation which it procures for him.Without suspecting in himself the dignity of lawgiver,he only experiences the constraint and the impotent revolt of a subject fretting under the yoke,because in this experience the sensuous impulsion precedes the moral impulsion,he gives to the law of necessity a beginning in him,a positive origin,and by the most unfortunate of all mistakes he converts the immutable and the eternal in himself into a transitory accident.He makes up his mind to consider the notions of the just and the unjust as statutes which have been introduced by a will,and not as having in themselves an eternal value.Just as in the explanation of certain natural phaenomena he goes beyond nature and seeks out of her what can only be found in her,in her own laws;so also in the explanation of moral phaenomena he goes beyond reason and makes light of his humanity,seeking a god in this way.It is not wonderful that a religion which he has purchased at the cost of his humanity shows itself worthy of this origin,and that he only considers as absolute and eternally binding laws that have never been binding from all eternity.He has placed himself in relation with,not a holy being,but a powerful.Therefore the spirit of his religion,of the homage that he gives to God,is a fear that abases him,and not a veneration that elevates him in his own esteem.

Though these different aberrations by which man departs from the ideal of his destination cannot all take place at the same time,because several degrees have to be passed over in the transition from the obscure of though to error,and from the obscure of will to the corruption of the will;these degrees are all,without exception,the consequence of his physical state,because in all the vital impulsion sways the formal impulsion.Now,two cases may happen:either reason may not yet have spoken in man,and the physical may reign over him with a blind necessity,or reason may not be sufficiently purified from sensuous impressions,and the moral may still be subject to the physical;in both cases the only principle that has a real power over him is a material principle,and man,at least as regards his ultimate tendency,is a sensuous being.The only difference is,that in the former case he is an animal without reason,and in the second case a rational animal.But he ought to be neither one nor the other:he ought to be a man.Nature ought not to rule him exclusively;nor reason conditionally.

The two legislations ought to be completely independent and yet mutually complementary.