Several times Kant actually makes it his object to block the natural sources of morality. He will not, for example, allow direct sympathy to be regarded as ethical. The inner feeling for the suffering of another as if it were one’s own is not to count as duty in the real sense of the word, but only as a weakness by which the evil in the world is doubled. All help to others must have its source in a reasoned consideration of the duty of contributing to the happiness of others. By taking from ethics their simplicity and directness, Kant also loosens the connexion which they and the belief in progress had formed with one another, and through which the two together had proved so productive of good. The disastrous separation between them which later on, in the course of the nineteenth century, became complete, was partly due to him. In consequence of his wishing to drive out the naïve rationalistic conception of the ethical in favour of a deepened one without at the same time being in a position to establish a basic principle of it which has been correspondingly deepened, has a definite content of its own, and is directly convincing, Kant brings the ethics of his time into danger. He labours at the provision of new foundations without remembering that the house will develop cracks, if it is not propped up sufficiently. Kant’s attempt to reach an ethical world-view Kant passes by the problem of finding a basic principle of the moral with a definite content, because, while attempting to deepen the concept of the ethical, he pursues an object which lies outside ethics. He wishes to bring ethical idealism into connexion with an idealistic representation of the world which has its source in a theory of knowledge. But [pg 111] from that source he hopes there will come an ethical world-view able to satisfy critical thought. Why has Kant with a rigorism which intentionally depreciates ordinary moral experience ventured forward to the discovery that the moral law has nothing to do with the natural world-order, but is something super-sensible? Because he refuses, similarly, to let the sensible world which is experienced by us in space and time be accepted as anything more than a manifestation of something nonsensible which makes up true reality. The concept of a moral which contains none but inward and spiritual duties is for him the expanding ladder which he draws out so as to reach by means of it the region of Being in itself. He has no feeling of dizziness when in company with ethics, he mounts above all empirical experience and all empirical aims and objects. He is determined to go right up with her, and she can never be sufficiently _a priori_ for him, because he sets up another ladder of the same length, that of epistemological idealism, and tries to lean one against the other, so that they may give each other mutual support.