There is no way of uniting epistemological and ethical idealism, however enticing the undertaking looks at first sight. When they are set side by side, the happenings which take place according to a law of causation subordinate to freedom, and become conscious in man through the moral law, become identified with the happenings which are universal in the world of things in themselves. There ensues a disastrous confusion of the ethical with the intellectual. If the sensible world is only a manifestation of an immaterial world, then all the happenings which come about in the space and time sphere of causation produced by necessity are only parallel appearances of the events which are brought about in the intellectual sphere of causation produced by freedom. All happenings, therefore, human activity just as much as natural happening, are, according to the point of view, at once intellectual and free, and at once natural and necessary. If ethical activity produced by freedom is represented as analogous with the results of epistemological idealism, then either everything that happens in the world, conceived as intellectual happening, is ethical, or there is no such thing as an ethical happening. Because it has chosen to put side by side these two things, human activity and natural happening, Kant’s way of looking at the question has to renounce all ability to maintain the difference between them. But the very life of ethics depends on this difference being there and effective. [pg 113] Epistemological idealism is a dangerous companion for the ethical. The world-order of immaterial happening has a supra-ethical character. From the setting side by side of ethical and epistemological idealism there can never result an ethical world-view: it will always be a supra-ethical one. From epistemological idealism, therefore, ethics have nothing to expect, but everything to fear. By its depreciation of the reality of the empirical world the ethical world-view is not helped: it is injured. Ethics have materialist instincts. They want to concern themselves with empirical happenings and transform the circumstances of the empirical world. But if that world is only “appearance,” derived from an intellectual world which functions within it or behind it, ethics have nothing on which to act. To wish to influence a self-determined play of appearances has no sense. Ethics can therefore allow validity to the view that the empirical world is mere appearance only with the limitation that activity exerted upon the appearance does at the same time influence the reality lying behind it. But thereby they come into conflict with all epistemological idealism.