For example, when desire is for the love of a woman, it is for the love of _this_ woman, not of _some_ woman. Ask such love what it sees to love in this individual that could not just as well be found in another, and the lover will laugh you out. You are not speaking his language. You are looking for qualities, types, principles--what he wants with all his soul is not a kind of a woman but just _his_ woman. And to her he sings, Who is it says the most? which can say more Than this rich praise,--that you alone are you? Or do you ask as the thing on which all your happiness hangs that death keep his hands off just this child? Then what meaning would it have for you if a condoling friend were to point out that you had other children far more remarkable? It was not for his qualities you cared when you cared for him, nor yet for his value as a unit in counting your offspring. I don’t pretend to explain why this is, or what it all means;[5] but when Kant maintains that to will a principle and nothing but a principle is not what we mean by willing, these instances of objects of desire that are purely individual and can not be reduced to principle naturally present themselves as facts of experience that may help us to catch Kant’s meaning. Of all principles of willing, the moral principle is the highest; but the willing of individual human beings cannot from its very nature be completely defined by principle. The only world in which will can have an object; _i.e._, the only world in which there can be such a thing as will, must be a world of individual things. If it is to be a moral world, it must be possible to struggle for these individual things without disobeying the law of duty. Happiness, defined as getting the individual thing you want, must be guaranteed, or else, since you can only want something that is individual, willing is objectless. Who or what is to guarantee that the world in which we willers of concrete things may will consistently with moral principle exists? Not experience, surely; that has a way of arranging things so that the woman one wants is just the one principle denies one; the child one has set one’s heart on is just the one death has set his seal on. The chapter of “life’s little ironies” is a full one. Then does it not require the guarantee of a world maker or a world ruler that life’s indifference or irony have not the last word? Does not the possibility of a moral will hang upon the assurance of God? So at least for Kant, God makes goodness possible. * * * * *