The moment Kant has said this he has made the moral world an ideal, an image of a world not identical with this present one, but into which our faith demands that the present one may by our effort evolve. It is impossible so far as I can see to make Kant’s first impression of duty square with this account of it. It cannot be that duty is a simple certain command that the humblest understanding can grasp. It must be that duty is a more or less vague striving toward this ideal, a striving to make the world in which we live with one another approximate more and more closely to this beautiful republic whose motto might be modeled after Rabelais, “‘Fays ce que vouldras,’ et ne nuis pas à ton voisin.”[8] Religion then is the determination to allow nothing to divert us from this struggle which it would not be out of place to call the struggle after divinity. Immortality would be a direction, not a condition. Happiness--the religious happiness--the sense of the progress to which we are contributing. All this seems to flow naturally from the Kantian conception, but Kant has that in him which will not let such results follow. He stands divided against himself. His theory of duty as decalogue law, his less confident but no less enduring conception of the object of religion as facts behind a veil, stand in contradiction with his view of duty as a struggle that must be more or less blind, baffled, and empirical toward a goal infinitely remote. * * * * * In this contradiction we must leave him. Religion, as the name for a search after the kind of reality in which the multiple strivings that leave us divided each within himself and one from another, was the deep inspiration of those who followed Kant. They thought they owed this inspiration to the master, and so indeed they did; but it is not surprising that Kant himself refused to recognize his immediate offspring (Fichte) and would probably have been greatly shocked at the speculations of his more remote progeny. Nor is it surprising to one accustomed to the disappointments of which the history of thought is the living chronicle that one of those inspired by Kant to this very search should have ended his seeking with the tragic finding that the harmonious will is an illusion and a contradiction. Will is essentially war, cries Schopenhauer. There is that in the experience of every man which forces him to give ear to this cry, voicing though it does the deepest and final denial of all that is religious. VI ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER 1788-1860