supreme concern of the will of man, a revelation to man alone of his own unspeakable dignity, the norm or standard whereby he is to regulate his life--this it is which is the law of his will. As gravitation rules the stars, so the moral law, the sanction of the eternal distinction between right and wrong, controls the will, not compulsorily, not arbitrarily, as though it could by any possibility be otherwise, but freely. So sovereign is its power, so authentic are its claims, that if it had might as it has right, it would rule the world." It is, therefore, to use Kant's own language, a _categorical imperative_, that is, an unconditional command. "Thou canst, and therefore thou must." By the very manhood you possess you are bound wholly to surrender yourself in submission to what you know to be the right for the right's sake alone. You must make it your own law, and obey it as inflexibly as the stars keep their courses in the everlasting way. Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong. We may see now how Kant bases his whole system upon the indestructible fact of ethical law, the primeval intuition of the awakened spirit of man into the eternal distinction between good and evil. Standing on that foundation, he is able to descry the world of transcendental realities--"the land which is very far off"--which the pure and critical reason could never behold. But though the eyes of the mind were holden, the intuition of the will enables him to gaze direct into the unseen and discern freedom, soul, immortality and God as eternal facts. For whence this sublime law of life unless we conceive mind, not blind chance, as the arbiter of things? Whence this constraining power within me, exerting itself to the uttermost to win my allegiance to the right, unless I am free to obey or disobey? How is not the very conception of morality entirely obliterated in the false philosophy that would fain persuade man that because he is _in_ the world he must needs be _of_ it, and because the tides rise and fall with the phases of the moon, that his actions are fixed and controlled by influences utterly beyond his power? We have no room for the "man-machine" in the beautiful school of Immanuel Kant.