The lessee of all Kant's wisdom, Hermann Cohen, with the clumsiness of an over-zealous assistant, has expressed his master's thought in a perfectly ludicrous form: "The moral law is to be conceived as a reality of such kind that it must exist, that its being must be" (note the elegance and euphony of the phrase "being must be"!) "even if no creature existed for whom it would be valid." True, the moral law is a maxim on which you should "act," a standard of human conduct, but it would still exist if there were no human beings and no action. It would come to exactly the same thing if Hermann Cohen said: the railway is to be conceived as a reality of such kind that it must exist if there were no human beings and consequently no travellers; even if there were no earth on the surface of which rails and sleepers could be laid. This is such palpable nonsense that it would be a work of supererogation to prove its absurdity. By this grotesque exaggeration Hermann Cohen has clearly brought to light the hollowness and weakness of Kant's Moral philosophy which culminates in the "Categorical Imperative." In spite of its arbitrary dogmatism, the formula of the "Categorical Imperative" has taken a hold on the imagination of the superficially educated, and has never ceased to be repeated with the fervour evinced by a devout man at prayer, by several generations of those who have made it their business to cultivate mental and moral science. In one of his early novels, "The Island of Dr. Moreau," H. G. Wells has described how an audacious scientist, by performing an operation on the brains of the most savage beasts of prey, such as panthers, wolves, etc., transformed them into creatures with the powers of thought and speech. He succeeds in suppressing, or at least in lulling for the time being, their bloodthirsty instincts, but he is always afraid that these may be roused again, and forbids the animals on which he experiments to touch blood or fresh meat. He takes good care to give no reason for this prohibition. He merely issues it sternly and threateningly. It is "the Law," an unknown, inexplicable, but terrible power to which one must submit, because opposition would expose one to unimaginable, but terrible evils. If temptation assails the beasts they flee it, whispering fearfully and warningly to one another: "The Law! the Law!" Wells is a trained philosopher, and often has his tongue in his cheek. I shrewdly suspect that when he writes of the mysterious "Law" which fills Dr. Moreau's semi-humanized beasts of prey with superstitious terror, he is poking fun at Kant's "Categorical Imperative."