It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a God. A few, and they are the men of genius, do not bow to an alien law. The rest try to justify their doings and misdoings, their thinking and existence (at least the mental side of it), to some one else, whether it be the personal God of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered human being. It is only in this way that they can bring their lives under the social law. Kant was permeated with his conviction, as is conspicuous in the minutest details of his chosen life-work, that man was responsible only to himself, to such an extent that he regarded this side of his theory as self-evident and least likely to be disputed. This silence of Kant has brought about a misunderstanding of his ethics--the only ethics tenable from the psychologically introspective standpoint, the only system according to which the insistent strong inner voice of the one is to be heard through the noise of the many. I gather from a passage in his “Anthropology” that even in the case of Kant some incident in his actual earthly life preceded the “formation of his character.” The birth of the Kantian ethics, the noblest event in the history of the world, was the moment when for the first time the dazzling awful conception came to him, “I am responsible only to myself; I must follow none other; I must not forget myself even in my work; I am alone; I am free; I am lord of myself.” “Two things fill my mind with ever renewed wonder and awe the more often and the deeper I dwell on them--the starry vault above me and the moral law within me. I must not look on them both as veiled in mystery or think that their majesty places them beyond me. I see them before me, and they are part of the consciousness of my existence. The first arises from my position in the outer world of the senses, and links me with the immeasurable space in which worlds and worlds and systems and systems, although in immeasurable time, have their ebbs and flows, their beginnings and ends. The second arises from my invisible self, my personality, and places me in a world that has true infinity, but which is evident only to the reason and with which I recognise myself as being bound, not accidentally as in the other case but in a universal and necessary union. On the one hand, the consciousness of an endless series of worlds destroys my sense of importance, making me only one of the animal creatures which must return its substance again to the planet (that, too, being no more than a point in space) from whence it came, after having been in some unknown way endowed with life for a brief space. The second point of view enhances my importance, makes me an intelligence, infinite and unconditioned through my personality, the moral law in which separates me from the animals and from the world of sense, removes me from the limits of time and space, and links me with infinity.”