The secret of the critique of practical reason is that man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all; he has the law in him, and so he himself is the law, and no mere changing caprice. The desire is in him to be only the law, to be the law that is himself, without afterthought or forethought. This is the awful conclusion, he has no longer the sense that there can be duty for him. Nothing is superior to him, to the isolated absolute unity. But there are no alternatives for him; he must respond to his own categorical imperatives, absolutely, impartially. “Freedom,” he cries (for instance, Wagner, or Schopenhauer), “rest, peace from the enemy; peace, not this endless striving”; and he is terrified. Even in this wish for freedom there is cowardice; in the ignominious lament there is desertion as if he were too small for the fight. What is the use of it all, he cries to the universe; and is at once ashamed, for he is demanding happiness, and that his own burden should rest on other shoulders. Kant’s lonely man does not dance or laugh; he neither brawls nor makes merry; he feels no need to make a noise, because the universe is so silent around him. To acquiesce in his loneliness is the splendid supremacy of the Kantian. CHAPTER VIII THE “I” PROBLEM AND GENIUS “In the beginning the world was nothing but the Âtman, in the form of a man. It looked around and saw nothing different to itself. Then it cried out once, ‘It is I.’ That is how the word ‘I’ came to be. That is why even at the present day, if any one is called, he answers, ‘It is I,’ and then recalls his other name, the one he bears.”--(Brihadâranyata-Upanishad.) Many disputations about principles in psychology arise from individual characterological differences in the disputants. Thus, in the mode that I have already suggested, characterology might play an important part. When one person thinks to have discovered this, the other that, by introspection, characterology would have to show why the results in the one case should differ from those in the other, or, at least, to point out in what other respects the persons in question were unlike. I see no other possible way of clearing up the disputed points of psychology. Psychology is a science of experiences, and, therefore, it must proceed from the individual to the general, and not, as in the supra-individualistic laws of logic and ethics, proceed from the universal to the individual case. There is no such thing as an empirical general psychology; and it would be a mistake to approach such without having fully reckoned with differential psychology.