53.] (b) The Practical Reason is understood by Kant to mean a _thinking_ Will, _i.e._ a Will that determines itself on universal principles. Its office is to give objective, imperative laws of freedom,--laws, that is, which state what ought to happen. The warrant for thus assuming thought to be an activity which makes itself felt objectively, that is, to be really a Reason, is the alleged possibility of proving practical freedom by experience, that is, of showing it in the phenomenon of self-consciousness. This experience in consciousness is at once met by all that the Necessitarian produces from contrary experience, particularly by the sceptical induction (employed amongst others by Hume) from the endless diversity of what men regard as right and duty,--_i.e._ from the diversity apparent in those professedly objective laws of freedom. 54.] What, then, is to serve as the law which the Practical Reason embraces and obeys, and as the criterion in its act of self-determination? There is no rule at hand but the same abstract identity of understanding as before: There must be no contradiction in the act of self-determination. Hence the Practical Reason never shakes off the formalism which is represented as the climax of the Theoretical Reason. But this Practical Reason does not confine the universal principle of the Good to its own inward regulation: it first becomes _practical,_ in the true sense of the word, when it insists on the Good being manifested in the world with an outward objectivity, and requires that the thought shall be objective throughout, and not merely subjective. We shall speak of this postulate of the Practical Reason afterwards.