42. And certainly we are at liberty to rejoice over this. The absolute clearness with which all this follows is good omen for the success of our undertaking, since it is the method by which we arrived at our result, which is obviously the most essential feature in it. Without it what advantage can our inquiry be said to have over that of others? Even Kant, for example, whose doctrines concerning the principles of ethics were quite different, arrived, in the further course of his statement, pretty much to the popular view. But what we miss in him is strict logical coherence. Beneke has shown that the Categorical Imperative as Kant used it, may be so employed as to prove, in the same case, contradictory statements and so everything and nothing.[54] If, none the less, Kant is able to arrive so often at right conclusions, this must be attributed to the fact that from the outset he had harboured such opinions. Even Hegel, had he not known in other ways that the sky was blue, would certainly never have succeeded by means of his dialectic in deducing this _à priori_. Did he not equally succeed in demonstrating that there were seven planets, a number accepted in his day, but which in our time science has long left behind? The causes of this phenomenon, therefore, are easily understood. 43. But there is another point which appears enigmatical. How does it happen that the prevailing public opinion respecting law and morality is itself, in so many respects, obviously right? If a thinker like Kant was unable to discover the sources from which ethical knowledge flows, how can we believe that the common folk succeeded in drawing therefrom? And if this were not the case, how were they able, while ignorant of the premises, still to reach the conclusions? Here the phenomenon cannot possibly be explained from the fact that the right view was long before established. This difficulty also resolves itself in a very simple manner when we reflect that much in our store of knowledge exists, and contributes towards the attainment of new knowledge, without the knowledge of the process itself being clearly present to consciousness.