whole, a maximum of well-being in my present state and in every future state." In what shall happiness be placed? In riches? In knowledge? In long life? In good health? None of these things is without dangers. In short, it is impossible to determine with full certainty, according to any principle whatever, what would make man truly happy; therefore it is not possible to act according to a definite principle, but only according to empirical concepts; and the imperatives of prudence, strictly speaking, command nothing.--As we see, the only effective argument of Kant against the admission of the categoric imperatives of well-being, of utility, of happiness, is that he does not know exactly what they are. This did not authorize him to exclude those imperatives and reduce them to pseudo--imperatives, to hypothetic imperatives, or to empirical rules. In other passages of his works, Kant tends to the other solution of excluding the maxims of prudence from the pure practical reason, because they are maxims of self-love (_Selbstliebe,_) or of the practical reason empirically or _pathologically_ conditioned, since for him every pleasure that precedes the moral law and is independent of it, is pathological, that is to say, it belongs to the senses, to the inferior appetitive faculty, not to that which is superior and to reason. Kant often returns to this point and always experiences the same embarrassments and contradictions, as is proved by the variety of the arguments to which he has recourse.[6] [Sidenote: _Errors derived from it in his Ethic._] But the unrecognized autonomy of the useful, of happiness, of well-being, generally revenges itself; because, surreptitiously introduced, it causes itself to be unduly recognized afterwards. Thus it comes about that Kant creates, on the one hand, the monster of disinterested actions, and on the other, does not altogether exclude the concept of actions morally indifferent or permissible.[7] Thus, too, it happens that owing to the discord that he preserves between virtue and happiness, thinking vain the pretence of the Stoics and Epicureans to reconcile them in this life, he is led to postulate the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul, and to make of virtue a means of rendering oneself worthy of happiness in another life. "The cold duty of Kant" (wrote Hegel) "is the last undigested morsel given by revelation to reason, and it weighs upon its stomach."[8] Consequently, the Ethic of Kant, although so different in tendencies and inspiration, yet joined hands with theological utilitarianism, ending at length by also declaring that moral obligation is inconceivable, without the idea of a God, who rewards and punishes in another life, and by declaring that God and the immortality of the soul cannot be otherwise affirmed than by means of moral exigencies. Moral rigorism, like utilitarianism, makes shipwreck in mystery. [Sidenote: _Occasions for a philosophy of economy._]