imperative of Kant, for this, we repeat, though it constitute its danger, does not constitute its essential character. [Sidenote: _Kant and the concept of freedom._] Nevertheless, in Kant himself, in this thinker, so rich in contradictions and suggestions, was indicated the concept which, when elaborated, was to constitute the principle, not merely of tautological and formalistic, but of concrete and formal Ethic, the concept of _freedom._ By means of this concept Kant enters into the heart of the real and reaches that region of which mysticism and religion had from time to time caught a glimpse and had here and there attained. As the origin of the rigid Kantian ethical conception and of his abhorrence for the material and mundane is to be found in Christianity (and in Paganism), so the origin of the concrete moral idea is to be sought in St. Augustine, and also in St. Paul, in the mystics and in the great French Christians of the seventeenth century; in that virtue of which Pascal wrote as _plus haute que celle des pharisiens et des plus sages du paganisme,_ and it operates with omnipotent hand, by means of which alone is it possible _dégager l'âme de l'amour du monde, la retirer de ce quelle a de plus cher, la faire mourir à soi-même, la porter et l'attacher uniquement et invariablement à Dieu._[4] The successors of Kant, especially Fichte and Hegel, closed the circle which he had left open, and altogether excluding transcendency, they made of God freedom and of freedom reality. Fichte, who expelled the phantom of the thing in itself from theoretical philosophy, removed from the categoric imperative the appearance of _qualitas occulta,_ which it had borne in the Philosophy of the practical, illuminating that tenebrous region, ready to receive any sort of phantasm or superstition, such as belief in a moral law arbitrarily imposed by the divinity.[5] Hegel does not recognize duty and the categoric imperative, but freedom only, and as he says, the free spirit is that in which subject and object coincide and freedom is freely willed. [Sidenote: _Ethic in the nineteenth century._] II. After the classical epoch of modern philosophy, in the general regression of Ethic, the concept of the concreteness and universality of the practical principle was also lost. Omitting the utilitarians, who no longer have a place here, it must suffice to record how there was a return either to the formalistic principles, which Hegel criticized in Kant (for instance the principle of the Ethic of Rosmini, the _respect for being,_ afterwards combated by Gioberti), or directly to those material principles which Kant had already excluded. Such are the _compassion_ of Schopenhauer, the _five practical ideas_ of Herbart, the love of Feuerbach, _benevolence_ as the supreme ethical idea of Lotze, the _theological_ morality of Baader, the _life_ of Nietzsche, and the like.