the world allows us only to conjecture his existence and his
majesty, not to behold them or prove them clearly; and on the other
hand, the moral law within us, without promising or threatening
anything with certainty, demands of us disinterested respect; and only
when this respect has become active and dominant, does it allow us
by means of it a prospect into the world of the supersensible, and
then only with weak glances: all this being so, there is room for true
moral disposition, immediately devoted to the law, and a rational
creature can become worthy of sharing in the summum bonum that
corresponds to the worth of his person and not merely to his
actions. Thus what the study of nature and of man teaches us
sufficiently elsewhere may well be true here also; that the
unsearchable wisdom by which we exist is not less worthy of admiration
in what it has denied than in what it has granted.
PART_2|METHODOLOGY
SECOND PART.
Methodology of Pure Practical Reason.
By the methodology of pure practical reason we are not to understand
the mode of proceeding with pure practical principles (whether in
study or in exposition), with a view to a scientific knowledge of
them, which alone is what is properly called method elsewhere in
theoretical philosophy (for popular knowledge requires a manner,
science a method, i.e., a process according to principles of reason by
which alone the manifold of any branch of knowledge can become a
system). On the contrary, by this methodology is understood the mode
in which we can give the laws of pure practical reason access to the
human mind and influence on its maxims, that is, by which we can
make the objectively practical reason subjectively practical also.