The Critique of Practical Reason — Kant — John Shaqi
The Critique of Practical Reason
Kant · en
grafted on it, because this is the best, nay, the only guard that
can keep off from the mind the pressure of ignoble and corrupting
motives.
I have only intended to point out the most general maxims of the
methodology of moral cultivation and exercise. As the manifold variety
of duties requires special rules for each kind, and this would be a
prolix affair, I shall be readily excused if in a work like this,
which is only preliminary, I content myself with these outlines.
PART_2|CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION.
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and
awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the
starry heavens above and the moral law within. I have not to search
for them and conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or
were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before
me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my existence.
The former begins from the place I occupy in the external world of
sense, and enlarges my connection therein to an unbounded extent
with worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, and moreover into
limitless times of their periodic motion, its beginning and
continuance. The second begins from my invisible self, my personality,
and exhibits me in a world which has true infinity, but which is
traceable only by the understanding, and with which I discern that I
am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and necessary
connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible worlds. The
former view of a countless multitude of worlds annihilates as it
were my importance as an animal creature, which after it has been
for a short time provided with vital power, one knows not how, must
again give back the matter of which it was formed to the planet it
inhabits (a mere speck in the universe). The second, on the
contrary, infinitely elevates my worth as an intelligence by my
personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent
of animality and even of the whole sensible world, at least so far
as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my existence by
this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and limits of
this life, but reaching into the infinite.