I will, however, explain, more clearly than Kant either would or could, the method whereby he accomplishes this difficult task. The demonstration is all the more necessary because what he did appears to be seldom properly understood. Almost all Kant's disciples have fallen into the mistake of supposing that he presents his Categorical Imperative directly as a fact of consciousness. But in that case its origin would be anthropological, and, as resting on experience, although internal, it would have an empirical basis: a position which runs directly counter to the Kantian view, and which he repeatedly rejects. Thus on p. 48 (R., p. 44) he says: "It cannot be empirically determined whether any such Categorical Imperative exists everywhere"; and again, on p. 49 (R., p. 45): "The possibility of the Categorical Imperative must be investigated entirely on _a priori_ grounds, because here we are not helped by any testimony of experience as to its reality." Even Reinhold, his first pupil, missed this point; for in his _Beitrage zur Uebersicht der Philosophie am Anfange des_ 19. _Jahrhunderts_, No. 2, p. 21, we find him saying: "Kant assumes the moral law to be a direct and certain reality, an original fact of the moral consciousness." But if Kant had wished to make the Categorical Imperative a fact of consciousness, and thus give it an empirical foundation, he certainly would not have failed at least to put it forward as such. And this is precisely what he never does. As far as I know, the Categorical Imperative appears for the first time in the _Kritik der Reinen Vernunft_ (p. 802 of the first, and p. 830 of the fifth edition), entirely ex nunc (unexpectedly), without any preamble, and merely connected with the preceding sentence by an altogether unjustifiable "therefore."; It is only in the _Grundlage zur Metaphysik der Sitten_--a book to which we here devote especial attention--that it is first introduced expressly and formally, as a deduction from certain concepts. Whereas in Reinhold's _Formula concordiae des Kriticismus_,[10] we actually read on p. 122 the following sentence: "We distinguish moral self-consciousness from the =experience= with which it, as an original fact transcending all knowledge, is bound up in the human consciousness; and we understand by such self-consciousness the =direct consciousness of duty=, that is, of the =necessity= we are under of admitting the legitimacy--whether pleasurable or the reverse--of the will, as the stimulus and as the measure of its own operations."