Kant was permeated with his conviction, as is con- spicuous in the minutest details of his chosen life-work, that man was responsible only to himself, to such an extent that he regarded this side of his theory as self- evident and least likely to be disputed. This silence of Kant has brought about a misunderstanding of his ethics—the only ethics tenable from the psychologically introspective standpoint, the only system according to which the insistent strong inner voice of the one is to be heard through the noise of the many.
I gather from a passage in his "Anthropology" that even in the case of Kant some incident in his actual earthly life preceded the "formation of his character." The birth of the Kantian ethics, the noblest event in the history of the world, was the moment when for the first time the dazzling awful conception came to him, "I am responsible only to myself; I must follow none other; I must not forget myself even in my work; I am alone; I am free; I am lord of myself."
"Two things fill my mind with ever renewed wonder and awe the more often and the deeper I dwell on them—the starry vault above me and the moral law within me. I must not look on them both as veiled in mystery or think that their majesty places them beyond me. I see them before me, and they are part of the consciousness of my existence. The first arises from my position in the outer world of the senses, and links me with the immeasurable space in which worlds and worlds and systems and systems, although in immeasurable time, have their ebbs and flows, their beginnings and ends. The second arises from my invisible self, my personality, and places me in a world that has true infinity, but which is evident only to the reason and with which I recognise myself as being bound, not accidentally as in the other case but in a universal and necessarv union. On the one hand, the consciousness of an endless series of worlds destroys my sense of importance, making me only one of the animal creatures which must return its substance again to the planet (that, too, being no
