subsequent ethical metaphysics. It is true that the conception of the categorical imperative is in line with the Ideas of Reason discovered in the Critique of Pure Reason. The Idea of Freedom, which in the latter is reached as a possible alternative to mechanical necessity, is empty without the conception Duty. But Duty has to be assumed as a fact of the moral consciousness before it can be shown that Freedom is its ratio essendi. Kant's ethics is rightly called metaphysical; but its fundamental ethical conception is not deduced from his antecedent inquiry into the conditions of our knowledge of the world, or from any non-ethical metaphysics.
I should regard Hegel's dialectic rather than Kant's criticism as expressing the type of an ethics based upon metaphysics. For in Hegel we find what we do not find in Kant, an attempt to pass, by a demonstrative method, from non-ethical to ethical conceptions. Were it possible to accept the logical connectedness of the successive stages of Hegel's dialectic, and the independence of the movement of thought of anything outside itself, then Hegel must be admitted to have shown that the initial concept 'being' implies the concepts of morality. The Absolute in which the self-evolution of the notion terminates is mind: "this," he holds, "is the supreme definition of the Absolute"; further, "the essential feature of mind is liberty"; and this free mind or will manifests itself in morality and law (Ency., § 382, 384, 487). This method seems to me to be the true type of an ethics based on metaphysics. Ethics is not made to depend upon metaphysics in the way in which mechanics depends on mathematics; metaphysical conceptions are not simply applied 'to the subject-matter of conduct.' But the conceptions proper to the merely theoretical or speculative view of things are shown to require ethical conceptions as their logically necessary complement: reality is ultimately unintelligible unless we regard it as free mind; mind is not really free unless it exhibit morality.
What is required from metaphysics is an interpretation, or comprehensive and harmonious view, of reality. And the general characteristic of any dialectical method is the demonstration of the incompleteness of each catagory inadequate to the whole,
