duty to achieve the sovereign good, but in these cases he has in mind only one part of it, viz.: virtue, not the other part, viz.: happiness. He says, very frequently, that it is one's duty to be worthy of happiness through virtue. The possibility of virtue is deducible from the obligation to virtue but happiness does not necessarily follow upon worthiness. Hence Kant postulates a God, who, being the author of nature, can and will reward virtue. But this postulate is an arbitrary hypothesis. It does not follow immediately from the obligation to virtue. When Kant, therefore, makes it a duty to realize the sovereign good, he requires one to render himself worthy of that for which he cannot hope, for which, indeed, he is forbidden to hope, because all desire is excluded from morality. Accordingly, to seek a good, one component of which is happiness, is to go against the fundamental principles of the ethical theory.
The next question concerns the freedom of the will. The question is thus divided: 1st. Whether the existence of noumenal freedom, if admitted, would justify Kant's inference to human liberty? 2d. Whether he has strictly proved the necessity of postulating noumenal freedom?
As to the first question, it is indeed true that any being capable of morality is endowed with freedom. But, according to Kant, man presents the twofold aspect of a being at once phenomenal and noumenal;—in his noumenal aspect he is indeed free, but in his phenomenal aspect determined. The consciousness of moral obligation, however, is a fact in the experience of man as a creature existing in time—homo-phenomenon. Duties, in the form of acts to be done or avoided, are a feature of our phenomenal existence. The homo-noumenon imposes obligation upon the homo-phenomenon. The subject of duty is always the latter, never the former. But the source of duty is in the former, the consciousness of it in the latter. But if it is only as phenomenal beings that we have the consciousness of moral obligation, how shall this fact of experience be reconciled with the circumstance that as phenomenal every event which takes place within us is subject to the universal law of natural necessity? The sense of duty becomes an illusion. Does it relieve the difficulty to say that man in his noumenal aspect is free? No, because in that part of his being he is not the subject of duty—he has no consciousness of moral obligation. The supposition of noumenal freedom is not adjusted to the existing moral conditions. As to the second question, the necessity of postulating noumenal freedom, there are here involved two propositions, ist. That duty is a universally acknowledged fact. But this assumption is
