Faith cannot stand unless it has nothing to stand on .sx Every moment is strain and crisis .sx That may be natural to the reformer in a decadent atmosphere ( if Danish religion was decadent ) , but it has the true Jansenist touch , as defined by Sainte-Beuve in the famous phrase , 'It forgot God the father .sx ' After all , the world created by God was pronounced good by Him .sx It is corrected but not superseded by the religion of Redemption- the Kingdom of the Son .sx No doubt there are fierce and dangerous factors working under the surface of our souls , but we need not ( indeed we cannot ) be always living under the surface .sx We get a clear result of his system when he speaks of children .sx As their life has no strain they cannot be real Christians and Kierkegaard has to deal ( rather shame-facedly ) with the Gospel texts on the subject ( Unscientific Postscript , p. 524) .sx Kant and the Utilitarians .sx Most people would agree that Immanuel Kant was a great thinker and also that he was hard to understand .sx There are many ways of being hard to understand .sx One is due to style .sx Not knowing German , I can hardly assess this .sx It would seem that he can be quite lucid when he wants , and can strike out effective phrases like ~'Perceptions without conceptions are blind , and conceptions without perceptions are empty,' or ~'So act that your action may be a general law .sx ' On the other hand , he is one of the philosophers whose work has been subjected to Higher Criticism , and the division into earlier and later strata recalls the Q and M and L of New Testament sources .sx This is partly owing to the fact that he was thinking , while he was writing , and did not always trouble to turn and revise page 100 in the light of what he had said on page 200 .sx But we must also take into account a feature of his mind that may be called Dualism .sx He tells us himself that his method of thinking was to take a point of view and work it out to its logical conclusion and then to do the same with the opposite point of view .sx They sometimes lie down side by side , like the lion and the lamb , but not to live in peace together .sx Two famous examples present themselves in the Critique of Pure Reason , where he is analysing the fact of knowledge .sx First of all , the case of the Senses and the Understanding .sx They seem to have no common root .sx The first is passive , the second active .sx The first deals with the outward and the second with the inner world .sx It is said that they are inseparable but it is not clear why ( for example ) my sensation of colour and my thought of Substance should combine into the amalgam we call 'seeing a thing' .sx We may say ( without going into technicalities ) that Kant took his account of the Senses from Hume , and his account of the Understanding from Leibniz , and it can hardly be said that he reconciled them .sx It is the same with the distinction between Phenomena ( things as they appear to us ) and Things in themselves ( as they really are) .sx We are told there is a deep gulf between the two .sx Phenomena fall within my experience .sx Things in themselves are unknowable , but in that case how do I know of their existence ?sx And what of the knowing Self which , in his view , seems to belong to both worlds ?sx We must keep this dualism in mind when we come to consider what Kant says about the relation of Goodness and Happiness .sx Most people know Heine's brilliant jest about the contrast between two Critiques- that of Pure Reason , in which he deals with thought , and that of the Practical Reason , in which he deals with action .sx In the first he had shown himself a revolutionary .sx 'The inhabitants of Koenigsburg set their watches by him when they saw this mild , inoffensive man take his regular walk .sx ' Had they known , they would have been more frightened of him than of Robespierre .sx Robespierre only killed a king .sx Kant killed a God- the God of the Deists ( that is , the God whose existence can be proved by reason) .sx Then he describes Kant looking up from his triumphant dialectic and his eye lights upon his faithful servant , Lampe .sx He must be left with something to live by .sx So in the second Critique Kant reinstates God , Freedom and Immortality as the object , not of proof , but of belief .sx Put less picturesquely , this means that the Critique of Pure Reason hedges in knowledge so strictly that it can deal with things only as they appear to us in sense experience .sx But when we take up the second Critique which deals with Morality , we find that the moral Good is permanent and unchanging in which we have to believe to make sense of duty .sx As Kant says with a regal gesture , 'I abolish knowledge to make room for belief .sx ' So we have got back to the existence of God , but the God of the moral law .sx Moral Duty ( he argues ) is distinguished from other purposive action by its absolute obligation- what Kant calls the Categorical Imperative .sx All other imperatives are conditional .sx 'If you want to be a musician , you must practice [SIC] so many hours a day' .sx But Conscience does not say , 'If you want to be good , you must abstain from committing murder .sx ' It says , 'Thou shalt do no murder .sx ' The moral command is unconditional .sx It is not based on desire which is selfish .sx Duty is not concerned with consequence :sx Happiness is concerned with nothing else .sx Here we have a sharp dualism .sx The soul of man is free only when it accepts the moral law as good in itself and does not get entangled with selfish desires .sx He does not go quite so far as to say that if I take pleasure in a good action it makes that action bad , but he does say that its goodness has no connection with my feelings .sx Kant finds it rather difficult to answer the question :sx have I any motive at all when I obey the moral law ?sx I do not desire anything for myself or for others .sx I am not concerned with any consequence that may follow .sx I may say that I 'respect' it but I show that respect simply by obeying a law which , because it is always binding on all , must have God for its Giver .sx So far Kant has not got much beyond the Stoic position .sx But after all , he had been brought up under Christian influences , and he goes a step further .sx To do my duty is to will the Supreme Good .sx I cannot will what is impossible and therefore there must be a God who is able and willing to bring about the Supreme Good- which includes Happiness .sx A. E. Taylor has said that what distinguishes Religion from Morality is that the former says , 'What ought to be , exists .sx ' Kant makes a move in that direction .sx There is another point at which he swerves from the strict Stoic creed .sx He accepts a belief in Immortality not so much as a system of rewards and penalties as the possibility of endless moral progress .sx His rather curious argument runs as follows :sx 'What the Law commands must be possible .sx ' 'I must ; therefore I can .sx ' 'This proves human freedom .sx But the Law commands that I shall be absolutely good .sx Now goodness is a process of becoming which never ends , and therefore needs an endless period'- in which not to attain its goal !sx But will this process go on after death as it does here on earth , where the just are never perfectly happy and where evils are constantly clouding and obstructing the Good Will , which Kant calls 'the brightest jewel of the Soul' ?sx I suppose he might have answered , Yes , survival after death and unending improvement need not mean perfect happiness there any more than here .sx But after seventeen centuries of Christian teaching about Heaven it was difficult to contemplate so bleak a prospect .sx So now he introduces a new moral intuition .sx 'That Goodness and Happiness ought to go together , and the existence of God proves that they shall .sx ' So he seems to have overcome the dualism of Happiness and Duty but at a cost .sx He has been violently attacked for reviving at this point the very desire for rewards , which he had banished so haughtily from his Ethics .sx Professor Webb defends him against this charge by saying that the desire is not selfish but a matter of justice- that all good men should be rewarded ( whether it includes myself or not) .sx This may or may not be a sufficient answer , but it hardly meets the problem 'Does Kant regard Happiness as a good thing or not ?sx ' The answer would seem to be that it is a bad thing before death and a good thing after .sx This is not perhaps as absurd as it sounds and might be worked into a theory that life here is a probation , in which we prove ourselves worthy or unworthy of happiness in the next .sx But in this life is it not lawful to seek the happiness of others ?sx On stern Kantian grounds , no .sx Our only desire for others should be that they observe the moral law .sx Thus , the evil of cruelty consists in its effect on the disposition of the doer and not in the sufferings of the victim .sx It is surely the height of pedantry to deny that at least one of the consequences which result from breaking the law of human kindness is the increase of human unhappiness .sx The Utilitarians defended Pleasure against Kant .sx I do not propose to say more than a word about Jeremy Bentham .sx As a reformer of Law and political institutions he was effective , largely because they demand an appeal to the kind of external obedience which can be regulated by external rewards and punishments .sx But , when he tries to open the secrets of the human heart , he appears as the pedant , which for all his good nature he really was .sx He seems to have accepted the syllogism :sx I only do what I desire .sx I only desire what gives me the greater pleasure .sx Therefore , whatever I do , I do because it gives me the greater pleasure .sx It is natural to ask- if everyone does what gives him the greatest pleasure and cannot do anything else , what is wrong and why is the moralist needed to tell us what we ought to do ?sx What is the greatest pleasure ?sx On what scale is it measured ?sx Am I the best judge of it ?sx And so on .sx But apart from all that , one is surprised at the poverty of his psychology .sx Bentham would have done well to consider the Romantic movement which he so much despised .sx We only do what we want !sx Struggles of martyrs , doubts of lovers , fight against temptation , changing moods of the voluptuary , earnest struggling after the true end of life- was all this world of feeling completely closed to him ?sx As though ~'What do I want ?sx ' were not the question of questions !sx That world was not wholly closed to John Stuart Mill .sx Brought up in the straitest sect of the Benthamites , he literally collapsed after a diet of 'push-pin as good as poetry' and 'forty-three motives for obeying the law' .sx He recovered into a brighter world of poetry and music .sx But he still called himself a Utilitarian .sx This was not merely loyalty to his upbringing .sx It was the result of his abiding dislike for any system which relied upon pure intuition .sx Wherever he sensed it , there was the enemy .sx It relied upon an obscure feeling , which was not accountable to reason .sx For Mill , life must be made up of clear-cut ends , and of means leading straight to them .sx The kind of Good preached by Kant and Coleridge seemed to him vague and undefined .sx But everyone knew what Pleasure was .sx Here was a goal with no mystical nonsense about it .sx