No More Learning

The preceding definition of freedom is NEGATIVE, and therefore
unfruitful for the discovery of its essence; but it leads to a
POSITIVE conception which is so much the more full and fruitful
Since the conception of causality involves that of laws, according
to which, by something that we call cause, something else, namely,
the effect, must be produced [laid down]; [Footnote: (Gesetzt. -There
is in the original a play on the etymology of Gesetz, which does not
admit of reproduction in English. It must be confessed that without
it the statement is not self-evident. )] hence, although freedom is
not a property of the will depending on physical laws, yet it is not
for that reason lawless; on the contrary it must be a causality
acting according to immutable laws, but of a peculiar kind;
otherwise a free will would be an absurdity. Physical necessity is a
heteronomy of the efficient causes, for every effect is possible
only according to this law, that something else determines the
efficient cause to exert its causality. What else then can freedom
of the will be but autonomy, that is the property of the will to be
a law to itself? But the proposition: The will is in every action a
law to itself, only expresses the principle, to act on no other
maxim than that which can also have as an object itself as a
universal law. Now this is precisely the formula of the categorical
imperative and is the principle of morality, so that a free will and
a will subject to moral laws are one and the same.

On the hypothesis then of freedom of the will, morality together
with its principle follows from it by mere analysis of the
conception. However the latter is still a synthetic proposition;
viz. , an absolutely good will is that whose maxim can always include
itself regarded as a universal law; for this property of its maxim
can never be discovered by analysing the conception of an absolutely
good will. Now such synthetic propositions are only possible in this
way: that the two cognitions are connected together by their union
with a third in which they are both to be found. The POSITIVE
concept of freedom furnishes this third cognition, which cannot, as
with physical causes, be the nature of the sensible world (in the
concept of which we find conjoined the concept of something in
relation as cause to SOMETHING ELSE as effect). We cannot now at
once show what this third is to which freedom points us, and of
which we have an idea a priori, nor can we make intelligible how the
concept of freedom is shown to be legitimate from principles of pure
practical reason, and with it the possibility of a categorical
imperative; but some further preparation is required.

Freedom must be presupposed as a Property of the Will of all
Rational Beings

It is not enough to predicate freedom of our own will, from whatever
reason, if we have not sufficient grounds for predicating the same
of all rational beings. For as morality serves as a law for us only
because we are RATIONAL BEINGS, it must also hold for all rational
beings; and as it must be deduced simply from the property of
freedom, it must be shown that freedom also is a property of all
rational beings. It is not enough then to prove it from certain
supposed experiences of human nature (which indeed is quite
impossible, and it can only be shown a priori), but we must show
that it belongs to the activity of all rational beings endowed with
a will. Now I say every being that cannot act except UNDER THE IDEA
OF FREEDOM is just for that reason in a practical point of view
really free, that is to say, all laws which are inseparably
connected with freedom have the same force for him as if his will
had been shown to be free in itself by a proof theoretically
conclusive. [Footnote: I adopt this method of assuming freedom
merely AS AN IDEA which rational beings suppose in their actions, in
order to avoid the necessity of proving it in its theoretical aspect
also. The former is sufficient for my purpose; for even though the
speculative proof should not be made out, yet a being that cannot
act except with the idea of freedom is bound by the same laws that
would oblige a being who was actually free. Thus we can escape here
from the onus which presses on the theory. (Compare Butler's
treatment of the question of liberty in his "Analogy," part I. , ch.
vi. )] Now I affirm that we must attribute to every rational being
which has a will that it has also the idea of freedom and acts
entirely under this idea. For in such a being we conceive a reason
that is practical, that is, has causality in reference to its
objects. Now we cannot possibly conceive a reason consciously
receiving a bias from any other quarter with respect to its
judgments, for then the subject would ascribe the determination of
its judgment not to its own reason, but to an impulse. It must
regard itself as the author of its principles independent on foreign
influences. Consequently as practical reason or as the will of a
rational being it must regard itself as free, that is to say, the
will of such a being cannot be a will of its own except under the
idea of freedom. This idea must therefore in a practical point of
view be ascribed to every rational being.

Of the Interest attaching to the Ideas of Morality

We have finally reduced the definite conception of morality to the
idea of freedom. This latter, however, we could not prove to be
actually a property of ourselves or of human nature; only we saw
that it must be presupposed if we would conceive a being as rational
and conscious of its causality in respect of its actions, i. e. , as
endowed with a will; and so we find that on just the same grounds we
must ascribe to every being endowed with reason and will this
attribute of determining itself to action under the idea of its
freedom.

Now it resulted also from the presupposition of this idea that we
became aware of a law that the subjective principles of action,
i. e. , maxims, must always be so assumed that they can also hold as
objective, that is, universal principles, and so serve as universal
laws of our own dictation. But why then should I subject myself to
this principle and that simply as a rational being, thus also
subjecting to it all other beings endowed with reason? I will allow
that no interest urges me to this, for that would not give a
categorical imperative, but I must take an interest in it and
discern how this comes to pass; for this "I ought" is properly an "I
would," valid for every rational being, provided only that reason
determined his actions without any hindrance. But for beings that
are in addition affected as we are by springs of a different kind,
namely, sensibility, and in whose case that is not always done which
reason alone would do, for these that necessity is expressed only as
an "ought," and the subjective necessity is different from the
objective.

It seems then as if the moral law, that is, the principle of
autonomy of the will, were properly speaking only presupposed in the
idea of freedom, and as if we could not prove its reality and
objective necessity independently. In that case we should still have
gained something considerable by at least determining the true
principle more exactly than had previously been done; but as regards
its validity and the practical necessity of subjecting oneself to
it, we should not have advanced a step. For if we were asked why the
universal validity of our maxim as a law must be the condition
restricting our actions, and on what we ground the worth which we
assign to this manner of acting--a worth so great that there cannot
be any higher interest; and if we were asked further how it happens
that it is by this alone a man believes he feels his own personal
worth, in comparison with which that of an agreeable or disagreeable
condition is to be regarded as nothing, to these questions we could
give no satisfactory answer.

We find indeed sometimes that we can take an interest [Footnote:
"Interest" means a spring of the will, in so far as this spring is
presented by Reason. See note, p. 391. ] in a personal quality which
does not involve any interest of external condition, provided this
quality makes us capable of participating in the condition in case
reason were to effect the allotment; that is to say, the mere being
worthy of happiness can interest of itself even without the motive
of participating in this happiness. This judgment, however, is in
fact only the effect of the importance of the moral law which we
before presupposed (when by the idea of freedom we detach ourselves
from every empirical interest); but that we ought to detach
ourselves from these interests, i. e. , to consider ourselves as free
in action and yet as subject to certain laws, so as to find a worth
simply in our own person whiph can compensate us for the loss of
everything that give worth to our condition; this we are not yet
able to discern in this way, nor do we see how it is possible so to
act--in other words, whence the moral law derives its obligation.

It must be freely admitted that there is a sort of circle here from
which it seems impossible to escape. In the order of efficient
causes we assume ourselves free, in order that in the order of ends
we may conceive ourselves as subject to moral laws: and we
afterwards conceive ourselves as subject to these laws, bjecause we
have attributed to ourselves freedom of will: for freedom and self-
legislation of will are both autonomy, and therefore are reciprocal
conceptions, and for this very reason one must not be used to
explain the other or give the reason of it, but at most only for
logical purposes to reduce apparently different notions of the same
object to one single concept (as we reduce different fractions of
the same value to the lowest terms).

One resource retrains to us, namely, to inquire whether we do not
occupy different points of view when by means of freedom we think
ourselves as causes efficient a priori, and when we form our
conception of ourselves from our actions as effects which we see
before our eyes.

It is a remark which needs no subtle reflection to make, but which
we may assume that even the commonest understanding can make,
although it be after its fashion by an obscure discernment of
judgment which it calls feeling, that all the "ideas" [Footnote: The
common understanding being here spoken of, I use the word "idea" in
its popular sense. ] that comes to us involuntarily (as those of the
senses) do not enable us to know objects otherwise than as they
affect us; so that what they may be in themselves remains unknown to
us, and consequently that as regards "ideas" of this kind even with
the closest attention and clearness that the understanding can apply
to them, we can by them only attain to the knowledge of appearances,
never to that of things in themselves. As soon as this distinction
has once been made (perhaps merely in consequence of the difference
observed between the ideas given us from without, and in which we
are passive, and those that we produce simply from ourselves, and in
which we show our own activity), then it follows of itself that we
must admit and assume behind the appearance something else that is
not an appearance, namely, the things in themselves; although we
must admit that as they can never be known to us except as they
affect us, we can come no nearer to them, nor can we ever know what
they are in themselves. This must furnish a distinction, however
crude, between a world of sense and the world of understanding, of
which the former may be different according to the difference of the
sensuous impressions in--various observers, while the second which
is its basis always remains the same. Even as to himself, a man
cannot pretend to know what he is in himself from the knowledge he
has by internal sensation. For as he does not as it were create
himself, and does not come by the conception of himself a priori but
empirically, it naturally follows that he can obtain his knowledge
even of himself only by the inner sense, and consequently only
through the appearances of his nature and the way in which his
consciousness is affected. At the same time beyond these
characteristics of his own subject, made up of mere appearances, he
must necessarily suppose something else as their basis, namely, his
ego, whatever its characteristics in itself may be. Thus in respect
to mere perception and receptivity of sensations he must reckon
himself as belonging to the world of sense, but in respect of
whatever there may be of pure activity in him (that which reaches
consciousness immediately and not through affecting the senses) he
must reckon himself as belonging to the intellectual world, of
which, however, he has no further knowledge. To such a conclusion
the reflecting man must come with respect ito all the things which
can be presented to him: it is probably to be met with even in
persons of the commonest understanding, who, as is well known, are
very much inclined to suppose behind the objects of the senses
something else invisible and acting of itself. They spoil it,
however, by presently sensualizing this invisible again; that is to
say, wanting to make it an object of intuition, so that they do not
become a whit the wiser.

Now man really finds in himself a faculty by which he distinguishes
himself from everything else, even from himself as affected by
objects, and that is Reason. This being pure spontaneity is even
elevated above the understanding. For although the latter is a
spontaneity and does not, like sense, merely contain intuitions that
arise when we are affected by things (and are therefore passive),
yet it cannot produce from its activity any other conceptions than
those which merely serve to bring the intuitions of sense under
rulesf and thereby to unite them in one consciousness, and without
this use of the sensibility it could not think at all; whereas, on
the contrary, Reason shows so pure a spontaneity in the case of what
I call Ideas [Ideal Conceptions] that it thereby far transcends
everything that the sensibility can give it, and exhibits its most
important function in distinguishing the world of sense from that of
understanding, and thereby prescribing the limits of the
understanding itself.

For this reason a rational being must regard himself qua
intelligence (not from the side of his lower faculties) as belonging
not to the world of sense, but to that of understanding; hence he
has two points of view from which he can regard himself, and
recognise laws of the exercise of his faculties, and consequently of
all his actions: first, so far as he belongs to the world of sense,
he finds himself subject to laws of nature (heteronomy); secondly,
as belonging to the intelligible world, under laws which being
independent on nature have their foundation not in experience but in
reason alone.

As a rational being, and consequently belonging to the intelligible
world, man can never conceive the causality of his own will
otherwise than on condition of the idea of freedom. for independence
on the determining causes of the sensible world (an independence
which Reason must always ascribe to itself) is freedom. Now the idea
of freedom is inseparably connected with the conception of autonomy,
and this again with the universal principle of morality which is
ideally the foundation of all actions of rational beings, just as
the law of nature is of all phenomena.

Now the suspicion is removed which we raised above, that there was a
latent circle involved in our reasoning from freedom to autonomy,
and from this to the moral law, viz. : that we laid down the idea of
freedom because of the moral law only that we might afterwards in
turn infer the latter from freedom and that consequently we could
assign no reason at all for this law, but could only [present]
[Footnote: The verb is wanting in the original. ] it as a petitio
principii which well disposed minds would gladly concede to us, but
which we could never put forward as a provable proposition. For now
we see that when we conceive ourselves as free we transfer ourselves
into the--world of understanding as members of it, and recognise the
autonomy of the will with its consequence, morality; whereas, if we
conceive ourselves as under obligation we consider ourselves as
belonging to the world of sense, and at the same time to the world
of understanding.

How is a Categorical Imperative Possible?

Every rational being reckons himself qua intelligence as belonging
to the world of understanding, and it is simply as an efficient
cause belonging to that world that he calls his causality a will. On
the other side he is also conscious of himself as a part of the
world of sense in which his actions which are mere appearances
[phenomena] of that causality are displayed; we cannot, however,
discern how they are possible from this causality which we do not
know; but instead of that, these actions as belonging to the
sensible world must be viewed as determined by other phenomena,
namely,--desires and inclinations. If therefore I were only a member
of the world of understanding, then all my actions would perfectly
conform to the principle of autonomy of the pure will; if I were
only a part of the world of sense they would necessarily be assumed
to conform wholly to the natural law of desires and inclinations, in
other words, to the heteronomy of nature. (The former would rest on
morality as the supreme principle, the latter on happiness. ), Since,
however, the world of understanding contains the foundation of the
world of sense, and consequently of its laws alsof and accordingly
gives the law to my will (which belongs wholly to the world of
understanding) directly, and must be conceived as doing so, it
follows that, although on the one side I must regard myself as a
being belonging to the world of sense, yet on the other side I must
recognise myself as subject as an intelligence to the law of the
world of understanding, i. e. , to reason, which contains this law in
the idea of freedom, and therefore as subject to the autonomy of the
will: consequently I must regard the laws of the world of
understanding as imperatives for me, and the actions which conform
to them as duties.

And thus what makes categorical imperatives possible is this, that
the idea of freedom makes me a member of an intelligible world, in
consequence of which if I were nothing else all my actions would
always conform to the autonomy of the will; but as I at the same
time intuite myself as a member of the world of sense, they ought so
to conform, and this categorical "ought" implies a synthetic a
priori proposition, inasmuch as besides my will as affected by
sensible desires there is added further the idea of the same will
but as belonging to the world of the understanding, pure and
practical of itself, which contains the supreme condition according
to Reason of the former will; precisely as to the intuitions of
sense there are added concepts of the understanding which of
themselves signify nothing but regular form in general, and in this
way synthetic a priori propositions become possible, on which all
knowledge of physical nature rests.

The practical use of common human reason confirms this reasoning.
There is no one, not even the most consummate villain, provided only
that he is otherwise accustomed to the use of reason, who, when we
set before him examples of tionesty of purposea of steadfastness in
following good maxims, of sympathy and general benevolence (even
combined with great sacrifices of advantages and comfort), does not
wish that he might also possess these qualities. Only on account of
his inclinations and impulses he cannot attain this in himself, but
at the same time he wishes to be free from such inclinations which
are burdensome to himself. He proves by this that he transfers
himself in thought with a will free from the impulses of--the
sensibility into an order of things wholly different from that of
his desires in the field of the sensibility; since he cannot expect
to obtain by that wish any gratification of his desires, nor any
position which would satisfy any of his actual or supposable
inclinations (for this would destroy the pre-eminence of the very
idea which wrests that wish from him): he can only expect a greater
intrinsic worth of his own person. This better person, however, he
imagines himself to be when he transfers himself to the point of
view of a member of the world of the understanding, to which he is
involuntarily forced by the idea of freedom, i. e. , of independence
on determining causes of the world of sense; and from this point of
view he is conscious of a good will, which by his own confession
constitutes the law for the bad will that he possesses as a member
of the world of sense-a law whose authority he recognises while
transgressing it. What he morally "ought" is then what he
necessarily "would" as a member of the world of the understanding,
and is conceived by him as an "ought" only inasmuch as he likewise
considers himself as a member of the world of sense.

On the Extreme Limits of all Practical Philosophy

All men attribute to themselves freedom of will. Hence come all
judgments upon actions as being such as ought to have been done,
although they have not been done. However, this freedom is not a
conception of experience, nor can it be so, since it still remains,
even though experience shows the contrary of what on supposition of
freedom are conceived as its necessary consequences. On the other
side it is equally necessary that everything that takes place should
be fixedly determined according to laws of nature. This necessity of
nature is likewise tot an empirical conception, just for this
reason, that it involves the motion of necessity and consequently of
a priori cognition. But this conception of a system of nature is
confirmed by experience, and it must even be inevitably presupposed
if experience itself is to be possible, that is, a connected
knowledge of the objects of sense resting on general laws. Therefore
freedom is only an Idea [Ideal Conception] of Reason, and its
objective reality in itself is doubtful, while nature is a concept
of the understanding which proves, and must necessarily prove, its
reality in examples of experience.

There arises from this a dialectic of Reason, since the freedom
attributed to the will appears to contradict the necessity of
nature, and placed between these two ways Reason for speculative
purposes finds the road of physical necessity much more beaten and
more appropriate than that of freedom; yet for practical purposes
the narrow footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is
possible to make use of reason in our conduct; hence it is just as
impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reason
of men to argue away freedom. Philosophy must then assume that no
real contradiction will be found between freedom and physical
necessity of the same human actions, for it cannot give up the
conception of nature any more than that of freedom.

Nevertheless, even though we should never be able to comprehend how
freedom is possible, we must at least remove this apparent
contradiction in a convincing manner. For if the thought of freedom
contradicts either itself or nature, which is equally necessary, it
must in competition with physical necessity be entirely given up.

It would, however, be impossible to escape this contradiction if the
thinking subject, which seems to itself free, conceived itself in
the same sense or in the very same relation when it calls itself
free as when in respect of the same action it assumes itself to be
subject to the law of nature. Hence it is an indispensable problem
of speculative philosophy to show that its illusion respecting the
contradiction rests on this, that we think of man in a different
sense and relation when we call him free, and when we regard him as
subject to the laws of nature as being part and parcel of nature. It
must, therefore, show that not only can both these very well co-
exist, but that both must be thought as necessarily united in the
same subject, since otherwise no reason could be given why we should
burden reason with an idea which, though it may possibly without
contradiction be reconciled with another that is sufficiently
established, yet entangles us in a perplexity which sorely
embarrasses Reason in its theoretic employment. This duty, however,
belongs only to speculative philosophy, in order that it may clear
the way for practical philosophy. The philosopher then has no option
whether he will remove the apparent contradiction or leave it
untouched; for in fhe latter case the theory respecting this would
be bonum vacans into the possession of which the fatalist would have
a right to enter, and chase all morality out of its supposed domain
as occupying it without title.

We cannot, however, as yet say that we are touching the bounds of
practical philosophy. For the settlement of that controversy does
not belong to it; it only demands from speculative reason $hat it
should put an end to the discord in which it entangles itself in
theoretical questions, so that practical reason may have rest and
security from external attacks which might make the ground debatable
on which it desires to build.

The claims to freedom of will made even by common reason are founded
on the consciousness and the admitted supposition that reason is
independent on merely subjectively determined causes which together
Constitute what belongs to sensation only, and which consequently
come under the general designation of sensibility. Man considering
himself in this way as an intelligence, places himself thereby in a
different order of things and in a relation to determining grounds
of a wholly different kind when on the one hand he thinks of himself
as an intelligence endowed with a will, and consequently with
causality, and when on the other he perceives himself as a
phenomenon in the world of sense (as he really is also), and affirms
that his causality is subject to external determination according to
laws of nature. [Footnote: The punctuation of the original gives the
following sense: "Submits his causality, as regards its external
determination, to laws of nature. " have ventured to make what
appears to be a necessary correction, by simply removing a comma. ]
Now he soon becomes aware that both can hold good, nay, must hold
good at the same time. For there is not the smallest contradiction
in saying that a thing in appearance (belonging to the world of
sense) is subject to certain laws, on which the very same as a thing
or being in itself is independent; and that he must conceive and
think of himself in this twofold way, rests as to the first on the
consciousness of himself as an object affected through the senses,
and as to the second on the consciousness of himself as an
intelligence, i. e. , as independent on sensible impressions in the
employment of his reason (in other words as belonging to the world
of understanding).

Hence it comes to pass that man claims the possession of a will
which takes no account of anything that comes under the head of
desires and inclinations, and on the contrary conceives actions as
possible to him, nay, even as necessary, which can only be done by
disregarding all desires and sensible inclinations. The causality of
such actions [Footnote: M. Barni translates as if he read desselben
instead of derselben, "the causality of this will. " So also Mr.
Semple. ] lies in him as an intelligence and in the laws of effects
and actions [which depend] on the principles of an intelligible
world, of which indeed he knows nothing more than that in it pure
reason alone independent on sensibility gives the law; moreover
since it is only in that world, as an intelligence, that he is his
proper self (being as man only the appearance of himself) those laws
apply to him directly and categorically, so that the incitements of
inclinations and appetites (in other words the whole nature of the
world of sense) cannot impair the laws of his volition as an
intelligence. Nay, he does not even hold himself responsible for the
former or ascribe them to his proper self, i. e. , his will: he only
ascribes to his will any indulgence which he might yield them if he
allowed them to influence his maxims to the prejudice of the
rational laws of the will.

When practical Reason thinks itself into a world of understanding it
does not thereby transcend its own limits, as it would if it tried
to enter it by intuition or sensation. The former is only a negative
thought in respect of the world of sense, which does not give any
laws to reason in determining the will, and is positive only in this
single point that this freedom as a negative characteristic is at
the same time conjoined with a (positive) faculty and even with a
causality of reason, which we designate a will, namely, a faculty of
so acting that the principle of the actions shall conform to the
essential character of a rational motive, i. e. , the condition that
the maxim have universal validity as a law. But were it to borrow an
object of will, that is, a motive, from the world of understanding,
then it would overstep its bounds and pretend to be acquainted with
something of which it knows nothing. The conception of a world of
the understanding is then only a point of view which Reason finds
itself compelled to take outside the appearances in order to
conceive itself as practical, which would not be possible if the
influences of the sensibility had a determining power on man, but
which is necessary unless he is to be denied the consciousness of
himself as an intelligence, and consequently as a rational cause,
energizing by reason, that is, operating freely. This thought
certainly involves the idea of an order and a system of laws
different from that of the mechanism of nature which belongs to the
sensible world, and it makes the conception of an intelligible world
necessary (that is to say, the whole system of rational beings as
things in themselves). But it does not in the least authorize us to
think of it further than as to its formal condition only, that is,
the universality of the maxims of the will as laws, and consequently
the autonomy of the latter, which alone is consistent with its
freedom; whereas, on the contrary, all laws that refer to a definite
object give heteronomy, which only belongs to laws of nature, and
can only apply to the sensible world.

But Reason would overstep all its bounds if it undertook to explain
how pure reason can be practical, which would be exactly the same
problem as to explain how freedom is possible.

For we can explain nothing but that which we can reduce to laws, the
object of which can be given in some possible experience. But
freedom is a mere Idea [Ideal Conception], the objective reality of
which can in no wise be shown according to laws of nature, and
consequently not in any possible experience; and for this reason it
can never be comprehended or understood, because we cannot support
it by any sort of example or analogy. It holds good only as a
necessary hypothesis of reason in a being that believes itself
conscious of a will, that is, of a faculty distinct from mere desire
(namely, a faculty of determining itself to action as an
intelligence), in other words, by laws of reason independently on
natural instincts. Now where determination according to laws of
nature ceases, there all explanation ceases also, and nothing
remains but defence, i. e. the removal of the objections of those
who pretend to have seen deeper into the nature of things, and
thereupon boldly declare freedom impossible. We can only point out
to them that the supposed contradiction that they have discovered in
it arises only from this, that in order to be able to apply the law
of nature to human actions, they must necessarily consider man as an
appearance: then when we demand of them that they should also think
of him qua intelligence as a thing in itself, they still persist in
considering him in this respect also as an appearance. In this view
it would no doubt be a contradiction to suppose the causality of the
same subject (that is, his will) to be withdrawn from all the
natural laws of the sensible world. But this contradiction
disappears, if they would only bethink themselves and admit, as is
reasonable, that behind the appearances there must also lie at their
root (although hidden) the things in themselves, and that we cannot
expect the laws of these to be the same as those that govern their
appearances.

The subjective impossibility of explaining the freedom of the will
is identical with the impossibility of discovering and explaining an
interest [Footnote: Interest is that by which reason becomes
practical, i. e. , a cause determining the will. Hence we say of
rational beings only that they take an interest in a thing;
irrational beings only feel sensual appetites. Reason takes a direct
interest in action then only when the universal validity of its
maxims is alone sufficient to determine the will. Such an interest
alone is pure. But if it can determine the will only by means of
another object of desire or on the suggestion of a particular
feeling of the subject, then Reason takes only an indirect interest
in the action, and as Reason by itself without experience cannot
discover either objects of the will or a Special feeling actuating
it, this latter interest would only be empirical, and not a pure
rational interest. The logical interest of Reason (namely, to extend
its insight) is never direct, but presupposes purposes for which
reason is employed. ] which man can take in the moral law.
Nevertheless he does actually take an interest in it, the basis of
which in us we call the moral feeling, which some have falsely
assigned as the standard of our moral judgment, whereas it must
rather be viewed as the subjective effect that the law exercises on
the will, the objective principle of which is furnished by Reason
alone.

In order indeed that a rational being who is also affected through
the senses should will what Reason alone directs such beings that
they ought to will, it is no doubt requisite that reason should have
a power to infuse a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction in the
fulfilment of duty, that is to say, that it should have a causality
by which it determines the sensibility according to its own
principles. But it is quite impossible to discern, i. e. , to make it
intelligible a priori, how a mere thought, which itself contains
nothing sensible, can itself produce a sensation of pleasure or
pain; for this is a particular kind of causality of which as of
every other causality we can determine nothing whatever a priori, we
must only consult experience about it. But as this cannot supply us
with any relation of cause and effect except between two objects of
experience, whereas in this case, although indeed the effect
produced lies within experience, yet the cause is supposed to be
pure reason acting through mere ideas which offer no object to
experience, it follows that for us men it is quite impossible to
explain how and why the universality of the maxim as a law, that is,
morality, interests. This only is certain, that it is not because it
interests us that it has validity for us (for that would be
heteronomy and dependence of practical reason on sensibility,
namely, on a feeling as its principle, in which case it could never
give moral laws), but that it interests us because it is valid for
us as men, inasmuch as it had its source in our will as
intelligences, in other words in our proper self, and what belongs
to mere appearance is necessarily subordinated by reason to the
nature of the thing in itself.

The question then: How a categorical imperative is possible can be
answered to this extent that we can assign the only hypothesis on
which it is possible, namely, the idea of freedom; and we can also
discern the necessity of this hypothesis, and this is sufficient for
the practical exercise of reason, that is, for the conviction of the
validity of this imperative, and hence of the moral law; but how
this hypothesis itself is possible can never be discerned by any
human reason. On the hypothesis, however, that the will of an
intelligence is free, its autonomy, as the essential formal
condition of its determination, is a necessary consequence.
Moreover, this freedom of will is not merely quite possible as a
hypothesis (not involving any contradiction to the principle of
physical necessity in the connexion of the phenomena of the sensible
world) as speculative philosophy can show: but further, a rational
being who is conscious of a causality [Footnote: Reading "einer" for
"seiner. "] through reason, that is to say, of a will (distinct from
desires), must of necessity make it practically, that is, in idea,
the condition of all his voluntary actions. But to explain how pure
reason can be of itself practical without the aid of any spring of
action that could be derived from any other source, i. e. how the
mere principle of the universal validity of all its maxims as laws
(which would certainly be the form of a pure practical reason) can
of itself supply a spring, without any matter (object) of the will
in which one could antecedently take any interest; and how it can
produce an interest which would be called purely moral; or in other
words, how pure reason can be practical--to explain this is beyond
the power of human reason, and all the labour and pains of seeking
an explanation of it are lost.

It is just the same as if I sought to find out how freedom itself is
possible as the causality of a will. For then I quit the ground of
philosophical explanation, and I have no other to go upon. I might
indeed revel in the world of intelligences which still remains to
me, but although I have an idea of it which is well founded, yet I
have not the least knowledge of it, nor can I ever attain to such
knowledge with all the efforts of my natural faculty of reason. It
signifies only a something that remains over when I have eliminated
everything belonging to the world of sense from the actuating
principles of my will, serving merely to keep in bounds the
principle of motives taken from the field of sensibility; fixing its
limits and showing that it does not contain all in all within
itself, but that there is more beyond it; but this something more I
know no further. Of pure reason which frames this ideal, there
remains after the abstraction of all matter, i. e. , knowledge of
objects, nothing but the form, namely, the practical law of the
universality of the maxims, and in conformity with this the
conception of reason in reference to a pure world of understanding
as a possible efficient cause, that is a cause determining the will.
There must here be a total absence of springs; unless this idea of
an intelligible world is itself the spring, or that in which reason
primarily takes an interest; but to make this intelligible is
precisely the problem that we cannot solve.

Here now is the extreme limit of all moral inquiry, and it is of
great importance to determine it even on this account, in order that
reason may not on the one hand, to the prejudice of morals, seek
about in the world of sense for the supreme motive and an interest
comprehensible but empirical; and on the other hand, that it may not
impotently flap its wings without being able to move in the (for it)
empty space of transcendent concepts which we call the intelligible
world, and so lose itself amidst chimeras. For the rest, the idea of
a pure world of understanding as a system of all intelligences, and
to which we ourselves as tational beings belong (although we are
likewise on the other side members of the sensible world), this
remains always a useful and legitimate idea for the purposes of
rational belief, although all knowledge stops at its threshold,
useful, namely, to produce in us a lively interest in the moral law
by means of the noble ideal of a universal kingdom of ends in
themselves (rational beings), to which we can belong as members then
only when we carefully conduct ourselves according to the maxims of
freedom as if they were laws of nature.

Concluding Remark

The speculative employment of reason with respect to nature leads to
the absolute necessity of some supreme cause of the world: the
practical employment of reason with a view to freedom leads also to
absolute necessity, but only of the laws of the actions of a
rational being as such. Now it is an essential principle of reason,
however employed, to push its knowledge to a consciousness of its
necessity (without which it would not be rational knowledge). It is
however an equally essential restriction of the same reason that it
can neither discern the necessity of what is or what happens, nor of
what ought to happen, unless a condition is supposed on which it is
or happens or ought to happen. In this way, however, by the constant
inquiry for the condition, the satisfaction of reason is only
further and further postponed. Hence it unceasingly seeks the
unconditionally necessary, and finds itself forced to assume it,
although without any means of making it comprehensible to itself,
happy enough if only it can discover a conception which agrees with
this assumption. It is therefore no fault in our deduction of the
supreme principle of morality, but an objection that should be made
to human reason in general, that it cannot enable us to conceive the
absolute necessity of an unconditional practical law (such as the
categorical imperative must be). It cannot be blamed for refusing to
explain this necessity by a condition, that is to say, by means of
some interest assumed as a basis, since the law would then cease to
be a moral law, i. e. a supreme law of freedom. And thus while we do
not comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral
imperative, we yet comprehend its incomprehensibility, and this is
all that can be fairly demanded of a philosophy which strives to
carry its principles up to the very limit of human reason.




BYRON AND GOETHE

BY GIUSEPPE MAZZINI


INTRODUCTORY NOTE

Giuseppe Mazzini, the great political idealist of the Italian
struggle for independence, was born at Genoa, June 22, 1805. His
faith in democracy and his enthusiasm for a free Italy he inherited
from his parents; and while still a student in the University of
Genoa he gathered round him a circle of youths who shared his
dreams. At the age of twenty-two he joined the secret society of the
Carbonari, and was sent on a mission to Tuscany, where he was
entrapped and arrested. On his release, he set about the formation,
among the Italian exiles in Marseilles, of the Society of Young
Italy, which had for its aim the establishment of a free and united
Italian republic. His activities led to a decree for his banishment
from France, but he succeeded in outwitting the spies of the
Government and going on with his work. The conspiracy for a national
rising planned by Young Italy was discovered, many of the leaders
were executed, and Mazsini himself condemned to death.

Almost at once, however, he resumed operations, working this time
from Geneva; but another abortive expedition led to his expulsion
from Switzerland. He found refuge, but at first hardly a livelihood,
in London, where he continued his propaganda by means of his pen. He
went back to Italy when the revolution of 1848 broke out, and fought
fiercely but in vain against the French, when they besieged Rome and
ended the Roman Republic in 1849.

Defeated and broken, he returned to England, where he remained till
called to Italy by the insurrection of 1857. He worked with
Garibaldi for some time; but the kingdom established under Victor
Emmanuel by Cavour and Garibaldi was far from the ideal Italy for
which Mazsini had striven. The last years of his life were spent
mainly in London, but at the end he returned to Italy, where he died
on March 10,1872. Hardly has any age seen a political martyr of a
purer or nobler type.
Massini's essay on Byron and Goethe is more than literary criticism,
for it exhibits that philosophical quality which gives so remarkable
a unity to the writings of Massini, whether literary, social, or
political.




BYRON AND GOETHE

I stood one day in a Swiss village at the foot of the Jura, and
watched the coming of the storm. Heavy black clouds, their edges
purpled by the setting sun, were rapidly covering the loveliest sky
in Europe, save that of Italy. Thunder growled in the distance, and
gusts of biting wind were driving huge drops of rain over the
thirsty plain. Looking upwards, I beheld a large Alpine falcon, now
rising, now sinking, as he floated bravely in the very midst of the
storm and I could almost fancy that he strove to battle with it. At
every fresh peal of thunder, the noble bird bounded higher aloft, as
if in answering defiance. I followed him with my eyes for a long
time, until he disappeared in the east. On the ground, about fifty
paces beneath me, stood a stork; perfectly tranquil and impassive in
the midst of the warring elements. Twice or thrice she turned her
head towards the quarter from whence the wind came, with an
indescribable air of half indifferent curiosity; but at length she
drew up one of her long sinewy legs, hid her head beneath her wing,
and calmly composed herself to sleep.

I thought of Byron and Goethe; of the stormy sky that overhung both;
of the tempest-tossed existence, the lifelong struggle, of the one,
and the calm of the other; and of the two mighty sources of poetry
exhausted and closed by them.

Byron and Goethe--the two names that predominate, and, come what
may, ever will predominate, over our every recollection of the fifty
years that have passed away. They rule; the master-minds, I might
almost say the tyrants, of a whole period of poetry; brilliant, yet
sad; glorious in youth and daring, yet cankered by the worm in the
bud, despair. They are the two representative poets of two great
schools; and around them we are compelled to group all the lesser
minds which contributed to render the era illustrious. The qualities
which adorn and distinguish their works are to be found, although
more thinly scattered, in other poets their contemporaries; still
theirs are the names that involuntarily rise to our lips whenever we
seek to characterize the tendencies of the age in which they lived.
Their genius pursued different, even opposite routes; and yet very
rarely do our thoughts turn to either without evoking the image of
the other, as a sort of necessary complement to the first. The eyes
of Europe were fixed upon the pair, as the spectators gaze on two
mighty wrestlers in the same arena; and they, like noble and
generous adversaries, admired, praised, and held out the hand to
each other. Many poets have followed in their footsteps; none have
been so popular. Others have found judges and critics who have
appreciated them calmly and impartially; not so they: for them there
have been only enthusiasts or enemies, wreaths or stones; and when
they vanished into the vast night that envelops and transforms alike
men and things--silence reigned around their tombs. Little by
little, poetry had passed away from our world, and it seemed as if
their last sigh had extinguished the sacred flame.

A reaction has now commenced; good, in so far as it reveals a desire
for and promise of new life; evil, in so far as it betrays narrow
views, a tendency to injustice towards departed genius, and the
absence of any fixed rule or principle to guide our appreciation of
the past. Human judgment, like Luther's drunken peasant, when saved
from falling on one side, too often topples over on the other. The
reaction against Goethe, in his own country especially, which was
courageously and justly begun by Menzel during his lifetime, has
been carried to exaggeration since his death. Certain social
opinions, to which I myself belong, but which, although founded on a
sacred principle, should not be allowed to interfere with the
impartiality of our judgment, have weighed heavily in the balance;
and many young, ardent, and enthusiastic minds of our day have
reiterated with Bonne that Goethe is the worst of despots; the
cancer of the German body.

The English reaction against Byron--I do not speak of that mixture
of cant and stupidity which denies the poet his place in Westminster
Abbey, but of literary reaction--has shown itself still more
unreasoning. I have met with adorers of Shelley who denied the
poetic genius of Byron; others who seriously compared his poems with
those of Sir Walter Scott. One very much overrated critic writes
that "Byron makes man after his own image, and woman after his own
heart; the one is a capricious tyrant, the other a yielding slave. "
The first forgot the verses in which their favorite hailed

"The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent;"
[Footnote: Adonais. ]

the second, that after the appearance of "The Giaour" and "Childe
Harold," Sir Walter Scott renounced writing poetry. [Footnote:
Lockhart. ] The last forgot that while he was quietly writing
criticisms, Byron was dying for new-born liberty in Greece. All
judged, too many in each country still judge, the two poets, Byron
and Goethe, after an absolute type of the beautiful, the true, or
the false, which they had formed in their own minds; without regard
to the state of social relations as they were or are; without any
true conception of the destiny or mission of poetry, or of the law
by which it, and every other artistic manifestation of human life,
is governed.

There is no absolute type on earth: the absolute exists in the
Divine Idea alone; the gradual comprehension of which man is
destined to attain; although its complete realization is impossible
on earth; earthly life being but one stage of the eternal evolution
of life, manifested in thought and action; strengthened by all the
achievements of the past, and advancing from age to age towards a
less imperfect expression of that idea. Our earthly life is one
phase of the eternal aspiration of the soul towards progress, which
is our law ascending in increasing power and purity from the finite
towards the infinite; from the real towards the Ideal; from that
which is, towards that which is to come. In the immense storehouse
of the past evolutions of life constituted by universal tradition,
and in the prophetic instinct brooding in the depths of the human
soul, does poetry seek inspiration. It changes with the times, for
it is their expression; it is transformed with society, for--
consciously or unconsciously--it sings the lay of Humanity;
although, according to the individual bias or circumstances of the
singer, it assumes the hues of the present, or of the future in
course of elaboration, and foreseen by the inspiration of genius. It
sings now a dirge and now a cradle song; it initiates or sums up.

Byron and Goethe summed up. Was it a defect in them? No; it was the
law of the times, and yet society at the present day, twenty years
after they have ceased to sing, assumes to condemn them for having
been born too soon. Happy indeed are the poets whom God raises up at
the commencement of an era, under the rays of the rising sun. A
series of generations will lovingly repeat their verses, and
attribute to them the new life which they did but foresee in the
germ.

Byron and Goethe summed up. This is at once the philosophical
explanation of their works, and the secret of their popularity. The
spirit of an entire epoch of the European world became incarnate in
them ere its decease, even as--in the political sphere--the spirit
of Greece and Rome became incarnate before death in Caesar and
Alexander. They were the poetic expression of that principle, of
which England was the economic, France the political, and Germany
the philosophic expression: the last formula, effort, and result of
a society founded on the principle of individuality. That epoch, the
mission of which had been, first through the labors of Greek
philosophy, and afterwards through Christianity, to rehabilitate,
emancipate, and develop individual man--appears to have concentrated
in them, in Fichte, in Adam Smith, and in the French school des
drolls de l'homme, its whole energy and power, in order fully to
represent and express all that it had achieved for mankind. It was
much; but it was not the whole; and therefore it was doomed to pass
away. The epoch of individuality was deemed near the goal; when low
immense horizons were revealed; vast unknown lands in whose
untrodden forests the principle of individuality was an insufficient
guide. By the long and painful labors of that epoch the human
unknown quantity had been disengaged from the various quantities of
different nature by which it had been surrounded; but only to be
left weak, isolated, and recoiling in terror from the solitude in
which it stood. The political schools of the epoch had proclaimed
the sole basis of civil organization to be the right to liberty and
equality (liberty for all), but they had encountered social anarchy
by the way. The philosophy of the epoch had asserted the sovereignty
of the human Ego, and had ended in the mere adoration of fact, in
Hegelian immobility. The Economy of the epoch imagined it had
organized free competition, while it had but organized the
oppression of the weak by the strong; of labor by capital; of
poverty by wealth. The Poetry of the epoch had represented
individuality in its every phase; had translated in sentiment what
science had theoretically demonstrated; and it had encountered the
void. But as society at last discovered that the destinies of the
race were not contained in a mere problem of liberty, but rather in
the harmonization of liberty with association--so did poetry
discover that the life it had hitherto drawn from individuality
alone was doomed to perish for want of aliment; and that its future
existence depended on enlarging and transforming its sphere. Both
society and poetry uttered a cry of despair: the death-agony of a
form of society produced the agitation we have seen constantly
increasing in Europe since 1815: the death-agony of a form of poetry
evoked Byron and Goethe. I believe this point of view to be the only
one that can lead us to a useful and impartial appreciation of these
two great spirits.

There are two forms of individuality; the expressions of its
internal and external, or--as the Germans would say--of its
subjective and objective life. Byron was the poet of the first,
Goethe of the last. In Byron the Ego is revealed in all its pride of
power, freedom, and desire, in the uncontrolled plenitude of all its
faculties; inhaling existence at every pore, eager to seize "the
life of life. " The world around him neither rules nor tempers him.
The Byronian Ego aspires to rule it; but solely for dominion's sake,
to exercise upon it the Titanic force of his will. Accurately
speaking, he cannot be said to derive from it either color, tone, or
image; for it is he who colors; he who sings; he whose image is
everywhere reflected and reproduced. His poetry emanates from his
own soul; to be thence diffused upon things external; he holds his
state in the centre of the universe, and from thence projects the
light radiating from the depths of his own mind; as scorching and
intense as the concentrated solar ray. Hence that terrible unity
which only the superficial reader could mistake for monotony.

Byron appears at the close of one epoch, and before the dawn of the
other; in the midst of a community based upon an aristocracy which
has outlived the vigor of its prime; surrounded by a Europe
containing nothing grand, unless it be Napoleon on one side and Pitt
on the other, genius degraded to minister to egotism; intellect
bound to the service of the past. No seer exists to foretell the
future: belief is extinct; there is only its pretence: prayer is no
more; there is only a movement of the lips at a fixed day or hour,
for the sake of the family, or what is called the people; love is no
more; desire has taken its place; the holy warfare of ideas is
abandoned; the conflict is that of interests. The worship of great
thoughts has passed away. That which is, raises the tattered banner
of some corpse-like traditions; that which would be, hoists only the
standard of physical wants, of material appetites: around him are
ruins, beyond him the desert; the horizon is a blank. A long cry of
suffering and indignation bursts from the heart of Byron: he is
answered by anathemas. He departs; he hurries through Europe in
search of an ideal to adore; he traverses it distracted,
palpitating, like Mazeppa on the wild horse; borne onwards by a
fierce desire; the wolves of envy and calumny follow in pursuit. He
visits Greece; he visits Italy; if anywhere a lingering spark of the
sacred fire, a ray of divine poetry, is preserved, it must be there.
Nothing. A glorious past, a degraded present; none of life's poetry;
no movement, save that of the sufferer turning on his couch to
relieve his pain. Byron, from the solitude of his exile, turns his
eyes again towards England; he sings. What does he sing? What
springs from the mysterious and unique conception which rules, one
would say in spite of himself, over all that escapes him in his
sleepless vigil? The funeral hymn, the death-song, the epitaph of
the aristocratic idea; we discovered it, we Continentalists; not his
own countrymen. He takes his types from amongst those privileged by
strength, beauty, and individual power. They are grand, poetical,
heroic, but solitary; they hold no communion with the world around
them, unless it be to rule, over it; they defy alike the good and
evil principle; they "will bend to neither. " In life and in death
"they stand upon their strength;" they resist every power, for their
own is all their, own; it was purchased by

"Superior science--penance--daring-
And length of watching-strength of mind--and skill
In knowledge of our fathers. "

Each of them is the personification, slightly modified, of a single
type, a single idea--the individual; free, but nothing more than
free; such as the epoch now closing has made him; Faust, but without
the compact which submits him to the enemy; for the heroes of Byron
make no such compact. Cain kneels not to Arimanes; and Manfred,
about to die, exclaims:

"The mind, which is immortal, makes itself
Requital for its good and evil thoughts-
Is its own origin of ill, and end-
And its own place and time, its innate sense,
When stripped of this mortality, derives
No color from the fleeting things without,
But is absorbed in sufferance or in joy;
Born from the knowledge of its own desert. "

They have no kindred: they live from their own life only they
repulse humanity, and regard the crowd with disdain. Each of them
says: "I have faith in myself"; never, "I have faith in ourselves. "
They all aspire to power or to happiness. The one and the other
alike escape them; for they bear within them, untold, unacknowledged
even to themselves, the presentiment of a life that mere liberty can
never give them. Free they are; iron souls in iron frames, they
climb the Alps of the physical world as well as the Alps of thought;
still is their visage stamped with a gloomy and ineffaceable
sadness; still is their soul-whether, as in Cain and Manfred, it
plunge into the abyss of the infinite, "intoxicated with eternity,"
or scour the vast plain and boundless ocean with the Corsair and
Giaour--haunted by a secret and sleepless dread. It seems as if they
were doomed to drag the broken links of the chain they have burst
asunder, riveted to their feet. Not only in the petty society
against which they rebel does their soul feel fettered and
restrained; but even in the world of the spirit. Neither is it to
the enmity of society that they succumb; but under the assaults of
this nameless anguish; under the corroding action of potent
faculties "inferior still to their desires and their conceptions";
under the deception that comes from within. What can they do with
the liberty so painfully won? On whom, on what, expend the exuberant
vitality within them? They are alone; this is the secret of their
wretchedness and impotence. They "thirst for good"--Cain has said it
for them all--but cannot achieve it; for they have no mission, no
belief, no comprehension even of the world around them. They have
never realized the conception of Humanity in the multitudes that
have preceded, surround, and will follow after them; never thought
on their own place between the past and future; on the continuity of
labor that unites all the generations into one whole; on the common
end and aim, only to be realized by the common effort; on the
spiritual post-sepulchral life even on earth of the individual,
through the thoughts he transmits to his fellows; and, it may be--
when he lives devoted and dies. in faith--through the guardian
agency he is allowed to exercise over the loved ones left on earth.

Gifted with a liberty they know not how to use; with a power and
energy they know not how to apply; with a life whose purpose and aim
they comprehend not; they drag through their useless and convulsed
existence. Byron destroys them one after the other, as if he were
the executioner of a sentence decreed in heaven. They fall unwept,
like a withered leaf into the stream of time.

"Nor earth nor sky shall yield a single tear,
Nor cloud shall gather more, nor leaf shall fall,
Nor gale breathe forth one sigh for thee, for all. "

They die, as they have lived, alone; and a popular malediction
hovers round their solitary tombs.

This, for those who can read with the soul's eyes, is what Byron
sings; or rather what humanity sings through him. The emptiness of
the life and death of solitary individuality has never been so
powerfully and efficaciously summed up as in the pages of Byron. The
crowd do not comprehend him: they listen; fascinated for an instant;
then repent, and avenge their momentary transport by calumniating
and insulting the poet. His intuition of the death of a form of
society they call wounded self-love; his sorrow for all is
misinterpreted as cowardly egotism. They credit not the traces of
profound suffering revealed by his lineaments; they credit not the
presentiment of a new life which from time to time escapes his
trembling lips; they believe not in the despairing embrace in which
he grasps the material universe--stars, lakes, alps, and sea--and
identifies himself with it, and through it with God, of whom--to him
at least--it is a symbol. They do, however, take careful count of
some unhappy moments, in which, wearied out by the emptiness of
life, he has raised--with remorse I am sure--the cup of ignoble
pleasures to his lips, believing he might find forgetfulness there.
How many times have not his accusers drained this cup, without
redeeming the sin by a single virtue; without--I will not say
bearing--but without having even the capacity of appreciating the
burden which weighed on Byron! And did he not himself dash into
fragments the ignoble cup, so soon as he beheld something worthy the
devotion of his life?

Goethe--individuality in its objective life--having, like Byron, a
sense of the falsehood and evil of the world round him-followed
exactly the opposite path. After having--he, too, in his youth--
uttered a cry of anguish in his Werther; after having laid bare the
problem of the epoch in all its terrific nudity, in Faust; he
thought he had done enough, and refused to occupy himself with its
solution. It is possible that the impulse of rebellion against
social wrong and evil which burst forth for an instant in Werther
may long have held his soul in secret travail; but that he despaired
of the task of reforming it as beyond his powers. He himself
remarked in his later years, when commenting on the exclamation made
by a Frenchman on first seeing him: "That is the face of a man who
has suffered much": that he should rather have said: "That is the
face of a man who has struggled energetically;" but of this there
remains no trace in his works. Whilst Byron writhed and suffered
under the sense of the wrong and evil around him, he attained the
calm--I cannot say of victory--but of indifference. In Byron the man
always ruled, and even at times, overcame the artist: the man was
completely lost in the artist in Goethe. In him there was no
subjective life; no unity springing either from heart or head.
Goethe is an intelligence that receives, elaborates, and reproduces
the poetry affluent to him from all external objects: from all
points of the circumference; to him as centre. He dwells aloft
alone; a mighty watcher in the midst of creation. His curious
scrutiny investigates, with equal penetration and equal interest,
the depths of the ocean and the calyx of the floweret. Whether he
studies the rose exhaling its Eastern perfume to the sky, or the
ocean casting its countless wrecks upon the shore, the brow of the
poet remains equally calm: to him they are but two forms of the
beautiful; two subjects for art.

Goethe has been called a pantheist. I know not in what sense critics
apply this vague and often ill-understood word to him. There is a
materialistic pantheism and a spiritual pantheism; the pantheism of
Spinoza and that of Giordano Bruno; of St. Paul; and of many others-
-all different. But there is no poetic pantheism possible, save on
the condition of embracing the whole world of phenomena in one
unique conception: of feeling and comprehending the life of the
universe in its divine unity. There is nothing of this in Goethe.
There is pantheism in some parts of Wordsworth; in the third canto
of "Childe Harold," and in much of Shelley; but there is none in the
most admirable compositions of Goethe; wherein life, though
admirably comprehended and reproduced in each of its successive
manifestations, is never understood as a whole. Goethe is the poet
of details, not of unity; of analysis, not of synthesis. None so
able to investigate details; to set off and embellish minute and
apparently trifling points; none throw so beautiful a light on
separate parts; but the connecting link escapes him. His works
resemble a magnificent encyclopaedia, unclassified. He has felt
everything but he has never felt the whole. Happy in detecting a ray
of the beautiful upon the humblest blade of grass gemmed with dew;
happy in seizing the poetic elements of an incident the most prosaic
in appearance--he was incapable of tracing all to a common source,
and recomposing the grand ascending scale in which, to quote a
beautiful expression of Herder's "every creature is a numerator of
the grand denominator, Nature. " How, indeed, should he comprehend
these things, he who had no place in his works or in his poet's
heart for humanity, by the light of which conception only can the
true worth of sublunary things be determined? "Religion and
politics," [Footnote: Goethe and his Contemporaries. ] said he, "are
a troubled element for art. I have always kept myself aloof from
them as much as possible. " Questions of life and death for the
millions were agitated around him; Germany re-echoed to the war
songs of Korner; Fichte, at the close of one of his lectures, seized
his musket, and joined the volunteers who were hastening (alas! what
have not the Kings made of that magnificent outburst of
nationality! ) to fight the battles of their fatherland. The ancient
soil of Germany thrilled beneath their tread; he, an artist, looked
on unmoved; his heart knew no responsive throb to the emotion that
shook his country; his genius, utterly passive, drew apart from the
current that swept away entire races. He witnessed the French
Revolution in all its terrible grandeur, and saw the old world
crumble beneath its strokes; and while all the best and purest
spirits of Germany, who had mistaken the death-agony of the old
world for the birth-throes of a new, were wringing their hands at
the spectacle of dissolution, he saw in it only the subject of a
farce. He beheld the glory and the fall of Napoleon; he witnessed
the reaction of down-trodden nationalities--sublime prologue of the
grand epopee of the peoples destined sooner or later to be unfolded-
-and remained a cold spectator. He had neither learned to esteem
men, to better them, nor even to suffer with them. If we except the
beautiful type of Berlichingen, a poetic inspiration of his youth,
man, as the creature of thought and action; the artificer of the
future, so nobly sketched by Schiller in his dramas, has no
representative in his works. He has carried something--of this
nonchalance even into the manner in which his heroes conceive love.
Goethe's altar is spread with the choicest flowers, the most
exquisite perfumes, the first-fruits of nature; but the Priest is
wanting. In his work of second creation--for it cannot be denied
that such it was--he has gone through the vast circle of living and
visible things; but stopped short before the seventh day. God
withdrew from him before that time; and the creatures the poet has
evoked wander within the circle, dumb and prayerless; awaiting until
the man shall come to give them a name, and appoint them to a
destination.

No, Goethe is not the poet of Pantheism; he is a polytheist in his
method as an artist; the pagan poet of modern times. His world is,
above all things, the world of forms: a multiplied Olympus. The
Mosaic heaven and the Christian are veiled to him. Like the pagans,
he parcels out Nature into fragments, and makes of each a divinity;
like them, he worships the sensuous rather than the ideal; he looks,
touches, and listens far more than he feels. And what care and labor
are bestowed upon the plastic portion of his art! what importance is
given--I will not say to the objects themselves--but to the external
representation of objects! Has he not somewhere said that "the
beautiful is the result of happy position? "[Footnote: In the Kunst
und Alterthum, I think. ]

Under this definition is concealed an entire system of poetic
materialism, substituted for the worship of the ideal; involving a
whole series of consequences, the logical result of which was to
lead Goethe to indifference, that moral suicide of some of the
noblest energies of genius. The absolute concentration of every
faculty of observation on each of the objects to be represented,
without relation to the ensemble; the entire avoidance of every
influence likely to modify the view taken of that object, became in
his hands one of the most effective means of art. The poet, in his
eyes, was neither the rushing stream a hundred times broken on its
course, that it may carry fertility to the surrounding country; nor
the brilliant flame, consuming itself in the light it sheds around
while ascending to heaven; but rather the placid lake, reflecting
alike the tranquil landscape and the thunder-cloud; its own surface
the while unruffled even by the lightest breeze. A serene and
passive calm with the absolute clearness and distinctness of
successive impressions, in each of which he was for the time wholly
absorbed, are the peculiar characteristics of Goethe. "I allow the
objects I desire to comprehend, to act tranquilly upon me," said he;
"I then observe the impression I have received from them, and I
endeavor to render it faithfully. " Goethe has here portrayed his
every feature to perfection. He was in life such as Madame Von Arnim
proposed to represent him after death; a venerable old man, with a
serene, almost radiant countenance; clothed in an antique robe,
holding a lyre resting on his knees, and listening to the harmonies
drawn from it either by the hand of a genius, or the breath of the
winds. The last chords wafted his soul to the East; to the land of
inactive contemplation. It was time: Europe had become too agitated
for him.

Such were Byron and Goethe in their general characteristics; both
great poets; very different, and yet, complete as is the contrast
between them, and widely apart as are the paths they pursue,
arriving at the same point. Life and death, character and poetry,
everything is unlike in the two, and yet the one is the complement
of the other. Both are the children of fatality--for it is
especially at the close of epochs that the providential law which
directs the generations assumes towards individuals the semblance of
fatality--and compelled by it unconsciously to work out a great
mission. Goethe contemplates the world in parts, and delivers the
impressions they make upon him, one by one, as occasion presents
them. Byron looks upon the world from a single comprehensive point
of view; from the height of which he modifies in his own soul the
impressions produced by external objects, as they pass before him.
Goethe successively absorbs his own individuality in each of the
objects he reproduces. Byron stamps every object he portrays with
his own individuality. To Goethe, nature is the symphony; to Byron
it is the prelude. She furnishes to the one the entire subject; to
the other the occasion only of his verse. The one executes her
harmonies; the other composes on the theme she has suggested. Goethe
better exgresses lives; Byron life. The one is most vast; the other
more deep. The first searches everywhere for the beautiful, and
loves, above all things, harmony and repose; the other seeks the
sublime, and adores action and force. Characters, such as Coriolanus
or Luther, disturbed Goethe. I know not if, in his numerous pieces
of criticism, he has ever spoken of Dante; but assuredly he must
have shared the antipathy felt for him by Sir Walter Scott; and
although he would undoubtedly have sufficiently respected his genius
to admit him into his Pantheon, yet he would certainly have drawn a
veil between his mental eye and the grand but sombre figure of the
exiled seer, who dreamed of the future empire of the world for his
country, and of the world's harmonious development under her
guidance. Byron loved and drew inspiration from Dante. He also loved
Washington and Franklin, and followed, with all the sympathies of a
soul athirst for action, the meteor-like career of the greatest
genius of action our age has produced, Napoleon; feeling indignant--
perhaps mistakenly--that he did not die in the struggle.

When travelling in that second fatherland of all poetic souls--
Italy--the poets still pursued divergent routes; the one experienced
sensations; the other emotions; the one occupied himself especially
with nature; the other with the greatness dead, the living wrongs,
the human memories. [Footnote: The contrast between the two poets is
nowhere more strikingly displayed than by the manner in which they
were affected by the sight of Rome. In Goethe's Elegies and in his
Travels in Italy we find the impressions of the artist only. He did
not understand Rome. The eternal synthesis that, from the heights of
the Capitol and St. Peter, is gradually unfolded in ever-widening
circles, embracing first a nation and then Europe, as it will
ultimately embrace humanity, remained unrevealed to him; he saw only
the inner circle of paganism; the least prolific, as well as least
indigenous. One might fancy that he caught a glimpse of it for an
instant, when he wrote: "History is read here far otherwise than in
any other spot in the universe; elsewhere we read it from without to
within; here one seems to read it from within to without; "but if
so, he soon lost sight of it again, and became absorbed in external
nature. " Whether we halt or advance, we discover a landscape ever
renewing itself in a thousand fashions. We have palaces and ruins;
gardens and solitudes: the horizon lengthens in the distance, or
suddenly contracts; huts and stables, columns and triumphal arches,
all lie pell-mell, and often so close that we might find room for
all on the same sheet of paper. "

At Rome Byron forgot passions, sorrows, his own individuality, all,
in the presence of a great idea; witness this utterance of a soul
born for devotedhess:--

"O Rome! my country! city of the soul!
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
Lone mother of dead empires! and control
In their shut breasts their petty misery. "

When at last he came to a recollection of himself and his position,
it was with a hope for the world (stanza 98) and a pardon for his
enemies. From the fourth canto of Childe Harold, the daughter of
Byron might learn more of the true spirit of her father than from
all the reports she may have heard, and all the many volumes that
have been written upon him. ]

And yet, notwithstanding all the contrasts, which I have only hinted
at, but which might be far more elaborately displayed by extracts
from their works; they arrived--Goethe, the poet of individuality in
its objective life--at the egotism of indifference; Byron--the poet
of individuality an its subjective life--at the egotism (I say it
with regret, but it, too, is egotism) of despair: a double sentence
upon the epoch which it was their mission to represent and to close!

Both of them--I am not speaking of their purely literary merits,
incontestable and universally acknowledged--the one by the spirit of
resistance that breathes through all his creations; the other by the
spirit of sceptical irony that pervades his works, and by the
independent sovereignty attributed to art over all social relations-
-greatly aided the cause of intellectual emancipation, and awakened
in men's minds the sentiment of liberty. Both of them--the one,
directly, by the implacable war he waged against the vices and
absurdities of the privileged classes, and indirectly, by investing
his heroes with all the most brilliant qualities of the despot, and
then dashing them to pieces as if in anger;--the other, by the
poetic rehabilitation of forms the most modest, and objects the most
insignificant, as well as by the importance attributed to details--
combated aristocratic prejudices, and developed in men's minds the
sentiment of equality.