but—­of the race, not merely in technical and intellectual, but also in moral respects, is supported both by rational grounds (without faith in such progress we could not fulfill our duty as co-laborers in it) and by experiential grounds (above all, the unselfish sympathy which all the world gave to the French Revolution); and the never-ending complaint that the times are growing worse proves only that mankind is continually setting up stricter standards for itself.  The beginning of history is to be placed at the point where man passes out of the condition of innocence, in which instinct rules, and begins to subdue nature, which hitherto he has obeyed.  The goal of history, again, is the establishment of the perfect form of the state.  Nature itself co-operates with freedom in the gradual transformation of the state based on necessity (Notstaat) into a rational state, inasmuch as selfish competition and the commercial spirit require peace, order, and justice for their own security and help to bring them about.  And so, further, we need not doubt that humanity will constantly draw nearer to the ideal condition of everlasting peace among the nations (guaranteed by a league of states which shall as a mediator settle disputes between individual states), however impracticable the idea may at present appear.

If the bold declaration of Fortlage, that in Kant the system of absolute truth appeared, is true of any one part of his philosophy, it is true of the practical part, in which Christian morality has found its scientific expression.  If we may justly complain that on the basis of his sharp distinction between legality and morality, between legal duty and virtue-duty, Kant took into account only the legal side of the institutions of marriage and of the state, overlooking the fact that besides these they have a moral importance and purpose, if we may demand a social ethic as a supplement to his ethics, which is directed to the duties of the individual alone, yet these and other well-founded desiderata may be attained by slight corrections and by the addition of another story to the Kantian edifice, while the foundations are still retained.  The bases are immovable.  Autonomy, absolute oughtness, the formal character of the law of reason, and the incomparable worth of the pure, disinterested disposition—­these are the corner stones of the Kantian, nay, of all morals.

%3.  Theory of the Beautiful and of Ends in Nature.%

We now know the laws which the understanding imposes upon nature and those which reason imposes upon the will.  If there is a field in which to be (Sein) and ought to be (Sollen), nature and freedom, which we have thus far been forced to consider antithetical, are reconciled—­and that there is such a field is already deducible from the doctrine of the religious postulates (as practical truths or assumptions concerning what is, in behalf of what ought to be), and from the hints concerning a progress in history