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