(1) But Kant is unfair in his picturesque contrast between the perplexities attending the pursuit of happiness and the certainty attachable to morality.  As a matter of observation, moral codes have varied quite as much as man’s different ways of finding happiness.  Cases of moral perplexity are as common as cases of uncertainty with regard to the road to happiness; there is no such universality and changelessness about morality as he assumes.  If a certain code seems fixed and indubitable to us, it is in large degree because we have become accustomed to it and given it our allegiance; a wider acquaintance with other codes, contemporary or past, would shake our confidence.  Some fundamental rules are unquestionable-rules against murder, rape, etc.; but just as unquestionable is the fact that these acts make against human happiness.

(2) Only a man with an Hebraic training and rigoristic temper could think of morality in this awestruck and unquestioning way.  More Bohemian people feel no such “categorical ought” in their breasts.  And if a man feels no such “categorical imperative,” how can you prove to him it is there?  Kant’s theory is at bottom mere assertion; if because of your training and temperament you respond to it, and if you are content not to analyze and explain the existence of this imperious pressure upon your will, you are tremendously impressed.  Otherwise the whole elaborate Kantian system probably seems to you an unreal brain-spun structure.

Kant, though a man of extraordinary mental powers, had but a narrow range of experience to base his theories upon, and lived too early to catch the genetic viewpoint.  Hence there is a certain pedantic naivete in his constructions.  No man with any modern psychological or historical training ought to be content to leave this extraordinary “categorical imperative” unexplained.  It is quite possible to trace its origin and understand its function; there is nothing unique or mysterious about it.  Why should we bow down to a command shot at us out of the air, a command irrelevant to our actual interests?  Children have to do so, and the majority of the human race are still children, who may properly acquiesce in the rules of morality without clearly realizing why.  But the reflective man should not be content to yield himself to the yoke unless he can see its necessity and value.  The “ought,” the knowledge of what is right, antedates the individual’s experience of what is best, and so seems mysterious and a priori to him; but it does not antedate the racial experience; it is rather its fruit.  The teleology of conscience is very simple, and its genesis and development purely natural.