forward this
demand, man must already have stepped beyond the sensuous, but the
sensuous uses this very demand to bring back the fugitive.

In fact, it is now that he ought to abandon entirely the world of sense
in order to take his flight into the realm of ideas; for the intelligence
remains eternally shut up in the finite and in the contingent, and does
not cease putting questions without reaching the last link of the chain.
But as the man with whom we are engaged is not yet capable of such an
abstraction, and does not find it in the sphere of sensuous knowledge,
and because he does not look for it in pure reason, he will seek for it
below in the region of sentiment, and will appear to find it. No doubt
the sensuous shows him nothing that has its foundation in itself, and
that legislates for itself, but it shows him something that does not care
for foundation or law; therefore, thus not being able to quiet the
intelligence by showing it a final cause, he reduces it to silence by the
conception which desires no cause; and being incapable of understanding
the sublime necessity of reason, he keeps to the blind constraint of
matter. As sensuousness knows no other end than its interest, and is
determined by nothing except blind chance, it makes the former the motive
of its actions, and the latter the master of the world.

Even the divine part in man, the moral law, in its first manifestation in
the sensuous cannot avoid this perversion. As this moral law is only
prohibited, and combats in man the interest of sensuous egotism, it must
appear to him as something strange until he has come to consider this
self-love as the stranger, and the voice of reason as his true self.
Therefore he confines himself to feeling the fetters which the latter
imposes on him, without having the consciousness of the infinite
emancipation which it procures for him. Without suspecting in himself
the dignity of lawgiver, he only experiences the constraint and the
impotent revolt of a subject fretting under the yoke, because in this
experience the sensuous impulsion precedes the moral impulsion, he gives
to the law of necessity a beginning in him, a positive origin, and by the
most unfortunate of all mistakes he converts the immutable and the
eternal in himself into a transitory accident. He makes up his mind to
consider the notions of the just and the unjust as statutes which have
been introduced by a will, and not as having in themselves an etern