hance, as
the arbiter of things? Whence this constraining power within me,
exerting itself to the uttermost to win my allegiance to the right,
unless I am free to obey or disobey? How is not the very conception of
morality entirely obliterated in the false philosophy that would fain
persuade man that because he is _in_ the world he must needs be _of_ it,
and because the tides rise and fall with the phases of the moon, that his
actions are fixed and controlled by influences utterly beyond his power?
We have no room for the "man-machine" in the beautiful school of Immanuel
Kant.

And, finally, the awful question of the future Kant solves in the light
of the same sublime principle. "That law," he urges, "which is the
essential law binding humanity must one day be fulfilled in every one of
us. There is a moral as well as a physical evolution which you try in
vain to confine to the limits of the life which now is. There is no
argument known to science justifying such an attempt." Kant believes in
the Eternities, because every man born of woman is destined to be at last
in absolute conformity with that law of everlasting righteousness which
is for us what the law of balance is to the infinite worlds. All life,
that which now is and whatever is to be in the hereafter, is simply a
never-ending progress towards an ideal whose dignity is infinite. Hence
the command of Jesus, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is also
perfect," would be endorsed by Kant as in strict harmony with the
philosophy which does not teach that the physical act of dissolution
called death fixes the moral state of man for ever, but that all life,
whatsoever it may be and wheresoever it may be lived, is but an approach
towards a goal of infinite value, the will of man absolutely conformed to
justice, or the moral law.

As Kepler described the philosopher and the scientist as "thinking again
the thoughts of God," even so does the Kantian ethic aspire to absolute
conformity of will with that Will which is supreme and eternal, the moral
order itself personified. This is immortality: this is everlasting life,
even as the Christian disciple and philosopher describes it: "This world
passeth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the Divine will
endureth for ever". The phenomenal world is a pageant, a scene. Only
"the good will" (Kant's constant expression) in absolute harmony with the
Supreme Will is real and eternal.

[1] _Philosophi