all credentials to attest its existence. And if, by a strong effort of the imagination, we try to picture to ourselves a man, possessed, as it were, by a daemon, in the form of an absolute Ought, that speaks only in Categorical Imperatives, and, confronting his wishes and inclinations, claims to be the perpetual controller of his actions; in this figure we see no true portrait of human nature, or of our inner life; what we do discern is an artificial substitute for theological Morals, to which it stands in the same relation as a wooden leg to a living one.

Our conclusion, therefore, is, that the Kantian Ethics, like all anterior systems, is devoid of any sure foundation. As I showed at the outset, in my examination of its imperative Form, the structure is at bottom nothing but an inversion of theological Morals, cloaked in