So much only seems clear. As in bees there is implanted an instinct to build cells and a hive for life in common, so men (it is alleged) are endowed with an impulse leading them to play in common a great, strictly moral, world-embracing Comedy, their part being merely to figure as puppets — nothing else. But there is this important difference between the bees and men. The hive is really brought to completion; while instead of a moral World-Comedy, as a matter of fact, an exceedingly immoral one is enacted. Here, then, we see the imperative form of the Kantian Ethics, the moral Law, and the absolute “Ought” pushed further and further till a system of ethical Fatalism is evolved, which, as it is worked out, lapses at times into the comic.

If in Kant's doctrine we trace a certain moral pedantry; with