as, in my other essay "On the Foundation of Morality," [1] I had proved the utter groundlessness of Kant's practical Reason with its Categorical Imperative which, under the name of the Moral Law, is still used by these gentlemen as the corner-stone of their own shallow systems of morality. I have shown it to be a futile assumption so clearly and irrefutably, that no one with a spark of judgment can possibly believe any longer in this fiction.—"Well, and so they probably did."—Oh no! They take good care not to venture on such slippery ground! Their ability consists in holding their tongues; silence is all they have to oppose to intelligence, earnestness, and truth. In not one of the products of their useless scribblings that have appeared since 1841, has the slightest notice been taken of my Ethics—undoubtedly the most important work on Moral Philosophy that has been published for the last sixty years—nay, their terror of me and of my truth is so great, that none of the literary journals issued by Academies or Universities has so much as mentioned the book. Zitto, zitto, lest the public should perceive anything: in this consists the whole of their policy. The instinct of self-preservation may, no doubt, be at the bottom of these artful tactics. For would not a philosophy, whose sole aim was truth, and which had no other consideration in view, be likely to play the part of the iron pot among the earthen ones, were it to come in contact with the petty systems composed under the influence of a thousand personal considerations by people whose chief qualification is the propriety of their sentiments? Their wretched fear of my writings is the fear of truth. Nor can it be denied, that precisely this very doctrine of the complete necessity of all acts of the will stands in flagrant contradiction with all the hypotheses of their favourite old-woman's philosophy
- ↑ Published in the same volume with the Prize-Essay on "Free Will." See "Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik."
