o repent.

The theoretical philosopher enriches the domain of reason by adding to
it; the practical philosopher draws upon it, and makes it serve him.

* * * * *

According to Kant the truth of experience is only a hypothetical
truth. If the suppositions which underlie all the intimations of
experience--subject, object, time, space and causality--were removed,
none of those intimations would contain a word of truth. In other
words, experience is only a phenomenon; it is not knowledge of the
thing-in-itself.

If we find something in our own conduct at which we are secretly
pleased, although we cannot reconcile it with experience, seeing that
if we were to follow the guidance of experience we should have to
do precisely the opposite, we must not allow this to put us out;
otherwise we should be ascribing an authority to experience which
it does not deserve, for all that it teaches rests upon a mere
supposition. This is the general tendency of the Kantian Ethics.

* * * * *

Innocence is in its very nature stupid. It is stupid because the aim
of life (I use the expression only figuratively, and I could just
as well speak of the essence of life, or of the world) is to gain a
knowledge of our own bad will, so that our will may become an object
for us, and that we may undergo an inward conversion. Our body is
itself our will objectified; it is one of the first and foremost of
objects, and the deeds that we accomplish for the sake of the body
show us the evil inherent in our will. In the state of innocence,
where there is no evil because there is no experience, man is, as
it were, only an apparatus for living, and the object for which the
apparatus exists is not yet disclosed. An empty form of life like
this, a stage untenanted, is in itself, like the so-called real world,
null and void; and as it can attain a meaning only by action, by
error, by knowledge, by the convulsions of the will, it wears a
character of insipid stupidity. A golden age of innocence, a fools'
paradise, is a notion that is stupid and unmeaning, and for that
very reason in no way worthy of any respect. The first criminal and
murderer, Cain, who acquired a knowledge of guilt, and through
guilt acquired a knowledge of virtue by repentance, and so came to
understand the meaning of life, is a tragical figure more significant,
and almost more respectable, than all the innocent fools in the wor