ace, in which he formulated the articles of an international treaty to
secure the disappearance of war. He considered that, while a universal
republic would be the positive ideal, we shall probably have to be
contented with what he calls a negative substitute, consisting in
a federation of peoples bound by a peace-alliance guaranteeing the
independence of each member. But to assure the permanence of this system
it is essential that each state should have a democratic constitution.
For such a constitution is based on individual liberty and civil
equality. All these changes should be brought about by legal reforms;
revolutions--he was writing in 1795---cannot be justified.

We see the influence of Rousseau's Social Contract and that of the Abbe
de Saint-Pierre, with whose works Kant was acquainted. There can be
little doubt that it was the influence of French thought, so powerful
in Germany at this period, that turned Kant's mind towards these
speculations, which belong to the latest period of his life and form a
sort of appendix to his philosophical system. The theory of Progress,
the idea of universal reform, the doctrine of political equality--Kant
examined all these conceptions and appropriated them to the service of
his own highly metaphysical theory of ethics. In this new association
their spirit was changed.

In France, as we saw, the theory of Progress was generally associated
with ethical views which could find a metaphysical basis in the
sensationalism of Locke. A moral system which might be built on
sensation, as the primary mental fact, was worked out by Helvetius. But
the principle that the supreme law of conduct is to obey nature had
come down as a practical philosophy from Rabelais and Montaigne through
Moliere to the eighteenth century. It was reinforced by the theory of
the natural goodness of man. Jansenism had struggled against it and was
defeated. After theology it was the turn of metaphysics. Kant's moral
imperative marked the next stage in the conflict of the two opposite
tendencies which seek natural and ultra-natural sanctions for morality.

Hence the idea of progress had a different significance for Kant and for
its French exponents, though his particular view of the future possibly
in store for the human species coincided in some essential points with
theirs. But his theory of life gives a different atmosphere to the idea.
In France the atmosphere is emphatically eudaemonic; happiness is the
go