of making man free, plunge him in the most terrible slavery.

Facts verify this supposition. Man raised on the wings of imagination
leaves the narrow limits of the present, in which mere animality is
enclosed, in order to strive on to an unlimited future. But while the
limitless is unfolded to his dazed imagination, his heart has not ceased
to live in the separate, and to serve the moment. The impulse towards
the absolute seizes him suddenly in the midst of his animality, and as in
this cloddish condition all his efforts aim only at the material and
temporal, and are limited by his individuality, he is only led by that
demand of the reason to extend his individuality into the infinite,
instead of to abstract from it. He will be led to seek instead of form
an inexhaustible matter, instead of the unchangeable an everlasting
change and an absolute securing of his temporal existence. The same
impulse which, directed to his thought and action, ought to lead to truth
and morality, now directed to his passion and emotional state, produces
nothing but an unlimited desire and an absolute want. The first fruits,
therefore, that he reaps in the world of spirits are cares and fear--both
operations of the reason; not of sensuousness, but of a reason that
mistakes its object and applies its categorical imperative to matter.
All unconditional systems of happiness are fruits of this tree, whether
they have for their object the present day or the whole of life, or what
does not make them any more respectable, the whole of eternity, for their
object. An unlimited duration of existence and of well-being is only an
ideal of the desires; hence a demand which can only be put forth by an
animality striving up to the absolute. Man, therefore, without gaining
anything for his humanity by a rational expression of this sort, loses
the happy limitation of the animal, over which he now only possesses the
unenviable superiority of losing the present for an endeavor after what
is remote, yet without seeking in the limitless future anything but the
present.

But even if the reason does not go astray in its object, or err in the
question, sensuousness will continue to falsify the answer for a long
time. As soon as man has begun to use his understanding and to knit
together phenomena in cause and effect, the reason, according to its
conception, presses on to an absolute knitting together and to an
unconditional basis. In order, merely, to be able to put