senses through a moral idea. No one who lives
a conscious life can renounce these claims to be respected as rational
and self-subsisting. And with these claims at least there is connected
in his soul a seriousness, an abandonment of doubt, a belief in
a reality, if not with the acknowledgment of a moral law in
his innermost being. Do but assail him who denies his own moral
destination and your existence and the existence of a corporeal
world, except in the way of experiment, to try what speculation can
do--assail him actively, carry his principles into life, and act as if
he either did not exist, or as if he were a piece of rude matter, and
he will soon forget the joke; he will become seriously angry with you,
he will seriously reprove you for treating him so, and maintain that
you ought not and must not do so to him; and, in this way, he will
practically admit that you really possess the power of acting upon
him, that he exists, that you exist, and that there exists _a medium
through which you act upon him_; and that you have at least duties
toward him.

Hence it is not the action of supposed objects without us, which exist
for us only and for which we exist only in so far as we already know
of them; just as little is it an empty fashioning, by means of our
imagination and our thinking, whose products would appear to us as
such, as empty pictures; it is not these, but the necessary faith in
our liberty and our power, in our veritable action and in definite
laws of human action, which serves as the foundation of all
consciousness of a reality without us, a consciousness which is
itself but a belief, since it rests on a belief, but one which follows
necessarily from that belief. We are compelled to assume that we
act in general, and that we ought to act in a certain way; we are
compelled to assume a certain sphere of such action--this sphere being
the truly and actually existing world as we find it. And _vice versa_,
this world is absolutely nothing but that sphere, and by no means
extends beyond it. The consciousness of the actual world proceeds from
the necessity of action, and not the reverse--i.e., the necessity of
action from the consciousness of such a world. The necessity is first
not the consciousness; that is derived. We do not act because we
agnize, but we agnize because we are destined to act. Practical reason
is the root of all reason. The laws of action for rational beings are
_immediately_ certain; their