s it to silence by the
conception which desires no cause; and being incapable of understanding
the sublime necessity of reason, he keeps to the blind constraint of
matter. As sensuousness knows no other end than its interest, and is
determined by nothing except blind chance, it makes the former the motive
of its actions, and the latter the master of the world.

Even the divine part in man, the moral law, in its first manifestation in
the sensuous cannot avoid this perversion. As this moral law is only
prohibited, and combats in man the interest of sensuous egotism, it must
appear to him as something strange until he has come to consider this
self-love as the stranger, and the voice of reason as his true self.
Therefore he confines himself to feeling the fetters which the latter
imposes on him, without having the consciousness of the infinite
emancipation which it procures for him. Without suspecting in himself
the dignity of lawgiver, he only experiences the constraint and the
impotent revolt of a subject fretting under the yoke, because in this
experience the sensuous impulsion precedes the moral impulsion, he gives
to the law of necessity a beginning in him, a positive origin, and by the
most unfortunate of all mistakes he converts the immutable and the
eternal in himself into a transitory accident. He makes up his mind to
consider the notions of the just and the unjust as statutes which have
been introduced by a will, and not as having in themselves an eternal
value. Just as in the explanation of certain natural phenomena he goes
beyond nature and seeks out of her what can only be found in her, in her
own laws; so also in the explanation of moral phenomena he goes beyond
reason and makes light of his humanity, seeking a god in this way. It is
not wonderful that a religion which he has purchased at the cost of his
humanity shows itself worthy of this origin, and that he only considers
as absolute and eternally binding laws that have never been binding from
all eternity. He has placed himself in relation with, not a holy being,
but a powerful. Therefore the spirit of his religion, of the homage that
he gives to God, is a fear that abases him, and not a veneration that
elevates him in his own esteem.

Though these different aberrations by which man departs from the ideal of
his destination cannot all take place at the same time, because several
degrees have to be passed over in the transition from the obscure of
though