But in this case, it would have an anthropological, and consequently empirical, foundation--a position which is diametrically opposed to Kant's explicit and repeated utterances. Again, on p. 108 we find: "Both in the practical philosophy of criticism, and in the whole of the purified or higher transcendental philosophy, Autonomy is that which is founded, and which founds, by itself alone; and which is neither capable of, nor requires, any other foundation; it is that which is absolutely original, true and certain _per se;_ the primal truth; the _prius κατ' ἐξοχήν (par excellence)_; the absolute principle. Whoever, therefore, imagines, requires, or seeks any basis for this Autonomy external to itself, can only be regarded by the Kantian School as wanting in moral consciousness;[13] or else as failing to interpret this consciousness correctly, through the employment of false first principles in his speculations. The School of Fichte and Schelling declares him to be afflicted with a dulness of intellect that renders him incapable of being a philosopher, and forms the characteristic of the unholy _canaille_, and the sluggish brute, or (to use Schelling's more veiled expression) of the _profanum vulgus_ and the _ignavum pecus_." Every one will understand how much truth there can be in a doctrine which it is sought to uphold by such defiant and dogmatic rhetoric. Meanwhile, we must doubtless explain by the respect that this language inspired, the really childish credulity with which Kant's followers accepted the Categorical Imperative, and at once treated it as a matter beyond dispute. The truth is that in this case any objections raised to a theoretical assertion might easily be confounded with moral obliquity; so that every one, although he had no very clear idea in his own mind of the Categorical Imperative, yet preferred to be silent, believing, as he did, in secret, that others were probably better off, and had succeeded in evolving a clearer and more definite mental picture of it. For no one likes to turn his conscience inside out.
Thus in the Kantian School Practical Reason with its Categorical Imperative appears more and more as a hyperphysical fact, as a Delphian temple in the human soul, out of whose dark recesses proceed oracles that infallibly declare not, alas! what will, but what ought to, happen. This doctrine of Practical Reason, as a direct and immediate fact, once it had been adopted, or rather introduced by artifice combined with defiance, was unhappily later on extended also to Theoretical Reason; and not unnaturally: for Kant himself had often said that both are but one and the same Reason (_e.g_., Preface, p. xii; R., p. 8). After it had been once admitted that in the domain of the Practical there is a Reason which dictates _ex tripode_,[14] it was an easy step to concede the same privilege to Theoretical Reason also, closely related as the latter is to the former--indeed, consubstantial with it. The one was thus pronounced to be just as immediate as the other, the advantage of this being no less immense than obvious.