faith can not stand unless it has nothing to stand on . every moment is strain and crisis . that may be natural to the reformer in a decadent atmosphere ( if Danish religion was decadent ) , but it has the true Jansenist touch , as defined by Sainte-Beuve in the famous phrase , it forgot God the father . after all , the world created by God was pronounced good by him . it is corrected but not superseded by the religion of redemption - the kingdom of the son . no doubt there are fierce and dangerous factors working under the surface of our souls , but we need not ( indeed we can not ) be always living under the surface . we get a clear result of his system when he speaks of children . as their life has no strain they can not be real Christians and Kierkegaard has to deal ( rather shame-facedly ) with the gospel texts on the subject ( unscientific postscript , p 524 ) . Kant and the utilitarians . most people would agree that Immanuel Kant was a great thinker and also that he was hard to understand . there are many ways of being hard to understand . one is due to style . not knowing German , I can hardly assess this . it would seem that he can be quite lucid when he wants , and can strike out effective phrases like perceptions without conceptions are blind , and conceptions without perceptions are empty , or so act that your action may be a general law . on the other hand , he is one of the philosophers whose work has been subjected to higher criticism , and the division into earlier and later strata recalls the Q and M and L of new testament sources . this is partly owing to the fact that he was thinking , while he was writing , and did not always trouble to turn and revise page 100 in the light of what he had said on page 200 . but we must also take into account a feature of his mind that may be called dualism . he tells us himself that his method of thinking was to take a point of view and work it out to its logical conclusion and then to do the same with the opposite point of view . they sometimes lie down side by side , like the lion and the lamb , but not to live in peace together . two famous examples present themselves in the critique of pure reason , where he is analysing the fact of knowledge . first of all , the case of the senses and the understanding . they seem to have no common root . the first is passive , the second active . the first deals with the outward and the second with the inner world . it is said that they are inseparable but it is not clear why ( for example ) my sensation of colour and my thought of substance should combine into the amalgam we call seeing a thing . we may say ( without going into technicalities ) that Kant took his account of the senses from Hume , and his account of the understanding from Leibniz , and it can hardly be said that he reconciled them . it is the same with the distinction between phenomena ( things as they appear to us ) and things in themselves ( as they really are ) . we are told there is a deep gulf between the two . phenomena fall within my experience . things in themselves are unknowable , but in that case how do I know of their existence ? and what of the knowing self which , in his view , seems to belong to both worlds ? we must keep this dualism in mind when we come to consider what Kant says about the relation of goodness and happiness . most people know Heine &apos;s brilliant jest about the contrast between two critiques - that of pure reason , in which he deals with thought , and that of the practical reason , in which he deals with action . in the first he had shown himself a revolutionary . the inhabitants of Koenigsburg set their watches by him when they saw this mild , inoffensive man take his regular walk . had they known , they would have been more frightened of him than of Robespierre . Robespierre only killed a king . Kant killed a God - the God of the Deists ( that is , the God whose existence can be proved by reason ) . then he describes Kant looking up from his triumphant dialectic and his eye lights upon his faithful servant , Lampe . he must be left with something to live by . so in the second critique Kant reinstates God , freedom and immortality as the object , not of proof , but of belief . put less picturesquely , this means that the critique of pure reason hedges in knowledge so strictly that it can deal with things only as they appear to us in sense experience . but when we take up the second critique which deals with morality , we find that the moral good is permanent and unchanging in which we have to believe to make sense of duty . as Kant says with a regal gesture , I abolish knowledge to make room for belief . so we have got back to the existence of God , but the God of the moral law . moral duty ( he argues ) is distinguished from other purposive action by its absolute obligation - what Kant calls the categorical imperative . all other imperatives are conditional . if you want to be a musician , you must practice so many hours a day . but conscience does not say , if you want to be good , you must abstain from committing murder . it says , thou shalt do no murder . the moral command is unconditional . it is not based on desire which is selfish . duty is not concerned with consequence : happiness is concerned with nothing else . here we have a sharp dualism . the soul of man is free only when it accepts the moral law as good in itself and does not get entangled with selfish desires . he does not go quite so far as to say that if I take pleasure in a good action it makes that action bad , but he does say that its goodness has no connection with my feelings . Kant finds it rather difficult to answer the question : have I any motive at all when I obey the moral law ? I do not desire anything for myself or for others . I am not concerned with any consequence that may follow . I may say that I respect it but I show that respect simply by obeying a law which , because it is always binding on all , must have God for its giver . so far Kant has not got much beyond the Stoic position . but after all , he had been brought up under Christian influences , and he goes a step further . to do my duty is to will the supreme good . I can not will what is impossible and therefore there must be a God who is able and willing to bring about the supreme good - which includes happiness . A E Taylor has said that what distinguishes religion from morality is that the former says , what ought to be , exists . Kant makes a move in that direction . there is another point at which he swerves from the strict Stoic creed . he accepts a belief in immortality not so much as a system of rewards and penalties as the possibility of endless moral progress . his rather curious argument runs as follows : what the law commands must be possible . I must ; therefore I can . this proves human freedom . but the law commands that I shall be absolutely good . now goodness is a process of becoming which never ends , and therefore needs an endless period - in which not to attain its goal ! but will this process go on after death as it does here on earth , where the just are never perfectly happy and where evils are constantly clouding and obstructing the good will , which Kant calls the brightest jewel of the soul ? I suppose he might have answered , yes , survival after death and unending improvement need not mean perfect happiness there any more than here . but after seventeen centuries of Christian teaching about heaven it was difficult to contemplate so bleak a prospect . so now he introduces a new moral intuition . that goodness and happiness ought to go together , and the existence of God proves that they shall . so he seems to have overcome the dualism of happiness and duty but at a cost . he has been violently attacked for reviving at this point the very desire for rewards , which he had banished so haughtily from his ethics . Professor Webb defends him against this charge by saying that the desire is not selfish but a matter of justice - that all good men should be rewarded ( whether it includes myself or not ) . this may or may not be a sufficient answer , but it hardly meets the problem does Kant regard happiness as a good thing or not ? the answer would seem to be that it is a bad thing before death and a good thing after . this is not perhaps as absurd as it sounds and might be worked into a theory that life here is a probation , in which we prove ourselves worthy or unworthy of happiness in the next . but in this life is it not lawful to seek the happiness of others ? on stern Kantian grounds , no . our only desire for others should be that they observe the moral law . thus , the evil of cruelty consists in its effect on the disposition of the doer and not in the sufferings of the victim . it is surely the height of pedantry to deny that at least one of the consequences which result from breaking the law of human kindness is the increase of human unhappiness . the utilitarians defended pleasure against Kant . I do not propose to say more than a word about Jeremy Bentham . as a reformer of law and political institutions he was effective , largely because they demand an appeal to the kind of external obedience which can be regulated by external rewards and punishments . but , when he tries to open the secrets of the human heart , he appears as the pedant , which for all his good nature he really was . he seems to have accepted the syllogism : I only do what I desire . I only desire what gives me the greater pleasure . therefore , whatever I do , I do because it gives me the greater pleasure . it is natural to ask - if everyone does what gives him the greatest pleasure and can not do anything else , what is wrong and why is the moralist needed to tell us what we ought to do ? what is the greatest pleasure ? on what scale is it measured ? am I the best judge of it ? and so on . but apart from all that , one is surprised at the poverty of his psychology . Bentham would have done well to consider the romantic movement which he so much despised . we only do what we want ! struggles of martyrs , doubts of lovers , fight against temptation , changing moods of the voluptuary , earnest struggling after the true end of life - was all this world of feeling completely closed to him ? as though what do I want ? were not the question of questions ! that world was not wholly closed to John Stuart Mill . brought up in the straitest sect of the Benthamites , he literally collapsed after a diet of push-pin as good as poetry and forty-three motives for obeying the law . he recovered into a brighter world of poetry and music . but he still called himself a utilitarian . this was not merely loyalty to his upbringing . it was the result of his abiding dislike for any system which relied upon pure intuition . wherever he sensed it , there was the enemy . it relied upon an obscure feeling , which was not accountable to reason . for Mill , life must be made up of clear-cut ends , and of means leading straight to them . the kind of good preached by Kant and Coleridge seemed to him vague and undefined . but everyone knew what pleasure was . here was a goal with no mystical nonsense about it . 