890 IMMANUELKANT
is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest
philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away. Philosophy must
therefore assume that no true contradiction will be found between freedom and natural
necessity in the same human actions, for it cannot give up the concept of nature any more
than that of freedom.
Hence if we should never be able to conceive how freedom is possible, at least
this apparent contradiction must be convincingly eradicated. For if even the thought of
freedom contradicted itself or nature, it would have to be surrendered in competition
with natural necessity.
But it would be impossible to escape this contradiction if the subject, who seems
to himself to be free, thought of himself in the same sense or in the same relationship
when he calls himself free as when he assumes that in the same action he is subject to
natural law. Therefore it is an inescapable task of speculative philosophy to show at
least that its illusion of contradiction rests on the fact that we [do not] think of man in a
different sense and relationship when we call him free from that in which we consider
him as part of nature and subject to its laws. It must show not only that they can very
well coexist but also that they must be thought of as necessarily united in one and the
same subject; for otherwise no ground could be given as to why we should burden
reason with an Idea which, though it may without contradiction be united with another
that is sufficiently established, nevertheless involves us in a perplexity which sorely
embarrasses reason in its theoretical use. This duty is imposed only on theoretical phi-
losophy, so that it may clear the way for practical philosophy. Thus the philosopher has
no choice as to whether he will remove the apparent contradiction or leave it untouched,
for in the latter case the theory of it would be unoccupied land, into the possession of
which the fatalist could rightly enter and drive all morality from its alleged property as
occupying it without title.
Yet we cannot say here that we have reached the boundary of practical philosophy.
For the settlement of the controversy does not belong to practical philosophy, as the latter
only demands from theoretical reason that it put an end to the discord in which it entan-
gles itself in theoretical questions, so that practical reason may have rest and security from
outward attacks which could dispute it the ground on which it desires to erect its edifice.
The title to freedom of the will claimed by ordinary reason is based on the con-
sciousness and the conceded presupposition of the independence of reason from
merely subjectively determining causes which together constitute what belongs only
to sensation and is included under the general name of sensibility. Man, who in this
way regards himself as intelligence, puts himself in a different order of things and in
a relationship to determining grounds of an altogether different kind when he thinks
of himself as intelligence with a will and thus as endowed with causality, compared
with that other order of things and that other set of determining grounds which
become relevant when he perceives himself as a phenomenon in the world of sense
(as he really is also) and submits his causality to external determination according to
natural laws. Now he soon realizes that both can subsist together—indeed, that they
must. For there is not the least contradiction between a thing in appearance (as
belonging to the world of sense) being subject to certain laws from which, as a thing
or being regarded as it is in itself, it is independent. That he must think of himself in
this twofold manner rests, with regard to the first, on the consciousness of himself as
an object affected through the senses, and, with regard to what is required by the sec-
ond, on the consciousness of himself as intelligence (i.e., as independent of sensible
impressions in the use of reason), and thus as belonging to the intelligible world.457