comprehended or understood, because we cannot support it by any sort
of example or analogy. It holds good only as a necessary hypothesis of
reason in a being that believes itself conscious of a will, that is,
of a faculty distinct from mere desire (namely, a faculty of
determining itself to action as an intelligence, in other words, by
laws of reason independently on natural instincts). Now where
determination according to laws of nature ceases, there all
explanation ceases also, and nothing remains but defence, i.e., the
removal of the objections of those who pretend to have seen deeper
into the nature of things, and thereupon boldly declare freedom
impossible. We can only point out to them that the supposed
contradiction that they have discovered in it arises only from this,
that in order to be able to apply the law of nature to human
actions, they must necessarily consider man as an appearance: then
when we demand of them that they should also think of him qua
intelligence as a thing in itself, they still persist in considering
him in this respect also as an appearance. In this view it would no
doubt be a contradiction to suppose the causality of the same
subject (that is, his will) to be withdrawn from all the natural
laws of the sensible world. But this contradiction disappears, if they
would only bethink themselves and admit, as is reasonable, that behind
the appearances there must also lie at their root (although hidden)
the things in themselves, and that we cannot expect the laws of
these to be the same as those that govern their appearances.

The subjective impossibility of explaining the freedom of the will
is identical with the impossibility of discovering and explaining an
interest * which man can take in the moral law. Nevertheless he does
actually take an interest in it, the basis of which in us we call
the moral feeling, which some have falsely assigned as the standard of