certain degree this is permitted to a poet; in neither case is there
any question of duty. For if anyone chooses to forfeit his
reputation as an orator, no one can prevent him. We have here only
to do with the distinction of imperatives into problematical,
assertorial, and apodeictic. Similarly in the note in which I have
pared the moral ideas of practical perfection in different
philosophical schools, I have distinguished the idea of wisdom from
that of holiness, although I have stated that essentially and
objectively they are the same. But in that place I understand by the
former only that wisdom to which man (the Stoic) lays claim; therefore
I take it subjectively as an attribute alleged to belong to man.
(Perhaps the expression virtue, with which also the made great show,
would better mark the characteristic of his school.) The expression of
a postulate of pure practical reason might give most occasion to
misapprehension in case the reader confounded it with the
signification of the postulates in pure mathematics, which carry
apodeictic certainty with them. These, however, postulate the
possibility of an action, the object of which has been previously
recognized a priori in theory as possible, and that with perfect
certainty. But the former postulates the possibility of an object
itself (God and the immortality of the soul) from apodeictic practical
laws, and therefore only for the purposes of a practical reason.
This certainty of the postulated possibility then is not at all
theoretic, and consequently not apodeictic; that is to say, it is
not a known necessity as regards the object, but a necessary
supposition as regards the subject, necessary for the obedience to its
objective but practical laws. It is, therefore, merely a necessary
hypothesis. I could find no better expression for this rational
necessity, which is subjective, but yet true and unconditional.