The categorical imperative, or absolute command, is a contradiction.

"Heap high the farmer's wintry hoard!" (exclamatory imperative)].

She yielded at last only to that formal imperative which her conscience would not permit her to disobey, and which for the first time I now employed in addressing her.

All prudential or technical rules are hypothetical imperatives, the moral law is a categorical imperative.

In the stadium of morality the good exists in the form of a requirement which can never be perfectly fulfilled, as a mere imperative; there remains an irrepressible opposition between the moral law and the individual will, between intention and execution.

The history of Christianity from Christ to Tolstoi is the history of a ghost-story; and as Rome fell before the men it martyred, so Russia has been compelled at last to open its prison doors by the passive imperative of the three gentle words.

More than about the automatic visceral reactions, these curiosities evoke the repressive imperatives of the associates, the mother and father especially.

By force of arms, starvation and the power of lies, they hoped to force us back to unimportance, and now the issue is: Whether the categoric imperative of the East Prussian Kant, or the hypocrisy of British cant, shall gain the victory.

No ethical system will with impunity pass by the autonomous legislation of reason and the unconditional imperative (the admonition of conscience translated into conceptual language): the nature and worth of moral will will be everywhere sought in vain if they are not recognized where Kant has found themin the unselfish disposition, in that maxim which is fitted to become a general law for all rational beings.