"Destroy these and they think the world will become vulgar and materialized, losing not only the surest sanction of morals, but ... the spiritual aspiration and tendencies," &c. "To these gloomy forebodings I venture to return a positive and categorical denial ...

On June 10th the Servian Government dispatched a note to Sofia demanding a categorical answer to the Servian demand for a revision of the preliminary treaty.

We now ask a categorical answer,Will you remove your press?

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

My words seemed to ease the admiral's mind, but he regretfully replied that the reports were so voluminous and categorical in character that he thought I, as a representative of the people of England, as well as an officer of His Majesty's Army, ought to be made acquainted with the situation.

So categorical are the nature of these that it is impossible to imagine them to have been made without fully understanding their import and significance to the orderly section of the Russian people who, on the faith of these pledges, gave us their trust.

His impartial spectator was the forerunner of the categorical imperative.

In the closing paragraphs, on the ultimate bases of ethics, the stern features of the categorical imperative are already seen, veiled by the English theory of moral sense, while the attractive Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, which appeared in the same year, still naïvely follow the empirical road.

In regard to quantity, every judgment is universal, particular, or singular; in regard to quality, affirmative, negative, or infinite; in regard to relation, categorical, hypothetical, or disjunctive; and in regard to modality, problematical, assertory, or apodictic.

To the categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive syllogisms correspond the three concepts of reason, the soul or the thinking subject, the world or the totality of phenomena, and God, the original being or the supreme condition of the possibility of all that can be thought.

" The law of practical reason is a "categorical imperative."

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

The universality and necessity (unconditionalness) of the categorical imperative proves that it springs from no other source than reason itself.

If the categorical imperative posited definite ends for the will, if it prescribed a direction to definite objects, it could neither be known a priori nor be valid for all rational beings: its apodictic character forbids the admission of empirical elements of every sort.

" A further addition to the abstract formula of the categorical imperative results from the discussion of the question, What universal ends admit of subsumption under it, i.e., stand the test of fitness to be principles of a universal legislation?

After it has been settled what the categorical imperative enjoins, the further problem awaits us of explaining how it is possible.

The categorical imperative is possible only on I the presupposition of our freedom.

There are three original and pregnant pairs of thoughts which cause Kant's name to shine in the philosophical sky as a star of the first magnitude: the demand for a critique of knowledge and the proof of a priori forms of knowledge; the moral autonomy and the categorical imperative; the regulative validity of the Ideas of reason and the practical knowledge of the transcendent world.

Schelling reclaimed the intuitive understanding, which Kant had problematically attributed to the primal spirit, as the property of the philosopher, after Fichte had drawn attention to the fact that the consciousness of the categorical imperative, which Kant had not thoroughly investigated, could be nothing else than intellectual intuition, because in it knowing and doing coincide.

Hers was a nature which suffers under the categorical question; but her mother's was one which presses them home.

A small but formidable committee entered my office one morning and demanded a categorical declaration of my principles.

" "Give me a categorical answer.

Pray don't make any categorical demands to Marshal Botta, and be obliged to retire to Leghorn, because they are not answered.

Should not Right Reason be our categorical imperative? Giri primarily meant no more than duty, and I dare say its etymology was derived from the fact that in our conduct, say to our parents, though love should be the only motive, lacking that, there must be some other authority to enforce filial piety; and they formulated this authority in Giri.

CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE, Kant's name for the self-derived moral law, "universal and binding on every rational will, a commandment of the autonomous, one and universal reason.