The first results
from the practically necessary condition of a duration adequate to the
complete fulfilment of the moral law; the second from the necessary
supposition of independence of the sensible world, and of the
faculty of determining one's will according to the law of an
intelligible world, that is, of freedom; the third from the
necessary condition of the existence of the summum bonum in such an
intelligible world, by the supposition of the supreme independent
good, that is, the existence of God.
Thus the fact that respect for the moral law necessarily makes the
summum bonum an object of our endeavours, and the supposition thence
resulting of its objective reality, lead through the postulates of
practical reason to conceptions which speculative reason might
indeed present as problems, but could never solve. Thus it leads: 1.
To that one in the solution of which the latter could do nothing but
commit paralogisms (namely, that of immortality), because it could not
lay hold of the character of permanence, by which to complete the
psychological conception of an ultimate subject necessarily ascribed
to the soul in self-consciousness, so as to make it the real
conception of a substance, a character which practical reason
furnishes by the postulate of a duration required for accordance
with the moral law in the summum bonum, which is the whole end of
practical reason.
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