21, we find him saying: “Kant assumes the moral law to be a direct and certain reality, an original fact of the moral consciousness.” But if Kant had wished to make the Categorical Imperative a fact of consciousness, and thus give it an empirical foundation, he certainly would not have failed at least to put it forward as such. And this is precisely what he never does. As far as I know, the Categorical Imperative appears for the first time in the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (p.

802 of the first, and p. 830 of the fifth edition), entirely ex nunc (unexpectedly), without any preamble, and merely connected with the preceding sentence by an altogether unjustifiable “therefore.”; It is only in the Grundlage zur Metaphysik der Sitten — a book to which we here devote especial