First supplement
Original German
Erster Zusatz.Von der Garantie des ewigen Friedens.
Das, was diese Gewähr (Garantie) leistet, ist nichts Geringeres, als die große Künstlerin, Natur (natura daedala rerum), aus deren mechanischem Laufe sichtbarlich Zweckmäßigkeit hervorleuchtet, durch die Zwietracht der Menschen Eintracht selbst wider ihren Willen emporkommen zu lassen, und darum, gleich als Nöthigung einer ihren Wirkungsgesetzen nach uns unbekannten Ursache, Schicksal, bey Erwägung aber ihrer Zweckmäßigkeit im Laufe der Welt, als tiefliegende Weisheit einer höheren, auf den objectiven Endzweck des menschlichen Geschlechts gerichteten, und diesen Weltlauf prädeterminirenden Ursache Vorsehung [10], genannt wird, die wir zwar eigentlich nicht an diesen Kunstanstalten der Natur erkennen, oder auch nur daraus auf sie schließen, sondern (wie in aller Beziehung der Form der Dinge auf Zwecke überhaupt) nur hinzudenken können und müssen, um uns von ihrer Möglichkeit, nach der Analogie menschlicher Kunsthandlungen, einen Begriff zu machen, deren Verhältniß und Zusammenstimmung aber zu dem Zwecke, den uns die Vernunft unmittelbar vorschreibt (dem moralischen), sich vorzustellen, eine Idee ist, die zwar in theoretischer Absicht überschwenglich, in praktischer aber (z. B. in Ansehung des Pflichtbegriffs vom ewigen Frieden, um jenen Mechanism der Natur dazu zu benutzen) dogmatisch und ihrer Realität nach wohl gegründet ist. — Der Gebrauch des Worts Natur ist auch, wenn es, wie hier, bloß um Theorie (nicht um Religion) zu thun ist, schicklicher für die Schranken der menschlichen Vernunft (als die sich in Ansehung des Verhältnisses der Wirkungen zu ihren Ursachen, innerhalb den Grenzen möglicher Erfahrung halten muß), und bescheidener, als der Ausdruck einer für uns erkennbaren Vorsehung, mit dem man sich vermessenerweise ikarische Flügel ansetzt, um dem Geheimniß ihrer unergründlichen Absicht näher zu kommen.
Ehe wir nun diese Gewährleistung näher bestimmen, wird es nöthig seyn, vorher den Zustand nachzusuchen, den die Natur für die auf ihrem großen Schauplatz handelnde Personen veranstaltet hat, der ihre Friedenssicherung zuletzt nothwendig macht; — alsdann aber allererst die Art, wie sie diese leiste.
Ihre provisorische Veranstaltung besteht darin: daß sie 1) für die Menschen in allen Erdgegenden gesorgt hat, daselbst leben zu können; — 2) sie durch Krieg allerwärts hin, selbst in die unwirthbarste Gegenden, getrieben hat, um sie zu bevölkern; 3) — durch eben denselben sie in mehr oder weniger gesetzliche Verhältnisse zu treten genöthigt hat. — Daß in den kalten Wüsten am Eismeer noch das Moos wächst, welches das Rennthier unter dem Schnee hervorscharrt, um selbst die Nahrung, oder auch das Angespann des Ostiaken oder Samojeden zu seyn; oder daß die salzigten Sandwüsten doch noch dem Cameel, welches zu Bereisung derselben gleichsam geschaffen zu seyn scheint, um sie nicht unbenutzt zu lassen, enthalten, ist schon bewundernswürdig. Noch deutlicher aber leuchtet der Zweck hervor, wenn man gewahr wird, wie außer den bepelzten Thieren am Ufer des Eismeeres, noch Robben, Wallrosse und Wallfische an ihrem Fleische Nahrung, und mit ihrem Thran Feurung für die dortigen Anwohner darreichen. Am meisten aber erregt die Vorsorge der Natur durch das Treibholz Bewunderung, was sie (ohne daß man recht weiß, wo es herkommt) diesen gewächslosen Gegenden zubringt, ohne welches Material sie weder ihre Fahrzeuge und Waffen, noch ihre Hütten zum Aufenthalt zurichten könnten; wo sie dann mit dem Kriege gegen die Thiere gnug zu thun haben, um unter sich friedlich zu leben. — — Was sie aber dahin getrieben hat, ist vermuthlich nichts anders als der Krieg gewesen. Das erste Kriegswerkzeug aber unter allen Thieren, die der Mensch, binnen der Zeit der Erdbevölkerung, zu zähmen und häuslich zu machen gelernt hatte, ist das Pferd (denn der Elephant gehört in die spätere Zeit, nämlich des Luxus schon errichteter Staaten), so wie die Kunst, gewisse, für uns jetzt, ihrer ursprünglichen Beschaffenheit nach, nicht mehr erkennbare Grasarten, Getraide genannt, anzubauen, ingleichen die Vervielfältigung und Verfeinerung der Obstarten durch Verpflanzung und Einpfropfung (vielleicht in Europa bloß zweyer Gattungen, der Holzäpfel und Holzbirnen), nur im Zustande schon errichteter Staaten, wo gesichertes Grundeigenthum statt fand, entstehen konnte, — nachdem die Menschen vorher in gesetzloser Freyheit von dem Jagd- [11], Fischer- und Hirtenleben bis zum Ackerleben durchgedrungen waren, und nun Salz und Eisen erfunden ward, vielleicht die ersteren weit und breit gesuchten Artikel eines Handelsverkehrs verschiedener Völker wurden, wodurch sie zuerst in ein friedliches Verhältniß gegen einander, und so, selbst mit Entfernteren, in Einverständniß, Gemeinschaft und friedliches Verhältniß unter einander gebracht wurden.
Indem die Natur nun dafür gesorgt hat, daß Menschen allerwärts auf Erden leben könnten, so hat sie zugleich auch despotisch gewollt, daß sie allerwärts leben sollten, wenn gleich wider ihre Neigung, und selbst ohne daß dieses Sollen zugleich einen Pflichtbegriff voraussetzte, der sie hiezu, vermittelst eines moralischen Gesetzes, verbände, — sondern sie hat, zu diesem ihrem Zweck zu gelangen, den Krieg gewählt. — Wir sehen nämlich Völker, die an der Einheit ihrer Sprache die Einheit ihrer Abstammung kennbar machen, wie die Samojeden am Eismeer einerseits, und ein Volk von ähnlicher Sprache, zweyhundert Meilen davon entfernt, im Altaischen Gebirge andererseits, wozwischen sich ein anderes, nämlich mongalisches, berittenes und hiemit kriegerisches Volk, gedrängt, und so jenen Theil ihres Stammes, weit von diesem, in die unwirthbarsten Eisgegenden, versprengt hat, wo sie gewiß nicht aus eigener Neigung sich hin verbreitet hätten [12]; — eben so die Finnen in der nördlichsten Gegend von Europa, Lappen genannt, von den jetzt eben so weit entferneten, aber der Sprache nach mit ihnen verwandten Ungern, durch dazwischen eingedrungne Gothische und Sarmatische Völker getrennt; und was kann wohl anders die Eskimos (vielleicht uralte Europäische Abentheurer, ein von allen Amerikanern ganz unterschiedenes Geschlecht) in Norden, und die Pescheräs, im Süden von Amerika, bis zum Feuerlande hingetrieben haben, als der Krieg, dessen sich die Natur als Mittels bedient, die Erde allerwärts zu bevölkern. Der Krieg aber selbst bedarf keines besondern Bewegungsgrundes, sondern scheint auf die menschliche Natur gepfropft zu seyn, und sogar als etwas Edles, wozu der Mensch durch den Ehrtrieb, ohne eigennützige Triebfedern, beseelt wird, zu gelten: so, daß Kriegesmuth (von amerikanischen Wilden sowohl, als den europäischen, in den Ritterzeiten) nicht bloß wenn Krieg ist (wie billig), sondern auch, daß Krieg sey, von unmittelbarem großem Werth zu seyn geurtheilt wird, und er oft, bloß um jenen zu zeigen, angefangen, mithin in dem Kriege an sich selbst eine innere Würde gesetzt wird, sogar daß ihm auch wohl Philosophen, als einer gewissen Veredelung der Menschheit, eine Lobrede halten, uneingedenk des Ausspruchs jenes Griechen: „Der Krieg ist darin schlimm, daß er mehr böse Leute macht, als er deren wegnimmt.“ — So viel von dem, was die Natur für ihren eigenen Zweck, in Ansehung der Menschengattung als einer Thierklasse, thut.
Jetzt ist die Frage, die das Wesentliche der Absicht auf den ewigen Frieden betrifft: „Was die Natur in dieser Absicht, Beziehungsweise auf den Zweck, den dem Menschen seine eigene Vernunft zur Pflicht macht, mithin zu Begünstigung seiner moralischen Absicht thue, und wie sie die Gewähr leiste, daß dasjenige, was der Mensch nach Freyheitsgesetzen thun sollte, aber nicht thut, dieser Freyheit unbeschadet auch durch einen Zwang der Natur, daß er es thun werde, gesichert sey, und zwar nach allen drey Verhältnissen des öffentlichen Rechts, des Staats-, Völker- und weltbürgerlichen Rechts.“ — Wenn ich von der Natur sage: sie will, daß dieses oder jenes geschehe, so heißt das nicht soviel, als: sie legt uns eine Pflicht auf, es zu thun (denn das kann nur die zwangsfreye praktische Vernunft), sondern sie thut es selbst, wir mögen wollen oder nicht (fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt).
1 Wenn ein Volk auch nicht durch innere Mißhelligkeit genöthigt würde, sich unter den Zwang öffentlicher Gesetze zu begeben, so würde es doch der Krieg von außen thun, indem, nach der vorher erwähnten Naturanstalt, ein jedes Volk ein anderes es drängende Volk zum Nachbar vor sich findet, gegen das es sich innerlich zu einem Staat bilden muß, um, als Macht, gegen diesen gerüstet zu seyn. Nun ist die republikanische Verfassung die einzige, welche dem Recht der Menschen vollkommen angemessen, aber auch die schwerste zu stiften, vielmehr noch zu erhalten ist, dermaßen, daß viele behaupten, es müsse ein Staat von Engeln seyn, weil Menschen mit ihren selbstsüchtigen Neigungen einer Verfassung von so sublimer Form nicht fähig wären. Aber nun kommt die Natur dem verehrten, aber zur Praxis ohnmächtigen allgemeinen, in der Vernunft gegründeten Willen, und zwar gerade durch jene selbstsüchtige Neigungen, zu Hülfe, so, daß es nur auf eine gute Organisation des Staats ankommt (die allerdings im Vermögen der Menschen ist), jener ihre Kräfte so gegen einander zu richten, daß eine die anderen in ihrer zerstöhrenden Wirkung aufhält, oder diese aufhebt: so daß der Erfolg für die Vernunft so ausfällt, als wenn beyde gar nicht da wären, und so der Mensch, wenn gleich nicht ein moralisch-guter Mensch, dennoch ein guter Bürger zu seyn gezwungen wird. Das Problem der Staatserrichtung ist, so hart wie es auch klingt, selbst für ein Volk von Teufeln (wenn sie nur Verstand haben), auflösbar und lautet so: „Eine Menge von vernünftigen Wesen, die insgesammt allgemeine Gesetze für ihre Erhaltung verlangen, deren jedes aber in Geheim sich davon auszunehmen geneigt ist, so zu ordnen und ihre Verfassung einzurichten, daß, obgleich sie in ihren Privatgesinnungen einander entgegen streben, diese einander doch so aufhalten, daß in ihrem öffentlichen Verhalten der Erfolg eben derselbe ist, als ob sie keine solche böse Gesinnungen hätten.“ Ein solches Problem muß auflöslich seyn. Denn es ist nicht die moralische Besserung der Menschen, sondern nur der Mechanism der Natur, von dem die Aufgabe zu wissen verlangt, wie man ihn an Menschen benutzen könne, um den Widerstreit ihrer unfriedlichen Gesinnungen in einem Volk so zu richten, daß sie sich unter Zwangsgesetze zu begeben einander selbst nöthigen, und so den Friedenszustand, in welchem Gesetze Kraft haben, herbeyführen müssen. Man kann dieses auch an den wirklich vorhandenen, noch sehr unvollkommen organisirten Staaten sehen; daß sie sich doch im äußeren Verhalten dem, was die Rechtsidee vorschreibt, schon sehr nähern, ob gleich das Innere der Moralität davon sicherlich nicht die Ursache ist (wie denn auch nicht von dieser die gute Staatsverfassung, sondern vielmehr umgekehrt, von der letzteren allererst die gute moralische Bildung eines Volks zu erwarten ist), mithin der Mechanism der Natur durch selbstsüchtige Neigungen, die natürlicherweise einander auch äußerlich entgegen wirken, von der Vernunft zu einem Mittel gebraucht werden kann, dieser ihrem eigenen Zweck, der rechtlichen Vorschrift, Raum zu machen, und hiemit auch, soviel an dem Staat selbst liegt, den inneren sowohl als äußeren Frieden zu befördern und zu sichern. — Hier heißt es also: Die Natur will unwiderstehlich, daß das Recht zuletzt die Obergewalt erhalte. Was man nun hier verabsäumt zu thun, das macht sich zuletzt selbst, obzwar mit viel Ungemächlichkeit. — „Biegt man das Rohr zu stark, so bricht's; und wer zu viel will, der will nichts.“ Bouterwek.
2 Die Idee des Völkerrechts setzt die Absonderung vieler von einander unabhängiger benachbarter Staaten voraus, und, obgleich ein solcher Zustand an sich schon ein Zustand des Krieges ist (wenn nicht eine föderative Vereinigung derselben dem Ausbruch der Feindseligkeiten vorbeugt): so ist doch selbst dieser, nach der Vernunftidee, besser als die Zusammenschmelzung derselben, durch eine die andere überwachsende, und in eine Universalmonarchie übergehende Macht; weil die Gesetze mit dem vergrößten Umfange der Regierung immer mehr an ihrem Nachdruck einbüßen, und ein seelenloser Despotism, nachdem er die Keime des Guten ausgerottet hat, zuletzt doch in Anarchie verfällt. Indessen ist dieses das Verlangen jedes Staats (oder seines Oberhaupts), auf diese Art sich in den dauernden Friedenszustand zu versetzen, daß er, wo möglich, die ganze Welt beherrscht. Aber die Natur will es anders. — Sie bedient sich zweyer Mittel, um Völker von der Vermischung abzuhalten und sie abzusondern, der Verschiedenheit der Sprachen und der Religionen13, die zwar den Hang zum wechselseitigen Hasse, und Vorwand zum Kriege bey sich führt, aber doch bey anwachsender Cultur und der allmähligen Annäherung der Menschen, zu größerer Einstimmung in Principien, zum Einverständnisse in einem Frieden leitet, der nicht, wie jener Despotism (auf dem Kirchhofe der Freyheit), durch Schwächung aller Kräfte, sondern durch ihr Gleichgewicht, im lebhaftesten Wetteifer derselben, hervorgebracht und gesichert wird.
3 So wie die Natur weislich die Völker trennt, welche der Wille jedes Staats, und zwar selbst nach Gründen des Völkerrechts, gern unter sich durch List oder Gewalt vereinigen möchte; so vereinigt sie auch andererseits Völker, die der Begriff des Weltbürgerrechts gegen Gewaltthätigkeit und Krieg nicht würde gesichert haben, durch den wechselseitigen Eigennutz. Es ist der Handelsgeist, der mit dem Kriege nicht zusammen bestehen kann, und der früher oder später sich jedes Volks bemächtigt. Weil nämlich unter allen, der Staatsmacht untergeordneten, Mächten (Mitteln), die Geldmacht wohl die zuverläßigste seyn möchte, so sehen sich Staaten (freylich wohl nicht eben durch Triebfedern der Moralität) gedrungen, den edlen Frieden zu befördern, und, wo auch immer in der Welt Krieg auszubrechen droht, ihn durch Vermittelungen abzuwehren, gleich als ob sie deshalb im beständigen Bündnisse ständen; denn große Vereinigungen zum Kriege können, der Natur der Sache nach, sich nur höchst selten zutragen; und noch seltener glücken. — — Auf die Art garantirt die Natur, durch den Mechanism in den menschlichen Neigungen selbst, den ewigen Frieden; freylich mit einer Sicherheit, die nicht hinreichend ist, die Zukunft desselben (theoretisch) zu weissagen, aber doch in praktischer Absicht zulangt, und es zur Pflicht macht, zu diesem (nicht bloß schimärischen) Zwecke hinzuarbeiten.
10 Im Mechanism der Natur, wozu der Mensch (als Sinnenwesen) mit gehört, zeigt sich eine ihrer Existenz schon zum Grunde liegende Form, die wir uns nicht anders begreiflich machen können, als indem wir ihr den Zweck eines sie vorher bestimmenden Welturhebers unterlegen, dessen Vorherbestimmung wir die (göttliche) Vorsehung überhaupt, und, sofern sie in den Anfang der Welt gelegt wird, die gründende (prouidentia conditrix; semel iussit, semper parent, Augustin.), im Laufe der Natur aber diesen nach allgemeinen Gesetzen der Zweckmäßigkeit zu erhalten, die waltende Vorsehung (prouidentia gubernatrix), ferner zu besonderen, aber von dem Menschen nicht vorherzusehenden, sondern nur aus dem Erfolg vermutheten Zwecken, die leitende (prouidentia directrix), endlich sogar in Ansehung einzelner Begebenheiten, als göttlicher Zwecke, nicht mehr Vorsehung, sondern Fügung (directio extraordinaria) nennen, welche aber (da sie in der That auf Wunder hinweiset, obgleich die Begebenheiten nicht so genannt werden) als solche erkennen zu wollen, thörigte Vermessenheit des Menschen ist; weil aus einer einzelnen Begebenheit auf ein besonderes Princip der wirkenden Ursache (daß diese Begebenheit Zweck, und nicht bloß naturmechanische Nebenfolge aus einem anderen uns ganz unbekannten Zwecke sey) zu schließen ungereimt und voll Eigendünkel ist, so fromm und demüthig auch die Sprache hierüber lauten mag. — Eben so ist auch die Eintheilung der Vorsehung (materialiter betrachtet), wie sie auf Gegenstände in der Welt geht, in die allgemeine und besondere, falsch und sich selbst widersprechend (daß sie z. B. zwar eine Vorsorge zur Erhaltung der Gattungen der Geschöpfe sey, die Individuen aber dem Zufall überlasse); denn sie wird eben in der Absicht allgemein genannt, damit kein einziges Ding als davon ausgenommen gedacht werde. — Vermuthlich hat man hier die Eintheilung der Vorsehung (formaliter betrachtet) nach der Art der Ausführung ihrer Absicht gemeynt: nämlich in ordentliche (z. B. das jährliche Sterben und Wiederaufleben der Natur nach dem Wechsel der Jahreszeiten) und außerordentliche (z. B. die Zuführung des Holzes an die Eisküsten, das da nicht wachsen kann, durch die Meerströme, für die dortigen Einwohner, die ohne das nicht leben könnten), wo, ob wir gleich die physisch-mechanische Ursache dieser Erscheinungen uns gut erklären können (z. B. durch die mit Holz bewachsene Ufer der Flüsse der temperirten Länder, in welche jene Bäume hineinfallen, und etwa durch den Gulfstrom weiter verschleppt werden), wir dennoch auch die teleologische nicht übersehen müssen, die auf die Vorsorge einer über die Natur gebietenden Weisheit hinweiset. — Nur was den in den Schulen gebräuchlichen Begriff eines göttlichen Beytritts, oder Mitwirkung (concursus) zu einer Wirkung in der Sinnenwelt betrifft, so muß dieser wegfallen. Denn das Ungleichartige paaren wollen (gryphes jungere equis) und den, der selbst die vollständige Ursache der Weltveränderungen ist, seine eigene prädeterminirende Vorsehung während dem Weltlaufe ergänzen zu lassen (die also mangelhaft gewesen seyn müßte), z. B. zu sagen, daß nächst Gott der Arzt den Kranken zurecht gebracht habe, also als Beystand dabey gewesen sey, ist Erstlich an sich widersprechend. Denn causa solitaria non iuuat. Gott ist der Urheber des Arztes sammt allen seinen Heilmitteln, und so muß ihm, wenn man ja bis zum höchsten, uns theoretisch unbegreiflichen Urgrunde hinaufsteigen will, die Wirkung ganz zugeschrieben werden. Oder man kann sie auch ganz dem Arzt zuschreiben, sofern wir diese Begebenheit als nach der Ordnung der Natur erklärbar in der Kette der Weltursachen verfolgen. Zweytens bringt eine solche Denkungsart auch um alle bestimmte Principien der Beurtheilung eines Effekts. Aber in moralisch-praktischer Absicht (die also ganz aufs Uebersinnliche gerichtet ist), z. B. in dem Glauben, daß Gott den Mangel unserer eigenen Gerechtigkeit, wenn nur unsere Gesinnung ächt war, auch durch uns unbegreifliche Mittel ergänzen werde, wir also in der Bestrebung zum Guten nichts nachlassen sollen, ist der Begriff des göttlichen Concursus ganz schicklich und sogar nothwendig; wobey es sich aber von selbst versteht, daß niemand eine gute Handlung (als Begebenheit in der Welt) hieraus zu erklären versuchen muß, welches ein vorgebliches theoretisches Erkenntniß des Uebersinnlichen, mithin ungereimt ist.
11 Unter allen Lebensweisen ist das Jagdleben ohne Zweifel der gesitteten Verfassung am meisten zuwider; weil die Familien, die sich da vereinzelen müssen, einander bald fremd und sonach in weitläuftigen Wäldern zerstreut, auch bald feindselig werden, da eine jede zu Erwerbung ihrer Nahrung und Kleidung viel Raum bedarf. — Das Noachische Blutverbot, 1 M. IX, 4:6. (welches, öfters wiederholt, nachher gar den neuangenommenen Christen aus dem Heidenthum, ob zwar in anderer Rücksicht, von den Judenchristen zur Bedingung gemacht wurde, Apost. Gesch. XV, 20. XXI, 25 —) scheint uranfänglich nichts anders, als das Verbot des Jägerlebens gewesen zu seyn; weil in diesem der Fall, das Fleisch roh zu essen, oft eintreten muß, mit dem letzteren also das erstere zugleich verboten wird.
12 Man könnte fragen: Wenn die Natur gewollt hat, diese Eisküsten sollten nicht unbewohnt bleiben, was wird aus ihren Bewohnern, wenn sie ihnen dereinst (wie zu erwarten ist) kein Treibholz mehr zuführete? Denn es ist zu glauben, daß, bey fortrückender Cultur, die Einsassen der temperirten Erdstriche das Holz, was an den Ufern ihrer Ströme wächst, besser benutzen, es nicht in die Ströme fallen, und so in die See wegschwemmen lassen werden. Ich antworte: Die Anwohner des Obstroms, des Jenisey, des Lena u. s. w. werden es ihnen durch Handel zuführen, und dafür die Produkte aus dem Thierreich, woran das Meer an den Eisküsten so reich ist, einhandeln; wenn sie (die Natur) nur allererst den Frieden unter ihnen erzwungen haben wird.
13 Verschiedenheit der Religionen: ein wunderlicher Ausdruck! gerade, als ob man auch von verschiedenen Moralen spräche. Es kann wohl verschiedene Glaubensarten historischer, nicht in die Religion, sondern in die Geschichte der zu ihrer Beförderung gebrauchten, ins Feld der Gelehrsamkeit einschlagender Mittel und eben so verschiedene Religionsbücher (Zendavesta, Vedam; Koran u. s. w.) geben, aber nur eine einzige, für alle Menschen und in allen Zeiten gültige Religion. Jene also können wohl nichts anders als nur das Vehikel der Religion, was zufällig ist, und nach Verschiedenheit der Zeiten und Oerter verschieden seyn kann, enthalten.
Musean translation
Machine-assisted translation directly from Kant's complete German text of the expanded 1796 edition, including both supplements, both appendices and his notes. Source: Internet Archive, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek copy.
First supplement.
On the guarantee of perpetual peace.
What provides this assurance (guarantee) is nothing less than the great artist nature (natura daedala rerum), from whose mechanical course purposiveness visibly shines forth, and who lets concord arise by means of the discord of human beings, even against their will. For this reason nature, when we think of her as the compulsion of a cause whose laws of operation are unknown to us, is called fate; but when we consider her purposiveness in the course of the world as the deep-lying wisdom of a higher cause, directed to the objective final end of the human race and predetermining this course of the world, she is called providence10. Strictly speaking, we cannot recognize this providence in the artful arrangements of nature, or even infer it from them; rather (as in every relation of the form of things to ends generally) we can and must only add it in thought, in order to form a concept of its possibility on the analogy of human works of art. But to represent its relation and accord to the end that reason prescribes to us directly (the moral end) is an idea that, though transcendent for theoretical purposes, is dogmatic and well grounded as to its reality for practical ones (for example, with regard to the concept of duty concerning perpetual peace, in order to turn that mechanism of nature to its use). The use of the word nature is also, when the concern is merely theory (not religion), as it is here, more fitting to the limits of human reason (which, in regard to the relation of effects to their causes, must keep within the bounds of possible experience), and more modest than the expression of a providence knowable to us, with which one presumptuously fits on Icarian wings in order to come closer to the mystery of its unfathomable purpose.
Before we define this guarantee more closely, it will be necessary first to inquire into the condition that nature has arranged for the persons acting on her great stage, a condition that in the end makes her securing of peace necessary—and only then the manner in which she provides it.
Her provisional arrangement consists in this: that she 1) has seen to it that human beings can live in every region of the earth; 2) has driven them by war everywhere, even into the most inhospitable regions, in order to populate them; 3) by that same means has compelled them to enter into more or less lawful relations. That moss still grows in the cold wastes by the Arctic Ocean, which the reindeer scrapes out from under the snow in order itself to be the food, or even the draft team, of the Ostyak or Samoyed; or that the salty sandy deserts still contain the camel, which seems as if created for traveling across them, so that they not be left unused, is already admirable. But the purpose shines forth still more clearly when one notices how, besides the fur-bearing animals on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, seals, walruses, and whales also supply the local inhabitants with food in their flesh and with fuel in their blubber oil. Most of all, though, nature's foresight arouses admiration through the driftwood that she brings to these regions bare of vegetation (without anyone quite knowing where it comes from), a material without which the inhabitants could prepare neither their boats and weapons nor their huts for shelter; and there they have enough to do with the war against the animals to live peacefully among themselves. But what drove them there was presumably nothing other than war. The first instrument of war among all the animals that human beings, in the course of the earth's being populated, had learned to tame and domesticate is the horse (for the elephant belongs to a later time, namely that of the luxury of already established states), just as the art of cultivating certain kinds of grass, called grain, which in their original nature we can no longer recognize, and likewise the multiplication and refinement of the varieties of fruit by transplanting and grafting (perhaps in Europe only two species, crab apples and wild pears), could arise only in the condition of already established states, where secure ownership of land existed—after human beings, in lawless freedom, had first made their way from the hunting11, fishing, and herding life to the farming life, and now salt and iron were discovered and perhaps became the first articles, sought far and wide, of trade among different peoples, by which they were first brought into a peaceful relation with one another, and so, even with more distant peoples, into understanding, community, and peaceful relations with one another.
In providing that human beings could live everywhere on earth, nature at the same time despotically willed that they should live everywhere, even against their inclination, and even without this “should” presupposing a concept of duty that would bind them to it by means of a moral law; instead, to attain this end of hers, she chose war. For we see peoples who make the unity of their descent recognizable through the unity of their language, such as the Samoyeds on the Arctic Ocean on one side, and on the other a people of similar language two hundred miles away in the Altaic Mountains, between whom another people, a Mongol one, mounted and therefore warlike, has pressed in and so scattered that part of their stock, far from the other, into the most inhospitable icy regions, where they would certainly not have spread of their own inclination12; so too the Finns in the northernmost region of Europe, called Lapps, are separated from the Hungarians, now just as far away but related to them in language, by Gothic and Sarmatian peoples who pushed in between; and what else could have driven the Eskimos (perhaps ancient European adventurers, a race entirely distinct from all the Americans) in the north, and the Pescheräs in the south of America, as far as Tierra del Fuego, if not war, which nature employs as a means to populate the earth everywhere? War itself, however, needs no particular motive but seems to be grafted onto human nature, and even to pass as something noble, to which human beings are inspired by the drive for honor, without self-interested incentives: so that martial courage (among the native peoples of America as well as among Europeans in the age of chivalry) is judged to be of great and immediate worth not merely when there is war (as is fitting) but also that there be war, and war is often begun merely to display that courage; consequently an inner dignity is attributed to war in itself, to the point that even philosophers, as though it were a certain ennobling of humanity, deliver a eulogy upon it, unmindful of the saying of that Greek: “War is bad in that it makes more wicked people than it removes.” So much for what nature does for her own end with regard to the human species as a class of animals.
Now comes the question that concerns the essential point of the aim of perpetual peace: “What does nature do toward this aim, in relation to the end that human beings' own reason makes their duty, and thus to favor their moral aim; and how does she provide the guarantee that what human beings ought to do according to laws of freedom, but do not do, is also secured, without prejudice to this freedom, by a compulsion of nature, so that they will do it—and this in all three relations of public right: civil right, the right of nations, and cosmopolitan right?” When I say of nature that she wills this or that to happen, this does not mean that she lays upon us a duty to do it (for only practical reason, free of coercion, can do that), but that she does it herself, whether we want to or not (fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt).
1 When a people is not compelled by internal dissension to submit to the constraint of public laws, war from without would still do so, since, by the natural arrangement mentioned earlier, each people finds another people pressing upon it as a neighbor, against which it must form itself internally into a state in order to be armed, as a power, against that neighbor. Now the republican constitution is the only one fully suited to the right of human beings, but it is also the hardest to establish, and harder still to maintain, so much so that many assert it would have to be a state of angels, because human beings with their selfish inclinations would be incapable of a constitution of so sublime a form. But now nature comes to the aid of the revered general will, grounded in reason but powerless in practice, and does so precisely by means of those selfish inclinations, so that all that matters is a good organization of the state (which is certainly within the power of human beings) to direct the forces of those inclinations against one another in such a way that one checks the others in their destructive effect, or cancels it; so that, as far as reason is concerned, the result is as if neither were there at all, and thus a human being, though not a morally good human being, is nevertheless compelled to be a good citizen. The problem of establishing a state, hard as it sounds, can be solved even for a nation of devils (provided they have understanding), and runs thus: “To order a multitude of rational beings who all demand universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt themselves from them, and so to arrange their constitution that, although in their private dispositions they strive against one another, these check one another in such a way that in their public conduct the result is exactly the same as if they had no such evil dispositions.” Such a problem must be solvable. For it is not the moral improvement of human beings, but only the mechanism of nature, that the task requires us to know how to use on human beings in order to direct the conflict of their unpeaceable dispositions within a people in such a way that they themselves compel one another to submit to coercive laws, and so must bring about the condition of peace in which laws have force. One can also see this in the states that actually exist, still very imperfectly organized as they are: that in their external conduct they already come very close to what the idea of right prescribes, although the inner side of morality is certainly not the cause of this (just as it is not from morality that a good constitution is to be expected but, conversely, from the good constitution that the good moral formation of a people is first to be expected), and that consequently the mechanism of nature, operating through selfish inclinations that naturally also work against one another outwardly, can be used by reason as a means of making room for reason's own end, the precept of right, and thereby also, so far as it lies with the state itself, of promoting and securing peace both internal and external. Here, then, the rule is: nature irresistibly wills that right should in the end gain the upper hand. What one neglects to do here comes about by itself in the end, though with much inconvenience. “Bend the reed too hard and it breaks; and whoever wants too much wants nothing.” Bouterwek.
2 The idea of the right of nations presupposes the separation of many neighboring states independent of one another; and although such a condition is in itself already a condition of war (unless a federative union among them prevents the outbreak of hostilities), even this, according to the idea of reason, is better than their fusion under a power that overgrows the rest and passes over into a universal monarchy; because laws lose more and more of their force as the scope of government grows, and a soulless despotism, after it has uprooted the seeds of the good, finally lapses into anarchy all the same. Yet it is the desire of every state (or of its head) to establish itself in a lasting condition of peace in this way: by ruling, if possible, the whole world. But nature wills it otherwise. She makes use of two means to keep peoples from mixing and to separate them: the difference of languages and of religions13, which does bring with it a propensity to mutual hatred and a pretext for war, but which, with growing culture and the gradual approach of human beings to greater agreement in principles, leads to an accord in a peace that is brought about and secured not, like that despotism (in the graveyard of freedom), by the weakening of all forces, but by their equilibrium, in their liveliest competition.
3 Just as nature wisely separates the peoples that the will of every state, even on grounds of the right of nations, would gladly unite under itself by cunning or force, so on the other hand she unites, through reciprocal self-interest, peoples whom the concept of cosmopolitan right would not have secured against violence and war. It is the spirit of commerce, which cannot coexist with war and which sooner or later takes hold of every people. For since, among all the powers (means) subordinate to the power of the state, the power of money may well be the most reliable, states find themselves impelled (to be sure, not exactly by incentives of morality) to promote noble peace and, wherever in the world war threatens to break out, to avert it by mediation, as if they stood in a permanent alliance for that purpose; for great leagues for war can, by the nature of the case, occur only very rarely, and succeed more rarely still. In this way nature guarantees perpetual peace through the mechanism in human inclinations themselves; to be sure with a certainty that is not sufficient to prophesy its future (theoretically), but that is nonetheless adequate in a practical respect and makes it a duty to work toward this (not merely chimerical) end.
10 In the mechanism of nature, to which the human being (as a sensible being) also belongs, there shows itself a form already underlying its existence, which we can make comprehensible to ourselves only by attributing to it the purpose of an author of the world who determines it beforehand. We call this author's predetermination (divine) providence in general; insofar as it is laid into the beginning of the world, founding providence (prouidentia conditrix; semel iussit, semper parent, Augustin.); insofar as it serves, in the course of nature, to maintain that course according to universal laws of purposiveness, governing providence (prouidentia gubernatrix); further, insofar as it aims at particular ends that human beings cannot foresee but can only surmise from the outcome, guiding providence (prouidentia directrix); and finally, with regard to individual events considered as divine ends, no longer providence but dispensation (directio extraordinaria). To want to recognize this as such (since it in fact points to miracles, although the events are not so named) is foolish presumption on the part of human beings; for to infer from a single event a particular principle of the operative cause (that this event is an end, and not merely a natural-mechanical by-product of some other end wholly unknown to us) is absurd and full of self-conceit, however pious and humble the language about it may sound. Likewise the division of providence (considered materialiter), as it extends to objects in the world, into general and particular providence, is false and self-contradictory (namely that it is, for example, a provision for the preservation of the species of creatures but leaves the individuals to chance); for it is called general precisely so that no single thing may be thought of as exempt from it. Presumably what was meant here is the division of providence (considered formaliter) according to the manner in which its purpose is carried out: namely into ordinary providence (for example, the yearly dying and reviving of nature with the change of the seasons) and extraordinary providence (for example, the conveyance of wood by ocean currents to the icy coasts, where it cannot grow, for the inhabitants there, who could not live without it), where, although we can explain the physical-mechanical cause of these phenomena well (for example, by the wooded banks of the rivers of temperate lands, into which those trees fall and are carried farther along, perhaps by the Gulf Stream), we must nevertheless not overlook the teleological cause as well, which points to the foresight of a wisdom that governs nature. As for the concept, customary in the schools, of a divine participation, or cooperation (concursus), in an effect in the sensible world, it must be dropped. For to want to pair things unlike in kind (gryphes jungere equis), and to let the complete cause of the changes in the world supplement its own predetermining providence during the course of the world (which would then have had to be deficient)—to say, for example, that next to God the physician has restored the patient to health, and so was present as an assistant in the matter—is, first, contradictory in itself. For causa solitaria non iuuat. God is the author of the physician together with all the physician's remedies, and so, if one really wants to ascend to the highest ground, theoretically incomprehensible to us, the effect must be ascribed wholly to God. Or one can also ascribe it wholly to the physician, insofar as we trace this event, as explicable according to the order of nature, in the chain of the world's causes. Second, such a way of thinking also deprives us of all definite principles for judging an effect. But in a morally practical respect (which is therefore wholly directed to the supersensible), for example in the belief that God will make up for the deficiency of our own righteousness, provided only that our disposition was genuine, even by means incomprehensible to us, so that we should therefore relax nothing in our striving for the good, the concept of a divine Concursus is entirely fitting and even necessary; but it goes without saying that no one is to try to explain a good action (as an event in the world) by it, which would be a supposed theoretical cognition of the supersensible, and hence absurd.
11 Of all ways of life, the hunting life is without doubt the most opposed to a civilized constitution; for the families, which must isolate themselves there, soon become strangers to one another and, thus scattered in vast forests, soon hostile as well, since each needs a great deal of space to obtain its food and clothing. The Noachian prohibition of blood, Genesis IX, 4:6. (which, repeatedly renewed, was afterward even made a condition by the Jewish Christians for the newly converted Christians from paganism, though in another respect, Acts XV, 20; XXI, 25—) seems originally to have been nothing other than the prohibition of the hunter's life; because in that life the case of eating meat raw must often occur, so that with the latter the former is forbidden at the same time.
12 One might ask: If nature has willed that these icy coasts should not remain uninhabited, what will become of their inhabitants if she someday (as is to be expected) no longer brings them driftwood? For it is to be believed that, with advancing culture, the settlers of the temperate zones will make better use of the wood that grows on the banks of their rivers, and will not let it fall into the rivers and so be washed away into the sea. I answer: The dwellers along the Ob, the Yenisei, the Lena, and so on will bring it to them by trade, and in exchange will obtain the products of the animal kingdom with which the sea along the icy coasts is so rich; provided only that she (nature) shall first have enforced peace among them.
13 Difference of religions: a curious expression! Just as if one were to speak of different moralities too. There may well be different kinds of faith, historical ones, which belong not to religion but to the history of the means employed to promote it, means falling within the field of scholarship, and likewise different religious books (Zendavesta, Vedam; Koran, and so on), but only a single religion, valid for all human beings and at all times. The former, then, can contain nothing but the mere vehicle of religion, which is contingent and can vary according to differences of times and places.
Plain English translation
Independent machine-assisted translation directly from the complete German 1796 edition, including its supplements, appendices and author's notes.
First supplement.On the guarantee of perpetual peace.
What provides this guarantee is nothing less than the great artist nature (natura daedala rerum). Purposefulness clearly shines out of nature's mechanical course, and nature makes concord rise out of human discord even against their will. For that reason we call it fate, as though it were the compulsion of a cause whose laws of operation we do not know. But when we consider its purposefulness in the course of the world, we call it providence10: the deep-lying wisdom of a higher cause that aims at the objective final end of the human race and predetermines this world course. Strictly, we do not know providence from these artistic arrangements of nature, nor can we even infer it from them. We can only (as with every reference of the form of things to ends in general) think it in addition, and must do so in order to form a concept of its possibility by analogy with human works of art. To imagine its relation and agreement with the end that reason directly prescribes for us, namely the moral end, is an idea that is extravagant for theoretical purposes, but dogmatic, and well grounded in its reality, for practical ones (for instance in regard to the concept of the duty of perpetual peace, in order to use that mechanism of nature for it).—When the word nature is used, as it is here, merely for theory (not for religion), it also suits the limits of human reason better (reason must keep within the bounds of possible experience as regards the relation of effects to their causes) and is more modest than the expression of a providence that we could know, with which one presumptuously fits oneself with Icarus wings in order to come closer to the secret of its unfathomable intention.
Before we define this guarantee more closely, we must first look for the condition that nature has arranged for the actors on its great stage, the condition that in the end makes their securing of peace necessary; and only then say how nature provides it.
Its provisional arrangement consists in this: 1) nature has seen to it that people can live in every region of the earth; 2) it has driven them everywhere by war, even into the most inhospitable regions, so as to populate them; 3) by the same war it has forced them into more or less lawful relations.—It is already wonderful that moss still grows in the cold deserts by the Arctic Ocean, which the reindeer scrapes out from under the snow, so as to be food, and also the draught animal, for the Ostyak or the Samoyed; or that the salty sand deserts still hold the camel, which seems almost created for traveling them, so that they are not left unused. But the end shines out still more clearly when one notices that, besides the furred animals on the shore of the Arctic Ocean, seals, walruses and whales provide food with their flesh and fuel with their blubber for the people who live there. Most of all, nature's care through driftwood awakens admiration: it brings wood to these treeless regions (no one quite knows from where), without which material those people could make neither boats and weapons nor huts to live in; and then they have enough to do with war against the animals, so as to live at peace among themselves.—— But what drove them there was presumably nothing other than war. The first instrument of war among all the animals that humans learned to tame and domesticate within the time of the earth's peopling was the horse (the elephant belongs to a later time, that of the luxury of states already established), just as the art of cultivating certain grasses, now no longer recognizable to us in their original character, called grain, and likewise the multiplication and refinement of fruit kinds by transplanting and grafting (perhaps in Europe only two kinds, crab apples and wild pears), could arise only in the condition of already established states, where secure landed property existed. Before that, people in lawless freedom had pushed through from the hunting11, fishing and herding life to the farming life; then salt and iron were invented, and perhaps these became the first articles, sought far and wide, of a trade between different peoples, through which those peoples first came into a peaceful relation with one another, and so, even with more distant peoples, into understanding, community and peaceful relation among themselves.
In seeing to it that people could live in every region of the earth, nature has also despotically willed that they should live everywhere, even against their inclination, and without this “should” presupposing a concept of duty that would bind them to it by means of a moral law. To reach this end of its own, nature chose war.—We see peoples who make the unity of their descent recognizable by the unity of their language: the Samoyeds on the Arctic Ocean on one side, and a people of similar language two hundred miles away in the Altai mountains on the other, with another people, the Mongol, mounted and therefore warlike, pressing in between them and scattering that part of the stock far from the rest into the most inhospitable ice regions, where they would certainly not have spread out of their own inclination12. So too the Finns in the northernmost region of Europe, called Lapps, separated from the Hungarians, now equally far away but related to them in language, by Gothic and Sarmatian peoples who pushed in between. And what else could have driven the Eskimos (perhaps ancient European adventurers, a stock wholly different from all other Americans) into the north, and the Pescheräs into the south of America as far as Tierra del Fuego, but war, which nature uses as its means to populate the earth everywhere? War itself needs no special motive; it seems grafted onto human nature, and even to count as something noble, for which a person is animated by the desire for honor without self-interested drives. Thus warlike courage (of American savages as much as of Europeans in the age of chivalry) is judged to be of immediate great worth not only when there is war (as is fair), but also so that there be war; and war is often begun merely to show that courage, so that an inner dignity is placed in war itself, to the point that even philosophers sometimes deliver a eulogy on it as a certain ennoblement of humanity, unmindful of that Greek's saying: “War is bad in this, that it makes more bad people than it takes away.”—So much for what nature does for its own end with regard to the human species as a class of animals.
Now comes the question that concerns the essential part of the aim of perpetual peace: “What does nature do for this aim, with reference to the end that man's own reason makes a duty for him, and therefore in favor of his moral aim, and how does it give the guarantee that what man ought to do by laws of freedom, but does not do, is secured by a compulsion of nature that he will do it, without prejudice to that freedom, and indeed in all three relations of public right, of state, international and cosmopolitan right?”—When I say of nature that it wills that this or that should happen, that does not mean that it lays a duty on us to do it (only free practical reason can do that), but that nature does it itself, whether we will or not (fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt).
1 Even if a people were not forced by internal discord to submit to the compulsion of public laws, war from outside would do it. For, by the arrangement of nature mentioned above, every people finds another people pressing upon it as a neighbor, and against that neighbor it must form itself inwardly into a state in order to be armed against it as a power. Now the republican constitution is the only one that is perfectly suited to the right of human beings, but it is also the hardest to establish, and still harder to preserve, so much so that many maintain that a state would have to consist of angels, because human beings with their selfish inclinations are not capable of a constitution of such sublime form. But then nature comes to the aid of the general will, which is revered but powerless in practice and grounded in reason, and it does so precisely through those selfish inclinations. So everything depends on a good organization of the state (which is indeed within human capacity), which directs those forces against one another in such a way that one holds the others back in their destructive effect, or cancels it out. The outcome for reason is then as if neither were there at all, and so the human being is forced to be a good citizen, even if not a morally good human being. The problem of establishing a state, hard as it sounds, is solvable even for a people of devils (if only they have understanding), and it runs like this: “A multitude of rational beings who all together require general laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, is to be ordered and its constitution set up in such a way that, although they strive against one another in their private dispositions, these dispositions hold one another back so that in their public conduct the outcome is exactly the same as if they had no such evil dispositions.” Such a problem must be solvable. For what the task asks us to know is not the moral improvement of human beings but only the mechanism of nature, and how one can use it on human beings so as to direct the conflict of their unpeaceful dispositions within a people in such a way that they force one another to submit to coercive laws, and so must bring about the condition of peace in which laws have force. One can see this even in the states that actually exist, still very imperfectly organized: in their external conduct they already come very close to what the idea of right prescribes, although the inner side of morality is certainly not the cause of it (and indeed a good moral formation of a people is rather to be expected from a good state constitution than the reverse). Thus the mechanism of nature, through selfish inclinations that naturally also work against one another externally, can be used by reason as a means to make room for its own end, the prescription of right, and so, as far as the state itself is concerned, to promote and secure inner as well as outer peace.—So here it is said: nature wills irresistibly that right should in the end gain the upper hand. What is neglected here is at last done by itself, though with much discomfort.—“Bend the reed too hard and it breaks; and whoever wills too much wills nothing.” Bouterwek.
2 The idea of the right of nations presupposes the separation of many neighboring states independent of one another; and although such a condition is in itself already a condition of war (unless a federal union of them prevents the outbreak of hostilities), still, by the idea of reason, even this condition is better than the merging of those states through a power that overgrows one of them and passes over into a universal monarchy. For as the extent of a government grows, its laws lose more and more of their emphasis, and a soulless despotism, after it has eradicated the seeds of good, at last falls into anarchy. Meanwhile it is the desire of every state (or of its head) to put itself into the lasting condition of peace in this way, by ruling the whole world if possible. But nature wills it otherwise.—Nature uses two means to keep peoples from mixing and to separate them: the difference of languages and of religions13. That difference does carry with it a tendency to mutual hatred and a pretext for war, but with growing culture and the gradual approach of human beings it leads to greater agreement in principles, and so to understanding in a peace that is brought about and secured not, as in that despotism (in the churchyard of freedom), by the weakening of all forces, but by their equilibrium, in the liveliest competition of those forces.
3 Just as nature wisely separates the peoples that the will of each state, even on grounds of the right of nations, would gladly unite under itself by cunning or force, so on the other side it unites peoples that the concept of cosmopolitan right would not have secured against violence and war, by their mutual self-interest. It is the spirit of commerce, which cannot coexist with war and which sooner or later takes hold of every people. For since among all the powers (means) subordinate to state power the power of money is likely to be the most reliable, states find themselves compelled (though certainly not by drives of morality) to promote the noble peace, and wherever in the world war threatens to break out, to ward it off by mediations, as if they stood in constant alliance for that purpose. For great unions for war can, by the nature of the thing, occur only very seldom, and still more seldom succeed.—— In this way nature guarantees perpetual peace through the mechanism of human inclinations themselves, though with a certainty that is not sufficient to prophesy its future (theoretically), but does suffice for practical purposes and makes it a duty to work toward this (not merely chimerical) end.
10 In the mechanism of nature, to which the human being (as a sensible being) also belongs, there shows itself a form that already lies at the ground of its existence, and that we can make intelligible to ourselves only by placing under it the end of a world-author who determines it beforehand. We call that author's fore-determination providence (the divine providence) in general; and insofar as it is placed in the beginning of the world, we call it the founding providence (prouidentia conditrix; semel iussit, semper parent, Augustine); insofar as it maintains nature in its course according to general laws of purposefulness, the governing providence (prouidentia gubernatrix); insofar as it serves particular ends that the human being cannot foresee but only surmises from the outcome, the guiding providence (prouidentia directrix); and finally, in regard to single events as divine ends, we no longer call it providence but dispensation (directio extraordinaria). To want to recognize dispensation as such (since it really points to miracles, though the events are not called that) is foolish presumption in the human being. For to infer from a single event to a particular principle of the efficient cause (namely that this event is an end, and not merely a natural-mechanical side effect from another end wholly unknown to us) is absurd and full of self-conceit, however pious and humble the language about it may sound.—Likewise the division of providence (materialiter considered), as it goes to objects in the world, into general and particular, is false and contradicts itself (as if providence were indeed a care for the preservation of the kinds of creatures, but left the individuals to chance). For it is called general precisely with the intention that no single thing should be thought of as excepted from it.—What was presumably meant here is the division of providence (formaliter considered) according to the manner in which it carries out its end: namely into ordinary (for instance the yearly dying and reviving of nature with the change of seasons) and extraordinary (for instance the bringing of wood to the ice coasts, where it cannot grow, by the ocean currents, for the inhabitants there, who could not live without it). There, although we can explain the physical-mechanical cause of these appearances well enough (for instance through the wooded banks of rivers in temperate lands, into which those trees fall, and which are then carried further by the Gulf Stream, perhaps), we must still not overlook the teleological cause as well, which points to the care of a wisdom ruling over nature.—Only as regards the concept of a divine assistance or cooperation (concursus) in an effect in the sensible world, which is customary in the schools, that concept must be dropped. For to want to pair things of unlike kind (gryphes jungere equis), and to let him who is himself the complete cause of the changes in the world supplement his own predetermining providence during the course of the world (which would therefore have had to be defective)—for instance to say that next to God the doctor set the sick person right, and so was present as an assistant—is first, in itself contradictory. For causa solitaria non iuvat. God is the author of the doctor together with all his remedies, and so, if one wants to climb to the highest original ground, which is theoretically incomprehensible to us, the effect must be ascribed wholly to God. Or one can ascribe it wholly to the doctor, insofar as we follow this event as explicable according to the order of nature in the chain of world causes. Second, such a way of thinking also deprives us of all determinate principles for judging an effect. But for moral-practical purposes (which are therefore directed entirely at the supersensible)—for instance in the faith that God will also supplement the lack of our own righteousness, if only our disposition was genuine, by means we cannot comprehend, so that we should not slacken in our striving for the good—the concept of a divine concursus is quite fitting and even necessary. Here it goes without saying that no one must try to explain a good action (as an event in the world) from it, which would be a pretended theoretical cognition of the supersensible, and therefore absurd.
11 Of all ways of life the hunting life is without doubt the most contrary to a civilized constitution, because the families that must isolate themselves there soon become strange to one another and so, scattered in wide forests, soon hostile, since each of them needs much space to obtain its food and clothing.—The Noachic prohibition of blood, Genesis IX, 4–6 (which, often repeated, was later even made a condition for newly received Christians coming from heathenism, though in another respect, by the Jewish Christians, Acts XV, 20; XXI, 25) seems originally to have been nothing other than the prohibition of the hunter's life, because in that life the case of eating flesh raw must often occur, so that with the latter the former is forbidden at the same time.
12 One could ask: if nature willed that these ice coasts should not remain uninhabited, what will become of their inhabitants when nature one day (as is to be expected) brings them no more driftwood? For it is to be believed that, with advancing culture, the inhabitants of the temperate zones will use the wood that grows on the banks of their rivers better, and will not let it fall into the rivers and be washed out to sea. I answer: the people on the Ob, the Yenisei, the Lena and so on will bring it to them by trade, and take in exchange the products of the animal kingdom, of which the sea on the ice coasts is so rich—once nature has first forced peace among them.
13 Difference of religions: a strange expression! as if one also spoke of different morals. There can well be different kinds of faith, historical, belonging not to religion itself but to the history of the means used to promote it, and falling in the field of scholarship, and likewise different books of religion (Zendavesta, Vedam, Koran and so on); but there is only one single religion, valid for all human beings and in all times. Those differences can therefore contain nothing other than the vehicle of religion, which is contingent and can be different according to differences of times and places.
About this section
First supplement is part of Toward Perpetual Peace by Immanuel Kant. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is part 7 of 10 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
Open the work page for the full contents, every edition, and the download links, or go back to Explore to browse other complete works in the European tradition. The reader keeps your place when you are signed in and lets you compare the original with each translation, one edition at a time.