“The religious inspiration of his ethic is to be found in Moses”

In his Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason Immanuel Kant had counted himself among the "rigorists"—"a name that is meant to be opprobrious but actually is laudatory". To understand Kant's mentality as well as several crucial passages in his works we must realize that the religious inspiration of his ethic is to be found in Moses. In Kant's moral philosophy the idea of duty is presented with harshness that all the graces are frightened away and a poor intellect might easily be tempted to seek moral perfection on the way of gloomy and monastic asceticism. Kant had indeed based his postulate of immortality, in his Critique of Practical Reason on the claim that practical reason demands that the achievement of holiness should be possible. The argument clearly implies the separate existence of many different moral personalities beyond the phenomenal world-one for each person encountered in the phenomenal world.