ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the significance of regarding legality as an idea of reason with practical reality. The concept of right is the most abstract binding of the practical and external; it is the prism that diffuses the requirements of practical reason into the external relationships of law. The chapter focuses on this process of diffusion by exhibiting the intricate conceptual progression by which law arises inexorably from the structure of willing. Legality, when conceived in Kantian terms as an idea of reason, is the articulated unity applicable to the external relationships of freely willing beings. Both law and ethics are for Immanuel Kant branches of moral philosophy; both are modes of understanding how the volition can live up to the demands of practical reason. The relationship between the universal and the particular precludes Kant from regarding the most fundamental abstractions as predetermining the disposition of every possible case.
