other sciences," in the words of Helvetius, "and founded on experiment, as well as natural philosophy." In making universality the essential condition of ethical imperatives, Kant nevertheless detached morality from its ordinary social context in the same way that Descartes hoped to detach communication from common speech. Moral obligation no longer referred to the duties prescribed by a particular office or social role but to the categorical imperative to follow no rule that could not be recommended as a general rule for everyone.

Conceived in part as a reply to Hume's moral and epistemological skepticism, Kant's elaborately reasoned moral philosophy remained oddly silent about the nature of the good life or the ends proper to man. Kant did not challenge Hume's judgment that these "abstruse questions," as Hume put it, were inappropriate objects of philosophical inquiry. "What is the end of man? Is he created for happiness? Or for virtue? For this life or the next? For himself or his maker?" According to Hume, these issues remained "inaccessible to understanding"; and Kant, for all his laborious effort to ground morality in first principles, had no more to say about them than Hume. Like other enlightened philosophers, he was evidently willing to leave them to individual judgment, on the assumption that the individual was the best judge of his own interests or at least that any attempt to give a particular vision of the good life some kind of social sanction would only give rise to bitterly divisive controversies the world could well do without. Ontology's principal contribution to public life, after all, had been to transform every petty squabble into a holy war against heresy. Politics had been "shamefully depraved" by "supernatural ideas," Holbach explained. Since it was in the very nature of disputes concerning ultimate ends that they could never be settled to anyone's satisfaction, they would always divide mankind into hostile communities, each with its own dogma, its own dialect, and its ingrained suspicion of outsiders.

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