" Now this is
precisely the formula of the categorical imperative and is the
principle of morality, so that a free will and a will subject to moral
laws are one and the same.
On the hypothesis, then, of freedom of the will, morality together
with its principle follows from it by mere analysis of the conception.
However, the latter is a synthetic proposition; viz., an absolutely
good will is that whose maxim can always include itself regarded as
a universal law; for this property of its maxim can never be
discovered by analysing the conception of an absolutely good will. Now
such synthetic propositions are only possible in this way: that the
two cognitions are connected together by their union with a third in
which they are both to be found. The positive concept of freedom
furnishes this third cognition, which cannot, as with physical causes,
be the nature of the sensible world (in the concept of which we find
conjoined the concept of something in relation as cause to something
else as effect). We cannot now at once show what this third is to
which freedom points us and of which we have an idea a priori, nor can
we make intelligible how the concept of freedom is shown to be
legitimate from principles of pure practical reason and with it the
possibility of a categorical imperative; but some further
preparation is required.
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