MIND AND SOUL as a postulate of practical reason In the present life happiness is clearly not proportioned to virtue; so if we are to be motivated to behave well, we must believe that the balance will be redressed in another life elsewhere The refutation of rational psychology, Kant claims, is a help, not a hindrance, to faith in an afterlife ‘For the merely speculative proof has never been able to exercise any inXuence upon the common reason of men It so stands upon the point of a hair, that even the schools preserve it from falling only so long as they keep it unceasingly spinning round like a top’ (B, 424) The positive element in Kant’s philosophy of mind that has had the longest-lasting inXuence is his treatment of freedom and determinism His contribution to this topic is placed not in the section of the Wrst critique devoted to rational and empirical psychology, but among the antinomies that purport to show the incoherence of attempts to survey the cosmos as a whole The third antinomy relates the idea of the world as a single determinist system to the belief in the possibility of free uncaused action The topic of this antinomy was later eloquently laid out by Tolstoy at the end of War and Peace: The problem of freewill from earliest times has occupied the best intellects of mankind and has from earliest times appeared in all its colossal signiWcance The problem lies in the fact that if we regard man as a subject for observation from whatever point of view—theological, historical, ethical or philosophic—we Wnd the universal law of necessity to which he (like everything else that exists) is subject But looking upon man from within ourselves—man as the object of our own inner consciousness—we feel ourselves to be free The laws of necessity taught us by reason, Tolstoy thought, forced us to renounce an illusory freedom and recognize our unconscious dependence on universal law Kant, on the other hand, thought that determinism and freedom could be reconciled In the third antinomy, unlike the Wrst two antinomies, both thesis and antithesis, if properly interpreted, are true The thesis is that natural causality is not suYcient to explain the phenomena of the world; in addition to determining causes we must take account of freedom and spontaneity The antithesis argues that to postulate transcendental freedom is to resign oneself to blind lawlessness As Tolstoy was to put it, ‘If one man only out of millions once in a thousand years had the power of acting freely, i.e as he chose, it is obvious that one single free act of that man in 243