self to be held back any longer by what is empirical, and which, inasmuch as it must survey the whole extent of rational knowledge of this kind, goes right up to ideas, where examples themselves fail us). In order to make such an advance, we must follow and clearly present the practical faculty of reason from its universal rules of determination to the point where the concept of duty springs from it.
Consider the history of moral debate--at the empirically misleading popular level, by Kant's description--over the Copernican, Darwinian, Newtonian, Einsteinian theories of the universe. To be sure, the scientists brought to their experience of the universe a practical skill set, but they projected beyond what was practical by way of reason and later by experimentation as well. This is not to say that physical science any more than metaphysics will present clear statements of the moral imperative owing to the potential for testing theory. Indeed, the fact that these people followed their reason where it led them issued in a host of metaphysical c
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