Konigsberg, June 19, 1789 [notes of conversation with Immanuel Kant]
"...I [Kant] take comfort in the fact that I am already sixty and that soon I shall reach the end of my life, for I hope to begin another, a better one.
"When I consider the joys I have known, I now feel no pleasure, but when I remember those occasions when I acted in conformity with the moral law inscribed in my heart, I am gladdened. I speak of the moral law. We might call it conscience, a sense of good and evil -- but it exists. I lied. No one knows of my lie, yet I feel ashamed. When we speak of the future life, probability is not certainty; but when we have weighed everything, reason bids us believe in it. And suppose we were to see it with our own eyes, as it were? If we were much taken with it, we would not longer be able to interest ourselves in the present life, but would be in a continuous state of languor. And, in the opposite case, we would not be able to comfort ourselves by saying, midst the trials and tribulations of the present life, 'Perhaps it will be better there!' But when we speak of destiny, of a future life, and so on, we presume the existence of an Eternal Creative Reason which created everything for some purpose and everything good. What? How? But here even the wisest man admits his ignorance. Here reason extinguishes her lamp and we are left in darkness. Only fancy can wander in this darkness and create fictions."
-- Letter of a Russian Traveler, 1789-1790, N. M. Karamzin, [Columbia University Press, NY, 1957], p. 40-41.
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