In one of his early novels, "The Island of Dr. Moreau," H. G. Wells has described how an audacious scientist, by performing an operation on the brains of the most savage beasts of prey, such as panthers, wolves, etc., transformed them into creatures with the powers of thought and speech. He succeeds in suppressing, or at least in lulling for the time being, their bloodthirsty instincts, but he is always afraid that these may be roused again, and forbids the animals on which he experiments to touch blood or fresh meat. He takes good care to give no reason for this prohibition. He merely issues it sternly and threateningly. It is "the Law," an unknown, inexplicable, but terrible power to which one must submit, because opposition would expose one to unimaginable, but terrible evils. If temptation assails the beasts they flee it, whispering fearfully and warningly to one another: "The Law! the Law!" Wells is a trained philosopher, and often has his tongue in his cheek. I shrewdly suspect that when he writes of the mysterious "Law" which fills Dr. Moreau's semi-humanized beasts of prey with superstitious terror, he is poking fun at Kant's "Categorical Imperative."
The great logical mistake in Kant's moral philosophy is that he conceives Morality as a social or collective phenomenon, and yet defines it as an individual one. According to Kant, the Categorical Imperative exists within us. It is as immutable as the starry heavens above us. It gives us the criterion by which to discriminate between good and evil. Its realm is our consciousness wherein it lives and rules; it is not introduced from outside, it springs from no power or conditions outside our person. All the same, the only law which this ultra subjective Categorical Imperative imposes on us is the most centrifugal that can possibly be imagined: "Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Hence our action is designed to produce an effect on the world around us. It is "to become a universal law" can, of course, only mean, it is to become a universal law of human society, for Kant cannot possibly have aspired to make the Categorical Imperative impose laws upon the stars in their courses. Our moral law, in so far as it applies to our actions, deals with society. When we formulate it in our minds, we associate it from its first inception with the notion of the society to which it is to be applied. It would have been logical to say: "Your standard of conduct is to be what society recognizes as its universal law." But Kant puts the cart before the horse and says on the contrary: "The maxims on which thy action is based are by thy will to become the universal law of society."