Note to readers here: This is a copyrighted work in production, but very near fruition. I am currently looking for individuals who are willing to proofread the work for spelling, grammar, cogency, and content. If you would be so kind, simply keep a text file of the excerpts citing problems so I can search and correct them. Compile a list by capturing and pasting corrections into Notepad or some other simple text editor. And then when you're through, cut and paste those corrections and comments into an email and mail them to me when finished.

My email is [email protected] For those who make a significant contribution, I will send you a signed hard copy when these are produced.

Thanks! -Don

Only as one lives a life long enough to reflect upon life well, and, when one is able to consider what an immortal view might look like, can anyone adequately envision their place in this world. Such a view still, can be no more than a feeble, even an enfeebled view. If we are going to look at an existence that is somehow incongruously suspended within the one true reality that only can exist once, and then only once in a great long succession of existences, while always slipping away, keeping all of us hidden from any direct knowledge of that reality, we can then slowly come to know what philosophers mocking the rest of human knowledge call the thing in itself.

Look here first, we say. But humanity then goes on regardless, calling everything else under the sun, philosophy.

Philosophy has failed humanity on this count. For no one walks among us seeking the non-ideal of reality, the reality every philosopher knows is there, just out of reach, but also well enough out of reach. Instead humanity bumbles along, made of so many mortal automatons, each with their own reality only, each seeking alternatively the ideals such as sun and then shade; each believing therein is truth and knowledge of all that is important, when in a truthful reality what anyone perceives is little more than what we might spit into a stream and watch float away on a hot summer day. It is not even that much.

A moral gamut of a relative casuistry, an inopportune empirical method of moral causality built around an illogical system of wholly inappropriate moral weights and measures, weighed upon a scale also held down by the innumerable thumbs of so many ghosts and demons; this is the best academic philosophy has come to describing the thing in itself for any of us. The rest they call, science. But it is but witchcraft. You will see. Because, I write here to show you.

What is important to our docile, if ignorant, humanity? The long historic tally here slowly sloshes back and forth as if summed by so many drunken sailors arguing over their last can of beans as they all float, endlessly and, directionless, in a tub asea.

The history of human discovery will often tell us tales of great irony about when and how any number of renowned researchers made their great breakthrough. There are many illustrative stories of flashes of insight suddenly creeping from the instinctual contents of the back of the skull toward the ill and foreboding prescience of the front of it, and, into consciousness arising in a vain and comic disbelief concerning the luck that seemingly accompanies most every great discovery. I give you another here.

It seems every life is likely loaded full of such impromptu discoveries. Each only though, being capable of recognition for some real inherent merit when a particular researcher happens to know the importance of what has just come floating into the conscious area of their brain that spends most of its time thinking of food, comfort, sleep, inhibitions and exhibitions. For some it is an unconquerable burden let to drift away like smoke as life too quickly disintegrates into a very few last, gasping, worrying, and wasted, breaths.

Self reflection and awareness are rare during any given day, if it is less rare in a seemingly even shorter lifetime. We stand underneath a lot of fly balls and, catch so very few. I bothered to catch this one.

I was similarly exceedingly lucky. But I was fortunately not lucky enough to know the greater depth of what I had found immediately. The stimulating titillation progressed scolding hotly, scalding smartly, contesting my sense of self as every new notion of this discovery lingered, beckoning more thought, and a more careful consideration about what it means, and what it might mean. At first it was not even a discovery, just an idea, if a very pleasing idea. This discovery has tugged upon a number of my years with continual revelation that even now has failed to cease.

What I found struck me as being very clever and worth repeating. But it was only over time and repeatedly, even annoyingly as I asked others as is my wont, "What do you think of this?" And then it came to me, what I had found. But even then it did not let go. Nor did the endless throbbing newness subside.

Then I kept on finding out why and, over and over, why my discovery was a discovery that will rank as among the most important of discoveries in the history of human discovery, regardless the untowardness of whom it is that discovered it. I have not had the time or the interest in towering genius in my life. I took more time to smell the roses. Lesser men than I by far have told me just how stupid I am. While I feel not the fool, I confess it as an emblem of my humanity for the base multitudes who will eagerly join me here. I am not pretentious. I relate here just a story, a story of discovery.

I slowly came to a conclusion about my all too fortuitous work, which was fortuitous because I am casual about everything, especially philosophy. I am thankfully not some jaded academic. Hold that thought, forever.

I once wrote a humorous article made of overt audacity, describing exactly why the first of my discoveries was the most important discovery in the history of human discovery. As I noted it then after a long process in succession, crossing many other great discoveries off a long list of human discoveries possibly ahead of my own discovery, until I presented this conclusion to the readers of that essay, "I am left here, with but the discovery Adam and Eve made when each figured out what the other was fit for, as possibly being ahead of my own discovery."

And as I finished writing that article, I thought to myself still immensely amused about how funny life is, "It is true though." Little did I know then just how true it would turn out to be. I'm going to try and fairly relate that story here in the most narcissistic manner possible.

Human knowledge is a funny, jumbled and a massively unintuitive thing. And, as I had come to the recognition of what I had discovered so slowly, at the very same time of the long process of discovery, I began to simultaneously assimilate much of it. And I found I was accepting this new knowledge as part of my natural way of thinking without noting my new way of thinking was a consequence of the discovery. I was becoming no longer aware, I was increasingly unable to differentiate how I then thought after, from how I thought before my discovery.

I have written this work in an effort to bring my readers to a similar reflective engagement within their own thinking. In order to fully gain what this philosopher has intended you take from reading this work, you will have to reflect back upon it, wondering just how your own thinking has changed since you picked up this work and began reading through the pages.

And if I have then accomplished my task here, you will still be wondering how your thinking has changed by what you read long after you read this too.

In 1670 Blaise Pascal struggling with his religion and questioning philosophy as a more fruitful source of cogent answers, stated and then asked, "What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, and imbecile norm of the earth; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall unravel this confusion?"

I have come here to try to do just that, though not by denying any of my baser instincts as apparently would Pascal. This is the task of philosophy, to unravel the confusion.

To add now some purely ironic frosting on this cake, I state aforehand for my readers unequivocally I am but an old man casually interested in philosophy. And, of my discovery, I state, I just got lucky. I got lucky, and I was even luckier to know what it was I had found, obscure as it might seem to some who would never consider philosophy.

The importance of it has to do with the fact that philosophy is the very pinnacle of all knowledge. If you want to shape the world, study and write philosophy. But, do not be surprised when you find it is philosophy changing the world, and not you. One cannot lead reality. Reality will always lead us to the discovery of its own choice.

What I have discovered is the answer to the conjecture of Immanuel Kant that there might be a Categorical Imperative. I have discovered The Moral Imperative of Life, the literal base and wellspring of everything moral exactly as it springs to us all from the cogito. And from The Moral Imperative of Life, and following out of this firm notion of morality, I have also discovered an astounding new knowledge set of immeasurable depth that exists far above superstition, and lauds over every empirical knowledge set.

I have discovered Categorical Knowledge. Categorical Knowledge is that knowledge that is true in every instance without any exception.

Don Robertson - December 2007

The New Epistemology of Morality and Truth

Chapter I ---- Introductory Statement of Purpose

Within the text of this work I will attempt to reprise and rescue the philosophical relationship to moral reason and truth. I say, attempt, because of an awareness that whenever a philosopher applies a position, there is always an inherent danger the result will be mistaken for something greater or less than intended.

Philosophy is the pinnacle of all human knowledge, and, to tread there always carries with it some inherent dangers because it is unbounded except as by reality. Reality inevitably takes its toll upon philosophy over time due to the flexible, even meandering nature of knowledge, and the wholly inflexible nature of reality. This is especially true because our perception of reality is mutable due to both advances and regressions of the knowledge of generations of short-lived human beings blindly groping at reality in between attending to the far more pressing matters that endlessly chase every turgid mortal life as it lasts.

As I impart here this civic view that philosophy is the pinnacle of all human knowledge, it occurs to me to point out there is a lot of horrible philosophy bordering upon revolt inspiring dogma or dangerous science. Just as there is much great philosophy found outside the bounds recognized by academic philosophers. And within the bounds of academic philosophy I thankfully do not and apparently will never find myself.

These academic, pantagruelian, pseudo-philosophers are but a small part of all the propped up and thrust forward, parading charades of puppet intellectuals that are self-certified to make up the academia of the most often lying opinions of experts. In every one of their endless machinations of rhetoric, verbiage and theory, each designed to justify the ego of the existence of the proprietor of same in a society that would be far and away better off without any of them; these puppets propped up by their common philistine betrayal of humanity itself, their coterie of claptrap, balderdash, immoral meddling and the outright skullduggery of a cunning and suicidal witchcraft that is the oppressive edifice of ignorance and barbarity against which all humanity in the ideal has striven over its long history to overcome in order to embrace the fleeting, elusive and all but vainglorious and vaporous notion of civilization. No! Let me retract the last part of that statement. I am far too generous and kind in what I said. Civilization is indeed a vaporous notion. It is the Tooth Fairy held out as true by so many barbaric academics. We are not there yet.

And among the academics today we find debates and papers about monism, materialism, phenomenal and noumenal realities, and indeed, even if knowledge is possible at all. It is not, if one knows where not to start. Indeed logic is but the lawyer that can prove either side of any argument, and science also is but the vain and wholly wishful proof of an overblown ego.

Logic and science are clubs where the members are all drunk with what they believe in modernity. But this stupifying modernity is 100,000 years old at least.

I sought progress outside of madernity. And I have successfully reduced every question to a moral question. And I invite here, all and any who might take exception with this feat, to topple it. Jump! Jump high! You will see.

Humanity has lost the battle of crass and ignorant wit common to academia in every era. And humanity has thus become increasingly immoral, ever more barbarous, impossibly more uncivilized and wholly unphilosophical. If you disbelieve this, just take a look around you. That is why it is necessary to step outside vile academia.

I nonetheless will still subscribe myself to this notion that philosophy is the pinnacle of all knowledge, noting to differentiate myself as widely as possible from the academics. Those who strive for truth are philosophers. And, many of the best philosophers never once thought of themselves as such, as they merely followed their natural, human desire to find truth. The exceedingly rare success of such seekers alone, points the path toward where civilization was before the academics illegitimately seized the mantle and the mace of every human truth, making of every bit of it a lie of one sort or another, all of it fostered with the illegitimate purpose of an ignorant and willful disposition to deceive, or more generally maintained out of a gainful prospect to be made regardless of the expense to truths otherwise known.

If by some chance you are reading this text for a philosophy class in some college or university, ask your professor to read outloud the last sentence to the class. And then to take full advantage of your professor's longer stay on this earth, and, their likely better knowledge. Ask him or her not only to read the last paragraph, but also to explain it. Note their blushing repose as they do so.

Still, regardless of the academics' foul and base intent, the temptation to find truth where there is none especially among time worn but fruitless universals is irresistible to our minds that exist somewhat isolated from the thing in itself. The thing in itself is only truth with nothing untruth existing anywhere within any of it. This is the thing in itself. We cannot know it. We can only know what it is not.

A blind man grasping an elephant by its trunk might exclaim, "It is not a mouse!" Being blind ourselves, we would have heard truth, or, as close as we might expect to achieve during our short lives.

If there is logic available to our frail and feeble human minds, it will arise only from the notion that we cannot know what is true, and that our only logical saving grace is that we can know what is not true.

Unfortunately, most believe that it is possible to know what is true by examining what is not true. There is no cogent logical basis in any permissible logic of which I am aware that allows these truth deductions.

It is the fiery aspiration of philosophers to set forth truth that will last millennia, or at least greatly shock a king or, pleasingly a child today.

This however, is not the only task given to philosophers. In our human minds there exists the existentialist possibility for conflicting truths to rival within the human perception of reality. It is only in our minds. It is however, also then the role of the philosopher to dispel and drive out or, ameliorate when possible, these competing notions of truth.

The philosophic approach to all these tasks is to recognize, we can know nothing veritably unless we know everything, which we obviously cannot know. So as philosophers we make suppositions; we make assumptions; all of it out of what we negatively deduce through what we know is not; while we try to prove what we can. Though, mostly we prove what we can to be untrue. The latter here is the easy gig for philosophers, for most everything ever asserted can be proved untrue.

And, if philosophy until now were a true/false multiple choice test, we would do quite well to mark very question, false. The real gains are made asking the questions for which we know the answers are false. Thus arises the philosophic conjecture.

The greatest tool of the philosophic process is termed, doubt. But doubt is widely slandered as cynic. And, some still seek as their proof, the affording to others a means to be mistaken for what doubt could, or could not be.

Doubt borders upon rhetoric, but never trespasses there. The goal of philosophy far surpasses any such contentious triviality. Hence the notion that doubt is cynic is only true as a classification that is a misnomer of purely academic worth.

We all know there are no perfect explanations, or we quickly learn so.

Nor are there even nearly perfect explanations. There are only what are considered slightly more plausible explanations, for which philosophy thankfully has always had a remedy for our wrong-headed self-assuredness about our infinitely misplaced notions of competence. Competence by its often failed proof made of trial and error, must be far more rare than knowledge. And we should not ever fool ourselves concerning just how rare competence is. For knowledge itself is exceedingly rare, if we throw out all the imposters.

And honestly, only imposters profess competence. Oh, yes. We all get lucky occasionally. But competence requires the regular application of some real knowledge built upon what are always exceedingly rare enough truths that we know none of the pretence of competence could possibly exist without an additional consistence catalyst of fraud to take up the ever persistent slack so common to our actual experiences buffetted as these are by unrelenting reality.

And, in each and every one of our lives each of us only has the opportunity to know the imposters. So we must pay them all their due and their respects. I might be one. We shall see. I shall certainly never deny it. Were I to make such a denial, it would be my own admission of incompetence.

I will begin here in this work with a base assumption of a minimalist (far and away and intentionally over simplified) philosophical interpretation of the epistemology of morality, ignoring the dogmatic role of religion. I will then advance from there stating unequivocally that there can be no comprehension of truth without an understanding of morality to temper and test the veracity of any supposed truth. I will explain why this is true. And I will thus set forth a less than complete but still basically whole method for the prioritization of moral reasoning and the discovery of truth. This in part will be accomplished and reinforced by non-static examples, and by noting these examples and citing some universal moral goals.

In noting I will ignore the dogma of religion, one should not believe I am arguing for the wholesale negation of every one of the moral ideas inherent to religious teachings. Rather, if my moral notions and ideas coincide with a similar or same religious idea, I will arrive there not by citing or relying upon any religious teaching. Similarly, if my moral ideas conflict with the moral ideas encompassed by this or that religious teaching, I will not bother to hesitate even to discuss the difference or similarities.

My thoughts here carry on by themselves generally independent of religion. I do discuss religion to some minor extent. These discussions only relate to the close comparative relationship between what is commonly thought of as science and what the scientific community commonly thinks of as religious.

It is not the role of philosophy to mollify or accommodate the approach of any religious teaching. Nor as you will discover here is it the role of philosophy to mollify or accommodate any of the teachings of science. These knowledge sets can only be categorized by philosophy. Neither is it the role of philosophy to do anything more than scale any belief system, each and every one of which philosophy should recognize as a religion of sorts. And, here the wholesale and carnival nature of virtually every religion disqualifies all of it to a greater degree from any serious philosophic inquiry.

One of my themes here is that science is not philosophy, far from it. I shall endeavor to demonstrate convincingly herein, science is but a religion.

I wholly expect some of the moral goals I express may turn out to be temporal and related merely to my own perception of my world and my humanity.

I know one of my goals here is to become antique. So even as I write this today in my present, I should presume myself properly so for the reader. And, as such I will do my utmost to restrain myself in presenting examples in order that my usefulness may last into an era where my examples may not.

My intent is to provide a basis for categorical moral truths for the future. Surely I will fail in some respect here. And I recognize it will therefore be better left for future philosophers to explore more noble and stable moral goals with better knowledge than my era and my learning have provided for me.

I do not, contrary to almost every philosopher alive today, subscribe to any notion of moral relativity. In this sense I am likely religious about truth, though I worship no deity, and attend no church.

I live not in a time when the intellectual emphasis was upon categorical knowledge. I live in an era of nearly completely unfettered empirical barbarism.

The reasons I have dedicated my time to this endeavor are the unimaginably misguided moral arguments and indictments acting upon a disparate humanity throughout history, but moreover and especially in my own time. Moral arguments come into existence from many facets of current society without any firm grasp of what morality is; from religion, from politics, and from humanitarian groups, as well as from social activists, educational proponents, and social engineers, all of whom seem hopelessly lost in the pursuit of the truth without a more rigorous morality. Each of these disparate interest groups have claimed moral imperatives where there are none.

Consider our historic humanity, where in the early Seventeenth Century actors in parts of Europe were considered almost an immoral caste. Still in some places in the world today these kinds of ideas hold positions of culturally based moral truth.

Even here in my own time one can search the Internet and find someone who claims there is a moral imperative of resistance, to develop anti-aging drugs, for school leadership, to ordain women priests, and on and on...

I can only ask myself, on what base premise are these moral imperatives purportedly based? None.

What has any of this to do with morality then? There must be some common intended thread more cogent to the mean base of our intellect that holds all these ideas together, or breaks them all apart. Some moral edicts seem trivial, misguided and misplaced in time and derived of a stranger sense of honor than that which I am either familiar or comfortable.

I seek here to give a working model of morality, to provide a reliable and veritable end to the moral chaos of humanity.

And in a final caveat concerning this work I note for the reader, moral reason must ultimately accord itself with human nature. This will be the principle task of future generations of philosophers. Human nature seems to be the final arbiter of whether or not moral goals are achievable, or are sustainable as precepts over time. Surely then, if moral goals are not sustainable, then these are not moral goals as such, but rather a waste of time.

I grant that this may be so.

Chapter II ---- Epistemological Derivatives of Morality

One simple means to arrive at and understand the notion of morality derives from examining the herding or group instinct. Human beings look to leaders to provide a statistically better avenue of conduct. This is part of being a social animal. And generally benefits can be derived by observing and following the motions and conduct of those around us.

Leaders arise because they make motion, motions that are followed due to the statistical tendency of others to follow. It is here unimportantly open to conjecture as to how far back in evolutionary history this instinct arose. Though it surely predates the dawn of humanity. For individuals of other species too have been observed, written about and noted for their apparently moral acts.

That leaders are perceived as good and bad need not be explored here, but simply noted as the aberrational duality of these two opposite terms will provide a basis upon which to fall back upon in a simpler for argument's sake analysis as the edicts of morality gain some structure. Here we see the nest of all relative moral reason. All moral relativism is a tit for tat, and a wholly unconvincing, He said. She said. analysis.

The developments of culture, language and the written word have permitted the lackluster reason of moral instinct to take on many complimentary and also contradictory new forms. Each of which are more or less beneficial in the place of each, despite growing conflicts between the competing sets of mores and the leaders who command them. Neither the notion of command or conflict are intrinsic to the moral phenomenon. These are instead derivative of the conditions of rising culture. Each arises simply because of the nature of choice, decision and memory.

Chapter III ---- Morality and Our Choice of Action

The initial state from which all moral choice of action arises is non-motive. Human beings are most content not having to follow or lead. And consequently, humans are most sated not having to make the choice as to which lead or leader to adopt or follow.

It is therefore non-presumptive to note how humanity gravitates toward calm, with no need to make any such decision, perilous as these inevitably may be. The ultimate goal of moral decisions therefore, seems to entail seeking a non-motion and calm state. There does not seem to be a natural motivational moral impetus. But if there is, it is selfish and perhaps expressed as want. Morality is a reaction, initially a reaction to follow and/or lead in order to seek a calm lacking selfish-want.

Frantic and motive situations naturally heighten awareness. This heightened awareness in the vernacular of the bio-chemist's psychology is naturally accompanied by adrenaline and followed by dopamine. This is a vast over simplification of the bodily chemical and hormonal reality, though adequate.

Generally, the adrenaline increases agitation and the dopamine would calm it. Important to note is that this calming is accompanied by addiction. The addictive connection to agitation arising from the catalyst of the subsequent dopamine provides a causal effect to the cyclical nature of all perceived stimulus to agitation.

Herein we can trace back the emotional nature of our logic. There too we find the personal conventionality of logic noted by the greatest of Greek philosophers. In a simple and yet heartily enduring analysis, nothing else matters concerning the ticking of our daily, monthly and yearly clocks but the conventional road signs of our cyclical stimulation. Even life can be measured by how these road signs suddenly emerge and then, similarly fade away.

Humans with regularity become agitated, and logic delivers the dopamine that quells the agitation, delivering our minds again into the preferred state of calm. At its base logic is both emotional and moral in nature. There is an underlying epistemologically sympathetic relationship between logic, emotion and morality that effects the semantics of any discussion of any one, two or all of the three.

Such a discussion however, can only typify our personal conventions of the priority we assign the components of this triad, logic, emotion and morality. And were it not for differences in personal convention, we might see some way to have the discussion omitting any two while relying solely upon any one of the three. Convention permits us to sympathetically support our beliefs by playing all three off each other, where in fact there is only a difference as we allow convention to arbitrarily differentiate that which is actually one and the same.

Philosophers have become hopelessly lost trying to differentiate consistently between logic, emotion and morality, when each can be expressed as happiness, contentment or any number of other terms for the transition to the calm, non-motive, sated state we naturally seek. This is the appeal of Zen Buddhism, or so I understand it as a detachment to achieve a state of calm. Unless universally adopted however, and accepted, this state does little to provide for the future when reality interrupts any such a state of being one might individually seek and temporarily obtain.

As with hunger, the cyclical nature of our agitation, due to a desire to experience the calming effect of the dopamine is what we perceive as applied intellect whether it is experienced in solving a dilemma or avoiding one.

It is expressed in English, that we thirst for knowledge and that we are happy with a given explanation. But it is one and the same, and actually, the ultimate goal we desire is the calming achieved by solving an intellectual problem. If it is a great problem, the calming effect is like a great open vista.

This is perhaps best observed by the delusional intellectual satisfaction one receives upon making logical deductions that are unbeknownst to us, wrong. But and which then lead to making the same mistake over and over again. We all do this throughout our lives. And, there is probably a better argument to be made that this is all we do with logic, than there is an argument that we don't do this with logic.

It should be noted here before we get much further, logic is wholly fallible. And it can be proven thus by its own precepts. Again this philosophic feat, no sleight of hand, was accomplished time and again by the Greeks. Ultimately this substantiates the tenet that logic is at its base emotional and that it relies wholly upon notions of morality, which of course are all mere convention, if we have not some cogent method for dealing with notions of morality.

So truth, or what we perceive as truth, our commonly asserted logical truth then arises in delivering the calm as well as recurrently giving rise to the agitation in a cyclical manner. Truth unlike reality, and due to the conventions of truth, has become a process. Truth is therefore a process of becoming as noted by Sartre. But, we get ahead of ourselves with that.

Hence though we can see the primitive value of truth, and why there is a seemingly endless search for and, a perpetual migration of common truths. Every time we look for truth it has moved again. This is due to varied needs for the stimulus of agitation for which the eventual reward is a sated calm, but then again, not too much sated calm.

Remarkably here, I might note that heroin addicts have been known to refer to their drug induced euphoria as the greatest good, a truth of sorts. This of course is delusional. We should however, consider the ease with which such delusions are maintained concerning truth.

It thus is not easy to land upon any categorical truth, which is truth that can be sustained indefinitely. If one isolates oneself from the rest of humanity, it is indeed possible to some extent to find the balance of excitation and calm that might last a lifetime. But in the more complex nature of social life finding such a balance is almost impossible due to reality. Reality seems always to provide impetus from varied external stimuli that then force changes to the pattern of our own cyclical state of arousal and sated content. Truth is then commonly altered.

These are all complicated notions, each easily made contentious, and all only provided here, to allow the reader the opportunity to swim among the sharks of the many common misconceptions about logic, which as I have stated is really emotion and morality, all three being the same.

My intent in laying the groundwork with such an introduction as this, is to make the reader familiar with the common hazards in these treacherous cognitive waters. We are wading into the water to test and exercise our sea worthiness.

Still, generally all this is verified for any individual if they merely look at the pattern of their daily existence in normal times. It is always then exceedingly pleasant to reflect lazily upon life and get into the run of a familiar daily routine. It is also easy to ascertain the ancientness of this by observing it in any domestic or wild animals. Routine is cyclical, and in one sense it is also truth.

If this notion is new to you, it is perhaps stunning. It was stunning to the ancient Greeks, but it should not be so stunning to us thousands of years after the Greek philosophers explored truth, and found that truth can take on the appearance of relative notions that vary with time, space and perspective. A later, better analysis of the phenomena has demonstrated this occurs because all our definitions are dependent upon and varied by time, space and perspective. Thus our notion of truth is a mere emotional flirtation with what we would ever so passionately like logic to be.

All our personally adaptable social organization is cyclical. The most appealing and enduring social organizations are the most consistently cyclical.

Because of the nature of our lives, constantly anticipated as if planned as these are with the focus being the cyclical-pattern-nature of seeking agitation and quelling it, it is thus easy to understand why when one thing goes wrong during a day, everything then seems to go wrong. Once the patterns of overlapping cyclical agitation and sating are disrupted by some external stimuli, nothing seems to follow in the comfort of a familiar daily routine.

Similarly, as humanity evolved, societies arose and humans became more mobile and social beings it becomes clear why recriminations become more commonplace. Group attacks upon foreigners and witches, observed with a myriad of names, are seen for a time as moral, logical and of course, emotional. Just as we see on deserted islands where animals have no natural fear of man, over time toleration wanes due to primitive, moral, cyclical, pattern-seeking edicts.

For humanity, progress begins to equate with conventional morality naturally because the goal of moral teachings are the benefit of quelling disturbances or want. All wars start out as moral wars in this sense.

Empiricism appears initially to be quite morally beneficial, a salvation in development, a scientific modernity, and the rights of man, universal suffrage and equality all temptingly emerge beckoning us all to a moral future. Or so it might seem. And finally one of an infinite possible choices of an apparently full-blown empirical belief arrives like an psychosis, incessantly rocking and head-bobbing and, eventually infecting nearly all humanity with the social disease of progress. Progress is the empirical messiah.

However, empirical wars also break out and eventually come to rule the thoughts of paranoid empirical leaders. Empirical humanity thus has devolved into far and away exceeding the superstitious barbarity of the past.

The prolific historians, Will and Ariel Durant with their six-thousand-plus pages in eleven volumes, our modern day Homers, phrased it this way, "In this period the basic developments were the rise of murderous nationalisms and the decline of murderous theologies."

Burdensome changes necessitated by the demands of an empirical culture are imposed upon the conventions of the cyclical patterns that make every individual human existence a seemingly ever more awkward contrivance. These are nonetheless quickly and convincingly adopted in a forced death march of ascending madness. Existentialism arises as a modern Buddhism, though scare-crowed akimbo a la Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre. A growing range of empiricisms repeatedly evolve effecting generations of the scientific that in turn contrive ever more specialized empiricisms with ever greater penetrating fortitude resulting in a consequent ever greater human virulence and producing a world of increasing inhabitability.

And the present is thus revealed to the reader here as this stick-man epistemological description of morality draws a sharp bead upon where are the more common notions of our moral origins and fallacies.

With a title like, The New Epistemology of Morality and Truth, I do hope none of you expected a Swan Boat ride in the Boston Common. My intent thus far is to describe what has become of humanity. It should have the sound of Hendrix transitioning from The Star Spangled Banner to Purple Haze at Woodstock. It sounds like he's pounding on a railroad iron with a sledge hammer, doesn't it? That's it. That's what I'm after here, nothing more and nothing less.

Chapter IV ---- The Moral Imperative and Kant's Categorical Imperative

I have often wondered why Kant did not find the moral imperative. He certainly sought it. He wanted to find it, but for some reason he was incapable. It has lately become clear to me he simply was too empirical, too primitively scientific to grasp how far he had strayed into the selfishness of primitive morality to fathom the importance of the future over the brief intensity of the present.

It is too easy to deride Kant, this pert and prolific character who lived until the turn into the nineteenth century so intensely in love with science he could but only envision its immodest unfolding dimensions. It is easier to chide those who still feel a scientific zeal and want to immortalize Kant for his tedious searching and documenting of the results of his personal observations of nearly endless mental experiments in categorization.

Aristotle's categories however, should be most interesting to philosophers for what they reveal of the deficiencies of this approach that could not be known without creating so many overlapping and nonsensical lists of categories.

For Kant the goal of morality was to provide for a better present, seemingly regardless of the unknown negative consequences for the future. He was simply enamored with the idea that scientific improvement in his present would emotionally, logically and morally confer an improvement upon the future. Without the moral imperative to guide him, this proved to be a tragic fallacy for this philosophic leader to be impaling humanity upon.

It now becomes for us clear, just how mistaken this philosopher, Kant, was about his moral precepts. His moral sense was no better than that of those who burned witches at the stake and saw in every foreigner a novelty teetering into a danger to the group. For Kant above all, was a scientist. And empirical science should be noted as, and, is here exposed to be the most dangerous fundamentalist religion ever to find so many devoted and recklessly competent followers.

I once before asked myself what reception Kant would give to the moral imperative could I travel back in time to present it to him. I considered then that he would find it natural. Perhaps upon first reading it, he would.

It has been my own experience conveying the moral imperative of life to others for the first time, that they will invariably, immediately agree with it, each seeing in it something they initially found pleasingly fits quite well with their own conception of morality.

The continued discoveries and changes to my own thinking since discovering the moral imperative however, now lead me to believe that like almost everyone else, if Kant were given the moral imperative of life, he would at first find it pleasing. But, it would likely vex him into a moral, emotional and logical corner from which he would desperately seek a logical/emotional escape.

The moral imperative of life might terrify Kant for a while. It would be difficult and even impossible for Kant to believe how immoral he had been all his life, before he dismissed such a notion. He would likely then move back into the emotionally satisfying empirical methodology of his logic leading to his familiar sated calm where a man like Kant would feel quite at home. If Kant was anything, it was not a brave explorer. Kant told us only what made him comfortable to the very end of his life. And indeed Kant was very comfortable in his immoral life.

It has occurred to me to compare Kant's addiction to believing in the false empirical solutions of his era, to an addiction to heroin. He simply could not deny the truth of the drug of empiricism.

Kant's mind was far too cluttered with notions of empirical means to improve humanity's immediate circumstance to discard it all, or, to discard the vast majority of it, and ultimately to abjure to the constraint of the moral imperative. This is still the primitive and commonly held view.

This has been my experience with contemporaries since 2006. So how could Kant who lived until 1804 have accepted it any better? Surely I would appear to Kant as a foreigner, if not a devil. It is equally likely I appear as a foreigner to many of my philosophic contemporaries today.

I am though, a philosopher.

Chapter V ---- The Moral Imperative

As I write I often forget some of my readers will be unfamiliar with the moral imperative of life. With apologies for my oversight, I give it to you here:

The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.

The moral imperative is easy enough to grasp and agree with upon first reading. Its implications are however, astounding.

In light of the moral imperative it is clear for the first time we all have received an invitation to a great party. The party is being held here on earth. And we should all act as the most gracious of guests here.

It is even more astounding that all that has come before the discovery of the moral imperative is superfluous, our notions of rights, our notions of great minds, our notions of what is right and what is wrong, and especially our notions concerning the progress of civilizations. All this has been rendered meaningless when surmised absent of any notion of human truth and without a firm understanding of what is moral.

It is as if all the many usurpers of the mantle of truth have suddenly had the lights turned on all around them for each of us to see. And all these ideas lay quite literally prone, and naked in the muck of utter barbarity, like so many suckling pigs in a sty.

The noble and moral contest is surely now, for human freedom to break the bonds, literally the incarceration of our human freedom by our empirical barbarity and then, forever lovingly cherish and court our humanity as we know we love her. Life is good. Life is good regardless all the selfishly infantile bawling over some suffering.

But the most astounding impact of all for the moral imperative is the ample and complete perception we are provided to note that all those who have attempted to better the world and life by empirical invention have merely served to debase it. They had not the knowledge of their place in time and history. They had not the perceptual foresight to inspect first before acting and affecting the cumulative damage that would result from their endless empirical meddling with the world and now even life itself.

There remains no excuse for carelessly trashing, or even experimenting with what were once thought improvements to the home where this party is being held. It is pigishly immoral.

Such pigishness in the home of the giver of this party is immoral because there are others coming in here after we leave in a short while, and there is no reason they should have to tolerate and deal with the cumulative waste of our utterly crass, ignorant, careless and immoral empirical stupidity.

I have been criticized for the wording of the moral imperative, but I have not found any more worthy. Its grammar is perhaps stuttering, but as such it works to force the reader to concentrate upon it, and, to at least attempt to take it all in.

It will be a thousand years though, maybe more. It will be a thousand years before the great mass of humans that make humanity will naturally have the all important notions of the moral imperative of life in their minds, and understand their part in the world, and what the experience, motivations and opportunities of life means to all others.

I have also had objections to the wording of the moral imperative of life, that it is impossible to live without detracting from the future.

While perhaps this objection has some merit to those who have not considered the moral imperative for any length of time, this objection has no merit. And, instead such an interpretation betrays the prejudice of the scientific (empirical) mind that can only consider consumption instead of the natural balance that must and will ultimately always be maintained within any closed system.

Humanity and the earth are closed systems. Humanity is tethered here for as long as humanity and time for humankind shall last. We can destroy ourselves trying to untether some small genetically hybrid strain of humanity from this earth in a vain and ungainfully destructive effort to realize some poorly conceived notion of a manifest destiny to become like the gods of mythology, immortal, space creatures who travel the galaxies and beyond. It is but a vile fantasy leading us to our own destruction only. And even the mere belief we might succeed here is but another immoral aberration fostering only the desire to take the risks involved in ridiculous efforts made by gambling away the prospects for the future on such an idle fool's idea of human progress.

The moral imperative is furthermore, a goal, a moral warning and not an impossible edict. It is made a goal by interpreting it to mean, in your life you will do as you will, but, it should be considered when you are acting outside the civil constraints of the moral imperative, you are acting immorally based upon the known, stated, and wholly incontrovertible goal of the moral imperative of life. That goal is a recognition of the courtesy we all owe the future.

The moral imperative is categorically true. It is true in every instance without any exception. This is what makes of it, the moral imperative. It is however, recognized that it is not easy not to step over the line of the moral imperative.

Chapter VI ---- The Significance of The Moral Imperative

So, to dispel any notions my readers might have here that I might not reach far enough to impact philosophy in any significant way, let me assure you it is my intent to create philosophy.

The moral imperative is the most important discovery in the history of humanity.

To dispel the notions of any reader who comes to read here believing there are sagaciously inspired documents that come to us from the past, and even any reader who might apply a divine reading to any of those documents, let me ask, in order to dispel any such notion, why has no one until now revealed the moral imperative for humanity? It seems a small task to ask of the sagacious and even a trifling to ask of any deity, does it not?

I am neither sagacious, nor a deity. I am a man. I may seem to some of my more modest readers, a bit narcissist. But let me assure everyone, I intend here to be no less modest in life than I will be in death. I stumbled upon the moral imperative quite by luck. But there it is. It erases much that has come before us, and it also creates so much more for the potential of humanity in our future. The path is revealed. That, none has nor, will effectively argue against.

There surely will be those reading here today and, in the future who might also wonder in the years to come, did this philosopher have any sense where he intended to drive a morally cold, naked and shivering humanity when he plied the switch of his moral invectives?

Yes, is the answer. Into a civilized future none today can imagine.

Chapter VII ---- The Moral Imperative and Its Phraseology

As wonderful as our lives are, as we read history it must dawn upon us, upon our notions about the personal geography of an individual existence, that our lives are quite brief.

Life is like a painting being painted. When it is finished it might then be cherished or despised by those who follow us into this world.

This analogy of life being like a painting is apt. Every artist knows every painting starts out wanting refinement. Artists similarly know every painting is a series of missed steps that together make something in the end that either makes a beautiful or worthy painting, or, it does not.

Our appreciation of paintings of many kinds and of many subjects examples just how wonderful life is. There are as many artistic approaches and techniques as there are approaches to life. But, when a painting is finished it either stands on its own accord, or it does not, if simply by our personal estimation of it. Or, it might stand by an often transient acclaim made by those who continue to behold it.

The perception of others of a painting too makes a good analogy toward life. Consider the painting, The Girl With the Pearl Earring, painted in the Seventeenth Century by Jan Vermeer. How many times has someone rescued this painting from impending doom, a fire, an army or some other disaster? To note that the painting is cherished and has been cherished by many who have beheld it is easy, as well as it is to note how many of those many were the painting's doting caretakers.

But to know the painting requires great depth of thought. It is believed to be a painting of Vermeer's daughter. It is a painting quite uncharacteristic of Vermeer's technical style. And yet it is a painting that lasts by our enduring appreciation of it. It is an awkwardly beautiful painting of a young girl looking over her shoulder at the artist; and similarly, at the viewer of the painting.

When I first saw this painting (a photograph of it) I was so struck by it, it was weeks before I read the title with comprehension. The "Pearl Earring?", I asked myself at some point. What pearl earring? I had to go back and look at the painting again to see it. And, if we examine the pearl of the earring, it is painted impressionistically centuries before the Impressionists. There is nothing focal about the earring in the painting.

Vermeer toyed with us by his title. Vermeer knew he had painted a painting that would last the ages. Vermeer toyed with us because, even though he had spent a lifetime painting, he knew with this one painting he got very lucky. He knew he had surpassed all his training and all his experience, except as what his eye, not requiring to be trained or experienced for the purpose, perceived upon the canvas before him, a canvas that has now stood before nearly twenty generations of observers of his painting. Few, if any, will ever walk away from the painting with any impression of a pearl earring.

For most of all, this is a painting not of a girl with a pearl earring. It is instead, a painting of the utterly human being who painted the girl. It is also a painting of all of those who have looked upon the painting and marveled at what it is. It is a painting of our humanity. We too know Vermeer painted a masterpiece. And we all know somehow, Vermeer knew it too. Like no other Vermeer, in this painting Jan Vermeer smiles back at us as we marvel at what he created, and more so, for what he found upon his canvas looking back at all who look upon it.

This is why I do not alter the awkward phrasing of the moral imperative of life.

I am smiling at everyone who will read it. I know what I have found. For one thing I have found out why Vermeer's painting is so wonderful to behold. It is a painting of Jan Vermeer's world that has long since ceased to be, and yet we see it as no other painting or even a photograph could capture it.

There is nothing more in Vermeer's painting than humanity, a moral humanity. For Vermeer knew as long as this painting lasts, he has made the world a better place for it. And, what is more, I know, like Vermeer knew, you know what we both have found too. I have found my world, and I have captured it for all to see. I have found humanity. I have made the world better by the discovery of the moral imperative. But it is my desire to make the world a better place that is the humanity I have discovered, and, that you should behold as you read the moral imperative. It is art.

I got lucky, as did Vermeer. Both Vermeer and I were lucky enough to have found something we created, and even luckier to note the importance of it. Such is life's bounty, short, even as it is.

Chapter VIII ---- The Moral Imperative Upon Its First Reading

There is little we can know in our lives. Logic is feeble, emotional. Our memories are flawed and tainted. The conventions we accept haunt us and our feeble logic, with our biases. We can be made of little more in any of our short lives.

We can know this. Life is brief.

We spend a third of our lives sleeping. Another tenth eating. Perhaps a twentieth of it being too ill to cope. Another tenth too young to cogitate in depth. I have not experienced an age too old to consider it personally, or perhaps I should but cannot, but it seems clear we all fail towards the end too. So how much is left to our intellect after we have had time to get our bearings upon the world, a world we create for ourselves, from scratch, ad hoc from the time of our birth? There is enough time in life to know just how fleeting it is. And that is enough time to recognize the importance of the moral imperative.

Of everything we do have time to consider, it all comes to us by what we experience, what others tell us, or what we might read or experience through some recorded medium. There are current sources of input, and dated sources of input. The overwhelming preponderance of what enters our individual spheres of awareness is repeated for our consumption from some distant second hand. To note the extent to which we overlook reality in the first hand, we need only consider just how often it is necessary when something directly presents itself before us from reality, it must then be pointed out to others in the exclamatory.

Thus, culture provides for each of us only a scant smell of the sweat from what is wrung out of a fabric of reality.

Of the means by which we absorb what is available to us, it is quite fairly stated that the process of absorbing information requires us to be enchanted with the source of the input as well as the material. It is this enchantment that is the impetus for us to put together and construct knowledge for ourselves in our minds. We allow in what enchants us and we ponder it over and over until it makes sense to us. But, this making sense is all relative to everything else we have learned, or taught ourselves as it were, in our lives in our worlds that again, we each build from scratch from the time of our birth.

We learn to focus upon what we assume are right answers and we ignore a wrong answer by our disenchantment with these. This leaves us blind in our one good eye, as we are often more wrong than right. And there is a greater world open to those who are also enchanted by the wrong answers. For those who have not learned this, they are blind in one of their eyes, and they will never learn to see out of the other. For they have little with which to compare what they might only think is right. And, they have no way to verify any of their notions of what they might believe is right.

It seems clear here, again, as a faint example; that which comes within our reach can become soiled, damaged, tainted, worn out, or extinct, and, that that which remains out of our reach remains pristine, even true to the thing in itself. Intrinsic to the inferences of the previous sentence, is the notion we can do what we do not wish to do, even that we often can do these things out of the focus of our intent, especially if it is our intent that we meant to act morally. And of course, everyone intends to act morally. Though few know how.

So you see, the wrong answers to every question can shed light upon our feeble notions of reality. This becomes critical as we view the world from the perspective of the moral imperative. For if we do not wish to do something because it is immoral, we had best discover all that we are doing, and not merely that one thing upon which we might be singularly and selfishly focused.

Chapter IX ---- Dissing Morality

It should come as no surprise to any modern reader of philosophy that morality has come under an extreme attack. Since before the time of Shakespeare there are those in the West in prose and again in philosophy who have declared morality to be a relative notion. The common perception today is that morality is a relative measure.

Is it?

Before the discovery of the moral imperative it was, surely. For without the moral imperative morality could not be constructed with any clear view of what is moral. As such morality became many things to many people, and thus it was denied by anyone who had given to morality even a modest cursory inspection. This is especially true when the Existentialists, their precursors and their post-existentialist adherents all agreed, life is all suffering.

To dwell upon the suffering in life and make of it the entirety of one's experience, this nihilist plague is no way to view the great gift we have been given. Even if we are like fruit flies, born, live and die within a smattering of hours, life is good. Suffering is but a small part of our existence. It is a mere slice of the whole of our existence. It is impossible not to take in the broader landscape of life. But for some it seems appealing to revel in their own suffering, or, the suffering of others. They have wasted their lives thus. They would make of philosophy and their lives too, a joke.

Philosophy is not a joke. Philosophy is the pinnacle of all human knowledge. Philosophy is all joy for the acknowledgement of the lives we have been given, even as brief as these are. Time appears to go by much faster the older you get. Waste it not endlessly dwelling upon suffering. For by dwelling upon suffering, you too might expand it to wholly encompass your short life.

Life too is likewise far too short to spend it quarreling and canceling two or more efforts; as some directionless humanitarian grumbler simply decrying the hue or how of humanity's sure barbarity; or as a marplot forever dissenting that there is a better path but with no intent to define, declare or effect it. Such lives are spent suffering, forever wanting to be released from the death grip they have struck upon themselves in their nightmare.

The amount of time it takes get a driver's license after one has obtained a learner's permit seems an eternity when we are young. By our perception of it, this is the same amount of time it takes to get through college. And this seemingly short duration of time will later equate quite well with the amount of time it takes for a first-born child to turn 21. My first born is now 30, and I push 60. For me it seems the full moon rises every other night now.

The time goes. The time goes!

Waste life not dwelling upon your suffering. This is not the sort of role model anyone should deliver unto the future. Life is good. Cherish it. Put on a happy face inward every chance you get, and outward to a fault always.

What becomes important as the time wanes is to express an appreciation for the great gift it has been. Time becomes too short then. It cannot be hurried, and I know few will ever be as lucky in life as have I to have discovered something like the moral imperative and to gain a feeling from such a discovery, that all is well. I have indeed fulfilled my obligations to this world and to everyone in it by that chance departure from a lifetime of failure made by the delusion of seeing other things more important.

By my short and otherwise insignificant life, I am waving and smiling to all those who too will find themselves at and coming to this, life's party. It is grand. Nothing can surpass it. Life and life alone is the ultimate good and the ultimate truth wrapped in to a single whole.

Cherish it.

Chapter X ---- Discovering The New Epistemology of Morality and then Truth

The moral imperative is the base and well-spring of all morality. The primary moral responsibility of everyone is to the future. It is immoral to detract from the future. It is immoral to gamble when the wager is the chance of detracting from the future.

The moral imperative implies it is possible to make for the future a world better than we of the present found.

It was the goal of the empiricists to make a better present than existed, but they largely failed. What they made were moral mistakes because they did not know it was immoral to gamble the future in an effort to make the present more to their liking. We are in their future, and we know all too well from our own experience and from reading history, when gambles are made that fail, these failures toll cumulatively upon the future. And, hence, we can know it is immoral to gamble when the wager is the prospect for the future.

It was also the goal of the humanitarians to make a better present than existed. But they too largely failed. They did not know of the moral imperative and they let the Golden Rule be their guide, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

The moral imperative implies instead, we should do for the future as we would have had the past do for us.

There is a conflict between the Golden Rule without the moral imperative of life, and the Golden Rule with the moral imperative of life to guide for us what we would have others do for us. The latter is moral. And, the former is immoral. The moral imperative comes first. The Golden Rule is only an attribute of life we would like to bequeath to the future as it becomes possible. But, there must first be a future.

Between the empiricists and the humanitarians we have found our present to be their future. We have found our present to be vastly over populated. We have found our present to be poverty stricken as a result of over-population. We have found our present to be polluted due to both the products and the byproducts of empirical processes. We have found our present to be dangerous beyond the comprehension of anyone living just a hundred years before our own time due to both over-population and the inventions made possible by empirical reason. We have found this worldwide danger compounded by the competing interests of humanitarian groups too often in belligerent, bellicose and even fatal conflict with each other.

The empiricists and the humanitarians selfishly make their lives briefly better, if at all, while they have continued to make lives in the future immeasurably worse.

The origin of the following quote is initially unimportant here, though I will say it comes to us from approximately 1840. "The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good. There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost every thing [...] is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded."

It is clear the writer here, lacking a better understanding of morality has embraced and is expressing some sort of cautious moral relativism. The writer is unaware of the cumulative nature of making mistakes that embrace and thus cultivate even small amounts of "evil". What is even more clear is the writer has begun to fathom the great complexity of sorting through decisions about how to make a moral action, if it is not to be left to luck.

He apparently has not a clue as to where to start though, merely recommending "best judgment" in weighing "good" and "evil" in every thing.

There is an utter and stark absence of the moral imperative from the moral reasoning of this individual's arcane moral judgment.

The writer here is Abraham Lincoln, who ended up twenty years after these words were spoken presiding over a war that took more than 600,000 lives, has attributable to its credit the invention of the precursor to the machine gun, and it was a war undertaken merely to preserve the continuity of an abstract political entity against the will and desire of little less than half the population of the entirety.

Whenever I think of Lincoln I end up whistling Dixie to myself as it is recurrently told in many of the histories of the man and his time that it was one of his favorite tunes. It is one of mine too.

Some said at the time of the South's secession, "Let them go." These dissenters noted commercial ties that would keep the Union intact regardless of political disunion either temporary or permanent.

Some unrelenting revisionists of history have continually and increasingly portrayed the Civil War as being a war to free the slaves. This simply was never true. The South broke away from the Union to preserve the autonomy of a way of life, which only coincidentally included the evil of slavery among an infinite number of human evils.

The Civil War was a war against a way of life that was in retrospect, if we look at it dispassionately, far and away less cruel than the way of life that has evolved throughout the preserved Union since. To note this one need only ask, how many American black men are currently in U.S. prisons? Their numbers and their suffering exceed the population of slaves in the South in 1860. And then we might further ask, would not many of these men prefer a life outside their cages even if in the deep South at any time before 1860, and even if in slavery?

It is the very idolaters of Lincoln who today endorse as necessary placing literally millions of young black men into cages not fit for animals, and for crimes ranging from jaywalking while smoking a joint, to murdering their incessantly racist blue uniformed attackers. Ah, modernity!

One must also recall of Lincoln's war and Lincoln's Union, that less than a hundred years later, Lincoln's preserved Union perfected and dropped Atom Bombs on Japan. Lincoln's Union went on to develop and manufacture tens of thousands of these nuclear weapons that still menace the world. Lincoln's Union provided for scientists everywhere the nuclear weapon technology that has spread throughout the now nuclear armed world. And Lincoln's Union continues on now right on into the 21st Century, nearly a hundred and fifty years later as a country that spends a greater percentage of its GDP on weapon design and manufacture than any three other countries on earth combined.

Wars are not fought with any sense of the future, or those coming in the future. Bombs are dropped with a sense of the future that is ranked only as vengeance. Wars are fought to appease the vainglorious living, present, alive and vital when the war is planned and commences.

Montaigne lived three centuries before the American Civil War. This French student of philosophy pointed out his own relative, conscience driven, and, conventional view of morality. "Men are tormented by the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves." Such a view would have saved Lincoln, ere he capable of reflecting upon it. Though still Montaigne's view also clearly lacked The Moral Imperative of Life, which now explains a way away from this nihilist view of morality and, toward free will, civilization and lessening of the relative nature of morality coming in our future.

It is nothing like reason that has triumphed though. It is categorical knowledge trumpeting loud enough to drown out all the many fallacies of empirical reason, and superstition before it.

Pyrrho thought we knew nothing. He was right when he spoke. Today however, we have The Moral Imperative of Life. We know something unknown to Pyrrho, Montaigne, Kant, or Lincoln. We know something today. Life is good.

Here seems as good a spot as any in this work to explain something about our now common notions about relativity and knowledge generally. While there are many facets of reality that are relative to other facets of reality, and those relative to yet other facets of reality, again and again, until the whole of reality demonstrates to us quite convincingly that we can know nothing affirmitively if we do not know everything, in the final analysis, there can only be one reality, unless we are entirely deceived by our senses and intellect. And it equally seems so this one reality that is the only reality, what philosophy has aptly termed the thing in itself, this is not relative to anything at all.

More importantly for our inspection of what knowledge we might possess, it is clear, whatever its content may be, that we do know something, this as opposed to the nothing we might wrongly assume is our due, due to the lack of our ability to know everything. We all clearly know some things. So then, what is it that we might know?

We can know we should not take our relative notions, or our notion that we cannot know everything, to mean we can have no sense about what reality is not. And, it is only this somewhat backward and awkward sense common throughout history that has convinced us, that we know something, and indeed that we are sentient beings.

Chapter XI ---- Go Forth and Multiply?

As we inspect the human condition, the brevity of our lives, and the beauty and wonderment of these too, we should be struck by our surroundings, the earth, and what human impact is upon it. When we think of humanity, we must include the planet upon which we live, and the balance we must strike with our limited surroundings. Ours is a closed system with every limit that is intrinsic to any other closed system. Humanity only lives on earth. In this sense, the earth is like time. Without it, humanity ceases to exist. In this sense humanity is as finite as the bountiful earth.

To the ancients, the earth seemed boundless. Our space-born views of the earth were as startling a discovery as the Copernican view of the cosmos. At the same time however, these space-born views are far more important to humanity because these views defined for humanity the boundary of our existence. We learned many enchanting things by the Copernican view. But we learned far more when humanity ventured into space and looked back upon the pearl of our planet. The limitlessness of space is contrasted sharply by the finite view we unveiled with the first photographs of our small and precious world from space.

The very first photographs of our world from space revealed the planet essentially as it was before the dawn of humanity. We marveled at these pictures for their achievement for a while. And then we began to think about all our achievements with this new perspective in mind. And then, our achievements dimmed profoundly. The earth was revealed as the finite place it is. And a shocking revulsion at our carelessness about it gave us all the broader insight to question. What is humanity?

For a while fiction writers gave us the notion of new worlds, but, we came quickly to realize, this is not any excuse for what our methods have done to the one and only planet upon which we have any prospects for survival. It has become increasingly clear, if there is any realistic prospect of space travel to other worlds, this one must be more fully appreciated first.

The great rush to space ended almost as quickly as it began. We now look upon this new frontier for what it truly is, an almost limitless ocean separating humanity from other worlds by great distances and even greater and likely insurmountable humanity altering requirements. If of the six-billion any human beings alive today goes to another planet, they, like the rest left behind, will be like Crusoe, without ship or compass bearing, and, no real hope of escape from another island paradise.

This is not a dim view. This is the nature of our island paradise.

For now and, for the far off distant future, we must remain patiently content, only to dream these idle dreams of other worlds.

Unlike Crusoe we have mates and growing populations. And, we must strike a steady balance with the nature of our island paradise for the long term. We learned of Easter Island, and what can become of limited resources met by the onslaught of growing populations wielding tools and piling up cumulative waste products with no moral sense of the future to constrain us despite obvious detriment upon the future of humanity.

Motherhood is held in the highest esteem in every culture. It is however, intolerably immoral for a woman to have five children today, or even any number greater than one or two. Anyone who might question this assertion should consider, at the projected growth of current populations, it likely will some day otherwise become immoral for a woman to have any children when they cannot be fed, housed or cared for by any reasonable measure. There are already far too many poor children in the world who are born to die too young.

The multitudes of children born to every woman on the planet take food from the mouths of those children already starving today.

If divided among all the world's living inhabitants, the world's available resource, its potential to sustain wholesome life, that which provides humanity a quality of life and a standard of living, is not sufficient to sustain equitably every human living today at a standard of living or a quality of life that would be considered a normal, minimal living standard and, would otherwise be utterly intolerable for some.

Others thus through no choice of their own are born only to learn to live under conditions that are seen as simply inhumane and inhuman to others. These lives are no less valuable in some survival of the fittest evolutionary paradigm of truth. These lives are no less valuable than those of anyone else. But this growing and increasingly burdened population lives within conditions that would be unbearable for most of humanity. The squeeze of unbearable living conditions however, is growing greater and encompassing more of the human population of the planet every day. The progeny of all are headed down that path because of limited resources, growing populations and cumulative damage to the planet as well as ever increasingly angered, intolerant and belligerent cultures. And thus, those women who would have more than one child are wrong to morally rationalize their choice, or their negligence.

We are by the mores of our societies and our cultures all immoral when we hold in high esteem and respect those immoral women who further defile the planet with yet another oversized litter of offspring that can do no less than to demand more than is their fair share of the planet. Is it right to debase the world this way?

So, when you see a beautiful child, and a gorgeous group of three or four children, remember too the bloodied and limb-lost fighters on both sides of every war you have ever known; think too of the insanely angry policeman who brutally beats a homeless person having simply become fed up with all the drunks and drug addicts littering his beat; think over the drug addicts and the prostitutes in every urban setting, and then think over again the potential lives for these children you see.

They are like puppies. They certainly will grow up to be big dogs.

Chapter XII ---- The Moral Priority to Understand the Wrong Answers

The paramount moral responsibility of the moral imperative, our moral responsibility to the future, is to preserve basic sustenance for the future. This responsibility is phrased this awkward way, "preserve", because our abilities to sustainably create the needs of basic sustenance are limited in the complex world. Our actions designed to create most often run afoul of the inexorable reality over time. And, this responsibility should be viewed as a responsibility to preserve basic sustenance by not simply depleting that in nature that provides for humanity its basic sustenance.

The history of many national and cultural efforts to expand those assets of the planet capable of providing the requirements of basic sustenance for the future provides an excellent example why these efforts are intrinsically a gamble where the wager is the future. The predictable eventual failure of all human efforts here have and will always have dire consequences for future generations having been further burdened with greater population by temporary surpluses.

Such efforts to increase the bounty of the earth, however initially successful, should be viewed as an immoral gamble where the future is the wager for two reasons. 1) Eventual failure will strand future generations left without such man-made creations when they fail. And, 2) successes in creating surplus abundance of the requirements for sustenance will cause over-population and an increased suffering will result when these efforts do run their course and fail.

A few agricultural examples here will suffice to demonstrate this.

One such example is the Irish Potato Famine in 1872 and 1879�1880. This famine lasting decades killed by starvation quite literally millions of the Irish people in a country whose population had been blown up because of the cultivation of the imported food crop potato, which originally came to Europe from the South American continent in 1560.

The American Dust Bowl, a series of catastrophic dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to the arid American and Canadian prairie lands in the 1930s, is another example.

Nikita Khrushchev's "virgin and idle lands program" also demonstrates the extent to which human efforts to improve and increase basic sustenance are a dangerous gamble where the wager is the future of humanity.

Using agriculture as an example serves two points necessary to show the complexity of making a better world for the future.

1) Agriculture can deplete limited soil resources, or fail due to drought or pestilence setting up future famine and ecological calamities any one of which will impinge upon the quality of life.

And 2) successful agricultural innovations will also immediately create a human population explosion making any increase in yield more tragic for the greater human populations that arise only to face failures of these efforts in a future strained by greater populations created by such a temporary success.

But also consider even reasonably long term agricultural successes can foster wars between newly created and competing populations, these that might war merely due to cultural intolerance, or even more especially, as any temporary bounty wanes due to any number of limiting factors.

As a child I was taught the United States was the breadbasket of the world. Today, no current elementary school texbook makes the same claim. And it can be fairly stated that American food aid spread around the world has caused to be born millions of children who have also starved as the food aid let up.

Agriculture is not the only means by which humans gamble in the present where the wager is the future.

Virtually any effort of humanity for which the result intended is to increase the bounty of the earth, the efficiency of the use of it, or research and education dedicated to these ends imperils the future of humanity. These efforts are simply a gamble where the wager is the future because we do not know everything that will result from every improvement that might tempt humanity's implementation. These efforts are demonstrably in conflict with the constraints of the moral imperative.

Quite obviously, many alive today will take some mistaken empirical belief their lives have allowed them to construct for themselves in their minds, and ask, What? We should do nothing?

There will be some who read here wishing to cast these thought into the stinging infamy of a dire obscurantism, a resurrection of the Luddites. But my response would be, does not starvation sting too? Pestilence? War? You are a fool should you think you have bettered the condition of the world of humanity, if this is where your efforts ultimately lead. Read your history.

But too, yes, yes... Yes. I do quite understand the exasperation. However, the fault is in our perception of what life is about for us, if we have any clear perceptions there at all. This is why I write here.

Life is but a party. Your moral obligation is to act as a guest here. And to not ruin it or recklessly attempt to better it for us here now without due consideration for all those who will follow us here. The earth is the location of the party, but it is not owned in any sense by us. It is however, wholly owned by the future. In that sense the party is being thrown by owners of this place who have not yet arrived at the party. Treat your opportunity thus.

Of course our human population is already larger than the earth can sustain without violating what we have observed here. And, while it would be immoral to abandon every aspect of what created this over-population, and for reasons I shall not go into here, we should still be vigilant and cull these efforts and thus reduce human populations by natural attrition to levels sustainable without having to continue to gamble the future.

We do not wish to bequeath to the future world starving populations for which we eventually have no humanitarian sympathy, because this is not the sort of world it would be our moral desire to leave as our legacy.

Here, however, within the scope of our intellect as it is ever aspiring to prescience, and as that which we should assume is our greatest tool with which we can provide for a better future, we only now find the importance of knowing and understanding the wrong answers. Humanity simply has more wrong answers with which we must come to an intellectual understanding, than we will ever have right answers.

We are more fallible when we act than when we do not act. This is our collective human nature. Humanity has an instinct and an aspiration to be moral, because this provides for us a sated calm, as when we are sitting half-in and half-out of the shade next to a running stream with no where to go, and no where we have to be, a picnic of sorts.

In the end you will see. We all, every one of us, just has time enough to take in life for how wonderful it is. And then, if we are lucky enough to consciously pass it on intact lessened not at all to the future.

Chapter XIII ---- How Wonderful is Life?

It is a paramount moral responsibility for those capable of the task to come to full cognizance concerning what makes life so wonderful. Beyond and immediately after basic sustenance, this is what we have an obligation to preserve for the future, the wonders of life.

By the Western emphasis to bring modern ways to the rest of the world we have done the world a vast disservice. We have seemingly gone to the ends of the earth destroying diversity. And, diversity is paramount to our appreciation of our life experience.

While the moral deficit is not so much planning and proselytizing, it is embracing the false perception that improvements can be easily made to the human condition. Making the world better for humanity is not as easy as mere intention. Human competence levels in this area of expertise must be continuously measured historically in order to provide realistic estimates to weigh against so many unrealistically proud and vain predictions of success.

Exemplifying the myopic view held in the 20th Century, I can point to building codes and best management practices that demanded consideration of 100 year storms as the standard by which architecture and building projects should be planned.

100 years is but one and a quarter human life spans. And, building to 100 year standards implies we should expect on average these planned catastrophes to happen going forward from any given point in time within fifty years, within most everyone's lifetime. That is what the 100 year projection predicts.

When we take a longer view, it seems building and zoning codes that permit coastal construction in areas that can be anticipated to catastrophically flood within 1000 year time spans, seem to guaranty that lots of trash and toxic waste will be swept into the sea at least every 1000 years, and likely much sooner.

There simply are places on earth where modernity should not be permitted to express its poisonous footprint. These are most clearly coastal areas, and inland waterways. These topographies surely meet this higher standard.

Were any government to assert this standard and begin processes to remove coastal and inland waterway developments, how would they convince their populations of the necessity of such an endeavor?

Were individual human beings longer lived, some would ask instead, how could we be so stupid to build here?

Ecological considerations are only the tip of the moral imperative iceberg of considerations we must implant in our moral outlook. We are each educated enough now to understand some small part of the danger and the risk. The gamble the empirical sciences have made that will negatively effect the future, are the very problems that are inherent to the empirical knowledge sets that have been created over the past several hundred years.

Were anyone immortal and omniscient, they might ask humanity, Why does humanity dwell and seek to perfect the very knowledge sets that contain that knowledge capable of destroying itself?

Do we not understand human nature? No. I think we all understand human nature quite well. It seduces us into being reluctant to embrace a moral character that would place limits upon our own freedoms, or that would impose upon us the obligation to limit those in our present who would grossly exceed their moral due.

Humans are gamblers, which was fine for a while, until the Age of Empiricism put into the hands of humanity opportunities to wager away the literal future of all humanity.

We are reluctant to restrain ourselves morally regardless of how such a reluctance will inconsiderately harm those who will in the future be following us into this world. We are immoral mostly because we do not understand what is moral. But, we do not understand because both the highs and the lows of our intellectual capacity lead most often to obfuscation, the clouding of the truth.

The human intellect loves a mystery. But there is no longer any mystery here.

Chapter XIV ---- So Where from Here?

In my efforts to evolve a categorical knowledge, differentiated from empirical knowledge, I have found empirical knowledge is based upon the trial and error of hypothetical categories. I have, like others, stumbled over and reflected back upon the emotional nature of both the impetus and grid of all our knowledge and actions. It seems quite clear each of our individual worlds, these worlds as they exist in our minds that only we can know; these worlds are wholly psychosomatic if we inspect them well.

Bonaparte, one of many murderous philosophers, intimated that imagination rules the world. Yes, but without first having the components that make a fertile imagination already occurring in our dreams, our imaginations are sterile.

Our individual worlds are unequivocally based upon an unwarranted sureness derived from the familiarity of knowing our own private worlds best, and unhesitatingly believing that coupled with this ill-perceived competence, if we hear or read a lie, that through some process of acknowledging what we perceive clearly as a lie, enlightenment evolves knowledge and the truth is revealed to us alone. This is clearly but a grasping emotion and, a logical fallacy.

The psychosomatic nature of all our realities is perhaps better phrased for the reader, as: We pretty much sleep-walk through our entire lives, and if we are not already dreaming about it, we tend to walk right by whatever it was without ever noticing something is amiss with our perception. The it here is any of the great infinite number of the components of the quite obviously, massively, even impossibly overwhelmingly complex thing in itself.

Our intellect is but a spec upon a seething mass of something we cannot comprehend for it dwarfs us as bacteria are drawfed upon the back of the elephant upon which they might live, and again as the elephant of the bacteria is dwarfed yet again by the galaxy that surrounds it, and yet again and again and again, and, conversely too.

Or again, another description of our individual realities may be rephrased, that we allow to accumulate our own realities, like junk in our attic, a conglomerate whole that is quite nearly useless, almost disconnected from the thing in itself due to its utter insignificance compared to the far richer complexity of the thing in itself.

And again, the congomeration of junk in our attics provides a good analogy, representing the notion that this grouping of ideas, concepts, words and phrases that make up our individual world, is not even a fair or even remotely indicative sampling of an immensely more complex real world outside our minds.

This disconnect we can only begin to comprehend based upon even our limited ability to comprehend it, is simple startling. We are often left mouths agape. When you philosophically begin to recognize it by a notion of the direction from which it comes into your thinking, you will have to pick yourself up off the floor of the building down the street from which you were previously sitting comfortably when the thought entered your mind. For even a mild recognition of this disconnect between our own individual almost completely psychosomatic worlds we create for ourselves and the thing in itself will simply knock you over as if you had been hit by a freight train.

This is not just true because of the sudden and complete discombobulation of all the recognizable and comfortable grouping of ideas, concepts, words and phrases that make up our perception of the likely homeyness of our individual world. It is also true because even our minimalist competence we assume effortlessly resounds and resonates as thought inside our head ceases, and we are no longer even the individual or, even anything remotely like what we thought was an individual and once thought we could be sure we were.

Worse yet however, there is some wider misheld belief among every society of intellectuals, those wild, fluttering, sqawking bevies of self-assured thinkers that must be seen as epistemological leaders in our surely leaderless cultures, that there is inherent in every society a mean truth-path intrinsic to the growing complexity of the patterns of culture, a somehow divined mean truth-path intrinsic to culture even as separate societies clash catastrophically.

To believe this unchosen path provides some measure of truth like yards of cloth is equivalent to a religious belief in some great being, an animism, that supernaturally guides the hand of the collective of humans in their societies of humanity. This notion there is a collective instinct capable of preventing massive and calamitous truth-mistakes from being made, based upon so many meager, tenuous and all too regimentally mistaken individual samplings of reality, somehow correlated as if choreographed by an unseen, non-conscious, collective guiding-entity capable of sorting through the psychosomatic machinations of large numbers of individually perceived worlds, the impossible composite of which, we presume makes a culture that will, could or even might ferret a path for a commonality of human truths, is simply an absurd and philosophically vulgar impossibility.

This however, is the basis for all our sciences. The belief that as the reckless, dangerous, immoral and meandering work of scientists unveils before our path, scientific truth, human truth might evolve. This is the quaint view of the naive intellectuals of two centuries ago as the scientific revolution ensued. But few alive today should be unshakable from this historically dangerous fallacy.

To dispel this absurd notion, we need only awake from our sleep-walking for a moment and ask, how does the standard of life stack up for five years olds of successive generations as time and scientific progress have progressed?

If there is anything I�ve learned, it is that by doing nothing, you are ninety-nine times out of a hundred not doing the wrong thing. Keep that thought.

Scientists and politicians should learn to master the art of not doing the wrong thing.

The problem with both science and politics is that so many human beings focus on each, as if either had some solution.

Politics has no solutions. Politics has temporary fixes that blow up in everyone's face almost as soon as those solutions are out of the end of the barrel from whence all authority arises.

Science has solutions. Scientific solutions work only long enough to create tenfold the problems the scientific solution was originally designed to address.

Those who look for solutions from politics or science are still laboring hard under the misguided religious belief that there is progress transpiring over the course of human history.

If there is progress it cannot be measured by either science or politics. Progrss may be measured by philosophy. But there are no numbered scales on the ruler of philosophy.

Any belief in some collective human progress is a religious belief because philosophers long ago discovered humanity is simply not smart enough to know what progress is in any reliable way. And thus a God is required to guide the way towards any of the progress scientists and politicians might promise any of us.

No one would be fool enough to practice science or politics, were there not some promise of fostering the progress they lie to all of us about with such regularity it has become a religion.

Have these people never viewed a petri dish?

Have these people never enumerated the greatest problems that face our humanity?

All the greatest problems today, of course arose because of previous scientific solutions.

Let me dispel this notion of progress, politically or scientifically inspired or otherwise. I cannot kill their God. But I certainly can dispel this notion the scientific and the political have any meaningful discourse with Him.

There is but one test I know of that tells us whether or not there is progress in the world. I call it, the five year old test.

This is the test for progress I have found to work:

You were once five years old. I was once five years old. Five years old is a precious age. Life for a five year olds is mostly full of moms, siblings, puppies and kittens, perhaps a trip or two to the beach, and a gold coin your dad and his pal found while digging a hole, if you are lucky.

Every year since we each were five years old, there has been a new crop of five year olds.

Now, here is the test for progress, the very test to which we should hold every politician and every scientist accountable with their political and scientific lives:

Since we were all five years old, can any of us say on average, life has improved for each successive years� crop of five year olds?

That gnawing feeling in your stomach, and the funny souring taste under and in the back of your tongue right now, that feeling that makes you want to vomit? That�s it.

That�s the measure of human progress.

In reality, the thing in itself is so profoundly and overwhelmingly complex, even to its smallest part, or, any slice of it, there is but a stunningly scant correlation our perception has with the thing in itself. And our own individual worlds are still even more utterly insignificant when given the added contrast of the multitude of these obviously overwhelmingly disparate views each of us holds, individually and temporarily created as they are within our minds.

We should be more careful and take better note of what we can know. But we cannot because we lack categorical knowledge. Categorical knowledge that has been exhaustively proven true in every instance, thus necessarily takes on a stunning survival role in higher civilization where dangers have increased manifold. It is less important that science gives results, than that we should look closely at the results that the sciences give.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) held that the more humanity understands individual objects, the more we understand God. Spinoza in his zeal for empirical research equated a knowledge of his God with a knowledge of science.

A little less than four hundred years after Spinoza lived, it is has become all too clear the God Spinoza had in mind would be a vengeful God, if that God would have us contend with every manner of that knowledge that would destroy humanity were it understood and let to slip into the wrong hands, hands that are unlucky, ignorant or, malicious as is humanity's most common wont.

Will there be any truth the day some young scientists accidentally discovers how to initiate the Big Bang? That is merely the extreme of the possibilities.

The proper perspective here is, we should no more allow unfettered empirical research, than we would jump off a cliff, or allow children to play with guns.

No one would argue that it is moral to allow children to play with a loaded gun. But scientists would allow themselves to allow children to play with guns and the bullets given to them separately. This scientists call the amoral approach of scientific inquiry, and, intellectual freedom. It of course is a fraud, a moral fraud.

But how should empirical research be constrained?

By and by the enlightened here have come to recognize the contributions of science to life have largely been negative, threatening and destructive of life and humanity. It may be exhilarating to experience new scientific wonders. But we must ask, at what eventual costs? This is the human truth of science that is being played out without an accompanying and properly exhaustive search for categorical truth being laid before the path of our humanity to guide us.

Neither society or the family do much to teach morality to our youth. We by default teach adolescents that morality is relative. I perhaps have obstreperously aspired above my proper sphere as a philosopher. Perhaps not though, for also I note we allow ill prepared leaders to make up and pretend they know what is moral for society at large. Morality is neither a democratic process or some relative notion. And as a philosopher I have written to drag humanity out of our obviously immoral empirical barbarity. Imagination rules the world indeed.

Morality comes from knowledge, categorical knowledge. Morality is an intellectual pursuit inclined to unfetter our free will, should our imaginations be so predispositioned.

Chapter XV ---- The Veritable Problem

Within each of our psychosomatic realities, the core of which is emotional, the husk of which is scientific, or empirical, we have all in our possession a false notion of our ability to know the truth in some massive sense unattainable by the relative acceptance of the grid and background noise of our short existences. And, culture is both arbitrarily developing and a loose agent of poison acting negatively upon the core body that sustains all life.

The poisonous and increasingly perilous attributes of our existences and all our actions have arisen because empirical reason has provided devices and methods of change that outstrip our limited understanding of all the possible impacts upon reality, the thing in itself.

The base assumption necessary for the veritable application of these scientific methods and devices, if it is possible at all, requires us to develop sound strictures based upon categorical knowledge. After all, if something is true every time, without any possible exception, we had better understand this and apply the meaning of it to what it is we are trying to accomplish, unless we wish to court negligent failure time and again.

And, we must be forever wary of every instance when we find ourselves believing we have discovered and found the truth by hearing or observing what is untrue. For while it is our common intellectual inclination to make such assumptions, there is no basis for these great leaps in the misplaced faith we have in our perception of reality.

Humanitarians too often with irascible inflexibility anathematize those for whom they have deciphered to discover as lying by whatever means they arrive at their conclusions and they thereby justify some questionable end.

Our minds simply lead us to believe a choice must be made, when in fact no veritable choice is possible simply sampling what is false. There are simply far too many falsehoods to point toward uncovering any much rarer truth.

This logical fallacy arises universally because the human mind has never been capable of fully understanding that for every single truth, there are an infinite number of untowardly correlative untruths. And likewise for every single one of these untruths, there also are again an infinite number of correlative untruths, and again, and again.

Blaise Pascal in 1670 stated at a similar philosophic juncture, "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."

Truth is no where confidently reflected upon the roster of human reason. And while the power to effect change can be proportional to reason, this notion does not and cannot equate reason or power with truth.

And here, knowing this now, it is quickly discovered virtually every scientific postulate has at its core such a wrong assumption. None of it is truth. All of it is a fabrication of false positives derived from the processes of trial and error, observation, postulate, and an infinitely immoral throwing of the experimenter's switch to see the effect upon humanity. It is all an immoral gamble. And, as such, none of it is, nor can it be, categorical truth.

The truth reflected for us against empiricism is that not only is there but one truth, coupled with an infinite number of untruths from which to choose, there are also an infinite number of untruths that are believable tempting every empiricist's beliefs.

One might wrongly object here, when we make observations and postulates, we see the truth in our observation. This too is but a similarly fated fallacy, one easily revealed if one considers the processes of making postulates. The first of our experimental postulates are wrong, as they do not quite fit what we desire to our satisfaction. And from these untruths, we again assume we can deduce or induce the truth, and again, only to our satisfaction. Still, there is no logical means by which to either deduce or induce the truth from untruth. There are no logical means because at any point in the process of empiricism there always remains an infinite number of untruths from which the empiricist must choose on his path toward truth.

Now, consider to whom is left this choice.

Humanity is to its last soul, vain in its appearance, avid of titles, resentful of criticism, and eager for popularity. The appearance of truth is exactly as it is, nothing more, nothing less. Truth has no title. And neither can truth be resentful of any criticism. And lastly here, the truth cannot be voted or applauded into existence. These are all manner of human conventions, conventions we seem forever poised to find when they are not found anywhere in the thing in itself.

Could we remove the conventionality of our halting emotions, emotions that keep us forever separated from the thing in itself, and yet at the same time, emotions that are the only waft we will feel on and against our sensitive cheeks relating to the very same thing in itself we have no other way to experience? Could we remove the conventionality of our emotions, we would likely experience something akin to electrocution from a sudden jolt of an unrecognizable and unfamiliar reality. We would likely drown in the overwhelming shock of it, in an instant.

Empirical reason, is a sure misnomer. For empiricism, the business of every science from physics to economics, and chemistry to the political science, is at its heart the process of making a model in our minds of the thing in itself. Be it a model made of numbers or, of some other intellectual or, physical clay it still is but a crude model when compared to the immediately vast and infinite complexity of the thing in itself. Shaving and honing away at a model cannot produce categorical truth except as it were by some entirely fantastic faith that belongs better in the knowledge category of superstition.

Empiricism at its very best can be seen as akin to the art of creating a self-inflated teleological sculpture.

With such a start, even with a very long preparatory run at saddling the thing in itself, empiricism cannot even cultivate a single word of the language required to captivate for even a single moment, a single small bit of the thing in itself completely. Every empiricism only says, "Maybe, maybe this time," in a defeatist's tone.

Without categorical knowledge leading the way, any such empirical sculpture is being made by recklessly hacking away with ever increasingly destructive tools in a gamble meant to wager the thing in itself can be made somehow better by building what amounts to sculpture, a mere mimicry of so many small and ill-perceived components of the thing in itself.

This is our wholly fabricated empirical reality today upon which nearly every human being now relies for sustenance, domicile, standard of living and quality of life, and in short, nothing less than the very future of all humanity is in the balance. Empiricism has turned the thing in itself for humanity into an all too likely temporarily bountiful house of cards, when the thing in itself before complex empiricism unleashed its consuming and corrupting power, was surely as solid and durable as the Rock of Gibralter, the oceans of a thousand years ago, or the American Great Plains just a few hundred years ago.

Science is rapidly destroying it all to the very last of it for humanity, all with a promise of profit while replacing what was the thing in itself, with the shiny objects and vast complexes of empirical curiosity that have been expressed so succinctly in the indomitable parking lots, subdivisions, superbowl stadiums, supermax prisons, universities meant to continue the trend, shopping malls, zoos, the endlessly growing human and pet graveyards, and the stupendous landfill sites of empirical humanity.

If nothing else empirical gets us, it will end when the planet is nothing less than one vastly poisonous empirical landfill.

Chapter XVI ---- The Categorical Truths

For humanity to the very best of my knowledge, the only categorical truths that have been thus far discovered are 1) the cogito, that because we think, we can know we exist, 2) that life is good, and, 3) the most important discovery in the history of human discovery, the Moral Imperative of Life, that it is immoral to detract from the prospects for the future.

The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.

By applying in every instance of our action these categorical truths we can find veritable truth as it is tested and proved by the categorical truths. As philosophers, we can discover more categorical truths that exist, what is true in every instance, and true without any exception.

The paramount moral obligation we all have is to the future. And while I have had some express to me that they cared not about the future, it is clearly an immoral sentiment when it is expressed. It is a selfish sentiment.

The superficially good moral instincts of secular humanists who care immensely for their fellow human beings, are, when applied without the restraint of the moral imperative, selfish as well. Caring for our currently living populations and, the living individuals that make up present humanity at the expense of those who will live in the future, is simply and utterly morally wrong, regardless of how it might cause us some discomfort to find the means to justify somehow ignoring some of the perceived needs of those alive today.

That discomfort is not importantly, the result of the actions of those in the future, but instead, it is always the result of the actions of either those in the past, or those in the present, either of whom may have over reached their morally acceptable footprint and posture causing a situation to arise where the needs of those alive today cannot be morally met, because meeting these needs will detract from the more morally paramount prospects of the future.

Rationalizing cumulatively detracting from the prospects for the future by the easily perceived and apparently endlessly arising wants and needs of the present is simply immoral.

Thus, when our efforts entail the production of food, or, the maintenance and development of water resources for current living populations without coupling these efforts with parallel efforts designed to control the easily foreseen growth of populations, our net effect upon the future of humanity is negative.

Malthusian equations are not just generally true, they impose upon us a duty of better judgment in our humanitarian efforts. If we do not act accordingly, we simply increase human suffering by the capacity that greater populations have to suffer more and, because larger populations generally exist more precariously upon the short cusp that is the most common basic human condition of the sustenance of life.

The male population of the world has been required to restrain its sexual instinct. It is just as important to cultivate a similar restraint upon the female sexual instinct to bear offspring. The children of a woman who has more than one or two children take nourishment and resources from the children of a woman who has but one or two children. This negative impact can be seen in the present.

The impact over time is stunningly negative for humanity.

What is the optimal human population for the world? This is a difficult question to answer, but, it seems clear the optimal human population is at least half the current population of the world, and more likely much less than a quarter.

Of course, anyone who would suggest immediately culling the earth's human population to these more appropriate levels, would be immoral. The example of such an act is not the sort of world anyone would wish to bequeath to the future. But we also must become more aware that within a closed system, such as our human reality, such an immediate culling of humanity has happened before and could easily happen again due to some catastrophe remotely linked to our immorally unnoticed course where we have by our humanitarian instinct allowed the current population to rise to such perilously unsustainable levels.

We must remember, we have a moral duty to seek and maintain a permanently sustainable planetary population. Otherwise we cumulatively take from the future due to the closed nature of the natural and humanity-made systems that support our humanity.

The medical industries have a twofold negative impact upon the future. First, they increase populations. And second, they increase the virulent nature of pathogens that effect humanity by their treatment of humanity afflicted with these pathogens.

Economists who want humanity to adopt more efficient economic methods similarly impose upon the future increased populations, increased movement of pathogens and invasive species, as well as they increase the speed and efficiency with which many other empirical mistakes are being made.

The word, empirical must simply come to mean, poorly thought out. For, that is what it is.

And the word, scientific must simply come to mean, questionable, immoral and dangerous.

Empirically driven political scientists and economists who want to bring modern Western political and economic theory to the whole world also increase the efficiency of the destructive inclinations of ever greater populations of empirical humans. Western political and economic thought based upon absurd and populist notions of progress are clearly suicidal.

The correlation between readily observable, and, easily measurable worldwide population increases and the qualitative measure of the standard of human life long ago reached and surpassed a perilous peak. The sharp decline in the average quality of standard of living of all humans will accelerate for at least sixty years due to natural and irreversible progressions in population growth, and likely much longer because humanity has not yet geared up to what we now know because of the discovery of categorical knowledge.

Were we immortal observers we would see more disease, more pollution, more war and more suffering in the world due to the desires and action of humanitarians bent on making the world a better place and the empirically driven efforts that are always destined to fail to attain those ends, because of an unappreciated complexity inherent to the thing in itself. This is true because the ends pointed to by humanitarians are meant to address the needs and the suffering of the present, when the only cogent approach is to address the needs and the potential suffering of the future.

Humanitarians have not made the world a better place. They have made it worse for humanity by addressing the suffering of living individuals and groups while ignoring the downside effect of their efforts upon the future of humanity.

The only viable moral focus is the future. And the only possible future equal to our own experience or better, includes a smaller human population footprint.

Humanity has sat upon the precipice of destruction slowing tossing the future of humanity over the edge since the dawn of the scientific era. Popular culture today accurately portrays a numbed empirically driven population unsure of the rapid progress being made toward a future that is bent upon self-destruction, and the self-destruction of every species on the planet too.

No species is an island.

Empirical humanity now half-heartedly awaits an empirical messiah. Such an empirical messiah is seen as the only hope humanity has to avoid a fatal collision with our own empirical barbarity.

It is an illusion, and a deviously circular deceit. Our empirical world is the sure manifestation of our barbarity, a barbarity that is destroying humanity and the world of humanity all around us.

This is still an exciting time for humanity.

Kant's reference to and notion of Categorical Knowledge was a huge discovery left for two centuries unrecognized by philosophy for what it was, until Kant's querying conjecture about a Categorical Imperative was answered and proved true by the discovery of The Moral Imperative of Life in 2006.

For those readers who seek it, Kant phrases his greatest conjecture best in A Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781.

The vast difference between Categorical Knowledge and Empirical Knowledge can only be compared to the difference between superstition and science that came to the fore before it.

Philosophy has at long last substantially regained the mantle of truth, its pinnacle, its apogee.

Empirical knowledge has been put into its rightful place, not leading, but subservient to a suspicious and more learned humanity.

And in a bold paradox contrary to the beliefs spreading since the Enlightenment, religion, common sense, superstition and folk wisdom each stand as potentially greater sources of the inspiration to discover Categorical Knowledge than does science.

And while no one can deny the beneficence of religion of many types in many lives we have all witnessed, all the while neither can we deny the beneficent interest of scientific ecstatics in the pursuit of their own religious beliefs concerning the wonders open to empirical devotion, neither can anyone ignore the propensity of human nature to propel too much of anything toward a fatal malady and an eventual malignance.

These are both faiths, religion and science. Neither can be substantiated by any sure understanding of the thing in itself except through a tenuous and tangential faith that must be re-examined periodically to ensure the excesses are not outweighing the benefit either bestows upon our humanity. The Inquisition was a horrible moment in human history, and so is the ongoing nuclear arms race.

Here we find ourselves blindly groping to understand the nature of the thing in itself as it is contrasted with many kinds of human knowledge through a long history of humanity, much of it made in an effort to overcome these and other similar creations of humanity. Humanity is increasingly responsible for creating its ever more dangerous history, but it will only be some present that is capable of knocking out the future and shutting forever the door, or so greatly destroying the prospects of amenable accommodations here on this planet, that humanity will cease to exist or not wish to any longer.

We pull at this string and that, for that is what it is like, like trying to untie a tangle of string. That is the process. And it is always suddenly as we look closer and closer that we see that string that needs to by pulled free to loosen and untangle the rest. The notion I wish to convey here is, that all these beliefs are tied together like a tangle of string.

Today, science is clearly the greater danger and the great debaser of humanity. It is the string that must be pulled to untangle the rest.

For a time philosophers thought conscientious application of the method of scientific discovery, the repeated development of a specific hypothesis, careful observation, controlled experiment, and mathematical formulation of veritable results, was thought would provide an open window through which to view all the complexity of the thing in itself. This has proved a philosophical aberration because humanity is not made of numbers and graphs, nor even of theory and hypothesis, and, neither is the thing in itself.

Any emphasis of study now, other than science, meant to provide comprehension of humanity and the history of the world or, any part of it generally has greater depth and a far more diverse set of mental processes from which philosophic explorers can draw their truth-seeking inspiration and ideas required to seek the mean of the thing in itself we search for on hands and knees in the dark and the mud.

Or, so we hope it to be there, within reach of the mean of, our meandering, knee-worn and filthy intellect. There can be no guarantees, and only our none too heralded instinct to follow.

Because of the nature of empirical research, theoretical or observational, both are by an emphasis fictional, if meant to provide some greater insight in that which is never fictional. The empirical sciences are dead and sterile by comparison to what is the potential for searching out categorical knowledge which is by its emphasis, reality and not fictional. The empirical sciences actually lead directly away from categorical knowledge. Scientists, too often poisoned by the materials they handle must look directly back over their weak, drooping and esteem-seeking shoulders for truth. For empiricism is but a method by which scientists inquire by chipping away at some medium to create a model of reality. Such a method will always yield mere approximations and half truths.

Philosophers have been lost since Kant posed the unproved conjecture of the Categorical Imperative. So many have thought and written philosophy is but a destructive force. Or, they have meant to simply be destructive with their philosophy. For a while philosophy put all its faith in reason, this replacing other religious fervor in a silly, roaming, pot and kettle debate.

Philosophers sought to liberate the minds of humans by liberating humanity from political and religious taboo, tradition and authority. But this it turned out was no first rate philosophy despite so many first rate minds toiling endless hours, writing endless works meant to justify this mindless destruction. It has even been suggested that the current conflict is a war to the death between religion and philosophy.

I see no such conflict. I see instead two religions, two philosophies, both competing for the honor of carrying but a single banner in front of a parade leading so very many empirical automatons no where before a crowd cheering they know not why.

For anyone who might question and doubt this assertion, that science cannot touch reality but tangentially, while again religiously and only incompletely, I pose the question, why then did not the work of some empirical scientist discover The Moral Imperative of Life?

This would have been impossible. There is no moral variable, constant or graph grid in any of the empirical sciences. That is the deficit of this empirical religion invented so many millennia ago by Aristotle. This is why categorical knowledge is so undeniably important to the understanding of any truth today. For as individuals part of the collective of humanity, when we seek truth, we must admit to our static limitations, and know that we can only find human truths that are categorically moral.

The Moral Imperative of Life is categorically true. And hence every other categorical truth must accord with The Moral Imperative of Life. This was where Kant was trying to get, and failed, what he searched for, but could not lay his pen to it.

This is reality, the thing in itself as awkward as it may seem to us for what we might have thought the thing in itself was before this revelation of The Moral Imperative of Life. It is so, because by our meager perception of it, the thing in itself, we have so little opportunity to observe directly anything else concerning the thing in itself. There is simply little else we can know first hand of the thing in itself. And our simple perecptual deficit, the deficit of our limited perception does not and cannot abrogate the necessity that for humanity all truths must accord themselves with The Moral Imperative of Life because it is a Categorical Truth. There are no exceptions.

But never mind and pay no attention to all that now. For while here I can hear Beethoven's Ode to Joy, it can seem an impossible task to untangle string. Its importance is only to note it. These problems and revelations will not cease anytime soon in our history. We must go forward and save the untangling problem for when our temperament and disposition favors it.

The great door to Categorical Knowledge has then however, been thrown wide open with the unveiling for us of The Moral Imperative of Life. From there only, can humanity build free will. Free will is at long last within our human grasp as our own moral limitations come into view.

The very survival of the human race has been no more accountable to good moral judgment than it has been to just fool luck until now. Until the discovery of The Moral Imperative of Life, the arguments concerning free will have all been mute and mere tripe.

The most common arguments made about free will in society are whether or not this or that criminal acted of his own free will. This is an approach meant as an exercise is justifying a hanging and nothing more. And it is nothing more than a mean and crass indictment of our own humanity.

We must ask instead, can a person, any person, act of their free will without a firm grasp of what is moral? The reason this question works so well to ferret the truth of free will is because all of us would act morally, if we knew how. Here more than anywhere else, virtue is its own reward. But we do no know how to be moral.

It is easily surmised no human acts of their free will, if they do not know what is moral. There we have finally set before a now more free humanity the quest for the next thousand years, the discovery of the great wealth of Categorical Knowledge based upon philosophy, moral philosophy, the cogito, the notion that life is good, and The Moral Imperative of Life, all so we might express our free will as not just sentient automatons but, as moral, sentient beings.

It surely is not enough to be sentient alone. The practitioners of witchcraft were and are, sentient beings. The empiricists were and are, sentient beings. Neither, it can be proved, were or are moral beings.

We are now entering the interregnum between empirical humanity and categorical humanity. The only alternative is a humanity devastating regicide committed by the dying ruler of truth in a final empirical display of immoral ill temper.

Categorical Knowledge alone will, and, alone can, sustain life and give humanity its first moral civilization.

And all else that would otherwise be left for humanity is no better than witchcraft, a humanity made of cunningly sentient automatons, far more dangerous and infinitely more immoral than the witchcraft of old is our humanity when it empirically detracts from the prospects of its own future. The empiricists are all but cannibals by their deadly, caustic and imperious results.

Few philosophers qualify themselves as moral leaders. Twain was one surely. This is from Twain's My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It:

For instance: It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of the emancipation agitation in the North, the agitators got but small help or contenance from any one. Argue and plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society - the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion - the silent assertion that there wasn't anything going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.

[...] (But Twain of course would not leave off there.)

[...] For ages and ages it has mutely labored in the interest of despotisms and aristocracies and chattel slaveries, and has kept them alive; keeps them alive yet, here and there and yonder, all about the globe; and will go on keeping them alive until the silent assertion lie retires from business - the silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try and stop.

Twain's words about lies of silent assertion written nearly 150 years ago describes well what has been my experience since discovering The Moral Imperative of Life. The absence of it from our thinking has been the biggest lie of silent assertion in the history of a humanity that has claimed for millennia it knew what morality is.

Humanity until the discovery of The Moral Imperative of Life did not know what is morality. It could not know. Nor could it achieve civilization. Nor could any individual of humanity act of their own free will before the discovery of The Moral Imperative of Life.

It is just as if there is some inertia to humanity's uncivility, and its barbarisms, all of which with we are comfortable, immovable, and content to live our lives made of lies of silent assertion.

For I am and yet I am not, Wilberforce.

For Wilberforce had an argument that was possible to make.

My own arguments about the philosophical relationship to moral reason and truth on the other hand is, an argument that must alone be realized by those for whom the argument is intended. It is no easy task for any of us. Both leaders and seekers must not just stop allowing the silent assertion lie about empirical human reason to prevail here. We must all understand nearly everything humanity has held out as truth up until the discovery of The Moral Imperative of Life was a lie based upon a silent assertion that humanity had some grasp of morality and civility, when in fact, it did not. In fact, the destructive and poisonous fog of all our many empiricisms has lessened the ability of human society to sustain and cultivate thinkers who can comprehend what truth might be, and the path where upon truth might lay.

Lincoln knew in 1860 there were more than two billion dollars tied up in the equity men envisioned in slavery. How much more can envisioned to be tied up in the equally immoral perception of equity ventures made of the empirical scientists? Virtue here will have to be its own recompense for the virtuous. And, in a purely humanitarian sense, we should let all others be damned.

Our thinkers toil now like automatons in empirical factories, thinking up more applications and better ways to discover and apply what amounts to nothing less than the witchcraft of empirical reason. All this is done regardless of its negative effect upon humanity's chances for a future, or even its enjoyment of life, because these empirical scientific automatons have been unable until now to perceive of any other truth other than empirical truths. And empirical truths are demonstrably not truths at all.

Without a clear understanding of our own philosophical relationship to moral reason and truth, no human can possibly express their free will. None of us would have this, what is transpiring today and passing for what each of us might want to believe but also find impossible to believe, that this is humanity and life as it was meant to be. For what generations of the thorough application of empirical reason have put us all up against is not worthy of humanity, or humanity's demise while awaiting an empirical messiah.

No empirical messiah will come.

Without a clear moral understanding, empirical human beings are merely automatons acting as if sleep-walking upon the landscape of an unknown, ill-conceived and entirely incomprehensible reality destitute of any meaning beyond a teeter-totter like tempting, offending and appeasing of the selfish interests of a myriad of poorly defined and wholly disingenuous groups that cry out, or for whom others cry out, each though as if floating, lost, mid-ocean, in the dark, seeking the stolen and deceived votes of a democracy, and a pointless freedom and equality that matters not to anyone one hoot.

The quality of our lives and of those lives to come into this world in the future is what matters whether we are the lowest of the low or, the highest of the high, whether we live in a small community, in a great city or, we exist as nomads upon some vast plain buried in snow more than half the year.

Almost the whole world now has been blindly pressed into the mold of an empirical civilization that is no more civilized than ancient civilizations that favored human sacrifice to gods unseen and pretended. Empirical cultures looked at the history of ancient cultures aghast at the slitting of the throats and the letting of the blood of human sacrifices, some of them children. But these same empirical cultures have not yet fathomed the greater depths of their own far more horrific depravity for having polluted the whole world and having empirically gambled to bring the entire human species to the clear brink of extinction.

Empirical societies have shown an inclination and the overwhelming propensity to sacrifice the whole of humanity.

Chapter XVII ---- Differentiating Knowledge Sets

Any notion humans can possess intellect seems to require that we differentiate different knowledge sets.

This can be a primary and necessary task for epistemological work. As a philosopher though, one should expect little concrete truth to come out of the discussion, for these inquiries are again made empirically, and are based upon the concept of Aristotle's notion of categories. Other than to be able to guess that we may know wherein philosophical mistakes might arise, we might learn little from the inquiry.

Tentatively I have come up with four major knowledge sets epistemologists could reckon their inquiry against, Scriptural Knowledge, Logical Knowledge, Empirical Knowledge and Categorical Knowledge.

No matter the personal biases of an investigator concerning any given knowledge set, its origins, fruits or faults, knowing of the existence of four somewhat distinct knowledge sets the human intellect must deal with is important enough. The semantic origins of words and phrases that arise or originate within these knowledge sets are noteworthy for philologists as well as it is for a more general knowledge required of philosophy.

It is most important for philosophy however, to know the nature of each of these distinct knowledge sets in order to prioritize and categorize how we each might individually choose to view the contents and interplay between each knowledge set.

That each of us will somehow choose to view different knowledge sets weighted in a different light, is, and should not be surprising to anyone. All our own personal knowledge amounts only to that knowledge that has enchanted us since birth. The noteworthy aspect of this phenomenon is the unmistakable illusion of some modest even some comparable similarity one person to the next each existing in a sea of dissimilarly understood ideas.

Upon reviewing this immediately preceding notion in my mind I hear a lone bagpiper playing the first doxen notes of the mournful Scottish tune Going Home. It sounds like some distant truth to me.

It has been my discovery that Categorical Knowledge is the goal of philosophy. But Categorical Knowledge is rare enough, that it cannot currently sustain a vigorous discussion with its own distinct terminology, its own words and phrases. Categorical Knowledge must therefore rely upon the words and phrases of the other three knowledge sets for its vital work.

Categorical Knowledge will not then arise wholly anew. We must borrow from, and, assimilate the words and phrases of the prior knowledge sets, which in fact led to its discovery and still define it. These borrowings of words and phrases will eventually, even likely, quickly displace some prior meanings of words and phrases to make meaning and knowledge cogent at a level and at a par with Categorical Knowledge. It is however, important to keep alive the idea from which the words and phrases as well as the notions of Categorical Knowledge arose for the unique nature of the time and the place.

Such a time and place may never arise again for humanity. It is my suspicion this discovery may permit humanity to bridge into an important extension of its long history, perhaps at first off onto a small island and then from there into a massive new continent.

The mutability of knowledge and knowledge sets is a theme I have struck upon before noting how science, the method, process, and perception of it, has changed meandering randomly over time.

The notion of Categorical Knowledge as a distinct knowledge set is brand new. The tendency for it too to drift will likely prove irresistible. The question arises as with every pursuit of knowledge, when does such a pursuit lose its way and no longer point toward truth, and instead, it might point toward a dogmatism?

The answer to this question is the crux of our definition of philosophy. There is only one pinnacle, and there upon, only one apogee. When any such pursuit of knowledge begins to drift, as all will invariably, it is no longer philosophy, for it is no longer at the apogee of the pinnacle. Only doubt has any chance at correcting the truth-course then. And some term it cynic?

The novelty of the Categorical Knowledge set is perhaps best grasped by the inquirer by considering the different perspective of someone well versed in Categorical Knowledge. This perspective should be differentiated from the perspective of others similarly immersed in empirical knowledge or superstition.

One might ask, is it possible for any knowledge set to stand separated from the others and against an impetus toward a meandering sense of each by the use of its distinct or indistinct words and phrases? This is an interesting question insofar as we might learn something about the nature of the inner workings of how our minds construct what we perceive as possible truths in knowledge sets.

And the answer closest to answering this question is, no. It probably is not possible to exclude the influences of words and phrases from one to another knowledge set or, to create a new knowledge set that will stand still upon its own indefinitely off into the future. It furthermore would be nearly pointless to attempt to create such a knowledge set, since it has already been done as best as it could be done with mathematics.

Mathematics is an incomplete and wholly abstract knowledge set, and this accounts for its distinction here. For mathematics speaks of nothing specific that exists in the real world. Mathematics is little more than a game-like mental fabrication that only tangentially correlates to anything in the real world. But mathematics too has been influenced by thought processes transmitted and transmuted from one knowledge set into another and finally into mathematics forcing it too to endlessly meander into wholly uncharted and unsuspected mental territory.

In some very limited and easily cognizable sense mathematics can be predictive of some approximation in the real world. But mathematics clearly can define nothing of the real world completely no matter how small, how large or even in between such a thing may be. Mathematics therefore, cannot give us categorical truth. Mathematics can only give us an approximation of truths.

Mathematics in the schema I have devised for the four knowledge sets of humanity, is part of Logical Knowledge. Like all logic, mathematics is wholly fallible. And, it therefore can have little impact upon philosophy's quest for Categorical Knowledge. It will have some, however.

Here, let me simply demonstrate the inadequacy of mathematics for Categorical Knowledge. 1 + 1 equals 2, right?

Okay. Let us then add for Don, one idea from Bob and, one idea from Mary. How many ideas now do Bob, Mary and Don now have? Certainly here, the answer can no longer be 2. Now, consider everything we will ever add within our lifetimes, as 1 + 1 equals 2. Any and all of these added components are unique and the numbers we apply to them are merely ideas, the same likeness of ideas Bob, Mary and Don had such trouble with in the first example.

Oh! You say we can add one apple to a second apple, and come up with two apples? And what if the first apple is in the Ming Dynasty of China, and, the second is yet to ripen on a tree in Hoboken, New Jersey next year? The difference in time and place can only be narrowed, but never eliminated.

The problem is, mathematics can define nothing completely.

And in fact, there is simply no statement in science or mathematics that is either 1) true without qualification and 2) that cannot be explained away as being utterly false in some instance or other.

The pithy and even embarrassing captivation with numbers and mathematics so common in our massively polluted and empirically threatened world of death-gripping-pitted hostilities, and so marvelous in the individually defined, created and methodically exercised worlds of all those who lose themselves to the catalyst of this embrace, the mathematical embrace, is a stunning example of why humanity cannot grasp even the smallest bit of reality, what philosophers refer to as the thing in itself, as if it were some unsightly, monstrous thing with a reputation for fetid impressions. We are all feeble, and some are but feeble, if fantastically inspired mathematicians. Other mathematicians recognize the expression on the face of these when they are so possessed.

Numbers are not real things.

1+1 does not and will never equal 2 in the world of reality, for there are no two things in the world alike enough that if we state about them, 1+1=2, that this mathematical expression might describe the reality of those two items to any meaningful degree, or otherwise.

The thing in itself is indeed overwhelming complex, and this small and utterly insignificant mathematical description, again 1+1=2, is rendered worse than meaningless to assess two different things that are different in an infinite number of ways, as all things are.

Mathematicians, and even math students are utterly convinced there is something there evidenced if we consider their devotion to their belief, but they consider not the very true fact that there are also an infinite number of different types of mathematics that could be invented, not any one of which is any better at describing completely the mere two things I have already alluded to here. And where are those two apples now?

In fact, there are an infinite-infinite number of fractional numbers between any two sequentially adjacent integers for which there also are an infinite number, and all in all more than the total tally of everything in the Universe, added to, every way every thing in the Universe could relate to every other thing in the Universe.

So, you see, it is undeniable.

Mathematics is both too small and too large a thing to meet much of reality head on, and certainly not enough to tell us much more than some trifling, and always by an exponential factor of infinity leaving out the implications of each of the triflings mathematics might also point to.

And consider the number of wrong answers there are, wrong answers about which we really have no sure logical means to exclude them from being right answers because, we cannot even be sure the right answers are right answers as, they do not exactly relate to reality so they are thus fictional, not being at all included in what we know about that nasty and elusive the thing in itself.

Consider: There is only one reality, unlike what mathematics would conjure up from its caldron of endless devotion.

Mathematics can make a prediction concerning the trajectory of a cannonball, but a prediction only. And, cannonball-mathematics will never tell us anything of the dire implications for a humanity knowing how to mathematically calculate a prediction concerning the trajectory of a cannonball. And indeed what has this mathematics done to and for humanity?

In this sense not solely alone, mathematics is the witch's tool plied over a hot and steamy caldren of death.

Mathematics can imitate the beauty of a rose, the cry of a child, even the sound of Niagara Falls. But mathematics cannot describe for us the value of experiencing these things for ourselves, nor that of dying, knowing we have bequeathed it all to the future, and to the future's future.

Let Ramanujan, Wiles and Newton, Pythagoras and Liebnitz all think they have discovered something. But to kindle my interest for our humanity give me two children for pure genius as they behold for the first time seven puppies or several hundred tadpoles. That is enough mathematics for a very pleasant world.

Life is good, and only life. Everything else is only so-so, if that.

And despite an impressive heritage and a grand following, we should not be surprised at the evidence that Logical Knowledge, in many cases having arisen anew from and equally given birth to Empirical Knowledge, is riddled with contradictions fatal by its own tenets. That contradictions arising within both Empirical Knowledge and Logical Knowledge should be of no surprise to any philosopher who recognizes the fallibility of every human knowledge set.

And these are not parlor tricks. The fallibility of Empirical Knowledge and Logical Knowledge are reality based. We can know what the thing in itself is not.

I have addressed it elsewhere before, but I think I can again describe but in another way why empirical knowledge is always fallible.

Every empirical knowledge set or subset is derived and maintained by creating a model of reality, the thing in itself with which we can only be more or less familiar. The models employed by empirical methods are shaved, pared, honed, and whether they are physical models, mathematical models or conceptual models, by the very approach of empiricism, any such model cannot be exactly like reality. This is a given in all the empirical sciences.

The only exception to this notion of the fallibility of all human knowledge sets, is the newly positioned ideal of Categorical Knowledge. The infallibility of the Categorical Knowledge set is wholly maintained by the premise that categorical knowledge is true in every instance without any exception.

The premise set forth in the definition of Categorical Knowledge logically rules out all contradictions by making any contradiction a criteria for exclusion from the Categorical Knowledge set. And, if there remains still some contradiction in Categorical Knowledge, then we must assume it to be a fault within the logic that establishes falsely any such contradiction. This is one simple though important, example of the sort of logical extension possible when dealing with the theory of Categorical Knowledge as a knowledge set.

You will note, if you look for it in the arguments about the nature of Categorical Knowledge as a set, especially in the immediately preceding arguments, we cannot ascribe the same categorical truth assumptions to superstition, or any empirical knowledge sets. Such an assumption is even less possible when we look for it in the collective of all empirical knowledge sets.

Of course, this is all merely positioning the structural ideal of Categorical Knowledge so that we might seek an ideal that is attainable in this limited sense, that Categorical Knowledge is designed specifically so that we seek categorical knowledge as an ideal, knowledge that is true in every instance without any exception. This is true because of the definition of Categorical Knowledge. But the importance of understanding the ideal of Categorical Knowledge is that it changes our perspective on every problem, just as it changes our perspective of every statement of fact as we inspect same for veracity.

In fact, Categorical Knowledge resolves to inspect every problem as if it were a moral problem. This is true, because The Moral Imperative of Life is Categorical Knowledge, and it therefore cannot be contravened by any other categorical knowledge.

The Moral Imperative of Life is a test for inclusion in the set of Categorical Knowledge. It is however only a definitive test that provides for exclusion from the Categorical Knowledge set. The Moral Imperative of Life is not a definitive test for inclusion in the Categorical Knowledge set.

All Categorical Knowledge must still be inspected and re-inspected for any exception that might exclude it from the Categorical Knowledge set on any ground that might be raised.

If this were not true, then Categorical Knowledge would not be categorically true.

Chapter XVIII ---- The Origins and the Base Unit of Categorical Knowledge

To this point I know I have made several important philosophic discoveries. I have placed these before readers of this work, giddy, and excited by the seemingly spectacular progress I have made for humanity through philosophy. The Moral Imperative of Life has cracked open the door so that we may view a vast new knowledge set, Categorical Knowledge, that will in turn certainly come to dominate the landscape of human thought and intellect beyond common, day to day existence.

I was quite satisfied with my work knowing I had made a contribution not just to philosophy, but to all humanity, one that will surely last a thousand years and cause many minds greater than my own to toil long hours fleshing out Categorical Knowledge for humanity.

While being its secondary discoverer, next to Kant who knew not what he had somehow miraculously stumbled across, I am also a neophyte here, probing the depth of Categorical Knowledge. Still I am anxious to get my hands dirty in the work of uncovering what can be discovered about the extent and the rules of Categorical Knowledge.

Categorical Knowledge as I discovered it, begins with the cogito.

Whenever I think of the cogito in this context I hear the score of Morning Mood from the Henrik Ibsen 1867 Peer Gynt play.

Descartes, when he discarded and doubted everything about which he could not have been fooled by the hand of God, discovered for us the base unit of Categorical Knowledge, I think, there, I am, Cogito, ergo, sum. The cogito has long since been recognized as an almost singularly important step in philosophy, but few have been able to expand upon it, simply because they knew not the next step.

Like Kant, academic philosophers mostly saw their task as an extension of their increasingly empirical understanding of the world. Reading this genre of philosophy to some degree is like watching a very clever and perhaps all too persistent blind man paint. Such a painter might know where the different tubes of assorted colors of paint are. He surely would have some notions about the canvas, his brushes, and even the texture he might impart as he painted. But being unable to see his creation, he would be unable to gage the appeal of his painting except by what others say about it.And, it is not important that Descartes cast the paramount role of doubt into the hands of his God. And too many since assumed here was where the crux of his important discovery lay. It is merely important that he revived the Greek notion of philosophic doubt in a noble effort that then landed him upon his own desert island, the cogito. Like Crusoe, Descartes found a lonely but beautiful paradise. From just such a paradise it is then only first possible to understand how impossibly difficult and what a counter intuitive task it might be to comprehend the thing in itself, to affect our free will, and, to even know it might be possible to effect free will.

Kant almost blindly correlated the notion and perspective of the baseline of the cogito across the peep-holed moral landscape of his vacant and sightless Categorical Imperative when he made the his great conjecture. Or, so I can only presume. For he did not pursue where it led. It was Kant's conjecture, that it might be possible to establish a categorical moral imperative.

The extent of Kant's moral understanding then, was that there is something incredibly powerful there, even categorically powerful. And even if he did not know what it might be, his instinct could not be ignored. His instinct told him there might be a categorical moral imperative. Such a bold statement coming form a philosopher who did not know The Moral Imperative of Life, is a more than notable statement about the thing in itself as humanity can come to know it.

I can only marvel at how astute Kant was in his blind pursuit. The choice of his expression, I do not know it in the German, French or Latin, but in the choice of the term Categorical Imperative he chose to describe as something that might be possible, a moral base unit, a baseline that was true in every instance without exception; this is a stunning bit of deduction on his part. For Kant knew not The Moral Imperative of Life, the answer to his conjecture.

Kant's immortal task was merely that he somehow conjured out of an empirical mind the most important attribute of such an imperative, that this would be categorical true, true in every instance without exception. Kant could not have imagined there would arise, from the answer to his conjecture concerning a Categorical Imperative, this new knowledge set of Categorical Knowledge.

And here with the irrefutable baseline of the cogito, the obligatory self-reflection of The Moral Imperative of Life, the resultant philosophic acknowledgement that life is good and indeed the ultimate truth as well, we have thrown wide open the door to the discovery of Categorical Knowledge, the only known path toward any truth our humanity might ever discover.

There is nothing empirical or logical about such discoveries. These discoveries come from the soul. The soul is that which makes us individuals. And, it is from this individuality alone that such progress arises.

Philosophers were never meant to be busy empirical bees.

Chapter XIX ---- A Methodology for Discovering Categorical Knowledge

As I stated earlier, historically the import of the cogito was well noted, but also it left even great philosophers impoverished for ways to expand upon it. Even Immanuel Kant only subconsciously made progress upon it and, he only unknowingly expanded it when he gave us the conjecture of the Categorical Imperative.

So, what methodology could possibly aid philosophers in their quest to derivatively uncover more Categorical Knowledge, that knowledge that is true in every instance without any exception?

First, we can know there is Categorical Knowledge. We find it in the cogito. We find it in The Moral Imperative of Life. These two statements are always true without any exception. And there in is the key to our method.

Descartes' method for discovering the cogito scours everything away but the base line of our methodology, the cogito. The Moral Imperative of Life is a method for discovering Categorical Knowledge that is derived from denying the lonely despair of the cogito. It is quite clear the concepts involved are not empirical processes, nor wholly logical.

Until the present time philosophers have used doubt to exclude any and all ideas, and statements of purported truth from their philosophic acceptance. Now, with The Moral Imperative of Life stated and qualified as Categorical Knowledge, a special class of categorical knowledge that must be the moral first step in any human action or thought, The Moral Imperative, the "M.I./L." if you will, now permits philosophers to include or exclude ideas with a first level of acceptance beyond the initial qualifying doubt. Does this idea, statement of purported truth pass the test of the M.I./L.? becomes the initial step in every philosophically moral process made by humans. And the M.I./L. requires the moral philosopher to apply this test as every other step in any process, action or deliberation.

There simply is no moral contravening of the M.I./L.

Intrinsic to the idea of using the M.I./L. to qualify philosophic ideas and statements of purported truth, is the notion that life itself is the ultimate good as well as the ultimate truth. For certainly nothing could either be held out to be good, or truth if it harms the prospects for life.

This is a strategic pattern shift away from empirical approaches to knowledge philosophic or otherwise. It does not hold out learning for the sake of learning alone as the quest for truth. Instead this new paradigm based upon the M.I./L. holds out learning to live and finding ways to master living life so as not to detract from the quality-of-life opportunities of those who will follow all of us into this world as truth.

To accomplish this in a framework where the goal is the discovery of Categorical Knowledge, we find our inquiry does not plod forward meandering as does scientific inquiry. The thought pattern becomes two staged. First a check of the moral direction, and then perhaps a single step forward. And then another check of the moral direction, before another step is made either forward or backward.

Chapter XX ---- The Danger Intrinsic to Methodologies for Discovering Categorical Knowledge

All of this seems rather draconian, almost as if the M.I./L. requires a new Inquisition, a new Luddite back-stepping, or a goose-stepping away from scientific advances that are the landmarks of our civilization.

Intrinsic to the M.I./L. are notions that there is knowledge, and there are perhaps even entire knowledge subsets, that humanity should abandon. This notion is not so new. For the most part humanity no longer practices witchcraft, sun worship, or human or animal sacrifice, each of which contained significant knowledge sets made of and by the human species.

What is new, and at least to some will appear objectionable, is the notion that some of our mainstream knowledge sets, some used to build, maintain and grow some modern technologies will be called into deep and worrisome question by the M.I./L. and our quest for Categorical Knowledge.

But then again, this may not be so difficult to embrace or understand either. Governing groups have outlawed the use, research and technological advancement of landmines, and to a lesser degree weapons of biological warfare. These are technological knowledge sets that have already had some restraint placed upon them due simply to the crude instincts of policy planners who have tired of the humanitarian noise about the carnage.

The M.I./L. specifically requires a stronger standard, a moral shield and banner, a test, a standard, the premises and justification for which are set forth by this philosophic work; a standard that questions every impending intellectual legacy, every kind of idea and, every statement of purported truth, or, any statement to set forth to factually act as a measure or indicator of truth.

Such an approach as this will be quite different from the wholly unfettered empirical inquiry societies generally have afforded empiricism, when, before the advent of Categorical Knowledge, empirical inquiry held the mantle of truth, as it has since the Enlightenment.

The idea of screening and prohibiting by moral edict and belief, personal or societal, some inquiry is not entirely new. In the Middle Ages the autopsy of cadavers was seen as far too ghastly, gruesome and unholy a practice to be permitted by the church in Europe. The Chinese at one point outlawed the manufacture of gun powder because of its danger. And the Japanese because of their recipient-end experience with nuclear weapons have placed strong restrictions upon this technology. There are restrictions upon euphoria inducing drugs, as well as some armaments that can be bought and sold by civilian populations and military establishments. There are and have always been restrictions upon what can be taught to children.

The danger intrinsic to this prohibitive sort of methodology for discovering Categorical Knowledge is to be found in how the justifications qualifying Categorical Truths are established and maintained by the philosophic community. Categorical Knowledge, the restrictive philosophic covenant Categorical Knowledge will necessarily grow into can become a great protective shield of truth or, an oppressive veil of tyranny and ignorance, and even a reason for something as vile and inhumane as a new inquisition.

These dangers existed before the discovery of The Moral Imperative of Life and the recognition of Categorical Knowledge as a separate and more important knowledge set that lauds over all the empiricisms and superstition alike.

After the Second World War some ineffective proscriptions were placed upon medical knowledge gained by involuntary and lethal experimentation upon prisoners by German medical personnel. Unfortunately no effective means was developed to rule out use of the knowledge developed under these fiendish empirical endeavors.

The technology and the personnel who developed the U2, Buzz Bomb, rockets in Germany during the war were eagerly embraced after the war by the US government anxious to develop and maintain a sure military superiority. But the history of the movement of military technologies around the world after the Second World War shows exactly the sort of proscriptions that are necessary, if possible. And these must be possible, if humanity is going to embrace civilized life.

I call not just on intellectual leaders for proscriptions but also for encouragement and maintenance of our humanity here in this new far more important quest for knowledge, Categorical Knowledge. I also call upon every individual to keep close to their heart, the sure notion that bureaucracies are categorically immoral. And to recognize that bureaucracies only arise due to the oppressive needs of a humanity with too grave a footprint upon the planet.

More than 60 years ago the American government set up the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb ostensibly to end the Second World War.

All these years later and existing among so many others, that bureaucracy, while it has morphed into a differently named bureaucracy, several in fact, it still exists. It still makes nuclear weapons as well as delivery systems, and a myriad of other humanity ending killing systems.

And within every empirical knowledge set being amassed by the bureaucracies of every science all the while being funded by government, there are countless other potential and actual WMDs just awaiting the time these can and will be used against humanity.

The most definitive political treatise ever written is still Machiavelli's The Prince. Given our view here however, that bureaucracies have displaced any and every authority of rulers, Machiavelli's views have become an obsolete curiosity.

It is clear no political leader, party, institution, nation nor even any league of nations can control all of the dangerous empirical knowledge as it plays out upon the future of humanity.

And of those political leaders and would-be political leaders who tried to follow the Machiavellian tale, would it please you to know, while they made great fodder for the history books, not one of them ever expressed their free will? It is true. They are all mere automatons who can be made as effective as lamp posts and fireplugs by those who know how to express their free will.

There is no antidote other than the foresight to hesitate, proscribe and refuse acknowledge or to fund continued research into the empirical sciences. This is the view afforded by what we can know through Categorical Knowledge. One simply must learn to occasionally consider in order to test veracity, everything from a much more distant view than is common or intuitive, and nothing like what Machiavelli thought. While such a distant view may not tell us much about the reality we have come to expect with a right answer, such a distant view can sometimes tell us what isn't reality if we are familiar with as many wrong answers as seem to abound.

Bureaucracies are categorically immoral because human nature ensures the chance will be taken up and lent toward the irresistible opportunity for both ignorance and corruption. These are as sure as bees will make honey.

Chapter XXI ---- Categorical Knowledge Can Be Expressed as an Art Form

In Twain's The Mysterious Stranger we are early on greeted by this:

"I am very old and poor," she said, "and I work for my living. There was no way but to confess. If I hadn't they might have set me free. That would ruin me, for no one would forget that I had been suspected of being a witch, and so I would get no more work, and wherever I went they would set the dogs on me. In a little while I would starve. The fire is best; it is soon over. You have been good to me, you two, and I thank you.

She snuggled closer to the fire, and put out her hands to warm them, the snowflakes descending soft and still on her old gray head and making it whiter and whiter. [...]

The Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916 after Twain's long life. It is no doubt Twain's own white hair he is describing here upon the head of an old woman condemned to be burned at the stake accused of being a witch.

It is good to know what is awaiting us in our old age, if only to brace oneself for it. For what we care about for ourselves, will soon enough grow insignificant even unto ourselves, let alone how others around us will mostly feel.

Twain gives this and much more of the reflections of old age to us brilliantly in The Mysterious Stranger a work cobbled together after his death from three separate manuscripts by Twain's biographer Albert Bigelow Paine. A. B. Paine wrote a fair portion of this work himself, knowing Twain well, and carrying his thoughts on after Twain's death. This is a work without a single laugh except as an inside joke for those who knew Twain not as but one of America's most important authors, but as one of history's most important philosophers.

While there are others to consider, The Mysterious Stranger is one of Twain's most important works for philosophy. It is Twain's philosophic capstone to the great monument of truth he created. In The Mysterious Stranger Twain repeatedly wrestles with the Moral Sense with a more morally mature view than were are used to from any of his contemporaries or predecessors. Twain for his time broke new moral ground no one today can fully appreciate because his thoughts have been so well assimilated into all of our thoughts in the West. When The Mysterious Stranger was published, few would be then left who doubted we all toil in the shadow of the greatest of great men when we read Twain.

This is the last of Twain's workload for us, The Mysterious Stranger, and no doubt, as he tried to write it, he knew it could not be surpassed by any other later work he might contribute to the great library of humanity. Twain got right what needed to be said, and what he and perhaps only he and his autobiographer were capable of saying in The Mysterious Stranger.

As great as is the American sense of who Twain the author is, as he was an American author about whom Americans are rightly proud, I do not think anyone has yet come near or even within any few country miles to reckoning the greatness of Twain the philosopher. We view him as a writer spanning but the Civil War era, but his career and his life spanned into the era of some of the most humanly damning work in empirical science as well. When The Mysterious Stranger was written, humanity had Relativity Theory, and the then and still now unbelievable horrors of modern warfare were already being written into history. To quote Twain from The Mysterious Stranger,

Next, Christianity was born. The ages of Europe passed in review before us, and we saw Christianity and Civilization march hand in hand through those ages, "leaving famine and death and desolation in their wake, and other signs of the progress of the human race," as Satan observed.

We cannot say, Twain's Moral Sense was immature, for it was not. He did lack the M.I./L., but he clearly knew life to be good, and no doubt suspected it to be the ultimate good as well as the ultimate truth. Twain's deficit of the M.I./L. was not so great he does not overcome it for us in The Mysterious Stranger.

No philosopher as old as Twain is when he wrote The Mysterious Stranger could possibly fail to write with a mind focused squarely upon the future, or with any absence of the notion common to anyone of great age, that life had slipped by so very fast, as it does always leaving the old with mouths agape, and so commonly utterly incredulous for the brevity of it.

We must forgive The Great Man very little, for he gives us so much in The Mysterious Stranger. He digs deep into his own heart and mind and notices well enough for us, we all sleep-walk through life unable to comprehend or even take notice of anything about which we are not already dreaming all the while.

It is easy to forgive Twain his praises immature. Twain was an artist of great depth. He was an artist who wrote and entertained millions. And he still entertains millions. Twain is a man like any of the greatest, one with whom we would like to converse today. Here Twain is somewhat unique for us and for his era, for he was not an empiricist at heart.

Twain though, while he lived and wrote, he was indeed also one of the greatest observational philosophers. He followed his human instinct to seek the truth, to uncover it and convey it. It is not an empirical truth. Rather, in quite bold brush strokes, Twain never fails to show us the path toward categorical truths by noting the absence of so much real truth in conventionality. And occasionally like the two quotes above, he points out to us other truths we might not have otherwise met up with in our own short lives, here made richer by Twain.

Twain when we read him today still interrupts all our dreams in order to interject his own into ours going on a hundred and fifty years later, as he will no doubt a thousand years from now, if there are still humans to laugh and reflect how we laugh at ourselves.

To update adequately our understanding of Twain will take as long as we have been updating our understanding of Diogenes, longer still, because we have so much from Twain and precious little from Diogenes.

Again I reference The Mysterious Stranger.

In it a tree of great cornucopia is smited and forever made to burden a man for as long as he shall live, to water it, to keep the tree alive, the life of a man being tied then by fate to the fate of the tree. The parallel is quite neatly implied as to how we should feel our obligation to the future in regards to how morally reckless and morally shamefully we act today.

The world around us today created by the empiricists gravely insults the morality of our humanity. And we are now tied to our own fate and burdened by requirements to carry water to everything that now only barely sustains us, and, ever less the progeny of all humans so tenuously coming in our future. Humanity's is a cumulative curse.

In The Mysterious Stranger Twain makes for us as a contrasting straw man a strong determinists' argument, that fate rules us all, which nearly it does. For we can have little enough control over our own lives, being done with so quick as they are, and almost long before we are aware of what life is.

Clearly Twain saw, life is a party, a party with all the responsibilities every party-goer encounters.

But Twain lets us know too, we can have some influence over the future and its burdens, for there is no other reason for Twain at close to eighty to write The Mysterious Stranger. And write he does. He encourages us all to abide our moral conscience, culture, our moral instinct more thoughtfully, and to develop what Twain refers to as our Moral Sense.

Here is a part of a Twain short story, A Horse's Tale in which Twain shows us in no uncertain terms, there is more, and we are still the barbarians. This quote is like a fable, being a conversation between two animals. These are great words, and words upon which to linger from the Great Man, the Great Philosopher, Twain.

12 - Mongrel and The Other Horse

Our moral sense must be Categorical Knowledge, and Twain senses that by how he views and portrays humanity's mostly foolish moral efforts in The Mysterious Stranger. Clearly Twain knew, no one had figured out what was really important yet, and much that was important was left to chance or neglect. Twain, more than Kant however, seems to know how very close he had come to discovering it.

Where Kant was tedious and even dishonest in his assessment, Twain is boldly able to doubt even himself. It is Twain the philosopher at his finest, and our finest as humanity too.

For all of us, Twain unconsciously hints at the Categorical Knowledge of his Moral Sense. He quite intentionally rattles us with his experience as to how uneasy it will be seeking a veritable moral sense. He as much as intimates that it must be a categorical sense by the method of his story, The Mysterious Stranger, a story wherein he turns the deity-doubt method of Descartes wholly upon its head, and gives us the irrefutable doubt and logic and reason of a kinder, gentler and more lovable relative of Satan in the place Descartes gave to God for Descartes' purposes of his own philosophic doubt.

Twain clearly does not leave this world having given up. He leaves us in The Mysterious Stranger with one last colossal moral effort to give us reason to question and an ability to find some greater moral grounding in all our beliefs.

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier."

Twain I could have made smile with The Moral Imperative of Life. He would probably have immediately asked, Have you told anyone else about this?

Twain though lived in what is from our perspective in the Twenty-first Century a nearly idyllic time. Many far less learned contemporaries of Twain thought of him as a cynic. But they had not our hindsight to view their own idyllic time and comprehend the clearness of the clarion cry Twain resounded for all humanity, about all, that it did not last, about it, that much of it was good, and above all, that which has not been too good to begin with and has since only become much worse.

Twain, more so than any other worldly writer was right in his observations made for us.

Chapter XXII ---- Categorical Truth in Art, Oral Traditions, Common Sense and the Humanity of it All

For those who may consider their philosophic luck and skill worthy enough to take up early the task of assembling Categorical Knowledge and scribing it into the library of humanity, there is the question of source, and the questions regarding the methods by which to convey Categorical Truth.

Many lackluster and wholly mistaken philosophers, philosophers who would like to be like Kant who would have made philosophy a science, have asserted the analogy is a poor substitute for logic.

Nothing could be further from the truth. An analogy is far superior to any logic ever conjured by humans. Logic is wholly fallible and always must be left submissive to assumptions critically forlorn, and to stand for truth without re-examination of the basic assumptions that are ceaselessly so tenuous and unfailingly capable of undermining the veracity of every logical approach and assertion.

An analogy on the other hand is made up wholly freeform, fluid, sweeping away dangerous shoals of ignorance; and it has not the crucial fault of any underlying assumption that cannot be adequately re-examined and questioned. An analogy can be modified, and re-examined for veracity at any level of its existence, and even checked by making other analogies for contrasting the effect of another upon the first asserted.

Sometimes as I write, or read, I become overwhelmed with the wholly fortuitous discoveries I made in The Moral Imperative and Categorical Knowledge. I honestly have been so lucky, so fortunate.

Each of us wishes as we grow old that we might live long enough to get a glimpse of the future to answer some of the more pressing questions of our own time and our own focus. The feeling for me is somewhat like not wanting to put a book down, even though I have become too eye-strained and mentally fatigued to read any further. The thoughts continue to rattle about my mind; I expand upon them; I note ideas and views I feel I should write down for posterity; I lose my place where it was I was amongst new ideas, new views; and I start over again often after I have lost consciousness due to my fatigue, and then I return to my work refreshed to wonder where and what it was I managed to leave off at, before when I left it, those precious thoughts that echo only in my own mind. Are they gone?

Though to be a part of that future so late in one's life as have I, is like finding an impressive gold nugget in the dirt, and for me next to it, finding a great uncut red ruby too. The golden nugget is The Moral Imperative of Life. The great shining red ruby is the notion of the broad landscape of Categorical Knowledge that flows happily and unimpeded from The Moral Imperative of Life.

Categorical Knowledge is the knowledge of how to put all the demons back into Pandora's Box. But it is more than that too.

The broad landscape of Categorical Knowledge is only made as grand as it is by The Moral Imperative of Life that lifts the fog of brutal ignorance and opens the only door to civilization for the first time in the history of our humanity. There is no other door to civilization than free will, and no free will without The Moral Imperative of Life. That is, unless we want to ascribe to and, describe the bees and the ants as civilized. Perhaps they are, but they are not humanly moral, and neither will they ever have any reason to have a consciousness that allows them to see the great beauty of the world, or, the preciousness of the life they have each been individually lucky enough to experience. There will be no bee art or ant poetry. And neither will tell a single decent joke either.

Even our own consciousness has been deficient prior to the discovery and acknowledgement of the Moral Imperative of Life for the Categorical Knowledge we make of it in recognizing the definitive categorical nature of the relationship we must afford it as it relates to any other truth we might suspect and wish to omnisciently invoke, what is otherwise blindly, unverified by our individual notions of competence in the presence of our measure of the thing in itself. By such a wanting consciousness we would have been wholly unable to see in ourselves in the mirror for our self reflection and what we are. And how ironic it is that consciousness in some state must exist for other species as it did for humanity unaware of The Moral Imperative, and, that now we know without some higher being to guide us, our consciousness must be utterly meaningless when placed before and lost among the ever present backdrop of the infinite complexity of the thing in itself.

Our knowledge must swim lost in a great sea unable to be singled out as either truth or untruth or even for its existence one iota beyond our individual acknowledgements provided for us by the stunningness of the cogito.

But we must put the cogito into its proper perspective. We each must rely upon the estimation we have of ourselves as this is part of the thing in itself. Here there is no better possible illumination of this process of how we estimate the reality of ourselves than for us to look at the painting of the French King, Louis XIV painted by Hyacinthe Rigaud.

This absolutely stunning portrait of Louis XIV is exactly the estimate that each of us has of our ability to place ourselves within what we perceive as the proper perspective for our ability to comprehend our existence as we relate to and exist within the thing in itself.

Now I am sure many of my readers are looking at this picture and wondering, is this author-philosopher really going to use this portrait to make such a statement? Yes. I absolutely am.

My wife, Janie, and I discussed this portrait for hours one evening. She thought old Louis looked a bit of a pouf, or at least a bit strange. I resisted her assertion. And she said, "Well, he is certainly dressed in the latest fashion!" Again I resisted, stating that no, he is dressed as a French king thought he should dress. I further explained to her that as the artist painted this portrait of Louis XIV, if what my wife thought of it was in any way a possible realistic view of the portrait, the artist's life would have been in jeopardy. I have included this conversation between myself and my wife concerning this portrait because I have no doubt some of my readers, if not most, are thinking as did my wife.

To dispel my readers' misperceptions about this painting, and allow each to understand how I could describe it as the best perspective for our ability to comprehend our existence as we perceive we relate to reality and exist within the thing in itself I will now relate what I told my wife about this painting after I'd done a bit of Internet research concerning it.

This painting is in the Louvre in Paris. When you approach this painting, you do not think to yourself, "What is with this pouf?" And nor has anyone ever had such a thought as they stood before this painting. This painting is nine feet tall by more than five feet wide! Your impression is, "Holy cow! Look at this guy!" And that is exactly what Louis XIV wanted. Just as it is exactly the best perspective for our ability to comprehend our existence as we perceive we must relate to reality and exist within the thing in itself.

If there are more advanced species than our own living in the Universe, they too learned of The Moral Imperative of Life. They too learned that only Categorical Knowledge is on the path toward veritable truth. They too learned that empirical knowledge is not truth. They learned empirical knowledge is merely a dangerous means of navigating in a great frothing sea of endless directions toward danger with no landmarks or, stars to guide.

All empirical directions lead unerringly toward tragedy and a global demise for life. The truth of life being life itself, the ultimate truth and the ultimate good, even if there is no knowledge of The Moral Imperative of Life or of the Categorical Knowledge that springs from it. This then is surely the tempted fate of the otherwise hopefully continued future that has born us so precariously and preciously alive, loving, feeling, rejoicing and so exuberantly ecstatic about our own personal existences today. As individuals we will not always be here. And we have only one possible worthy legacy to leave to those who will or, perhaps only might follow us here into this world.

Both The Moral Imperative of Life and Categorical Knowledge are far more important to be learned than mathematics, and any branch, or all the branches of the empirical sciences combined. These empirical efforts to overcome our ignorance are at best feeble and, easily likened to witchcraft. It is all merely a similar skill, as the empiricisms have been learned and perilously adapted to fit our dubious needs with illegitimate and immoral methods wholly without the guiding moral constraints and the positive guidance of Categorical Knowledge and The Moral Imperative of Life.

This guidance alone will unveil a path towards improving life and the world. From where we are today Paradise is not far off, and finding that path clearly will be a process of merely undoing much that has been done empirically and was meant to, but failed to improve upon the lives of the living while ignoring the lives of those coming in the future.

These postulated more advanced species we have considered would certainly have learned all this. Or their species, like ours, could not have survived to become more advanced and civilized at the same time in a manner that removed the great dangers of unfettered empirical helmsmanship so close to the here aforementioned rocky shoals that threaten the vessel in which we all survive. The sea is rough. The vessel is over-loaded. And the darkness of an evening we all know may be our last is coming up fast.

There are no categorical empirical truths. Empiricism produces only pragmatic best-guesses from which tentative rules are devised to approximate what has been deduced from previous approximations. Everything is approximate in empiricism. The empirical rules are by their very definition temporary fixes that can and, often do fail and blow up as time demonstrates their lack of any real veracity. Every machine ever made by made has broken down. Every scientific theory ever heralded as truth has similarly been broken down.

Here in the discovery of Categorical Knowledge is the real wealth of a knowledge set directive meant to encourage those creative enough to carry this notion of our common need to distinguish between empirical knowledge and categorical knowledge, which is paramount to guide for us, a well being of our humanity as it hopefully advances into a civilized future. We can either focus upon this great civilized need and entertain our best efforts there, or, we can gamble we might survive the many even greater cataclysms empirical science will surely deliver upon humanity in the future if it is let alone, free to unleash its mischief and deviltry.

We simply cannot continue upon the unfettered empirical path. If we ignore The Moral Imperative of Life and Categorical Knowledge, our only other possible living deliverance from recurring empirical destruction, or worse, an overwhelming and absolute empirical destruction, would be that we might lose all our intellect and be made again incapable of being truly sentient beings.

And there, with the intellect of sentient beings, there! Human beings have found too much enjoyment of their very lives to ever consider the destruction of our intellect a positive development we would like to leave for those who would follow us into this wonderful world.

Chapter XXIII ---- We Will Make No Contribution from the Quiet in the Tall Grass of a Graveyard

Count the blessings of your life. Count the joys life has provided without a tardy regret. Count the number of times you have recalled in amazement your life, as all you recall is your life. Know too the observed can outlast the observer of the observed. And that the observations of the observer, if written down, can sometimes outlast even any memory of either the observed or, the sameness in the observer. So, write it down without shy restraint.

Know just how important are all the wrong answers too. Know so long before you think you might have one right answer memorized, it only then to await when perspectives change to become another answer, wrong. Wrong answers come tirelessly into being, always more likely. We have all no doubt committed to perishable memories many wrong answers. That is one right answer. Neither likely was this the first time those same answers were memorized, or the last for this or, for others who will retrace our footsteps, make the physical gestures, the confidence expressing movements, and allow those images to enter other eyes, again, to commit to another perishable memory another wrong answer.

In the morning now I walk. It is but a four mile walk, over hills on country roads, to visit with all the animals along the way, to see the sun rise and the vistas of morning. It is fall, autumn. The blackbirds, the Canada Geese are now beginning to flock up, in fours and twos and tens and twenties, and occasionally just now in fifty or sixty Canada Geese. I have seen them in Michigan years ago when by the tens of thousands they ceaselessly sailed from horizon to horizon, honking, honking while still more arrived all day long into the late evening as they disappeared into the enveloping ink of dusk.

Here and now, there are pastured horses, two whom I please and make friends with with wild apples I've picked for their trusting purpose and purposeful trusting along my way. There are beavers and muskrats, Whitetail Deer and moose, sometimes, and always their tracks are on the side of the road. A few humans drive by, mostly potato farmers, one other infrequent walker, and a kind and friendly young mulatto runner once! Amazing.

Though, one day is nothing to measure a lifetime by. But these walks day after day come close.

I rummage through years, events and acquaintances gone past, left in other fields, forgotten times remembered, the achievements and foibles of youth and life, sorting, soaring, seeking, never finding, though, but those brief and yet now endless encounters with memories of fond and tremulous events in the life I've come to think I just might have known. Was it? It is so difficult to tell what might have been real, what might have been the misperception of the day, and what might have been merely a dream. I have left much simply behind where there is no where else for any of it, wondering, wondering, did it all happen as that? It sometimes seems not possible, too fast gone, behind, lost but to memories like the dreams I know I remember, or, were they real too?

It is all a quite lovely dream, regardless. It is all this dream only I will know regardless how many others will have dreams that brush up close and warm with mine. It is like the warm sunshine again, felt, seen, and sensed through closed eyelids. Thank you, thank you, self and all others. You have been forgiving company and trusting hosts and more than common companions despite all our obvious shortcomings I can easily and surely will overlook for your better attributes I've grown accustomed to trust and rely upon. It is called life, but it is but a dream.

We go sailing past each other, but I recognize someone there too. I know. It is me again, and all I am, but that so, it matters not as it makes me foolishly and yet reassuringly proud and, at the same time it gnaws at my existence making a new memory where the hole made, lets the life slip through, passed, going, gone. I tried as best I knew for all, for me, and for you.

It is so funny to consider how being knocked unconscious can be remembered as a new starting point in a life.

You make us all cry, here, again, now. Get back to it, before there is no time left, fool.

Chapter XXIV ---- So What Can We Make of It?

The reader here should understand, as I write, I am going over these matters for myself, trying to make sense of Categorical Knowledge as well as The Moral Imperative of Life. As I follow and relate my own instincts, you should also follow yours. And write. Categorical Knowledge is new. The Moral Imperative of Life was unveiled to me only in 2006. Good minds will find fertile soil here in which to plant new thoughts that will thrive and flourish.

It occurred to me during my morning walk today, I might look to describing what is a moral action, since, due to discovery of The Moral Imperative, we now know more clearly what isn't a moral human action.

Johnnie Appleseed, while a fictional character, seems a moral character the lesson of whom I can begin with for this discourse about what is moral.

You will likely remember from your childhood, the story of Johnnie Appleseed related how this storybook character traveled the countryside planting apple trees wherever he went. Here we can consider this fictional character might have not only not detracted from the world of the future, he may have actually added to it without the common and significant harm caused by mechanized agriculture that fosters an over population of the planet, were he a real character. Or perhaps the storybook character is based upon the life of someone.

I believe the important thing here though, is not to look for doers in the world of high achievements in Categorical Knowledge. Probably the most moral life lived according to The Moral Imperative of Life is to live a life not bent upon improving the world for the future. And, if it is possible to improve the world, it surely would be accomplished by a life spent explaining to others their own moral duty, hopefully preventing some of them from doing what they might do otherwise. This will be the only way to preserve a viable world for the future.

There is a common myth in our Western culture that humanity's future is in the stars and space travel. This notion is no less preposterous, or at least only slightly less preposterous, than that we might expect to see a space ship blasting off from the petri dishes that populate biology laboratories. That humanity has built rockets that have propelled human beings as far as the moon is a spectacular scientific achievement, if we want to rate any scientific venture as an "achievement." We must measure the moon flights in light of the knowledge these flights were only capable of being accomplished by the most immoral of human cultures ever to exist on the planet, and more are planned.

One has to question, what is the value to humanity in putting so much human equity, literally gambling away nearly every other human potential by heading out into space? What is it humanity will find there that is not available to us here on earth? Nothing. And in the process of making such a gamble we are collectively running the risk of closing the door to all humanity in the future. No gamble is worth that wager.

It is the common mistake today of most ecologists, that they want to adopt a proactive approach, and to technologically fight the ecological degradation of the planet.

From the view point of The Moral Imperative of Life, as well as it is from the new knowledge platform of Categorical Knowledge, it simply is for the most part a non sequitur to even strive to be an environmental scientist. Such an effort is intrinsically the promise of defeat. And it is not enough to be an environmentalist either. The emphasis is in the wrong place. There is nothing wrong with the environment. The problem is with human knowledge, and how humans perceive of and use knowledge.

If we are looking for a new term to describe the approach of The Moral Imperative and Categorical Knowledge, we might call it acrosentient, meaning first thinking, or, thinking first.

We must understand, the empirical technologies of ecologists are no better than any other empirical technology for their likelihood of success without unforeseen complications that aren't so catastrophic that they negate any initially anticipated or some ill-perceived and temporary success. And because the technology of the environmentalist is specifically designed to effect the planet, it is even more likely to cause significant and irremediable harm to our planet.

Our humanity is now seeking to gain control of an immoral and world devastating culture in which the empiricists have time and again amply demonstrated for us, they are like a the proverbial bull in a china shop and the devil in the details when it comes to preservation of our planet for the future.

And all these many empirical knowledge peddlers, those whose approach to knowledge is framed in the carnival atmosphere of the empirical sciences; they simply heighten the collective anticipation of everyone in empirical societies, as all await their empirical messiah, or some less spectacularly ill-conceived optimism, thought as some possible good outcome to the collective actions of humanity framed within the human existence so utterly sure of its wholly faulty, even utterly suicidal empirical belief systems.

There is only Categorical Knowledge. All else is but superstition and witchcraft. Empiricism is a halfway step toward a sentient civilization. The great, unyielding ignorance overshadows all else.

Chapter XXV ---- Examining Humanity's Empirical Progress Through Economists' Lens

Empiricism has given to humanity specialized fields of study in many empirical sciences. Economics in the culture in which I live is just such a study. To some extent the mental interplay of the words, phrases and concepts of empirically studied economics has moved into the vernacular of the mind.

In a stunning example of the both the fruits and faults intrinsic to human logic, these vernacular notions of the common mind now rightly claim some intuitive knowledge of economics based upon the adoption of the economists' somewhat more formal use of their own words, phrases and concepts.

Whenever the words, phrases and concepts of any knowledge set gain legs and begin to move about away from the original framework and use, into new minds unused to the sometimes acknowledged and sometimes unconscious mental constraints intrinsic to what the empirical experimenter and theorist might hold, care must be maintained. One must be careful to be on the lookout for the mistakes that can be encountered, as well as for the insight possible when new eyes look at old assumptions.

And here I am going to attempt to draw some rather grandiose conclusions by drawing upon some long ago held assumptions expressed by the words, phrases and concepts of the empiricists' economics, and by interjecting these the words, phrases and concepts into a wild swinging (and surely I must acknowledge a possible miss) in a discussion about Categorical Knowledge.

Economists have asserted there have been numerous stages of what they once called industrial progress, but which we might consider changes in the strategy, or the underlying requirements inherent to changing paradigms of humanity's empirical existence.

For those who have studied economics I'll assert my own view that the words, phrases and concepts of the economists generally come from two competing, if entirely disingenuous and utterly superfluous empirical knowledge sets. These are those whose economic views follow the reality pinching empirical observations and theories of Karl Marx, and those who follow the Libertarian school of economics propounded by the Austrian, Von Mises, which was given to an opposing set of economists as a completely knee-jerk reaction against the somewhat ridiculous views of the Marxists.

Those who have read Marx and Von Mises will be astonished as to the similarity of their misconceptions and their mirrored and utter lackluster performance at the bar of observational skill. Neither view even approaches reality.

One can come away from reading either or both these authors wondering, what are these two historical economist figures really talking about? What? What hidden motivations, what subconscious scars, what twisted upbringings were there that provided the impetus for either author, Marx and Von Mises? What could have caused them to scribe such obscure interpretations of a world wholly disconnected from reality, as they each proclaimed they saw it around them?

Whenever one sees such a clearly mistaken duality of thought, each opposing the other with a ying and yang similarity, as here, like the impossible arguments of husband and wife, or two toddling siblings, as is the Marxist view contrasted with the Libertarian view, one should be suspect of the gross value claimed by either author for their respective proclaimed knowledge sets.

The sum of the two together is more likely where it might be possible to find some philosophic value, however small and insignificant that might be, were it even possible to be gained by straining to note the strange and even bizarre conventions held in common by each and, the stark and utter similarity in the words, phrases and concepts they both somehow thought meaningful.

These purported stages of human and thus economic development common to these two authors' interpretation of history, and all economists for more than several generations, we might better consider changes in the strategy, or changes to the underlying requirements inherent to changing paradigms of human existence.

The economics fable of the economic stages of man has been given to us wildly and variously by knowledge asserting economists as, 1) the hunting and gathering stage, 2) the pastoral stage, 3) the agricultural stage, 4) the manufacturing stage, 5) the industrial age, and now lastly the stage I would add to every economists' view to include within the body of their myth, the most recent addition to better consider changes in the strategy, or the underlying requirements inherent to changing paradigms of human existence, 6) the information and credit age.

For in life, as economists see it anyway, the survival of the fittest paradigm tossed out as reality by all these empiricists as if it were somehow a perverted but necessary truth, is now apparently all about avoiding a great multitude of legalized usury bear traps that plague modern existence.

The empirical study of economics now, clearly makes no real sense for those of us living long after the deaths of both Von Mises and Marx, those of us who are living in this most recent stage of man's economic development, the one that clearly will both enslave the world again and break all our inane nationalisms into far too many warring pieces for historians ever keep track of them all again.

Mixed in among these purported stages of humanity we saw institutionalized slavery made illegal, and even more slavery insidiously reinvented too many times to bother mentioning here except in the last stage I added, the credit age, which has all but placed life itself beyond the financial means of homo sapiens.

Here the approximations that are intrinsic to every empirical knowledge set come to the fore and dominate the scene in a sort of empirical anarchy. This is the economic faire humanity faces.

But virtually every empirical knowledge set is similarly crashing and burning in an epoch ending crescendo of madness. The empiricism of the political has finally at long last met the urgent demands of the empiricism of economists, where labor is most intensive to obstruct the outbreak of sustainable economy and an endless enemy in terrorism his proven a great boon toward these ends.

All this clearly portends yet another round of fiery iconoclastic ecstasy as the empiricists' ridiculous dream of endlessly growing science, populations and economies disintegrates into the realization that terrorism is but one plausibly more popular course away from society's self annihilation.

Philosophy is another.

Historically, some empirical views would point to a clear advancement of society, man and woman noting these many purported stages as an advancement, and even claiming each threshold passed was progress in some human sense.

These same empiricists might assert this advancement is not entirely dissimilar to the (often seen in textbooks or the funny papers) artist-rendering of the stages in the Darwinian evolution of Homo Sapiens from a knuckle dragging cretin to the sharp guys and gals wearing their suits and carrying their briefcases off to work on Wall Street or their telemarketing jobs. Thank you, Charles Darwin, for that mud in all our eyes.

However, for our discussion here in a framework of Categorical Knowledge we might return back to pull back the curtain of these stages of what the economists once described as industrial development while they also almost totally ignored the effect of these stages upon humanity other than to note that these stages provided for a greater flow of currency and likewise, something called a good economy built upon ever more empirical inventions, the shiny, noisy, polluting, often warlike and every time humanity degrading objects of empirical wonderment, all of it being placed into ever more empirical hands, and ever more empirical mouths of an ever increasing empirical population of empirical human beings, living empirical lives, to their empirical fullest regardless of the effect of the Age of Empiricism upon the future of our far less noble humanity.

And a colloquially eloquent realist might here assert for us all, "Hey, joik! Ya do what ya gotta do, right?"

And this is civilization?

Notwithstanding my arguments here, it will be argued by some empirical economists, that the typical human being, or perhaps simply the typical empirical human being of modest means living in North America or Europe, has more freedom, enjoys more conveniences and luxuries, is more broadly informed, and has greater opportunity to better his own position and that of his children than he would have had under any previous type of civilization with which we are familiar.

Let me give my readers here ample opportunity to digest and consider the validity of these arguments, in order that I may demonstrate the persuasive power of approaching such grand questions as these from the perspective of Categorical Knowledge and The Moral Imperative of Life. It surely seems possible, even likely, no small part of any number of my readers here might somehow find these logical assertions affirming the value of empirical society, cogent and even somewhat empirically, even possibly logically, compelling.

I would however, respond as a proponent of what The Moral Imperative of Life and Categorical Knowledge have taught me, that it is categorically true, that no empirical human being alive today can be assured of any future at all for either themselves or their progeny at least in no small part, due entirely to the innumerable empirical dangers brought into the once far less dangerous world by the application of many modern empiricisms.

And, that if the numbers and severity of these dangers are not on the ascendance still, mortally booby-trapping humanity's existence individually and collectively with ever greater surety due to the ignorance of what we don't know and, what the scientists don't know about the effect of what it is they are doing, or, trying to do, it seems illogical and, would be difficult to prove otherwise.

And furthermore, neither can any empirical human being alive today be assured that either they or their progeny will ever have even a chance at the most modest of standard of living or quality of life, that was both otherwise assured and enjoyed by any previous type of civilization with which we are familiar.

Categorical Knowledge is to Empirical Knowledge, just as Empirical Knowledge was once to superstition.

And there is apparently nothing in the economists' knowledge set that even approaches criteria of Categorical Knowledge.

Chapter XXVI ---- Can Categorical Knowledge Be Expressed Statistically?

I've been dealing with The Moral Imperative of Life for just over a year.

I've been dealing with the newer notion for just a few months that existing above superstition and empirical knowledge, there is something higher in Categorical Knowledge. As such, I'm grappling daily with what can and what cannot be Categorical Knowledge.

One must remember: My intellectual curiosities come from the tradition of philosophers who existed for a long time believing the only thing possible to know with absolute sureness, was the cogito. When Descartes found the cogito, he found something even Diogenes would have admired.

In philosophic time the analysis of a year and a few months can leave much to be desired. But I persist sure of progress as my time runs continually shorter.

The beliefs of superstition came about as a result of individual efforts to answer questions and relate the more revealing of those machinations to others whether by word of mouth or in a written language. Intuition, sparsely commingled with primitive logic and observations sometimes less than perfect, were the tools of humans who first developed the knowledge sets we now refer to as superstition.

We have not come a long way since. Or so we have been led to believe.

It nonetheless becomes difficult then to fit in the arrival of mathematics as this clever toy-like, game-like knowledge set arose for humankind. But it seems clear mathematics arose from the efforts of those imbued with pure unadulterated superstition.

To accept this notion that what is for some, the exquisite beauty and predictive power of mathematics; that this knowledge set could somehow arise from the superstitious mind requires some historic sense as well as a nimble mind. The task becomes easier as we think about symbols like the Roman numerals, and especially if we consider the complete lack of the zero for those imbued with the superstitions of the time and the knowledge set of number theories that had not yet found the need for a zero compelling enough to invent zero.

The later empiricism of the scientific mind was then, a major paradigm shift for how humanity views reality. Though empiricism too must be observed to have arisen from those imbued with the notions of only superstitions and some mathematics, which as I have already stated also arose from those superstitious minds.

Let me pause to inject here some better perspective for taking in the notion of what I am trying to impress upon my reader with one step back in our current perspective from the immediate discussion.

Every human being believes they have a good sense of the thing in itself, that reality that is just outside the reach of our sensing it and quite impossible for us to know in any great depth, if at all. This statement of course would include those human beings who were entirely immersed in the superstitions of the past. Every era views itself as the modern era. And, every mind views itself as the most cogent. And the view of every mind that seems so cogent to its proprietor is different from the view every other proprietor has of their own concept of the thing in itself. This again is no less true in an era that we would refer to as superstitious than it is in the modernity of empirical thought existing today.

Now getting back to where I left off...

I have considered long enough to provide what I see as an adequate analogy to demonstrate the working of the empirical mind upon reality. The empirical mind works in a method that can be observed to be generally quite similar to how we might imagine the method used to determine how the trajectory of a cannon ball was put into play. In a sense every empirical effort has been very similar to such a mental effort and feat.

To see what I mean here one must consider what the discovery of the solution to the canon ball trajectory problem entails. It entails trial and error. It entails observation. It entails the creation of theories and an application of mathematics. The method used to achieve the end result is quintessentially empirical. Keep in mind it is however, the method of empiricism I wish to describe here, not the result of the cannon ball trajectory problem.

The method of empiricism is seeking a reasonable solution that gives a good approximation of the results observed and expected most of the time. Empiricism, and every empirical result, always leaves out a place for a bettering of the result the empirical process might achieve, as well as for observations of results that do not fit the expected result.

Empiricism is a good method as long as you have plenty of cannon balls, and a nice safe place to shoot them.

Mathematics is a good knowledge set with which to find and express an empirical result discovered concerning the the quest for an answer to the cannon ball trajectory problem.

But we are concerned here with Categorical Knowledge.

As previously stated, I expect I shall have to borrow from the words and phrases of other knowledge sets to adequately express and explore the potential of Categorical Knowledge to determine what is true in every instance without any exception.

Mathematics might be one of those knowledge sets.

So, let me compare the analogy of the empirical exploration of the cannon ball trajectory problem with how we might discover Categorical Knowledge.

The empirical exploration of the cannon ball trajectory problem seeks an approximate solution through an otherwise almost opaque lens looking at reality. The empirical exploration of the cannon ball trajectory problem does not care about the entire picture, only the solution to a limited problem. So the opaqueness of the view upon reality taken up by empirical inquiry is only a detriment to the empirical process to the extent it might obscure a better approximate solution within the limited view required to solve, approximately, just this one problem.

Empiricism narrows what is observable about reality through its process of trial and error and theorizing. But this clouding of the lens upon reality made by empirical explorations generally aids in the discovery of an empirical solution.

Categorical Knowledge has no such license to ignore reality, if it is ever to attain a truth that is true in every instance without any exception, and Categorical Knowledge leaves no room for a better solution or results that do not fit the Categorical Knowledge discovered or, any previous Categorical Knowledge already existent in the whole of the Categorical Knowledge set.

And it is here at this moment in our discussion that I can introduce the usefulness of statistics in determining Categorical Knowledge. For the process of discovering Categorical Knowledge cannot permit itself to narrow and thus cloud its view of reality.

So where there is a clouding of the empirical lens viewing reality, a clouding that is necessary in empirical inquiry, necessary in order to narrow in onto an empirical solution; this empirical necessity can thus be contrasted with the necessity of determining by every possible means to what extent the lens being used to observe reality in a categorical inquiry is clouded. This in contrast, is paramount to any inquiry into Categorical Knowledge.

I can right now hear my empirical friends cheering and jeering me on, saying, "I'm glad you brought this up, Robertson. So, give us some insight here, about when the pigs fly!"

I entered into this chapter with a clear notion in mind as to what I was to accomplish here, friends, so hear me out.

It thus, seems quite possible in a negative affirmation of Categorical Knowledge to say, if the lens or the combination of lenses through which our observations are focused on reality is by their sum statistically too clouded to observe reality in its entirety, it is categorically true that as philosophers we cannot endorse proceeding any further upon any line of trial and error this line of inquiry might require, for fear of violating the principles of The Moral Imperative of Life by either our failure or our success.

The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.

And further, we should not look to determine what odds are against our succeeding in the discontinued inquiry simply because, failures tend to cumulatively detract from the potential for the future, and it is entirely likely any such knowledge set we should by chance perfect will have the potential, likely or not, to be used to negatively impact the future because we cannot think these things through in our blindness for what we might discover for use by someone else in the future.

And that, my friends, brings me to the next chapter, entitled, What Are Our Real Freedoms?

Chapter XXVII ---- What Are Our Real Freedoms?

Our sometimes pragmatically evolved empirical cultures are driven by envy, want, hatred, distrust of strangers, and an unrealistically altruist empirical democratic sense derived from the Enlightenment ideas of misguided political philosophers who espoused their wholly imagined Rights of Man found later in the basket before a guillotine.

These ideas then were later infused with the hackneyed work of those who also believed most fervently in a natural ascension of man from his humble beginnings through a process called both and alternatively, natural selection and also survival of the fittest.

This is all only undeniable evidence of how mixed up and wanting is human logic and reason. One had best assume logic to be a faulty premise as it applies to the otherwise accidental discovery of the thing in itself.

Who would have guessed humanity could be so humble?

These so-called humble beginnings are seen as sometimes better and are also now often recognized as being far more sustainable. Thus our humble beginnings are infinitely more moral than any current paradigm of human existence so foolishly since ensconced with any of the Rights of Man.

And while it has been widely believed for a period, morality is somehow a democratic process or a mob action with some far less than sparse spicing up of this well understood to be corrupt process of condescension leveled against those other unfortunate victim-societies that are pop-culturally, or perhaps better phrased, militarily inferior by some either culturally-centrist or militarily assessed approximation. We should all be suspect of these and any other similarly dim-witted notions about morality and truth.

We can note an ever present but increasing historic trend that, mostly those other cultures become intolerably inferior, when they possess some natural resource, often dwindling, that the most imperial of empirical cultures might desire. Gold was once the bloodiest reason for endless war, conquest and genocide though more recently it has become land and oil. The latter reality is clear evidence of over population.

Democracy, and the Rights of Man play no part in morality, unless these enfeebled ideas play some fourth-tiered role in preserving a standard of living or quality of life attribute humans collectively or individually might find desirable and to be included among those things that make life enjoyable, which some may feel should be preserved for the future.

Far from any notion that morality is a question to be answered by the vile majority, a proper definition of morality instead must include a clear and ever present path towards the most resplendent while still sustainable future.

But here quite naturally, we cross on over into the question, What might be our true and natural freedoms?

Humanity has ever been overly generous in its assignment of true and natural freedoms humans can safely, wisely and morally enjoy.

But one might ask, Surely, there must be some freedom worth dying for, for the future?

I draw here from the inspiration of the most important of Greek philosophers, Diogenes of Sinope, when I say, the most important right we all have as individuals is the right not to go along with any group, any leading individual or, individuals, in anything that does not command our moral interest.

Life is simply too short to have it commandeered by some crusading fool. And that is when to vote; not at the ballot box, but with your feet.

And as we are all sometimes crusading fools, this right seems well worth laying down the line whereby we might simply say, No, at any personal cost to ourselves.

It is better done here than done later. For here is where we see the mob begin to form, growing ever more fierce, when armies enlist brigades and legions of murderous killers, and when the empiricist tells all who will listen, they have in mind the next great invention with which to entice humanity yet again further down the path of its own destruction. It seems the moral duty of every individual not to join in on the all too common murderous and suicidal insanity that can grow out of just going along with the crowd.

There is a similar truth in all nations divided by two or more political parties. The moral measure of such societies, is that there are so many signed up into these political parties, all of whom are a mob in waiting, and a war looking to happen.

The essence of democracy is divisive and, that this is the reason all citizens should be interested in the affairs of the state. But moreover, the essence of your only true and natural freedom is to wholly curb your interest, never wishing to be part of the problems that invariably arise from participation in groups unrestrained by morality and incapable of thinking in terms of Categorical Knowledge.

Let those crusaders who make speeches and stage-fret about injustice, offense, inhumanitarian atrocity, fantastic opportunity or who extol the virtue of marvelous new inventions of empirical thought make those speeches to those about whom they perceive are causing the injustice, offense, committing the atrocity, or are in need of the opportunity or invention instead of to those whom they seek to rile into mobs of anger, violence, outrage, greed or marketable desire.

Every human being has the true and natural right to simply walk away from that which is immoral. Such a right is close to Categorical Knowledge. We instinctually avoid some dangers, but we must learn to avoid more. This is the lesson of modernity. Avail yourself of every opportunity to avoid danger headed for the future. It is your moral duty to the future not to let these things get out of hand and thus become more vital in and by themselves.

And, when someone is insistent upon our being interested, act too dumb to understand what it is they are blabbering about. For most of us are indeed too dumb to understand what these people really want when they come around telling everyone how our natural rights are being trampled upon by someone who should offend us, or that it is our natural right to avail ourselves of some opportunity just ripe for the picking.

In litigious societies here too we find a vast moral problem. It is thought there is a right of society to compel individuals to testify, and to thus go along with the hanging of a witch. But, it is the jurists themselves who are the conjuring, mob-riling witches. Society has no rights. The spurious notion of society when it is brought up and espoused by legal scholars and prosecutors is merely the vile incantation of legions of witches, each seeking to rile a mob and enable a hanging.

Human nature demonstrates universally how the propensity toward dishonesty, intolerance, a popery of intemperate haughtiness, and the belief that having sex with children is permissible for a self-anointed caste escalates with greater education and societal honor. Courts are surely the best example here for a complete lack of probity, but they are only slightly ahead of every academic institution for their own vile and unappealing dishonesty. The ape can be lauded, applauded, educated and certified but that will not make of him anything more than an ape except in the minds of these knuckle-draggers themselves.

When, and who is it that will prosecute the judges for their crimes? Who will cure these doctors of their diseases they collect and then give to every patient? And who will teach the teachers who endlessly teach lies? And why do they all think it is permissible to copulate and sodomize your children?

It is human nature.

At one point in time it was seen as a fit punishment to cut off the hands of thieves and brand the cheeks felons. Today they are commonly given tenure or appointment for life as judges in some court.

I am reminded here of a story I read many years ago, and I cannot place exactly the source. But it doesn't matter. For I intend to expound beyond the original scope of the story. The original story told of a French sovereign who while riding inside his coach and six in the Seventeenth Century had seen animals among the fields and pastures he passed, and was alarmed that as he passed some of the animals, they looked up and had the faces of people.

Today as our own nobles who live like kings among the small and quaint villages made of gentleman farms in the countryside surrounding our great cities, they might take a similar ride as this French sovereign, but into the fierce depths of the bowels of a city where they would observe people, and be no less startled to find they had the faces of animals.

Those who are wise enough never to lend the legal processes any undue credulity by testifying in and before their vile courts do us all a moral favor while looking to a more distant future. And, neither would I raise my hand in any protest when they are boiled in their own stew. Give them all over to Marat. He is of their kind and has a hearty appetite for them. Then they might have the ill-advised audacity to call on Socrates himself to attest!

This too is human nature.

There is no truth either in a courtroom, or, on the way into a courtroom.

Your health is in gravest danger when you decide to head off to a hospital.

And the education you afford your children is probably the most stultifying experience you could provide for them. It is all too often going to end up exactly like rape.

And, if there is any right you have it is to say, No, and to walk away. You will forever retain and possess this right, the only true and natural right anyone has, to walk away no matter any education or authority, no matter any threat, even though you may someday be imprisoned or slain for exercising it. It still is your right.

This was the experience Lincoln gave so many who wished to walk away from the Union. It is today couched in terms of a bloody and heroic national referendum on slavery. But slavery is far and away worse today that it was in 1860.

If I were required to give an oath affirming this natural right, it would be to command all or any of those who would deny it, to strike me dead as I turn and walk away. And still, even then, I will not offend the only true and natural right I have. For all others are but a ruse to afford and enforce an enslavement.

Chapter XXVIII ---- If Economics is the Answer, Then Why Does the Past Appeal to Us So?

At the pinnacle of modern economic thought is this notion that in modern economic times there is an increasing importance in consumption for ultimately determining the size of a national income, progress and, that it is the aggregate earnings of labor and property which arise from the economic efforts of humankind that must by-and-large then determine humanity's overall well-being.

Since one man's expenditure, it was thought, is another man's income, expenditure and consumption were determined to play a large part in the economic vitality of humanity.

Further confounding what has since been learned, it was also believed there were two types of monetary expenditure necessary to better humanity's condition, expenditures for simple consumption and expenditures for investment including furthering empirical research and development.

As economic leaders in government knew full well that expenditures for investment fluctuated wildly with the economic tenor of the moment, they continually primed the pump of expenditures for consumption by opening the spigots of credit to keep their economies growing by consuming.

These two expenditure paths, consumption and investment, were seen as all that was needed to meet humanity's goals, because if kept on an evenly growing keel, they would adequately provide by increasing the quantity and quality of market goods and services thought essential to the improvement and well-being of humanity in this sort of empirical market driven society.

There cannot be a better discussion and definition of the consumerism society that is at the ultimate arm's length reach of empiricism and the veritable implication of all empirical thought, consumerism.

Thorstein Veblen may have called it the leisure society, but it is in fact the consuming society into which humanity has been thrust by the adoption of empiricism as a path toward truth. We did not leisure ourselves into modernity, we consumed ourselves into modernity. Quite literally, with the arrival of modernity we consumed ourselves out of house and home, that very cradle of our existence.

I want you to be humored here when I remind you of the notion that, An idle mind is the devil's workshop.

Humanity continually has been asked the wrong question to determine the veracity of its path.

When some think of the past, they admire what is seen as a simpler way of life. This is surely an illusion. But still to continue our thoughts here, most also believe it would be difficult, if not impossible for them to live a life as it was in the past, despite its overwhelming appeal.

One need be continually reminded, however. The present is not as important as is the future for determining what is moral and ultimately sustainable.

So, perhaps we should all ask ourselves instead, were we given a choice whether to have our children or theirs, born into the future or into the past, which would we choose?

We must be realists about the past, though still, only by prioritizing moral goals using The Moral Imperative of Life and Categorical Knowledge will humanity ever feel again about the future the way it does about the past.

Chapter XXIX ---- Solving the Empirical Paradox

I sometimes read with horrified dismay of the efforts of economists to justify a continuation on the empirical path of trial and error, postulate, hypothesis, and logic, forever tweaking human ways and means, seeking greater efficiency in their methods for destroying the world with increasing celerity, when it is all in fact, this very tenuous and dangerous empirical understanding of the nature of our existence and truth that accounts for the social problem we must as philosophers encourage humanity to tackle.

It is the efforts of economists that so succinctly are the twisted barbarity we should seek to restrain, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and all the theoretical scientists must be forever restrained by Categorical Knowledge.

But, let us examine just this one aspect of the Empirical Paradox, the economists.

Any economist who might concern themselves with economic costs without tolling first the human costs of that which gave rise to and, that which has become the science of economics is far beyond reprobation.

Science, (and I include economics and politics as empirical sciences), would never be practiced at all were it not for this otherwise false notion that through the application of science, we can make life somehow better. This notion, of some ability to make life better defines the question for us.

We honestly need not look any further than this one question. Can the collective efforts of humanity make life better by haphazardly and empirically chipping away at everything around us? Is reality and our humanity so pliable this can be a method by which to create a better condition in the world?

Close inspection of this notion proves, such a belief as there is wrapped up in empiricism of humanity's ability to improve life, is pure animism, a belief in a cosmic guiding hand, perhaps a deity, kindly leading us through a maze of ever increasing complexity and ever more perilously compounded danger. That is all simply too fantastic.

But let me explain at a more specific level, why the work of economists is part of the problem.

History has taught us all, reality is very complex. Literally, reality is overwhelmingly complex.

No one understands reality, nor even any of reality's smallest parts, completely. And yet here we have economists making every effort to make our collective economic lives more efficient. The trend today among economists with an altruist's concern for global warming is to note for a concerned society that it is committing an economic inefficiency by making billions of dollars of infrastructure investments every year without taking the impacts of climate change into account.

These economists want to address a perceived problem disconnected from the rest of reality and as an economic inefficiency.

Unfortunately, and those kindling this sort of analysis should take note, even by taking what little we know of the impact of climate change into account, we still have no overall knowledge of the still very real and still very overwhelming complexity of reality. The complexity of reality remains, again, literally overwhelmingly complex. Only the empirical tools grow increasingly more powerful. Reality, what philosophers call the thing in itself, remains overwhelmingly complex regardless of the more powerful tools with which scientists can effect reality.

The factual dominoes of reality are stood on end, and, back to back, in every direction, everywhere around all of us. And whenever any of us moves, these are set off in a chain reaction we can neither anticipate nor stop.

There is an infinite complexity all around us, and that this complexity cannot be diminished by the crowing of a Ph.D. or, a great fluttering and squawking bevy of Ph.D.s even when spiced with a sprinkling of the preening and molting of sheer genius, has been demonstrated ad nauseum.

And, there is no prescience derived from playing the greater fool by ignoring our universal and incontrovertible blind spot here.

The solution empiricists seem to come up with at every turn of their perceiving a new problem, is that of a bigger hammer with which to pound upon the overwhelmingly complex workings of reality. It is easy to see most of the problems of humanity are now due to all the empirical hammers left lying around asking again to be used in another inappropriate way. Empirical progress seems only accorded, due and heralded because of the naturally inquisitive nature of humans, this inquisitiveness expressing itself as empiricists continually find more complex areas within reality with which to pound with their ever larger and more destructive hammers.

The very survival of the human race has been no more accountable to good or moral judgment about these decisions to whack away, than it has been to just fool luck, is a statement very near to the heart of the pressing need for Categorical Knowledge.

Furthermore as an example, history has taught us, not only was man not meant to fly, when humanity did teach itself how to fly, humanity created a vast impertinent and utterly dangerous knowledge set that proved capable of perilously enhancing humanity's propensity toward war and ultimately self-destruction. With aeronautics humanity polluted the atmosphere with hydrocarbon pollutants. Humanity spread disease and pestilence worldwide with ever greater celerity and frequency. And humanity added more impetus to the notion of the otherwise dubious value of these nationally competitive scientific ventures for technology's sake and for the sake of armaments too.

Where else can such a trend lead as common as it is? It can only end best by capping the degrading power of empiricism with a rise in the power and influence of Categorical Knowledge.

When man learned to fly, the net result was overwhelmingly thrilling but, quite negative. This is made especially obvious when we look at the direction such a discovery lent to further discoveries. From aeronautics came ICBMs and then Star Wars.

I do not mean to slander the self-sufficient and sustainable culture of Borneo, but, should Borneo have the bomb? We are no different from the people of Borneo. If anything, we are even more terrible barbarians.

Similarly, humanity is simply not collectively aware enough to ever consider that every time the Space Shuttle is launched and lands, many tons of pollutants are spent into the atmosphere. Most think they are witnessing something marvelous, the greatest fruits of the accomplishments of humanity when they observe all those pollutants and destructive prowess being leveled against a world otherwise quite rightly terrified by everything the Space Shuttle represents.

This example of the empirical paradox can be lent to every technological development from the harnessing of fire in prehistory to the exploration of genetics, nanotechnologies, and the harnessing of particle physics and Bose-Einstein condensates today.

And of all these fanciful empirical notions that life can be made better, pshaw! This is a lie and a fraud. Life cannot be made better. Life is the ultimate truth and the ultimate good all wrapped up into a single notion even when imperfectly understood as it is. This too categorically is part of the overwhelmingly complex nature of the thing in itself.

Short of changing the entire nature of our understanding of our existence and, with proactive caution taking into account the overwhelming complexity of reality, we cannot possibly fully fathom the utter sureness that there is always bound to be self-defeating lack of knowledge about the thing in itself that will negatively effect our existence when we attempt to better humanity's condition. This is true so much so in a technological society, we will by our errant and immoral efforts otherwise always end up at the point of putting the human species out of business entirely, due to some foolish sense of our competence.

And the goal of economists then, is to help humanity to make those mistakes more efficiently!

At this point in the history of our human existence, the important thing is no longer the unfettered pursuit of empirical knowledge. It never was. All these empirical soothsayers are mere P.T. Barnums. They are populists like Huey Long. They are all selling a quack cure for what ails us but never seemed to cause humanity as much discomfort as all these fatal empirical cures.

There is no personally accountable methodology among individual scientists any more than there is a collectively accountable methodology among all scientists. The scientific method is brute force, politically ambitious, profit driven and increasingly bureaucratic. The closest approximations we as observers of it can make of the scientific processes are aptly to compare the social evolution of leaders here as among the denizens of a cult.

Scientific hubris today exceeds any hubris of any other religion at any time in our past. And paradoxically the universally failed pragmatic and empirical approach has been proved a surely suicidal path time and again by younger more anxious to impress scientists who would have us all believe the incantations and prognostication so that society might fund and follow their new suicidal approach, which would they think afford them fame, fortune and power.

This is such as it was with the human genome project. While humanity clearly has the capacity to destroy like gods, it has not the capacity to undo the destruction or to keep that destruction from cumulatively degrading or destroying the future of humanity.

And yet still, scientists to the very last one would swear on a stack of original copies of Newton's Principia that they are doing science, that science is truth, and, that because their work is scientific they have the right to quarterback a gamble that might mean the end of the world for all humanity.

No! These gambles are immoral. What is there in these words these scientists do not understand?

The important thing humanity must come to a firm understanding of is Categorical Knowledge, knowledge that is true in every instance without any exception. Categorical Knowledge is the only approach that will dismantle the laboratories and force the dismount of all these suicidal scientists who have usurped the throne of our human truth.

It is only Categorical Knowledge that will tell every scientist exactly what is worth the effort, and exactly what is a foolish and self-defeating gamble immorally wagering the very future of our humanity.

And as a philosopher, I can tell you categorically, every empiricism is self-defeating until we have a good grasp of Categorical Knowledge to guide these otherwise fatally reckless empirical efforts.

That is simply the very nature of the paradox of what post-Enlightenment, empirical humanity has been building for itself at breakneck and suicidal speed. And with what is now a long self-evident history of changes made by empiricists of every sort, from ever-tweaking economists, political scientists, humanitarians and secular humanists of every flavor, to physicists, chemists, psychologists, electrical engineers and the ever encroaching medical professionals, we can be utterly sure none of it is any more beneficial to the increasingly doubtful future of a massively debased humanity than was any other witchcraft.

My apologies to those whose sincerity otherwise cannot be doubted. There is no other word for it.

Chapter XXX ---- Humans, the Tool Builders

I want to write about a topic I have written about before and draw it into this discussion of Categorical Knowledge. I know what I want to say, if it seems to come out awkwardly or terse here.

When I wrote about this topic originally I then referred to it as lost knowledge. I made a point about the extent of knowledge lost to humanity, the transient and temporal nature of humanity's ability to discover and possess knowledge, and the importance of writing down that which you are thinking as you read philosophy.

As I approach this topic again though, I want to impress my readers that human beings are tool builders. Humans construct some of the most amazing tools, and the variety, the genre of them is manifold.

There are the obvious sort of tools, each in endless variety, hammers, saws, screw drivers, knives etc. There are semantic and literary tools, the contraction, the analogy, the short story. There are ideas tools, Darwinism, Relativity, and Gravity before that. And really, all of superstitious and empirical thought is about building new tools of endless new varieties.

It seems all of the tools with which we are familiar by our use of them are at some point going to be distorted and lost to humanity. And, the differing knowledge sets given to us by the history of these are apparently no different. They too will be discarded in favor of others not unlike the songs of whales sung as they meander through their own reality, the seas.

I know this. Astronomy as a science was at one time almost exclusively a science made in support of navigational skills. There were then developed astronomical knowledge sets that would baffle any student of astronomy except the most advanced today. And yet perhaps even more startly, anyone who studies astronomy for more than a decade or two has found most of the empirical tools they learned about when they first studied astronomy, no longer have much pertinence, if they have not been proved misleading enough to merit forgetting about them altogether.

And even when I took Calculus, I learned with a slide rule.

Every knowledge set is like that, transient, malleable, forever changing and quite often made obsolete.

So, in this new age of Categorical Knowledge, we should look at the mountain before us that must be first climbed, that mountain of Categorical Knowledge that must also eventually be mined. And we can then take some small solace from the notion that Categorical Knowledge should stand the test of time far better than any of the other tools humanity has built.

And this is the point about tools here about which I write in this small chapter.

Categorical Knowledge is a tool set humanity has until now almost entirely over looked. But it is also the most important and the most lasting tool set humanity will likely ever construct.

Chapter XXXI ---- Bringing It All Back Home

Philosophy is the pinnacle of all knowledge. Philosophy existed before there was a notion of philosophy. And without a sturdy understanding of philosophy no being has any possibility of achieving the hope of freedom or, free will.

Doing something for oneself, or one's clan, state, nation, or tribe or, any other sense of the self is not an expression of free will. It is instinct, and selfish instinct at that. There is nothing of the automaton's instinct that is related to free will.

When the Englishman, Francis Bacon in 1620 began a methodical empirical frontal assault upon the world of humanity, recruiting an army of empirical soldiers as he did to do battle upon the world of humanity, he set into motion a course of events about which he could have no sense of what he would wrought upon the world of humanity. Let me assure you, were it possible for me to take Bacon by the hand today and, show him, he would bow his head in shame.

The reckless unfettered pursuit of empirical knowledge is not the power to enhance the lives of humanity, but the power only to debase and destroy it.

Bacon's Britain equipped with an empirical army and navy of immoral human automatons went on soon enough to express its empirical power over the whole world. This empire was not to benefit humanity, nor even Britain except as one might view Britain's many military and economic conquests as temporary phenomena in a world debilitating competition of nation states.

It is not until one learns to act for the sake of the future, that one acts morally of their own free will. We all would always act morally, were we to know how. The methodology of empirical knowledge is absent and silent of morality.

Moral acts are made acting only for the future, with the future solely in mind. A moral act is made in joyous yet also a solemn appreciation for our own lives. A moral act is made with the restraining compliant recognition that life is both the ultimate good and the ultimate truth. A moral act is made only after noting for our consideration the constraints of how our meager human intellect will always be tightly tethered from any omniprescient god-like flight by our human emotions, desperation, disposition and a commonly vile and more often than not envious and vengeance filled human nature.

We are not immortal. We are human. Life is short. We can however, appreciate and preserve a certain quality of life for those who will come into this world as and, after we leave it. Such moral acts alone can offer up the penance of a greater understanding and appreciation of our own lives. There is knowledge. It is Categorical Knowledge. And, Categorical Knowledge obviates all empirical knowledge that is left out of the harness of Categorical Knowledge.

Beyond sustenance, diversity of experience is the most endearing quality of life. We are thankfully surrounded by a sacred place of utterly stunning variety and diversity. The world cannot be made better by any act that culls this variety and diversity. Were this somehow possible, we certainly would not have the knowledge required to decipher the requisites for such a task.

Rene Descartes discovered the cogito through a process of depriving of his notion of sure knowledge everything that he could rule out through doubt. In the end Descartes found only the cogito was left, I think, therefore, I am.

Today using the cogito as a base of adequate philosophy, we can add little but the sure notion that life is good, and, that life is short.

To this notion that life is good, I have as a consequence added The Moral Imperative of Life:

The moral imperative of life is to live a life that detracts not at all from the lives available to those who will follow us into this world.

From the categorically true notion of The Moral Imperative of Life, I have found that what then arises is this new notion of Categorical Knowledge, e.g., that knowledge that is true in every instance without any exception.

That knowledge that arises directly from the strict and rigorous application of The Moral Imperative of life is Categorical Knowledge.

No other Categorical Knowledge can contradict The Moral Imperative of Life, for Categorical Knowledge cannot contradict itself.

Academic philosophers will come here and decry the fantastic leaps I have applied to philosophy. To this, here and now I respond.

Descartes was right. The cogito is all we can know for sure. Everything else is imperfectly implied.

But academic philosophers, you have lost all to your own conventions. What would Diogenes say to you? I know what he would say to me.

I will add to my argument the following notion of all knowledge.

When we are born we know we exist, for as Descartes has said for us, I think, therefore, I am. This holds true even for a newborn babe, even one in the womb.

From then on everything else we know of the thing in itself consists entirely of what fascinates us enough to enchant our brains where our senses meet, again imperfectly as Descartes noted for us. Each of us when so enchanted then, upon our enchantment quite literally constructs all our own imperfect personal knowledge and, hence we literally create for ourselves the entirety of the only universe any of us will ever know.

These many universes are modest and short lived, for life is short.

And, due to the manner in which we construct our own realities, none of our universes is even remotely like another's universe.

The individuals that make humanity literally sleep walk through each of their lives, for if they are not already dreaming of something, they will demonstrably miss it entirely.

When a philosopher writes philosophy, as have I here, it is his hope to enchant others so that they might be enchanted and construct knowledge for themselves. No philosopher has any adequate notion of what their writings or talks will create for others who may or may not be enchanted by their performance.

Philosophy, the philosophy that is the pinnacle of all human knowledge is a slow process. But it is nonetheless a sure process. Philosophy is a sure process because the only tool of philosophy worth heralding is doubt, unfettered doubt, and it is only doubt that can provide a path toward truth.

I can be doubted, and I have accomplished my philosophic purpose. Part of what I might have said can be accepted, and I have accomplished my philosophic purpose. Part of what I might have said can be discarded and exchanged for something else, and I have accomplished my philosophic purpose. For if I can cause others to feel an enchantment with philosophy, I have accomplished my philosophic purpose.

Humbled, as I now always am, coarse and plebeian as I surely will be deemed to be, I have written here to speak, to enunciate the truth that no other has seen and shared in their own time as precious. Forgive my mistakes, and my terse care, for always time draws nearer and, the hungry, towering urgency of any worthy goal, if this might be one, and if it is ever to be achieved, has pressed me insatiably as if stricken with a fatal fever or an indomitable love of humanity and life.

It is my most moral hope here, that by this work, others in the future will read my words for a time and smile fondly with their enchantment and the knowledge they construct for themselves based upon an enchantment with notions of Categorical Knowledge, and, The Moral Imperative of Life.

I will leave this world feeling, due to simple luck I have won the immortality lottery, and that my identity as a husband, a father, a man, a writer and a philosopher has been stamped onto a passport assuring some sort of meaningful life after death. I'll let these readers be the judge of that.

Perhaps, just as I became aware in my old age, of the wretched and nauseating stench of so much empirical barbarism, these readers too reading these words might chance to more clearly imagine what I did, simply a far less glittery, a much softer sounding and a far more pleasant fragrance of the world we should wish to bequeath to our moral humanity in the future.

How long will it be before Niagara Falls is restored to the seemingly sacred and pristine beauty that surely seems must have once been a legitimizing, and, worthy certification of the power of living life? So is the whole earth. And will any human then be alive to feel it?

It is a place called, Eden, this earth.

This is a work in progress. Indeed it will be in progress as long as there is philosophy. If anyone has any input, I may be tentatively reached by email at [email protected]

Don Robertson, The American Philosopher

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