Immanuel Kant is the philosopher who brought to its culmination the eighteenth-century Enlightenment's argument for the freedom of human thought and action from the bonds of traditional political and theological autocracy. Yet Kant has also seemed to many to advocate an insistence upon obedience to law for its own sake, an insistence upon blind obedience to law that in the twentieth century just ended has been associated with the destruction of everything for which the Enlightenment stood. A profound paradox can be avoided only if it can be shown that Kant intended obedience to universal law to be mandatory solely as the necessary condition for the realization of human freedom and through that freedom a systematic and unselfish distribution of happiness among all persons seeking a systematic union of their purposes in a world both natural and moral in which each and every person is treated as an end and never merely as a means. On this account, while all human beings must be treated as ends in themselves, the sheer fact of adherence to universal law is not an end in itself but is rather the means to the realization of the human potential for autonomy or freedom in both choice and action. In Kant's own words, “If only rational beings can be an end in themselves, this is not because they have reason but because they have freedom. Reason is merely a means.”