alone. However, in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant 1794/1960), Kant gives an account of the moral agent which is carefully qualified to avoid the pitfalls of a naïvely optimistic theory. In fact, he is scornful of moral optimism. ‘That such a corrupt propensity must indeed be rooted in man need not be formally proved in view of the multitude of crying examples which experience of the actions of men puts before our eyes’ (p. 28). The facts speak for themselves: there is too much evidence