Kant's Progress in Heaven

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant postulates the immortality of the soul as a necessary condition for the realization of the highest good. Most important is the notion of infinite progress toward perfect conformity of the Gesinnung to the moral law. But how can a soul separated from the body make any progress toward moral perfection? And what does `progress' mean if time, as a precondition of change, is conceived as a sensible form of intuition? Both questions are controversially discussed in current research. Most problematic is that both moral perfection and progress understood as continuous change toward the good seem to presuppose sensibility. In this paper I will argue that neither the testing of virtue nor the infinite progress toward holiness require a sensible nature. I will show that this interpretation is supported by two later Kantian texts: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and On the End of All Things.