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Page 18
With the view of attaining to this, it is of extreme importance to
remember that we must not allow ourselves to think of deducing the
reality of this principle from the particular attributes of human
nature. For duty is to be a practical, unconditional necessity of
action; it must therefore hold for all rational beings (to whom an
imperative can apply at all), and for this reason only be also a law
for all human wills. On the contrary, whatever is deduced from the
particular natural characteristics of humanity, from certain
feelings and propensions, nay, even, if possible, from any
particular tendency proper to human reason, and which need not
necessarily hold for the will of every rational being; this may indeed
supply us with a maxim, but not with a law; with a subjective
principle on which we may have a propension and inclination to act,
but not with an objective principle on which we should be enjoined
to act, even though all our propensions, inclinations, and natural
dispositions were opposed to it. In fact, the sublimity and
intrinsic dignity of the command in duty are so much the more evident,
the less the subjective impulses favour it and the more they oppose
it, without being able in the slightest degree to weaken the
obligation of the law or to diminish its validity.
Here then we see philosophy brought to a critical position, since it
has to be firmly fixed, notwithstanding that it has nothing to support
it in heaven or earth. Here it must show its purity as absolute
director of its own laws, not the herald of those which are
whispered to it by an implanted sense or who knows what tutelary
nature. Although these may be better than nothing, yet they can
never afford principles dictated by reason, which must have their
source wholly a priori and thence their commanding authority,
expecting everything from the supremacy of the law and the due respect
for it, nothing from inclination, or else condemning the man to
self-contempt and inward abhorrence.
Thus every empirical element is not only quite incapable of being an
aid to the principle of morality, but is even highly prejudicial to
the purity of morals, for the proper and inestimable worth of an
absolutely good will consists just in this, that the principle of
action is free from all influence of contingent grounds, which alone
experience can furnish. We cannot too much or too often repeat our
warning against this lax and even mean habit of thought which seeks
for its principle amongst empirical motives and laws; for human reason
in its weariness is glad to rest on this pillow, and in a dream of
sweet illusions (in which, instead of Juno, it embraces a cloud) it
substitutes for morality a bastard patched up from limbs of various
derivation, which looks like anything one chooses to see in it, only
not like virtue to one who has once beheld her in her true form. *
* To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to
contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things
and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she
then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections,
every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his
reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction.
The question then is this: "Is it a necessary law for all rational
beings that they should always judge of their actions by maxims of
which they can themselves will that they should serve as universal
laws?" If it is so, then it must be connected (altogether a priori)
with the very conception of the will of a rational being generally.
But in order to discover this connexion we must, however
reluctantly, take a step into metaphysic, although into a domain of it
which is distinct from speculative philosophy, namely, the
metaphysic of morals. In a practical philosophy, where it is not the
reasons of what happens that we have to ascertain, but the laws of
what ought to happen, even although it never does, i.e., objective
practical laws, there it is not necessary to inquire into the
reasons why anything pleases or displeases, how the pleasure of mere
sensation differs from taste, and whether the latter is distinct
from a general satisfaction of reason; on what the feeling of pleasure
or pain rests, and how from it desires and inclinations arise, and
from these again maxims by the co-operation of reason: for all this
belongs to an empirical psychology, which would constitute the
second part of physics, if we regard physics as the philosophy of
nature, so far as it is based on empirical laws. But here we are
concerned with objective practical laws and, consequently, with the
relation of the will to itself so far as it is determined by reason
alone, in which case whatever has reference to anything empirical is
necessarily excluded; since if reason of itself alone determines the
conduct (and it is the possibility of this that we are now
investigating), it must necessarily do so a priori.
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