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Updated: May 2, 2025
This is the way of peace and the way of nature, for even if we seriously try to keep up a private conscience at all, apart from feeling, faction, party or class spirit, or even habit, which are our habitual guides, the difficulties are so great that most hasten, more or less consciously and voluntarily, to put themselves under authority again, serving only the smallest margin of independence in material interests, choice of masters, etc, and yielding to the pleasing and easy illusion that inflates the minimum to seem the maximum of freedom, and uses the noblest ideal of history, viz., that of pure autonomous oughtness, as a pedestal for idols of selfishness, caprice and conceit.
From the feelings are formed concepts, from concepts judgments; and the abstraction of the categorical imperative is a highly derivative phenomenon and a very late result, although the feeling of oughtness or of moral obligation, which accompanies the correct estimation of values and bids us prefer spiritual to sensuous delights and the general good to our own welfare, grows necessarily out of the inner nature of the human soul.
Morality is not a means to employ IF we wish happiness; in that case its precepts would be but hypothetical, if you wish happiness, do so and so. No, its commands are categorical. The inescapable fact of "oughtness" is the bottom fact upon which our ethics must be built. To the truth in this manner of speech we must all respond.
But every reform springs from a sense of "oughtness"; and the sense of moral obligation is itself the spontaneous expression of the consciousness of moral freedom. So far as we believe in the duty of reform or in "duty" itself, sans phrase we have already renounced Determinism, and proclaimed our belief in liberty.
The bases are immovable. Autonomy, absolute oughtness, the formal character of the law of reason, and the incomparable worth of the pure, disinterested disposition these are the corner stones of the Kantian, nay, of all morals. Theory of the Beautiful and of Ends in Nature.% We now know the laws which the understanding imposes upon nature and those which reason imposes upon the will.
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