"Finally, man would still have duties, even though he ceased to be in any relation with other men. As long as he has any intelligence and liberty left, the idea of right remains in him, and with that idea, duty. If he were all at once thrown upon a desert island, duty would still follow him there."[89] Kant has likewise defended the existence of the duties of man toward himself. "Supposing," he says, "that there were no duties of this kind, there would not be any duties then of any kind; for I can only think myself under obligations to others, so far as I am under obligations to myself.... Thus do people say, when the question is to save a man or his life: I owe this to myself; I owe it to myself to cultivate such dispositions of mind as make of me a fit member of society (_Doctrine de la vertu_, trad. franç. de Barni, p. 70)." =132. Duties concerning the body.--Duty of self-preservation.=--The duties toward one's self are generally divided into two classes: duties _toward the body_, duties _toward the soul_. Kant justly criticised this distinction, and asks how can there be any obligations toward the body--that is to say, toward a mass of matter--which, apart from the soul, is nothing better than any of the rough bodies which surround us. Kant proposes to substitute for this distinction the following: duties of man toward himself as an _animal_ (that is, united to animality by the corporeal functions), and the duties of man toward himself as a _moral being_. Considered as an animal, man is united to a body, and this union of soul and body is what is called life. Hence a first duty which may be considered a fundamental duty, and the basis of all the others, namely, the duty of self-preservation. It is, in fact, obvious that the fulfillment of all our other duties rests on this prior one. Before being a duty, self-preservation is for man an instinct, and even so energetic and so universal an instinct that there would seem to be very little need to transform it into duty: so much so is it an instinct that man has rather to combat in himself the cowardly tendency which attaches him to life, than that which induces him to seek death. Yet does it happen, and unfortunately too often, that men, crazed by despair, come to believe that they have a right to free themselves of life: this is what is called suicide. It is, therefore, very important in morals to combat this fatal idea, and to teach men that, even though life ceases to be a pleasure, there is still a moral obligation which they cannot escape.