Between the merchant who is honest in his weights and fixed in his prices merely because he calculates that such a course is to his own advantage, and the merchant (if such a person could exist) who should never sell a spool of thread or a paper of pins without having first reminded himself that his ultimate motive for so doing was respect for the law of duty, there is the ordinary merchant who is honest because he has the desires characteristic of an honest man. Schiller has made fun of the artificial stringency of Kant's theory in some verses which represent a disciple coming to Kant with his perplexity: "Willingly serve I my friends, but I do it, alas with affection. Hence I am plagued with this doubt, virtue I have not attained!" to which he received the reply: "This is your only resource, you must stubbornly seek to abhor them; Then you can do with disgust that which the law may enjoin." These verses are a caricature of Kant's position; he does not require that affections should be crushed, but that they should be stamped with acknowledgment of law before being accepted as motives. But the verses bring out the absurd element in the notion that the affections and inclinations may not of themselves be morally adequate springs to action,--as if a man could not eat his dinner simply because he was hungry, or be amiable to a companion because he wanted to be, or relieve distress because his compassionate nature urged him to it. It is worth while noting that some moralists have gone to the opposite extreme and have held that an act is not right unless it expresses the overflowing spontaneity of the affections; that a man's act is only imperfectly right when he performs it not from affection, but from coercion by duty. Thus Emerson speaks of men who "do by knowledge what the stones do by structure." And again, "We love characters in proportion as they are impulsive and spontaneous. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say, 'Crump is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native devils.'" The facts seem to be that while, in a good man, natural impulses and formed habits are adequate motive powers under ordinary conditions, there are times when an end, somewhat weak in its motive force because it does not express an habitually dominant power of the self, needs to be reënforced by associations which have gathered at all periods of his past around the experience of good. There is a certain reservoir of emotional force which, while far from fluid, is capable of transfer and application, especially in a conscientious person. Kant criticizes the moral sense theory on the ground that "in order to imagine the vicious man tormented with a sense of his transgressions, it must first represent him as morally good in the main trend of his character" (Abbott, p. 128).