But this view is entirely erroneous. Such a feeling of compulsion is certainly a force driving to action, but it is assuredly not a sanction conferring validity. Besides, the inclination to vice develops according to the same law of habit, and exercises, as an impulse, the most unbounded sway. The miser’s passion which leads him, in his desire of amassing riches, to submit to the heaviest sacrifices and to commit the most extreme cruelties, certainly constitutes no sanction for his conduct. 9. Again, motives of hope or fear that a certain manner of behaviour, as, for example, regard for the general good, will render us agreeable or disagreeable to other and more powerful beings, these it has often been sought to regard as a sanction for such conduct.[9] But it is manifest that the most cringing cowardice, the most servile flattery might then boast a natural sanction. As a matter of fact virtue shines out most brightly where neither threats nor entreaties are able to divert her from the right path. 10. Some speak of an education in which man, as belonging to an order of living beings accustomed to live in society, receives from those by whom he is surrounded. An injunction is repeatedly laid upon him, the command: “You ought.” It lies in the nature of things that certain actions are very frequently and generally required of him. There is thus formed an association between his mode of action and the thought: “You ought.” And so it may happen that he may come to regard, as the source of this command, the society in which he lives, or even something vaguely conceived to be higher than an individual, that is to say, something regarded in a way as superhuman. The “ought” associated by him with such a being would then constitute the sanction of conscience.[10] In this case the natural sanction would then consist in the naturally developed belief in the command of a more powerful will. But it is manifest that such a belief in the command of a more powerful being contains, as yet, nothing which deserves the name of a sanction. Such a conviction is shared by one who knows himself to be at the mercy of a tyrant or of a robber horde. Whether he obey, or bid defiance, the command itself contains nothing able to give to the required act a sanction similar to that of the conscience. Even if he obey he does so through fear, not because he regards the command as one based on right. The thought, therefore, that an act is commanded by some one does not constitute a natural sanction. In the case of every command issued by an external will the question arises: Is such a command authorized or is it not? Neither is there any reference here to a command enforced by a still higher power enjoining obedience to the former. For then the question would again reappear, and we should proceed from one command to another enjoining obedience to the former, and from that to a third enjoining in like manner obedience to the second, and so on _ad infin_.